AHR Forum

Creating National Identities in a
Revolutionary Era

The construction of national identities in times of crisis is the subject of this Forum. The essays probe the intricacies of modern forms of nationalism by examining identity as a revealing expression of collective self-imagery. They do so through chronicles of three efforts to create national identities amid the chaos and confusion of the revolutionary era in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Western Europe and North America. David A. Bell examines the paradox of French nationalism being created at a time of acute anxiety about the legitimacy of the very idea of a French nation. Dror Wahrman probes the widespread fears about the unreliability of national identities that emerged in England in the wake of the successful American revolt. Andrew W. Robertson demonstrates that during the crucial period of national identity-making in the United States, from the election of George Washington to end of the War of 1812, partisan political identities worked against the consolidation of local identities that would have weakened nascent American nationalism. Together, the essays underscore the contradictions, instabilities, fabrications, and mystifications embedded in the creation of national identities in these places and times. Benedict Anderson enlarges the analytical reach of the Forum by subjecting the topic to a transnational and transhistorical analysis. His commentary identifies core issues in the essays and suggests how broad comparisons with similar developments in other times and places illuminate their implications for the three nations under study while conversely explaining how such comparisons reveal the significance of the three tales themselves for larger inquiries into the critical issue of modern nationalism. The Forum thus provides compelling evidence about the centrality of the illusive concept of national identity to our attempt to understand the history of nationalism.

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