3 - Industrialization and Assimilation in Historical Perspective

Summary

This chapter contains historical support for my argument from the pre-modern and modern worlds. Even though industrialization was very limited in the pre-modern world, I provide evidence that urban, industrial areas allowed for the creation of broader ethno-national identities in the two cases of ancient Greece and Rome. I then discuss theories of the rise of nationalism in the modern world, with close examination of several cases from both Western and Eastern Europe. In particular I examine in more detail how industrialization encouraged assimilation in Germany and the constituent nations of the United Kingdom, before moving on to a discussion of the case of South Africa. In many of these cases I not only show how industrialization led to the growth of broader ethnic identities but how these processes were actively discouraged by the state, most obviously in the case of apartheid South Africa, while in other cases state-promoted assimilation failed.