Atlas of European Historiography: The Making of a Profession 1800‐2005

Until comparatively recently most of the people in the world did not live in nation‐states, they lived in large multi‐cultural empires or in loose tribal structures. States like England or France were anomalies. Napoleon heroically (as poor Beethoven thought) pioneered the concept with his attempt to unify Northern Italy as a single dependent republic, before succumbing to the imperial idea himself. Having unleashed nationalism however, he could not find a way of stopping it. The ideal of the independent nation‐state reached a climax about a century later, when Woodrow Wilson and the other victors in the first world war tried...