Writing the Nation: A Global Perspective

Writing the Nation A Global Perspective

Edited by

Stefan Berger

Writing the Nation

Also by Stefan Berger The British Labour Party and the German Social Democrats, 1900–1931: A Comparison The Search for Normality. National Identity and Historical Consciousness in Germany Since 1800 Ungleiche Genossen? Die britische Labour Party and die deutsche SPD bis 1931 Social Democracy and the Working-Class in Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Germany Inventing the Nation. Germany The Force of Labour: The Western European Labour Movement and the Working Class in the Twentieth Century, edited with David Broughton Writing National Histories: Western Europe Since 1800, edited with Mark Donovan and Kevin Passmore Nationalism, Labour and Ethnicity, 1870–1939, edited with Angel Smith Policy Concertation and Social Partnership in Western Europe. Lessons for the 21st Century, edited with Hugh Compston Labour and Social History in Great Britain. Historiographical Reviews and Agendas 1990 to the Present, special issue of the Mitteilungsblatt des Instituts für soziale Bewegungen Historikerdialoge. Geschichte, Mythos and Gedächtnis im deutsch-britischen kulturellen Austausch 1750–2000, edited with Peter Lambert and Peter Schumann Writing History: Theory and Practice, edited with Heiko Feldner and Kevin Passmore Towards a Comparative History of Coalfield Societies, edited with Andy Croll and Norman LaPorte The Other Germany. Perceptions and Influences in British–East German Relations, 1945–1990, edited with Norman LaPorte A Companion to Nineteenth Century Europe Narrating the Nation. The Representation of National Narratives in Different Genres, edited with Linas Eriksonas Writing National Histories. Representations of the Past in 19th and 20th Century Europe, special issue of Storia della Storiografia, edited with Andrew Mycock

Writing the Nation A Global Perspective Edited by Stefan Berger

Editorial matter, selection and introduction © Stefan Berger 2007. All remaining chapters © their respective authors 2007. All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: ISBN-10:

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This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 16

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

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This book is dedicated to my colleagues and friends in the ESF-NHIST programme who have taught me so much

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Contents Preface

ix

Biographical Notes

xi

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

Introduction: Towards a Global History of National Historiographies Stefan Berger

1

The Power of National Pasts: Writing National History in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Europe Stefan Berger

30

Seven Narratives in North American History: Thinking the Nation in Canada, Quebec and the United States Allan Smith

63

The Mirror of History and Images of the Nation: the Invention of a National Identity in Brazil and its Contrasts with Similar Enterprises in Mexico and Argentina Eliana de Freitas Dutra

84

Writing the Nation in Australia: Australian Historians and Narrative Myths of Nation Mark Hearn

103

Between Myth and History: the Construction of a National Past in Modern East Asia Q. Edward Wang

126

Writing the Nation in India: Communalism and Historiography Radhika Seshan

155

Writing the Nation in the Arabic-Speaking World, Nationally and Transnationally Birgit Schaebler

179

vii

viii Contents

9

Writing National and Transnational History in Africa: the Example of the ‘Dakar School’ Ibrahima Thioub

197

Select Bibliography

213

Index

232

Preface As always during the course of editing a book one accumulates many debts. This present volume would not have seen the light of day without the decision of the International Committee of Historical Sciences to adopt our proposal for a key theme on national historiographies in global comparative perspective. In organising this key theme for the 2005 Sydney congress of the Committee I am particularly grateful to the ICHS’s president, Professor Jürgen Kocka, and the ICHS’s secretary general, Professor Jean-Claude Robert for all their support. The proposal was launched through the Swiss section of the ICHS, and my co-chair in the NHIST programme, Professor Guy Marchal, was instrumental in getting the Swiss national historical association interested in this theme. Guy also launched the entire idea of a European Science Foundation (ESF) programme on national history writing with an exploratory workshop he organised at the University of Lucerne in 1999. Inspired by this meeting I subsequently wrote a first draft of the proposal for the programme ‘Representations of the Past: the Writing of National Histories in Nineteenthand Twentieth-Century Europe’ and, together with my co-chairs, Professor Guy Marchal and Professor Christoph Conrad, we assembled a team capable of leading the four teams which operate under the umbrella of the NHIST programme. Following two more workshops in Strasbourg and Leipzig, the programme proposal and the teams were confirmed and the ESF officially launched the programme in the spring of 2003. After two and a half years, it underwent a rigorous procedure of peer review, which strongly endorsed the programme. This is not the place to report in depth on the many activities of the NHIST. Detailed information can be found on its website: www.unileipzig.de/zhsesf. But it is the place to thank my co-chairs and team leaders, Professor Ilaria Porciani, Professor Chris Lorenz, Professor Lluis Roura, Professor Matthias Middell, Professor Tibor Frank and Dr Frank Hadler, with whom I have been privileged to develop intellectual partnerships and friendships over the last years. Special thanks also go to Professor Jo Tollebeek and Professor Lutz Raphael for strongly supporting the NHIST as co-editors of crucial NHIST volumes. The harmony within the wider programme team has been vital to the communicative and organisational success of NHIST. Furthermore I would like to thank the more than one hundred scholars from thirty European countries who continue to co-operate tirelessly with NHIST in its explorations of national history writing. A very big thank you also goes to the scientific secretary of the programme at the ESF, Dr Monique van Donzel, and to the administrative secretary of the programme at the ESF, ix

x Preface

Ms Madelise Blumenroeder, whose patience and unstinting support for the programme have been invaluable throughout. Last but not least a heartfelt thank you also has to go to Dr Maurice Bric, NHIST’s rapporteur on the ESF’s Standing Committee for the Humanities. Right from the beginning he has given generously of his time to advise the programme chair and help him over many intellectual and bureaucratic hurdles. If the programme has been running smoothly and successfully and is on track it is in no small measure due to the combined efforts of all the people mentioned above. And if this volume could be put together, it is also due to the many things that I have learned from my colleagues in the NHIST. Therefore it seems appropriate to dedicate this book to them. I would also like to thank the authors of the volume for their patience and perseverance with their editor who asked them many times to revise their pieces, to take note of each other’s articles and to comment on the editor’s lengthy introduction. They have been model contributors and I hope that they are happy with the end result of their endeavours. Last but not least I feel a particular debt to Michael Strang and Ruth Ireland from Palgrave Macmillan. I have been discussing the NHIST programme with Michael for many months now and am very grateful for his interest and his support. Next year we will be launching a major Palgrave Macmillan book series which brings together the research results of the NHIST in a six-volume book series entitled ‘Writing the Nation’. Ruth has been wonderfully supportive throughout the gestation period of this present volume and, as general editor of the book series, I am hoping to have the pleasure of further dealings with her over the next couple of years. Stefan Berger Disley, 1 August 2006

Biographical Notes

Stefan Berger is Professor of Modern German and Comparative European History at the University of Manchester. He has published widely on the history of nationalism and national identity, on historiography and on labour history. Among his most recent books are A Companion to Nineteenth Century Europe (Blackwell, 2006), The Other Germany: Perceptions and Influences in British–East German Relations, 1945–1990, ed. with Norman LaPorte (ADEF vol. 52, Martin Wiessner Verlag, 2005), Inventing the Nation: Germany (Edward Arnold, 2004) and The Search for Normality: National Identity and Historical Consciousness in Germany since 1800, 2nd edn (Berghahn, 2003). Eliana de Freitas Dutra is Professor of History at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, MG. She is currently co-ordinating a research project entitled ‘Brasiliana: Writings and Lectures of the Nation’. Among her publications are Rebeldes Literários da República: História e Identidade Nacional no Almanaque Brasileiro Garnier (University of Minas Gerais Press, 2005), O Ardil Totalitário: Imaginário Político no Brasil dos anos 30 (University of Rio de Janeiro Press, 1997), Caminhos Operários nas Minas Gerais (Hucitec/INL, 1988) and Politica, Nação e Edição (Anablume, 2006). Mark Hearn is Associate Lecturer in Australian History at Macquarie University, New South Wales. He has published widely in the field of Australian history, including scholarly articles in journals such as Gender and History, Rethinking History and Australian Historical Studies, and he is the coeditor of Rethinking Work: Time Space Discourse (Cambridge University Press, 2006). He was awarded the C. H. Currey Memorial Fellowship from the State Library of New South Wales for 2006 to research the Fin de Siècle Imagination in Australia, 1890–1914. Birgit Schaebler is Professor of History and Chair of West Asian History at the University of Erfurt, Germany. She held research fellowships and taught at the universities of Duke, Harvard and in Georgia, USA. She has published widely on the colonial and post-colonial histories of the Middle East and her book Rebellions in the Druze Mountain from Ottoman Times to Independence: a Historical-Anthropological Study has been translated into Arabic (Dar anNahar, Beirut, 2003). She is currently working on a book on the entangled histories of Europe and the Middle East, especially with respect to the question of a global modernity. Among her most recent publications is Globalization and xi

xii Biographical Notes

the Muslim World. Culture: Religion and Modernity, ed. with Leif Stenberg (Syracuse University Press, 2004). Radhika Seshan is a Lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Pune in India. She is a specialist in medieval Indian economic history and is developing an interest in gender studies. Her publications include many articles on medieval economic and gender history as well as three edited collections: Fractured Identity? The Indian Diaspora in Canada (Rawat Publications, 2003), Visiblising Women: Facets of History through a Gender Lens (jointly with K. K. Shah, Kalpaz Publications, 2005) and Medieval India: Problems and Possibilities (Rawat Publications, 2006). Allan Smith teaches history at the University of British Columbia. Widely published in the fields of Canadian, Canadian-American, and comparative North American history, he is the author of Canada – an American Nation? Essays on Continentalism, Identity, and the Canadian Frame of Mind (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994, 2000), recently issued in French as Le Canada: une nation américaine? Réflexions sur le continentalisme, l’identité, et la mentalité canadienne, Trad. Sophie Coupal (Québec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 2005). A member of the Advisory Board of Canadian-American Public Policy and of the Comité Consultatif of Mens: Revue d’histoire intellectuelle et culturelle de l’Amérique française, he is currently at work on a study of transnationalism in late twentieth-century Canadian-American affairs. Ibrahima Thioub is Chair of the History Department of the Faculty of Humanities of the Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, Senegal. He is president of the Association for West African Studies and vice-president of the executive committee of the Association of African Historians. He also edits the scholarly journals Afrika Zamani and Afrique et Histoire. He has worked extensively on questions of social marginality in Africa from the colonial period to the present day. His numerous publications focus on the history of the Senegalese prisons and on the African historiography about slavery and colonialism. Q. Edward Wang is Professor and Chair of the History Department at Rowan University, USA. Born and raised in Shanghai, he received his education partly in China and partly in the United States. His publications include: Mirroring the Past: the Writing and Use of History in Imperial China (co-authored with On-cho Ng, 2005), Turning Points in Historiography: a Cross-Cultural Perspective (co-edited with Georg G. Iggers, 2002), Inventing China through History: the May Fourth Approach to Historiography (2001) and Postmodernism and Historiography: a Chinese-Western Comparison (co-authored with Ku Wei-ying, 2000; in Chinese).

1 Introduction: Towards a Global History of National Historiographies1 Stefan Berger

History was a crucial element with which to construct nations and national identity. Nation-builders everywhere agreed: their nation had to have a history – the longer and the prouder the better. Creating national historical consciousness was widely seen as the most important precondition for engendering true national feeling in the wider population, as both the ethnicisation of the nation and its sacralisation only took shape against the background of history and heritage. But how, when, under which conditions and by whom was history used to create national identity? Was it used differently in different parts of the world? Was there a European master narrative of national history and were all other narratives of the nation derived from this master copy? The current volume explores these questions in global perspective with contributions ranging over all five continents. Its origins lie in a five-year European Science Foundation (ESF) programme entitled ‘Representations of the Past: the Writing of National Histories in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Europe’ that I had the pleasure to chair between 2003 and 2008.2 Exploring in detail the master narratives of about thirty European nation-states, the programme almost inevitably raised questions concerning the framing of national historical narratives outside of Europe and the cross-currents between European and non-European national histories. The principle of the nation-state was so obviously one of the most powerful transnational foci for spatial identities in modern history that it seemed worthwhile to explore the role of history writing in constituting the nation in different parts of the world.3 I was lucky enough to gain the support of the World Historical Congress, which decided to make this one of its ‘major themes’ at its Sydney meeting in 2005, where many of the chapters in this volume got their first airing as conference papers. Having presented the authors with the structural framework pursued by the ESF project, they had the task of applying it to their respective parts of the globe, so as to allow comparisons between the diverse ways in which national historical narratives were framed. They were specifically asked, first, to outline the institutionalisation and professionalisation of national historical writing, 1

2 Writing the Nation

secondly, to analyse the national master narratives in relation to narratives of ethnicity/race, class, religion and gender, thirdly, to pay due attention to the interrelationship between national and sub- as well as transnational narratives (i.e. local, regional, continental and global histories), and fourthly, to look at territorial overlaps between national histories in their respective parts of the world (i.e. the role of contested territories on constructions of national histories). Finally, they were asked to augment the comparative perspective by looking at the emergence and development of transnational networks and contacts within the community of historians.4 Starting from the ESF project and therewith making Europe the benchmark for all other parts of the globe makes this project prone to accusations of Eurocentrism. It is true that subsequent chapters deal mostly with the kind of ‘scientific’ history writing which was invented in Europe in the second half of the eighteenth century. It is also true that other ways of looking at history, including national history, that existed in other parts of the world, often far earlier than the eighteenth century, do not come into view much in this volume.5 The book starts from the assumption that it was such European ‘scientific’ history which powerfully underpinned European forms of modern nationalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. With colonialism and imperialism, both ideas, that of the modern nation and that of ‘scientific’ history, spread to all other parts of the globe. Hence, it seems justified to compare the ways in which such European ‘scientific’ histories underwrote national projects in diverse corners of the world. This does not mean that the book is opposed to the post-colonial project of ‘provincialising’ Europe, i.e. problematising essentially European/Western benchmarks for universal history.6 But Dipesh Chakrabarty himself has pointed out that any notions of authentically Indian representations of the past are problematic, as the very definition of history, at least in academic discourse, derives from a European model.7 Professional, university- or academy-based historians struggled hard in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, both inside and outside of Europe, to be able to define what is and what is not history. In the non-European world many pre-modern forms of historical imagination existed and inspired alternative and rival interpretations of the national past – interpretations which often stood in marked contrast to European ‘scientific’ ways of looking at national history. If we take India as an example, Kumkum Chatterjee has pointed to interesting parallels and important differences between Indian conceptions of national history and European ones.8 Tamil nationalism created the region as nation just as Czech and Romanian nationalism did in nineteenth-century Europe. In fact, the region could and did become a crucial component of the nation in many parts of the world. For Europe this has frequently been emphasised for the German example,9 but Prasenjit Duara has pointed out similar processes for China.10 Although Duara explicitly rejected the European Enlightenment ‘linear model’ of history writing

Introduction 3

for the colonial world, his insistence that nation emerged at the interface of conflicting local, regional, national and transnational narratives is also something that rings true for many European national histories. To return to our Indian example, the parallels between Indian and European conceptions of national history do not end with the impact of regional history. ‘Scientific history’ promising ‘authenticity’ and ‘hard evidence’ also, according to Kumkum Chatterjee, won the day among India’s professional historians. Hence Indian debates about what constituted history were debates where oral traditions and memories were pitted against scientific history, as was the case in the debates surrounding the kulagranthas that Chatterjee specifically examined. Those in favour of incorporating oral tradition and storytelling into notions of history tended to ignore an indigenous Indian scientific tradition which had developed independently from the European one. Nativism was so bound up with critiques of Western understandings of history that it was also constantly in danger of constructing the ordinary people as ‘uncorrupted soul of the nation’. As in Europe, therefore, we often find in the colonial world the central paradox that rural communities and the people are championed by urban and educated scholars. Alternative non-scientific understandings of history remained popular in many parts of the world, including Europe, but ‘scientific’ history managed to establish itself as the only ‘proper’ form of history everywhere. In official discourse, only ‘scientific’ history was authoritative history. Given the victory of ‘scientific history’ everywhere, are modern national histories outside Europe purely derivative, as Benedict Anderson famously claimed?11 Are they spread by anti-colonial nationalisms in Asia and Africa in the twentieth century? Or are anti-colonial nationalisms, as Partha Chatterjee has maintained, distinctive and authentic forms of nationalism?12 The chapters in this volume seem to support Anderson in as much as they all emphasise the importance of European models, even if these models were invariably adapted and modified. One might also add that, of course, the very search for distinctiveness and authenticity is derived from the European model of nationalism. Nevertheless, one should perhaps not underestimate authentic forms of non-European national histories which precede the modern age. Thus, for example, several studies on the Chinese historian Sima Qian have emphasised that his understanding of national history and his methodological approach to historical studies is fundamentally different from that of Western historiography. Especially his preference for multiple and competing stories is often juxtaposed to the Western model of linear and homogeneous narratives.13 In China, in fact, we encounter ideas of nation and national enemies as early as the Han period and again in the Song period. And ‘national history’, at least in name, existed in East Asia from the seventh century, as shown in Japan’s Six National Histories which were compiled between the eighth and the tenth centuries. And what about the forms of creole nationalisms in Latin America which are accompanied by constructions of national histories as early as the eighteenth

4 Writing the Nation

century, at a time when many parts of Europe were still struggling to come to terms with the modern concept of nation? In some parts of Latin America we also encounter an intriguing mixture of scientific European history and native oral traditions.14 Benedict Anderson’s thesis linking the early forms of creole nationalisms with the absence of language differences to the European motherlands and to the weakness of indigenous middle classes at the moment of national independence has come in for considerable criticism by scholars of Latin American nationalism.15 But so far it is unclear what will replace it. When and where then do modern national histories first appear? My own chapter on European histories emphasises the longevity of historical narratives about the nation ranging back, in some cases, to the middle ages.16 European humanism and the Reformation were crucial in establishing many of the key tropes that informed national narratives throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Yet it was only in the European bridge period between 1750 and 1850 that the national principle gained dominance over its rivals, such as religion, the dynastic principle and feudalism. The coming of modernity was accompanied by the victory of the nation-state over all rival forms of territorial and non-territorial allegiance. In the century between 1850 and 1950 it dominated identity constructions and it also dominated historical writing. Only during the second half of the twentieth century did the national principle undergo a series of profound challenges and crisis points, mostly in Western Europe and also in the Muslim world, as shown in the rise of pan-Arabism and pan-Islamism. And yet the national paradigm frequently showed a persistence and ability to maintain the primary allegiance of European citizens that makes it rather doubtful whether national histories and the national principle belong firmly to the past at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Many historians in Europe today seek to explore issues of Europeanisation and localisation of historical writing in the hope of overcoming the many limits of the national paradigm, but almost everywhere in Europe, national paradigms are still among the most powerful structuring devices of historical narratives. In North America, white settler societies imported the concept of national history from Europe and employed it with great effect from the second half of the eighteenth century onwards. Processes of professionalisation and institutionalisation, which gathered momentum in the last third of the nineteenth century, often started from the assumption of a transfer of historist ideas from Germany and Europe, although they were frequently based on a crude misunderstanding of Ranke and Co.17 After 1900 things moved rapidly and many historians from around the globe already came to the top American universities rather than the top European ones to learn and study (national) history. Notions of a unified national history in North America were challenged in the 1970s as sub-groups in society discovered history as a powerful tool to legitimate their own aims and gain recognition within the nation. Historians began to celebrate diversity rather than insist on unity – most markedly in

Introduction 5

Canada and least noticeably in Quebec, which always had been far less an immigrant society than either the USA or Canada as a whole. The Spanish and Portuguese colonists in Latin America were also importing concepts of nation and national history from Europe. The process of institutionalisation and professionalisation of history writing began earlier than in North America. Chile is widely regarded as pioneering the institutionalisation of history writing,18 but other countries, for example Brazil, were also creating an infrastructure for ‘scientific’ historical writing by the 1830s and 1840s. Latin American historical institutions, publications and narratives were modelled closely on European foundations. They played an influential role in legitimating the struggle for independence and in constructing postindependence identities. The attempts of national historians to use history to create homogeneity and coherence in what often were ethnically diverse societies only gave way to a greater recognition of diversity and multiculturalism in the context of the 1990s, when black and indigenous groups began using history to protest against centuries of discrimination. In Australia the first stirrings of a separate national narrative underpinning separate national identity constructions have been traced back to the First World War. Like in Europe and the Americas the pathfinders were self-taught amateurs. In Australia professional historians at the universities only began teaching and researching Australian history in the inter-war period. The construction of a unified and glorious national past was relatively short-lived and from the 1950s onwards, critical voices could be heard loud and clear in the Australian historical profession fracturing the national storylines. Hence the period of time in which Australian historians wrote a glorifying and nationalist form of history was, certainly by comparison with Europe and the Americas, relatively short. But as in Europe and the Americas the story is not a teleological one of declining power of national narratives after the Second World War. The 1990s saw a conservative backlash with significant attempts to stop what some saw as the self-deprecating agenda of critical historians and to develop a new patriotism in historical writing.19 In comparison with Europe, new nations or white-settler nations have more of a problem with historical time, in that they have greater difficulties in locating the origins of their nations in the dim and distant past. Most European nation-states were built on assumptions of the longevity of the nation-state: the older, the better, the more authentic. If there was no continuity of state traditions, ethnicity came to the fore to claim a long tradition of proud opposition of ‘the people’ to foreign state oppression. By contrast, new nations, according to Gerard Bouchard’s pathbreaking comparative work on new nation nationalisms, were faced with the dilemma that they either had to borrow the past of their mother country (a strategy followed by nation-states such as Uruguay, Argentina, New Zealand and Australia) or they had to borrow the past of the indigenous population (a strategy employed by Mexico and Peru). A third option was to decide that they did not need a long history and to

6 Writing the Nation

reset historical time along the lines of Benjamin Franklin’s famous words according to which the United States of America was a nation without ancestors. But many new nations, such as Brazil, the Caribbean island nations and Quebec, failed to resolve the problem of historical time satisfactorily and ended up with uneasy constructions of métissage and hybridity.20 If historical time in white-settler societies was problematic for national historiographies, historians in East Asia, the Middle East, India and Africa could point, like their European counterparts, to constructions of national pasts which long preceded the modern age. In East Asia proto-nationalism was often linked with the spread of neo-Confucianism from China to Korea and Japan, which was met by both enthusiastic endorsement and rejection. Yet it was the encounter with Western imperialism which gave national history a new relevance and urgency in the colonial world. To develop national history which would contribute to nation formation was perceived as a necessary step on the road to modernisation and Westernisation. Japanese historians were earliest off the mark and replaced the traditional Sino-centric with a new nation-centred view of history.21 European historians, such as Gustav Zerffi or Ludwig Rieß, were invited to write introductions to historical studies or, as in Rieß’s case, to teach at Japanese universities. Although historians have argued that their influence should not be overestimated, their interactions with Japanese historiography are testimony to Japan’s efforts to learn from ‘the West’.22 But by the end of the nineteenth century Japanese historians already began to turn away from the Westernisation paradigm, stressing instead indigenous Japanese values which justified the nation’s beginning imperial expansion in East Asia. Japanese imperialism in turn spurred on national history writing in Korea and China, where historians emphasised their respective nations’ claim to autonomy, if not superiority. Historiographies in all three countries had for centuries been focused on dynastic principles, which were now challenged by the national principle. Dynastic narratives had to fit and be accommodated to the national narratives, if they were to survive in the Westernised historiographies of East Asia. The transfer of European ideas of historism, and of Ranke in particular, was, however, not unlike the case in the US, restricted to notions of empiricism and source criticism.23 In Korea, Sino-centric understandings of history were based on relating time to legitimating dynasties; this was difficult to square with Western scientific ideas of history which linked time to concepts of ‘progress’.24 Western ‘scientific’ standards were frequently employed to demonstrate the longevity and proud history of the nations of Korea and China. The ebb and flow of the New Text Confucianism and its relations with the development of modern Chinese historiography and the Korean debates surrounding the rejection of the idea of a significant Chinese influence on Korea’s high antiquity are examples explored by Edward Wang in his chapter. The strong ties between nationalism and history writing in East Asia seem to continue almost unabated to the present day and have

Introduction 7

survived the communist experiments in China and North Korea virtually unharmed. Modern Indian national history was first written by the British colonists in an attempt to justify the British colonisation of the Indian sub-continent. When nationalist Indian historians responded to this imperial historiography they often felt the need to operate in the same scientific framework that their imperialist rivals championed. Adopting ‘scientific’ standards was one way of legitimating their rival nationalist narratives. Operating within the modernist framework of European historians, Indian historians often concentrated on demonstrating that India had everything that Europe had and more. It was, as Radhika Seshan argues in her chapter, the ‘me too’ syndrome of Indian historiography – a syndrome which can also be seen in a range of other colonial and post-colonial historiographies. Indigenous challenges to the Western historical framework existed. They emphasised that India had a much older and very different sense of history, located, above all, in familial chronicles. But at the Indian universities it was the Western frame of history which prevailed and which guaranteed that Marxist approaches to Indian history became by far the most popular ones in post-independence India from the 1950s onwards. Out of such academic Marxism the ‘subaltern school’ developed from the 1970s onwards. It was to create one of the most powerful critiques of Western and Europe-centred conceptual frameworks which inform many of today’s writings on post-colonial historiographies. Like Asia, the Arab-speaking world and sub-Saharan Africa had to contend with European/Western interpretations of their spatial identities. During the second half of the nineteenth century Arab historians upheld notions of a greater Arab nation which were based on the cultural rediscovery of Arab language and literature and were meant to counter the colonialist and imperialist narratives written by European historians of the Middle East. By the inter-war period many of the prominent Arab historians were trained at colonial schools and universities in Europe and North America. The American University of Beirut also played an important role in providing an institutional home for narratives of Arab nationalism. But the audience of Arab national historians was, as Birgit Schaebler outlines in her chapter, first and foremost European. It was about ‘writing the Arab nation into the minds of the Europeans’. This only began to change in the 1940s and 1950s when a new generation of Arab historians addressed an Arab audience and combined an emphasis on Arab language, history and community with an explicit antiEuropean bias. In Egypt, for example, the founding figure of the academic school of history, Muhammad Shafiq Ghurbal, studied with Arnold Toynbee at the University of London, but when he became head of the history department at Fu’ad University in 1936, he was keen that Egypt’s history should be written by Arabs in Arabic.25 In many Arab nation-states, such as Syria, Arab nationalism overwrote a nation-state centred nationalism.26 In the Arabspeaking world it was not so much multiculturalism which challenged the

8 Writing the Nation

idea of the nation at the end of the twentieth century, but Islamism. Its representatives argued that Arabism found expression not in the concept of the nation but in religion. In sub-Saharan Africa national history was instrumental in the anti-colonial struggle of the twentieth century.27 Francophone African historiographies were arguably less anti-Western than their Anglophone counterparts.28 As Ibrahima Thioub argues in connection with the Dakar School of Senegalese historians, it was the scientificity of national history writing which made it appear to anti-colonialists, such as Léopold Séngar Senghor, as the perfect tool with which to establish an authentic African identity whilst at the same time continuing a developmentalist project celebrating Senegal’s contribution to the wider Francophonie. Establishing indigenous cultural credentials vis-à-vis the West went hand in hand with the continuing idea that one had to catch up with the West not only in Senegal. Emphasising African cultural heritage did not mean challenging European notions of progress. Already pioneers of African history, such as W. E. B. Du Bois sought to counter Hegel’s famous dictum that Africa had no history by describing ancient African kingdoms in a way that made them look comparable to European civilisations.29 The institutionalisation of African national history as an academic discipline took place after the Second World War, but it could build on the work of local amateur historians who had written African history as early as the late nineteenth century.30 It brought with it the effective separation of African from African-American historiography which had been a prominent feature of writings on Africa ever since the pioneering work of Du Bois. In many contemporary African nation-states one of the central tasks is to come to terms with multiethnic states which are the legacy of colonialism. How national history should be written for such entities remains hotly debated among historians of Africa.31 For a minority of historians African history is the starting point for decentring Europe’s and North America’s place in world history,32 but for many historians in Africa the contemporary demands of the nationstate make such a perspective seem illusory. As the case of the Dakar School demonstrates, the concern for the independent African nation could lead historians to the pursuit of transnational agendas. Both the search for an authentically African civilisation in antiquity and the concern with the transatlantic slave trade are powerful examples of the ways in which concern for the African nation drove historians to look beyond the boundaries of the nation-state. In contemporary Africa, nationalist history still provides a powerful tool of those in political power with which they mobilise particular sets of collective memoirs. This is not just the case in Senegal. Zimbabwe, as Terence Ranger explains, provides perhaps the most saddening example of a kind of ‘patriotic history’ which currently legitimates political dictatorship and attempts to brainwash an entire generation.33 Ranger himself can be viewed as a historian who travelled a long way from using national history for the purpose of liberation and emancipation to

Introduction 9

become a vociferous critic of the xenophobic and dogmatic national history as propagated by the Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe. Liberation and emancipation had also been keywords in the arsenal of European Enlightenment historiography during the second half of the eighteenth century. Many Enlightenment historians developed a keen interest in national history and sought to explore national characters, but they did so with the ultimate aim of establishing common and universal characteristics of the conditio humana. The specificity of national characters and national histories began moving to the fore only with the onset of Romantic historiography in the early nineteenth century. A direct response to the universalist aspirations of Enlightenment historiography and the French Revolution, Romantic narratives employed history to establish the unique character of nations, legitimate their existence in history and justify their alleged superiority over other nations. Vernacular languages, literatures and cultures were given the stamp of authenticity. As my own chapter outlines, time frameworks for the nation were developed which operated routinely with models of rise and decline, golden ages, lost homelands and national revivals. Much of nineteenth-century national historiography in North America was, like its European counterpart, framed in a Romantic mode. Dramatic stories of heroism formed the basis of the construction of ‘national characters’. Canadian ‘northernness’ with its emphasis on location and climate was similar to the idea of the ‘frontier’ in US historiography, as both implied that the nation was forged in the process of a mastery of vast territorial spaces. Quebec’s ‘Gallic spirit’ by contrast tended to emphasise more idealistic and spiritual dimensions of the national storyline. In Australia Romanticism in historical writing took the form of endorsing the traditions of British liberalism and the heritage of British racial origin. The myths of ‘mateship’ and egalitarianism made Australia a better Britain – without the negative effects of the English social class distinctions and improving on the considerable positive legacies that the British homeland had bequeathed on Australia. In some Latin American states, such as Mexico, nineteenth-century historians were also widely engaged on projects which were to demonstrate that the colonial society had in important ways improved on the motherland.34 This could take the form of defending Spanish colonisation or it could end in calls for an independent Mexico. In Argentina Romantic national narratives, like in North America, started from the importance of vast open spaces to be settled and civilised. Celebrating the rustic individuality of a new people, white historians who tended to be part of the white colonising elite, set themselves the task of ‘whitening’ their respective nations. On the one hand, white-settler societies such as those of the USA, Canada, Latin America and Australia tended to construct histories which celebrated the struggles of ordinary citizens and their success in forging egalitarian and free societies. On the other hand, omissions abounded in these narratives: violence against the indigenous peoples, sectarian struggles between

10 Writing the Nation

the Protestant British and the Catholic Irish, the role of women in society, the emergence of new class distinctions and social differentiations – all of this was absent from the Romantic national narratives in white-settler societies. Their national storylines tended to rely on narratives of conquering an inhospitable and wild country that they civilised and cultivated. That these lands had been inhabited by other peoples which were often treated with the utmost contempt was widely ignored in the heroic national histories. Do we find parallels to Romantic national narratives outside of Europe and European white-settler societies? Neo-Confucianism in China can perhaps be seen as a parallel to Romanticism in Europe in that both seem to have been preoccupied with metaphysical and moralising concerns about the national past. Under the influence of Western Romantic paradigms of history writing Chinese historians began to search in China’s high antiquity for the sources of the Chinese cultural revival. Like in Europe it became of paramount importance to trace the origins of the Chinese as far back as possible to ‘prove’ the authenticity and superiority of Chinese culture over everything else. The early generations of Indian national historians were also following a European Romantic paradigm in their quest to restore a long-lost past and thereby recapture a sense of pride and self-respect. In the Arab-speaking world and in sub-Saharan Africa one equally encounters notions of cultural rediscovery and revival which have been at the very heart of the Romantic national history movement in Europe. The ‘Arab renaissance’ during the second half of the nineteenth century and Cheik Anta Diop’s twentieth-century efforts to prove the authenticity and superiority of a genuinely African civilisation are prominent examples of such Romantic narrative constructions in the Middle East and in Africa. A prominent characteristic of Romantic historiography, albeit older and more persistent than Romanticism, was the strong gendering of national narratives. It became standard narratological practice in Europe to feminise national enemies, bemoan the rape of one’s own nation by others and celebrate the nation as family. One of the central categories of early Australian national narratives was that of ‘mateship’ – a clearly gendered category stressing the importance of male bonding in the outback and of male solidarities in hostile and difficult surroundings more generally. White-settler societies, including the Americas and South Africa, which defined themselves through a frontier which had to be pushed backward in order to expand the reach of the nation tended to have a strong male bias, as it was male characteristics, such as courage, physical strength, endurance, perseverance and struggle which were the most important ingredients in stories about how a nation came fully into its own by appropriating vast expanses of land. In South America historians have recently stressed the importance of the idea of ‘honour’ in gendering national discourses in this part of the world.35 Colonialist discourse often feminised the indigenous population in an attempt to justify the paternalist authority of the coloniser over the colonised. For India Mrinilina Sinha

Introduction 11

has demonstrated how such discursive construction of Indian males as feminine has worked.36 During the second half of the nineteenth century Romantic history writing was challenged by what one might term positivist history writing in Europe. Through an even more rigorous application of the arsenal of ‘scientific’ methods these positivist historians began to debunk what they saw as the myths of Romantic national history. Not all of them subscribed to the rigorous Comtean version of positivism, according to which one could verify or empirically measure discrete historical phenomena. And few actually believed in the possibility of discovering firm laws of human activity in the past. But most believed in the progressive historical evolution of knowledge and in the crucial importance of basing history on empirical facts. Using the word ‘positivist’ here as a blanket term for what has been described as an important move away from Romanticism, can be confusing, but for lack of a better term I am still using it in what follows. Those ‘positivists’ were often sceptical of attempts to ground national history in concepts of ‘the people’ and instead paid greater attention to the role of states and governing elites. Maintaining the self-image as pedagogues of the nation, they set out to provide an even more scientific and truthful mirror in which the nation would be able to see itself in its full glory. Scientific nationalism in history writing, whether in Romantic or positivist mode, emerged at different times in different places in Europe – in some places, such as Germany and France, it was already well developed by the middle of the nineteenth century. Elsewhere, for example in Ukraine and Latvia, it was only after the First World War that the ideas of nationalism and ‘scientificity’ merged fully. Once again, the Americas provide the closest parallels to the European scenario in that the second half of the nineteenth century witnessed a positivist challenge to Romantic forms of history writing. Stressing the factual orientation of historical sciences, historians made good use of the alleged ‘scientificity’ of their subject area to emphasise in particular stories of impressive material growth in the US and Canada. In Latin America, historians began to chart the failure of their societies to produce an equally impressive economic performance, thereby occasionally producing national histories which were critical of aspects of post-independence national politics. And yet, the orientation towards empiricism and source criticism in both North and South America continued to produce histories which sought to foster and strengthen national feeling. Whereas in Europe and the Americas the new positivism often re-enforced the traditional nationalism by means of emphasising the latter’s more ‘scientific’ basis, in Australia, a more rigorous application of scientific method went hand in hand with more critical perspectives on the national storyline. This might have something to do with the relative belatedness of the emergence of scientific nationalism in Australian historiography. If notions of a separate Australianness only began to enter academic discussions about

12 Writing the Nation

national history in the inter-war period, it was not long before Keith Hancock formulated the first critique of the Australian nation-building project, arguing that isolationism and an overdependence on the state had produced a ‘monochrome culture of mediocrity’. Manning Clark continued the selfcritical re-evaluation of Australia’s past after the Second World War, calling on his fellow historians to abandon the old comforting myths and face the more problematic aspects of Australia’s past. As Mark Hearn argues in his chapter, this was taken up with a vengeance by the New Left in the 1960s and 1970s. In China a positivist challenge to neo-Confucian historiography resulted in calls to base history on more factual evidence well before the European influence made itself felt. China can thus be seen to have developed its own variant of historism which preceded and paralleled the movement of European historism. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it would be easier for Chinese historians to adapt Ranke and European historism because they could relate their calls for ‘scientificity’ to indigenous traditions. The New Text school of the nineteenth century critically reinterpreted China’s past so as to bring it into line with Western conceptions and ideas. In Japan, positivism, like Romantic national history and historism itself, were more clear-cut Western imports, but the positivist challenge contributed to critiquing the mythologies of the Meiji state. Taguchi Ukichi, who wrote a multivolume national history of Japan between 1877 and 1882, was informed by the desire to show the workings of laws in Japanese society – an idea which he clearly owed to his European predecessors Spencer and Buckle. Overall, the state remained very much the focus of Japanese historical narratives. A Historiography Office was founded to glorify Meiji rule and justify the overthrow of the Tokugawa shogunate by the Meiji who were ascribed divine origins. Scientific positivism was also crucial to the self-understanding of the founding fathers of the Dakar School of historians. They used its tools as a benchmark for their diverse attempts to discuss the impact of colonial domination on African societies. As Ibrahima Thioub demonstrates, the outcome could be extremely different and range from straightforward nationalism, which depicted Africans as innocent victims of the colonial powers, to more complex and self-critical narratives, asking uncomfortable questions about the collusion of African elites in projects of colonialism. Twentieth-century Marxism, both inside and outside of Europe, often took the mantle of positivism and was not averse to matching it to a nationalist outfit. Prominent cases include Stalinist Russia as well as Maoist and North Korean historiographical endeavours. In the Arab world Marxism provided the incentive to merge the concept of nation with the idea of revolution in attempts to provide social justice within the framework of a continuous and proud Arab culture. In parts of Latin America and Africa, Marxism was the ideology which seemed best suited to explain underdevelopment and exploitation by international capital while at the same time holding out the vision of international workers’ solidarity and the continuation of the modernist,

Introduction 13

progressive project. Especially in the 1960s and 1970s, arguably the global highpoint of Marxist influence at institutions of higher education, it was a common reference frame for historians from different continents. Marxist approaches to historical writing could also underpin powerful critiques of national master narratives. In India, Marxist history writing from the 1950s onwards broke away from dynastic history. The Marxists’ concerns with analysing Indian ‘feudalism’ and discussing the hindrances to the development of capitalism in India did not lead them to transcend national history but they did manage to give national history a more self-critical edge. And in a range of Western European countries as well as in North America, Marxist historians in a range of countries were in the forefront of formulating more self-reflexive national narratives from the 1960s onwards. Scientific nationalism, in its Romantic, positivist and Marxist guises, existed alongside the internationalist commitment of historians to the universal applicability of the tools of historical science everywhere. Like other sciences, the historical sciences underwent a thorough internationalisation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with diverse attempts in Europe, Asia and the Americas to form transnational associations and networks. Yet, scientific nationalism proved to be much stronger than any internationalist professional ethos, and the cultural demobilisation after the First World War was fraught with difficulties, as most historians all too willingly served their respective nations and governments in the pursuit of political aims and ambitions.37 In the Second World War such political functionalisation of historiography found its apogee in the justification of German historians for the racial state of the National Socialists, ethnic cleansing and the holocaust. It was the Second World War and the holocaust which marked the most fundamental rupture of national paradigms in most parts of Europe. But this was a delayed rupture, as the immediate post-war years saw, above all else, attempts to restabilise and reconnect to the traditional national narratives which had dominated the pre-war years. Only from the late 1950s onwards do we see attempts to engage more critically with the national master narratives and either replace them with other national master narratives, or, in a few cases, to move beyond the national paradigm altogether. Political projects, such as the one of the European Union in Western Europe or the building of really existing socialism in Eastern Europe, once again sought to engage historians and functionalise their craft to provide identitarian narratives which could underpin these transnational political projects. In a global perspective the transnational ambitions of European historiography should be compared more often with transnational endeavours elsewhere. Pan-Arabism, and pan-Africanism are two prominent examples of political transnational projects underpinned by a good deal of historical writing. From the 1930s onwards Arab historians constructed a pan-Arab nation on ideas of race, civilisation and material unity. They pointed to Arab achievements, stressing that they were greater than the achievements of classical Rome and Greece,

14 Writing the Nation

which were perceived as the foundations on which European civilisation rested. And the search for black Athene as well as the description of an African antiquity which rested on the Pharaonic civilisation of Egypt served a very similar purpose of giving to Africans a long and proud history – something that had been routinely denied by the European imperialist project. The latter, by creating a Francophone, Anglophone and Lusophone African space, also contributed in important ways to forms of transnational identities which led to transnational histories being constructed. It was difficult to contain African history in the nation-state. In Asia and in the Americas, attempts to initiate either political or historiographical projects with transnational ambitions were burdened with greater difficulties. In East Asia, Japan’s failure to acknowledge publicly the atrocities committed in the Second World War continue to stand in the way of producing transnational historical narratives. Historians such as Saburo Ienaga have fought for many decades to include discussions on Japanese guilt in school curricula and other public media, but nationalist colleagues, such as Kanji Nishio, perceive such attempts as national ‘masochism’ and continue to peddle old nationalist myths in their publications on national history.38 On the Indian sub-continent the communalist orientation of history writing, which stemmed from British colonialist discourses constructing Hindu and Muslim as mutually exclusive identities, fed directly into the nationalisation (along ethno-religious lines) of India and it still contributes to the destruction of transnational spaces and ambitions. Australia’s long-time refusal to accept its geographical position in Asia and its continued attachment to the European and Western mindframe isolated it in Asia. In North America, Canada is struggling to keep its mighty southern neighbour from swallowing Canada and in Latin America the national paradigm also continues to be used as a defence against the all-pervasive influence of the USA. If transnational projects have a different scope and differing ambitions in diverse parts of the world, the belief in stable and homogeneous national narratives is undermined in the present almost everywhere by the methodological challenges of the new cultural history, memory history, post-structuralist and post-colonial history. Yet national histories are far from being a spent force in the wider world. Many of the post-Soviet nation-states in Eurasia are good examples of the importance of national historical consciousness to nation-building projects in the contemporary period.39 After the dissolution of Yugoslavia the new successor states perceived it as crucial to construct their own separate national histories.40 In Palestine the construction of national history is widely thought to be a crucial part of the forging of a Palestinian identity.41 And minority nationalisms in Western Europe, from Scotland to Catalonia, are also busy constructing their own national pasts against the national narratives of Britain and Spain. Nevertheless, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, most professional historians are looking for more open, more playful national identities, which can accept fracture, hybridity

