Introduction Len Scales and Oliver Zimmer; Part I. Approaches and Debates: 1. Were there nations in antiquity? Anthony D. Smith; 2. The idea of the nation as a political community Susan Reynolds; 3. Changes in the political uses of the nation: continuity or discontinuity? John Breuilly; Part II. The Middle Ages: 4. Germanic power structures: the early English experience Patrick Wormald; 5. The historiography of the Anglo-Saxon 'nation-state' Sarah Foot; 6. Exporting state and nation: English institutions and English identity in medieval Ireland Robin Frame; 7. Late medieval Germany: an under-Stated nation? Len Scales; Part III. Routes to Modernity: 8. The state and Russian national identity Geoffrey Hosking; 9. Ordering the kaleidoscope: the construction of identities in the lands of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth since 1569 Robert Frost; 10. Nationhood at the margin: identity, regionality and the English crown in the seventeenth century Tim Thornton; 11. The nation in the age of Revolution Ian McBride; Part IV. Modernity: 12. Enemies of the Nation? Nobles, foreigners and the constitution of national citizenship in the French Revolution Jennifer Heuer; 13. Nations, nation and power in Italy, c.1700-1915 Stuart Woolf; 14. Political institutions and nationhood in Germany, 1750-1914 Abigail Green; 15. Nation, nationalism and power in Switzerland, c.1760-1900 Oliver Zimmer; 16. Nation and power in the liberal state: Britain c.1800-c.1914 Peter Mandler.