Our Nations and Nationalisms

‘Nationalism’ is an increasingly unpopular word. Few would apply the label of ‘nationalist’ to themselves, and fewer still to any part of our history before the 1700s. But then, where does it come from? And what does it mean for us today?

With one eye on the present as he unpicks the past, Owen Dudley Edwards finds nationalism to be older than recorded history and broader than modern geography. Our Nations and Nationalisms traces the phenomena back as far as the Old Testament and the works of Homer and Virgil, through the attempts of Shakespeare and James VI & I to found the first British Union, and into the Celtic legends that helped form the identities held in the UK today. 

Taking wide-ranging examples from ancient to modern, from home and abroad, Dudley Edwards interrogates nationalism in action, asking what it really is and how it has impacted upon all of our lives, wherever we live or were born

This demonised word, he argues, is a fact of human nature. It may take a variety of forms, but we are all, in some sense, ‘nationalists’; it is incumbent upon each of us to find ways to use this fact in the interests of humanity, and not a single nation.