Diversity and Demarcation

The first chapter covers the outgoing epoch of the multinational empires and continental Middle and Eastern European colonial powers, which experienced the zenith of their expansion of power and their collapse. The period between the turn of the century and the outbreak of the First World War was the golden age of European imperialism. It also introduced the heyday of nationalism. The nineteenth differed from preceding centuries by establishing increasingly strict boundaries in the interest of demarcating state and nation in two regards: in territorializing state authority and defining who was subject to it. Citizenship became the pre-eminent legal tool for marking the bounds of nation-state authority over persons. Alongside the particularly intense manifestation of national and ethnic criteria for inclusion and exclusion, new hierarchical systems, based on citizenship, grading affiliation based on ethnicity and race developed, redefining the relationship between colonizing and colonized nations on the European continent as well as in the overseas colonial territories.