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Nations: The Long History and Deep Roots of Political Ethnicity and Nationalism by Azar Gat with Alexander Yakobson (review)

Gat’s motivation for writing this important book was his “deep dissatisfaction” with the portrayal of nations and nationalism in much scholarly literature as “recent and superacial” results of modern “processes of social integration and political mobilization, which have welded together large populations hitherto scattered among parochial and loosely connected small rural communities” (1). While acknowledging modernity’s huge impact on the political expression of ethnic and national identity, Gat begs to differ in important respects with the modernist consensus. Drawing extensively on ethnonational histories and on theories ranging from evolutionary biology to the social organization of kinship relations, Gat shows convincingly that the nation as a kin-and-culture-based unit of mass political allegiance appeared early and frequently in history, certainly well before the emergence of the economic and institutional arrangements that characterize modernity (2–3). In Gat’s view, ethnicity, deaned as “a population of shared kinship (real or perceived) and culture,” played a major role in all forms of the state, including premodern city-states and multiethnic empires (3). “Desperate” popular resistance to alien rule was the norm (13–14). Gat straddles the positions of two other important scholars who have emphasized the premodern roots of the nation and of politicized ethnicity. On one hand, Connor emphasizes the ties of descent that underpin the political solidarity of ethnic groups, modern or otherwise.1 But Gat points out that evolutionary biology per se cannot support a hypothesis based solely on literal kinship of a large, genetically diverse nation (5–6). On the other hand, Smith argues in a more socialconstructivist vein that premodern “ethnie” often developed a sense of political solidarity based on myths of promised lands, golden ages, distinctive virtues, and great battles against perennial foes (9).2 But Gat also notes that solidarity was not built by cultural meanings out of thin air; such ideas were anchored in nested alliances of lineages, clans, and tribes that underpinned early states (3, 21, 44–66). Gat produces a highly plausible synthesis of these two perspectives, showing the interaction of the social organization of extended kin ties and the development of national culture in many, if not all, proto-nations. In stressing the historically dominant role of kin-based patrimonial organization, Gat echoes a broader argument in Fukuyama’s excellent, The Origins of Political Order.3 Reviews