Transnational Histories of the Royal Nation

This book examines modern monarchies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, specifically interrogating how monarchies have exerted a powerful influence on nation-building and the construction of nationalist identities. In turn, challenges from national political cultures and the pressures exerted by local as well as transnational public spheres continually modify and re-define ideas of royal rulership. The contributors to this volume show that, in various parts of the modern world, the contours of the national body politic have been profoundly imprinted with notions of territoriality, religion, cultural identity and historicity inherited from dynastic or monarchic regimes. This mutual entanglement of monarchy and nation-building manifests itself in the concept of the ‘royal nation’. This edited collection argues that the emergence of royal nations in recent history was a global phenomenon, and that area-studies approaches are inadequate in fully conceptualizing this.