Introduction 15

and contamination and actively celebrate diversity.42 Even in nations where history was crucial in underpinning nationalist myths of exclusion, such as in Ireland and Israel, revisionist historians have recently attempted to shed those nationalist myths in an attempt to move beyond the national paradigm.43 Attempts to escape the narrow national paradigm were facilitated by the increasing internationalisation of the historical profession after 1945. Unprecedented possibilities for academic exchange programmes meant far greater mobility for European historians. Not only the EU in Western Europe and the alliance of communist states in Eastern Europe, but also a host of bilateral agreements ensured that many historians gained direct experience of different national states and national histories. In particular the exchange programmes between North American universities and their counterparts in all other continents became the launchpad of much transcontinental traffic of historical ideas in the second half of the twentieth century. Of course, as Allan Smith points out in his chapter, transnationalism serves the national interests of the USA extremely well. Not only is it an important means to understand better the international position of the only remaining superpower, it also tends to transmit the (self-)image of the USA as home of liberalism, democracy, progress, individualism and enterprise – an image which is crucial to maintaining the idea of an American mission in the wider world. The political functionalisation of history writing was a widespread phenomenon in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In nineteenth-century Latin America, as Eliana Dutra reminds us in her chapter, historians were frequently divided between those who used versions of national history to legitimate a rupture with colonialism and the colonial motherland and those who used history in favour of retaining the colonial ties. Post-independence history became a recruit to the struggle between those who favoured monarchist and those who preferred republican state forms, such as in Brazil or between those who argued for strong central states and those who were in favour of more federal structures, as in Argentina. Hispano-centric perspectives, such as the idea of Mexico as the New Spain, competed with indigenist narratives, such as the emphasis on the Aztec heritage in Mexican history writing. History wars also have a prominent place in Australia’s national history. Here historians moved enthusiastically to endorse multiculturalism and denounce national identity as an invented tradition towards the end of the twentieth century. Rethinking the precise relationship between nation, gender, race and class put micro-histories of national identity firmly on the agenda and made indigenous studies one of the most hotly debated areas of Australian national history. It provoked a conservative backlash in the 1990s, when historians such as Geoffrey Blainey and Keith Windschuttle attempted to recast the story of white liberal progress denouncing the black armband brigade among their fellow historians. In addition, Australian national history remained isolationist and bound up in debates concerning the nation. Only rarely have Australian historians explored Australia’s history in transnational

16 Writing the Nation

perspective – linking it to the Asian-Pacific world around it. After the initial orientation towards Britain had been rejected, there was no reorientation towards the wider space that Australia inhabited on the globe but, on balance, an inward-looking, self-absorbed concern with Australianness. In Japan, historical criticism of traditional national mythologies was ruthlessly censored before 1945. During the Second World War the direct political functionalisation of Japanese historiography was most evident in the way in which historians rallied around the Imperial dynasty and defended the idea of the descent of the emperor from the gods. Communist China also used historiography extensively to legitimate communist rule and challenge Western claims that the process of nation-formation had started in the West. China was held up as the oldest nation in the world. Communist and anticommunist historiographies in both parts of Korea were united in their quest to proof ‘scientifically’ the longevity and autonomy of the Korean nation.44 During the British rule over India, history was an important battleground between the colonisers, enlisting it in the justification of their rule over the subcontinent, and the colonised, seeking arguments for self-rule and national independence. Post-independence, history has remained a vital battleground for competing national identities on the sub-continent but also for differing political and religious projects within the Indian nation-state.45 In the Arabspeaking world historians also did not escape the pull of politics. Notions of an Arab nation were central to Jamal Abdul Nasser’s attempt to create socialism in Egypt and the plight of the Palestinians since the 1960s has continually sharpened the political edge of Arab historical narratives. To many historians the Palestinian liberation struggle showed both the necessity of and the path to greater Arab unity. The Senegambian story told by Thioub is also one in which the political functionalisation of national history writing looms large. The anti-colonial struggle for independence and the post-independence attempts to legitimate the state seem to feed almost seamlessly into the political mobilisation of collective memories in the present, where African historians are enlisted by various regimes to prop up uncritical versions of the past. National history writing has been serving national politics everywhere. As long as the nation-state remains an important political reference point, national histories will continue to loom large in historical writing. It was the very strength of that national framework which ensured that the national paradigm was successful in accommodating and subsuming religious, class and race histories.46 Whilst the transnational categories of religion, class and race had the potential of challenging the dominance of the national master narrative throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, they in fact rarely did so. They developed their most powerful appeal not against but in conjunction with the national narratives. If we look at religion first, British, German, Swiss and Scandinavian narratives were mostly Protestant while Spanish, Portuguese and Polish narratives were often Catholic and Russian and Romanian narratives were frequently Orthodox. Confessional differences

Introduction 17

were at times an important marker of national enmities between nationstates. Confessional rivalries within one nation-state often constituted different master narratives which competed with one another. The idea of nations expanding or shielding Christian Europe from the infidels at Europe’s borders was a powerful one in various national histories, including Spain, Portugal, Hungary, Poland and Russia. The proximity of theology and history writing in the nineteenth century fed into the nationalisation of religious discourses and the sacralisation of national discourses.47 In North America the strongest impact of religion on constructions of national historical narratives can be found in nineteenth-century Quebec, where Catholicism became central to identity discourses. Only after 1918 did some historians begin to rethink the strong ties between Québécois national identity and religion in an attempt to recover lines of development more in line with those in histories of Canada and the USA. Especially after the Second World War this trend was re-enforced by a tendency to see the strong religious element in identitarian constructions of Quebec as something of an exaggeration. The strength of secular trends in Quebec since the last third of the twentieth century has further eroded the links between Catholicism and the Québécois historical narrative. Links between Protestantism and the national narratives of the USA were extremely evident in particular in the treatment of the arrival of the Pilgrim Fathers in America and the role of a Protestant ethic in the making of the individualist, enterprising and democratic spirit which allegedly pervaded the history of the USA. Like in the national narratives of Spain and Portugal, Catholicism loomed large in Latin American histories – as focus for identity in Catholic national histories and as important ‘other’ in liberal national histories. Like in many European nation-states which were multiconfessional, so in Australia religion was undermining rather than underpinning national cohesion. As a consequence most early Australian national histories chose to ignore the sectarian struggles between the Protestant English and the Catholic Irish on Australian soil. The anchoring of national narratives in Confucianism in China and Korea and in Shintoism in Japan ensured that there was also a significant merger between religion and nation in East Asia. Japanese attempts to prove the divine origins of the Meiji sometimes brought history close to a form of historical theology. Even in communist China an attempt was made to integrate Muslims into the national narrative by promoting Hui minzu (Muslim national) historiography from the 1950s onwards.48 As mentioned above, religion was a major concern for the British historiography of India. Presenting the British as protecting the Hindus from the oppressive Muslims, they also constructed Hinduism as a static religion preventing social change. Religion thus played an influential role in exoticising India and dividing it along religious lines. When Hindu historical narratives increasingly began to challenge British rule after 1857, British narratives changed track and presented the British colonial presence as vital for protecting

18 Writing the Nation

the Muslims. Hindus in turn accused Muslims of betraying the nation by putting allegiance to Islam before allegiance to India. Hindu national narratives frequently excluded both Christians and Muslims from definitions of the nation. More recently Hindu nationalism has produced a range of historical accounts which project a fictional composite Hinduism into the history of early India.49 In the Middle East notions of a pan-Arab nation were constructed against the European colonisers, but also to rival Islam. There were exceptions such as al-Husri, who argued that Islam was the product of the Arab national genius and therefore had to be connected to notions of a strong Arab nation, but within the tradition of socialist pan-Arabism, anti-Islamic sentiment prevailed. Following the failure of socialist pan-Arabism, the rise of Islamism therefore brought ideas to the fore which saw the construction of an Arab nation as nothing but a Western imperialist plot. To Islamists Arabism found expression in Islam and not in the nation. In countries such as Lebanon, confessional pluralism provided a major stumbling block for an integrated national history. Separate pro-Lebanese, pro-Syrian and pro-Arab narratives undermined the cohesiveness of any united Lebanese national narrative. To this day the national historical consciousness in Lebanon is struggling to come to terms with confessional plurality.50 Elsewhere, for example in Turkey, secular and Islamist national narratives constructed different foundational moments and key events for their mutually incompatible national histories.51 Throughout sub-Saharan Africa Christian missionaries have been vitally important for writing history in the nineteenth century. Often they combined a belief in European modernisation and progress with respect for indigenous cultures and Christian moral values. In nation-states such as Nigeria, which is divided into a Muslim north and a Christian south, Muslim and Christian national narratives produced rival accounts of national developments which rarely even talked to each other. If religion was frequently nationalised in historical narratives, the same can be said for class histories. Early labour movement history in Europe, which originated from within the fold of the labour movement, and early forms of social history practised in the universities and academies rarely privileged class over nation. Quite the contrary, they often gave the national storyline a different spin by introducing the concept of class. The communist historiographies which developed in the Soviet Union after 1917 and in Eastern Europe after 1945 often unimaginatively repeated the traditional national narratives with sometimes only the slightest of modifications.52 Class histories in North America became prominent at the universities from the 1960s onwards and, under the impact of the New Left, soon began to provide an important critique of American exceptionalism and key ideas of the liberal American national narrative. Yet most of labour history stayed firmly within the national framework for writing history (if anything, local and regional labour history became far more popular than transnational

Introduction 19

approaches), thereby creating more a national counter-narrative than attempting to overcome the national orientation of historical writing per se. In Latin America class became racialised to a significant extent, with Africans and the indigenous people generally forming the lowest social class and being excluded from the nation, even in countries, such as Brazil, where the national ideology made much of notions of hybridity and creolisation. It was only really towards the end of the twentieth century that mainstream historians took note of the complex ways in which issues of race and class were intertwined in Latin American national histories.53 In Australia the central role of egalitarian ‘mateship’ in national narratives had, for a long time, served as an effective barrier against class analyses of Australian society. The change came here, like in the US, with prominent New Left critiques from the 1960s onwards. New Left historians insisted on analysing the class structure of Australian society and like their North American and European counterparts, they contributed in a major way to the emergence of more critical national narratives in Australia. Marxist historians were prominent in the systems of higher education in China, Japan and Korea after 1945. In communist China and North Korea, sterile and dogmatic forms of a state-sponsored and state-controlled class history emerged, but in Japan and South Korea Marxist historical discourses also often supported hyper-nationalist versions of the past. Their criticism of capitalism in Japan and authoritarian forms of government in South Korea hardly influenced their continued endorsement of forms of historiographical nationalism. Marxist-inspired class histories in India from the 1950s onwards were, by contrast to East Asia, influential in providing national counter-narratives. Through the subaltern school of studies, Marxism was transformed into post-colonialism which was to present one of the greatest challenges to Western-dominated forms of historical writing, including national history, at the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first centuries. In the Arab-speaking world, concerns with forms of social injustice bred an interest in Marxism and an attempt to merge nationalism with populist perspectives. Taking the example of the sixteen-volume history of Egypt by Abd al-Rahman al-Rafi, which became known as the ‘National Corpus’, one can see how the category of ‘the people’ is replacing all other possible foci of national history, in particular the monarchy, which did not fit into this foremost example of popular-nationalist history writing. Al-Rafi’s storyline was close to the interests of the National Party in Egypt.54 When the Nasserite project failed, the attempted merger between radical populism and nation stood discredited and left the field wide open to Islamist interpretations of the Arab past. In the Dakar school of history writing an interest in social class led some historians in the wake of Abdoulaye Ly to question the role of African elites in the transatlantic slave trade. But otherwise the strong ethnicisation of African history gave little scope to questions of class which was often discussed only in highly specialised labour history circles from the

20 Writing the Nation

1970s onwards. These labour historians rarely had much impact on the writing of national histories. Race entered the historiographical discourses with the rise of Social Darwinism in Europe in the late nineteenth century. It grew out of the intense early concern of national narratives with ethnicity and ethnicised cultures (to the extent that nation was often used synonymously with ethnicity), and led in turn to attempts to categorise European nation-states according to alleged racial affinities. Hence it provided new typologies of friends and foes in national discourses across Europe. Especially after the First World War, notions of the racially defined Volk and the territorial space it allegedly occupied served the purpose of legitimating demands for the revision of the peace treaties of Versailles and Trianon – most notably in the case of German and Hungarian historians. But versions of Volksgeschichte were prominent elsewhere in Europe and the Greek Megali idea rested on notions of racial superiority of Greeks over Turks just as much as German Ostforschung relied on ideas of racial superiority of Germans over Poles.55 In North American historical discourses racial tensions and discriminations within society were often ignored. National history was white history. This only began to change when the idea of a unified national history was challenged by what Allan Smith calls the ‘politics of sub-group recognition’.56 Canada endorsed the new diversity more wholeheartedly than the USA, but in both historiographies issues of race began to loom large in national histories and tended to give a critical edge to national storylines. One of the most intriguing mergers between the concepts of nation and race took place in parts of Latin America and is analysed in some detail in Eliana Dutra’s chapter. In Brazil, historians propagated the idea of the nation consisting of three races which together made up the unique composition of the Brazilian nation-state. In Mexico, racial fusion between colonial and indigenous populations produced the mestizos who were held up as being inherently superior in their qualities to Europeans. As the case of Argentina demonstrates, the idea of a mixed-race nation was not prominent across Latin America, but in Brazil and Mexico it provided the basis of a biological legitimation of the nation-state which emphasised ethnic heterogeneity rather than homogeneity. Of course, those constructions ignored the massive forms of discrimination faced by non-white parts of the populations in Latin America. In Chile, the indigenous Mapuche lost vast areas of land during the 1860s. In Argentina the indigenous population was systematically murdered during the War of the Desert (1879/80) which paved the way for the agricultural estates on the pampas. In Guatemala, as late as the 1960s, indigenous people were systematically murdered, and the lives of the Amazonian people in Brazil are not respected even today.57 It was only in connection with indigenous and African groups forming their own associations and defending their rights in Brazil during the 1990s, that they began to use historical narratives in the pursuit of greater social equality and more equal opportunities. The treatment of the indigenous

Introduction 21

population of Australia has also been one of the topics discussed with great passion and intensity by the Australian historical profession for the past twenty years – ever since the issue became relevant in Australian national debates in the 1980s. As Mark Hearn argues in his chapter, race and indigenous studies form the most contested area of Australian national history today. In East Asia racial constructions of the nation, like in Europe, served the purpose of mass murder in the 1930s and 1940s. Japanese constructions of Chinese and Korean racial inferiority were an important factor in legitimating the cruel and sadistic treatment of millions of Chinese and Korean citizens under Japanese occupation and colonial regimes. Historians participated prominently in the racialisation of historical national narratives in Japan. Yet such racialised historical discourses could equally be found in China, where they built on the age-old idea of the ‘barbarians’ threatening China. Whereas the ‘barbarians’ had long been defined in terms of culture, such cultural ‘othering’ was easily biologised and racialised in the twentieth century. As in Europe, it might be possible to argue that an older concern with ethnicity and nativist traditions in Japan became racialised in the 1930s. Initially, an emphasis on Japanese rural communities and ordinary people was meant to provide alternatives to state- and emperor-centred national histories.58 Such an opposition between ethnic and state-centred national histories can also be observed elsewhere in East Asia. In Vietnam, for example, a folk- and community-centred ethnic history remained steadfastly opposed to the official state-sanctioned version of history which emphasises centralisation and homogeneity.59 British discourses on India were largely responsible for racialising religious differences between Hindus and Muslims. By linking ‘caste’ to ‘race’, they linked Hindus to conceptions of an ‘Aryan race’ and excluded Muslims from this racial classification. Race was also a category employed in Arab nationalist discourses after 1900, although language, politics, religion, heritage, history and community were all more important than racial definitions of the Arab nation. But the notion of race was by no means absent and could attach itself to other characteristics of the Arab nation. After all, the great Ibn Khaldun already argued that blood relationships were more important than all other ties and although he was referring more to kinship than to race, kinship relationships, in an organicist understanding of history, were, like culture, easily racialised. In African national history, the central concern with ethnicity has also led to a proliferation of racialised discourses: the interlinkages between ethnic groups and their struggles for dominance over specific nation-states led to the construction of internal ‘ethnic’ others, which were perceived as enemies of the nation. In the 1990s the genocide in Rwanda provided a gruesome example of where such racialised historical discourses ended, although the parallel dissolution of Yugoslavia demonstrated that Europe was still not immune to the power of racialised historical narratives at the end of the twentieth century.

22 Writing the Nation

The racialisation of national discourses in Europe is, of course, inextricably linked with the holocaust in Europe. During the last two decades the holocaust has come to the fore in a wide range of national historical narratives in Europe and beyond. This was not the case at all immediately after the Second World War, when the holocaust was not central to any national storyline, including the German one. It was only from the 1960s onwards that a holocaust consciousness slowly but surely began to enter diverse national narratives. The foregrounding of the holocaust in national history was paralleled by the development of more critical perspectives on traditional national storylines. Only in West Germany did this develop into a fully articulated theory of post-nationalism during the 1980s, but even here, reunification led to a rethinking of the nation in which post-nationalism became a victim of the many attempts to make sense again of a unified German history. And yet, the new mainstream patriotism in Germany has incorporated holocaust remembrance as a crucial task of German memory politics. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, representations of the holocaust play a vital role in many nation-states,60 as holocaust centres proliferate and holocaust discourse informs international policy, e.g. in Kosovo in the 1990s and in the setting up of the International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague in 2003. Arguably, an increased holocaust consciousness has fractured the mirror of homogeneous national histories in many European nation-states, but on a global level, the legacy of the holocaust has also been functionalised for more dubious political projects. Thus, it has served the State of Israel to justify the continued discrimination of Palestinians and to ignore worldwide pleas to help rectify the historical injustice done to Palestinians by the State of Israel. And it has served the United States to justify its ‘war against terror’ and the invasion of Iraq. It underpins a human rights discourse which sees war as necessary to uphold human rights on a global level. In the Middle East we find a vociferous counter-reaction to the holocaust narratives – with holocaust deniers being invited to a state-sponsored international conference in Teheran in 2006. While the holocaust has acquired a European and a universal dimension over the last decades, it is not the centre of historical consciousness and memory politics everywhere. In parts of what used to be communist Eastern Europe, including the Soviet Union, the coming-to-terms with the Stalinist past forms a major task for historians and has been at the centre of attention of modern and contemporary national history. In South Africa the apartheid regime forms the nadir of memory politics, and in many Latin American countries, e.g. Argentina, Chile, El Salvador, Guatemala and Uruguay, military dictatorships and their widespread human rights violations form the centre of historical attention. In Turkey, the Armenian genocide in the First World War is far more central to the national historical discourse than the holocaust. If the holocaust did not become the central memory event everywhere, it did have an important impact on studies of nationalism, as scholars of

Introduction 23

nationalism after 1945 often posited a stark juxtaposition between an evil ethnic nationalism (of which the holocaust was supposed to form the high point) and a more benign political and civic nationalism (of which the USA and France were supposed to be prime examples). All of the chapters in this collection demonstrate that such a dichotomy between civic and ethnic national narratives will be impossible to maintain in future. National narratives everywhere relied on a mixture of ethnic and civic elements.61 In immigrant societies, such as the white-settler colonies of the New World, the ethnic element was weaker. In the US, for example, national historical narratives relied heavily on the consensual belief in liberalism, democracy, progress, individualism and enterprise. And yet, even here, such values were frequently tied back to the belief that they were inherent in a white AngloSaxon race which was constructed as the elite of US society. What was, however, crucially important for national narratives was the existence of firm borders and the ability to construct histories around the continuous existence of states.62 In this respect Europe remains divided between the areas in East Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, which, for much of the nineteenth century, remained under the control of transnational empires – the Romanov empire, the Habsburg empire and the Ottoman empire – and areas in Western and Northern Europe, where states with firm(er) and far less contested borders were often well established by the beginning of the nineteenth century. Borders also figured prominently in non-European national narratives. In Canada and the US, geography was in fact the most important factor in ascribing a unique character to the nation. The importance of geopolitics found its most celebrated expression in Frederic Jackson Turner’s famous idea of the ‘frontier’ and its importance for the making of the USA. But the border between Canada and the USA also became a muchstudied object of national history from the Canadian side, as Canadian historians struggled to create firmer cultural and intellectual borders vis-à-vis a United States which was seen as penetrating Canadian territories and minds economically and culturally. But the most studied border today is the southern border of the United States with Mexico, where it is the US desperately trying to stem the tide of illegal immigrants. National borders are highly visible signifiers of power, and where they disappear, such as in the core areas of the European Union, they also symbolise the constructions of new forms of political and social power. Power relationships, more generally, have been central to the framing of national narratives everywhere. They impacted on the historical imagination, just as the framing of the latter empowered particular social groups and cultural narratives and legitimated global or regional power politics of nation-states.63 Notions of national missions were vitally important to the construction of national historical narratives. During the era of high imperialism all European imperial powers claimed to have some form of civilising mission, according to which particular values inherent in the nation had to be spread to all corners of the

24 Writing the Nation

world. Some European nations formulated missions to defend Europe and Europe’s borders against alleged non-Christian, mostly Muslim invaders, thereby acting as Europe’s shield and sword. During the Cold War and beyond, much of US history underpinned the projection of US history having the telos of defending and spreading the values of the Western world around the globe. But national missions did not necessarily consist in spreading national ideals across the world. They could equally mean cutting the nation off from outside influences. Russian slavophile historians thus frequently stressed the need to keep Western ideas and concepts out of Russia.64 Historians in the pay of the Tokugawa dynasty in Japan equally stressed the need to stop Western influences from contaminating Japanese concepts of the nation.65 And in the USA there were many historians, at various times in its history (especially after the First World War) which emphasised that history taught the Americans not to get involved in wider world politics. By way of conclusion this volume provides considerable evidence for the liberating and emancipatory potential of national narratives – especially where they were employed in contexts of anti-colonialism, post-colonialism and forms of oppression of national minorities. Yet this evidence is outweighed by the contrary evidence that national narratives time and again led to intolerance, xenophobia, violence, war and genocide. Grounding national history on essentialised historical narratives contributed in significant ways to a politics of radical othering which justified diverse forms of exclusion and mass murder. At the beginning of the twenty-first century some historians are attempting to champion forms of national history writing which would maintain openness, diversity and tolerance by presenting the nation as a shattered mirror containing multiple reflections or as a kaleidoscope which changes shape whenever one turns the dial slightly. Playfulness and self-reflexivity have been catchwords of such attempts to write national histories of the twenty-first century.66 Others have warned against taking the nation-state, national history and national identity as benchmarks of suband transnational identity formations. The latter are functioning differently and any comparison with the nation unduly makes the historical form of the nation-state a seemingly timeless and unchanging model for other forms of territorial bonding. And it might well inscribe some of the more dangerous and unhelpful characteristics of national identity constructions into those sub- and transnational units.67 Finally, there are those who are warning against all forms of emotive attachments based on history and identity.68 They see the historians’ task as one of critiquing all claims of a historically based identity. Historical writing should demonstrate the constant flux of identities and deconstruct allegedly supra-historical norms and values. Such radical critique of all forms of spatial and social attachments might perhaps open the way for solidarities below the level of identities. In global perspective, such a vision of history writing as permanent critique of identitarian constructions is perhaps the best hope against the nasty underbelly of national history.

Introduction 25

Notes 1. I am grateful to Q. Edward Wang for making a number of extremely helpful suggestions which have improved this introduction. All remaining errors are of course, as always, entirely my own. 2. For details see www.uni-leipzig.de/zhsesf. The main outcome of the programme is a six-volume book series entitled ‘Writing the Nation’ to be published by Palgrave Macmillan between 2007 and 2009. Apart from this, the programme yielded a whole range of publications, details of which can be found on the website of the programme. 3. History writing was, of course, by no means the only or even the most important genre of constructing national pasts. For the impact of different genres on European national histories see Stefan Berger and Linas Eriksonas (eds), Narrating the Nation: the Representation of Nations in Different Genres (Oxford, 2007). On the importance of the historical novel for Indian national identity see Rumina Sethi, Myths of the Nation: National Identity and Literary Representation (Oxford, 1999). 4. For the importance of such transnational networks see, for example, Peter Schöttler, ‘Französische und deutsche Historiker-Netzwerke am Beispiel der frühen Annales’, in Hamit Borzarslan (ed.), Regards et Miroirs: Mélanges Rémy Leveau (Leipzig, 1997); John L. Harvey, ‘An American Annales? The Revue internationale d’histoire économique of Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre’, Journal of Modern History 76 (2004), 528–621; Philipp Stelzel, ‘Fritz Fischer and the American Historical Profession: Tracing the Transatlantic Dimension of the Fischer Kontroverse’, Storia della Storiografia 44 (2003), 67–84; Stefan Berger, ‘William Harbutt Dawson: the Career and Politics of an Historian of Germany’, English Historical Review 116 (2001), 76–113. 5. For an intriguing attempt to justify using the nation as a useful category of analysis in universal histories of historiography beyond the pre-modern–modern dichotomy, see Daniel Woolf, ‘Of Nations, Nationalism and National Identity: Reflections on the Historiographic Organisation of the Past’, in Q. Edward Wang and Franz Leander Filafer (eds), The Many Faces of Clio: Cross-Cultural Approaches to Historiography. Festschrift for Georg G. Iggers (Oxford, 2006), pp. 366–81. Woolf is currently preparing a multivolume global history of historiography. For details see http://www.arts.ualberta.ca/⬃dwoolf/oxfordhistory.html. Other intriguing attempts to put historiography in a transnational and global perspective include Rolf Torstendahl (ed.), An Assessment of Twentieth-Century Historiography: Professionalism, Methodologies, Writings (Stockholm, 2000); Eckhardt Fuchs and Benedikt Stuchtey (eds), Across Cultural Borders: Historiography in Global Perspective (Oxford, 2002), Georg Iggers and Q. Edward Wang (eds), Turning Points in Historiography: a CrossCultural Perspective (Buffalo, 2002), and the journal Historiography East and West which first appeared in 2003 and is explicitly committed to the discussion of history writing in global perspective. 6. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincialising Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, 2000). For fascinating post-colonial perspectives on the Americas, discussing in particular historiographical questions, see also Mark Thurner and Andrés Guerrero (eds), After Spanish Rule: Postcolonial Predicaments of the Americas (Durham, NC, 2003). For Africa, compare Richard Werbner, Postcolonial Identities in Africa (London, 1996). 7. Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for “Indian” Pasts?’, Representations 37 (1992), 1–26. 8. Kumkum Chatterjee, ‘The King of Controversy: History and Nation-Making in Late Colonial India’, American Historical Review 110:5 (2005), 1454–75.

26 Writing the Nation 9. Celia Applegate, A Nation of Provincials: the German Idea of Heimat (Berkeley, 1990); Alon Confino, The Nation as a Local Metaphor: Württemberg, Imperial Germany and National Memory 1871–1918 (Chapel Hill, 1997); also, comparing Germany with India, see Alon Confino and Ajay Skaria, ‘The Local Life of Nationhood’, National Identities 4:1 (2002), 7–24. 10. Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago, 1995), chapter 6. 11. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1991). 12. Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, NJ, 1993), especially p. 5 and chapter 4. 13. Grant Hardy (ed.), World of Bronze and Bamboo: Sima Qian’s Conquest of History (New York, 1999); Stephen W. Durrant, The Cloudy Mirror: Tension and Conflict in the Writings of Sima Qian (Albany, NY, 1995). 14. For Columbia see Joanne Rappaport, The Politics of Memory: Native Historical Interpretation in the Colombian Andes (Durham, NC, 1998). 15. Claudio Lomnitz, ‘Nationalism as a Practical System: Benedict Anderson’s Theory of Nationalism from the Vantage Point of Spanish America’, in M. A. Centeno and F. Lopez Alves (eds), The Other Mirror: Grand Theory through the Lens of Latin America (Princeton, NJ, 2000), pp. 329–59; Michiel Baud, ‘Beyond Benedict Anderson: Nation Building and Popular Democracy in Latin America’, International Review of Social History 50 (2005), 485–98. 16. Lesley Johnson and Alan V. Murray (eds), Concepts of National Identity in the Middle Ages (Leeds, 1995). 17. For an intriguing comparison of professionalisation processes in France and the USA see Gabriele Lingelbach, Klio macht Karriere: die Institutionalisierung der Geschichtswissenschaft in Frankreich und den USA in der zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Göttingen, 2003). Please also note that I use the term ‘historist’ and ‘historism’ rather than ‘historicist’ and ‘historicism’ consistently throughout the volume. As I first explained in a 1995 article in Past and Present, the English term ‘historicism’ refers to two separate ideas which should be kept apart: on the one hand, they refer to Rankean ideas about history as an evolutionary, reformist concept which understands all political order as historically developed and grown, and on the other hand it also refers to ideas criticised by Karl Popper as seeing history developing according to predetermined laws towards a particular end. For Rankean ideas I use the term ‘historism’ – analogous to the German word ‘Historismus’ – and for Popperian usage I propose the more traditional ‘historicism’ – analogous to the German word ‘Historizismus’. 18. Allen Woll, A Functional Past: the Uses of History in Nineteenth Century Chile (Louisiana, 1982). 19. An excellent overview is provided by Martyn Lyons and Penny Russell (eds), Australia’s History: Themes and Debates (Sydney, 2005). 20. Gerard Bouchard, Genèse des Nations et Cultures du Nouvelles Nations (Montreal, 2001). 21. For the adoption of Western forms of historical thinking in Japan and China see ¯ sha Historians and the also Peter Duus, ‘Whig History, Japanese Style: the Min`yu Meiji Restoration’, Journal of Asian Studies 33 (1974), 415–36; Luke Kwong, ‘The Rise of the Linear Perspective on History and Time in Late Qing China’, Past and Present 173 (2001), 157–90. 22. Margaret Mehl, History and the State in Nineteenth-Century Japan (New York, 1998), especially pp. 71ff. and 97ff. On Zerffi see also Tibor Frank, Ein Diener seiner

Introduction 27

23.

24. 25.

26.

27.

28. 29. 30.

31. 32.

33.

34.

35.

36.

37.

Herren: Werdegang des österreichischen Geheimagenten Gustav Zerffi (1820–1892) (Vienna, 2002). For China see Axel Schneider, ‘Reconciling History with the Nation: Historicity, National Particularity and the Question of Universals’, Historiography East and West 1 (2003), 117–36. Hyunsoo Lim, ‘Rethinking the Concept of Time: Modern Historical Consciousness and Historiography in Korean Society’, Korea Journal 41:1 (2001), 44–68. Yoav Di-Capua, ‘ “Jabarti of the Twentieth Century”: the National Epic of Abd al-Rahman al-Rafi and Other Egyptian Histories’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 36:3 (2004), 429–50. Y. Choueiri, ‘Two Histories of Syria and the Demise of Syrian Patriotism’, Middle Eastern Studies 23:4 (1987), 496–511. See also, on many aspects of history writing in the Middle East, Bernard Lewis and P. M. Holt, Historians of the Middle East (New York, 1962). See, generally on the role of history in the anti-colonial struggle David C. Gordon, Self-Determination and History in the Third World (Princeton, NJ, 1971); on the important Ibadan school of historians see Paul Lovejoy, ‘The Ibadan School of History and its Critics’, in Toyin Falola (ed.), African Historiography: Essays in Honour of Jacob Ade Ajayi (Burnt Mills, 1993); on the impact of Ganda politics on Ganda historiography see also Michael Twaddle, ‘On Ganda Historiography’, History in Africa 1 (1974), 85–100. Matthias Middell, ‘Transfer and Interaction: France and Francophone African Historiography’, in Fuchs and Stuchtey (eds), Across Cultural Borders, p. 172. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Negro (New York, 1915). Joseph C. Miller, ‘History and Africa/Africa and History’, American Historical Review 104 (1999), 1–32; Andreas Eckert, ‘Historiker, “Nation-Building” und die Rehabilitierung der afrikanischen Vergangenheit: Aspekte der Geschichtsschreibung in Afrika nach 1945’, in Wolfgang Küttler et al. (eds), Geschichtsdiskurs, vol. 5: Globale Konflikte: Erinnerungsarbeit und Neuorientierungen seit 1945 (Frankfurt/Main, 1999), pp. 162–87. On the example of Ghana see Michael Amoah, Reconstructing the Nation in Africa: the Politics of Nationalism in Ghana (London, 2006). Steven Feierman, ‘African Histories and the Dissolution of World History’, in Robert H. Bates, V. Y. Mudimbe and Jean O’Barr (eds), Africa and the Disciplines: the Contributions of Research in Africa to the Social Sciences and the Humanities (Chicago, 1993), pp. 167–212. Terence Ranger, ‘Nationalist Historiography, Patriotic History and the History of the Nation: the Struggle over the Past in Zimbabwe’, Journal of Southern African Studies 30:2 (2004), 215–34. On the construction of Our Lady of Guadalupe as a key national image in Mexico see the magisterial David Brading, Mexican Phoenix. Our Lady of Guadalupe: Image and Tradition Across Five Centuries (Cambridge, 2001). See, for example, Sarah Chambers, From Subjects to Citizens: Honor, Gender and Politics in Arequipa, Peru, 1780–1854 (University Park, PA, 1999); Susan Caulfield, In Defence of Honor: Sexual Morality, Modernity and Nation in Early Twentieth Century Brazil (Durham, NC, 2000). Mrilinina Sinha, ‘Gender and Imperialism: Colonial Policy and the Ideology of Moral Imperialism in Late Nineteenth Century Bengal’, in M. Kimmel (ed.), Changing Men: New Directions on Men and Masculinity (London, 1987), pp. 217–31. Keith Wilson, Forging the Collective Memory: Government and International Historians Through Two World Wars (Oxford, 1996).

28 Writing the Nation 38. For a perceptive Japanese–German comparison see Sebastian Conrad, ‘Entangled Memories: Versions of the Past in Germany and Japan, 1945–2001’, Journal of Contemporary History 38:1 (2003), 85–99. 39. Rawi Abdelai, ‘Memories of Nations and States: Institutional History and National Identity in Post-Soviet Eurasia’, Nationalities Papers 30:3 (2002), 459–84; Ronald Grigor Suny, ‘Constructing Primordialism: Old Histories for New Nations’, Journal of Modern History 73:4 (2001), 862–96. 40. Wendy Bracewell, ‘The End of Yugoslavia and New National Histories’, European History Quarterly 29:1 (1999), 149–56. 41. Jihane Sfeir-Khayat, ‘Historiographie Palestinienne: la Construction d’une Identité Nationale’, Annales 60:1 (2005), 35–52. 42. For the move in Europe towards transnational perspectives in the area of history schoolbooks compare Hanna Schissler and Yasemin Nuhoglu Soysal (eds), The Nation, Europe and the World: Textbooks and Curricula in Transition (Oxford, 2005). For the example of the success story of a state-sanctioned transnationalism in the area of school textbooks see also Michael G. Müller, ‘The Joint Polish–German Commission for the Revision of School Textbooks and Polish Views of German History’, German History 22:3 (2004), 433–47. For an explicit rallying call to use transnationalism to come to European forms of history writing see Guy Hermet, ‘Histoire de l’Europe et Historire des Nations’, Vingtième Siècle 71 (2001), 73–8. For another call to write transnational European rather than national history in a post-Cold War world see Michael Geyer, ‘Historical Fictions of Autonomy and the Europeanisation of National History’, Central European History 22:3–4 (1989), 316–42. 43. Stephen Howe, ‘The Politics of Historical “Revisionism”: Comparing Ireland and Israel/Palestine’, Past and Present 168 (2000), 225–53. However, the history of Palestine before 1918 is still being told very differently by Turkish, Israeli and Arab authors. See Maurus Reinkowski, ‘Late Ottoman Rule over Palestine: its Evaluation in Arab, Turkish and Israeli Histories, 1970–1990’, Middle Eastern Studies 35:1 (1999), 66–97. 44. For a recent instalment in the history wars between Chinese and Korean historians see Yonson Ahn, ‘Competing Nationalisms: the Mobilisation of History and Archaeology in the Korea-China Wars Over Koguryo/Gaogouli’, Japan Focus, 9 February 2006, http://japanfocus.org/products/details/1837 (accessed 25 July 2006). 45. On the relationship between politics and history writing see also Vinay Lal, The History of History: Politics and Scholarship in Modern India (Oxford, 2005). 46. In European and even more so in global perspective Paul Kennedy’s optimistic prediction of the 1970s that national historical narratives were declining in importance cannot be sustained at the beginning of the twenty-first century. See Paul Kennedy, ‘The Decline of Nationalistic History in the West 1900–1970’, Journal of Contemporary History 8:1 (1973), 77–100. 47. See especially Anthony D. Smith, Chosen Peoples: Sacred Sources of National Identity (Oxford, 2003). 48. Zvi Ben-Dor Benite, ‘From “Literati” to “Ulama”: the Origins of Chinese Muslim Nationalist Historiography’, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 9:4 (2003), 83–109. 49. An important critique of such attempts is provided by Romila Thapar, Interpreting Early India (Oxford, 1994). 50. Axel Havemann, ‘Historiography in Twentieth Century Lebanon: Between Confessional Identity and National Coalescence’, Bulletin of the Royal Institute for Inter-Faith Studies 4:2 (2002), 49–69.

Introduction 29 51. Alev Cinar, ‘National History as a Contested Site: the Conquest of Istanbul and Islamist Negotiations of the Nations’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 43:2 (2001), 364–91. 52. For some examples see Ulf Brunnbauer (ed.), (Re-)Writing History: Historiography in Southeast Europe After Socialism (Münster, 2004); Maciej Górny, ‘Past in the Future: National Tradition and Czechoslovak Marxist Historiography’, European Review of History 10 (2003), 103–14; Carsten Riis, Religion, Politics and Historiography in Bulgaria (Boulder CO, 2002). 53. On the complex interrelationship between race, nation and class see the intriguing essays by Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (London, 1991). 54. Di-Capua, ‘ “Jabarti of the Twentieth Century” ’. 55. Ingo Haar and Michael Fahlbusch (eds), German Scholars and Ethnic Cleansing, 1919–1945 (Oxford, 2004). 56. On the role of race in the construction of history in North America see Maghan Keita, Race and the Writing of History: Riddling the Sphinx (Oxford, 2000). 57. For all of this see Nicola Miller, ‘The Historiography of Nationalism and National Identity in Latin America’, Nations and Nationalism 12:2 (2006), 201–21, especially p. 204. 58. Ronald A. Morse, Yanagita Kunio and the Folklore Movement: the Search for Japan’s National Character and Distinctiveness (New York, 1990). 59. Patricia M. Pelley, Postcolonial Vietnam: New Histories of the National Past (Durham, NC, 2002). 60. Martin L. Davies and Claus-Christian W. Szejnmann (eds), How the Holocaust Looks Now: International Perspectives (Basingstoke, 2006). 61. This is also confirmed by more recent general texts on nationalism in Europe; see, for example, Timothy Baycroft and Mark Hewittson (eds), What is a Nation? Europe, 1789–1914 (Oxford, 2006). 62. A very helpful introductory text is provided by Hastings Donnan and Thomas M. Wilson, Borders: Frontiers of Identity, Nation and State (Oxford, 1999). 63. On the close interrelationship between social power and historical narratives see also John Breuilly’s inaugural lecture at the University of Birmingham entitled Myth-Making or Myth-Breaking? Nationalism and History (Birmingham, 1997). 64. N. V. Riasanovsky, Historical Consciousness and National Identity: Some Considerations on the History of Russian Nationalism (New Orleans, 1991). 65. Hiroshi Watanabe, ‘Historiography as a Magic Mirror: the Image of the Nation in Japan, 1600–1990’, in Erik Lönnroth, Karl Molin and Ragnar Björk (eds), Conceptions of National History (Berlin, 1994), pp. 175–87. 66. For the German case see Konrad Jarausch and Michael Geyer, Shattered Past: Reconstructing German Histories (Princeton, 2003). 67. Thus, for example, Hartmut Kaelble has been warning against making the nationstate the benchmark for the European Union. See in particular idem, ‘The Historical Rise of a European Public Sphere?’, Journal of European Integration History 8:2 (2002) 9–22. 68. Allan Megill, ‘Historical Identity, Representation, Allegiance’, in Berger and Eriksonas (eds), Narrating the Nation.

