Complete the account of how nations were made.

Since 1983, when Anderson, Gellner and the Hobsbawm and Ranger volume all appeared, historians have treated nations as constructed rather than discovered. Eugen Weber showed French peasants being turned into Frenchmen by schools, railways and conscription as late as the end of the nineteenth century. In Italy and Germany the state preceded and produced the nation rather than the reverse.

The claim is not that national feeling is fake but that it is made, and by identifiable institutions. Once you look for the schoolteacher, the railway timetable and the conscription list, the nation stops being the explanation of nineteenth-century politics and becomes one of the things nineteenth-century politics produced.