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.

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’.