2 The Power of National Pasts: Writing National History in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Europe1 Stefan Berger

Proto-nationalism and pre-modern European narratives about the nation National history writing in Europe is older than the nineteenth century. In fact, we find authors writing about natio and nationes in the middle ages and in early modern Europe. Take, for example, the case of the twelfth-century English historian William of Malmesbury,2 whose Deeds of the Kings of the English conveys a clear idea of the political and cultural unity of a nation called England. Having a distinct notion of a civilising process, William’s text praises the English for becoming civilised under the influence of the Normans and formulates a specific mission of the English for civilising the barbarous Celts, i.e. the Welsh, Scots and Irish. The central theme of William’s history, the progress of civilisation, is taken up much later by David Hume in the eighteenth century. Hume admired William’s writings and shared his Francophilia as well as his belief in progress and civilisation – central themes indeed of the entire eighteenth-century historiography in Europe.3 But well before the eighteenth century, the European humanists took up the topic of the nation with a vengeance.4 Humanist scholars across Europe created a pool of common memories, values, symbols and myths oriented towards a spatial entity called nation, even where, as in the Italian or German lands, no nation existed. Concepts of geography, territory and history were linked to the idea of nationhood. Whereas medieval historians had often been monks, humanists were an urban-based and university-trained cosmopolitan elite. Where they were in the direct pay of monarchs and state authorities they tended to construct their national narratives around their masters’ state-building attempts. This was particularly noticeable in the court of the Habsburg emperor Maximilian I. The invention of the printing press towards the end of the fifteenth century was crucial in allowing the national discourses to spread more easily and interact with one another.5 A European public sphere began to emerge in which ideas about the nation were being discussed. 30

The Power of National Pasts 31

As humanists were often classical scholars, they tended to fall back on classical texts for determining characteristics of particular nations. A good example is the rediscovery of Tacitus’s text about the Germanic tribes from the end of the first century AD by Italian humanists in the fifteenth century. They used it to demonstrate that only their Italian forefathers in the Roman Empire possessed culture and civilisation in contrast to the barbarians who had not come under the benign civilising influence of Rome. However, in response to their Italian colleagues, German humanists, such as Jakob Wimpfeling, Conrad Celtis and Ulrich von Hutten inversed this argument and formulated a catalogue of virtues of the Germanic warrior people who were characterised by honesty, openness, decency, love of liberty and purity of morality. The Germanic tribes were thus positively contrasted with the degenerate, decadent and effeminate Romans. Humanists were not only concerned with defining national character. They also were keen to search for origins and emphasise the longevity of the nation. Thus German humanists argued that the German people descended from a certain Tuisco, the oldest adopted son of the biblical Noah. National heroes were crucial, as they symbolised all national virtues and defended the national ‘essence’ against foreign threats. Sometimes national narratives in Europe shared national heroes, as was the case with Charlemagne, who appeared in both French and German narratives of the nation, but more often national heroes were unambiguously national characters. This was particularly necessary, as humanists already tended to define their own nation against that of other nations, in particular neighbouring nations which were frequently perceived as crucial ‘others’ to the ‘own’ nation. Thus German humanists tended to criticise the French and Italians for being over-civilised, corrupt and arrogant. Their luxurious lifestyle promoted laziness and led to decline – something that was often ridiculed and mocked in German humanists’ narratives about France or Italy. The idea of enemies of the nation was thus already well developed in the sixteenth century.6 The Reformation of the sixteenth century could build on the humanist discourse about the nation. Medieval theories of translation had legitimated the power of the pope. Protestant monarchs and heads of state across Northern, Central and Western Europe used the idea of a Protestant nation as an anti-universalist oppositional term against the pope and constructed national pasts which were separate from and opposed to Rome. National narratives became a useful tool to defeat the militant universalism of the Counter-Reformation and legitimate the setting up of Protestant nations. The Reformation thus became of foundational importance to many Protestant nations in Europe.7 As we can see from this brief overview, many of the tropes of national belonging and identity, which were prominent ingredients of national histories, went back to medieval and early modern times. But I would still like to maintain that major change occurred during the second half of the eighteenth century. Modern nations differed fundamentally from medieval and early modern

32 Writing the Nation

nations and hence modern national histories also had a very different quality and function from medieval and early modern national histories. Only with the advent of modernity during the European ‘bridge period’ (Sattelzeit) between 1750 and 1850 did loyalty to the nation become the most important means of legitimating states.8 Only then did nation replace and merge with religion, dynasticism and feudalism to produce the crucial cement in the relations between dominant and dominated. Before 1750 nation and national histories did not play this important role. Hence a qualitative change took place in the writing of national histories which needs closer observation.

National history writing and the arrival of modernity in Europe, 1750–1850 The second half of the eighteenth century marked the beginning of a new understanding of history as science, something which has been described by Heiko Feldner as ‘scientificity’.9 The new scientific self-understanding of history spread with the institutionalisation and professionalisation of history as an academic subject. At the universities history became an important subject in its own right. Historical research institutes and history societies were founded and academies came into existence in which history often had an important position. Some of these institutions were royal foundations, like the royal academies in many countries. Some were founded by aristocrats, like the grandee foundations in Hungary. Others, such as many learned societies in the urban centres of Europe, had middle-class benefactors. And some, like the Welsh University of Aberystwyth, even had an important working-class input, as in this specific case, the coppers of the South Wales miners were instrumental in raising a substantial portion of the money for the university. The locus of social and cultural power tended to be important for the development of national narratives across Europe. The universities of Göttingen and Berlin in the German lands are often quoted as the places where changes in teaching and research came together to produce a novel sense of what history was all about. Philology and source criticism became crucial tools of the historian to make distinctions between ‘myths’ and ‘truths’.10 The historical seminar was the place where professors and students would explore the remnants of the past together and expand, through research, our knowledge of the past on a scientific basis. Leopold von Ranke came to symbolise this new understanding of historical writing in the nineteenth century, and historians from across Europe flocked to Germany to get apprenticed to a German master, who would provide them with the tools of historical craftsmanship.11 The institutionalisation and professionalisation of historical writing, which found such powerful expression in the European cult surrounding the figure of Ranke, led to the introduction of more clear-cut dividing lines between the amateur and the professional, between literature and history, or, for that matter, between ‘myths’ and ‘history’. The

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ideology of ‘scientificity’ contributed in a major way to genre-building and it set up the historians as authoritative spokespersons for what ‘actually happened’ in the past. It was this authority which made historians so prominent as nationbuilders in nineteenth-century Europe. They were not the only ones, to be sure. Other, often neighbouring subject areas, with equal claims to ‘scientificity’, interrelated with history to provide arguments in favour of national causes. Geography, archaeology, cartography, numismatics and genealogy readily spring to mind and are by no means an exhaustive list of the subjects enlisted in the shaping and framing of national master narratives. Arguably the most successful national histories across Europe were those which integrated the findings of diverse scientific disciplines to give a comprehensive description of the national character. To take the example of geography, the Swiss, British and Russian national narratives were all deeply influenced by the definition of the Swiss nation as being shaped by the Alps, of the British nation as being defined by the sea and the Russian nation as being forged across the vastness of the Russian empire stretching from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to East Central Europe in the west and from the polar circle in the north to the Asian sub-continent in the south.12 Yet the second half of the eighteenth century, when the new ‘scientific’ paradigm began to emerge, was also the high point of Enlightenment history.13 Its emphasis on universal categories, such as progress and liberty, meant that its practitioners were often not very interested in national peculiarities and specifics. Rather they sought to establish the workings of universal human principles and characteristics in the past. This led many to write transnational forms of history, but even where they wrote about the history of a particular nation, they often did so in an attempt to demonstrate universal principles in the history of that particular nation. And yet there is no straightforward dichotomy between a history writing committed to Enlightenment universalism and a history writing dedicated to the subsequent Romantic nationalism. After all, Voltaire, Montesquieu and Hume all showed a keen interest in issues of national character and differences between nations.14 August Ludwig Schlözer in Göttingen is good example of the joint interest in national specifics and universal principles. Schlözer’s vita and oeuvre demonstrates of how little significance a narrow national focus was to him, although he did write national history. Having studied in Uppsala in Sweden, he became a professor of Russian history in St Petersburg before taking up the chair in history at the University of Göttingen in 1768. Here he developed not only his interest in Scandinavian and Russian history, but also his general interest in the peoples of the wider world. His commitment to universal history went hand in hand with a deep mistrust in the generalities produced by philosophers of history.15 The French Revolution of 1789, with its declaration of the rights of man, symbolised the highpoint of the attempt to build a new society on some of

34 Writing the Nation

the universal values championed by the Enlightenment, but it also marked a turning point for historical studies. When the French exported their universal values in the revolutionary wars of the 1790s and the Napoleonic wars of the 1800s, national history became an important means in other parts of Europe to defend the specific and peculiar against the universal aspirations and imperial expansionism of France. National history now became a response to Enlightenment universalism. It was in this context that Johann Gottfried Herder’s ideas on national history spread like wildfire across Europe, making Herder another figure of truly European significance in national history writing.16 Herder postulated that each people had the right to live in their own nation. According to Herder it was not history, but poetry and language which best expressed the soul and essence of the nation. Far from championing a narrow nationalism, Herder, who remained deeply influenced by Enlightenment thought, in particular the ideas of Gottfried Wihelm Leibniz, advocated a genuine pluralism of nations which all had their unique value. An outspoken opponent of colonialism and of the oppression of minority nationalisms in European empires, Herder’s nations were cosmopolitan entities. And yet, his concern with the originality of national cultures opened the door to all those subsequent nationalists who were keen to find arguments that their particular nation was more original and hence of more value than other nations classed as ‘derivative’ or ‘second-hand’. Herder gave a voice to all those non-dominant ethnic groups of Central, East Central and Eastern Europe which, during the long nineteenth century, were keen to establish their own nation-state.17 He inspired national revivals which were being carried by linguists, poets, collectors of folk songs and fairytales, and, last, but not least, historians. Influenced by Herder, historians developed an arsenal of arguments in favour of national peculiarity and specificity. Citing the work of linguists they emphasised the role of language as indicator of common historical origins, often ranging back to the middle ages.18 They pointed to a distinguished literary tradition in highlighting the achievements of their respective nations. They frequently stressed links between nation and religion and more than one nation was declared ‘holy’ in remembrance of particular services rendered to religion. God was frequently invoked as forging a nation’s character or sowing the seeds of a nascent nation. National stories across Europe became stories of ‘golden ages’, ‘lost homelands’ and ‘national revivals’. National epics, such as the Finnish Kalevala, were rediscovered in order to construct mythical ‘golden ages’ and demonstrate the longevity of the nation and of national ambitions. Where there was a lack of hard evidence, historians were not averse to inventing sources and, in some cases, even whole epics in order to enhance the credentials of one’s own nation. The invention of the Scottish bard Ossian and the forgery of the Königinhof and Grünberg manuscrips by Vàclav Hanka are important examples of such ‘inventions of tradition’.19

The Power of National Pasts 35

Historians illustrated the virtues of their nation and measured those virtues against the alleged moral failings of others. Romantic national history was in vogue not only in East Central Europe, as the well-documented example of Belgium shows.20 Nations defined themselves against other nations, in particular neighbouring ones, but nations also were constructed against alleged internal enemies. Jews, socialists and Catholics made frequent appearances in various European national histories as corroding the internal unity and eating away at the national cohesiveness of national souls. Cultural conservatives, such as the Hungarian national historian Szekfu
identified Jews in particular with the degrading impact of modernity on European society. By contrast, monarchs and dynasties were often hailed as symbols of integration and unity. Monarchs were, of course, not the only national heroes. Founders of nations, such as Bismarck or Garibaldi, saviours of the nation such as William Wallace and Churchill, reformers of the nation, such as Peter the Great and the Freiherr vom Stein, military leaders, such as Moltke, de Gaulle or Gustav Wasa, cultural icons such as Shakespeare, Schiller, Cervantes, Molière or Dante, and great religious leaders such as Jan Hus and Martin Luther – they all filled the pantheon of national history writing which became obsessed with ‘great men’.21 National histories throughout Europe were always highly gendered affairs.22 Thus, for example, enemies of the nation were routinely depicted in feminised forms, while the awakening of national consciousness was identified with masculine strength and virility. Yet historians often spoke of periods of foreign domination or repression as periods in which the nation had been ‘raped’, thereby identifying the enemy nation as male rapist. National saints could be female as well as male and although most active representatives and heroes of the nation were male, there were exceptions such as Marianne and Joan of Arc in France, Maria Theresa of Austria and Queen Luise of Prussia. In Czech national history, the freedom of Czech women in ancient Czech history was routinely contrasted with the oppression allegedly suffered by German women – a narrative ploy to underline the more democratic tendencies of the Czech nation. But overall, the close relation between war and nation-state formation tended to exclude women in the national storylines, as it was the male citizen-soldier and his heroism which took centre stage. Occasionally women made an appearance as warriors. Thus Polish women were assured a prominent place in national histories as they took up arms in 1831 against Tsarist Russia. Mythical Boadicea could be depicted as having fought for Britishness against the Roman invaders. And the bakeress of Aljubarrota famously contributed to the victory of Portugal over the Castilian forces in the battle of Aljubarrota in 1385 – an incident recalled in most national histories of Portugal. But more generally speaking, female combatants did not fit into the gender order of nineteenth-century historical narratives and were written out of those narratives, such as the German ‘sword virgins’ who had fought alongside their male comrades in the wars of liberty in the 1810s.23

36 Writing the Nation

Women instead made a regular appearance as anti-heroes. Thus, the Polish historian Lelewel depicted the foreign-born wives of Polish kings as the source of all evil foreign customs weakening Polish national culture. And many Spanish national narratives made a woman, Florinda ‘La Cava’, the main culprit in the story of the Arab invasions of the peninsula in the eighth century. Most national histories were concerned with depicting the nation as a large family, in which male and female virtues were combined to produce perfect harmony and unity. Male and female images thus often appear next to each other. References to the Tsar as father figure of all Russians coincide with invocations of ‘mother Russia’. Frederick II of Prussia appears next to Queen Luise of Prussia as a major embodiment of German national virtues. Women mattered in national histories – as queens, saints, mythical founding figures, as those who had sacrificed themselves for the nation, as model mothers and role models for contemporary women. Women were the integrative, bridgebuilding, friendly, protective and homely face of the nation, the necessary counterpart to the warriors and statesmen who guided the nation through peril. In particular where historians attempted to sacralise nations, women often played an important role as martyrs for the national cause. The gendering of national narratives was arguably as prevalent in Russian national history as it was in British national history and can be found in Norwegian national narratives just as well as in their Greek counterparts. Yet the question has to be addressed whether ‘zones of nationalism’ in Europe translate into ‘zones of national history writing’.24 Is the character of nationalism in Western Europe fundamentally different from nationalism in Central and Eastern Europe? More recent research on nationalism has shed considerable doubt on this assumption.25 And yet it did matter for the framing of national storylines whether nation-states could be constructed as already existing nation-states or whether they were future projections. Historians in England, France, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain could build their stories on unbroken traditions of statehood. Borders in Western Europe hardly changed at all after 1815. Hence territorial overlaps figured less prominently in Western European national histories than in their Eastern European counterparts. There was the conflict between Portugal and Spain over the tiny Spanish enclave of Olivença, and of course, there were border conflicts in Central Europe, notably Germany, e.g. the Schleswig question involving Denmark and the Alsace question involving France. But this hardly compares to the situation in Central and Eastern Europe, where border conflicts and overlapping national histories were often central to the construction of national narratives. Here one city could not only have several different names, but also belong to several national narratives, as is the case with the Austrian Lemberg, which also is the Polish Lwów and the Ukranian Lviv (not to speak of the Jewish and Armenian worlds of the city!). In Central and Eastern Europe where multinational empires dominated the nineteenth-century landscape, a multitude of non-dominant ethnic groups struggled to construct their own

The Power of National Pasts 37

national storylines. They often looked precisely to Western European societies for models of successful nation-building. Occidentalism in East Central and Eastern Europe attempted to adapt and accommodate a range of Western ideas and practices of nation-building. At the same time, Protochronism, i.e. the notion that the East already preceded Western developments in key areas, could be used, most famously perhaps in the Romanian national narrative, to guard the nation against accusations of backwardness and failure. Where national history was more difficult to construct and more contested, there it tended to play a much larger role in underpinning national identity. Inversely, where there was a greater consensus on the underpinnings of the national storyline, national history had less of a role to play. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British history and its successful construction of a nation based on the principles of constitutional reform, individual liberty and benign imperialism would be a case in point.26 Yet even in Britain the construction of a consensual national history could not paper over all of the cracks of the multinational state, as the Irish began to contest the national storyline, ultimately constructing their own national history in opposition to British imperialism.27 In nineteenth-century multinational states, which were weaker than Britain, e.g. Spain, competing national narratives appeared more readily, for example in Catalonia and the Basque country. The empires of Central and Eastern Europe struggled far more visibly to contain multiple national histories than the nation-states of Western Europe. The Holy Roman Empire had already collapsed in 1806, and although the German lands struggled to form a united German nation-state in the following decades, historians did much to construct national storylines. Following the unification of Germany under Prussia in 1871, the Prussian school of historiography, postulating that it had been Prussia’s mission all along to unify Germany, quickly rose to dominance. The Habsburg empire fought in vain against the establishment of an Italian nation-state in March 1861. The Habsburgs were to grant Hungary a semi-autonomous status within the empire, thereby only awakening other Slav nationalisms to the fact that they were discriminated against. Few national historians were so prominent in staking out the national claims vis-à-vis the empire as the Czech historian Palacký.28 The Romanov empire in Russia had to contend with the stirrings of nationalisms on its borderlands. Most prominently, of course, the Poles rapidly developed national narratives challenging the division of Poland in 1795 and working towards the resurrection of an independent Poland. But also in the Ukraine, in Finland and in the Baltic states autonomous national narratives made an appearance during the nineteenth century.29 Unlike the Habsburgs, who attempted to accommodate the diverse nationalities without giving up the empire, the Romanovs responded to such stirrings of borderland nationalisms with intense campaigns of Russification. Historians lent a hand by justifying why particular areas of the empire were Russian.

38 Writing the Nation

In the Ottoman empire, the successful struggle of the Greeks for their own independent nation-state proved to be hugely inspirational for a variety of other nationalities across South Eastern, Eastern and East Central Europe. Each of these national struggles developed and built on narrations of the nation seeking to stake out claims of national originality and authenticity. National historians across the Habsburg, Romanov and Ottoman empires complained bitterly about empires as ‘prisons of the peoples’ of Europe. The emphasis of national history here was on oppression and suffering under the imperial powers.30 Yet national historians as apologists for and prophets of the nation-state did not dominate the profession entirely. Powerful critics of the growing obsession with national history writing included Lord Acton, Regius Professor of History at the University of Cambridge after 1895, who championed empire against nation and praised in particular the Habsburg empire as guarantor of peace and stability in East Central Europe.31 The nineteenth-century Lucerne-based historian Eutych Kopp described the key ingredients of Swiss national history as pure fiction, for which he was duly denounced as an Austrian traitor.32 But such critical voices could not prevent the forward march of national history writing in the nineteenth century. For about one century, between 1850 and 1950, it was by far the dominant form of history writing in Europe.

The apogee of national history writing, 1850–1950 While the Romantic mode of national history writing continued well into the second half of the nineteenth century, towards the end of that century, with processes of professionalisation and institutionalisation of history writing growing ever stronger, one can observe a positivist backlash against Romanticism. Historians now put even greater emphasis on source criticism and set about debunking a whole range of ‘historical myths’ peddled by Romantic historiography. In East Central Europe, for example, Pekar
began demolishing Palacký’s notion of Hussitism as bearer of modern democracy in the Czech lands and Bobrzyn´ski did the same with Lelewel’s celebration of ‘gentry democracy’ in Poland.33 What remained constant, however, was the notion that history was a kind of mirror in which the nation could see itself as it was. Historians were the ones holding up the mirror. But unlike in the fairytale of Snow White, the mirror was not bound to ‘truth’, despite the protestations of historians. Hence every holder of the mirror saw in it what he had constructed, meaning that those with an interest in national history never had just one mirror but several mirrors, i.e. competing narratives. And yet everyone holding a mirror claimed that his was the only genuine article. Historians continued to see themselves as pedagogues of the nation. Heinrich von Treitschke in Germany, Nicolae Iorga in Romania or Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos in Greece were all busy framing and legitimating the

The Power of National Pasts 39

nation-state. National historians did not emerge at the same time everywhere. Especially in Eastern Europe, major works of national history appeared relatively late. Thus, for example, one of the first major Ukranian national historians, Mykhailo Hrushevsky, wrote his History of Ukraine-Rus in ten volumes between 1894 and 1934.34 In Estonia a national master narrative was only beginning to be formulated in the inter-war period – with the formation of the University of Tartu in 1919 and the work of Hans Kruus being particularly important.35 This was in striking contrast to Lithuania, another Baltic state, where amateur historians such as Teodor Narbutas or his contemporary Daukantas established a national master narrative as early as the 1830s and 1840s.36 Such synchronicity of the asynchronic (Ernst Bloch) calls for diachronic as well as synchronic comparisons of national history writing across Europe and beyond. Whenever and wherever historians acted as spokespersons for the nation, they strove to emphasise the unity of the nation and, frequently, the superiority of their nation over other nations. The cosmopolitan beginnings of the national ideology in Herder were increasingly forgotten as the nineteenth century progressed. And yet historians were also part and parcel of a profession which rapidly Europeanised itself towards the end of the nineteenth century. As most university-trained historians believed that scholarship was objective, science, they argued, should know no national boundaries. The beginnings of the world historical congresses, for example, go back to 1898.37 It was difficult to maintain and uphold such internationalist sentiments in the first half of the twentieth century, when two world wars saw the enlistment of historians in the war efforts of their respective countries.38 Especially after 1918 military demobilisation was not followed by cultural demobilisation, so that history was enlisted like never before in attempts to make politics, redraw boundaries and functionalise the past for national gain in the present.39 During this high period of national history writing the crucial tension between intense nationalism and commitment to transnational professional networks could not be resolved. If historians found it difficult to combine a transnational self-understanding with national commitment, they certainly struggled to maintain the unity of the national master narrative and fend off alternative interpretations of the national history or the national character. In particular, religious and class narratives time and again threatened the cohesiveness of the dominant national storyline. They had to be integrated into the national master narrative – a task which frequently produced friction and historical controversy. If we look at the issue of religion first, we can observe that throughout much of Central, Western and Northern Europe historians were, with few exceptions, overwhelmingly Protestant. Even where they were not devout Christians, a ‘cultural Protestantism’ reigned supreme in these historiographies – with Catholicism often perceived as a backward, superstitious and altogether antinational force which stood in the way of progress. The anti-Catholicism of

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Protestant national historiographies was re-enforced by the liberal inclinations of many nineteenth-century national historians. In some parts of Europe Catholicism was directly linked to the repression of national ambitions. Thus, in the Habsburg empire Catholicism was widely identified with German pro-empire sentiments, whereas the national aspirations of the Czech, Slovak and Magyar people were given expression in religious terms through their Hussite, Lutheran and Calvinist beliefs. In Britain Catholicism was externalised as ‘foreign’ – with the Protestant British empire standing tall against Catholic influence in continental Europe.40 The Finnish historian Renvall was explicit about depicting Catholicism as foreign to Nordic thinking. Narratives which came to regard Protestantism as a central ingredient of national identity often linked the Protestant religion to the evolution of the political nation. Constructions of British constitutionalism, Swiss republicanism and German constitutionalism all depended heavily on understandings of Protestantism. Catholic narratives were consciously excluded and frequently regarded as a monstrosity, although individual Catholics, such as Lord Acton in Britain and Franz Schnabel in Germany could become respected members of the historical professions. In religiously mixed countries, such as Germany, Switzerland or indeed Slovakia, it tended to be the Protestant storylines which dominated the historical profession. But diverse confessional communities (Protestants, Catholics, Orthodox Christians, Jews) shaped their own separate national narratives often underpinning distinct religious milieux. In Germany and the Netherlands, for example, national narratives became pillarised according to different confessional denominations. In France, by contrast, the major dividing line was between the secular narratives and their Catholic alternatives. This was similar in countries which were confessionally homogeneous. In Lutheran Sweden and Catholic Spain the dividing line also ran between secular and religious national narratives. Where there was little tension between nation and religion, as in some monoconfessional countries, such as Norway, religion did not play an important part in the national narrative. It could in effect be taken for granted. By contrast, in Eastern Europe religion could serve as an important marker of difference in border areas, for example, between Orthodox Russians, Uniate Ukrainians and Roman Catholic Poles.41 Confessional aspects could, of course, only become important in national rivalries, where hostile nations claimed allegiance to different confessions. As Poland and Lithuania were both Catholic and as Prussia/Germany and Estonia/Latvia were all Protestant, national rivalries had to be linked to other than confessional differences. Religion and nationalism formed strong alliances, but they also produced considerable tensions. Nationalism has often been perceived as a form of secular millenarianism in which politics was replacing religion as the key to salvation.42 At the same time, religion sometimes became a powerful rival to the nation’s claim for absolute loyalty. In many respects, nineteenth-century

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empires such as the Ottoman empire found it easier than nation-states to live with several separate religions coexisting with various degrees of autonomy. With the advances of secular education and the rise of the scientific state in the modern period, the principles of religion and nation could present stark choices, but equally there were many attempts to bring them together. Religion remained a shaper of people’s destinies and identities, but the universal aspirations of all world religions often sat awkwardly with national ambitions. It was not by chance that in nineteenth-century Italy, the neoGuelphs failed to build the Italian nation-state around the papacy. Nowhere did a European nation define itself exclusively by religion. Unsurprisingly it was a Frenchman, Ernest Renan, in his classic attempt to define a nation, who argued that religion was not a sufficient basis for the establishment of modern nationality.43 Yet religion undoubtedly belonged to one of the most powerful bonds within many national communities and those which aspired to become one and was thus used effectively to underpin national storylines. Religious beliefs had a lasting influence on both French (Thierry, Guizot) and German (Ranke, Droysen, Sybel) nineteenth-century historiography. Not infrequently historians understood their own work as tracing and documenting God’s actions in the past.44 Great personalities in history were presented as agents of a higher will. Many nineteenth-century German historians studied theology and came from families of vicars and pastors. In their writings religious discourses became nationalised and national discourses became sacralised. Religion served the nation, but also became a crucial element of understanding the nation. Nation became the new religion. The structure of national narratives often paralleled the structure of the New Testament. The suffering, death and resurrection of Jesus equalled the destruction, ruin and eventual resurrection of the nation. Polish historians often referred to Poland as ‘Christ of nations’, and comparisons with the passion of Christ were easily made in other historiographies as well, e.g. the Hungarian one.45 In many nations religion became a key ingredient of national selfunderstanding. Orthodoxy and Romanianness became virtually synonymous.46 The Swedish nation was constructed as a Lutheran bulwark against Russian (and by implication also Orthodox) expansion. Sweden had of course also defended European Protestantism against the Catholic CounterReformation in the Thirty Years War. Denmark was often identified with a rather inward-looking Lutheranism in the nineteenth century.47 In Palacký’s narration of the Czech nation fifteenth-century Hussitism was the central ingredient of Czech national identity. In Poland and Lithuania the Catholic church as an institution was constructed as having guaranteed the survival of the nation during prolonged periods of statelessness.48 Catholicism was crucial to the national narratives produced under Franco and Salazar in Spain and Portugal.49 Both nations achieved national greatness only by fusing church and crown. Greek national narratives presented the Orthodox church as a bridge to the classical heritage of Greece. ‘Helleno-Christianity’ became the cradle of

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European civilisation and culture and therefore established a superior position of the modern Greek nation over all its rivals.50 Religion played the greatest role in the construction of national narratives where national missions were defined in religious terms. Spanish and Portuguese national narratives stressed how both nations brought Catholicism to half the globe and how they drove the Muslims out of Europe. Poland, Russia, the Habsburg empire and Greece also presented their national histories in terms of shielding Christian Europe from the infidels. The battle of Mohacs against the Ottomans in 1526 was presented as a national catastrophe for Hungary where the Hungarians sacrificed themselves for the sake of Christian Europe. The Greek struggle for independence was presented as a model for other Christian nations in the Balkans to establish their national narratives against the foremost Islamic power in Europe.51 The Reconquista in Spain was an epic of national recovery in which Europeans triumphed over Arab culture. Overall, religious storylines helped to unify national narratives, although they could also threaten that unity. The same ambivalence can be observed in the interrelationship between national and class narratives. With the emergence of the social question in the nineteenth century, politicians, social reformers and historians began to write about social classes and, in particular, about the working classes. Those histories which gave the greatest attention to questions of class often emerged from within the European labour movements rather than from within the European universities in the nineteenth century. Labour activists, though, mostly depicted class and class conflict within the national framework. Such a choice already indicated the desire on behalf of many socialists not to transcend the national storylines but to reframe them into stories which would be able to incorporate class. Eduard Bernstein’s histories of the labour movement in Germany and Robert Grimm’s histories of the labour movement in Switzerland are examples of such inclusive class histories.52 Their class narratives were alternative national narratives including different visions of national identity rather than attempts to overcome national identity. In different European nation-states these efforts met with diverse levels of resistance from official historiography. The German historical profession was one of the most rigorous in attempting to prevent the emergence of class narratives well into the twentieth century. Gerhard Ritter’s description of Eckart Kehr as Edelbolschewist in the early 1930s, and Hans Rothfels’s successful attempt to prevent Gustav Mayer access to archival material during the years of the Weimar Republic are just two prominent examples of such attempts at exclusion.53 In Britain, by contrast, the narrative construction of ‘the people’ was often used to defuse the disruptive potential of class and to unify the national narrative around issues of constitutionalism, freedom and individualism.54 Writing national history under the framework of ‘the people’ allowed historians such as Trevelyan to merge class and nation and write an inclusive national narrative.

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Around the turn of the twentieth century class began to move into academic discourse, in particular where social and economic history became more prominent within the historical profession. Yet at the same time class was also nationalised. Thus, for example, Karl Lamprecht’s interest in class and societal issues found expression in German national history.55 In Britain the Hammonds, Webbs, R. H. Tawney and G. D. H. Cole brought class and social history to the fore, but dealt almost exclusively with national topics. The early Annalistes were arguably less interested in the national framework of history writing than any other professional historians in inter-war Europe and actively encouraged the writing of comparative and transnational history using categories of ‘class’.56 The same is true for the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, founded in 1935, which explicitly championed the writing of a transnational and comparative history of class.57 Here we find the first attempts to challenge the dominance of the national paradigm in history writing. The class paradigm was an important tool for these efforts, as historians, e.g. Arthur Rosenberg, privileged ‘class’ over ‘nation’ as the basic framework of historical analysis.58 There were other prominent critics of national master narratives in this classical period of national history writing, none perhaps more famous than Herbert Butterfield whose Whig Interpretation of History argued forcefully that not every event in English history should be judged against the allegedly eternal values of individual liberty, constitutional government and religious tolerance. But they rarely presented an alternative to that which they wanted to do away with. Those who adopted class rather than nation as a leading framework for their histories had developed such an alternative. Yet much more common remained the introduction of ‘class’ into ‘nation’. As social history gained ground within national histories, ‘class’ became an important part of national history. Class histories challenged the older, almost exclusively political, construction of the nation. They sought instead to insert social constructions into national history. The new concern with ‘class’ and ‘society’ did by no means signal the abandonment of earlier national commitments, as is evident in the hyper-nationalism of German Volksgeschichte, the intense patriotism of leading figures of the Annales school and the much commented on Englishness of the Webbs. Soviet historiography after 1917 did not abandon the national framework either. Existing Russian national narratives were occasionally denounced as bourgeois and there were calls to replace them with revolutionary national narratives, which were meant to highlight the contribution of workers to the forging of the nation-state. But under Stalin Soviet historiography adopted and adapted many of the Russian nationalist storylines that had been prominent in Tsarist historiography.59 Thus, for example, it was even less possible in Stalin’s Soviet Union than in Tsarist Russia to suggest that the origins of the first Russian state had been anything other than Slav. The debate on the origins of the first Russian state had in fact been a long-standing one. Ever since the eighteenth century

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Slavophiles insisted on the Slav origins of Russia and Normanists argued for the Varangian origins of the Russian state. It is interesting to note that some non-Russians, such as Gustav Ewers, stood on the Slavophile side of the scholarly divide, whilst some Russians, such as Mikhail Pogodin, were on the Normanist side. But in Stalinist Russia the state and the Communist Party validated and enforced Mikhail Lomonosov’s arguments about the Slavophile roots of Russia. As the class discourse emerged in the nineteenth century, its propagators almost invariably attempted to link it to the national discourse by claiming that the social, cultural and political exclusion of the working class from the nation was unjust. The workers formed the true nation and therefore needed to reassert their belonging. It was those enjoying ‘privilege’ at the cost of others who were branded parasitical and standing in the way of unity. The central concern with unity linked class and national narratives. Like national narratives, class narratives were obsessed with finding the origins of national class struggles and creating a continuous history of nationalised class struggles from the dim and distant past to the present. Both narratives were concerned with eradicating sectional, ‘selfish’ interests. But where was that selfishness located? In many countries this was the aristocracy, but increasingly, the middle classes also formed key obstacles to unity. This kind of discourse always raised the question which social class should be regarded as the main carrier of the national idea. The answer to this question was remarkably diverse in different parts of Europe. In Poland it was the gentry and many historians, like Lelewel, stressed how important for nation-formation the struggle of the gentry against absolutism in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries had been. In more industrialised countries, notably Britain, constructions of the nation were predominantly middle class and framed the national storylines around issues of continuing industrial, political and cultural progress. In Scandinavia and the Ukraine, where free peasants formed an important section of the population, the nation was constructed around ideas of peasant liberties which had to be defended against encroachments by an indigenous or, more often, ‘foreign’ elite. Where the class enemy was foreign, class conflict became easily ethnicised. Hence in the Habsburg empire the German-speaking elite was frequently perceived in national narratives of non-Germans as a major national and class enemy. Some smaller nations, such as the Czechs and Slovaks, self-consciously tended to depict themselves as plebeian nations who stood against ‘foreign’ elites and aristocratic privilege. Class narratives were often centrally grouped around revolutions and revolutionary events. Revolutions were foundational moments for nations (France, 1789; Russia, 1917), but they were also moments in which class and nation came into conflict. Revolution was frequently an absent ‘other’ even in those national storylines that did not contain a successful revolution of their own. Some national stories, such as the British and the German ones,

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were preoccupied with demonstrating that revolution was not necessary. Here revolution and class were frequently depicted as standing outside of the national tradition. Narratives of revolution were invariably narratives of the extension of democratic rights and liberties. As such they highlighted existing disunities and exclusions. Where they failed, questions surrounding lack of unity lingered. Where they succeeded, claims of refound unity laid the foundation of revolutionary myths of origins, of nations reborn, rejuvenated and unified by the revolutionary experience. Yet everywhere we also find counter-revolutionary narratives which presented a different picture of the revolution as dividing the nation and usurping and destroying national traditions. Hence the republican French narratives viewed 1789 as source of unity and strength, whereas the Catholic French narratives lamented 1789 as the decline of traditional French values and norms. Even within the prorevolutionary narratives, class variants could put a very different gloss on how the narrative was framed. As long as the Greek revolution was represented as a national rising against Turkish oppression, it was a story of national unity. But when Yanis Kordatos interpreted the revolution primarily as a social rather than a national rising, directed against both Turkish and indigenous Greek oppressors of the people, class reframed the national history in important ways. Revolutions themselves redirected national narratives in significant ways. In England the Glorious Revolution of 1688 was in many respects the starting point of a tradition of historical writing which paved the way towards the dominance of the constitutionalist, Whiggish, progressive national history. Such narratives, in which 1688 itself figured prominently, dominated English national history before the 1960s. 1789 marked the starting point of the French republican narratives characterised by strong universalist ambitions for which the Great Revolution was the central reference point. And the revolutions of 1848 in the German lands led to a significant reorientation of North German liberal nationalist historians away from an anti-statist British-type liberalism and towards (Prussian) statism, power politics and realpolitik. Most revolutions, whether they succeeded or failed, also produced distinct exile traditions of national history writing. Historians finding themselves on the losing side of a revolutionary conflict were forced into exile, where they continued to develop alternative national storylines. This was the case with both the fascist and the communist dictatorships of the twentieth century. In both cases the state and the party intruded into the autonomy of the historical profession and attempted to undermine, silence and intimidate those historians not in line with the prescribed national history. But the national histories of Germany, Italy, Spain and Portugal were written by a whole range of exiled historians who continued their profession often under difficult circumstances in diverse domiciles of exile during the period of the fascist and authoritarian dictatorships. And national histories of communist East Central and Eastern European states after 1945 were

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given a prominent airing in the West during the time of the Cold War. Yet the national histories produced in exile were rarely straightforward continuations of the national paradigms defeated in or silenced by a revolution. In most cases exile national histories were influenced in multiple and complex ways by the experience of exile and by the exposure to the historical culture of the host country. Thus, for example, the prominent German historian Hans Rothfels was influenced by his enforced American exile, although in his case there are also many subtle continuities which connect his radical conservatism of the inter-war years to his liberal conservatism of the years after 1945.60 The potential of class to challenge the dominant national master narrative was purportedly absent in narratives of race. Culture and language had been the mainstay of the Romantic ethnicisation of national histories in the nineteenth century. Ethnic narratives thus tended to become interchangeable with national ones. Towards the end of the nineteenth century the rise of Social Darwinism in Europe contributed to the emergence of categories of ‘race’ in national history writing. Ideas of cultural superiority were now combined with ideas of racial breeding. Thus, for example, East Central European historiographies now had to cope with and react to German histories which linked an alleged mission to civilise Eastern Europe with the superiority of Germanic racial stock over the Slav races. In particular in those countries, like Germany and Hungary, where the post-First World War settlements left large ethnic minorities outside the borders of the nation-state, a racialised national(ist) history writing became ever more popular in the inter-war period and extended the previously dominant ethnic-statist interpretations of the nation.61 Claiming the right of the nation to unite people with the same ethnic background, this history contributed to the revision of borders and justified war, ethnic cleansing and genocide. German Volksgeschichte is perhaps the best-known example of such a racialised history writing in the inter-war period. But it was by no means unique.62 If we look, for example, to Greece, we observe the popularity of the Greek Megali idea which postulated that the former Byzantine lands were really Greek and therefore needed to be liberated from the Turks. It was precisely the parallel construction of different ethnic narratives on the same territorial space which made the principle of ethnicity so explosive, as it immediately raised the question of what to do with the ‘ethnic other’. Where more established nation-states and their histories traditionally ignored their ethnic minorities and wrote them out of the national story (e.g. the Samis in Norway, Sweden and Finland; the Eskimos in Denmark; the Romani in Hungary), in the context of the upheaval produced by the Second World War, ethnic and racial definitions of the nation led to unprecedented forms of barbarity, including genocide and widespread ethnic cleansing. It was to have a deep impact on the way that national storylines were recast throughout Europe in the decades after 1945.

