In complex fashion, those revolutions
inaugurated transformations ‘from subject-
ship to citizenship’ across much of the globe
that are still ongoing today, when most of
the world’s governments proclaim them-
selves to be ‘republics’ of some sort popu-
lated by ‘citizens.’ In eighteeenth-century
North America and France, to be a ‘citizen’
was once again understood to be someone
who shared in political self-governance, as
in the ancient and Renaissance Italian city-
states. Unlike the medieval European
burghers, then, these modern ‘citizens’ were
people who were emphatically not ‘sub-
jects.’ They rejected rule by hereditary
monarchical and aristocratic families in
favor of a much broader community of
political equals. But in these modern
republics, self-governance by ‘citizens’ no
longer took place chiefly in ‘cities.’ Rather,
it occurred within ‘nations.’ These were
substantially larger populations who could
not possibly have face-to-face knowledge of
each other, only some form of ‘imagined
community,’ in Benedict Anderson’s valu-
able phrase (Anderson, 1983