Abstract

Taking into account the eclipse of the category of Nation-State in Atlantic and Trans-Atlantic history, the introduction discusses its new historical and analytical centrality in the age of globalization. The aim is not to provide a comparative analysis in a space larger than the European one, where the origin of the Nation-State is rooted, but to place the historical processes and the construction associated with them in a conceptual framework where States are not the only historical actors and their actions and transformations can be understood only with reference to the social, economic and cultural relations which crisscross their borders