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Towards post-national national histories? From the end of the Second World War to the present63 National histories across Europe were re-examined following the upheaval of war, occupation, collaboration and genocide between 1939 and 1945. Adjusting the national storylines in Europe to the post-war world also meant coming to terms with the Cold War division of Europe. Immediately after 1945 historians across Europe struggled to stabilise existing national narratives amidst much insecurity and soul-searching. Unsurprisingly the most radical re-evaluation of the national past came in the one country which had been directly responsible for the mayhem which had engulfed Europe for six years: Germany. Here Alexander Abusch formulated a vision of German national history which was quickly dubbed the ‘theory of misery’ (Miseretheorie), as he narrated the course of German history as a succession of disasters.64 Outside observers of German national history, such as A. J. P. Taylor in Britain, tended to agree in 1945 that German national history had only known extremes and therefore stood at almost the polar opposite to the gradual reform which characterised the British national master narrative.65 More surprisingly, the soul-searching among those responsible for drafting the German national master narrative was relatively short-lived. Abusch’s theories quickly fell out of favour with the East German communists who wanted to construct a national history which would help to underpin and sustain the new communist Germany. And in West Germany a virtually unchanged historical profession was keen either to remain silent or to seek excuses for its widespread support for Nazism and war. National Socialism was widely portrayed as the exception to an otherwise untainted national tradition. Those countries which had been allied to Nazi Germany faced the difficult task of explaining this alliance and positioning it in the national narrative. East of the Iron Curtain, Hungary and Romania took refuge in the officially decreed anti-fascism, which freed the vast majority of the people from any guilt. Only the ruling classes had been responsible for a wicked alliance with the German fascists and they had been punished in the post-war revolutionary events which had brought the communists to power. In Romania a period of strict internationalism and hyper-critical perspectives onto national history in the early 1950s was followed by a long period of intense nationalism, sponsored by the communist leader Ceaucescu whose regime sponsored many of the traditional nationalist narratives. In Hungary the official antifascist discourse papered over successfully the fact that Hungarians were not just victims but also perpetrators in the Second World War and its accompanying ethnic cleansings and genocide. In Western Europe it was especially Italy where historians had the task of locating an indigenous fascist movement in the national continuum. They did so, by and large, by defining fascism as the anti-Risorgiomento, i.e. as

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anti-national. Just as German historians wrote National Socialism out of German national history, so their Italian counterparts did the same with fascism. Like their German colleagues, Italian historians by and large emphasised that the good national tradition had been preserved in the resistance against fascism and especially against the German occupation after 1943, which was presented as struggle for national liberation and rebirth resulting in the foundation of the Second Republic. In countries which had experienced occupation during the Second World War, resistance movements were crucial in re-establishing proud national narratives after 1945. France is a good example.66 Historical narratives downplayed the widespread collaboration with the National Socialists and instead depicted the resistance movement as representing the French nation united in its struggle for freedom and national resurrection. In its communist variant this resistance story carried a heavy class inflection, whereas in its more dominant Gaullist variant it promised reintegration and salvation to all Frenchmen regardless of class. In Denmark the traditional anti-German orientation of the national master narrative was re-enforced after the Second World War. The occupation was understood as national humiliation by an aggressive and expansionist neighbour who was met with collective resistance. The only country which had fought the Second World War from beginning to end against National Socialist Germany and had escaped occupation was Britain. Here the national narrative was also deeply influenced by that experience. It was widely constructed as ‘Britain’s finest hour’, in which the principles of individualism, constitutionalism and liberty had won against the ideas of tyranny and dictatorship.67 But the suffering of all Britons in the war had also drawn renewed attention to the many social inequalities which characterised this ‘island nation’. And the history of the war was written as the history of the growing recognition that social reform and social justice must follow the wartime heroism. Hence the victory of the Labour Party in 1945 and its subsequent attempt to establish a welfare state and a more equal society were directly linked to the wartime experience. But the British national narrative had always been one of gradual reform and Labour’s reforms after 1945 could be written into that national storyline as just the latest instalment of a long and continuous national history.68 Similar strategies had not been an option across much of continental Europe, where the attempted stabilisation of traditional national storylines tended to be short-lived. More critical perspectives on national narratives emerged from the late 1950s onwards and contributed to a reorientation of history away from the national paradigm. In Germany, the work of Fritz Fischer on the outbreak of the First World War questioned the idea of National Socialism as a mere freak accident in German national history.69 Post-Fischer a new generation of historians began to ask questions concerning the roots of National Socialism in German national history. The first German nationstate between 1871 and 1945 was seen more sceptically. By the 1980s, there

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were those historians who argued that a unified Germany had only been a temporary arrangement in Europe and an experience which had not been a happy one for millions of Germans and Europeans. It was something not to be repeated. In Italy left-of-centre historians followed the lead of Dennis Mack Smith in arguing that Italian fascism had emerged out of the Risorgiomento nationalism of the nineteenth century rather than being an aberration.70 Again, the traditional national narrative became questionable, as Italian historians analysed the many links between fascism and nineteenth-century Italian nationalism. Elsewhere in Europe, the resistance myths began to crack in the 1970s and 1980s, as historians uncovered how widespread the collaboration with the National Socialist occupation regimes had been.71 Even in countries which had managed to stay neutral during the conflict, awkward questions eventually began to surface. In Sweden and Spain they focused on the degrees of economic (and in the case of Spain also military) co-operation with Nazi Germany during the war. In Switzerland they concentrated on the question of Swiss banks and the property of millions of Jews which had vanished in the Nazi annihilation camps. The Bergier commission in Switzerland, which investigated the actions of Swiss banks during the Second World War, produced twenty-five detailed studies in the period between 1996 and 2001.72 It is only with the beginning of the twenty-first century that Spain has started to debate some of the most unpalatable aspects of the Franco dictatorship.73 In Finland it was only during the 1980s that historians began to uncover the close collaboration of Finnish generals with the Germans in the war against the Soviet Union. Before that the role of Finland as an ally of National Socialist Germany was mostly denied. Where the traditional national narratives became questionable, historians began to look elsewhere. In Sweden, for example, national history began to be constructed around the idea of Sweden as a pioneer and model of the welfare state. In several European countries, the post-war popularity of the idea of Europe was also clearly a response to the crisis of national histories and identities. With the formation of the European Union and NATO, questions of the unity of the European continent and of the Western community of nations appeared on the agenda. While both Nazi barbarity and Asian communism had to be written out of what constituted Europe, the search was on for historical evidence which could demonstrate that the new Cold War alliance system in the West was based on common ideals, values and political practices. Yet the rather short-lived flourish in the genre of intellectual history of Europe in the 1950s demonstrated above all that it would be rather difficult to construct a history of the continent whose telos was realised in a united states of Europe.74 The continent was so clearly the product of violent conflict and war that history was rather a poisoned chalice for European identity. By contrast, national narratives continued to thrive and the move to contemporary history since the end of the Second World War has, if

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anything, strengthened the nationalisation of historiographical traditions, as contemporary history, perhaps more than any other history, has been national history.75 If West European historiographies struggled after 1945 to come to more critical evaluations of traditional national narratives, it looked as though East European communist historiographies would be more willing to break with those traditional national histories. The idea of the anti-fascist struggle against Nazism and its allies was combined with the notion of national history containing two lines of tradition. The first comprised all those factors, things, events and personalities which hindered progress, while the second incorporated everything that furthered progress. While the former ended in fascism, the latter found its apogee in the communist presence and future. Communist histories were careful to construct ‘the people’ as standing on the side of progress; hence ‘the people’ had also opposed fascism and welcomed the communist transformation. The identities of rulers and ruled in the present was an important precondition for historians’ interpretation of the past. But the foremost fighter against fascism in all communist historiographies, was, of course, the Soviet Union. Hence anti-fascism did not only allow the national historians in communist Eastern Europe so salvage the national tradition. It also gave them an opportunity to hail the Soviet Union as fatherland of the proletariat which had to be protected against the evil forces of capitalism. Such internationalism was easily combined with a continued fixation with traditional national history – painted red.76 Especially in countries such as Hungary, Slovakia and Poland, where there was little indigenous Marxist historiography before 1945, the merger between class and national paradigms contained many traditional narratives. Most famously, of course, the national histories of the Soviet Union immediately after the ‘great patriotic war’ were as Russo-centric and favourable on virtually all aspects of Russia’s imperial past as never before. But elsewhere in communist Eastern Europe, historians have also noted intriguing continuities from the old national to communist and back to the new national storylines. In Estonia, for example, the theme of national awakening remained a popular one throughout the communist years.77 In neighbouring Latvia, some historians praised the Latvian SS troops for making an important contribution to the Latvian national cause.78 The strong nationalisation of communist historiographies in Eastern Europe during the Cold War also helps to explain why many East European countries witnessed a relatively smooth transition from communist to nationalist histories in the post-Cold War period. Demands for new national histories could be heard throughout Eastern Europe after the collapse of communism. Ironically, traditional national narratives were often conserved better in the communist historiographies of Eastern Europe than in the pluralising historiographies of Western Europe, where war, genocide and the many dark shadows, which had criss-crossed Europe in the first half of the twentieth

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century, could not be kept off the memory landscape forever.79 The darkest of those shadows, the holocaust, was not central to national history writing in any European country. Even where the national narrative could have been framed around ‘the nation’ helping to save ‘its’ Jews, as was the case in Denmark or Bulgaria, it did not happen. And in the classic country of perpetrators, Germany, the memory of Germans as victims dominated the national narratives well into the 1960s. Germans were victims of Hitler, of Allied bombing, of ethnic cleansing, of rape, torture and unbearable conditions in Soviet prisoner of war camps. Only from the 1970s onwards did the holocaust become the cornerstone of national history writing in Germany. And from this time onwards holocaust narratives elsewhere in Western Europe also tended to become more self-reflective and critical towards collaboration of their respective nations in the annihilation of European Jewry. This trend was facilitated by changes to the historical profession in the 1960s, when the expansion of higher education systems in Western Europe led to exploding numbers of university historians.80 As it became increasingly more difficult to control access to the historical profession, challenges to traditional national narratives proliferated. Not only was the pool of European historians getting bigger, the history of Europe, or rather, the history of the European nation-states, was also practised with increasing impact in much better equipped American universities. The exchange programmes within Western Europe but also between Europe and North America meant that more and more historians were exposed to other national academic systems which often widened horizons and spurred an interest in transnational and comparative history. Historians were no longer primarily the propagators of the nation, but came to see themselves as mediators between different national cultures. The growing internationalisation of the historical profession also meant that distinct national styles of history writing decreased in importance. And the national framework for history writing became itself contested terrain, as historians turned to sub- and supra-national frameworks for writing history. The European-wide breakthrough to social history in the 1960s was rarely combined with a move away from the national paradigm. Fernand Braudel and parts of the Annales sidelined nation – partly by focusing on early modern and medieval history. Some social historians in East and West, Eric Hobsbawm in Britain, Jürgen Kocka in the FRG or Jürgen Kuczynski in the GDR, attempted to privilege ‘class’ over ‘nation’ as a basic framework for analysis. However, genuinely transnational and comparative historiography remained rare. Most of social history continued to be written in a national vein. National institutes, dedicated to the study of class and labour history, were founded after the Second World War, e.g. the Italian Gramsci Institute, the French Institut français d’histoire sociale, or the German Friedrich-EbertFoundation. When, with the onset of a new, post-industrial era in the 1980s the nationalised class master narratives declined and found themselves in

52 Writing the Nation

serious crisis,81 a genuine pluralisation of the historiographical profession and its methods followed. The new political history, the new cultural history, the new international history, women’s history, gender history, history from below, post-modern and post-structuralist history began to emerge next to and challenge older forms of history writing. Some of the new themes and methods also began to challenge the framework of national history. Women and gender historians, for example, argued that any discussion of the position of women and of gender relations within society could not be restricted to the nation-state.82 History from below challenged the assumption that it was the national framework which was most meaningful to the people in their everyday lives.83 Post-modernism and post-structuralism contributed to undermining essentialised notions of national identity and paved the way towards constructivist and narratological interpretations of national belonging.84 At the beginning of the twenty-first century few professional historians would still profess an unproblematic belief in unified national narratives. And yet more sceptical and more playful perspectives on national history began standing side by side with recurring attempts to renationalise identities and histories in a variety of European nation-states. The heritage mania of Thatcherite Britain had its supporters among professional historians, such as Geoffrey Elton, who famously called for more patriotic history.85 The German Historikerstreit of the 1980s was arguably the best-known and most protracted attempt by liberal-conservative historians to argue that national history was necessary to underpin a sense of national cohesion and give a feeling of national belonging to people.86 In the 1980s those who argued in favour of post-national perspectives and wanted to hang West German identity not on national history but on variants of constitutional patriotism seemed to be winning the day, but the unexpected reunification of the country in 1990 brought a second instalment to the Historikerstreit, which marked the notable come-back of national history.87 If it was the return of the nation-state which contributed to the renationalisation of German narratives in the 1990s, it was the crisis of the nationstate in Italy which provoked historians there to rally to the defence of the Italian nation.88 In France key representatives of the Annales school, such as Fernand Braudel, who had championed the move away from national perspectives in the post-war era, returned to the theme of the nation with a nostalgic and patriotic lens.89 And the collapse of the communist regimes across Eastern Europe witnessed a variety of attempts to resurrect national histories. Some of these fed directly into renewed acts of ethnic cleansing and genocide, as was the case in the former Yugoslavia.90 Some brought with them xenophobic reactions and deeply problematic continuities to national pasts, as was the case in the Baltic states and in Slovakia. Yet the return to national history in Europe after the end of the Cold War was not straightforward. In Germany, for example, the search for a normal

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national identity post-1990 often produced a consensus around Westernised forms of national identity. In this narrative, exemplified by Heinrich August Winkler’s national history published in 2000, the Federal Republic of Germany had learned the lessons from a hyper-nationalist past and become Westernised.91 In Britain, the success of the ‘four nations’ approach to British history in the 1990s spelt the end of the long dominance of English over Scottish, Welsh and Irish histories.92 The lament of David Starkey over the loss of a powerful English national narrative is a minority voice among academic historians today, albeit the voice of a powerful propagator for traditional national narrative on prime-time television.93 Media history in many countries across Europe has played an important role in renationalising historical narratives in the 1990s and beyond. In France, debates about Vichy and Algeria have not allowed the return to more patriotic narratives and the recent uproar following the passing of a law in the French parliament allegedly calling on teachers and university researchers to portray the benefits of the French empire, clearly indicate the limits of renationalisation of the historical profession in ‘la grand patrie’.94 The history of empire has, of course, been intensely nationalised in the different national historiographies in Europe. But at the same time, not the least under the impact of post-colonial approaches to history writing, it has become virtually impossible for academic historians to present the history of empire as an extension of a glorious national history. Post-colonial perspectives have helped to fracture the national storylines of European nationstates.95 Winston Churchill’s History of the English-Speaking Peoples was arguably the last gasp of an imperial history singing the praises of the Anglo-Saxon race as colonisers and bearers of civilisation.96 Fifty years on, imperial history writing is not only acutely aware of the negative balance sheet of colonialism and imperialism, but it also asks predominantly about processes of cultural transfer of social, cultural and political practices not only from Europe to the non-European world but also vice versa, from the colonised and subaltern periphery to the metropolitan centre. This research is successfully dissolving static and unchanging understandings of centre and periphery which informed an older world systems analysis.97 The concern with transfer and transnationalism in fact goes well beyond empire histories. During the 1990s and 2000s younger historians have frequently adopted comparative and transnational methods in order to go beyond national history. At the same time, however, other historians have warned not to throw out the baby with the bathwater and to recognise the importance of the national framework for many aspects of nineteenth- and twentieth-century history. They have therefore sought to establish forms of national history writing which were cognisant of the methodological and theoretical challenges to an older national history and which presented a kaleidoscopic view of the nation – multi-perspectival, fractured and nonessentialist.98 At the beginning of the twenty-first century it looks as though

54 Writing the Nation

a more self-reflective national history will continue to coexist with a growing popularity of transnational and comparative perspectives which relativise the importance of the national framework for analyses and interpretations of the past. Many historians across Europe are looking forward to a genuine Europeanisation and perhaps even globalisation of historical writing,99 but they are facing an uphill struggle in a Europe, where nation-states still remain the strongest anchor of identity and the most pertinent framework for history writing.

Conclusion: towards a happy eclecticism? National history writing was not a child of the nineteenth century. Many of the national tropes were much older and went back to medieval or Renaissance Europe. During the eighteenth century Enlightenment historians wrote national histories. But it was only with the emergence of the Romantic mode of history writing in the nineteenth century that national history was written to define primarily what was specific and special about nations understood as collective personalities with their own unique characters. Language, literature, culture and history became defining characteristics of distinct ethnies striving to build nations and create states for such nations. In the nineteenth century the thorough nationalisation of historical writing coincided with the professionalisation of the historical discipline to produce historians who were in the vanguard of nation-builders across Europe, because they could speak authoritatively about the nation’s past. The rise of historicism in European historiography was a means of lending ‘scientific’ authority to the subject of history writing and crediting its practitioners with a special role as interpreters of the past who possessed, through their science, the key to understanding the present and predicting the future. The framework of the nation was widely different in nineteenth-century Europe. It ranged from long-existing nation-states in Western and Northern Europe, such as Spain, Portugal, Britain, France, the Netherlands, Sweden and Denmark, to nations which had a past experience of independent statehood but no present nation-state, such as Poland, Lithuania, Hungary and the Czech lands, to those nations who could not construct any institutional anchor to their national ambitions and therefore were thrown back on ethnocultural definitions of the nation, such as Finland, Norway, Slovakia, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Serbia and Croatia. And there were those, like Greece, Italy and Romania who discovered their ancient forefathers of classical Greece, the Roman empire and the Dacians to argue that there was essential continuity in national character from those classical antecedents to the present time. Yet regardless of the remarkable diversity of the national framework, the building blocks of Romantic national history were remarkably similar across Europe from West to East and North to South. Following Herder, the ethnicisation of the national storylines brought with it greater attention to language

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and literature, including the language and customs of the ‘ordinary folk’. The concern with the originality of cultures led to a European-wide competition in which historians had the task to demonstrate that their particular culture was more original than others. The worries about originality were often exacerbated by concerns with origins. Here historians vied with each other to prove that their nation had longer and more substantial roots in the dim and distant past than other nations. Myths of origin soon populated diverse national histories across Europe. Long histories invariably meant histories of decline and renewal in which periods of degeneration were succeeded by ages of restoration and ‘golden ages’ in which the nation had made a major contribution to European civilisation. Each nation was defined not only by their unique national souls but also by their national enemies, both internal and external. Those enemies were frequently feminised, pointing to the importance of the gendering of national narratives in Europe. National enemies were often overcome by national heroes and both, heroes and enemies, belonged firmly to the pantheon of Romantic national narratives. Eventually the heroic Romantic national narratives were being challenged by positivist traditions as the nineteenth century progressed and the institutionalisation of historical research increased – demanding ever higher standards of source criticism and historical professionalism. The Romantic histories were re-examined, found wanting and denounced as peddling historical myths and half-truths. Yet the more rigorous positivist historiographies did not abandon the national orientation of history writing. Quite the contrary, they gave the national storylines even firmer ‘scientific’ grounding. Professing to be part and parcel of an international community of professional historians striving to achieve the same high standards of craftsmanship in framing their stories, historians struggled to maintain the cohesion and singularity of national histories in the face of competing narratives of religion and class which threatened to challenge the national paradigm. Under the circumstances, national histories were remarkably successful in subsuming those alternative narrative frameworks under their genre. When the European nations clashed in the First World War historians and their narratives were vitally important in sustaining the cultural mobilisation of nations and providing arguments for the war effort. Intriguingly, the military demobilisation after the First World War was not followed by a cultural one. The inter-war years in fact saw the radicalisation of national narratives in particular in those nation-states which had lost significant territories as a result of the post-war settlements of Versailles and Trianon. Germany and Hungary in particular developed racialised versions of ethno-cultural narratives which sought to revise the post-war boundaries and extend their national borders to incorporate all those who were regarded as ethnically German and Hungarian. But national narratives flourished elsewhere as well and when the European nations clashed for a second time in a military conflict which not only spanned the continent but the globe, national narratives

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and their purveyors were in the forefront of those legitimating the war, ethnic cleansing and genocide. After 1945 attempts to restabilise traditional national narratives were short-lived, as, from the late 1950s onwards, more self-critical and self-reflective perspectives on the national past came to the fore in a wide range of European nation-states. From the 1960s the increase in the number of historians and the pluralisation of methods and themes contributed to the relative decline of the genre of national history writing. Yet, throughout the Cold War era the nation remained an important framework for the writing of history in both Eastern and Western Europe, even if it lost its exclusive and almost total hold over the historical profession that it had in earlier times. The Europeanisation of the political framework in Western Europe seems to have stabilised multinational states by de-emphasising the relevance of the national framework. Hence Spain, Britain or Belgium still exist as national entities, albeit embattled ones, whereas the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia have all disintegrated in the 1990s when confronted with the power of ethnic storylines unrestrained by communist imperialism. But a renationalisation of historical writing could not only be observed across Eastern Europe. It was also very much in evidence, for diverse reasons, in parts of Central and Western Europe. As the EU’s attempt to arrive at ‘ever close union’ could be constructed as a threat to national identities and as separatist nationalist movements surfaced in a variety of West European nation-states, historians rallied to the defence of the national framework. And yet, the renationalisation of historical narratives in the 1990s possessed a very different quality to the nationalisation that was so prevalent in the nineteenth century and the inter-war period. They have at times been described as post-classical national narratives, in that they are far more self-reflexive and far more aware of the constructed nature of all forms of national belonging than their predecessors. Hence they are also far more playful and tolerant of other constructions of national identity. Have, one is tempted to ask, national historians in contemporary Europe defused the dangerous aspects of national narratives, especially their exclusivism and essentialism? Has the Janus-faced character of the national paradigm been overcome and is the nation today a vehicle for emancipation, political rights and freedom rather than war and genocide? Are we indeed moving towards a ‘happy eclecticism’ under the impact of globalisation and post-modernism? The picture certainly remains somewhat different for different parts of Europe, and it would, in my view, be premature, to say goodbye to national paradigms and narratives which might yet prove their ability to turn nasty. National others within Europe are still very much in existence and even European ‘others’ are being constructed in the form of Turkey and Russia in particular. Yugoslavia and the fate of many Yugoslav historians during the 1990s should also be a warning sign not to write off the vicious sides of an essentialised and racialised national history.

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Notes 1. This chapter could not have been written without the existence of the five-year European Science Foundation programme entitled ‘Representations of the Past: the Writing of National Histories in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Europe’, which I have had the pleasure of directing since 2003. I am grateful to the well over one hundred scholars from around thirty European countries who have attended its workshops and conferences and contributed chapters to publications of the programme. For details see http://www.uni-leipzig.de/zhsesf. 2. John Gillingham, ‘Civilizing the English? The English Histories of William of Malmesbury and David Hume’, Historical Research 124 (2001), 17–43. 3. J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, vol. 2: Narratives of Civil Government (Cambridge, 1999). 4. Caspar Hirschli, ‘Das humanistische Nationskonstrukt vor dem Hintergrund modernistischer Nationalismustheorien’, Historisches Jahrbuch 122 (2002), 355–96; Reinhard Stauber, ‘Nationalismus vor dem Nationalismus? Eine Bestandsaufnahme der Forschung zu “Nation” und “Nationalismus” in der frühen Neuzeit’, Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 47 (1996) 139–65; Johannes Helmrath, Ulrich Muhlack and Gerrit Walther (eds), Diffusion des Humanismus: Studien zur nationalen Geschichtsschreibung europäischer Humanisten (Göttingen, 2002). 5. For a masterly account situating history writing in England between the late fifteenth and the early eighteenth centuries within the history of print culture see Daniel Woolf, Reading History in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2000). 6. Franz Bosbach, ‘Der französische Erbfeind: zu einem deutschen Feindbild im Zeitalter Ludwig XIV’, in idem (ed.), Feindbilder: Die Darstellung des Gegners in der politischen Publizistik des Mittelalters und der Neuzeit (Cologne, 1992), pp. 117–39; Ekkehard Klug, ‘Das “asiatische” Rußland: über die Entstehung eines europäischen Vorurteils’, Historische Zeitschrift 245 (1987), 265–89. 7. Heinz Schilling, ‘Nationale Identität und Konfession in der europäischen Neuzeit’, in Bernhard Giesen (ed.), Nationale und kulturelle Identität: Studien zur Entwicklung des kollektiven Bewußtseins in der Neuzeit (Frankfurt/Main 1991), pp. 192–252. 8. The term Sattelzeit was introduced to historical studies by the German historian Otto Brunner to characterise the period between 1750 and 1850, in which the old feudal order was replaced by modern commodified relations. See Pim den Boer, ‘The Historiography of German Begriffsgeschichte and the Dutch Project of Conceptual History’, in Iain Hampsher-Monk, Karin Tilmans and Frank van Vree (eds), History of Concepts: Comparative Perspectives (Amsterdam, 1998), p. 18. 9. Heiko Feldner, ‘The New Scientificity in Historical Writing around 1800’, in Stefan Berger, Heiko Feldner and Kevin Passmore (eds), Writing History: Theory and Practice (London, 2003), pp. 3–22. 10. For the importance of that distinction for historical writing and the difficulty of maintaining it, see Chris Lorenz, ‘Drawing the Line: “Scientific” History between Myth-Making and Myth-Breaking’, in Stefan Berger and Linas Eriksonas (eds), Narrating the Nation: the Representation of National Narratives in Different Genres (Oxford, 2007). 11. Georg G. Iggers and James M. Powell (eds), Leopold von Ranke and the Shaping of the Historical Discipline (Syracuse, 1990). 12. David J. M. Hooson (ed.), Geography and National Identity (Oxford, 1994). 13. Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: the Science of Freedom (New York, 1996), pp. 368–95. 14. Joep Leersen, ‘The Rhetoric of National Character: a Programmatic Survey’, Poetics Today 21:2 (2000), 267–92.

58 Writing the Nation 15. Johan van der Zande, ‘August Ludwig Schlözer and the English Universal History’, in Stefan Berger, Peter Lambert and Peter Schumann (eds), Historikerdialoge: Geschichte, Mythos und Gedächtnis im deutsch-britischen kulturellen Austausch 1750–2000 (Göttingen, 2003), pp. 135–56. 16. H. B. Nisbet, ‘Herder: the Nation in History’, in Michael Branch (ed.), National History and Identity: Approaches to the Writing of National History in the North-East Baltic Region, Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Helsinki, 1999), pp. 78–96. 17. On non-dominant ethnic groups in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe see the eight-volume book series entitled Comparative Studies on Governments and Non-Dominant Ethnic Groups in Europe (1850–1940) (Dartmouth, 1991–3). 18. Patrick Geary, The Myths of the Nations: the Medieval Origins of Europe (Princeton, 2002). 19. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983) was, of course, the main inspiration for the rich vein of research into diverse ‘inventions of tradition’. 20. Jo Tollebeek, ‘Historical Representation and the Nation-State in Romantic Belgium (1830–1850)’, Journal of the History of Ideas 59 (1998), 329–53; also Hervé Hasquin (ed.), Histoire et Historiennes depuis 1830 en Belgique (Brussels, 1981). 21. On national heroes see Linas Eriksonas, National Heroes and National Identities: Scotland, Norway and Lithuania (Brussels, 2004). 22. Specifically on historiography see the pathbreaking study of Bonnie Smith, The Gender of History: Men, Women and Historical Practice (Cambridge, MA, 1998), and, more recently, Ilaria Porciani and Mary O’Dowd, History Women, special issue of the Storia della Storiografia 46 (2004). See also more generally Ida Blom, Karen Hagemann and Catherine Hall (eds), Gendered Nations: Nationalisms and Gender Order in the Long Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 2000). 23. On the link between citizenship and military service and the exclusion of women from the political sphere in nineteenth-century Europe see Ute Frevert, ‘War’, in: Stefan Berger (ed.), A Companion to Nineteenth Century Europe (Oxford, 2006), pp. 417–31. 24. Ernest Gellner has argued prominently that nationalism developed in ‘zones’, from Western through Central to Eastern Europe (roughly zones one to three); see, for example, his ‘Nationalism and the International Order’, in idem, Encounters with Nationalism (Oxford, 1996), pp. 20–33. 25. Mark Hewittson and Tim Baycroft (eds), What is a Nation? Europe, 1789–1914 (Oxford, 2006). 26. John Breuilly, ‘Historians and the Nation’, in Peter Burke (ed.), History and Historians in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 2005), pp. 56–87. 27. Joep Leersen, Remembrance and Imagination: Patterns in the Historical and Literary Representation of Ireland in the Nineteenth Century (Cork, 1996). 28. J. F. Zac
ek, Palacký: the Historian as Scholar and Nationalist (The Hague, 1970). 29. Stephen Velychenko, National History as Cultural Process: a Survey of the Interpretations of Ukraine’s Past in Polish, Russian, and Ukranian Historical Writing from the Earliest Times to 1914 (Edmonton, 1992). 30. Frank Hadler and Mathias Mesenhoeller (eds), Vergangene Größe und Ohnmacht in Ostmitteleuropa: Repräsentation imperialer Erfahrung in der Historiographie seit 1918 (Leipzig, 2007). 31. Roland Hill, Lord Acton (Yale, 2000). 32. Guy P. Marchal and Aram Mattioli (eds), Erfundene Schweiz: Konstruktionen nationaler Identität (Zurich, 1992); on Switzerland see also Oliver Zimmer, A

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33. 34.

35.

36.

37.

38. 39.

40.

41.

42.

43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

48. 49.

Contested Nation: History, Memory and Nationalism in Switzerland, 1761–1891 (Cambridge, 2003); Guy P. Marchal, Schweizer Gebrauchsgeschichte. Geschichtsbilder, Mythenbildung und nationale Identität (Basel, 2006). Maciej Janowski, ‘Three Historians’, CEU History Department Yearbook (2001/2), 199–232. Serhii Plokhii, Unmaking Imperial Russia: Mykhailo Hrushevsky and the Writing of Ukrainian History (Toronto, 2005); T. Prymak, ‘Hrushevsky and the Ukraine’s “Lost” History’, History Today 39 (1989), 42–6. S. and J. Kivimäe, ‘Estnische Geschichtsforschung an der Universität Tartu 1920–1940: Ziele und Ergebnisse’, in G. von Pistohlkors, T. U. Raun and P. Kaegbein (eds), The Universities in Dorpat/Tartu, Riga and Wilna/Vilnius 1579–1979 (Cologne, 1987). Antanas Kulakauskas, ‘Rediscovery of the History of Lithuania in the Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries’, in Branch (ed.), National History and Identity, pp. 259–64. Karl Dietrich Erdmann, Toward a Global Community of Historians: the International Historical Congresses and the International Committee of Historical Sciences, 1898–2000 (Oxford, 2005). For the example of Germany, see Matthew Stibbe, German Anglophobia and the Great War, 1914–1918 (Cambridge, 2001). On ‘cultural demobilisation’ compare John Horne, ‘Kulturelle Demobilmachung 1919–1939: Ein sinnvoller historischer Begriff?’, in Wolfgang Hardtwig (ed.), Politische Kulturgeschichte der Zwischenkriegszeit 1918–1939 (Göttingen, 2005), pp. 129–50. Chris Clark and Wolfram Kaiser, Culture Wars: Secular–Catholic Conflict in Nineteenth Century Europe (Cambridge, 2003). See also Keith Robbins, History, Religion and Identity in Modern Britain (London, 1993). On the strong impact of religion on nationalising tendencies in Central and Eastern Europe see Joachim Bahlke and Arno Strohmeyer (eds), Konfessionalisierung in Ostmitteleuropa: Wirkungen des religiösen Wandels im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert in Staat, Gesellschaft und Kultur (Stuttgart, 1999); Hans-Christian Maner and Martin Schulze Wessel (eds), Kirche und Staat, Religion und Gesellschaft in Ostmitteleuropa in der Zwischenkriegszeit (Stuttgart, 2002). Elie Kedourie, Nationalism (Oxford, 1993); Heinz-Gerhard Haupt and Dieter Langewiesche (eds), Nation und Religion in der deutschen Geschichte (Frankfurt/Main, 2001). Ernest Renan, ‘What is a Nation?’ [1882], reprinted in Vincent P. Pekora (ed.), Nations and Identities (Oxford, 2001), p. 172f. Thomas Albert Howard, Religion and the Rise of Historicism (Cambridge, 2000). Árpád von Klimó, Nation, Konfession, Geschichte: Zur nationalen Geschichtskultur Ungarns im eurpäischen Kontext 1860–1948 (Munich, 2003). Celia Hawkesworth, Muriel Heppell and Harry Norris (eds), Religious Quest and National Identity in the Balkans (Basingstoke, 2001). On many aspects of Scandinavian historiography see Frank Meyer and Jan Eivind Myhre (eds), Nordic Historiography in the Twentieth Century (Oslo, 2000). Also: Bo Stråth and Øystein Sørensen (eds), The Cultural Construction of Norden (Oslo, 1997). Virgilis Krapauskas, Nationalism and Historiography: the Case of Nineteenth-Century Lithuanian Historicism (New York, 2000). A good overview for Spain is provided by Xosé Manoel Núñez, Historiographical Approaches to Nationalism in Spain (Saarbücken, 1993); for Portuguese historiography

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50.

51. 52. 53.

54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

59.

60. 61.

62. 63.

64. 65. 66. 67.

68.

see especially Sérgio Campos Matos, Historiografia e memória nacional (1846–1899) (Lisbon, 1998). Effi Gazi, Scientific National History: the Greek Case in Comparative Perspective 1850–1920 (Frankfurt/Main, 2000); Antonis Liakos, ‘The Construction of National Time: the Making of the Modern Greek Historical Imagination’, Mediterranean Historical Review 16:1 (2001), 27–42. On the Balkans generally see the wonderful work of Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford, 1997). On the interrelatedness of national and class paradigms see Stefan Berger and Angel Smith (eds), Nationalism, Labour and Ethnicity 1870–1939 (Manchester, 1999). The classic account on Germany remains Georg Iggers, The German Conception of History: the National Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present, 2nd rev. edn (Middletown, CT, 1983). Michael Bentley, Modernising England’s Past: English Historiography in the Age of Modernism 1870–1970 (Cambridge, 2006). Roger Chickering, Karl Lamprecht: a German Academic Life, 1856–1915 (Atlantic Highlands, 1993). See the classic Marc Bloch, ‘Pour une histoire comparée des sociétés européennes’, Revue de Synthèse Historique 46 (1928), 15–50. Maria Hunink, De Papieren van de Revolutie: Het Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis 1935–1947 (Amsterdam, 1986). Arthur Rosenberg, Demokratie und Sozialismus: Zur politischen Geschichte der letzten 150 Jahre (Amsterdam, 1938). On Rosenberg see also Mario Keßler, Arthur Rosenberg: Ein Historiker im Zeitalter der Katastrophen (1889–1943) (Cologne, 2003). On nineteenth-century Russian historiography see Thomas M. Bohn, Russische Geschichtswissenschaft von 1880 bis 1905: Pavel N. Miljukov und die Moskauer Schule (Cologne, 1998). For a good example of Stalin’s attachment to traditional Russian nationalist narratives see Maureen Perrie, The Cult of Ivan the Terrible in Stalin’s Russia (Basingstoke, 2002). On Rothfels see Johannes Hürter and Hans Woller (eds), Hans Rothfels und die deutsche Zeitgeschichte (Munich, 2005). On the history wars between Germany and Poland see Jan M. Piskorski with Jörg Hackmann and Rudolf Jaworksi (eds), Deutsche Ostforschung und polnische Westforschung im Spannungsfeld von Wissenschaft und Politik: Disziplinen im Vergleich (Osnabrück, 2002). Manfred Hettling (ed.), Volksgeschichte im Europa der Zwischenkriegszeit (Göttingen, 2003). This section draws heavily on Stefan Berger, ‘A Return to the National Paradigm? National History Writing in Germany, Italy, France and Britain from 1945 to the Present’, Journal of Modern History 77:3 (2005), 629–78. Alexander Abusch, Der Irrweg einer Nation (Berlin, 1946). A. J. P. Taylor, The Course of German History (London, 1945). H. R. Kedward, ‘French Resistance: a Few Home Truths’, in William Lamont (ed.), Historical Controversies and Historians (London, 1998), pp. 3–14. Winston Churchill’s six-volume The Second World War is a wonderful example of one, very important, of those constructions; for a painstaking analysis see David Reynolds, In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War (London, 2004). On Britain, especially post-1945, see Peter Mandler, History and National Life (London, 2002).

The Power of National Pasts 61 69. John A. Moses, The Politics of Illusion: the Fischer Controversy in German Historiography (London, 1975). 70. Dennis Mack Smith, Italy: a Modern History (Ann Arbor, MI, 1959). 71. For a European panopticum which does not only focus on historiography see Monika Flacke (ed.), Mythen der Nationen: 1945: Arena der Erinnerungen, 2 vols (Mainz, 2004). 72. For the work of the Commission see http://www.uek.ch/en/. 73. David Rey, ‘Erinnern und Vergessen im post-diktatorischen Spanien’, in Martin Sabrow, Ralph Jessen and Klaus Große Kracht (eds), Zeitgeschichte als Streitgeschichte: Grosse Kontroversen seit 1945 (Munich, 2003), pp. 347–69. 74. Heinz Duchhardt and Andreas Kunz (eds), Europäische Geschichte als historiographisches Problem (Mainz, 1997). 75. For an interesting comparison of traditions of contemporary history across Europe see Alexander Nützenadel and Wolfgang Schieder (eds), Zeitgeschichte als Problem: Nationale Traditionen und Perspektiven der Forschung in Europa (Göttingen, 2004). 76. Frank Hadler, ‘Drachen und Drachentöter: Das Problem der nationalgeschichtlichen Fixierung in den Historiographien Ostmitteleuropas nach dem zweiten Weltkrieg’, in Christoph Conrad and Sebastian Conrad (eds), Die Nation schreiben: Geschichtswissenschaft im internationalen Vergleich (Göttingen, 2002), pp. 137–64. 77. Jörg Hackmann, ‘“Historians as Nation-Builders”: Historiographie und Nation in Estland von Hans Kruus bis Mart Laar’, in Markus Krzoska and Hans-Christian Maner (eds), Beruf und Berufung: Geschichtswissenschaft und Nationsbildung in Ostmittel- und Südosteuropa im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Münster, 2005), pp. 125–42. 78. Leo Dribins, ‘The Historiography of Latvian Nationalism in the Twentieth Century’, in Branch (ed.), National History and Identity, p. 253. On the rewriting of Ukranian national history post-1990 see Taras Kuzio, Nation-Building in the Ukraine: the Search for Identity (London, 1998). 79. Martin Evans and Ken Lunn (eds), War and Memory in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 1997). 80. Lutz Raphael, Geschichtswissenschaft im Zeitalter der Extreme: Theorien, Methoden, Tendenzen von 1900 bis zur Gegenwart (Munich, 2003), especially pp. 215ff. 81. For an excellent summary of the development of class and labour history in Western Europe see M. van der Linden and L. Heerma van Voss, ‘Introduction’, in idem (eds), Class and Other Identities: Entries to West European Labour Historiography (Amsterdam, 2001). 82. Laura Lee Downs, Writing Gender History (London, 2004). 83. Alf Lüdtke (ed.), The History of Everyday Life: Reconstructing Historical Experiences and Ways of Life (Princeton, 1995). 84. Homi Bhaba (ed.), Nation and Narration (London, 1990). 85. Geoffrey Elton, ‘The Historian’s Social Function’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, 27 (1977), 197–211. 86. Charles Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust and German National Identity (Cambridge, MA, 1988); Richard J. Evans, Forever in Hitler’s Shadow: West German Historians and the Attempt to Escape from the Nazi Past (New York, 1989); Geoff Eley, ‘Nazism, Politics and the Image of the Past: Thoughts on the West German Historikerstreit 1986-87’, Past and Present 121 (1988), 171–208. 87. Stefan Berger, The Search for Normality: National Identity and Historical Consciousness in Germany since 1800, new pb edn (Oxford, 2002).

62 Writing the Nation 88. Silvana Patriarca, ‘Italian Neo-Patriotism: Debating National Identity in the 1990s’, Modern Italy 6 (2001). 89. Fernand Braudel, L’Identité de France, 2 vols (Paris, 1986); for a good criticism see Julian Jackson, ‘Historians and the Nation in Contemporary France’, in Stefan Berger, Mark Donovan and Kevin Passmore (eds), Writing National Histories: Western Europe since 1800 (London, 1999), p. 241. 90. Wolfgang Höpken, ‘Vergangenheitspolitik im sozialistischen Vielvölkerstaat Jugoslawien 1944–1991’, in Petra Bock and Edgar Wolfrum (eds), Umkämpfte Vergangenheit (Göttingen, 1999); see also, more generally, Ulf Brunnbauer (ed.), (Re)Writing History in South-East Europe (Essen, 2004); Sorin Antohi (ed.), Narratives Unbound: Historical Studies in Post-Communist Eastern Europe (Budapest, 2006). 91. Heinrich August Winkler, Der lange Weg nach Westen, 2 vols (Munich, 2000). 92. Hugh Kearney, The British Isles: a History of Four Nations (Cambridge, 1989). 93. David Starkey, ‘The English Historian’s Role and the Place of History in English National Life’, The Historian 71 (2001), 6–15. 94. Jane Marshall, ‘Liberté takes back seat as scholars told: think “positive”’, The Times Higher Education Supplement, 6 January 2006, p. 19. 95. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincialising Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, 2000); Simon Gikandi, Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism (New York, 1996); Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, 1993). 96. Winston Churchill, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, 4 vols (London 1956–8). 97. Imanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System, 3 vols (London, 1974–88). 98. For Germany see in particular Konrad H. Jarausch and Michael Geyer, Shattered Past: Reconstructing German Histories (Princeton, 2003). 99. A recent conglomerate of European contemporary historians, EurhistXX, is explicitly exploring diverse ways of Europeanising historical writing. See http://www.eurhistxx.de/. Other historians in Europe are actively working towards globalising historical writing. See, for example, the manifold contributions to the First European Congress of World and Global History, organised at the University of Leipzig under the leadership of Matthias Middell in September 2005. For an intriguing call to Europeanise historical writing see also Stuart Woolf, ‘Europe and its Historians’, Contemporary European History 12 (2003), 323–37.

3 Seven Narratives in North American History: Thinking the Nation in Canada, Quebec and the United States Allan Smith

The product of a complex interaction between a constantly shifting array of conceptual frameworks and the changing constellation of fact and event they responded to and configured, national history in North America developed through a sequence of narrative structures the general pattern of which was at once broadly shared and uniquely its own. Never entirely dominant, always in some measure the object of challenge and contestation, these narrative structures nonetheless grounded and framed the bulk of the work done in the period of their prominence and centrality. Shaped initially by amateurs, belletrists and journalists, and after the 1880s, by professional, usually university-based, historians, they at once reflected and influenced opinion, mobilised support and enthusiasm for the nation, naturalised its existence, legitimated its claims, and assisted it to its place as the principal focus of citizen loyalty and allegiance. Clear in their broad assertions and import, performing their essential duties even after professional specialisation and sometimes excessive detailing encroached, projecting precisely the kind of descriptive and explanatory power demanded by the age in which they were produced, they did work of a consistently important nation-building, understanding-enhancing, and information-yielding sort.

