As a historian, I have often written about the idea of a ‘nation in arms’. The United States was forged not just by its Declaration of Independence, but by its victory — after an eight-year war — over George III.It was the revolutionary wars from 1793 to 1815 that turned ‘peasants into Frenchmen’, as the phrase goes.Modern and , too, became nations through bloody wars. And while British national identity was forged in much earlier times, we still define ourselves partly in terms of battle. Each time we sing the national anthem, for instance, we ask God to send our monarch not only happy and glorious but, first and foremost, victorious.
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