<P> In the late - 19th century, thinking about citizenship began to influence China . Discussion started of ideas (such as legal limits, definitions of monarchy and the state, parliaments and elections, an active press, public opinion) and of concepts (such as civic virtue, national unity, and social progress). </P> <P> John Stuart Mill in his work On Liberty (1859) believed that there should be no distinctions between men and women, and that both were capable of citizenship . British sociologist Thomas Humphrey Marshall suggested that the changing patterns of citizenship were as follows: first, a civil relation in the sense of having equality before the law, followed by political citizenship in the sense of having the power to vote, and later a social citizenship in the sense of having the state support individual persons along the lines of a welfare state . Marshall argued in the middle of the 20th century that modern citizenship encompassed all three dimensions: civil, political, and social . He wrote that citizenship required a vital sense of community in the sense of a feeling of loyalty to a common civilization . Thinkers such as Marc Steinberg saw citizenship emerge from a class struggle interrelated with the principle of nationalism . People who were native - born or naturalised members of the state won a greater share of the rights out of "a continuing series of transactions between persons and agents of a given state in which each has enforceable rights and obligations", according to Steinberg . This give - and - take to a common acceptance of the powers of both the citizen and the state . He argued that: </P> <P> The contingent and uneven development of a bundle of rights understood as citizenship in the early nineteenth century was heavily indebted to class conflict played out in struggles over state policy on trade and labor . </P> <P> Nationalism emerged . Many thinkers suggest that notions of citizenship rights emerged from this spirit of each person identifying strongly with the nation of their birth . A modern type of citizenship is one which lets people participate in a number of different ways . Citizenship is not a "be-all end - all" relation, but only one of many types of relationships which a person might have . It has been seen as an "equalizing principle" in the sense that most other people have the same status . One theory sees different types of citizenship emanating out from concentric circles--from the town, to the state, to the world--and that citizenship can be studied by looking at which types of relations people value at any one time . </P>

In ancient greek city-states who could (generally) be citizens