As Cuban and Puerto Rican nationalists discovered, by the latter half of the nineteenth century, new world powers embracing the nation-state system and territorial expansion had begun to emerge. Using the ideals of popular sovereignty, capitalism, industrialization, and the new visions of social ordering that these nations championed, revolutionaries began to challenge the power of the old aristocratic elite.

Nation-Building and Expansion

Nation-state advocates asserted that the globe was divided into peoples or nations of common heritage and territory that required a state. Often, however, it was the state that created the nation by imposing standardized laws, time, administration, language, etc., on a diverse population to create a common identity. The Americas, Japan, and parts of Europe provide the best examples. In Europe, states appeared as revolutionaries broke away from multinational empires unable to keep their lands intact.

Territorial expansion, however, complicated the needs of the nation-state by introducing a new "people" outside the people defined by the nation. Nevertheless, the alleged benefits were asserted to outweigh the costs. By century’s end, nation-state competition for colonies led to a "scramble" for land that consumed the entire globe and led to goods and people crossing borders like never before. Imperialists brought modernization but not equal rights to the colonies.

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