Historians still argue whether nations are modern inventions or medieval survivors
Most scholars treat nations as a modern creation; nationalism became a major ideology only at the end of the eighteenth century. A dissenting camp points to Alfred the Great, whose reign saw books of the Bible put into Old English to rally the English against Norse invaders, as evidence that nations are far older.
The word itself is about birth. English took nation around 1300 from Old French, which drew on the Latin natio, literally that which has been born, from nasci, to be born. In Latin it could mean children of one birth or a group sharing an origin, and Cicero used it simply for a people. Benedict Anderson famously called the nation an imagined community, since members of even a small nation will never meet most of the others yet still feel a bond with them. Anthony Smith described it as a cultural and political community conscious of its own unity and interests.
Adrian Hastings led the case for an early date. He argued that English nationalism, after a gap following the Norman Conquest, revived with the Wycliffe circle's complete English Bible in the 1380s, and that steady use of the word nation from the early fourteenth century implied continuity ever since. Susan Reynolds saw many medieval European kingdoms as nations in all but mass participation. Others proposed medieval Bulgaria, China, Korea and Japan, or Byzantium as a Roman empire reshaped into a medieval nation-state.
Bulgaria makes a vivid example. Founded on the Danube in 680 and 681, it adopted Orthodox Christianity in 864 and became a centre of Slavic culture, a role strengthened when the Cyrillic script was invented in its capital, Preslav, around the start of the tenth century. Literacy in Old Church Slavonic helped a small Bulgar elite and many Slavic tribes merge under one name.
Critics are unconvinced. John Breuilly and Patrick Geary warn that a name like English can persist while its meaning changes completely, so recurring labels prove little. Sami Zubaida adds that many old empires ruled mixed populations where shared ethnicity between ruler and ruled brought no special favour. Smith himself concluded that in antiquity only Egypt and Judea, at certain periods, came close to being true nations.
Source: Nation
