Nationalism and awareness of it has recently been rising again across the world. The historical literature understands nationalism as a modern phenomenon and links the spread of nationalism to economic development driven by technological change such as printing or the telegraph and a growing division of labor (Anderson 1983, Gellner 1983). Economists instead often consider nationalism as a sign of backwardness or ignore it altogether. Economic history has focused on issues like protectionism but has paid limited attention to broader types of nationalism so far. Hence, the potential of the field remains largely unexplored, especially when it comes to testing new theories from identity economics and evidence based on modern econometric analyses and more granular data. We aim to analyze the link between economics and the spread of nationalism by means of quantitative case studies from the nineteenth and twentieth century and sound identification strategies.

Therefore, we aim to bring together the frontier research on this topic by asking the following questions: How do nationalist politics and identity formation interact with trade, economic inequality, industrialization, the spatial dimension of economic activity and technological change? How can we measure nationalism? Which theoretical approaches help us in order to conceptualize nationalism? What is the role of media for the spread of nationalism?