SOAN 234 - Nations and Nationalism

(HIST 234) FDR: SS4
Credits: 3
Planned Offering: Winter 2014 and alternate years

This course examines the rise and global spread of national identity over the last five centuries by considering cases from Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas and using these to test major theories of nationalism from history and the social sciences. Major questions considered include the following: What, if any, are the empirically identifiable relationships between national identity and other major dimensions of “modernization,” such as the rise of the modern state and industrial capitalism? Is nationalism a cause, consequence, or victim of “globalization”? Can we construct a theory of the spread of national identity that not only makes sense of macro-level patterns but also articulates clear “microfoundations” and identifiable causal mechanisms? Eastwood.