In search of an explanation of how a sense of ethnic identity evolves to create the concept of nation, Armstrong analyzes Islamic and Christian cultures from antiquity to the nineteenth century. He explores the effects of institutions—the city, imperial polity, bureaucratic imperatives of centralization, and language divisions—on the development of ethnicity. Political science furnishes the focus, anthropology and sociology provide the conceptual framework, and history affords the evidence.
Originally published 1982.
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