Tom Nairn: Old Nations, Auld Enemies, New Times

Second Edition Publishing March 2026

About the Book: 

Tom Nairn has been the most forceful and original mind to confront, de-mask and anatomise the British state. The perception that Great Britain was a multinational state and not a united nation had never quite been lost over the centuries, but it was Nairn who almost single-handedly hammered this truth into the skull of British intellectuals and campaigners until it became – as it is today –practically uncontested by the political class. - NEAL ASCHERSON, London Review of Books

For the last fifty years Tom Nairn has been one of Britain’s most consistently provocative and influential voices. No other writer has left so deep an impression on mainstream debates about Scotland, Britain and nationalism. No other writer has so thoroughly interrogated the United Kingdom’s post-war crisis and decline.

Old Nations, Auld Enemies, New Times brings together, for the first time, the full span of Nairn’s work, from his ground-breaking analysis of the British state in the 1960s and ’70s to his more recent examinations of globalisation, the English question and Scotland’s independence referendum.

Nairn stands alongside the great Scottish intellectual and literary figures of recent decades. Old Nations is the definitive Nairn collection – and an indispensable guide for anyone looking to understand the current moment in Scottish and British politics.

About the Authors:

TOM NAIRN, after serving time on the hulk of HMS Britain, escaped to teach ‘Nationalism Studies’ at Edinburgh University, then to research ‘Globalisation and Nationalism’ at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Victoria, Australia. His book The Break-up of Britain appeared in 1977 (Verso Books, most recent edition Common Ground Publishing, Melbourne, 2003). Faces of Nationalism (Verso) appeared in 1997 and Global Matrix (Pluto Press, with Paul James) in 2005.

JAMIE MAXWELL is a political journalist. He writes for the New Statesman, Bella Caledonia and the Scottish Review of Books, among other publications. He is the editor of The Case for Left Wing Nationalism, a collection of his late father Stephen Maxwell’s essays and the co-author, with David Torrance, of Scotland’s Referendum: A Voter’s Guide.

PETE RAMAND is the co-author, with James Foley, of Yes: the Radical Case for Scottish Independence and a co-founder of the Radical Independence Campaign. In 2013 he received an MSC (with distinction) in Nationalism Studies from the University of Edinburgh.