Editing Nation state (section)

== Historiography ==
{{Further|Nationalist historiography}}
Historians often look to the past to find the origins of a particular nation state. Indeed, they often put so much emphasis on the importance of the nation state in modern times, that they distort the history of earlier periods in order to emphasize the question of origins. Lansing and English argue that much of the medieval history of Europe was structured to follow the historical winners—especially the nation states that emerged around Paris and London. Important developments that did not directly lead to a nation state get neglected, they argue:
:one effect of this approach has been to privilege historical winners, aspects of medieval Europe that became important in later centuries, above all the nation state.... Arguably the liveliest cultural innovation in the 13th century was the Mediterranean, centered on [[Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor|Frederick II]]'s polyglot court and administration in Palermo...Sicily and the Italian South in later centuries suffered a long slide into overtaxed poverty and marginality. Textbook narratives, therefore, focus not on medieval Palermo, with its Muslim and Jewish bureaucracies and Arabic-speaking monarch, but on the historical winners, Paris and London.<ref>{{cite book|editor=Carol Lansing and Edward D. English|title=A Companion to the Medieval World|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=Re-1YpI9ObsC&pg=PA1964|year=2012|publisher=John Wiley & Sons|page=4|isbn=9781118499467}}</ref>