The Nation as Propertied Community: The Emergence of Nationalism in the United States and Norway

Abstract

This article engages in the debate about the origins and nature of nationalism. The argument is a modernist one, but it qualifies this narrative by focusing on landed property rights as the basis for the emergence and development of nationalism. The argument complements Ernest Gellner's theory of nationalism by suggesting that nationalism was at first a landed agrarian phenomenon which later became ideologically functional to industrial society due to its property assumptions. A historical‐sociological comparative analysis of land rights and national development in the United States and Norway between 1770 and 1884 forms the basis of the argument. The key point is that nationalism emerged as a consequence of the emergence of the more widespread individual ownership of land, which spawned the idea of national popular sovereignty. This original connection to property rights made nationalism ideologically functional for industrial society.

boere into Boere (farmers into Boers): The so‐called great trek and the rise of Boer nationalism

“…This might make for an interesting comparison, though, especially if one explores the applicability of Fuglestad's argument about the emergence of agrarian nationalism in the United States and Norway to Boer nationalism. Fuglestad places the origins of these nationalist movements in modernising, capitalist agrarian society, where, like in the case of the Boers, "the main source of wealth was land, and where a large majority of the people lived off the land" (Fuglestad, 2018:256).…”

“…In this, I follow Fuglestad who argues, in my view convincingly, that agrarian forms of nationalism sometimes provided “‘a missing link’” between the pre‐or proto‐national forms of society (feudal, absolutist, mercantilist, etc.) and the fully modern industrial form identified most clearly by Gellner (Fuglestad, 2018:256). Painting with a broad brush (due to constraints of space), my paper maps out the transformation of boere (farmers) into Boers ( á la Weber, 1976) in an attempt to contribute to a gap in the scholarship: over‐researched as the Trek may be, and problematic as an exclusive focus on white migration during the early to mid‐1800s may be, the origins and nature of Boer nationalism—like the interrelationship between Boer and Afrikaner nationalism—remain a neglected subject of historical inquiry.…”

Landscape, Geopolitics, and National Identity in the Norwegian Thrillers Occupied and Nobel

“…Indeed, two millennia of cultural production about Scandinavia and its mountainous northwestern fringe only served to reinforce the power of nature in shaping life in Ultima Thule (see Dodds, 2018). However, we should also consider the importance of non-aristocratic forms of land ownership in late nineteenth-century Norway as an emotive aspect of proprietary or propertied nationalism that privileged one's personal plot of land as part of a larger congeries that strengthened the ethnos and polity (see Fuglestad, 2018). Given the scope of this analysis, it is also relevant to note that the putative founder of geopolitics, political scientist Rudolf Kjellén, forged his arguments about the "biological" nature of nation-states with examples rooted in Sweden's dominion over Norway, later going on to support the German Reich's influence across Europe during the Great War and later inspiring the Nazi-era school of Geopolitik (cf.…”

A new sociology of nationalism: The sociology of property and nation

“…Nationalism was a key part of this because it altered the rules of political legitimacy from kings and gods to the people, and a fundamental aspect here was transformations in property rights. It has been the central point in my earlier works to demonstrate how the pristine forms of nationalism that emerged in Europe and America in the late 18th and the early 19th century were essentially about the securing of property rights, and, through this, creating independent individuals from which popular sovereignty emanated (Fuglestad, 2018a, Fuglestad, 2018b, Fuglestad, 2018c). It was in this way, by basing sovereignty on individual and (in theory) universal ownership of property, that nationalism (that is, its agents) debunked the sovereignty of absolutist monarchs and placed it in the people, at the same time laying the foundation for modern society.…”