Social Background Of Indian Nationalism (Paperback)

Prologue
Nationalism, A Historical Phenomenon
Like all social phenomena, nationalism is a historical category. It emerged in the social world at a certain stage of evolution of the life of the community when certain socio-historical conditions, both objective and subjective, matured. As E. H. Carr remarks, "nations", in the modern sense of the world, did not emerge until the close of the Middle Ages'.'
Before national communities, national societies, national states, and national cultures came into existence, communities in various parts of the world generally lived through tribal, slave, and feudal phases of social existence. At a certain stage of social, economic, and cultural development, nations came into being. They were generally distinguished from non-national communities of previous peri- ods of social existence by certain specific characteristics such as an organic welding of the members of the nation, living in a distinct territory within a single economy, so that they felt conscious of common economic existence; generally one common language used by them; and further, a similar psychological structure among its members and a common culture evolved by it. Though an ideal nation possessing all these traits in a state of fullest development remained an abstraction (since the elements of the past always survived, in varying degrees, in the economy, social structure, psycholog- ical habits, and culture, of any nation), still, from the sixteenth century onward, national communities, in different stages of national consolidation, have appeared in the amphitheatre of human history.