Lord Acton was an English Catholic historian and politician. His essay, Nationality, written with extraordinary maturity of insight in his late 20s and published in 1862, provides an analysis of the political interactions of state, race and territory that is highly pertinent to some of the most divisive issues of our own day – multiculturalism, indigenous rights, and republicanism.
Cultural diversity
For Acton, 19th-century nationalism was a vexed ideology, the bastard progeny of…