The Romantic imperative First to hand was the species of story cast in terms of the Romantic idea. Made by its embodiment in the great national histories of early nineteenth-century Europe a compelling model and guide at just the moment that Canadians, Quebeckers and Americans were moving to give their still-forming societies cultural, literary and artistic definition,1 that idea in fact had a North American life of very considerable fullness and weight. The pioneering, pre-professional work of the century’s opening decades certainly showed Romanticism’s influence. Treating Canada as the product of the grand and momentous conflicts – the Conquest of 1760, the War of 1812 – that first delivered it into the hands of the British and then kept it firmly in their grasp, historical writing in that 63

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society made emphasis on stirring event, the heroism of the great, and the dramatic richness of history’s unfolding its most striking feature.2 In Quebec, in evident imitation of the great French historian Michelet, ‘the spirit of the people’ was a leading motif by 1830.3 To the south, American projection of United States history as a triumphant movement to national self-realisation recapitulated Romantic ideas of turbulent struggle and positive outcome.4 With the more mature – though still largely amateur – work of the 1830s, 1840s and 1850s, the Romantic thrust deepened. François-Xavier Garneau’s great history made much of the notion that peoples, like individuals, had a unique, special and distinguishing genius: identifying Quebec’s ‘Gallic spirit’ as the agent driving its endurance and survival, Garneau’s volumes saw that extraordinary phenomenon as ‘a cohesive force, peculiar to [Quebeckers’] moral temperament . . . develop[ing] itself in proportion to the efforts made to overcome it’.5 George Bancroft’s compelling, extensive, and powerfully written rendering of the United States’ past turned from its first volume’s appearance in 1834 on the sense – derived from Bancroft’s sojourn as one of the first Americans to pursue historical study in Germany – that national growth was an organic process moving forward with the slow, inevitable grandeur of a great oak growing. ‘Planted’ in the soil of New England, ‘ripened’ through time, and manifest at length in the luxuriant growth that flowered into freedom in the 1770s, the nation had displaced the British, despatched tyranny, brought a new order, and marked an advance for humankind in general – all in accordance with a fructifying design that was not to be questioned but only accepted and understood.6 Journalist-bookseller John McMullen’s exuberantly earnest 1855 presentation of Canada as manifesting ‘the genius of a mighty nation’ marked Romanticism’s embeddedness in his society. Seeing Canada as moving through ‘infancy, childhood, and youth’, imagining it on the verge of adulthood and full maturity, envisioning its dominance of the whole northern half of the continent, and viewing the whole stupendous process as a matter of natural growth and development, McMullen gave evidence on almost every page of the measure to which Romantic notions had penetrated and gripped his thinking.7 In evidence through the rest of the century – one historian’s notably histrionic concern to see his 1883 work help ‘the manly, yearning spirit of our young Canadians’ find fulfilment in a Canada that ‘stand[s] robust, and pure, and manly, and intelligent among the nations of the earth’8 was typical – Romantic modes and conventions remained heavily entrenched. Garneau and McMullen continued in print; Bancroft’s great epic rolled on to its ‘Last Revisions’ in the 1880s; dramatic emplotment, emotive style, the invocation of the heroic, and very graphic description sustained a place; new genres themselves betrayed the Romantic influence.

Progress and materialism Resilient and with a continuing presence, but under increased pressure and attack, the Romantic idea received its first serious challenge in the 1860s as still

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mainly self-taught observers, struck by the hard facts of material growth, state-building and renewal, and a remarkable expansion of economic and political infrastructure generally made tangible result and achievement a central element in their efforts to grasp and define their communities. Though, in consequence, old notions lingered on – and might even, as use of the germ theory of historical development made clear, have a role in explanation of material success and advance9 – a general shift in focus was very plain. Canada, given structure and mass by railway-building, growth in trade and the Confederation project of the 1860s, became an undoubted place of phenomenal expansion and development,10 its builders the men who had promoted, engineered, financed and organised the wonders so clearly in view.11 Defining the community even in times of recession,12 growth and achievement might also emerge as a counterpoint to its natural splendour: Canada, ‘picturesque’ as the title of clergyman-educator G. M. Grant’s 1882 celebration of the nation put the matter, was also – as the same production made clear – moving forward to the rhythm of railway construction, factory-opening, mining and agricultural development.13 With even major political moments seen as yielding institution-building and practical arrangement as much as they produced liberty and freedom,14 and – more pointedly still – intellectual development a matter to be catalogued and inventoried,15 the output-oriented outlook went from triumph to triumph. Defining all, leaving nothing aside, making ‘even the professional classes . . . los[e] their poetic sensibilities and becom[e] indifferent to the claims of culture’,16 its influence seemed as great as it was – to some – pernicious. Evident enough in Canada, the sense of nation as the sum of its material parts was even plainer in the United States. With the Civil War itself presented as a triumph for growth, industry and expansion as much as a victory for freedom and the integrity of the state, that sense could, indeed, hardly have found stronger expression. Though, as a result, suggestions that the unity that great struggle restored was an ancient unity born in colonial times did find their way into the national story,17 the stress on cohesion as at once a product of statecraft and the ground of achievement and growth was very pronounced. Early presidential activity was rendered in terms of its relevance to building an effective state;18 Lincoln’s great accomplishment was treated in nationconsolidating as much as moral terms;19 and the nation at large became a place whose meaning was to be projected in the calculus of material progress. Emphasised in publications celebrating the centenary of 1876,20 underscored in work on inventions and technologies,21 plain in the great general histories that began to appear in the 1880s,22 the nation’s character as a place of development unadorned remained perhaps its most consistently remarked-upon feature. The achievements of the period from 1860 to 1890, in one formulation, had ‘no parallel’;23 in another, ‘the old nations of the earth carry on at a snail’s pace [while] the Republic thunders by with the rush of the express. The United States, in the growth of a single century, has already reached the foremost rank among the nations, and is destined soon to outdistance all the others in the race.’24

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Quebeckers, as aware as other North Americans of the splendours of the age, viewed those splendours through a conceptual lens that was increasingly their own. A positive and approving view of economic advance and material growth was, to be sure, in evidence: discernible in L.-O. David’s work,25 it could also be seen in Benjamin Sulte’s concern to acknowledge the importance of business and commerce from the days of French rule onwards.26 Generally, the focus was on quite a different sort of orientation. With their society less involved than its neighbours in large-scale business and development – Sulte himself pointed to the fact that the Quebec of the 1880s ‘had neither large factories nor small industries’27 – and with its intellectual life increasingly under the influence of clerical and ultramontane ideas,28 Quebec historians turned to the view that, while action and outcome necessarily formed a critical part of what needed to be considered in assessing any society’s history and experience, that action and those outcomes were – in Quebec’s case at least – to be seen, not in the shades and colouring of material expansion and growth, but in the tone and inflection of a great spiritual saga centred on the spread of the faith. Revising Garneau – his emphasis on nation and survival kept him his place, but his liberal and anti-clerical sympathy demanded strict redefinition of his claims to it – and foregrounding faith, historians put religion’s role in the colonising process much to the centre,29 reframed the Conquest as a providential occurrence – putting Quebec ‘under the shelter of the British flag’, it saved it from ‘the violent storm of the French Revolution’30 – and expounded the sense that ‘our country’s history . . . retraces the footsteps of [the missionaries’] journeys to establish a Catholic [sic] colony on the banks of the St. Lawrence’.31 Rejecting any idea that nation was to be understood in the accents and contrasts of material achievement – but showing by the very strength and intensity of that rejection how much in the air the idea was – they at once turned action and outcome to their special purposes and underscored the force it possessed in its other guises and forms.

Land, space and professionalisation A force in identity-building and a stimulus to community pride and self-esteem, the emphasis on achievement and output also invited criticism, revision and ultimately dismissal. Its materialist manifestation certainly provoked the idea that much was missing: eliding inequalities, focusing on wealth creation, ignoring issues of distribution and social justice, it signalled absence and omission in a very clear way. The real difficulty arose in relation to its general shape: descriptive, celebratory, not in any of its formulations much concerned with anything beyond the most anodyne statements of cause and explanation, it posed fundamental problems in an age increasingly concerned with just those matters. Even, in consequence, as social reformers and critics hastened to fill gaps and repair omissions in the material picture,32 growing numbers of discipline-based investigators, powerfully reinforced by the late

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nineteenth-century thrust towards professionalisation, university-based research and analytical rigour,33 took the entire design to be in need of overhaul and reconfiguration. Making the new geopolitics34 their principal tool and inspiration, and working through the monographs, academic journals and conference presentations that increasingly dominated historical production, the professionals produced a rendering of events that not only explained as it described, but did so in lines and contours useful to both religiously and secular-minded observers. Highlighting land, space, distance and climate, foregrounding situation, context, circumstance and opportunity, rooted in the elements quite literally grounding the North American experience, that rendering in fact did wonders: explaining growth, defining character, and making the ways God’s work was done less mysterious and opaque, it dominated, captured the field of analysis and discussion, and remained in its essence untouched for decades. Not, of course, everything the new thrust produced involved a nationaffirming depiction of matters. Goldwin Smith, the former Regius Professor of History at Oxford whom marriage had brought to Toronto, thought ‘turning from the political to the natural map’ showed the absurdity of Canada’s claims to national coherence.35 The picture painted by the generation of American colonial historians that emerged in the 1890s had profound implications for the idea that the United States had been bound for independence from the earliest days of settlement.36 For the most part, though, national integrity – and national accomplishment – was both explained and affirmed. Location, climate and ‘northernness’ quickly became the defining features of a Canadian character and identity,37 while space and its mastery – ‘our daring and splendid expansion’38 – emerged as a main theme in the national narrative. Explorers, mapping river and terrain, took a new, central place in what was now offered to the public;39 the great multivolume series Canada and its Provinces (1914–17) – the title itself suggested dispersal and unity – devoted major sections to exploration, transport and the linking of far-flung places;40 the continent-spanning Canadian Pacific Railway gained recognition as a primary consolidator of the national life;41 and by the 1930s geography – in the form of the great river systems focusing on the St Lawrence – was seen by the historians of the appropriately named, University of Toronto based, Laurentian school to be the force calling actors into the interior, making extended economic systems possible, and eventually compelling formation of the nation itself.42 Work in Quebec, too, showed the influence of the new emphasis. Quebec’s providential duty was still insisted upon – ‘our mission,’ wrote Mgr L.-A. Pâquet in 1902, ‘is less to handle capital than to stimulate ideas; less to light the furnaces of factories than maintain and spread the glowing fires of religion and thought’43 – but so was the extent – literally – to which that mission had been achieved. The spatial dimension of New France’s success was strongly emphasised: ‘New France, thanks to its explorers, its missionaries, and its fur traders, had succeeded in putting the mark of its presence on fully three-quarters of

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the then known territory of North America’.44 Pâquet himself, contemplating the great Quebec out-migration to the northeastern United States in his own time, underscored the measure in which ‘the religious concept . . . is today spread over a large part of North America’.45 Geography’s role in assisting fulfilment of the divine project was particularly insisted upon. Positioned on the St Lawrence, linked by rivers and lakes to the north, south and west, New France could, in journalist and later Laval University historian Thomas Chapais’s formulation, hardly resist movement beyond the banks of the river on which it had first been established.46 For the cleric-nationalist, university-affiliated, and very widely read historian Lionel Groulx, the link between geographical circumstance and divinely ordained action was clear: the hero Dollard, moving to end Iroquois containment of his society’s expansion, functioned as an instrument of the divine purpose, but did so in a setting that added its own impulsion to what he was doing. ‘Scann[ing] in his mind the immensity of the country waiting to be wakened from its sleep,’ he was moved the more deeply to open the route to it.47 Influential in Canada and a presence in Quebec, sensitivity to geography, expanse and circumstance led to work of particular importance in the United States. Treating the land as the critical variable in every phase of nation-making and development, that work became the foundation of the most influential national narrative that country produced. Cast in its classic form by University of Wisconsin, later Harvard, historian F. J. Turner in 1893,48 and positing highly individualised activity on a continuously receding frontier as the source of American achievement, self-reliance, democracy and expansion, it endowed geography, space and land with an explanatory power quite the equal of that with which they were being blessed in Europe. A force, indeed, in politics as well as scholarship – its impact on the populist-progressive movement was marked49 – and an element in the emergence of the west as a primary symbol in American life and culture,50 that work spilled over into a variety of areas, shaped thinking on several fronts, and situated itself as a core determinant of American self-imaging and reflection. Celebratory, dealing in particularity and character, possessed of an important new measure of interpretive capacity and strength, geography-oriented narratives added a critical dimension to discussion everywhere they appeared. Invoking the uniquely North American, speaking to each community’s distinguishing qualities, and penetrating popular culture in a decisive way, they marked thinking and outlook long after their early manifestations had gone from the scene.51

The New World affirmed The shift in perspective after 1919 was not fundamental – geography retained its place, rigour in argument remained central, and professionalisation deepened – but it was basic enough to propose a reorientation of Canada’s story,

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sharpen exceptionalist argument in the United States, and generate additional attention to Quebec’s place in relation to the world beyond its borders. The new significance attached to location in North American – indeed, New World – space was not, to be sure, unqualified. Canada, certainly, continued to be viewed in terms of its Atlantic dimension; that dimension in fact acquired a new importance with arguments that the great trade in staple products – fish, fur, timber, eventually wheat – had not simply created the institutions and structures that bound the nation together but also tied it to Europe and the Atlantic economy.52 Quebec’s orientation to the world of conservative, Frenchbased Catholicism similarly kept its place: insisting afresh – it was in the 1920s that l’Action française had perhaps its strongest Quebec influence – on Quebec’s sustenance by its links with both France and Rome, historians made that source of energy a principal part of their focus and concern.53 Even a self-absorbed, if not absolutely isolationist, America found it possible to renew the sense that its history had an Atlantic component: the influence of the new colonial historians was still in evidence – C. M. Andrews’s The Colonial Background of the American Revolution appeared in 1924 – and major figures – the controversial Columbia University historian Charles Beard, most conspicuously – affirmed their involvement with European – especially German – modes of historical thinking.54 The dominant note was, nonetheless, struck by those who insisted on the central importance of North America. Presentation of Canada as a society configured by a powerful array of cultural, social and economic forces ultimately reducible to the geographic and situational moved steadily forward. Shaped, as it was now argued, by development patterns, investment flows, and trade exchanges essentially continental in scope, heir to a frontier-based politics of democracy and reform, sharing an open, free and undefended border with its great neighbour to the south,55 it had to be seen as nothing more nor less than ‘an American nation’ itself.56 Quebec’s case was more complicated. As industrialism and the modernising process at last took hold, and as disciplined investigation of its past grew,57 a sense that it might be seen as a North American society similar to its neighbours took somewhat tentative root. Early attempts to encourage economic diversification were identified;58 the structure of government in New France was considered – at least partly – in light of the work of the American colonial historians;59 and an effort was made to relativise the church’s influence in cultural and intellectual life.60 In the main, though, the community’s character was represented in familiar terms – ‘the theology of history,’ as Serge Gagnon puts it, ‘still dominated Quebec historiography’61 – with the sole and important difference that that historiography awarded the continental setting intensified stress and attention. Struck by the scale of ‘the French groups scattered outside our territory’ – hundreds of thousands had settled in the US – and seeing them as vehicles for ‘the expansion of the French force in America’, one 1922 commentator projected Quebec’s history as a saga still unfolding in ways altogether

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consistent with its role as a ‘France of America, an apostolic nation, a nation of light . . . in a northern New World’.62 Continuing to attend to ‘the entire French family in America’,63 exploring its genesis and history, seeing its present extent as in some sense restoring the work of the explorers and missionaries of New France, historians made the largely lost French presence in North America the focus of much of their work through the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. Culminating in Groulx’s 1947 establishment of La Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française – its title alone made its intended relevance clear – and peaking at just the moment when the fundamental orientation was about to change once again, the impulse marked a critical interlude in Quebec’s cultural and intellectual history.64 Writing American history presented difficulties of its own. A function of the variety of formats in which historians worked out the relationship among continent, New World, identity and nation, that writing could, indeed, sometimes be quite bewildering in its range and sweep. Diplomatic history was not much pursued – even in the hands of so nationalist a practitioner as Yale University’s Samuel Flagg Bemis (whose contention that the United States had drawn consistent foreign policy advantage from European turmoil dominated his work)65 it seemed too much inclined to see America ensnared in relations beyond its control – but almost every other sort entered into the construction of an America apart, in North America, working out its own nature and destiny. Immigration history stressed break, rupture, discontinuity and starting anew;66 quasiTurnerian notions of specialness, virtue and a liberal-democratic-populist rectitude infused work on society and culture;67 complacency and an evident self-satisfaction at the fact that American statesmen were builders and not destroyers arose from the pages of political biography;68 and a sense of American development patterns as actively modelling behaviour for the rest of the hemisphere governed the work of the – for a time – enormously influential Berkeley historian Herbert Bolton.69 Focusing on their world apart, struck afresh by its accomplishment, seeing its uniqueness – as, indeed, Canadians and Quebeckers saw theirs – as at once national and unbordered, American historians joined their neighbours in taking their nation beyond the national frame even as they affirmed that frame’s special meaning and importance.

Borders and identities If historical writing between the wars deepened the sense that there was a strong relationship between space, place and history, historical writing after 1945 took that sense and built it into a quite new view of what that relationship meant and how it was to be understood. The pattern was clearest in Quebec. Confronting the fact – it was very plain by the 1940s70 – that resistance to modernity, secularism and anglophone economic domination had not been successful, a group of University of Montreal historians radically reassessed both that resistance and what lay behind it. Failure, they concluded, had been inevitable. The weapons of

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choice – church-controlled education, stress on spiritual mission – had in fact disabled Quebeckers, prevented effective struggle, and virtually delivered the community into the hands of the forces it was ostensibly resisting and keeping at bay. The fault, though, the historians continued, had not been entirely that of the church; the British Conquest of 1760, displacing local business elites, bore a large part of the blame. Making commerce English, encouraging the view that French-speakers were unsuited to the world of trade, it opened the way for a tacit alliance between English-speaking elites and the church leadership, the effect of which was to shore up and encourage an educational and cultural system that would on one level serve religion (and ensure a docile workforce) but on another create conditions costing Quebeckers the capacity to be actively involved in shaping the society and economy around them. The community would lose – had lost – control of its business life, and – irony of ironies – the church itself would be subordinated as something quite other than a Catholic society grew up and spread. Quebec, in short, had been before 1760 developing in much the same way as other North American colonies; even after that date tendencies towards both business and modernity remained in evidence; the way, however, had been lost, and not because of some innate call to religion and spirituality, but thanks to plainly identifiable interventions by religious and business elites. A society – the point would be insisted upon from this moment forward – not naturally estranged from the economic life around it, Quebec needed to rejoin that life, the better to compete, regain control of its economy, and ensure its linguistic and cultural survival. Linked to the emergence of a separatist nationalism in the 1960s, and with increasing currency among university historians, these ideas – though they would be challenged by the so-called Quebec or Laval school – moved to a central position in both Quebec self-understanding and Quebec politics.71 The radicalism and depth of Quebec’s revisionism was not duplicated in Canada, but the changes there were nonetheless great. A response to the fact that Canada, like Quebec, was experiencing its continental position in a quite new way – levels of American economic and cultural penetration were increasing substantially72 – those changes offered a direct challenge to understandings of Canada as an American nation. And if one consequence of their work was political – firming up the sense of border and difference, that work eased the path of policy advocates wanting restrictions on American capital and culture – another was cognitive. The shift from an effort ‘to explain Canadian phenomena . . . by identifying them as variations on a North American theme’ to attempting to grasp them ‘by contrasting them with American phenomena’73 produced, in fact, a remarkably enriched understanding of several of the factors involved in structuring Canada’s institutions and culture. Nation-building was seen afresh,74 the metropolis-hinterland dynamic viewed anew,75 relations among climate, northernness, landscape and national imagination rethought,76 the British and Atlantic dimension of the past re-examined,77 and Canadian conservatism and social democracy put at the base of a political culture which

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was then presented as British and European as much as it was North American and liberal.78 Comprehension was aided as particularity got stressed, boundedness rebuilt, and the way to the new national policies of the 1960s and 1970s advanced and assisted. Change in the United States had its own special form. Experiencing the challenges their nation confronted in the 1940s and 1950s in global, security and ideological terms, American historians reacted with a very vigorous reaffirmation of their basic creed and beliefs. Insisting on the liberal, democratic commitment at the core of their nation’s history, they made the presence of the nation’s defining values loom even larger in its life and being. Evident during the Second World War,79 the thrust to see as much of the national life as possible as an expression of fundamental traditions and verities became especially prominent with the onset of the Cold War. The American Studies movement, in the words of a staunch defender, ‘solidified faith in the American philosophy and devotion to its maintenance’.80 Historical work showed just how profound an influence that philosophy was. Drawing on the commonplace that nations cohere because their members share beliefs, but moved mostly by the fact of living ‘in an age of increasing international peril, when national security and the capacity for survival are fundamental concerns’,81 historians insisted that Americans – whatever their differences in religion, region or political sympathy – were united by consensual beliefs, fundamental orientations, and deeply embedded habits of mind. Shared liberal and democratic values were seen to have allowed even the most disaffected of regions to merge back into the nation;82 an overarching national faith brought Protestant, Catholic, and Jew together in a common life and citizenship;83 basic liberal assumptions united the most varied of political philosophies;84 a pragmatic cast of mind defined American behaviour and action;85 and cohesive patterns of thinking – about progress, mission, the individual, enterprise – were common to all.86 ‘Instead of a polarized culture . . . scholars glimpsed an essentially homogenous culture full of small, impermanent variations.’87 The ‘consensus view’ of American history became deeply and firmly entrenched. Concerned about threats, fearing erosion of basic beliefs, wanting to preserve borders, cultures and ways of life, historians in all three societies generated narratives that would contribute to that important and compelling end. Sometimes new in their emphases, in the American case a matter of repetition and stress, these in all three instances drew out distinguishing features, emphasised joint bonds and ties, and generally focused on what was common and shared. Different in content, united in form, they restored national narration to something like its classic pattern and shape.

Fragmentation and diversity By the 1970s preoccupation with national character and general identity was yielding to concern with diversity, cleavage, minorities, and the politics of

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sub-group recognition. Confronting new social and political realities – of which unprecedentedly assertive behaviour on the part of ethnic, racial and gendered particularisms was only the most obvious manifestation – and equipped with a range of conceptual tools pointing to the way ideology, discourse and narrative structure put absence and exclusion at representation’s core, historians – their own number both augmented and diversified by the new trends – saw features they had not before noticed, brought those features into their work, and gave that work a markedly different reach, emphasis and orientation. Occurring unevenly across the three societies, the process, initially, was least developed in Quebec. Less an immigrant society than its neighbours – until the 1960s population growth had generally been sustained by high birth rates – fielding historians who continued to think very largely in terms of modernising nationalism, and seeing itself as rather a victim than a perpetrator of narrative and ideological marginalisation, that community maintained a more emphatically national focus.88 Change, nonetheless, was evident. Women were obvious beneficiaries of this,89 but ethnic and immigrant groups,90 aboriginal peoples,91 and racialised minorities92 moved into the picture too. A more textured, inclusive, narrative developed.93 The United States also showed hesitancy in moving onto the new ground. Precisely because it was a society built on immigration, it was seen by historians and others as depending very heavily on the integrative, homogenising power of the established national narrative. Since, however, the new imperatives had an especially strong American presence – the Civil Rights movement made American blacks insistent petitioners for recognition, ethnic groups advanced claims, aboriginal peoples followed suit, and women were fundamentally involved – a change in direction was hard to resist. Those grappling with the tension between these two drives found ways to manage it in a sharp distinction between national faith and component group identity: so long as the former wasn’t threatened the latter could be acknowledged.94 Enforced by American popular culture,95 and patrolled by the guardians of American nationality,96 that distinction allowed a considerable measure of change in the national narrative: in the United States as elsewhere, notes Peter Novick, ‘the resurgence of particularist tendencies further undercut the objectivist vision of a convergent past’.97 Canada’s embrace of the new idea was remarkably fulsome and unreserved. Able to accommodate that idea in virtue of the fact that understandings of the nation had never rested on principles of linguistic, ethnic, or ideological homogeneity – no Canadian way of life, no Canadian new man, had ever been defined – Canada in fact moved very quickly indeed. Appearing in the national narrative in the early 1960s,98 firmly positioned there by the end of the decade,99 the idea was by 1980 so fully in place that even some of its friends saw a danger of fragmentation and decentring.100 Rather, however, than being withdrawn and reconsidered, the idea was made more capacious: racialised groups were accommodated,101 statements of support for a more unified national

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history became rather signs of that history’s retreat than indications that it occupied a still strong position,102 and generalised forms of the pluralist case moved out into the world at large.103

The rise of transnationalism In the last decades of the twentieth century, both the phenomenal field and the tools used to conceptualise it changed yet again, and with those changes came a further – and striking – articulation of the nation and its history. Operating to a scale, magnitude, volume and intensity not earlier witnessed, international capital flows, trade links, cultural movements and institutional formations made it difficult to see particularisms and national space as – even in principle – bounded and delimited. More fundamentally, basic shifts in the understanding of understanding cast rigid, fixed categories of all sorts into doubt. Inviting investigators to view the objects of their attention as fluid, interacting, permeable and open, those shifts and the ways of seeing associated with them seemed made for the study of the new international order. Levering students of that order away from ‘the traditional distinction between international relations and domestic politics’,104 generating ideas of identity associated with openness, hybridity and pluralism,105 and producing a terminology oriented to ‘transnationalism’, ‘complex interdependence’, the ‘intermestic’, ‘borderlessness’, ‘globalization’ and ‘cosmopolitics’,106 they created whole new categories of analysis and understanding in precisely the domain where compelling change and innovation was in fact taking place. Historians’ inserting of the nation into this context did not necessarily involve its weakening or attenuation. Quebec historians, certainly, took Quebec’s assumption of a place in the new global domain as one more mark of its normalcy. In a framework shared with others, shaped by – and shaping – that framework in the same general way, moving along common trajectories of growth and development, Quebec had lived – and was continuing to live – a pattern of existence that affirmed its integrity even as that pattern framed it in the world of hemisphere and americanité.107 The realignments and structures associated with the new order of being were, indeed, serving nation-affirming purposes in a very clear way: just as fresh arrangements in Europe had helped generate a new status for stateless nations there, so might change in North America accomplish the same purpose on that continent.108 Historians even used transnational modes of thinking to produce a Quebec past consistent with the national project: identifying Quebec as a North American, new world society, seeing it as possessing the demographic features and mobility patterns exhibited by other such societies, they put it forward as having experienced – and (the implication was) likely to continue to experience – precisely the sort of growth and evolution that had elsewhere led to autonomy and independence.109 For Canadians, transnational thinking’s service to the nation lay in the way it offered escape from a Canadian-American binary that, in dealing in terms of

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two nations, inevitably foregrounded power asymmetry, underscored United States domination, and left Canada condemned to subordination and weakness. Reconceiving the North American field as a transnational space would put the emphasis on system-wide phenomena – economic and cultural flows, notably – some of which could be seen as Canadian-influenced – and even Canadian-dominated. Ontario emerged as ‘a North American region-state’;110 Canadian firms and businesses took their place ‘in a North American spatial system moving towards greater integration’;111 Canada’s participation in the creation and consumption of a shared popular culture could be insisted upon;112 viewed as a ‘community’ dynamised by transborder forces and energies, North America was beyond old forms of United States hegemony.113 Transnationalism’s affirming of nation was especially evident in the United States. Initially making little impression there – American historians, continuing under broad Turnerian influences to think of the nation as self-generating and propelled forward by an internally created impulsion, rather ignored than resisted the transnational idea – the new optic began to take on attractiveness and appeal precisely in the measure that it could be shown to be assisting the nation, either by better positioning it to act internationally, or by bringing it to an improved grasp of its origins, growth and development. Seen as providing an ‘historical foundation for understanding the contemporary relation of the United States to transnational and global developments’, and viewed as removing ‘distorted notion[s] of the national history of the United States’, it emerged, not as incompatible with, but as actively serving, nation and its interest. ‘The plea is not for a postnational history . . . [but] for the value of “thickening” the history of the United States, making it both more complex and truer to lived experience in the historical record.’ ‘The agenda being offered here does not propose a postnational history, but rather an enriched national history . . .’ Emphasising transnational systems – immigration, economic, cultural – placing the United States within them, but leaving the focus rather on it than moving that focus to those systems, transnational history in the United States followed – but even more stringently – the nation-affirming track laid down in Quebec and Canada.114 Variations on a theme, but composed in radically different registers, these narratives yield rich, multiple and generous meaning. Fixed on nation, they indicate its compelling power both as idea and hard, tangible, lived reality. Cast in constantly fluctuating cadences – defined, indeed, by volatility and change – they underscore the highly unstable nature of attempts to close with and capture either idea or reality. Expressed in the grammar – and through the optic – of the age in which they took form, they give – perhaps their greatest gift – a strong sense of what that age valued and how it saw the world before it. Functioning, indeed, as a critically important window on their own time and place, they make that time and place as much their referent as is the period on which they were designed to report. Telling nation’s story in latent as well as manifest ways, revealing its preoccupations and orientation in one epoch even

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as they present claims involving another, they make those ways and revelations as much a part of their story as the statements and utterances in terms of which that story is formally cast. Operating in two dimensions, delivering meaning at two levels, artefacts of a doubled recording and testimony, they yield much benefit even as they privilege, displace, elide and omit.

Notes 1. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1983) remains the indispensable guide to this general process. 2. David Thomson, History of the Late War Between Great Britain and the United States of America (Niagara, UC, 1832); John Richardson, War of 1812, Containing a Full and Detailed Narrative of the Right Division of the Canadian Army (Brockville, 1842); and George Warburton, The Conquest of Canada (London, 1849). 3. [Pierre-Jean de Sales Laterrière], A Portrait and Historical Account of Lower Canada: With Remarks on the Present Situation of the People, as Regards Their Manners, Character, Religion, etc., etc., by a Canadian (London, 1830), p. 36. 4. See, particularly, Mason Locke Weems, Life of Washington (Philadelphia, 1809), David Ramsay, History of the United States from their First Settlement as English Colonies in 1607, to the Year 1808, 3 vols (Philadelphia, 1816–17), and Timothy Pitkin, A Political and Civil History of the United States of America from the Year 1763 to the Close of the Administration of President Washington, 2 vols (New Haven, 1828). 5. History of Canada (1845), translated by Andrew Bell (Montreal, J. Lovell, 1860). Cited in Ramsay Cook (ed.), French Canadian Nationalism: an Anthology (Toronto, 1969), p. 79. 6. George Bancroft, The History of the United States of America from the Discovery of the Continent, 6 vols (New York, 1891–2), I, 335. Quoted in Russel B. Nye (ed.) This Almost Chosen People: Essays in the History of American Ideas (East Lansing, 1966), p. 39. 7. John McMullen, The History of Canada, From its First Discovery to the Present Time (Brockville, 1855), preface, I, 381. Cited in M. Brook Taylor, Promoters, Patriots, and Partisans: Historiography in Nineteenth Century English Canada (Toronto, 1989), pp. 154, 163. 8. J. E. Collins, Canada’s Patriot Statesmen: Life and Times of the Right Honourable John A. Macdonald (Toronto, 1891), pp. 497–8. 9. Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: the ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession (New York, 1988), pp. 87–8. 10. H. Y. Hind, T. C. Keefer et al., Eighty Years of Progress of British North America (Toronto, 1863). 11. The message of Henry J. Morgan, Sketches of Celebrated Canadians, and Persons Connected with Canada, from the Earliest Period in the History of the Province Down to the Present Time (Quebec, 1862). See also Fennings Taylor (ed.), Portraits of British Americans, by William Notman, 3 vols (Montreal, 1865–8). 12. Charles R. Tuttle, Tuttle’s Popular History of the Dominion of Canada From the Earliest Settlement to the Present Time (Montreal, 1877). 13. G. M. Grant (ed.), Picturesque Canada: the Country as it Was and Is, 2 vols (Toronto, 1882).

Seven Narratives 77 14. Charles Lindsey, The Life and Times of Wm. Lyon Mackenzie, with an Account of the Canadian Rebellion of 1837 Chiefly from Unpublished Documents, 2 vols (Toronto, 1862); John Charles Dent, The Last Forty Years: Canada Since the Union of 1841, 2 vols (Toronto, 1880–1); William Kingsford, History of Canada, 12 vols (Toronto, 1887–98). 15. John G. Bourinot, The Intellectual Development of the Canadian People (Toronto, 1881). 16. G. M. Adam, ‘Literary Interregnum’, The Week, 12 June 1884, 439. 17. The colonial origins of American unity were the theme of Moses Coit Tyler, A History of American Literature 1607–1765 (New York, 1878). See John Higham, History: the Development of Historical Studies in the United States (Englewood Cliffs, 1965), p. 152. 18. Henry Adams, History of the United States During the Administrations of Jefferson and Madison, 9 vols (New York, 1889–91). 19. See, for example, John Nicolay and John M. Hay, Abraham Lincoln: a History, serialised in the Century magazine between November 1886 and May 1890, and published in book form by the Century Co. in the latter year. 20. E. O. Haven, National Handbook of American Progress (New York, 1876); B. J. Lossing, American Centenary: a History of the Progress of the Republic (Philadelphia, 1876); Thomas Woolsey, The First Century of the Republic: a Review of American Progress (New York, 1876). 21. Over a hundred of which were listed in David A. Wells, Recent Economic Changes, and their Effect on the Production and Distribution of Wealth and the Well-being of Society (New York, 1890). 22. Justin Winsor, A Narrative and Critical History of America, 8 vols (Boston and New York, 1884–9); John Bach McMaster, A History of the People of the United States from the Revolution to the Civil War, 8 vols (New York, 1883–1913); James Ford Rhodes, History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850, 7 vols (New York, 1893–1906). 23. David A. Wells, Progress: the Lesson of the Century (1891). Cited in Nye, This Almost Chosen People, p. 25. 24. Andrew Carnegie, Triumphant Democracy or Fifty Years March of the Republic (London, 1888), p. 1. 25. Les Patriotes de 1837–1838 (Montreal, 1884) and David’s L’union des deux Canadas: 1841–67 (Montreal, 1898). David’s general approach to these matters is discussed in Yves-F. Zoltvany, ‘Laurent-Olivier David et l’infériorité économique des Canadiens français’, Recherches sociographiques 10:2–3 (1969), 426–30. 26. L’histoire des Canadiens français, 1608–1880, 8 vols (Montreal, 1882–4), I, 7. 27. Ibid., VIII, 133. Translated and quoted in Serge Gagnon, Quebec and its Historians 1840 to 1920 (Montreal, 1982), p. 103. See also Jean Hamelin and Yves Roby, Histoire économique du Québec, 1851–1896 (Montreal, 1971). 28. P. Sylvain, ‘Libéralisme et ultramontanisme au Canada français: affrontement idéologique et doctrinal (1840–1865)’, in W. L. Morton (ed.), The Shield of Achilles (Toronto, 1968), pp. 111–38, 220–5; N. Fahmy-Eid, Le clergé et le pouvoir politique au Québec: une analyse de l’idéologie ultramontane au milieu du XIXe siècle (Montreal, 1978); Nive Voisine, ‘L’ultramontanisme canadien-français au XIXe siècle’, in N. Voisine and J. Hamelin (eds), Les ultramontains canadiens-français (Montreal, 1985), pp. 67–104. 29. Following the work done by the French cleric Charles-Etienne Brasseur de Bourbourg in his Histoire du Canada, de son Eglise et de ses missions depuis la découverte de l’Amérique jusqu’à nos jours . . . (Paris, 1852). 30. Mgr. L.-F.-R. Laflèche, Quelques considérations sur les rapports de la société civile avec la religion et la famille (Montreal, 1866). Cited in Cook (ed.), French Canadian Nationalism, p. 98.

78 Writing the Nation 31. Abbé Ferland, Cours d’histoire du Canada, 2 vols (Quebec, 1861, 1865). Cited in Cook (ed.), French Canadian Nationalism, p. 99. 32. The relevance, essentially, of the work produced by such figures as Edward Bellamy and Herbert Croly in the United States and T. Phillips Thomson in Canada. See Bellamy’s Looking Backward (Boston, 1888), Croly’s The Promise of American Life (New York, 1909), and Thomson’s The Politics of Labour (New York, 1887). 33. Evident generally in the proliferation of fields, disciplines, and university departments in the late nineteenth century, that thrust’s manifestation in the domain of historical study was especially visible in the introduction of the Rankean seminar – pioneered in North America in 1876 by Herbert Baxter Adams at Johns Hopkins University – the development of university-based work in national fields – Canadian at the University of Toronto in 1894, McGill University in 1895 – the establishment of professional associations – the American Historical Association in 1884 – and the appearance of scholarly journals – the Bulletin des recheches historiques (1885), the American Historical Review (1895), and the Review of Historical Publications Relating to Canada (1896). See Carl Berger, The Writing of Canadian History: Aspects of EnglishCanadian Historical Writing 1900 to 1970 (Toronto, 1976); Novick, That Noble Dream; Gagnon, Quebec and its Historians. 34. See W. H. Parker, Mackinder: Geography as an Aid to Statecraft (Oxford, 1982) and James M. Hunter, Perspectives on Ratzel’s Political Geography (Lanham, 1983). 35. Canada and the Canadian Question (Toronto, 1891), p. 1. 36. Dealing in the geometry of oceanic rather than landed space, and struck by how its vastness and expanse had been overcome by imperial law and institutions, they paralleled A.T. Mahan’s celebrated emphasis on the influence of seapower on history with a view of imperial structures that stressed their role in creating transoceanic cohesion and closeness, the very important corollary of which was that the United States, far from following a trajectory of separation and independence from the outset, had been bound in and brought close to its parent society, with the rupture that did eventually occur being the result, not of ineluctable processes of natural growth and development, but accident, mismanagement and mistakes in policy. Alfred T. Mahan, The Influence of Seapower Upon History, 1660–1783 (Boston, 1890); Herbert Levy Osgood, ‘The Study of American Colonial History’, American Historical Association Annual Report (1898), 63–73; The American Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, 3 vols (New York, 1904–7); George Louis Beer, British Colonial Policy, 1754–1765 (New York, 1907); The Origins of the British Colonial System, 1578–1660 (New York, 1908); The Old Colonial System, 1660–1754, 2 vols (New York, 1912); Charles McLean Andrews, Colonial Self-Government, 1652–1689 (New York, 1904); The Colonial Period (New York, 1912). 37. R. G. Haliburton, The Men of the North and their Place in History ([Montreal?] 1869); William H. Hingston, The Climate of Canada and its Relations to Life and Health (Montreal, 1884); Charles R. Tuttle, Our North Land (Toronto, 1885). See also Carl Berger, ‘The True North Strong and Free’, in Peter Russell (ed.), Nationalism in Canada (Toronto, 1966), pp. 3–26. 38. Charles G. D. Roberts, A History of Canada (Boston, 1897), pp. 445–6. 39. Agnes C. Laut, Pathfinders of the West (London, 1904); Lawrence J. Burpee, The Search for the Western Sea: the Story of the Exploration of Northwestern America (Toronto, 1908). 40. Adam Shortt and A. G. Doughty (eds), Canada and its Provinces: a History of the Canadian People and their Institutions, by One Hundred Associates, 23 vols (Toronto, 1914–17).

Seven Narratives 79 41. H. A. Innis, History of the Canadian Pacific Railway: an Introduction to Canadian Economic History (Toronto, 1923). 42. H. A. Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada (New Haven, 1930); D. G. Creighton, The Commercial Empire of the St. Lawrence (Toronto, 1937). 43. Mgr. L.-A. Pâquet, Sermon sur la vocation de la race française en Amérique, juin 23, 1902. Translated as A Sermon on the Vocation of the French Race in America, in Cook (ed.), French Canadian Nationalism, pp. 152–60, 154. 44. Thomas Chapais, Jean Talon, intendant de la Nouvelle-France (Québec, 1904), p. 375. My translation. 45. Pâquet, A Sermon, p. 156. 46. Chapais, Talon, p. 356. 47. ‘Si Dollard revenait . . .’ an address delivered at the Monument national in Montreal, 31 January 1919, and published in Dix Ans de l’Action Française (Montreal, 1919), pp. 89–122. Translated in Cook (ed.), French Canadian Nationalism, pp. 188–201, 190. 48. Frederick Jackson Turner, ‘The Significance of the Frontier in American History’, reprinted in his The Frontier in American History (New York, 1920), pp. 1–18. 49. Richard Hofstadter, The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington (New York, 1968). 50. Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: the American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge, MA, 1950). 51. Besides the indications of this discussed in Smith’s Virgin Land, one thinks of the material brought under review in Margaret Atwood’s Survival: a Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (Toronto, 1972) and, in Quebec, Gilles Vigneault’s revered song Mon pays, c’est l’hiver (1965). 52. Creighton, Commercial Empire; Innis, Fur Trade; A. R. M. Lower, ‘The Trade in Square Timber’, presented at a meeting of the Royal Canadian Institute in February, 1932; published in University of Toronto Studies, History and Economics, Contributions to Canadian Economics, VI, 1933 (Toronto, 1933), pp. 40–61. 53. Susan Mann Trofimenkoff, Action Française: French Canadian Nationalism in the Twenties (Toronto, 1975). 54. Novick, That Noble Dream, pp. 157–8. 55. Berger, Writing of Canadian History, pp. 137–59. 56. J. W. Dafoe, Canada: an American Nation (New York, 1935). 57. P. Régimbald, ‘La disciplinarisation de l’histoire au Canada français, 1920–1950’, Revue de l’histoire de l’Amérique française 51:2 (1997), 163–200. 58. Joseph-Noël Fauteux, Essai sur l’industrie au Canada sous le Régime français, 2 vols (Quebec, 1927). 59. Gustave Lanctôt, L’administration de la Nouvelle France (Paris, 1929). 60. Antoine Roy, Les lettres, les sciences, et les arts au Canada sous le Régime français (Paris, 1930). 61. Serge Gagnon, Quebec and its Historians: the Twentieth Century (Montreal, 1985), foreword, n.p. 62. J.-M.-R. Villeneuve, O.M.I., ‘And Our Dispersed Brethren . . . ?’ Translated from ‘Et nos frères de la dispersion’, Notre Avenir Politique: Enquête de l’Action française, 1922 (Montreal, 1923), pp. 113–39, in Cook (ed.), French Canadian Nationalism, pp. 202–27, 232, 211, 203. 63. Antonio Perrault, ‘Enquête sur le nationalisme’, L’Action Française 2 (1924), 105–18. Translated as ‘Inquiry into Nationalism,’ in Cook (ed.), French Canadian Nationalism, p. 219.

