al wrote:Grelf wrote:Err, no it is not. Politics and warfare were matters of the nobility back then, it did not concern the commoners at all, no matter how movies make it seem otherwise.
You say it as if it is different now.
There is no nobility today where I live. So yeah, it is. The general population has a voice on politics, and warfare is not a mere sport of the nobles either.
al wrote:They couldn't care less about who their lord was, or if his claims would increase in size or not, the only thing that they probably cared about concerning this was how heavily their lord was willing to tax them.
LoL. You totally ignore cultural and religious aspects, kin relations, etc, etc.
Nationalism is basically identification with one's own country or political entity. Why is that important if people didn't identify themselves with their country and didn't dabble in politics? If you study some more history you'll realize that lords swapped territory as often as people move to new homes today, and the lives of the people who lived there didn't change at all. And why would they identify themselves with every single random new territory they belong to, when matters such as war or politics don't even affect their lives? From one day to another people suddenly belonged to different kingdoms and empires, and it mattered not, because for commoners life outside of their villages or towns mattered very little. They could barely even know about what happened outside very well.
al wrote:There were concepts of people, country, nation and even race long before XIX. And there are thousands examples of how people (as an ethnic group) were trying to unite themselves under one state or to remove foreign rule from their country, while initiative came from both nobility and commoners.
"People", "country" or "race" are concepts much different from nationalism. The Russian Empire certainly was a nation-state, right? Even though they cared little to annex people from completely different cultures, ethinicity and religions.
