The early modern “nation” meant a status-group sharing custom, not a territorial state.

Evidence

A society, but in the sense of an association, group, or body of individuals governed by a statute, a society made up of a certain number of individuals, and which has its own manners, customs, and even its own law. The something that begins to speak in history, that speaks of history, and of which history will speak, is what the vocabulary of the day called a “nation.” At this time, the nation is by no means something that is defined by its territorial unity, a definite political morphology, or its systematic subordination to some imperium. The nation has no frontiers, no definite system of power, and no State. The nation circulates behind frontiers and institutions. The nation, or rather “nations,” or in other words the collections, societies, groupings of individuals who share a status, mores, customs, and a certain particular law—in the sense of tegulatory statutes rather than Statist laws. — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 150

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the pre-revolutionary, pre-territorial sense of ‘nation’ as a status association, which is the seed of later nationalism and race-thinking.
• XREF: Directly seeds Benedict Anderson’s imagined community thesis and the later biopolitical notion of race as nation. — connects to: Nations are bounded by principle in a way universal religions were not. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 39; Shared language and culture do not constitute belonging to a nation.

Related

• The nation emerges as a new subject of history distinct from the State (similarity 0.84)
• Nations are bounded by principle in a way universal religions were not. (similarity 0.81)
• A nation is held together by consent, not by blood or geography (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Shared language and culture do not constitute belonging to a nation. #corroborates (0.85)