This chapter shifts the focus to Europe in the early nineteenth century, where three important archetypes of economic nationalism were conceived. The first two were isolationist. Protectionists in France promoted disengagement from the world economy to forestall a rise in economic inequality which they feared might undermine national unity. Romanticist philosophers such as Adam Müller and Johann Gottlieb Fichte in Germany saw intensifying trade as eroding ‘traditional’ national and cultural values, which led them to advocate strict autarky. Friedrich List drew on these ideas, but also on developmental American approaches, in particular Alexander Hamilton’s ideas. He crafted an intellectual synthesis that sought to spur industrialisation by managing trade. However, List was unable to solve the tension between an ideology defending the economic sovereignty of small nations and one advocating imperialist expansion in search for markets, land and resources.

The chapter reconstructs the biographical and political background to the most widely known project of the brothers Grimm, the Children’s and Household Tales. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm began the collection when they were in their twenties and Jacob worked as a civil servant in Kassel, partly under French rule. By surveying the larger repertoire of genres preferred by leading nationalists reacting to Napoleon’s occupation, such as propagandistic pamphlets and war songs but also collections of folk narratives, the chapter uncovers the specific ideological function of the folktale collection as literary proof of cultural nationhood. Influenced by the volatile geopolitical situation during the Napoleonic wars, the brothers believed that the state should coincide with the German nation as defined by linguistic and cultural criteria, and they thought that the independent existence of this cultural unit was authentically demonstrated by collections of materials such as their folktales. Nationalism emerged as an ideology crucially dependent on scholarly documentation, which the brothers thought they could supply.