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Preface What is a nation? What is nationalism? What does it mean to examine them in global perspective? We conceive of a nation or national identity as a form of loyalty. People have a multitude of loyalties: to family, friends, places, clubs, institutions, re- gions, countries, even to their place of work or brands of products. What distin- guishes loyalty to a nation is the primacy it holds on people’s allegiance. It is so powerful that people are willing to give their lives to ensure the continued existence of the group members and territory that make up their nation. By extension, we call nationalism the process that defi nes, creates, and expresses this essential loyalty to the nation. We view the term nationalism in a neutral sense. While this process can take extreme forms and lead to violent aggression and the extermination of others, nationalism can also be benign and form the basis for peaceful coexistence. Nations and nationalism have found a bewildering range of expressions across the world and through time, and it is this geographic and temporal variation that we seek to address in a systematic fashion. Given the sheer number of nations that exist or have existed historically—some scholars argue that there are as many as 4,000–5,000 in just the contemporary era—our global perspective does not at- tempt to be comprehensive. Instead we have chosen to follow cross-sections through time and space. We identify major historical eras in the development of nations and nationalism to examine characteristic themes and representative cases from all major regions of the world. Our emphasis is on depth rather than breadth. Th e 146 entries in this encyclo- pedia are full-length articles that go in depth to cover major debates and issues instead of brief descriptions of general features. Th ey are authored by reputable scholars and try to provide accessible introductions to topics that are ambiguous, complex, and frequently misunderstood. Because literature on nations and na- tionalism arguably ranks among the most diverse and convoluted, our goal is to provide students, nonspecialists, and even junior scholars with concise informa- tion on this subject. In deciding what cases and themes to use, we take represen- tative examples from each world region. Th ese run the gamut from large powerful nations such as China and Russia to smaller nations that do not enjoy any form of sovereignty, like Tibet and Wales. We try to cover both prosperous nations of the developed world along with ex-colonial nations in the less-developed world. Sim- ilarly, some nations only appear during one time period, and others do not appear at all, because the most important consideration for us was that at least one rep- resentative example from all major regions of the world was included, even if scholarship has sorely neglected or sidelined that area, such as in Africa. NATIONS AND NATIONALISM: VOLUME 1 (1770–1880)