In my world history class we just reached the development of the first “nation states” such as France, which so far don’t seem all that different from other, older, civilizations. I am mainly curious why historians refer to France as developing into a “nation state”, while earlier empires like Rome and Persia weren’t considered to be nation states.
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First, although the words are used synonymously in at least American English, there’s a difference between nations and states. There’s a Kurdish nation, for example, but not a Kurdish state. At least one not widely recognized. It’s an ethnic thing.
Places like the US, Canada, and Australia don’t really have “nations” and are instead “states”, so that’s why it’s common in those places to use the terms interchangeably. France has most of the French “nation” inside the French “state”. Rome had all the Italic Latin, the “Romans” as included in their nation, but later Roman went in to mean anyone who was a citizen of Rome, which included a shit ton of people that weren’t ethnically Roman or Latin.
Secondly, the Treaty of Westphalia is commonly thought to be the advent of the modern international system, wherein European countries recognized the sovereignty of each other. Before that, it was more loosey and goosey and if you could flip a prince or duke or something into the service of your king, well now their land is party of your country. This was 1648, so most textbooks work from there.
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