Insisting on a radical divide between post-1750 ideologies in Europe and earlier political thought in both Europe and Asia, modernist scholars of nationalism have called attention, quite justifiably, to European nationalisms’ unique focus on popular sovereignty, legal equality, territorial fixity, and the primacy of secular over universal religious loyalties. Yet this essay argues that nationalism also shared basic developmental and expressive features with political thought in pre-1750 Europe as well as in rimland—that is to say outlying—sectors of Asia. Polities in Western Europe and rimland Asia were all protected against Inner Asian occupation, all enjoyed relatively cohesive local geographies, and all experienced economic and social pressures to integration that were not only sustained but surprisingly synchronized throughout the second millennium. In Western Europe and rimland Asia each major state came to identify with a named ethnicity, specific artifacts became badges of inclusion, and central ethnicity expanded and grew more standardized. Using Myanmar and pre-1750 England/Britain as case studies, this essay reconstructs these centuries-long similarities in process and form between “political ethnicity,” on the one hand, and modern nationalism, on the other. Finally, however, this essay explores cultural and material answers to the obvious question: if political ethnicities in Myanmar and pre-1750 England/Britain were indeed comparable, why did the latter realm alone generate recognizable expressions of nationalism? As such, this essay both strengthens and weakens claims for European exceptionalism.

现代主义民族主义学者坚持认为1750年后的欧洲意识形态与欧洲和亚洲较早的政治思想之间存在着根本性的分歧，这很合理地引起了人们对欧洲民族主义对民众主权，法律平等，领土固定性和特殊性的独特关注。世俗高于普遍的宗教忠诚。然而，这篇文章认为，民族主义在1750年前的欧洲以及亚洲的边缘地区（也就是偏远地区）也具有政治思想的基本发展和表现特征。西欧和亚洲边缘国家的政治都受到保护，免受内亚占领，都享有相对团结的当地地理环境，在整个第二个千年中，不仅经历了所有持久的经济同步变化，而且经历了令人惊讶的同步，所有经历过的经济和社会压力。在西欧和亚洲的边缘地区，每个主要州都开始使用一种已命名的族裔来识别，特定的人工制品成为包容性的标志，并且中心族裔得到扩展并变得更加标准化。本文以缅甸和1750年前的英格兰/英国为案例研究，重构了一方面在“政治族裔”与另一方面在现代民族主义之间的百年历程和形式上的相似之处。然而，最后，本文探讨了一个明显问题的文化和物质答案：如果缅甸和1750年以前的英国/英国的政治族裔确实具有可比性，为什么仅后者领域会产生可识别的民族主义表达？因此，