From Rome to Modern Times: The Evolution of Nationalism

Nationalism is one of the most powerful forces shaping our world today, fuelling everything from independence movements to heated debates over identity and belonging. Yet the word at its core, “nation,” carries a history far older and stranger than most people realise. The term once meant almost the opposite of what it does now. Tracing how a single Latin word travelled from the streets of ancient Rome to the constitutions of modern states reveals just how much human ideas about community, loyalty, and sovereignty have changed over two thousand years.

What “nation” meant in ancient Rome 🔗

To understand modern nationalism, we have to begin with language. The English word “nation” comes from the Latin natio, which is itself derived from nasci, meaning “to be born.” Etymologically, natio literally means “that which has been born”, pointing to birth, origin, and breed rather than to any political organisation.

For the Romans, this had a very specific and rather narrow meaning. A scholarly study of Latin texts from the third century BC to the second century AD found that natio was primarily a collective term for a tribal community of foreigners who were tied together by their place of birth but were not organised into a politically recognised entity. In other words, a “nation” was a group of outsiders. The word described people who lived beyond the framework of Roman citizenship.

Citizens versus “nations” 🔗

This distinction mattered enormously in Roman society, which drew a sharp line between citizens and non-citizens. Roman citizens held valuable rights, including the ability to vote, own property under Roman law, and participate in political life. The communities labelled nationes sat outside this privileged circle. The Romans had separate vocabulary for their own political community. The famous phrase Senatus Populusque Romanus (“the Senate and People of Rome”) used populus, the word reserved for the people as a political body, while natio remained attached to foreign tribes defined merely by common ancestry.

So the earliest sense of “nation” was about exclusion and difference. It marked who did not belong to the central political order, rather than describing a proud, self-governing people. This is almost the reverse of how the word is used today.

The medieval shift: nations in universities and councils 🔗

The meaning of “nation” did not transform overnight. A crucial stage in its journey happened in the universities and church assemblies of medieval Europe, where the word picked up new associations of grouping and shared identity.

Student “nations” and regional belonging 🔗

Medieval universities such as Bologna, Paris, and Oxford were remarkably cosmopolitan, drawing students from across the continent. To navigate life as foreigners in a strange town, students organised themselves into regional corporations. These groupings were called “nations,” and students born in the same region usually spoke the same language and expected to live under their own familiar customs, so they banded together for mutual support and protection.

At the University of Paris, which grew up around Notre Dame Cathedral in the late twelfth century as a guild of masters and scholars, the students in the faculty of arts were divided into four nationes according to their geographic origin. These were not states or political units. They were practical associations that helped young men who were essentially aliens in a foreign city defend themselves against local innkeepers and tradesmen. Even so, the word “nation” was now tied to a community held together by common origin, language, and shared interest, a meaningful step away from the purely tribal Roman usage.

Communities of opinion in the Church 🔗

The same logic appeared in the great ecclesiastical councils of the late medieval period. When churchmen gathered to debate doctrine and resolve disputes, they too organised themselves into “nations” for the purposes of discussion and voting. Here the term began to signify not just people of common birth but communities of opinion, groups that could speak and act with a collective voice. Gradually, “nation” came to suggest something closer to a body that represented cultural and political authority, rather than a mere collection of foreigners.

The sixteenth-century turn toward a sovereign people 🔗

The truly dramatic shift came around the sixteenth century. By this time, “nation” was increasingly used to describe a sovereign people, a community that could be the source of political authority in its own right. This was a profound change. The word that had once marked outsiders without citizenship now pointed to the very people in whose name a state might claim to rule.

This linguistic evolution mirrored deeper changes in European politics. As centralised monarchies grew stronger and the medieval patchwork of feudal loyalties began to break down, thinkers and rulers needed a vocabulary for large communities bound to a territory and a government. “Nation” increasingly filled that role, fusing the older idea of a people sharing a common origin with the new idea of a population governed under one political authority.

Westphalia and the modern state system 🔗

A landmark moment in this story is the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648, which is commonly associated with the rise of the modern system of states, often called the “Westphalian system”. The principle at its heart was sovereignty: the idea that each state has authority over its own territory and domestic affairs to the exclusion of outside powers, with each state treated as equal under international law. This framework of clearly defined, independent territorial units provided fertile ground for the idea that each people might have its own state.