80 Writing the Nation 64. Fernand Harvey and Paul-André Linteau, ‘L’évolution de l’historiographie dans la Revue de l’histoire de l’Amérique française, 1947–1972: aperçus quantitatifs’, RHAF 26:2 (1972), 163–83. 65. Jay’s Treaty (New York, 1923); The Diplomacy of the American Revolution (New York, 1935). 66. Marcus Lee Hansen, The Immigrant in American History (Cambridge, MA, 1940); The Atlantic Migration (Cambridge, MA, 1940). 67. Charles Beard, The Rise of American Civilization, 2 vols (New York, 1927); Vernon L. Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought, 3 vols (New York, 1927, 1930); John D. Hicks, The Populist Revolt (Minneapolis, 1931); William Warren Sweet, Story of Religions in America (New York, 1930); Arthur M. Schlesinger and Dixon Ryan Fox (eds), A History of American Life, 4 vols (New York, 1927). The same themes were treated with more reserve and circumspection in Samuel Eliot Morison, Massachusettensis de Conditoribus; or, The Builders of the Bay Colony (Boston, 1930) and The Puritan Pronaos (New York, 1936) and Curtis P. Nettels, The Roots of American Civilization (New York, 1938). 68. Albert J. Beveridge, Lincoln, 2 vols (London, 1928); Henry F. Pringle, Theodore Roosevelt (New York, 1931); Carl Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: the Prairie Years, 2 vols (New York, 1926) and Abraham Lincoln: the War Years, 4 vols (New York, 1939). 69. Who, as Felipe Fernandez-Armesto reminds us, supervised more PhD students than any other American historian. The Americas (London, 2003), 121. Bolton’s argument – essentially that all western hemispheric societies were frontier in nature and so – when properly understood – could be seen emulating the American model – is summarised in his ‘Epic of Greater America’, American Historical Review 37:2 (1933), 448–74. Consult also his History of the Americas (Boston, 1928) and his Wider Horizons of American History (New York, 1939). 70. Everett C. Hughes, French Canada in Transition (Chicago, 1943). 71. Guy Frégault, La Civilisation de la Nouvelle France, 1713–1744 (Montreal, 1944); Maurice Séguin, ‘L’agriculture et la Nation, 1760–1850’ (PhD thesis, 1947; published as La Nation ‘Canadienne’ et l’agriculture (1760–1850) ([Trois-Rivières], 1970); Michel Brunet, La Présence Anglaise et les Canadiens (Montreal, 1958). On the Quebec/Laval school, see James Lambert, ‘Quebec/Lower Canada’, in M. Brook Taylor (ed.), Canadian History: a Reader’s Guide, vol. 1, Beginnings to Confederation (Toronto, 1994), pp. 119–21. 72. Report of the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters, and Sciences [the Massey Commission] (Ottawa, 1951); Report of the Royal Commission on Canada’s Economic Prospects [the Gordon Commission] (Ottawa, 1957). 73. Gad Horowitz, ‘Conservatism, Socialism, and Liberalism in Canada: an Interpretation’, Canadian Journal of Political Science 32:2 (1966), 141. 74. Mainly in the political biographies of the 1950s and 1960s. See, in particular, D. G. Creighton, John A. Macdonald: the Young Politician (Toronto, 1951); John A. Macdonald: the Old Chieftain (Toronto, 1955); J. M. S. Careless, Brown of the Globe: the Voice of Upper Canada (Toronto, 1959); Brown of the Globe: Statesman of Confederation (Toronto, 1963); and Roger Graham, Arthur Meighen: the Door of Opportunity (Toronto, 1960); Arthur Meighen: And Fortune Fled (Toronto, 1963); Arthur Meighen: No Surrender (Toronto,1965). 75. J. M. S. Careless, ‘Frontierism, Metropolitanism, and Canadian History’, Canadian Historical Review 35:1 (1954), 1–21. 76. Northrop Frye, The Bush Garden (Toronto, 1971); Atwood, Survival.

Seven Narratives 81 77. W. L. Morton, The Canadian Identity (Toronto, 1961); The Kingdom of Canada (Toronto, 1963). 78. Horowitz, ‘Conservatism, Socialism, and Liberalism’. 79. Ralph Henry Gabriel, The Course of American Democratic Thought (New York, 1940); Arthur M. Schlesinger, ‘What, Then, is the American, This New Man?’, American Historical Review 48:2 (1943), 225–44; Merle Curti, The Growth of American Thought (New York, 1943). 80. ‘Seymour Cites Program to Combat Red Threat’, New Haven Register, 22 February 1949. Quoted in Novick, That Noble Dream, pp. 381–2. Charles Seymour was the President of Yale University. 81. Higham, History, p. 221. 82. Charles G. Sellers, Jr. (ed.), The Southerner as American (Chapel Hill, 1960). 83. Will Herberg, Protestant, Catholic, Jew: an Essay in American Religious Sociology (Garden City, NY, 1955). 84. Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition (New York, 1948); Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York, 1955). 85. Daniel J. Boorstin, The Genius of American Politics (Chicago, 1953). 86. Nye, This Almost Chosen People. 87. Higham, History, p. 214. See also John Higham, ‘The Cult of American Consensus: Homogenizing Our History’, Commentary 27 (1959), 93–101. 88. Ronald Rudin, ‘Revisionism and the Search for a Normal Society: a Critique of Recent Quebec Historical Writing’, Canadian Historical Review 73:1 (1992), 30–61; Ronald Rudin, Making History in Twentieth Century Quebec (Toronto, 1997). 89. Denise Lemieux and Lucie Mercier, La recherche sur les femmes au Québec: bilan et bibliographie (Quebec, 1982); Andrée Lévesque, ‘Historiography: History of Women in Quebec since 1985’, Quebec Studies 12 (1991), 83–91. 90. Lynda Price, Introduction to the Social History of Scots in Quebec, 1780–1840 (Ottawa, 1981); Honorius Provost, Les premiers Anglo-Canadians à Québec: essai de recensement, 1959–1775 (Quebec, 1983); Ronald Rudin, The Forgotten Quebeckers: A History of English-speaking Quebec, 1759–1980 (Quebec, 1985); Bruno Ramirez, Les premiers Italiens de Montréal: l’origine de la Petite Italie du Québec (Montreal, 1984); Jean-Pierre Wilhelmy, German Mercenaries in Canada (Beloeil, Quebec, 1986); Pierre Anctil, Le rendez-vous manqué: les Juifs de Montréal face au Québec de l’entre-deux-guerres (Quebec, 1988); J. Willis, ‘Le Québec, l’Irlande et les migrations de la grande famine: origine, contexte, et dénouement’, in M. Bellavance (ed.), La grande mouvance (Sillery, Quebec, 1990), pp. 17–32. 91. D. Francis, A History of the Native Peoples of Quebec (Ottawa, 1983); Charles A. Martijin, ‘Voyages des Micmacs dans la Vallée du Saint-Laurent, sur la Côte-Nord et à Terre Neuve’, in C. A. Martijn (ed.), Les Micmacs et la mer (Montreal, 1986), pp. 24–38. 92. Denise Helly, Les Chinois à Montréal, 1871–1951 (Quebec, 1987); Daniel Gay, Des empreintes noires sur la neige blanche: les Noirs au Québec, 1950–1990 (Quebec, 1988); Dorothy W. Williams, Blacks in Montréal, 1628–1986: an Urban Demography (Cowansville, 1989). 93. Evident in the work produced by Paul-André Linteau, René Durocher and JeanClaude Robert in the 1970s, the elements of this were synthesised in their Histoire du Québec contemporain, 2 vols (Montreal, 1979). 94. The complicated manoeuvring involved in this transaction is examined in Allan Smith, ‘National Images and National Maintenance: the Ascendancy of the Ethnic Idea in North America’, Canadian Journal of Political Science, 14:2 (1981), 227–57.

82 Writing the Nation 95. Allan Smith, ‘Seeing Things: Race, Image, and National Identity in Canadian and American Movies and Television’, American Review of Canadian Studies/Canadian Review of American Studies, Special Joint Issue, 26:3 (1996), 367–90. 96. David A. Hollinger, ‘How Wide the Circle of the “We”? American Intellectuals and the Problem of the Ethnos Since World War II’, American Historical Review 98:2 (1993), 317–37. 97. Novick, That Noble Dream, p. 573. 98. Morton, The Canadian Identity. 99. J. M. S. Careless, ‘“Limited Identities” in Canada’, Canadian Historical Review 50:1 (1969), 1–10; Allan Smith, ‘Metaphor and Nationality in North America’, Canadian Historical Review 51:3 (1970), 247–75. 100. J. M. S. Careless, ‘“Limited Identities” Ten Years Later’, Manitoba History (1980). 101. Allan Smith, ‘First Nations, Race, and the Pluralist Idea: Canada and the United States in the Post-Modern Age’, in Canada – An American Nation? Essays on Continentalism, Identity, and the Canadian Frame of Mind (Montreal, 1994), pp. 195–249. 102. Michael Bliss, ‘Privatizing the Mind: the Sundering of Canadian History, the Sundering of Canada’, Journal of Canadian Studies 26:4 (1992), 5–17; J. L. Granatstein, Who Killed Canadian History? (Toronto, 1998). 103. Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition (Princeton, 1992). 104. Peter Gourevitch, ‘The Second Image Reversed’, International Organization 32 (1978), 881–911, 881. 105. Homi K. Bhabha, ‘Signs Taken For Wonders’, in Henry Louis Gates (ed.), Race, Writing, and Difference (Chicago, 1986), pp. 163–84; Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis, 1996). 106. R. O. Keohane and S. J. Nye (eds), Transnational Relations and World Politics (Cambridge, MA, 1972); S. P. Huntington, ‘Transnational Organization in World Politics’, World Politics 25 (1973), 333–68; R. O. Keohane and S. J. Nye, Power and Interdependence: World Politics in Transition (Boston, 1977); R. O. Keohane and S. J. Nye, ‘Realism and Complex Interdependence’, in M. Smith, R. Little and M. Shackleton (eds), Perspectives on World Politics (London, 1981), pp. 120–31; Bayless Manning, ‘The Congress, the Executive, and Intermestic Affairs: Three Proposals’, Foreign Affairs 55 (1977), 306–24; Kenichi Ohmae, The Borderless World: Power and Strategy in the Interlinked Economy (New York, 1990); Thomas J. Courchene, ‘Glocalization: the Regional/International Interface’, Canadian Journal of Regional Science 28 (1995), 1–20; Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins (eds), Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation (Minneapolis, 1998). On the meaning and emergence of the master-term ‘globalisation’, see Roland Robertson, ‘Mapping the Global Condition: Globalization as the Central Concept’, in Mike Featherstone (ed.), Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization, and Modernity (London, 1990), pp. 19–20, and James H. Mittelman, ‘Globalization: an Ascendant Paradigm?’, International Studies Perspectives 3 (2000), 1–14. 107. Gérard Bouchard, Genèse des nations et cultures du Nouveau Monde: Essai d’histoire comparée (Montreal, 2000). 108. Daniel Latouche, ‘Quebec and the North American Subsystem: One Possible Scenario’, International Organization 28 (1974), 931–60; Rita Dionne-Marsolais, ‘The FTA: a Building Block for Quebec’, American Review of Canadian Studies 21 (1991), 245–52; R. A. Young, ‘Does Globalization Make an Independent Quebec More Viable?’ in A. R. Riggs and T. Velk (eds), Federalism in Peril (Vancouver, 1992), pp. 121–34; M. Keating, Nations Against the State: the New Politics of Nationalism in Quebec, Catalonia, and Scotland (New York, 1996); and Stephen

Seven Narratives 83

109. 110. 111.

112.

113.

114.

Schulman, ‘Nationalist Sources of International Economic Integration’, International Studies Quarterly 44 (2000), 364–90 in which see especially ‘Québécois Minority Nationalism in Canada’, 375–8. Bouchard, Genèse des nations. Thomas J. Courchene with Colin R. Telmer, From Heartland to North American Region State: the Social, Fiscal, and Federal Evolution of Ontario (Toronto, 1998). Victor Konrad, ‘The Borderlands of the United States and Canada in the Context of North American Development’, International Journal of Canadian Studies 4 (1991), 77–95, 83. Paul Rutherford, ‘Made in America: the Problem of Mass Culture in Canada’, in David H. Flaherty and Frank E. Manning (eds), The Beaver Bites Back: American Popular Culture in Canada (Montreal, 1993), pp. 260–80. John D. Wirth, ‘Advancing the North American Community’, American Review of Canadian Studies 26 (1996), 201–73. For a more detailed consideration of the processes involved here, see Allan Smith, ‘Organizing Ideas and How They Work: The National–International Binary, the Rise of Transnationalism, and the Imagining of the Canadian Community’, in Damien-Claude Bélanger, Sophie Coupal and Michel Ducharme (eds), Les idées en mouvement: perspectives en histoire intellectuelle et culturelle du Canada (Quebec, 2004), pp. 29–52. Thomas Bender, ‘Introduction’, in Thomas Bender (ed.), Rethinking American History in a Global Age (Berkeley, 2002), pp. 1–21, 6, 10, 19.

4 The Mirror of History and Images of the Nation: the Invention of a National Identity in Brazil and its Contrasts with Similar Enterprises in Mexico and Argentina* Eliana de Freitas Dutra

Preliminary remarks This chapter will examine the crucial role played by history writing in the configuration of a national imaginary and collective identity in Brazil from the second half of the nineteenth century to the first half of the twentieth century and it will contrast this with similar efforts undertaken in Argentina and Mexico. In order to produce a full account of this enterprise we have chosen to take as our first point of reference the Exhibition of Brazilian History that took place in Rio de Janeiro in 1881. This imperial-era exhibition was intended to be a showcase for the nation, and established a general inventory of archival sources for the purpose of broadening knowledge of Brazil’s past, and in particular of ‘fatherland history’. This exhibition and the catalogue that accompanied it can be seen to have become something of an emblem of the transition between two generations of constructors of national history writing in Brazil: the monarchist historians and the republican historians. Our second point of reference will be the works of those Brazilian national historians who enjoyed great acclaim during the empire and at the start of the republican period, and who included Francisco Adolfo de Varnhagen, Capistrano de Abreu and João Ribeiro. Their interpretations contributed to the establishment of the founding myth of Brazilian history: the myth of the ‘three races’. These historians’ writings, like those of most of the intellectuals of their time, sought to affirm a Brazilian national identity with the aim of integrating Brazil within the concert of nations. The ‘national monument’ style of history writing that they produced would help form a consciousness of national identity. The objective that they set themselves, namely to describe the country’s specific character, picking out national particularities, would give special prominence to the theme of the racially mixed origin of the Brazilian 84

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people. When looked at through the various mirrors of history, representations of national identity in Brazil, as in Argentina and Mexico, can be seen to have oscillated between the following positions: first, the affirmation of local particularities, emphasising difference from other nations in order to assert this identity and focusing on the ‘self’ and the ‘other’; secondly, the celebration of the nation’s specific characteristics, which allow it to transcend its particularities and accede to universality, at which point the focus broadens to provide the references necessary for its inclusion in the ranks of the civilised world; and, finally, the illusion of bovarism, in which a tendency to dream, to focus on someone other than oneself, and to yearn for a different destiny, is manifest. These three positions were prominent in the emergence of nation-states in Latin America in the nineteenth century, during which period the construction of a national identity became an imperative for the political and intellectual elites in the majority of these newly independent countries. As part of this process these same elites, which for the most part saw themselves as representing enlightened, white civilisation, drew up strategies to ensure their supremacy. Historians in particular would turn themselves into the craftsmen of national identity, producing narratives that would be able to reclaim national genealogies and bring peoples together around a shared past. They did so in the context of political struggles which, whether for independence or for the consolidation of republics, were clearly concerned with establishing sovereign states and, at the same time, limiting popular sovereignty. In Brazil the political realities of empire and African slavery formed another important context of national history writing. The following discussion will attempt to shed light on how historians read the past and contributed to the planting of a collective national memory in Latin America.

The sources of history: the encounter with the ‘self’ and the European ‘other’ In 1838, sixteen years after Brazil’s independence, two key institutions in the production of Brazilian national history were founded in Rio: the Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro (Brazilian Historical and Geographical Institute), or IHGB, and the Arquivo Nacional (National Archives). The creation of the IHGB was mainly due to the efforts of a group of intellectuals and politicians, and was closely bound up with a dual aim: the affirmation and consolidation of the Brazilian state through the construction of Brazilian history. Its main task was, according to its founding statutes, to ‘bring together, systematise, archive and publish documents necessary to the writing of the history of Brazil’.1 In order to meet these objectives, the IHGB sent some of its members over to Europe to track down documents relating to Brazilian colonial history. The Arquivo Nacional, which was founded at the same time, along with the Biblioteca Nacional, acted for their part as guardians

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of the sources from which the IHGB worked in its project to provide the nation with a historical narrative. Brazil’s independence in no way constituted a break with Portugal, as it occurred entirely within the ranks of the Portuguese ruling dynasties whose representatives emphasised notions of continuity and a shared historical existence, a common past. What resulted from the symbolic links between a Portuguese Brazil and an independent Brazil, then, was the construction of a Brazilian identity that was firmly attached to the colonial past. The historian who most comprehensively implemented this enterprise of defining the interpretative principles on which the history of Brazil should, according to the tenets of the IHGB, be based, was Francisco Adolfo de Varnhagen.2 Varnhagen, or the Viscount of Porto Seguro as he was known after receiving the title, would between 1854 and 1857 publish his multivolume História Geral do Brasil.3 Devoted to the royal family, the history he wrote aimed to legitimise both the creation and the responsibilities of the independent state. His work was particularly concerned with the links between Brazilian and Portuguese history and the celebration of the country’s Portuguese heritage. He gave many examples of heroes of the past who, having been born in Brazil, fought against foreign powers that had threatened Portuguese rule. Highlighting the political consensus that had assured Brazil’s greatness, territorial integrity and union, he justified recent conquests, listed the advantages of the monarchical system and praised the qualities of its representatives. His writings emphasised the importance of Catholic traditions and the colonial elite’s right to supremacy. Stressing the involvement of the three races in the formation of the Brazilian people he provided a justification for the slave-owning society. In bringing together these elements into a grand synthesis, he drew inspiration from a predecessor, the German naturalist Carl von Martius, whose exploratory expeditions in Brazil led him to write a short pamphlet entitled ‘How the History of Brazil should be Written’, which won the first prize in a competition organised by the IHGB in 1845.4 It was in fact Martius who had first sketched the outline of the paradigm of national identity that still serves as a reference in Brazil today, namely the notion of the union of the three races, a point that we shall come back to shortly. The foundational character of this text is not doubted by contemporary Brazilian historians; nor indeed is its influence on Varnhagen in his decision to write the História Geral do Brasil.5 Varnhagen’s greatest contribution to historical practice was his attempt to base national history on the systematic use of archive material. During his travels abroad, both in his career as a diplomat and when sent by the IHGB, Varnhagen accumulated a vast reserve of experience in locating sources concerning the history of Brazil, and he handed this experience down to the generations of historians who followed him. The catalogue of the Exhibition of Brazilian History of 1881, which paid tribute to him with a personal dedication, was proof of the practical results of his work. The catalogue played as

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important a role in constructing national history as Varnhagen’s opus. This catalogue, produced for the exhibition which took place in the National Library in Rio, is even today considered to be the most comprehensive list of publications concerning the geography and history of Brazil. This general inventory of sources and archive materials upon which knowledge of Brazil’s past and the history of the pátria would be based, was co-ordinated by the chief librarian of the National Library, Ramiz Galvão, along with two employees of this research establishment who, as keepers of these sources, would become the most important names in republican national history writing at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries: João Ribeiro and Capistrano de Abreu. As we shall see, in spite of the great respect that they had for Varnhagen, these men would later distance themselves from him, both as regards his reputation as a historian and as regards his manner, indeed his style, of imagining the nation. Intended by its ideologically motivated producers to be a monument to the history of the pátria, and often considered in its own right to have been a historical event in the literary life of the country, the catalogue was planned as a preliminary sketch for a Brazilian national historical bibliography. It benefited from the support of an institution, the National Library that, like the IHGB, was nurtured by the imperial state. Moreover, the catalogue had the backing of the entire Brazilian national history enterprise, with its aim of producing a history of Brazil in the scientific mould. The catalogue also had a pronounced pedagogical aspect, and as such displayed obvious affinities with the historical culture of this period. It was designed as a homage to the exemplary nature both of imperial policy, as embodied in the figure of the emperor and the Portuguese royal family, and of celebrated figures from public life, the arts and sciences. Among the objects on display were works of history and geography, writings by travellers, unpublished geographical maps, rare original editions and manuscripts that had been recently discovered, works of literature, portraits, engravings, coins, prints, drawings, lithographs, works of art, periodicals and biographies. The exhibition, like the catalogue, arranged history into tables, within which the history of institutions and the history of the state dominated, divided in linear chronological fashion into periods. The catalogue can be read as a grammar of nationality, a sort of pedagogical textbook containing its fair share of political implications. It offered citizens a fountain of knowledge and showed them, through the exhibition, how the past could be resurrected and turned into a prediction for the future.6 A similar enterprise was undertaken in Mexico in the latter half of the nineteenth century, although here it revolved not around an exhibition, but an important publishing project: the creation of the Diccionario Universal de Historia y Geografía.7 This encyclopaedic dictionary, published in ten volumes between 1853 and 1856, would prove to be one of the most important tools used in the invention of a national image in Mexico. Its publication

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had been preceded by the founding, in 1833, of the Mexican Society of Geography and Statistics. This institution, also heavily involved in the construction of the Mexican nation and the development of the Republic, was charged with gathering geographical and statistical information relating to various states of the Mexican Republic. A large amount of this information was used in the dictionary, which brought together ‘the greatest possible quantity of information on Mexican history, cultural traditions, geography and natural sciences, assembling them for the furtherance of universal scientific and humanist knowledge’.8 The successful completion of such a complex project required the collaboration of men of letters, scientists and also editors, without whom the construction of the idea of a national community would not have been possible. The dictionary was in fact the Mexican edition of the Diccionario Universal de Historia y Geografía which had been published in Madrid by Francisco de Paula Mellado in 1846, and which had itself been based on the Dictionnaire Universel d’Histoire et de Géographie, published in Paris by Nicolas Bouillet in 1842.9 Its full title was the ‘Universal Dictionary of History and Geography, produced in Spain by a society of distinguished men of letters, reprinted and considerably enlarged, for publication in Mexico, by the addition of new historical, statistical and biographical material on the Americas in general and the Mexican Republic in particular’.10 While attempting to offer Mexicans an ‘image of themselves’ in a nationalistic sense, the Mexican edition of the dictionary, like its European forebears was also seeking to strike a balance between promoting national culture and maintaining a universal outlook.11 Such attempts to balance universalism and nationalism were characteristic of a range of Latin American institutions, e.g. the Sociedad Mexicana de Géographia y Estadística (founded in 1833), the Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro (founded in 1838), the Instituto Historico y Geográfico (founded in 1855), the Argentine Junta de História y Numismática (founded in 1901), the Mexican Academia de Létran (founded in 1836) and the Academia Brasileira de Letras (founded in 1898).12 All of those institutions adopted the values of Western civilisation, the practice of Western science, literature and the arts, and the establishment of Western educational policies that were designed to progress the inclusion of their respective nations into the global concert of nations. Latin American constructions of national history were thus modelled on European patterns.13 It is hardly surprising, then, to find many European influences and appropriations. The same spirit that allowed the Diccionario Universal de Historia y Geografía to pass from Spain to Mexico animated the Exhibition of the History of Brazil, which drew its inspiration from the growing European exhibition culture spread by the expositions universelles. It sought to demonstrate that Western civilisation also existed in the tropics.14 In the same way, the IHGB maintained very strong links with the Institut Historique in Paris, formed in 1834, and made a point of ensuring the simultaneous participation

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of its associate members in both institutes, facilitating exchanges, co-operation and the sharing of material.15 The IHGB had further links with other comparable European institutes and its journal, the Revista Trimestral do Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro, was widely distributed abroad.16 The role of European influence in the civilising projects put in place by the Latin American political and intellectual elite was particularly strong in the field of education. The development of public education was an integral part of the enterprise of founding nationalities. Domingos Faustino Sarmiento, an Argentine intellectual and politician with liberal affiliations, wrote a book on popular education in 1849, in which he described experiments carried out in this field in Europe and the United States.17 As President of the Republic, between 1868 and 1874, he implemented reforms in favour of popular education and the promotion of literacy, which included inviting American teachers to give classes in the newly founded teaching colleges.18 Sarmiento’s belief that the sources of modern knowledge were to be found in Europe would lead him to consult the works of authors such as the naturalists Buffon, Saint-Hilaire and Cuvier, as well as those of philosophers and writers including Montesquieu, Michelet, Guizot, Tocqueville, Cousin, Dumas and Victor Hugo.19 Sarmiento believed that education, supplemented by a policy of immigration and the establishment of the rule of law, would bring progress to Argentina, conquer barbarism, and ensure the victory of civilisation throughout the country. Even before Sarmiento, the Argentine historian Bartolomeu Mitre had, during his term as President (1862–8), founded the Colégio Nacional in Buenos Aires and created an official working group for the elaboration of a national public education project. This group was led by a Frenchman, Amadeo Jacques, who would play an important role in the formation of Argentina’s education system, in particular reserving a special place for the teaching of history in secondary school programmes.20 In Mexico, foreign influences were particularly visible in the practice of history writing. Thus, for example, the historian Lorenzo de Zavala adapted Volney’s Leçons d’Histoire for a Mexican public,21 while another historian, Tadeo Ortiz de Ayala, was inspired by Humboldt, Montesquieu and Chateaubriand, and Lucas Alamán modelled his Historia do Méjico on the American historian William H. Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Mexico. The same was true in Brazil, where Francisco Adolfo de Varnhagen’s historical work was greatly influenced by the Englishman Robert Southey’s History of Brazil, the three volumes of which were first published in England between 1810 and 1819.22 The first Portuguese edition, produced by the French publishers Garnier Frères in Rio de Janeiro, appeared in 1862.23 In Brazil, foreign influences remained linked to the idea of the civilising mission of education. Under the empire, primary education was seen as an instrument for the regeneration of the people and under the Republic as a tool to help prepare Brazilians for participation in political and civic life. Meanwhile, the Colégio Pedro II under the Monarchy and the Colégio Nacional under the Republic, both located in Rio de Janeiro,

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would be the privileged centres for the training of the future ruling elite. In the Colégio Pedro II, French cultural hegemony was all-pervasive, especially in school textbooks, and nowhere more so than in general history manuals.24

Historians and the national past: the image of desire Yet foreign influence was clearly modified by indigenous experience, as the case of von Martius demonstrates. Having come to Brazil in 1817, von Martius undertook several expeditions in the company of another naturalist, Johan Baptist von Spix, during which he explored the country’s territory. His essay, which won him the prize offered by the IHGB, would come to be seen as an essential building block in the construction of a national history. He emphasised the reality of the mixed nature of the country, where Portuguese, Indians and Africans lived side by side. ‘Out of the meeting, mixing, mutual relations and changes of the three races’ came the distinctive feature that presided over the formation both of the Brazilian individual and the Brazilian nation.25 According to von Martius, the role of the historian was therefore to present Brazil as providentially predestined to carry out the task of successfully mixing races that were ‘utterly different, in their individuality and their specific moral and physical characteristics, in order to form a new and wondrously organised nation’.26 He thus formulated a historical mission assigned to Brazil’s empire, which was given the task of perfecting the three races, and thereby constructing a truly civilised society in the tropics. In von Martius’s view, the Portuguese were the dominant race over the other two, which were judged to be inferior. ‘Portuguese blood, like a powerful river, [should] absorb the small tributaries of the indigenous and Ethiopic races.’27 Two suggestions were already contained in his treatment of this question: while there would be a progressive process of whitening the ‘other’, the government of the new nation would nonetheless remain a task reserved for the white element, ‘the discoverer, conqueror [and] owner’.28 Von Martius’s understanding of Brazil and its destiny would leave its mark first upon the monarchist Francisco Adolfo de Varnhagen, and later on many other authors, including the staunchly republican Capistrano de Abreu and João Ribeiro. While von Martius, in keeping with the views of his time, used racial criteria to explain Brazilian history and emerged as key proponent of the civilising role of the (white) elites, he nonetheless recognised the positive contribution of the two other races, especially the indigenous Brazilians, in the constitution of the country’s people, and the development of Brazilian nationality and culture. He laid particular emphasis on the indigenous Brazilians’ contribution in terms of their language and also their symbols and traditions, with which Brazil’s national mythology could be enriched. He saw racial mixing as a decisive step towards the advent of the Brazilian individual, regarding it with an optimism that was tinged with human and Christian sympathy for the African and indigenous peoples, whom he depicted as helpless races. He also insisted

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that the merit of a work of history would be judged according to the ability of the historian to defend these helpless races and contribute to the creation of truly humane legislation, accompanied by active measures to improve the moral and civic education of the indigenous Brazilians and Africans. For him, this encounter between different races should evolve into a shared process of development that would take into account ‘the energy, the numbers and the dignity possessed by each [of their] societ[ies]’.29 Von Martius’s formulations would later serve to justify the myth of ‘racial democracy’ in Brazil. Varnhagen’s work also paid considerable attention to indigenous Brazilians, although he did little to hide his contempt for their way of life. As far as he was concerned, they were barbarians, savages and rebels possessing neither laws nor religion, who should be converted and civilised. His opinion regarding Afro-Brazilians was also unfavourable. Slavery, he argued, had to be maintained on account of the economic damage that its abolition would cause to the nation. But the slaves were depicted as spreading bad habits and perverted morals. In his view, slave labour had brought no advantage to Brazil, and he saw the use of indigenous labour as being preferable to using black workers. These peoples, whom he considered to be ‘inferior races’ could in no way constitute sources of origin for the Brazilian nation. Faced with the reality of racial fusion with such inferior peoples, Varnhagen saw no other way for history to reclaim a legitimate genealogy for the nation than through a reaffirmation of its links with Portugal. In Varnhagen’s opinion, any contributions from indigenous peoples or Africans, be they cultural, institutional or religious, should be discarded. In fact, according to his view, these contributions had no implications for the formation of the identity of the new nation, since the latter desired a purely Portuguese identity and saw itself as a continuation of the work of Portuguese colonisation that had subjugated the other races. His negative view of indigenous people and Africans was modified by his analysis of the war fought between the Portuguese and the Dutch (1645–54) for possession of the Brazilian Nordeste. He admitted that the Portuguese victory was due to the decisive role played by black and indigenous troops. This, he argued, had contributed to the emergence of an integrated Brazil, based, however unsteadily, on the three races.30 Inevitably, he saw this victory by a mixed people as proof of the superiority of the civilising influence and guiding presence of Portuguese colonialism. Another historian who paid similar attention to the indigenous Brazilians,31 albeit from a very different perspective, was Capistrano de Abreu.32 He constructed an alternative version of Brazilian history in which he sought to identify Brazil’s particularities in opposition to the Portuguese. Working as a career civil servant in the Arquivo Nacional, and as a teacher in the Colégio Pedro II, the most prestigious school in Rio de Janeiro, then the capital of Brazil, Capistrano de Abreu occupied an important place in Brazilian intellectual life from the 1880s to the 1920s. He was a model of the truly ‘modern historian’, a title refused to Varnhagen at this time. Through his close readings of European

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authors and of new developments in European thought, he retained and sometimes combined influences that might be drawn from the historist tradition, positivism, sociology or theories of social scientism. In his rigorous application of the critical method and the full range of procedures that typified the modern, scientific conception of history, he brought together a talent for meticulous investigation in his search for positive truth and a mastery of the methods of comparison, deduction and narrative exposition, in which the interpretation of facts becomes more important than their mere enumeration.33 In the final analysis, his history of Brazilian nationality rested on three pairs of complementary pillars: physical and social phenomena, indigenous peoples and climate, social environment and race. His most famous work, Capítulos de História Colonial, was published in 1907. Capítulos de História Colonial is a work of synthesis in which the author examines the conquest and population of Brazil’s territory.34 Brazil’s history is presented in his work as being born out of the specificities of the land, its people having sprung, through intermixing, from the interrelation between nature and such physical factors as climate, soil and food. For Capistrano, too, the Brazilian people were a mixed people. However, in his account of the evolution of racial fusion, Capistrano placed most emphasis on the type of man produced from the union between indigenous Brazilians and the Portuguese. This was the mixed-race Brazilian par excellence who, in his view, was to be found in the countryside as opposed to the mulattos, born from Portuguese and African parents and living in great numbers on the coast, upon whom he did not look favourably. The true Brazilian was a man of the country in whom, he thought, the racial mix was purer. For Capistrano, the Portuguese and Africans were exotic, foreign people. The wars fought against the Dutch were instrumental in forging and unifying this people: they gave rise to the birth of Brazil. Capistrano’s reading of Brazil as a country born from military victory thus had parallels with Varnhagen’s interpretation. However, where Capistrano differs is in his emphasis on the people being attached to their land rather than to the Portuguese. In his analysis, the author combines biological, climatic, psychological, racial and cultural factors. One should bear in mind that Capistrano’s interpretation took shape in the context of the wholesale import into Brazil of the European evolutionist and deterministic explicatory models that would provide the concepts and paradigms through which Brazilian national specificities would be understood.35 Racial categories in particular were a central heuristic principle by which society, man and history were explained. Racial mixing, like national character, became an object of scientific enquiry. In essence, the debate here centred on the question of whether the country could achieve progress and civilisation with a mixed people. A substantially different reading of Brazil’s history was adopted by João Ribeiro. Also a history teacher at the Colégio Pedro II, which, with the advent of the Republic became the Ginásio Nacional, this historian drew his inspiration from von Martius, whose precepts he turned into a powerful and original

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reading of the history of Brazil in a work published in 1900 entitled História do Brasil, Curso Superior.36 João Ribeiro developed a line of argument that always concentrated on the split from Portugal, which formed the foundation of his republican reading of Brazilian history. He thus very much wrote against the view of Varnhagen who, as a defender of the imperial state, had constructed an interpretation of the history of Brazil that was based on the idea of continuity with Portugal. João Ribeiro proposed a scientific model of history, employing great rigour in his source criticism while at the same time arguing for a history that would go beyond the events themselves in order to bring meaning to them, a politically engaged history that was imbued with ‘an ethic of the contemporary’ in which readings of the past would retain links with the perspectives of the present. A present which, at this time, was taken up with the challenges of consolidating the Republic, establishing an effective new economic order, ensuring that the transition from slave labour to free labour was achieved and integrating former slaves, if only symbolically, with the rest of society; in short, the construction of a new nation upon the various pillars inherited from the Monarchy. A militant member of the abolitionist republican movement, João Ribeiro enjoyed great intellectual and political acclaim in the Brazilian intellectual world of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. According to Ribeiro, Brazil’s mixed identity should become the cornerstone of the republican political project. In his manual of Brazilian history, he saw the mixed origins of Brazil’s population as forming the basis of the republican spirit.37 This ‘new race’ would thus form the physical foundation of the political revolution at the heart of the liberal, cosmopolitan Republic. However, he concluded by declaring that Brazilians, as an American people and members of a new race, despite being filled with republican spirit, were nonetheless incapable of self-government, being in this respect identical to other mixed peoples. As Brazilians had been deprived for centuries of an education sufficient to communicate the feelings, virtues and moral qualities that are inherent in civilisation, they would have to rely upon an elite, an escol, to represent it. The idea of the three races as the basis of Brazilian national identity became solidly established during the 1930s and was put into service as a tool of statecontrolled cultural nationalism.38 School textbooks, patriotic pamphlets, literature, painting and music all celebrated the nation’s roots in racial mixing. They thus contributed to the promulgation of the image of Brazil as a racerelations paradise. This image stood in blatant contrast to the many discriminations faced by black and indigenous Brazilians. The Brazilian Republic chose a highly elitist political model that was incapable either of delivering effective social integration for former slaves or of extending the full rights of citizenship to all its people. In terms of educational and employment opportunities, and the distribution of wealth, the situation of black Brazilians of African descent is still deplorable a century after the abolition of slavery (1888). At the

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dawn of the twenty-first century they constitute the majority of the poor and illiterate population. They form the largest group both within the prison population and among victims of urban violence. They are very poorly represented in universities, parliament and the Catholic church. And they are not represented at all within the diplomatic corps. In Mexico, as in Brazil, national history writing devoted much attention to the idea of a ‘mixed nation’. The elaboration of this notion in Mexico took place over an extended period following national independence in 1810, to be finally accepted and officially promulgated after the Mexican Revolution of 1910. It had developed within the context of the debate in which a ‘Hispanocentric’ vision of Mexican history confronted its ‘indigeno-centric’ counterpart. It is hardly surprising, then, that during this period of the nineteenth century, in which a Mexican national pantheon was coming into being, a dispute arose regarding which of two figures should represent the origins of Mexican nationality: Cuauhtémoc, the last emperor of the Aztecs, or Cortés, the Spanish conqueror.39 The past glories of Mexico’s pre-Columbian civilisations would be a determining factor in the amount of attention paid to indigenous Mexicans by indigeno-centric historians. The presence of indigenous Brazilians in the various constructions of Brazil’s past pales in comparison. This attention varied in its intensity and its ideological slant, according to the affiliations of the authors in question, who could be liberal or conservative, and also according to the different ways in which it was used as a political tool. After 1810, against the backdrop of an independent Mexico, conservative voices defended Mexico’s Spanish past – referring to the historical reality of ‘New Spain’ – from which they had no intention of freeing themselves, considering it to be a fundamental element in the definition of what it was to be Mexican. This was certainly true in the case of the Hispano-centric historian Don Lucas Alamán in his famous works Historia de México (1849–52) and Dissertaciones y Historia de Mexico (1844–9). For Lucas Alamán, Cortés was Mexico’s great national hero on account of his role in the country’s conquest and conversion. The race, culture and spiritual and institutional values of Spain in his view constituted central factors in the construction of national identity, in contrast to the indigenous Mexicans, who had contributed nothing to the past traditions of New Spain. A defender of Spanish colonisation and the subjugation of the indigenous population, he was highly critical of the results of mixing, in spite of the difficult conditions under which mixed-race Mexicans lived, and he also believed that African blacks, of whom there were far fewer in Mexico than Brazil, were a naturally ‘vile’ caste.40 As for the native population, the indigenous people of the land, he did not believe that they had ‘participated in the formation of Mexican nationality’. The liberals, for their part, refused to accept that the colonial past was a part of Mexican national history, which, according to them, had been interrupted by Spain’s brutal domination, and they saw the newly independent people as descendants of the old Mexican nation.41 This was the argument put forward

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by the most important name in the anti-conservative camp at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Don Carlos Maria de Bustamante,42 who saw the 300 years of colonial Mexico as a ‘historical hiatus that did not contribute to the constitution of nationality’.43 In his view, a litany of disasters for the indigenous Mexicans had begun with the discovery of America. Putting himself forward as the representative of creole independentism, the historian reclaimed Mexico’s indigenous past in order to create a historical consciousness that could both legitimise the creole homeland and ensure that the Mexican people would identify themselves with the Aztecs, their pre-Hispanic ancestors.44 Other authors would also show their concern for the indigenous population and its social status in an independent Mexico. Nonetheless, the idea of a mixed Mexican nation boasts a dual paternity in the form of the works of historians Vicente Riva Palácio, in his Mexico a Través de los Siglos (1844) and José Maria Vigil, in volume V of México a Través de los Siglos.45 Riva Palácio, author, politician, liberal, journalist and director of the Archivo General de la Nación and the Biblioteca Nacional, effected a quite sweeping revision of Mexican history, within which he set out to integrate the history of the colonial period. He went beyond the then current polarised definitions of the Mexican past that identified exclusively either with the Aztec empire or with New Spain. He situated the biological and cultural origin of the Mexican people in the colonial period, at which time a new historical subject emerged which would give rise to the new nation that formed in the nineteenth century: the mestizos. His account held that Mexican nationality was created through the racial fusion between indigenous peoples and the Spanish, who were all subject ‘to the same morphological and functional vicissitudes’.46 He assigned particular prominence to the physical superiority of the mestizos over the Europeans, although he nonetheless affirmed the cultural primacy of the latter.47 José Maria Vigil took a similar line with regard to constructing principles of identity capable of unifying the Mexican nation. He emphasised the notion of a mestizo consciousness, and set out to bring calm to the issue of Mexico’s historical past by giving equal prominence to the nation’s indigenous and Spanish heritage. Out of the combination of both of these emerged a new Mexican people, possessing a culture and history that had been forged in this mixing of races. According to Vigil, historical education was paramount in forming the true Mexicans, the mestizos, as true citizens. At the beginning of the twentieth century, other works contributed to the celebration of racial mixing. These included Justo Sierra Mendes’s México y su Evolución Social and Andrés Molina Henríquez’s Los Grandes Problemas Nacionales, both of which were first published in 1900. Another famous name of the twentieth century, again from Mexico, to defend the role of racial mixing and indeed to hold it up as a factor unifying identities throughout the whole of Latin America, was the revolutionary intellectual José Vasconcelos. Unlike in Brazil and Mexico, the idea of a mixed-race nation did not meet with great success in Argentina, where the history of racial fusion was not

