Much like nations, the nation-based order and the domestic and international hierarchies it produces are imagined. Benedict Anderson and scholars in Historical International Relations have frequently approached nationalism and nations as a horizontal division of the world. By contrast, this article explores the imagined hierarchies within and between nations during the 1848 Springtime of Nations. Through an examination of fraternal images found in a variety of textual and visual sources, I investigate how the European national imaginary of 1848 translated into the nation-based order and its corresponding domestic and international hierarchies. The collapse of the 1848 Revolutions brought about a crisis in the national imaginary. The revolutionary fraternity was co-opted in a distorted form by dynastic regimes and opposed by socialists advocating for the international brotherhood of workers. The Springtime of Nations, with its successes and failures, was a pivotal chapter in creating, shaping, legitimising, and challenging the nascent nation-based order.

This study delves into the intricate relationship between warfare and social rights during the Second French Republic. As recent scholarship suggests that the emergence of social rights in the 18th century involved a transition from Christian charity principles to secular obligations, primarily influenced by proponents of free markets, this research uncovers a distinct path during the July Monarchy. Here, socialists framed social rights using a unique language centered on warfare, which was overtly at odds with the prevailing free-market discourse. This transformation led to the concept of “guerre industrielle” or industrial warfare, portraying industrial workers as modern soldiers in the international economic competition among nations. Such a narrative significantly molded the political demands of the emerging French working class, focusing on securing decent employment and extending to workers the social provisions already granted to the military. These demands gained substantial momentum during the tumultuous 1848 Revolution, fueling a call for comprehensive societal transformation, emphasizing cooperative production and mutual assistance. Nevertheless, the rejection of these radical ideas was primarily attributed to the reluctance of moderate republicans to embrace the profound societal changes implied by such demands. By delving into the intricacies of this relationship, the article offers fresh insights into the development of social rights before the emergence of the Welfare State and their impact on the construction of tools of socioeconomic governance during the last two centuries.

This article explores the temporality of revolution in 1848. It argues that what united the various revolutionary movements of that year was a sense of participating in a common European ‘present’, in which old imperial hierarchies collapsed and every cause and people seemed to exist in the same historical moment. The significance of that sense of the present was visible across the continent, but it was of greatest significance in the revolutionary theatres beyond the core imperial centres, and it was those places that would suffer first when that present passed. Too much ‘history’ was taking place at once, and as events in different settings followed their own particular courses, minds turned away from a European project. As European unity faltered, it was the representatives of imperial counter-revolution who demonstrated their ability to think strategically on a continent-wide level. They defeated the various movements, which had promised a better European present, and deferred improvements to the future. By doing so, they returned the peoples of the continent to their own particular – rather than common European – ‘nows’.

In Galicia in 1848, petitions as to whether the province should be divided in two with a Polish and a Ruthenian region moved thousands of people to action. Although the petitions were among the largest in the history of the Habsburg monarchy, the petition lists have never been researched in detail. Whereas the initiators of the petition for the partition were anxious to present a narrative of national and confessional unity for a “Ruthenian” Eastern Galicia suppressed by “Poles,” the counter-petitionists disputed the very existence of a Ruthenian nationality and chose a narrative of peaceful, conflict-free living together. A close reading of the petition lists reveals both conflict and co-existence. The lists with a checkered contrast of Cyrillic, Latin, and Hebrew scripts bear witness to what was a multi-ethnic and multi-confessional society. More than that, these sources prove impressively that the three large religious and ethnic communities – Poles, Ruthenians, and Jews – were in continuous day-to-day contact with each other. While the history of emerging nationalism has so far been in the foreground in historiography of the revolutionary events in Galicia in 1848, the petitions' sources tell another story of everyday social interaction and of practices of social ambiguity in the Galician village and market communities.

George Dennis’ The cities and cemeteries of Etruria, a massive two-volume work of over 1000 pages, was published towards the end of 1848, the British Museum’s copy (now the British Library’s) being received on 18 January 1849. It was quickly acclaimed as a literary and archaeological masterpiece (Rhodes 1973: 52–5; Pallottino 1955: 126, n. 1), which brought the then little-known Etruscans to life in the most vivid of ways. The fruit, in Dennis’ word, of extensive travelling in Etruria between 1842 and 1847, and of much work in the libraries of, in particular, Rome, it remains 150 years later an indispensable topographical source. Indeed, a 2nd, revised, edition appeared in 1878 (reprinted in 1883, but misleadingly entitled a 3rd edition), and a further version of the 1848 volume was published in J.M. Dent’s highly regarded ‘Everyman’ series in 1907.

The Communist manifesto does not have much to say about the pre-capitalist societies most archaeologists deal with, and still less about the primitive societies that interest most prehistorians. (Nothing from the Manifesto makes its way, for example, into the useful compendium brought together by Godelier (1973).) Much of what Marx and Engels had to say directly about antiquity consists of unpublished sketches and passing references, and even the systematic treatment of The origins of the family, private property and the state (1884) must be considered provisional: the changes that reading Morgan (1877) had on the discussions of the Formen (1857–58) and the Anti-Dühring (1878) can only suggest that the accumulation of positive evidence in the course of a century and a half of archaeological research would have caused Marx and Engels to revise substantially every one of their specific claims.

The two most important 19th-century books on archaeology in the United States both dealt with earthworks. The earlier of these two, Ancient monuments of the Mississippi Valley by Ephraim G. Squier & Edwin H. Davis, was the first volume published by the fledgling Smithsonian Institution, and is 150 years old this year. It presented, with lavish illustrations, information about hundreds of earthworks. Its principal argument was that the mounds had been built by an American race distinct from the historically known indigenes, no less and perhaps considerably more than 1000 years ago. This volume in no small measure catalysed the development of archaeology in the United States. Without Squier & Davis’ extensive documentation of the vast number, size, complexity and variety of earthworks, the later book might never have been commissioned or might have been conceived in far less ambitious terms.