Context: I'm trying to explain to a group of audience that people in the past did not really "love their country", because nationalism was not a thing back then. They argue that even in the past, people know about the differences between their versus other cultures, they called others "barbarians", they fought and died for their states, etc. therefore, that is nationalism.
My question is: How do modern historians define nationalism? People fight and die for their country just like they did in the past, what is the difference between our sense of "love my country" with our ancestors? At which point in history did nationalism started?
Thanks for helping.
As you seem to know, it varies across time and place. Loyalty and pride could be tied to race, religion, a certain class of people, lines of kinship, locality, or foreign tributary relations.
/u/yodatsracist explains some more on the concept [here] (https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1c3g9k/some_questions_about_nationalism_i_guess_a_lot_of/c9cp1gl).
... and also recommends this very helpful website to understand the major theories: http://www.nationalismproject.org/what.htm
The important point to make here is that nationalism (nationality) is a historically specific version of idea that has other historical analogs. Of course humans have basically always separated into groups (although this is more a question of anthropology perhaps?). However, when I talk about Nationalism, the nation, nationality, etc, what I'm talking about is a phenomenon rooted in the late 18th century. "Loving one's country" isn't all that nationalism is. It's general a consciousness that one is part of a particular group of a particular type - the nation.
Part of the trick here is that nations often imagine themselves as primordial and it can be difficult to poke people's intuitions about this around because it feels so "natural" to talk about nations as if they are the direct descendants of certain people's or civilizations. Of course, that's not necessarily so - but it is often IMAGINED to be so and that is one of the things that glues the nation together. This also can make discussion of the topic difficult to broach for the first time because it goes against peoples intuition (from having been steeped in the ideas of nationalism) that nations are a part of a kind of natural order.
Why are these things modern in particular? Well, they require things like a sophisticated (often industrial) economy, a population that can communicate with one another - literacy in a common language plays an important role here (see Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities), and a political elite that can organize the state based around these things (nation-state). Historically speaking, these sorts of things and this sort of political organization didn't really start to take off until the late 18th century.
So, I think the "love one's country" thing is a bit of a red herring. If someone is using the term nationalism just to refer to the general idea of being attached and willing to fight for one's group, they aren't really using it the way that historians often use it. That isn't to say they are wrong, I am willing to say that general idea probably has some merit. But that isn't nationalism by itself. The nation - as a particular KIND of group in which that happens- is really a modern construct. I also think that you can make an argument that a kind of proto-nationalism existed before this, but that it was distinct enough to be a different sort of historical construct.
See also: Eric Hobsbawm's Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth and Reality