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placed at the centre of narratives of national history. In Argentina, like elsewhere in Latin America, the consolidation of the nation-state was regarded as being of the highest importance. Following the Revolution of May 1810, the ‘unitarists’, the liberal elites who wanted to concentrate power in the city of Buenos Aires, struggled against the proponents of federalism, mainly provincial leaders who were fighting for local political autonomy. In the context of these debates, Bartolomé Mitre, often called the father of modern Argentina and president of the Republic from 1862–8, was instrumental in providing historical narratives for a centralised liberal state. In 1858 he published a book entitled História de Belgrano, which in 1887 appeared in definitive, enlarged form as História de Belgrano y de la Independencia Argentina.48 This work would turn him into the founder of the new Argentine historiography on account of his ‘serious approach and his scientific objectivity’.49 Strongly committed to the Instituto Histórico y Geográfico and the Junta de História y Numismática, Bartolomé Mitre’s political activity and his historical work complemented one another: the historical past would be put into service as part of his campaign to legitimise the unity of the provinces. In his work, Mitre revisited Argentina’s colonial origins and picked out some of the characteristics of Spanish colonisation of the River Plate region as crucial to the formation of the nation’s character. In particular he noted the vastness of the country’s open spaces populated in the main by ‘purebred’ Spaniards. Time and again he returned to the country’s geographical features, which included a huge territorial area, good climate, excellent grazing on the prairies, a coastline open to overseas trade and a natural internal communications network provided by the river. He also noted the absence of great social differences or tensions between conquerors and conquered, rich and poor. All of this had given rise to a ‘rustic individuality’ and to a ‘new type of people’ in Argentina.50 These qualities and specificities of Argentine society were, in Mitre’s view, the starting point for the development of the Argentine nation with its allegedly innate democratic inclinations and republican destiny.51 This last point recalls João Ribeiro’s republican interpretation of Brazilian history, and the presence at the very origins of the formation of the Brazilian people of a liberal, republican calling. Mitre’s optimistic belief in historical progress finding expression in a centralised liberal nation was counterposed by his colleague and friend Faustino Sarmiento’s more negative reading of Argentina’s rural traditions. Sarmiento, in Facundo, his biography of the famous Argentine caudillo Facundo Quiroga, saw the Argentine prairies and the provinces as barbaric domains characterised by authoritarianism, lack of civic feeling, and resistance to the emergence of culture. The very epitome of backwardness, they were inhabited by primitive indigenous races and a particular type, the gaucho, well known for being brutish and aggressive.52 By contrast he described the cities as spaces of urban civility, of the res publica, the spirit of association and progress. In his view, only sociocultural change brought about through a policy of public schooling aimed at

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educating the people, and an effective immigration policy allowing the entry of races capable of sustaining the nation’s progress could push back barbarism and counter Argentina’s colonial origins by placing the country on the road to modern civilisation. Sarmiento’s book fuelled the national identity debate in Latin America up until the 1930s, being appropriated by groups ranging from one extreme of the political spectrum to the other. It found itself alternately acclaimed or rejected by an intellectual class that sought to diagnose the problems underlying these countries’ lack of development and the ills of their societies, and thereby find a way into the civilised world.53 Several other authors of history textbooks in Argentina would set about establishing liberal narratives relating to the nation, national identity and national history, following the example of Clement Fregueiro’s Lecciones de Historia Argentina (1886) and Ricardo Levene’s Lecciones de Historia Argentina (1912).54 Their works, along with those of Mitre, provided students with the dominant narrative of Argentina’s past. All of these liberal interpretations of Argentine history portrayed the gauchos and caudillos as barbaric representatives of rural Argentina. Sometimes historians admitted that their courage and heroism had been crucial for the victory in the war of independence. But the ‘true’ Argentine, most liberal historians agreed, was urban and of European origin. Indigenous peoples and blacks remained unrepresented in the construction of the Argentine nation and were excluded from the national pantheon.55

Conclusion The construction of national histories in Brazil, Mexico and Argentina reflected the difficulties of the intellectual classes and politicians in accepting the ethnic composition of their societies. Everywhere they dreamed of ‘whitening’ the population. They felt like foreigners within their own countries, because they saw themselves as Europeans. In 1930s Brazil the recognition that African and mixed-race Brazilians formed part of the nation’s community did not resolve this problem: the integration of racial difference that was permitted was restricted to the social and cultural sphere. In all three countries the construction of national histories was crucial to state-driven nationalisms. They sought to foster feelings of national belonging but they often neglected to promote the ideals of citizenship. People of different ethnic origin were unified around patriotism without being given equal access to political power. This left Latin American countries, and Brazil in particular, vulnerable to paternalism, authoritarianism and populism in the twentieth century. One should not, however, lose sight of the differences between the three countries examined here. In Brazil the discourse surrounding racial mixing was linked to the reality of slavery. In Mexico the same discourse was linked to the centuries-old historical presence of the country’s indigenous people. The Mexican Revolution of 1910 guaranteed certain political rights to its people, such as the right of access to land ownership granted to the population of

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indigenous heritage through an agrarian reform. Whatever later political and social developments held in store, the mixed-race population in Mexico had thereby acquired a firmer legal foothold than was the case in Brazil, where the question of land is still a burning issue for the indigenous people and peasants who, today, form the landless (sem terra) movement. There was no popular participation in party politics in Brazil until the 1920s, when modest progress in this direction began. It was only with the end of the 1930s that the state would really set about establishing a more organised, large-scale system of political education. The discrepancy between the success of the idea of the union of the three races and the actual situation regarding citizenship rights can thus be seen as one of the defining features of twentiethcentury Brazilian society. The situation in Argentina was different altogether. First, the country’s indigenous population had been virtually annihilated, while its black population, far smaller than Brazil’s, became a minority with the arrival of the huge wave of European immigration. Secondly, as early as the nineteenth century Argentina was already seeing urban growth, high investment in popular education and a degree of political mobilisation, following the example of workers’ parties, that was highly effective in terms of political participation and people’s rights. This ensured a greater degree of social inclusion for immigrants and the working classes. The combination of these factors explains how a national historical narrative became hegemonic, which invoked an ethnically white and culturally European nation. If Argentina went furthest in ‘whitening’ its national history, Brazil went furthest in constructing a national identity based on the myth of the three races. This myth, which deeply penetrated the national imaginary and was accepted with unparalleled enthusiasm into the cultural life of Brazilian society, is today used by descendants of the country’s African population as an instrument in their demands for affirmative action policies. Prominent among them are the establishment of quotas ensuring university places and public sector jobs for Afro-Brazilians, policies for preserving black heritage and popular traditions, and the recognition in the civic calendar of those dates that commemorate not only the history of Brazilian slaves, but also their place in the country’s history and the cult of black heroes therein. The myth of the merging of the races, previously a fig leaf with which to hide the social deprivation of the lower classes, many of whom were of African origin, is thus today an important weapon in the struggle for social reform. This does not make it better history, but it highlights once again how much national history was and continues to be involved in the political project of nation-building. Notes * Translated by Jonathan Hensher. 1. Estatutos. Revista do IHGB 1 (1839), 18–19, quoted in Lúcia Maria Paschoal Guimarães, Debaixo da Proteção de Sua Magestade Imperial. O Instituto Histórico Geográfico Brasileiro (1838–1889) (Rio de Janeiro/Brasília, 1997), vol. 1, p. 288.

The Mirror of History 99 2. On the role of the IHGB see Manoel Luis Salgado Guimarães, ‘Nação e Civilização nos Trópicos’, Estudos Históricos 1 (1988), 5–27, Guimarães, Debaixo da Proteção de Sua Magestade Imperial, vol. 1, p. 288, Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, As Barbas do Imperador (São Paulo, 1998). 3. See Adolfo Francisco Varnhagen, História Geral do Brasil, 6th edn, 5 vols (São Paulo, 1957). Also see José Carlos Reis, As Identidades do Brasil de Varnhagen à FHC (Rio de Janeiro, 1999), Guimarães, ‘Nação e Civilização nos Trópicos’, Ângel Maria de Castro Gomes, História e Historiadores (Rio de Janeiro, 1996), Nilo Odália (ed.), Varnhagen (São Paulo, 1979), José Honório Rodrigues, ‘Varnhagen: Mestre da História Geral do Brasil’, Revista do IHGB April/June (1967). 4. See Friedrich Philipp Von Martius, Como se deve escrever a História do Brasil (Rio de Janeiro, 1991). This was the first book edition of the text. 5. See for example Reis, As Identidades do Brasil de Varnhagen à FHC, Guimarães, ‘Nação e Civilização nos Trópicos’, Guimarães, Debaixo da Proteção de Sua Magestade Imperial, Gomes, História e Historiadores and Roberto Venture, Estilo Tropical (São Paulo, 1991). 6. B. F Ramiz Galvão, Apresentação do Catálogo da Exposição de História do Brasil (Biblioteca Nacional do Rio de Janeiro, 1881), quoted in Catálogo da Exposição de História do Brasil (Brasília), p. x. 7. See Antonia Pi-Suñer Llorens, ‘Una Gran Empresa Cultural de Mediados del siglo XIX: el Diccionario Universal de Historia y Geografía’, in Laura Beatriz Suarez de la Torre (ed.), Empresa y Cultura en Tinta y Papel (1800–1860) (Mexico, 2001), pp. 409–18, and Arturo Sóberon Mora, ‘Las Armas de la Ilustración: panfletos, catecismos, cartilhas y dicionarios en la construction del México moderno’, in Empresa y Cultura en Tinta y Papel (1800–1860), pp. 431–44. Also see Laura Beatriz Suarez de la Torre, ‘Lectores-actores mexicanos, lecturas extranjeras: influencias para la formación de una cultura nacional’, in Eliana de Freitas Dutra and JeanYves Mollier (eds), Politica, Nação e Edição (São Paulo, 2006). 8. Llorens, ‘Una Gran Empresa’, p. 409. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid. Unless otherwise stated, all translations are my own. 11. See Jean-Yves Mollier’s chapter on ‘Encyclopédies et commerce de la librairie du XVIIIe au XXe siècle’ in his La Lecture et ses Publics à l’époque contemporaine (Paris, 2001). Also see Jean-François Botrel, ‘La “Biblioteca de Autores Espanoles” (1846–1878) ou la construction d’un Panthéon des lettres espagnoles’, in Dutra and Mollier (eds), Politica, Nação e Edição as well as Llorens, ‘Una Gran Empresa’. 12. The Junta de História y Numismática Americana was the successor to the Junta de Numismática which had been formed in 1893 by the historian and politician Bartolomé Mitre, who was its head until 1906. During this period he made no reference to the writing of national history in Argentina. The Junta de História y Numismática Americana became the Academia Nacional de História in 1938. 13. Benedict Anderson, Nação e Consciência Nacional (São Paulo, 1989), p. 60. 14. It is important to emphasise the prevalence of French culture in Brazil at this time, in the arts, with the Academia Imperial de Belas Artes, as well as in literature, under the patronage of the emperor. France was, in fact, the model of a civilised society for most Latin American countries. See Schwarcz, As Barbas do Imperador. 15. Maria Alice de Oliveira Faria has noted the presence of 46 Brazilians among the members of the Institut Historique de Paris and of 26 French members of the IHGB between 1834 and 1850. See Guimarães, ‘Nação’, p. 12. 16. According to Guimarães, the Revista Trimestral do Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro was sent out to 136 similar societies and received an international prize

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17. 18.

19. 20.

21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32.

33. 34. 35.

at the 1881 History Congress in Venice for the regularity of its publication. See Lúcia Maria Paschoal Guimarães, ‘Um Olhar sobre o Continents: O Instituto Histórico e Geográfico brasileiro e o Congresso Internacional de História da América’, Estudos Históricos 20 (1997), 3. Stella Maris Scatena Franco, Luzes e Sombras na Construção da Nação Argentina: Os Manuais de História Nacional (Bragança Paulista, 2003), p. 22. See Edmund Lafforge, La Escuela popular: su évolution y proyección (Buenos Aires, 1980), pp. 67–8, and Horacio Solari, Historia de la educación argentina (Buenos Aires, 1949), pp. 106–9. Noted in Franco, Luzes e Sombras na Construção da Nação Argentina, pp. 38–9. See Maria Lígia Coelho Prado, ‘Para ler o Facundo de Sarmiento’, in América Latina no século XIX: Tramas, Telas e Textos (São Paulo, 1999). See Ricardo Rojas, La Restauración Nacionalista: Informe sobre Educación (Buenos Aires, 1909). Noted in Franco, Luzes e Sombras na Construção da Nação Argentina, pp. 38–9. For an analysis of this adaptation see Suarez de la Torre, ‘Lectores-actores mexicanos, lecturas extranjeras’. Robert Southey, History of Brazil (London, 1810–19). On the history of the Maison Garnier in Brazil see Eliana Regina de Freitas Dutra, Rebeldes Literários da República. História e Identidade Nacional no Almanaque Brasileiro Garnier (1903–1914) (Belo Horizonte, 2005). See Circe Maria Fernandes Bittencourt, Livro Didático e Conhecimento histórico: Uma História do Saber Escolar (PhD thesis, São Paulo, 1993). See Von Martius, Como se deve escrever a História do Brasil, p. 30. Ibid., p. 31. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., p. 30. See Varnhagen, História Geral do Brasil, vol. 2, chapters 27–30 and vol. 3, chapters 31–33. It should be noted that the figure of the indigenous Brazilian had, since the first half of the nineteenth century, been at the centre of representations of the nation’s past, and formed a source of inspiration, and indeed explanation, in those texts belonging to the ‘indigenist’ tradition that played an important role in the construction of the idea of the nation in Brazil through fictional narratives and novels of national foundation. See Flora Süssekind, O Brasil não é Longe Daqui: o Narrador, a Viagem (São Paulo, 1990) and Maria Helena Rouanet, Eternamente em Berço Esplêndido: a Fundação de uma Literatura Nacional (São Paulo, 1991). Also see Doris Sommer, Ficções de Fundação: Os Romances Nacionais da América Latina (Belo Horizonte, 2004). On the role and works of Capistrano in Brazilian national history writing, see Arno Wehling, A Invenção da História. Estudos Sobre o Historicismo (Rio de Janeiro/Niterói, 1994); Reis, As Identidades do Brasil de Varnhagen à FHC; Ricardo Benzaquen de Araújo, ‘Ronda Noturna. Narrativa, Crítica e Verdade em Capistrano de Abreu’, Estudos Históricos 1 (1988), 28–54; Gomes, História e Historiadores. See de Araújo, ‘Ronda Noturna. Narrativa, Crítica e Verdade em Capistrano de Abreu’ and Gomes, História e Historiadores. Capistrano de Abreu, Capítulos de História Colonial (1500–1800), 5th edn (Rio de Janeiro, 1969). Like Capistrano de Abreu, various other authors aligned themselves with scientistic theories, following the examples of the doctor Nina Rodrigues, the ethnologist

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36. 37. 38.

39.

40.

41. 42.

43. 44.

45. 46. 47.

48. 49. 50.

51.

52.

53.

Sílvio Romero, the writer Euclides da Cunha and the sociologist Oliveira Vianna. One writer would remain opposed to these ideas: Manoel Bonfim. João Ribeiro, História do Brasil, Curso Superior, 14th edn (Rio de Janeiro, 1953), 1st edn 1900. Ribeiro, História do Brasil, Curso Superior, pp. 303–20. The sociologist Gilberto Freyre was the main proponent of a fairly positive vision of a mixed-race, multicultural Brazil at this time. See Gilberto Freyre, Casa Grande & Senzala-Formação da Família Brasileira sob o Regime Patriarcal, 14th edn (Rio de Janeiro, 1969), 1st edn 1933. See Mónica Quijada, ‘El Paradigme de la Homogeneidad’, in Mónica Quijada, Carmen Bernand and Arn Schneider (eds), Homogeneidad y Nation: Con un Estudio de Caso (Madrid, 2000), pp. 41–3. See Juan A. Ortega y Medina, ‘Indigenismo e Hispanismo en la Consciencia Historiográfica Mexicana’, in Roberto Blancarte (ed.), Cultura e Identidad Nacional (Mexico, 1994), p. 67. Medina, ‘Indigenismo e Hispanismo en la Consciencia Historiográfica Mexicana’, p. 58. See Carlos Maria de Bustamente, Historia General de Nueva España: México (Mexico, 1975). Bustamante also wrote a Cuadro Histórico de la Revolución Mexicana, 5 vols (Mexico, 1985). For a recent overview of Mexican historiography and the subjects covered in the nineteenth century see Enrique Florescano, El Nuevo Pasado Mexicano (México, 1991). Quoted in Medina,’Indigenismo e Hispanismo en la Consciencia Historiográfica Mexicana’, p. 58. The situation of indigenous peoples in Mexico is dealt with in the work of José Maria Luís Mora, México y sus revoluciones (México, 1950) and Lorenzo de Zavala, Ensayo Histórico de las Revolutiones de México (Instituto Cultural Helénico y FCE, 1985). Vicente Rivas Palacio, Mexico a través de los siglos (Mexico, 1884–9), cited by Medina, ‘Indigenismo e Hispanismo en la Consciencia Historiográfica Mexicana’, p. 71. Quoted in Quijada, ‘El Paradigme de la Homogeneidad’, p. 44. See Augustín Basave Benítez, México Mestizo: Análisis del Nacionalismo Mexicano en torno a la mestzofilia de Andrés Molina Henríquez (Mexico, 1992), p. 30, and Quijada, ‘El Paradigme de la Homogeneidad’, pp. 44–5. See Tulio Halperin Donghi, ‘Mitre e a Formulação de uma História Nacional para a Argentina’, Estudos Avançados 8 (1994), 199. Ibid. Bartolomé Mitre, História de Belgrano y de la Independencia Argentina, 5th edn (Buenos Aires, 1902), vol. 1, p. 9, quoted in Donghi, ‘Mitre e a Formulação de uma História Nacional para a Argentina’, p. 206. See Natalio R. Botana, El Orden Conservador: La Política Argentina entre 1888 y 1916 (Buenos Aires, 1986), cited in Franco, Luzes e Sombras na Construção da Nação Argentina, p. 67. For the debates on political ideas in Argentina see Jose Luis Romero, Las Ideas Políticas en Argentina (Buenos Aires, 1975). Facundo was written in 1845, before Mitre’s work. Doris Lessing wrote of the book that it is ‘part fiction, part biography, part political history, part manifesto’. See also Prado, ‘Para ler o Facundo de Sarmiento’. In spite of their interpretative differences, see on Brazil Sérgio Buarque Holanda, Raízes do Brasil (Rio de Janeiro, 1994) (reprint of 1936 edition); on Argentina Carlos Octávio Bunge, Nuestra América. Ensayo de Psicologia social (Buenos Aires, 1918) (1st edn 1903); on Bolivia Alcides Arguedas Pueblo Enfermo: Contribution la

102 Writing the Nation Psicologia de los pueblos hispanamericanos (Santiago del Chile, 1937) (1st edn 1909), cited by Eve-Marie Fell, ‘Primeras reformulaciones del pensamiento racista al despertar de la consciencia revolucionária’, in Ana Pizarro (ed.), América Latina: Palavra, Literatura e Cultura, 2 vols (São Paulo/Campinas, 1994), vol. 2, p. 583. 54. See José Maristany, Las Ficciones el Pasado en los Manueles de la Historia Argentina 1880–1910 (online publication: www.univ-tours.fr/Maristany, accessed 29 January 2005). See also Franco, Luzes e Sombras na Construção da Nação Argentina. 55. See Franco, Luzes e Sombras na Construção da Nação Argentina and Quijada, ‘El Paradigme de la Homogeneidad’. For the participation of blacks in Argentine culture see George Reid Andrews, The Afro-Argentines of Buenos Aires, 1800–1900 (Wisconsin, 1980) and Carmen Bernand, ‘La Población Negra de Buenos Aires (1777–1862)’, in Quijada et al. (eds), Homogeneidad y Nation, pp. 92–140.

5 Writing the Nation in Australia: Australian Historians and Narrative Myths of Nation Mark Hearn

In 1916 Ernest Scott, the recently appointed Professor of History at the University of Melbourne, chose to conclude A Short History of Australia with a discussion of Australia’s novelists and poets. In the final paragraph of the discussion, and the book itself, he observed: Perhaps not many of the writings of these men are well known outside Australia; but what of that? She has her own life, and it is good; they wrote for her about the things that are hers; and they have helped her people to understand their country, their destiny, and themselves.1 Scott might have provided a similar commentary of the ambitions of Australia’s historians, across the twentieth century, to create and contest a mythic narrative of national experience. Berger et al. observe that European national histories ‘showed a remarkable zeal in demonstrating the uniqueness of their particular nation-state’; a similar zeal in Australian national histories was intensified by a strong sense of insularity as a federation of colonies finding its path to nationhood in a region distant from comparable Western nations.2 Australians defensively withdrew from the Asia-Pacific region in the name of economic growth and white cultural destiny. Looking inward, the national narrative attempted to discover the sources of Australian character from within a culture that could proudly acknowledge its British origins, while scrutinising itself for the evidence of a unique transcendence. This chapter surveys a range of culturally influential twentieth-century Australian national histories that have embraced or challenged myths of national identity and nation-building – from the interpretations of an evolutionary Australian-British liberalism and progress typified by Ernest Scott in the period between the two world wars, to the mid-century assertions of a culturally distinctive Australian nationalism, and the at times intensely competitive layers of revision over issues of national identity, race and gender that have accrued in recent decades. Successive generations of Australian historians have grappled with the themes of mateship and egalitarianism, White Australia, 103

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and masculine struggles of progress and sacrifice in war. During the first half of the twentieth century, many Australian historians sought to cultivate the mythic status of these themes in the shaping of what Somers has described as a ‘metanarrative’: a myth of national identity.3 From the late 1960s this project, serving the needs of homogeneous nation-building, was challenged by a more critical analysis of the evolving nation, as the economic and cultural protectionism that had characterised Australian society since federation in 1901 began to break down under the influence of post-war immigration and the liberalisation of the economy. Myth is a highly charged concept to link with the study of history: as Collins observes, ‘myth and history are typically construed as antithetical approaches to the past’. To suggest that fable and fact may be reconciled to explain the past is to apparently suggest that truth and falsity can explain the same historical event. Yet as Collins argues, myth cannot be so easily dismissed from a consideration of history, particularly from histories of nations and national identity. All histories contain some element of myth, reflecting a sense of mythic significance embraced by a cultural group in order to reinforce shared values.4 Historians write to communicate with their contemporary audience. As Munslow observes, the historians’ ‘categories of analysis, assumptions, models and figurative style’ are all part of the history, drawn into the project of constructing the present from the narrative traces selected from the past.5 Echoing Foucault, Collins concludes that all history writing is concerned with the political problems of the present.6 Cultivating historical myths to serve the present needs of the imagined community has characterised Australian society from its inception. By the 1820s, barely three decades from white settlement in 1788, Atkinson argues that two mythic notions had taken hold: the colonies as sites of the crown’s punishment of convicts, and an impulse to turn away from these origins to create a white ‘native’ culture extending the ideals of British enterprise and liberty in a new land. Such was the vision articulated by William Charles Wentworth in his 1819 Statistical, Historical, and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales, the first history produced by a native-born Australian – the son of a convict seeking legitimacy and a place in the colonial elite.7 Wentworth’s creative initiative was only fitfully pursued. Lacking a professional cohort or research base in the embryonic university system that evolved from the 1850s, a scattering of historical works appeared across the nineteenth century championing white progress, yet at times recognising the suffering imposed on indigenous Australians, as West’s 1852 History of Tasmania acknowledged. A persistent theme was the conviction that white Australians, escaping the suffocating and embedded aristocratic structures of Britain, could develop a uniquely free and liberal society. John Dunmore Lang’s Historical and Statistical Account of New South Wales, which appeared in regularly updated editions between 1834 and 1875, and Freedom and

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Independence for the Golden Lands of Australia (1852), argued that Australia could break free of its imperial ties and establish a thriving republic in the southern hemisphere.8 Attached to their cultural and racial roots, Australians were reconciled to their place in the empire as the colonies federated to form the Commonwealth of Australia in 1901, while gripped by a powerful sense of cultural and national mission. Following Federation, liberal Australian historians turned to the task of explaining and justifying this mythic claim.

A liberal endowment: shaping the national story A number of the historians discussed in this chapter may well have bridled at any suggestion that their histories included elements of politicised mythmaking. Influenced by von Ranke’s empirical historicism and intolerant of theory, Ernest Scott felt it was his role to elaborate plain facts in service to clarifying the story of the Australian people.9 Yet the Short History, the first significant history of Australia published in the twentieth century, outlined the mythic origins and character of the Australian people. Scott wanted to explain how British racial origins and an accompanying heritage of liberal ideals creatively flourished in Australia. Gifted with ‘the most liberal endowment of self-government that had ever been secured in the history of colonization by dependencies from a mother-country’, the ‘thoroughly British’ Australian population had been left ‘free to work out their own destiny’. Thus Australia became ‘. . . a field for the exercise of their racial genius for adaptation and for conquering difficulties’.10 Scott was himself a product of this genius for adaptation: an emigrant of illegitimate birth from London without an academic degree, Scott had trained on the job as a journalist and published several works on the exploration and settlement of Australia before securing the chair of history at the University of Melbourne in 1913.11 Nowhere was Scott’s idealised vision of Australian identity more potently expressed than in his observations on the landing of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps at Gallipoli on the 25 April 1915. When Britain found itself at war with Germany in August 1914 Australians ‘flew to arms on the instant’ in support of the empire. The Anzac landings had occurred barely a year prior to the publication of Scott’s Short History, and although he could only offer a few remarks about the campaign in the concluding chapter, which appropriately drew links between ‘Imperial Relations and the Australian Spirit’, he made the most of his opportunity to elevate the campaign into myth. Scott asserted that Anzac and its sacrifices had been predestined by fate and prophesied in the nationalist poetry of Henry Lawson. Scott observed that poetry was that ancient and ‘Pierian’ art form of the Muses. The Muses of Greek mythology bestowed poetic or artistic inspiration and the gifts of

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memory and prophecy. The ‘Pierian spring’ had flowed ‘constantly and copiously’ in Australia, and poured ‘hot from the heart’ of Henry Lawson: There are passages in his virile ‘Star of Australasia’ that ring like the authentic message of prophesy, written as this poem was nearly a quarter of a century before the name of Anzac blazed into being: . . . I tell you the Star of the South shall rise – in the lurid clouds of war. Australians were fulfilling an ancient destiny by sacrificing themselves in war, to ‘fight for a Right or Great Mistake’, as Scott quoted Lawson.12 In his Short History Scott strove to solve the present problems of Australians. In his identification of shared British origins, Scott offered a reassuring sense of familiarity, proudly enhanced by an account of how Australians had proved themselves worthy of their inherited traditions by facing the sufferings of war and the challenges of developing a new country. Scott defined and expressed this mythic history on behalf of the Australian people, and sent it back into the popular imagination: the Short History became a standard reference for students and the general public and ran through a number of editions between 1916 and the outbreak of the Second World War, and sold 40 000 copies within a decade.13 In Scott’s tale of progress and sacrifice the first Australians were swept from sight by the relentless tide of European progress; he briefly described how the ‘fading out of the native race’ was grim, hateful and inevitable.14 The sectarian and racial tensions between the Protestant English majority and the Irish Catholic minority were largely unremarked; and the fundamentally gendered nature of Scott’s celebration of the Australian character – the masculine conquest of the land and cult of military sacrifice on behalf of the feminised nation and the imperial motherland – was simply taken for granted. In these absences and evasive rationalisations of colonisation and settlement Scott’s Short History also established a familiar pattern for Australian historiography that persisted well into the twentieth century, sustaining the myth of racial and male superiority that defined the metanarrative of white, British-Australian culture. Scott’s Short History provided a vital text for establishing Australian history as a legitimate area of historical enquiry, capable of being fashioned into a compelling narrative and worthy of further research. Yet it would be another decade before Scott established a course in 1926 called ‘Australasian History’, which sought to place the study of Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific in its imperial context; it was the first time such a course had been offered by an Australian university, but Scott apparently did not believe it was appropriate to structure the course along the lines of the nation-building lessons that he had described in the Short History.15 At the University of Sydney George Arnold Wood had already set about expanding the research horizons of Australian historiography. Like Scott, Wood was a British immigrant, although formally trained as a historian at Balliol

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College. At Oxford he was influenced by von Ranke’s methods and encouraged to explore primary sources. Appointed to the chair of history in 1891, Wood was an ardent liberal who believed history must illuminate the present and act as a moral force, shaping the values of future leaders.16 Overworked and sometimes at odds with the University of Sydney authorities because of his radical liberalism, Wood presided over a syllabus that privileged British and European history at the undergraduate level; he only once taught an undergraduate course in Australian history, in 1925. Amongst postgraduates he encouraged research into Australian history, as access to primary sources was enhanced by the opening of the State Library of New South Wales in 1910, and through his involvement in the project to publish The Historical Records of Australia between 1914 and 1925. These volumes of official records, documenting the early colonial period, provided a vital research resource for Australian historians.17 Research was also stimulated in the early twentieth century as historical societies were established in the various states, each publishing their own journals privileging a story of white progress.18 In 1922 Wood published The Discovery of Australia, a pioneering account of the exploration of the continent, and in the same year published an influential article in the Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society on white Australia’s origins as a convict settlement. Wood took issue with the established tendency to avoid discussion of the shameful convict stain, considered an embarrassment by most respectable Australians. Wood argued that convicts, ‘generally criminals of a low rank’, had played a vital role in nation-building after being transported by the state to protect the interests of a corrupt English aristocracy. ‘Is it not clearly a fact that the atrocious criminals remained in England, while their victims, innocent and manly, founded the Australian democracy?’ The convicts were equipped with both the qualities and the gender required for nationbuilding. Australian sacrifice at Gallipoli and on the Western Front demonstrated that convict ancestry had produced Australians who had ‘proved themselves to be among the greatest and noblest souls who have ever grown among the British race’. Wood cast back in time to find vindication of the liberal democratic nationalism that he championed.19 The most sophisticated expressions of the liberal interpretation of Australian history in the inter-war years were provided by R. M. ‘Max’ Crawford and Keith Hancock. A former student of Wood’s in Sydney and Oxford’s Balliol College, Crawford took over the chair of history from Ernest Scott at the University of Melbourne in 1937 and set about establishing what would become known as the Melbourne school of history. Crawford reformed both the department’s programmes and the secondary school curriculum to include some study of Australian history. Crawford also significantly expanded the staff and research skills of the department: the Melbourne school came to represent ‘history as a truly liberal education’.20 At the University of Sydney Stephen Roberts undertook a similar renovation of university and school history programmes, and the study of Australian history benefited, but perhaps not to

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the extent that occurred in Melbourne; Roberts, with an interest in European history, did not make the national story a high priority.21 The establishment of the scholarly journal Historical Studies in 1940 also stimulated the professional development of the discipline.22 Crawford developed a ‘synoptic view’ of history, which broke with both conventional empiricism and the determinism of Marxism to advance a sophisticated liberal humanism. Crawford argued in 1939 that historians must engage with the complexity of human activity and conflict, and an acknowledgement of human agency – a process of critical analysis and the enunciation of moral judgements. The historian should be a philosopher.23 Crawford’s willingness to explore new territory included his own region. Ourselves and the Pacific introduced the history of the Pacific region to an Australian audience. Published in 1941, just as Australia faced an unprecedented threat posed by Japan’s rapid military conquests across the Pacific, Crawford and his collaborators invited Australians to consider their geographic place in the world, rather than to dwell in the imagined homeland of Britain: ‘To-day, Australians and New Zealanders have no doubt that their destiny is to be influenced by the fact that they border the same ocean as China, Japan, the United States and Russia.’ However as Ourselves and the Pacific acknowledged, immigration restriction of Asians and Pacific Islanders had helped the British dominions delay their destiny. Excluding Chinese immigrants reflected ‘. . . their desire to shut out the Pacific and to preserve their own European character’.24 Crawford promoted a legend of European character transformed by Australian experience. Crawford celebrated the individualistic character of an unromantic type who persevered through the challenges of settlement and war which created a nation: ‘The heroism of the Anzacs was not different in kind from the courage and endurance of the early pioneers. Australia became a nation [at Gallipoli] because for the first time she was plunged into the responsibilities of nationhood.’25 In Australia, published in 1952, Crawford seems to have been the first historian to employ the term, ‘the Australian Legend’, to describe a ‘national myth’ drawn from life on the land, and a need to distinguish Australian experience and achievements from that of the ‘old world’ of Europe.26 Crawford described Australians facing the trials of the outback with a willingness to ‘have a go’, often disrespectful of human pretentiousness and drawn to a cynical and at times grim brand of humour.27 This portrait of the Australian type neatly fused with Crawford’s liberalism. Australians cherished their individual independence, and hoped to build a nation where liberal freedom might flourish: . . . the essence of Australian democracy has been a belief in the rights of the individual, without thought of status. The very demand for state action has in some part sprung from this belief – to secure equality of opportunity, a fair and reasonable livelihood, political rights. The call for state intervention in Australian democracy has often been, in short, an expression of its individualism.28

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Crawford understood that, to borrow from Collins, he was distorting the truth to produce a mythic explanation of the past in order to re-enforce the values that Australians shared. As Crawford observed, immediately following the quotation cited above: ‘The Australian Legend is not necessarily a picture of the Australians; but it is a picture of ideals that have been dominant in Australia, and ideals may at least take part in moulding character.’ Crawford hoped that his transmission of the national myth would play its own role in shaping the national character, and like Scott before him, Crawford re-enforced the lesson of the Australian legend by concluding his discussion with a final testimony to the plain heroism of the Australian character as it faced the test of war. He cited a long quotation from Charles Bean’s history of the Australian Imperial Force in France in 1918 on the individualistic nature of the Australian soldier. It was understandable that Crawford would defer to the official historian of Australia in the First World War. Charles Bean was a vigorous champion of the Anzac myth, a cause which Bean pursued in a multivolume history and several other works from The Anzac Book in 1916, through to the multivolume Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918 published between 1921 and 1942, and in his advocacy of the establishment of the Australian War Memorial in the nation’s capital, which when it opened in 1941 included a virtually unique museum that celebrated Australian military heroism.29 Bean himself had collected many of the artefacts of this heroism from the battlefield: he served as a front-line war correspondent with the Australian forces from Gallipoli until the German surrender in 1918. The extract that Crawford selected included all the defining elements of that peculiar mix of Australian individualism, egalitarianism and mateship that Bean felt was intensely expressed in war. In a text that read as a testimonial for the Australian ‘digger’ as observed at the 1918 armistice, Bean wrote that the ‘incorrigibly civilian’ Australian soldier had maintained his volunteer status by almost perversely exercising his democratic right to reject conscription in the 1916–17 referenda ballots; the digger was never really reconciled to military discipline, yet he was bound to his fellow soldiers – ‘a man must “stand by his mates” at all costs’. He rejected English ‘social class’ distinctions that were manifested in the British army; the Australian soldier ‘. . . knew only one social horizon, that of race’ – even Australian officers could be included in that category. The Australians were, Bean concluded, ‘masters of their own lives’.30 Bean’s embrace of egalitarian individualism was a logical development of Scott’s liberal nationalism. The historian Keith Hancock, one of Scott’s students at the University of Melbourne, came to observe the mastery that Australians exercised over themselves and their land with a sardonic eye. Hancock went on to study at Oxford in the 1920s. While steeped in the liberal tradition, Hancock’s analysis developed a harder edge, driven by the tensions of a young man caught between the metropolitan culture of Britain and provincial Australia, and his compulsion to test the idealised character of Australian national life against the reality of experience.31 In Australia, published in 1930,

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Hancock’s ‘intellectual detachment’ struggled with an ‘emotional attachment’ to the Australian people to produce an innovative interpretation and structure, focusing on themes rather than chronology.32 Hancock employed an inventive use of language that provocatively clarified and at times redefined the national narrative – colonial Australians were ‘transplanted British’ who became ‘independent Australian Britons’ – which in Hancock’s estimation was no bad thing: ‘it is not impossible for Australians, nourished by a glorious literature and haunted by old memories, to be in love with two soils’.33 Hancock offered some shrewd insights into the myths of mateship and egalitarianism: while Australians’ ‘intolerance of oppression and sympathy with the under-dog’ were attractive character traits, they could conspire to create a monochrome culture of mediocrity. ‘The passion for equal justice can so easily sour into a grudge against those who enjoy extraordinary gifts . . . the ideal of “mateship” . . . springs not only from [the Australian’s] eagerness to exalt the humble and meek, but also from his zeal to put down the mighty from their seat.’34 Hancock was the first Australian historian to offer an incisive critique of the nation-building project that successive Commonwealth governments had pursued since Federation – through immigration restriction of non-Europeans, tariff protection, compulsory arbitration of industrial disputes and social welfare initiatives including the old age pension. Hancock concluded that Australians had ‘an excessive dependence on the state’.35 Hancock argued that Australians sought both ‘fiscal’ and racial protection. In this culture of protectionism, ‘[t]he policy of White Australia is the indispensable condition of every other Australian policy’.36 White Australia was the central defence of national identity – which, in Hancock’s view, justified the restriction of nonEuropeans. ‘What [Australians] fear is not physical conquest by another race, but rather the internal decomposition and degradation of their own civilisation. They have gloried in their inheritance of free institutions, in their right to govern themselves and freely make their own destiny.’37 Hancock was not blind to white hypocrisy over the ‘natural progress of the aboriginal race towards extinction’. The ‘invasion of Australia’, as Hancock bluntly characterised the waves of exploration and pastoral expansion, had a ‘devastating’ impact on the indigenous population. ‘Australian democracy is genuinely benevolent, but is preoccupied with its own affairs. From time to time it remembers the primitive people whom it has dispossessed, and sheds over their predestined passing an economical tear.’38 Hancock believed that tariff protection had not only to be analysed on economic grounds, but also for its ‘emotional and ideological flavour’.39 Hancock’s analysis had been influenced by his contemporary, Edward Shann, whose Economic History of Australia was also published in 1930.40 Like Shann, Hancock criticised the fiscal impact of protection, to which Hancock added a cogent analysis of its cultural consequences. Protection in Australia was a ‘faith and a dogma’ that had triumphed ‘because it appealed irresistibly to the most ardent sentiments of Australian democracy’.41 Prime Minister Alfred Deakin’s New

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Protection programme in the period 1905–8 had drawn the incipient Australian Labor Party into support for his administration by requiring manufacturers to provide ‘fair and reasonable’ wages in exchange for tariff assistance. Despite the mounting cost of tariff protection in the 1920s, Australians clung to it as a defence of their standard of living and a bulwark against ‘frugal and unscrupulous foreigners’, particularly the populous Asian neighbours to the north.42 This ‘easy-going’ and intellectually lazy faith in protectionism also inclined Australians towards the paternalistic and utilitarian ‘state socialism’ of which by the 1920s the Labor Party had emerged as the leading advocate.43 Hancock presented Australian government ‘as the instrument of selfrealisation’ through which the people sought ‘. . . to put the collective power of the state at the service of individual rights’.44 Despite the overweening enthusiasm for state intervention, Hancock believed the Australian national mission remained fundamentally liberal, if almost morbidly inward-looking. Rowse identified Hancock’s radical ‘New Liberalism’, an advocacy of a free market approach to trade and industrial relations, as an essential but largely unacknowledged theme of Hancock’s text: ‘What distinguishes Australia is the subtlety with which its politico-economic meaning is buried within an apparently non-partisan survey of Australian civilization and nationhood.’45 Writing from the ‘New Left’ perspective of the 1970s, Rowse argued that Hancock sought to defend the interests of British and Australian capital at a time of economic crisis – the Great Depression. Yet it seems apparent, as Rowse implicitly acknowledged, that Hancock’s hope that Australians would one day realise the ‘spiritual achievement’ of a distinctive nationality compelled him to embrace ‘radical liberalism’, as a means of urging Australians from their habits of economic dependency – while he remained undisturbed by Australia’s continuing attachment to Britain.46 Perhaps because he continued to invest a hope in the future potential of a mature liberal Australian society, Melleuish suggests that Hancock failed to push his analysis to its logical conclusion – that protection might also equal selfishness. Hancock resorted to ironic observation.47 As it stood, Hancock’s astringent survey of Australia’s isolationist and ‘homogeneous egalitarian society’ did not sit comfortably with a country plunging into the devastating international economic depression of the early 1930s, which only encouraged nations, including Australia, to erect ever more towering tariff barriers.48 Australia exerted considerable influence over subsequent generations of Australian historians, inspiring a repetition of its characterisations – and provoking a rejection of them.49

Radical nationalism and Clark’s ‘counter-revolution’ Melleuish observes that the radical nationalists Vance and Nettie Palmer influenced Hancock’s Australia, helping him to frame ‘a picture of the failure of suburban Australia to generate a vital, living culture’.50 Where Hancock crafted a tough and realistic assessment of the national culture, Vance Palmer’s 1954

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The Legend of the Nineties sought to revive the transformative power of myth. In the Australian context, radical nationalist history refers to a left-wing, egalitarian and nationalist perspective typified by Palmer. The Legend of the Nineties focused on the writers who had celebrated the struggles of convicts, gold miners and bush workers for economic justice and political rights. ‘The significance of this dream-time was that it turned the eyes of Australians inward and impelled them to discover themselves and their own country.’ Palmer acknowledged that ‘myth-making’ played a crucial role in any revival of a radical and nationalist consciousness. ‘It has been said that men cannot feel really at home in any environment until they have transformed the natural shapes around them by infusing them with myth.’51 Palmer wanted to exploit the legend to inspire a new and distinctively Australian form of cultural vitality in the reactionary Cold War climate of the mid-1950s, and at a time when consumerism seemed to diminish the strength of the radical heritage. Brian Fitzpatrick had already provided radical nationalism with analytical depth in his studies of Australian economic and working life and a critical interrogation of empire relations. By focusing on the class relations and forms of structural injustice that historians such as Crawford and Hancock had tended to downplay, Fitzgerald argued that Australians were not quite masters of their own lives. It has been said that the ‘old left’ historians whose work came to prominence in the post-Second World War years ‘discovered that cultural tradition as young men in uniform’.52 A journalist who was unable to secure an academic position because of his left-wing politics and drinking problems, Fitzpatrick provided texts that reflected a blend of Marxism (hitherto virtually unknown in Australian historiography) and radical nationalism. Fitzpatrick poured out a range of books across the war years – British Imperialism and Australia (1939), A Short History of the Australian Labor Movement (1940), The British Empire in Australia (1941), and The Australian People (1946) – that would influence subsequent generations of economic and labour historians.53 Fitzpatrick was the first historian to place the working class at the centre of the national story, rather than to cue its appearance in necessary but incidental roles. There was a touch of romanticism in Fitzpatrick’s analysis: in The Australian Commonwealth (1956) he described how the working class contributed its laconic traits to national life in an aversion to unnecessary conversation – most subjects are ‘hardly worth talking about’ – and a reluctance to make heroes: ‘The Australian people made heroes of none, and raised no idols, except perhaps an outlaw, Ned Kelly, and Carbine, a horse.’54 Robin Gollan, one of a new post-war generation of Marxist historians, was amongst those who acknowledged Fitzpatrick’s influence.55 Gollan’s 1960 Radical and Working Class Politics took up the theme of the labour movement’s intervention in national life, and Labor’s emergence as ‘the party of Australian nationalism’, turning away from socialist internationalism to embrace White Australia through immigration restriction and a strong defence policy within the British Empire.56 Manning Clark also recognised Fitzpatrick’s pioneering work.57 Yet in 1954

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Clark described Fitzpatrick as a ‘disappointed radical’ lamenting the apparent and mystifying collapse of the Labor Party from a pure force ‘working for the regeneration of mankind’ in the 1890s into a machine concerned only with the capture of political power. Clark scoffed, ‘this makes most of the histories of Labor read rather like the stories of fallen women.’ A history at once more coolly rigorous and understanding of human nature was required.58 In the same year that Palmer published The Legend of the Nineties Manning Clark challenged the assumptions upon which it was based. In a lecture at the Australian National University, Clark declared that Australian history needed to be rewritten, a task specifically required to address ‘the problems and aspiration of this generation’.59 Clark had been a student of Crawford’s at the University of Melbourne, and had won a scholarship to Oxford; unlike Crawford and Hancock, he was demoralised by the experience of class-ridden pre-war Britain. A brief experience of the darkness of Nazi Germany in 1938 intensified his pessimism. In 1946 Crawford invited Clark to begin teaching Australian history at Melbourne – the first attempt to develop systematically its study at a major Australian university – and a spirit of high seriousness pervaded Clark’s efforts to rewrite the national story.60 Between 1946 and 1954 Clark clarified the research domain of Australian history and the parameters of his own project by editing several volumes of primary source documents.61 This process of exploration and reconsideration resulted in a lecture that displayed the intellectual sophistication that Clark brought to his task. ‘Rewriting Australian History’ also set out many of the rhetorical and symbolic devices that Clark would employ in his A History of Australia, devices that would turn from tools of creative revision to totems of his own myth over the course of the six volumes published between 1962 and 1987. Clark not only wished to explain the story of the Australian people: like Ivan Karamazov, Clark wanted ‘to be there when everyone suddenly understands what it has all been for’. Clark was troubled about what Australian historiography had all been for: he declared the liberal ideal ‘bankrupt’, and accused the universities of producing its most persistent defenders.62 A disappointed idealist, Clark seemed unsure of a new path, reaching back to an 1890s sermon by Cardinal Patrick Moran for a metaphor of contemporary disillusionment: ‘in many respects it is an age of ruins’.63 Despite seeking solace in history, Clark declared that in order to address the problems of the new generation historians needed to abandon ‘the comforters of the past’.64 They had to jettison Hancock’s ridicule of Australian mediocrity and a belief in Europe as ‘the creative centre’. Historians had to explore the tension between ‘the Catholic and Protestant view of the world’, as revealed in Australian history. They had to abandon Wood’s liberal romanticism of the convicts, the ‘great majority’ of whom were professional criminals: ‘let us rather examine the habits and values of the criminals’, anticipating not only his own work but the rich field of convict history that would develop in subsequent decades.65 Clark exposed the weaknesses of the radical nationalist

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interpretation: historians had to move beyond an unthinking embrace of ‘the ideal of mateship’, and locate it as a phenomenon of a specific set of historical circumstances – nineteenth-century bush life – and recognise that ‘the conditions to which belief in mateship was a response have almost entirely disappeared.’ Mateship had also helped produce the White Australia policy and an insular nationalism. To address the problems of a new generation, Australian history had to be written by ‘someone who had something to say about human nature’, and who could strike on ‘some great theme to lighten our darkness’.66 Clark’s analysis was praised for initiating a ‘counter-revolution in Australian historiography’; Clark certainly cast himself in a prophetic role.67 Unlike the previously published single volume short histories, the sheer scale of Clark’s work asserted that Australian history was worthy of epic scrutiny. Clark’s innovation was dramatically signalled in epigrams from Nietzsche and Dostoevsky that introduced the first volume of his history, which examined the clash of Catholicism and Protestantism in a new land, in turn faced with the Enlightenment’s challenge to faith, and following these tensions at work in the dilemmas of individual and collective experience.68 These themes set his history on a different level from what had come before and the work of his contemporaries. The national story Clark told seemed for a time to represent something more than the nation, elevating both his history and the Australian experience. The mateship stories of radical nationalism found their most coherent and persuasive statement in Russel Ward’s The Australian Legend, a work which in its sophistication challenged Clark’s critique. Published in 1958, The Australian Legend traced the development of the nineteenth-century bushworker from its convict origins. Like Fitzpatrick and Gollan, Ward’s work blended Marxism with nationalism, stimulated by a desire to reassert the role of bushworkers in forging a uniquely Australian identity. Ward conceded that he cultivated a myth, but one that he argued intensely expressed the actual experience of Australians, and a myth which held values that should endure: According to the myth the ‘typical Australian’ is a practical man, rough and ready in his manners and quick to decry any appearance of affectation in others. He is a great improvisor, ever willing to have a go at anything . . . He is a fiercely independent person who hates officiousness and authority, especially when these qualities are embodied in military officers and policemen. Yet he is very hospitable and above all, will stick to his mates through thick and thin, even if he thinks they may be in the wrong.69 One can hear the echo of Bean’s celebration of the digger and the dread social levelling that Hancock identified in mateship. Inglis has observed that ‘historians have put mateship at the centre of national experience’.70 Ward reasserted the value of a myth for a changing Australian nation: ‘though some shearers are now said to drive to their work in wireless-equipped motor-cars,

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the influence of the “noble bushman” on Australian life and literature is still strong.’71 Ward’s reassertion was largely accepted on its own terms. Despite the occasional note of scepticism, by the 1960s there had been no serious interrogation of the meaning of mateship as a form of either masculine or national identity.

