This article compares European nationalism and earlier notions of political community in Europe and Asia. Without denying the discursive novelty of post-1750 nationalism, it argues that eighteenth-century social and economic incentives to ethnic integration in individual European countries accelerated much older dynamics. Moreover, in the same period, c. 1400–1850, as state-centred ethnicities cohered in Europe, similar processes produced broadly comparable formations around the rimlands of Asia. Together, Europe and the Asian rimlands thus generated an early modern cultural system – distinctive from both nationalism and universal empire, but possessing features of both – that I term ‘political ethnicity’. The novelty and idiosyncrasy of this Eurasian-wide formation has yet to be recognized. Why, then, in Europe alone did political ethnicity eventually produce nationalism? Using Myanmar and Britain as case studies, the article argues that in Europe distinctive medieval legacies joined religious ruptures and exceptionally rapid commercial expansion to compress religious authority, to diffuse metropolitan norms with unprecedented rapidity, and to transfer sovereignty from the crown to propertied interests speaking in the name of the ‘nation’.

中文翻译：

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为什么民族主义是欧洲的？亚洲和欧洲的政治种族 1400–1850

本文比较了欧洲民族主义和欧洲和亚洲早期的政治共同体概念。在不否认 1750 年后民族主义的话语新颖性的情况下，它认为 18 世纪欧洲个别国家对种族融合的社会和经济激励加速了更古老的动态。此外，在同一时期，C. 1400-1850 年，随着以国家为中心的种族在欧洲凝聚，类似的过程在亚洲边缘地区产生了大致可比的结构。因此，欧洲和亚洲边缘地区共同产生了一种早期的现代文化体系——与民族主义和普遍帝国不同​​，但同时具有两者的特征——我称之为“政治种族”。这种遍及欧亚大陆的结构的新颖性和特殊性尚未得到认可。那么，为什么仅在欧洲，政治种族最终会产生民族主义呢？本文以缅甸和英国为案例研究，认为在欧洲，独特的中世纪遗产与宗教破裂和异常迅速的商业扩张相结合，以压缩宗教权威，以前所未有的速度传播都市规范，