In his account of how ‘the nation’ was represented in eighteenth-century thought, Eric Hobsbawm wrote that ‘the primary meaning’ of the term ‘and the one most frequently ventilated in the literature, was political.’ This conception was notably bereft, he continued, of those attributes of nation-ness ‘so hotly debated by the nineteenth-century theorists, such as ethnicity, common language, religion, territory and common historical memories.’ Hobsbawm's conception of the Enlightenment nation – with its corollary projection of a Western, civic original, and an Eastern, ethno-linguistic, successor – persists, though not without its critics. Many, such as Maria Todorova, have challenged the ‘dichotomy’ posed in such accounts; a product, she and others argue, of a surfeit of theoretical works over more detailed accounts of contemporary understandings and context. As these authors suggest, there remains a surprising shortage of empirical works documenting how ‘the nation’ was actually portrayed in eighteenth-century culture and thought.

In addition therefore to examining the political connotations of the term highlighted by Hobsbawm, the following pages reveal how the nation was also commonly employed to distinguish bodies of people on the basis of descent, culture and language: The language of a given nation was to be sure not only used to determine its ‘racial’ ancestry but was further held to convey certain truths about its ‘character’ and state of ‘progress.’