Chapter 2
1. In the chapter ‘The Feudal System’, Jawaharlal Nehru credits the emergence of empires in Europe to the enterprise of robber barons lording over serfs from his castle at the bottom and fighting for the bigger lord at the top and argues that the process had been different in India and China. (Jawaharlal Nehru, Glimpses of World History, Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund/Oxford University Press, New Delhi, Thirteenth Impression, 1998.) That may have been so, but it’s possible to argue that empires have always been built through complex processes of negotiations of which brute force is often just a component. Threat of coercion is necessary to hold a territory together, but it’s impossible to administer it without some form of acquiescence of the population
2. Writing about the heady days of short-lived English Republic, Winston S. Churchill observes in the 2nd volume of his A History of English Speaking Peoples, ‘On 4 January 1649, the handful of Members of the House of Commons who served the purposes of Cromwell and the Army resolved that “the people are, under God, the original just power, … that the Commons of England in Parliament assembled, being chosen by and representing the people, have supreme power in this nation.’ Quoted from: Winston S. Churchill, A History of English Speaking Peoples, Volume Two, The New World, Cassel, London, Fifth Edition, Seventh Impression 1980, p. 227.
3. These quotes appear in a different context in Carlin Romano’s opinion piece, ‘Are Sacred Texts Sacred? The Challenge for Atheists’ in The Chronicle Review, Volume 54, Issue 4, p. B11 http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=z7l8lk37pncd9zfjn38qnmmjbzxlbng9. Accessed 28 September 2007.
4. John B. Allock (1989). ‘In praise of chauvinism: rhetorics of nationalism in Yugoslav politics’ in Third World Quarterly, Volume II No. 4, The author makes an important contribution to the theory of nationalism by analysing what he calls ‘Nationalism as political “rhetoric”’ in the Yugoslav context. pp. 206–221
5. Noting similarities, John Rex observes, ‘The clearest case of a society that bases itself on the notion of citizenship and the ideology of modernizing nationalism is that of France, where the natural tendency is to deny and seek to destroy the ethnicities of minorities. In Germany, the second kind of ethnic domination is to be found. There is a belief in the existence of a volk which pre-exists the nation of citizenship and whose membership includes many not even resident within the nation-state, while excluding others, who may be so resident but are not members of the volk,’ in ‘National Identity in the Democratic Multi-Cultural State’, Sociological Research Online, vol. 1 no. 2 section 5.2. http://www.socresonline.org.uk/socresonline/1/2/1.html. Accessed 9 June 2000.
6. Jawaharlal Nehru (1981). The Discovery of India. Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund/ Oxford University Press, New Delhi. p. 362
7. Dipankar Gupta (1996). Political Sociology in India: Contemporary Trends, Orient Longman, New Delhi. p. 19
8. Dubai Deals and London Exchanges between emissaries of General Parvez Musharraf, Benezir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif were topics of heated discussion in the aftermath of Lawyers’ agitation in Pakistan. There is a penetrating cover story of possible power pact in the August 2007 issue of Newsline, published from Karachi.
9. A comprehensive overview of the processes of Partition that led to the creation of Pakistan and India is given by Mushirul Hasan in his introduction Partition Narratives to The Partition Omnibus, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2002.
10. R. G. Collingwood (1994). The Idea of History. Oxford University Press, Oxford. p. 366
11. P. Saravanamuttu (1989). Ethnic Conflict and Nation-building in Sri Lanka, Third World Quarterly, Vol. 11, No. 4, London.