I would like to thank Gregory Blue, Mark Berger, Michael Bodden and Laura Hein for their comments on earlier versions of this introduction, and Henry Heller for his on the penultimate version. Outstanding shortcomings remain my responsibility.

¹ The idea that nations are ‘invented’ is at least as old as Renan's 1882 statement that ‘Forgetting, I would even say historical error, is essential to the creation of a nation, which is why the advance of historical studies often poses a threat to nationality’. E Renan, What is a Nation?, trans Wanda Roemer Taylor, Toronto: Tapir Press, 1996. It is now generally accepted, although, as I show in ‘The Inadvertence of Benedict Anderson: a review essay on Imagined Communities on the occasion of a new edition’, Global Media and Communications, 4 (1), 2008, it is usually incorrectly associated with the work of Benedict Anderson.

² While the cultural materiel out of which nations are fashioned is often of some antiquity—the rational kernel of the ‘primordialist’ arguments about nations' antiquity and eternity—as I discuss below, scholars have found it hard to refute the modernity of nations as distinct forms of community.

³ It is not possible to discuss here why, correspondingly, this division of labour was less consequential for the study of capitalism. Suffice it to point to the rich comparative literature on national forms of capitalism. Of course, this is not enough and the work of theorising a geopolitics of capitalism as a specifically national and international system has only just begun. See, for example, J Rosenberg, The Empire of Civil Society, London: Verso, 1994; and B Teschke, The Myth of 1648, London: Verso, 2003.

⁴ The extensive contemporary literature on developmental states is usually traced to the theorisers of industrial catch-up of ‘late developers’, beginning with Carey and List, and with attempts to apply the lessons to developing countries. See F List, The National System of Political Economy, Fairfeld, NJ: AM Kelly, 1977, first published in 1841; H Carey, The Past, the Present and the Future, Philadelphia, PA: Carey and Hart, 1848; and A Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1962. A good overview of the literature on the developmental state can be found in H Chang, Kicking Away the Ladder, London: Anthem, 2004. I argue, however, that an awareness of the importance of national political economy against ‘free trade’ was more deeply rooted in classical political economy. See R Desai, ‘Imperialism’, in R Munck & G Honor Fagan (eds), Globalisation and Security—An Encyclopaedia, Vol 1, Economic and Political Aspects and Vol 2, Social and Cultural Aspects, New York: Praeger, 2008.

⁵ I have argued that the much-contested term ‘globalisation’ is best used to denote a phase in the management of the USA's declining hegemony rather than any secular economic or technological processes which have, in any case, been of much longer standing than the scope of the term allows. R Desai, ‘The last empire? From nation-building compulsion to nation-wrecking futility and beyond’, Third World Quarterly, 28 (2), 2007, pp 435 – 456. R Kiely, Empire in the Age of Globalization: US Hegemony and Neo-liberal Disorder, London: Pluto, 2005 distinguishes between neoliberalism, globalisation and empire as three distinct phases of a longer neoliberal phase.

⁶ H Heller, The Bourgeois Revolution in France 1789 – 1815, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2006.

⁷ Desai, ‘Imperialism’.

⁸ C Leys, Politics in Britain: From Labourism to Thatcherism, London: Verso, 1989, p 42.

⁹ R Suny, ‘Incomplete revolution: national movements and the collapse of the Soviet Empire’, New Left Review, 189, 1991, p 112. See also his Revenge of the Past; and T Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001.

¹⁰ P Lawrence discusses how much Nazism skewed inter-war debates about nationalism in his Nationalism: History and Theory, London: Pearson Education, 2006, pp 59 – 106.

¹¹ H Kohn, ‘The genesis and character of English nationalism’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 1, 1940.

¹² T Nairn, ‘The modern Janus’, in the second expanded edition of The Break-up of Britain, London: Verso, 1981.

¹³ G Wu, in this volume, “From Post-imperial to Late Communist Nationalism: Historical Change in Chinese nationalism from May Fourth to the 1990s,” p 10.

¹⁴ M Lewin, Soviet Century, London: Verso, 2004.