'Nationalist' writers and politicians have been apt to take the 'nation' as a given entity, perhaps even a providential one. A more recent trend in historical writing, however, has been to emphasize the extent to which 'nations' are made, not born. The histories in this new series take as this as their organizing principle, whether the forging of the 'nation' was a matter of conscious manipulation by an elite or guided by more popular imperatives,...