(a) "Nationalism in the 19th century was a driving force for both integration and disintegration." Illustrate with examples from…

(a) Nationalism: integration and disintegration

In Europe, nationalism integrated fragmented territories into nation-states. German unification in 1871, driven by Prussian statecraft, liberal-nationalist agitation and the Franco-Prussian War, created a powerful central state. The Italian Risorgimento similarly fused liberal, Catholic and popular movements under Cavour, Garibaldi and the Sardinian state to make Italy. The same ideology disintegrated multi-ethnic empires. In the Balkans, Greek, Serbian, Bulgarian and later Albanian and Macedonian nationalisms weakened Ottoman rule, contributed to its later breakup, and helped produce the Congress of Berlin (1878) settlements. Austro-Hungarian fragmentation was accelerated by Magyar, Czech, Polish and South Slav nationalisms that strained the Dual Monarchy throughout the later nineteenth century; the Ausgleich of 1867 was itself a concession to Magyar nationalism. Outside Europe, Meiji Japan’s nation-building (1868) fused state, army and education to create a modern national state. In Latin America, creole nationalism broke up the Spanish empire (1810–25), but the same forces then fractured Bolívar's Gran Colombia (1830) and the Central American federation (1838). The Indian National Congress (1885) gave institutional form to Indian nationalism; its early moderate phase sought association with British rule, while later it became a vehicle for anti-colonial nationalism. Ottoman reform currents later associated with the Young Turks sought a redefined national identity in the late nineteenth century, showing that nationalism could both modernise and destabilise empires. The contradiction is that nationalism consolidated states where the imagined nation matched the state, but dissolved empires where one state contained several nations; it made political legitimacy depend on national identity rather than dynastic or religious authority.

(b) American Revolution and the Enlightenment

The Revolution translated Enlightenment ideas into political, civil and ecclesiastical practice. Politically, it drew on Lockean natural rights—property in Locke’s theory, and life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness in the Declaration of Independence—along with republicanism and Montesquieu’s separation of powers; Paine's Common Sense (1776) popularised the case against monarchy. State constitutions and the Federal Constitution of 1787 embodied constitutionalism, limited government, representative legislatures and checks on executive power, making sovereignty reside in the people rather than in hereditary rule. In civil society, Enlightenment rationalism challenged inherited privilege: several states abolished primogeniture, removed religious tests for public office, and expanded suffrage, though still limited by property, race and gender. In the ecclesiastical sphere, the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom (1786) disestablished the Anglican Church and separated church from state. The federal Constitution banned religious tests for federal office (Article VI), and the First Amendment (1791) barred an established church. Jefferson’s later 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists described this as a “wall of separation,” while Enlightenment thinkers promoted rational religion against revealed dogma. Together, these changes made rights, representation and religious liberty central to public life. Thus the Revolution was not merely a war of independence but a constitutional experiment in Enlightenment governance. The fit was not complete: slavery survived and was protected in the Constitution, and historians such as Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood show that English Whig opposition thought, common-law rights and Protestant dissent shaped revolutionary ideology as much as the philosophes did.

(c) New imperialism: continuity and shift

New imperialism continued old colonial practices: extraction of surplus, racial hierarchy, and the “civilizing mission” justified domination. Yet it marked a fundamental shift. Industrial capitalism created demand for markets, raw materials and investment outlets; the Scramble for Africa, formalised at the Berlin Conference of 1884, produced formal empire and new financial mechanisms such as concessions, railways and chartered companies. European control of Africa rose from about a tenth of the continent in 1870 to about 90% by 1914, made possible by steamships, quinine and the Maxim gun (Daniel Headrick). New powers such as Germany, Italy, Belgium, the United States and Japan entered the race, turning imperial rivalry into a cause of great-power conflict. It also integrated the world into a global system of trade, migration and capital. The shift was not merely territorial but financial and institutional, as metropolitan banks and legal regimes tied colonies to metropolitan markets. Hobson and Lenin emphasised over-accumulation and monopoly capital as causes, while Gallagher and Robinson’s “imperialism of free trade” stressed a spectrum from informal control to formal empire. Peripheral agency mattered: local elites, resistance and adaptation shaped how imperial rule operated. Hence new imperialism was both a continuation of colonial exploitation and a structural transformation of global power.