It is worth noting a scholarly debate here. Historians do not all agree on whether the nation came first or the nation-state came first. Some argue that the nation-state was an unintended by-product of fifteenth-century developments in political economy, capitalism, mercantilism, and advances in map-making and cartography, while others hold that nations existed first and that nationalist movements then arose to demand sovereignty for them.

Modern nationalism and the idea of an imagined community 🔗

By the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the modern concept of nationalism had taken full shape. It emphasised collective identity and political sovereignty: the belief that a people sharing a common culture, language, or history deserves to govern itself within its own state. The American and French revolutions gave this idea explosive momentum, replacing loyalty to a king with loyalty to “the people” or “the nation.”

Anderson’s “imagined communities” 🔗

One of the most influential modern explanations comes from the political scientist Benedict Anderson. In his classic 1983 work, he described nations as “imagined communities”, arguing that members of a nation feel a deep sense of belonging even though they will never meet the vast majority of their fellow citizens. He pointed out that the concept of the sovereign nation was born in an age when the Enlightenment and revolution were dismantling the legitimacy of divinely ordained dynastic rule, with the nation imagined as a deep, horizontal comradeship of equals.

This is a far cry from the Roman natio. Where the Romans used the word to mark foreigners outside the political order, the modern nation is precisely the political order, a self-aware community claiming the right to rule itself.

The concept in the Indian and colonial context 🔗

The modern idea of the nation took on special significance in colonised societies. Here, nationalism became the language of resistance against foreign rule. Indian nationalism is often described as an instance of civic nationalism, inclusive of people across diverse ethnic, linguistic, and religious backgrounds, and it developed fully during the independence movement against nearly two centuries of British rule.

What is striking is how the freedom struggle drew together a vast and varied population under a single national identity. An all-India nationalist consciousness found an institutional base in the Indian National Congress, founded in 1885, which evolved from seeking reforms within the colonial system into a movement demanding full independence. The struggle for self-rule, or Swaraj, became inseparable from the very meaning of nationhood, so much so that the words “freedom movement” and “nationalist movement” were often used interchangeably.

Different faces of nationalism 🔗

The modern concept is not a single, fixed thing. Scholars distinguish between several types. Civic nationalism is built on liberal values such as freedom, tolerance, equality, and individual rights, rather than on ethnic identity. By contrast, ethnic and cultural forms of nationalism define belonging through shared ancestry, religion, or culture. Anti-colonial nationalism, of the kind that drove freedom movements across Asia and Africa, focused on rejecting foreign domination and asserting the right to self-determination.

These distinctions matter because nationalism can produce very different outcomes. It can unite a diverse people in a shared project of self-government, or it can turn exclusionary, defining the nation so narrowly that some of its own members are pushed out. The thinker Rabindranath Tagore, who gave India its national anthem, was himself a sharp critic of nationalism, which he saw as a limiting and even dangerous idea even at the height of the anti-colonial struggle. That tension, between nationalism as liberation and nationalism as exclusion, runs right through the modern history of the concept.

Why this long journey matters 🔗

The evolution of “nation” from an insult for outsiders to a banner for sovereign peoples is more than a curiosity of etymology. It shows that political concepts we treat as natural and permanent are in fact products of history, shaped by changing institutions, technologies, and struggles for power. The Roman who spoke of a natio would barely recognise the word as it is used in a modern parliament or a freedom rally.

Understanding this history also makes us more thoughtful citizens. When we hear appeals to “the nation” today, we are hearing the echo of a word that has carried very different meanings across the centuries. Knowing where it came from helps us think critically about how it is being used now, and about whose belonging it includes or excludes.

What do you think? If the meaning of “nation” could shift so dramatically from “outsiders” to “sovereign people” over two thousand years, how might the concept continue to evolve in an increasingly interconnected and globalised world? And when you hear the word “national” used in public debate, do you find it draws people together or sets them apart?

References

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation
2. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/311975311_On_the_Roman_Concept_of_Natio
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation_(university)
4. https://brewminate.com/a-history-of-the-medieval-university-of-paris/
5. https://courses.lumenlearning.com/muw-historyofeurope/chapter/nation-states-and-sovereignty/
6. https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-worldhistory/chapter/introduction-to-nation-states/
7. https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/postcolonialstudies/2014/06/19/anderson-benedict/
8. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_nationalism
9. https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/social-sciences/indian-nationalism
10. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civic_nationalism
11. https://www.pass.va/en/publications/acta/acta_22_pass/jayal.html