The New Left and the gendering of the Australian legend A decade later, Humphrey McQueen’s A New Britannia (1970) rejected Ward’s mateship myth and the labour movement’s contribution to nation-building. Succumbing to the ‘siren entreaties of bourgeois culture’ Labor betrayed the working class in parliament; the unions timidly resorted to state-sponsored compulsory arbitration instead of pursuing revolutionary action. Embracing White Australia, the labour movement ensured that racism became ‘the most important single component in Australian nationalism’, in a culture that obsequiously clung to its empire ties.72 A New Britannia was a shrill expression of the New Left challenge to established Australian historiography, clearing the ground for a heterogeneous reconsideration of Australian historiography and the interrogation of national myths. Connell and Irving’s Class Structure in Australian History (1980) and Rowse’s Australian Liberalism and National Character (1978) provided two of the most coherent New Left critiques of Australian nationalism; the tone of ‘Old Left’ romanticism was replaced with a critique of class structure and the ‘hegemony’ of the industrial ruling class and prevailing liberal ideology.73 Miriam Dixson’s The Real Matilda (1976) provided a sharp analysis of Australian mateship culture, which had treated women with ‘contempt’ and ‘brutality’. Women had been excluded from the workplace and public life and hence from the national story. Dixson took aim at Ward’s myth of the typical Australian to expose the ‘womanlessness’ and ‘peculiarly limited style of masculinity’ of Australian national identity.74 Like her New Left contemporaries, Dixson’s work had an explicitly political ambition: to challenge the prevailing organisation of Australia’s power structures and institutions, to create ‘a less fiercely competitive society’ that so reflected male aggression. Significantly, this project required not only reformed institutions but a new language: The Real Matilda included ‘a kind of glossary’ to explain the ‘outof-the-way’ concepts that clarified a new understanding of ‘women and identity’, including ‘androgyny’, ‘machismo’ ‘patriarchal society’ and ‘role model’.75 The Real Matilda appeared as the Whitlam Labor government was cast from office in November 1975 by the edict of the Governor-General, ushering in seven years of conservative rule; although the principle of equal pay for women was established in the mid-1970s, signalling a gradual reversal in the policies and cultural practices that had denied the citizenship of women since Federation, the achievement of a less fiercely competitive society remained unfulfilled.

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Despite the assaults from McQueen and Dixson, several important studies of Australian national identity returned to Ward’s work and the noble bushworker myth, indicating the legend’s enduring hold on the popular imagination and the narrative strategies of historians considering Australian national identity. Richard White’s Inventing Australia (1981) reflected New Left influences, but also posed a more self-conscious and critical perspective of national identity. White argued that Ward had stressed the nationalist element of the bushworker myth while marginalising its significance as a tool for ‘romanticising imperial expansion’, and as ‘a symbol of escape from urban, industrial civilisation’.76 Anticipating the thesis advanced by Benedict Anderson’s influential Imagined Communities, White asserted that ‘[t]here is no real Australia waiting to be uncovered. A national identity is an invention.’ The historian must look to the inventors of the various forms of national identity cultivated since white settlement, and ask ‘what their function is, whose creation they are, and whose interest they serve’.77 The writers and artists of the 1890s had propagated the bush legend as an escape from Australia’s rapidly urbanising culture; Palmer and Ward tried to revive this cause fifty years later. By that time the experience of the Second World War and disastrous Nazi fantasies of a master race had ‘helped discredit the whole idea of a national type’. White argued that the ‘quiet’ post-war replacement of White Australia with multiculturalism, built on successive waves of post-war immigration, had created a more mature and restrained sense of national identity.78 White wrote at a time of relative optimism about the possibilities of a multicultural Australia, when the potential disturbances of the ‘new economic orthodoxy’ of globalising capital were not fully apparent; by the turn of the century these pressures had made their presence felt.79 In The Imaginary Australian (1999), Miriam Dixson argued that the rejection of Ward’s Australian legend had gone too far – at least in fomenting an ‘unwarranted’ self-loathing of ‘Anglo-Celtic Australia’. At a time when civic ‘fragmentation’ – unemployment, family pressures, crime, drugs – threatened societies worldwide, ‘the Anglo-Celtic aspects of Australian life function as a vital cohesive centre’. In a searching analysis unusual in the historiography of Australian nationalism, Dixson took up Anderson’s argument and the international debate on nationalism to resolve these present dilemmas. Dixson argued that a more realistic and assured sense of national identity had to be drawn from Australian history, to find a way between the past quest for homogeneous ethnic integrity and the emptiness of internationalism.80 Where The New Matilda stressed the marginalisation of women in the national story, The Imaginary Australian interrogated the ‘complex and ambiguous’ and indeed ‘collusive’ role of women, symbolised in the feminised idealisation of the nation.81 The critical rethinking of national identity will not only be achieved by broad analysis. The contributors to The Australian Legend and Its Discontents (2000) explored the legend’s diverse meanings, and perhaps none more cogently than Linzi Murrie in ‘the Australian Legend and Australian Men’. Bringing a perspective of Cultural Studies and ‘masculinity politics’ to his analysis,

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Murrie made explicit the gender codes implicit and unexamined in much of the previous historiography of Australian mateship, and intensified the focus on the ‘peculiarly limited style of masculinity’ observed by Dixson in The Real Matilda: The Bushman masculinity is distinguished by the centrality of the homosocial as a masculine value. The heroic individualism, so important in representations of other frontier masculinities, is absent here. In its place is the egalitarianism of mateship which functions as a strategy of legitimation within the male homosocial group. The ‘typical Australian’ must not deviate too much from his mates.82 Murrie argues that the mateship of the Australian legend had a dual function in terms of gender relations: by excluding women and marginalised men outside the ‘Australian’, the ‘national’ and the ‘masculine’ and by establishing the peripheral zone of the excluded, the legend ‘authorises masculinity within the group, ensuring that dominant masculine values are reproduced in the male subject.’ Like all good legends it proved adaptable: the bush mateship of the 1890s could be recast for the needs of binding the digger to the requirements of war. Murrie concluded that ‘The Australian legend has been a powerful fiction for constructing and legitimating dominant meanings of “masculine” and “Australian” in Australian culture’, forged through ‘the mythology of mateship’.83 In 1997 the historian Marilyn Lake declared that ‘feminists today are among the most creative interpreters of citizenship.’84 Since the early 1970s the New Left’s call for a more penetrating and analytical history has inspired a range of important revisions in the fields of cultural history, class, convict history and race relations; none have been as vitally significant as the sustained revision of gender relations – not only to clarify the treatment of women and recognise their contribution to Australian national life, but to demonstrate the fundamentally gendered nature of Australian history and national identity. A leading advocate of this intellectual development, Lake has stressed the relationship between the categories of gender, race and class, and the need to explore the expression of these interrelated categories in the development of nationalist consciousness.85 Privileging masculine conceptions of the nation required categorisation of those excluded: Lake claims the Harvester judgement, which established the concept of a fair and reasonable wage for male breadwinners and marginalised women in the workforce, also ‘empowered white manhood’, by entrenching the legal discriminations against indigenous and non-white workers.86 Being forced from the workforce into motherhood roles did not, however, drive women from participation in the nation. As one of the authors of Creating a Nation (1996), the first general history of Australia to assert ‘the agency and creativity of women’, Lake and her collaborators, as Dixson observes, ‘accorded women a central role . . . [as mothers] women were not alienated from, but central to nation building.’87 Creating a Nation followed

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the intervention of women in the private and public spheres of Australian life, and revealed how the concerns and needs of women and children (the latter often also relegated with women to the periphery of the national story), helped shape public policy. Feminist historians such as Lake and Anne Curthoys have been at the forefront of looking out from the imagined boundaries of the nation to better understand its nature and appeal. Lake has argued that the development of Australian national identity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries must be seen as part of a ‘transnational discourse of nation and race’. Lake seeks to locate the development of the idea of the ‘white man’ both as a ‘territorial’ phenomena in Australia, and also in its global context, part of a wider discourse of white identity, particularly with racial ideas circulating in the United States, an exchange stimulated by anxiety about ‘the white man, a figure produced in the relations of colonial rule’, and the dilemmas of a multiracial state.88 Engaging with the recent transnational debates on the nation and its identities, Curthoys has acknowledged the insularity of Australian history and has argued that to understand the nation we must explore the forms of identity constructed around it – such as the notion of diaspora, an enduring sense of identity and cultural links, transported through migration from one nation to another. Exploring the diaspora of the various immigrant groups to Australia charts the relationship between the nation and the wider world, and may return the Australian historian to an interest in ‘British identities and connections’.89 Looking inward remains instructive: Alan Atkinson has reconsidered the history of European settlement in Australia to argue that Australia exhibited a remarkably original political culture from the beginning. Despite its multivolume scale, Atkinson’s study employs a creative and forensic analysis of ‘talk’ and ‘writing’ to offer a positive interpretation of Australian identity which does not perpetuate the traditional marginalisation of women and the indigenous, and which is sensitive to the transnational context of the development of Australian political language.90 The focus of Lake’s and Atkinson’s recent works suggests that interrogating the nature of national identity requires finely-honed studies as well as the sweep of the big picture. Dale Blair’s Dinkum Diggers investigates the national myth at a discrete level of the experiences of the men who served in the First Battalion of the Australian Imperial Force in the First World War. Dinkum Diggers does not present a heroic portrait in the style of Bean, but a picture of predominantly working-class men trying to cope with their extraordinary circumstances and suffering as best they could, and sometimes rather baffled by exaggerated reports of their battlefield conduct. Blair could not find evidence of Ward’s idea that the diggers conformed to an idealised, mateship notion of how they should behave.91 Unless we pursue discrete research into the microhistory of national identity, we will never know how myths of the nation functioned in individual lives, or in the networks of community or institutionalised fraternities such as a military battalion.92

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Black armbands and three cheers? The only way to discover who people actually are is through their expressions, through their symbolic systems . . . ethnography takes an historian to the systematic and public expression of who people are – their rituals, their myths, their symbolic environments.93 In The Death of William Gooch Greg Dening addressed a paradox – that in order to discover who people actually are, we must explore their symbolic systems and find out who they are through their myths. In the 1990s Australian history has been preoccupied with defining the nation’s past and its identity in controversies surrounding the work and opinions of prominent historians, and struggles over the disputed facts of indigenous history – particularly over the extent of frontier violence and dispossession. Macintyre and Clark’s The History Wars (2003) is an account of these polarised and politicised histories. Plotting the fact fights, Macintyre and Clark’s narrative shades into the terrain of myth, as they follow where history has been summoned to serve the symbolic needs of Australian national discourse. Macintyre and Clark note that in the early 1990s Prime Minister Paul Keating and his speechwriter, the historian Don Watson, relied inspirationally on Manning Clark.94 An outspoken public figure in his later years, Clark’s History of Australia was vilified by his own publisher, Peter Ryan, following Clark’s death in 1991, as factually inaccurate propaganda; Manning Clark, Ryan concluded, was a victim of his own myth. It was an ‘epic’ myth of a tragic Australia, struggling for independence from its British origins, that Clark offered his readers: an epic that Watson and Keating embraced.95 Clark helped Watson and Keating conceive a symbolic environment which Labor politics could occupy and expand the moral space of Australian public life through an emotionally charged invocation of significant stories – or myths – from the past. Watson was presented with an unprecedented opportunity to employ the historian’s craft in national politics and invest Keating’s speeches with the resonance of myth, invoking the Australian legend to commemorate the sacrifices of two world wars and the symbolically charged fate of the Unknown Soldier.96 History could also be summoned to destroy what Manning Clark might have described as the ‘comforting’ myths with which white Europeans had obscured their treatment of the indigenous. ‘We committed the murders’, Keating bluntly reminded white Australians in the 1992 Redfern Park speech, as he stood before a stunned and largely indigenous audience. ‘We practiced discrimination and exclusion.’ The High Court of Australia’s 1992 Mabo judgement, which recognised native title and the historic connection of Australia’s indigenous people to the land, would form the basis of ‘righting an historic wrong’.97 Historians had also played a vital role in rethinking the nation’s relationship with its indigenous peoples, and laying the intellectual framework for the Mabo judgement and the Keating government’s response. Rowley and Stanner’s work

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began the task of revision in both historiography and in wider public discourse.98 Henry’s Reynolds’s path-breaking The Other Side of the Frontier (1981) established that aboriginal tribes resisted the European invasion of their lands, and estimated that up to 20 000 aborigines had died in frontier violence; The Law of the Land (1987) documented the legal and political denial of indigenous land rights.99 Reynolds’s work was cited in the High Court judgement in support of the claims made by Eddie Mabo on behalf of the Meriam people. Attwood expressed concern about the role historians should play in redefining national identity in the wake of Mabo; historians had to retain a critical distance from a tendency to ‘essentialise’ aboriginal claims about the past, propagating a ‘delusion’ that the past can be repossessed as ‘it really was’. A ‘new history’ could ‘examine the moments when the ideals and values of both settler Australians and aborigines have been upheld such that all peoples have benefited, and so genuine human progress can be said to be achieved.’100 The moment of optimism about reconciliation between white and black Australia that might be drawn from shaping a new history after Mabo was soon subdued by a revival of conflict and division. Not all Australians conceded that the nation owed a debt of land or even an apology to the nation’s indigenous peoples; and historians played a crucial role in defining a symbolic language of resistance to Labor’s proposals and Keating’s reshaping of the national story. In 1993 historian Geoffrey Blainey lamented the predominating influence of a ‘black armband’ interpretation of Australian historiography, which had ‘assailed’ a previously optimistic tone. Australian historians had once patriotically given ‘three cheers’ to a story of progress. Manning Clark ‘had done much to spread the gloomy view’; multiculturalism, embraced by the Labor Party, preached that ‘much of Australian history was a disgrace’, as a result of mistreatment of aborigines, Chinese and Pacific Islanders. Blainey revealed himself as a pessimistic conservative, observing Australia’s once impressive economic achievements and vibrant democracy threatened by a poor work ethic and a low sense of ‘individual responsibility’ in a ‘rights-mad’ society.101 Since the 1960s Blainey had led the cheer squad with impressive surveys and analysis of successful Australian enterprise – conquering ‘the tyranny of distance’ and charting the relentless expansion of the mining industry.102 Despite The Triumph of the Nomads, which praised aboriginal Australians for exhibiting a kind of European skill in mastering the land, Blainey’s work was essentially a tale of white liberal progress, particularly celebrating the achievements won outside the cities, in rural towns and on the land.103 In 1982 The Blainey View, a nationally broadcast television series and accompanying coffeetable style book popularised his interpretation.104 Two years later Blainey’s cheering turned to dark prophecy. In a speech, appropriately in the regional Victorian town of Warrnambool, Blainey warned that Australian culture was threatened by a rising tide of Asian immigration. Blainey’s revival of the old fears of White Australia stirred great controversy, and Blainey’s work faced the full reaction of a revisionist scholarship that at times belligerently challenged

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his methodology, values and conclusions.105 Blainey’s black armband is a phrase, like the Australian legend, that has produced its own literature and entered national political discourse, embraced by Prime Minister John Howard in his conservative reading of Australian history and his resistance to offering indigenous Australians a formal apology.106 Blainey has been rivalled only by Keith Windschuttle in making the most decisive impact by a historian on the national narrative since Clark and Henry Reynolds. Windschuttle published The Fabrication of Australian History (2002) to challenge the claims about the extent of frontier violence against aborigines made by Reynolds and other historians. Windschuttle accused ‘politicised’ historians of misleading the public with an account of ‘wilful genocide resembling the kind the Nazis perpetuated against the Jews’.107 Analysing the conflicts between white and black Australians in Tasmania between 1803 and 1847, The Fabrication of Australian History claimed that few aborigines had been killed in direct violence with whites. Windschuttle also disputed Reynolds’s claim of 20 000 aborigines killed in frontier violence across Australia.108 Windschuttle argued that he simply sought to identify the true facts of Australia’s frontier history, freed from undue political bias.109 Many historians have rejected Windschuttle’s arguments. Reynolds has responded with a searching critique of Windschuttle’s methodology and aims, arguing that ignoring key evidence, Windschuttle presents aborigines with no concept of patriotism or of possessing land; they were criminals engaging in murder and theft, thus provoking a backlash from white settlers. Windschuttle’s historical interpretation cleared the way, Reynolds asserted, for a highly politicised and sustained assault on the aims of ‘contemporary indigenous politics – land rights, selfdetermination, reparation, even the need for a prime ministerial apology’.110 Despite often trenchant criticism from other historians, Windschuttle’s book sold nearly 6000 copies of a relatively expensive hardcover edition in the two years between 2002 and 2004 – high sales for a work of Australian history in recent years.111 The Australian national narrative is intensely contested. Race and indigenous studies, so often neglected by successive generations of historians until the 1970s, has emerged as a key area of conflict in Australian national identity and historiography. Yet as Curthoys observes, ‘[i]n their increased attention to Aboriginal history, however, it seemed that historians paid a high price, losing their earlier ability to provide apparently unifying national narratives. Popular understandings of the place of Aboriginal history in Australian history remain unsettled and deeply divided.’112 The division is provoked by competing visions of the needs of the present, needs that impel the stories historians choose to tell. Australian historiography has always responded to present needs and conceptions of the nation. Feminist, indigenous or labour histories seek to find in the past inspiration for the political needs of women, the indigenous or the working class in contemporary struggles and to understand their historical experience; often a tale of marginalisation or injustice is uncovered. Blainey

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and Windschuttle uphold a story of predominately white European and liberal progress in Australia, and judged by media attention and book sales it is a narrative that continues to command considerable appeal in the public imagination. Writing history is an act of moral creativity. If the apparently competing versions of the national narrative contain mythological elements, it is because they have been invested by their authors with symbolic meanings and aspirations to elaborate a moral story in service to a shared vision of the nation.

Notes 1. Ernest Scott, A Short History of Australia (London, 1916), p. 340. 2. Stefan Berger with Mark Donovan and Kevin Passmore, ‘Apologias for the Nationstate in Western Europe since 1800’, in Stefan Berger, Mark Donovan and Kevin Passmore, Writing National Histories: Western Europe since 1800 (London, 1999), p. 10. 3. Margaret R. Somers, ‘Deconstructing and Reconstructing Class Formation Theory: Narrativity, Relational Analysis, and Social Theory’, in John R. Hall (ed.), Reworking Class (Cornell, 1997), p. 85. 4. Rebecca Collins, ‘Concealing the Poverty of Traditional Historiography: Myth as Mystification in Historical Discourse’, Rethinking History 7:3 (2003), 341–3. 5. Alun Munslow, Deconstructing History (London, 1997), p. 121. 6. Collins, ‘Concealing the Poverty of Traditional Historiography’, 347–8, 356; Michel Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, in Michel Foucault, Aesthetics: Essential Works, vol. 2 (London, 2001). 7. Alan Atkinson, The Europeans in Australia, vol. 2 (Melbourne, 2004), pp. 17–20, 61. 8. Walter Phillips, ‘John Dunmore Lang’ and Graeme Davison, ‘John West’, in Graeme Davison et al., The Oxford Companion to Australian History (Melbourne, 2001), pp. 379, 683. 9. Stuart Macintyre, ‘The Making of a School’, in R. M. Crawford, Manning Clark and Geoffrey Blainey (eds), Making History (Melbourne, 1985), p. 11. 10. Scott, Short History, pp. 330–2, 336. 11. Stuart Macintyre, ‘Ernest Scott: “My History is a Romance” ’, in Stuart Macintyre and Julian Thomas (eds), The Discovery of Australia, 1890–1939 (Melbourne, 1995), pp. 71–5. 12. Scott, Short History, pp. 336–40. 13. Stuart Macintyre, A History for a Nation: Ernest Scott and the Making of Australian History (Melbourne, 1994), p. 73. 14. Scott, Short History, pp. 184–5. 15. Macintyre ‘Ernest Scott: “My History is a Romance” ’, p. 85. 16. Brian H. Fletcher, ‘History as a Moral Force: George Arnold Wood at Sydney University, 1891–1928’, in Macintyre and Thomas (eds), The Discovery of Australia, pp. 13–14. 17. Ibid., pp. 18–19. 18. Don Garden, ‘Historical Societies’, in Davison et al., The Oxford Companion to Australian History, p. 321. 19. G. A. Wood, ‘Convicts’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society 8:4 (1922), 187, 190, 197. 20. Macintyre, ‘The Making of a School’, pp. 3, 9–12.

Writing the Nation in Australia 123 21. Brian Fletcher, ‘Australian History’, in Barbara Caine et al. (eds), History at Sydney: Centenary Reflections 1891–1991 (Canberra, 1992), p. 162. 22. Macintyre, ‘The Making of a School’, p. 7. 23. R. M. Crawford, The Study of History: a Synoptic View (Melbourne, 1939); Robert Dare, ‘Max Crawford and the Study of History’, in Macintyre and Thomas (eds), The Discovery of Australia, pp. 188–90. 24. R. M. Crawford (ed.), Ourselves and the Pacific (Melbourne, 1941), pp. vi, 221. 25. R. M. Crawford, Australia (London, 1952), p. 166. 26. Ibid., pp. 145, 148. 27. Ibid., p. 153. 28. Ibid., p. 154. 29. The Anzac Book (London, 1916); C. E. W. Bean, Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918 (Sydney, 1921–42); for Bean’s mythic intentions see Martin Ball, ‘Re-reading Bean’s Last Paragraph’, Australian Historical Studies 122 (2003). 30. Crawford, Australia, p. 155. 31. Gregory Melleuish, Cultural Liberalism in Australia (Melbourne, 1995), pp. 118–20. 32. W. K. Hancock, Australia (London, 1930), p. vii. 33. Ibid., p. 68. 34. Ibid., p. 74. 35. Ibid., p. 69. 36. Ibid., p. 77. 37. Ibid., p. 80. 38. Ibid., p. 33. 39. Ibid., p. 82. 40. Edward Shann, An Economic History of Australia (Cambridge, 1930). 41. Hancock, Australia, pp. 83, 89. 42. Ibid., pp. 89, 102. 43. Ibid., pp. 127–8, 140. 44. Melleuish, Cultural Liberalism in Australia, p. 122. 45. Tim Rowse, Australian Liberalism and National Character (Melbourne, 1978), p. 89. 46. Ibid., pp. 80–1. 47. Melleuish, Cultural Liberalism in Australia, pp. 123–6. 48. Hancock, Australia, p. 67. 49. Stuart Macintyre, ‘“Full of Hits and Misses”: a Reappraisal of Hancock’s Australia’, in D. A. Low (ed.), Keith Hancock: the Legacies of an Historian (Melbourne, 2001), pp. 36–8. 50. Melleuish, Cultural Liberalism in Australia, p. 117. 51. Vance Palmer, The Legend of the Nineties (Cambridge, 1954), pp. 52, 172. 52. Stuart Macintyre, ‘Old Left’, in Davison et al., Oxford Companion to Australian History p. 482. 53. Brian Fitzpatrick, British Imperialism and Australia, 1783–1833 (Sydney, 1939); A Short History of the Australian Labor Movement (Melbourne, 1940); The British Empire in Australia, 1834–1939 (Melbourne, 1941); and The Australian People, 1788–1945 (Melbourne, 1946). For Fitzpatrick and the development of Australian labour history see Stephen Garton, ‘What Have We Done? Labour History, Social History, Cultural History’, in Terry Irving (ed.), Challenges to Labour History (Sydney, 1994), pp. 42–62. 54. Brian Fitzpatrick, The Australian Commonwealth (Melbourne, 1956), pp. 28, 209. 55. Robin Gollan, Revolutionaries and Reformists (Sydney, 1975), pp. 190–1. 56. Robin Gollan, Radical and Working Class Politics (Melbourne, 1960), p. 196. 57. Manning Clark, The Quest for Grace (Melbourne, 1990) pp. 176–7.

124 Writing the Nation 58. Manning Clark, ‘Rewriting Australian History’, in Manning Clark, Occasional Writings and Speeches (Melbourne, 1980), pp. 14–15. 59. Ibid., p. 4. 60. Crawford et al. (eds), Making History, pp. 57–8, 61. 61. C. M. H. Clark, Select Documents in Australian History, vol. 1, 1788–1850 (Sydney, 1950), vol. 2, 1851–1900 (Sydney, 1955). 62. Clark, ‘Rewriting Australian History’, pp. 18–19. 63. Ibid., p. 7. 64. Ibid., p. 4. 65. Ibid., p. 10; see Marian Quartly, ‘Convict History’, in Davison et al., Oxford Companion to Australian History, p. 154. 66. Ibid., pp. 15–17, 19. 67. Peter Coleman, ‘Introduction: the New Australia’, in Peter Coleman (ed.), Australian Civilisation (Melbourne, 1962), p. 6. 68. C. M. H. Clark, A History of Australia, vol. 1, From the Earliest Times to the Age of Macquarie (Melbourne, 1962). 69. Russel Ward, The Australian Legend (Melbourne, 1958). 70. Ken Inglis, ‘Mateship’, in Davison et al., Oxford Companion to Australian History, p. 420. 71. Ward, The Australian Legend, p. 13. 72. Humphrey McQueen, A New Britannia (Melbourne, 1970), pp. 42, 51, 220, 233–6. 73. Rowse, Australian Liberalism and National Character; R.W. Connell and T. H. Irving, Class Structure in Australian History (Melbourne, 1980). 74. Miriam Dixson, The Real Matilda (Melbourne, 1976), pp. 12, 24. 75. Ibid., pp. 230, 233. 76. Richard White, Inventing Australia (Sydney, 1981), p. 103. 77. Ibid., p. viii; Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London, 1983). 78. White, Inventing Australia, pp. 157, 169–70. 79. Ibid., p. 171. 80. Miriam Dixson, The Imaginary Australian (Sydney, 1999), pp. 2–3, ch. 6. 81. Ibid., pp. 56–62. 82. Linzi Murrie, ‘The Australian Legend and Australian Men’, in Richard Nile (ed.), The Australian Legend and Its Discontents (St Lucia, 2000), p. 90. 83. Ibid., pp. 91–2. 84. Marilyn Lake, ‘Feminists Creating Citizens’, in Wayne Hudson and Geoffrey Bolton (eds), Creating Australia (Sydney, 1997). 85. Marilyn Lake, ‘Mission Impossible: How Men Gave Birth to the Australian Nation – Nationalism, Gender and Other Seminal Acts’, Gender & History 4:3 (1992). 86. Marilyn Lake, ‘On Being a White Man, Australia, circa 1900’, in Hsu-Ming Teo and Richard White (eds), Cultural History in Australia (Sydney, 2003), p. 109. 87. Dixson, The Imaginary Australian, p. 59; Patricia Grimshaw, Marilyn Lake, Ann McGrath and Marian Quartly (eds), Creating a Nation (Melbourne, 1996). 88. Marilyn Lake, ‘White Man’s Country, the Trans-National History of a National Project’, Australian Historical Studies 122 (2003), 354, 360. 89. Anne Curthoys, ‘We’ve Just Started Making National Histories, and You Want Us to Stop Already?’, in Antoinette Burton (ed.), After the Imperial Turn: Thinking With and Through the Nation (Durham, 2003), pp. 85–6. 90. Alan Atkinson, The Europeans in Australia, 2 vols (Oxford, 1997); see also Alan Atkinson, The Commonwealth of Speech: an Argument about Australia’s Past, Present and Future (Melbourne, 2002).

Writing the Nation in Australia 125 91. Dale Blair, Dinkum Diggers (Melbourne, 2001), pp. 192–3. 92. Giovanni Levi, ‘On Microhistory’, in Peter Burke (ed.), New Perspectives on Historical Writing (Cambridge, 1991). 93. Greg Dening, The Death of William Gooch (Melbourne, 1995), p. 157. 94. Stuart Macintyre and Anna Clark, The History Wars (Melbourne, 2004), p. 242; see also pp. 123–5. 95. Peter Craven, ‘The Ryan Affair’, and J. S. Ryan, ‘A History of Australia as Epic’, in Carl Bridge (ed.), Manning Clark: Essays on his Place in History (Melbourne, 1994). 96. Mark Ryan (ed.), Advancing Australia: the Speeches of Paul Keating, Prime Minister (Sydney, 1995), pp. 279, 285, 287. 97. Ryan, Advancing Australia, pp. 227, 232; Don Watson, Recollections of a Bleeding Heart: a Portrait of Paul Keating PM (Sydney, 2002), pp. 288–91. 98. C. D. Rowley, The Destruction of Aboriginal Society (Canberra, 1970); W. E. H. Stanner, After the Dreaming (Sydney, 1969). 99. Henry Reynolds, The Other Side of the Frontier (Melbourne, 1981); The Law of the Land (Melbourne, 1987). 100. Bain Attwood, ‘The Past as Future: Aborigines, Australia and the (Dis)course of History’, in Bain Attwood (ed.), In the Age of Mabo (Sydney, 1996), pp. xxxvii–xxxviii. 101. Geoffrey Blainey, ‘Drawing Up a Balance Sheet of Our History’, Quadrant, July–August (1993), p. 10. 102. Geoffrey Blainey, The Rush That Never Ended (Melbourne, 1964); The Tyranny of Distance (Melbourne, 1966). 103. Geoffrey Blainey, The Triumph of the Nomads (Melbourne, 1975). 104. Geoffrey Blainey, The Blainey View (Melbourne, 1982). 105. Macintyre and Clark, The History Wars, ch. 5; Deborah Gare et al., The Fuss That Never Ended (Melbourne, 2003). 106. Graeme Davison, The Use and Abuse of Australian History (Sydney, 2000), pp. 16–17; Dixson, The Imaginary Australian, p. 13; Gare, The Fuss That Never Ended, pp. 104–5; Macintyre and Clark, The History Wars, pp. 128–32. 107. Keith Windschuttle, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, vol. 1, Van Diemen’s Land, 1803–1847 (Sydney, 2002), p. 2. 108. Keith Windschuttle, ‘The Myths of Frontier Massacres in Australian History, Part II: the Fabrication of the Aboriginal Death Toll’, Quadrant, November (2000). 109. Windschuttle, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, p. 402. 110. Henry Reynolds, ‘Terra Nullius Reborn’, in Robert Manne (ed.), Whitewash: On Keith Windschuttle’s Fabrication of Aboriginal History (Melbourne, 2003), pp. 115, 135; see also Macintyre and Clark, The History Wars, pp. 161–70. 111. Information supplied by Keith Windschuttle to the author, 13 September 2004. 112. Anne Curthoys, ‘Aboriginal History’, in Davison, Oxford Companion to Australian History, p. 5.

6 Between Myth and History: the Construction of a National Past in Modern East Asia Q. Edward Wang

The advance of modern historiography not only benefited from an augmented interest in historical veracity, which necessitated the advent of scientific method, but it also drew on persistent attempts at imagining, discovering and inventing a past for fostering nationalism. The East Asian experiment with modern historiography, which occurred from the late nineteenth century, was no exception. To be sure, in East Asia, especially in China where historical study had boasted a long tradition since the dawn of its civilisation, attempts to re-envisage a past had been seen before, though usually for a different purpose. For example, during the Song period of the eleventh century, when China proper witnessed a revival of classical culture, the literati class, known in the West as the neo-Confucians, demonstrated an unprecedented enthusiasm for political participation. In their effort to moralise the government, they invoked the memory of the ‘Three Dynasties’ (sandai) in China’s high antiquity and idealised the lives under these reigns as the paragon of all societies.1 The neo-Confucian movement in Song China had a far-reaching influence in East Asia. It reshaped, with notable time difference, intellectual development across China, Korea and Japan. The neo-Confucian ideal that the literati ought to play a leadership role in politics and society foregrounded the use of history writing as an important means to either attack or ascertain the legitimacy of political power. But its practice could also erode China’s stature as the leader in the region and evoke a nascent nationalist feeling among China’s neighbours. In seventeenth-century Korea, for example, the Korean literati, mostly of the Confucian persuasion, challenged China’s stature as the leading Confucian state, as China had been overrun and ruled by the Manchus after the fall of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644). They instead proposed that Korea be the cultural centre of Confucianism, or Sojunghwa (Little China).2 This proto-nationalist sentiment also appeared in Tokugawa Japan (1600–1868), where we saw a golden age for the development and influence of neo-Confucianism. But this golden age also spawned many schools, of which the National Learning (kokugaku) school was particularly notable. For 126

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the school rejected the universal value and political relevancy of Confucian teaching in Japanese culture and advocated instead the need to promote indigenous Japanese learning.3 This advocacy of the National Learning school was well reflected in Japanese historiography of the Tokugawa period, a period that witnessed a stately effort to compile a voluminous history for Japan, entitled Dai Nihon shi (A History of Great Japan). Tokugawa Mitsukuni (1628–1700), a relative of the ruling Tokugawa family and a devout neo-Confucian, was the patron of the project with which he hoped to extend the history’s role as a tool for moral education and political legitimacy. Though Confucianistic in its design and written in Chinese, the Dai Nihon shi project was launched for the glory of Japan. But despite his ambition, Mitsukuni did not see its completion. In fact, the compilation of the Dai Nihon shi was not completed until 1906. The difficulty and delay were partly because prior to the seventeenth century, or before Tokugawa’s unification, Japan was a deeply divided and fragmented country, plagued by the bloody Warring States period. It was a great challenge for the historians commissioned by Mitsukuni to trace the country’s past with credible sources and settle the controversies surrounding the regal successions and regime changes. In addition, from the eighteenth century an anti-neo-Confucian intellectual trend emerged, first in Qing China (1644–1911) and then in Korea and Japan, that criticised the metaphysical discourses of the neo-Confucians in Song and Ming China and favoured a more empirical reading, understanding and interpreting of the Confucian classics using the methods of philology, phraseology, etymology and even epigraphy. This new intellectual trend gave rise to a historicism that was characterised on the one hand by its restorationist interest in reconstructing the milieu in which the ancient classics were created and received and on the other hand by its empiricist emphasis on seeking truth in factual evidence. The rise of ‘evidential learning’ (kaozhengxue), so named because of its empiricist and historicist agenda, contributed to the decline of neoConfucianism in the scholarly community in eighteenth-century China and Korea, though its full impact was not received in Japan until the nineteenth century.4 This change of intellectual interest and trend in East Asia certainly played a role in causing the interruption and suspension of the Dai Nihon shi project and was ultimately attributable to its belated completion. Emphasising the importance of source verification, evidential learning heightened the vigilance of the historians against unscrupulous sources and slowed the pace of their work. But its influence went beyond that. In a significant way, the ebb and flow of evidential learning influenced the way in which historians in China, Japan and Korea experimented with modern historiography and determined the different characteristics and trajectories of the historiographical development in these three countries from the nineteenth century onwards.

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The creation of national myth and the challenge of academic history Let us begin with Japan. This is, however, not because Japan had initiated the writing of nationalist history before the nineteenth century. As shown before, the writing of Dai Nihon shi, despite its proto-nationalist intention, had basically continued the existing tradition of Confucian historiography. It also was unrelated to the fact that Japan opened to the West before China and Korea. In fact, China was first in experiencing the impact of the Western expansion into the region. In the wake of its defeat in the Opium War (1838–42), the reigning Qing dynasty in China signed the Nanjing Treaty, the very first one between an East Asian regime and the West, according to the rules and laws, not to mention the demands, of the latter. The signing of the treaty led to some important changes in the historical view and world-views of the Chinese, to which we will return below. We begin with Japan because the fall-out of the Opium War was well noted in Japan and influential in changing the Japanese perception of the world. Indeed, though the Qing’s defeat had generated some interest on the part of the Chinese literati in knowing and writing about the Western enemy, these writings seemed to have a better reception in Japan than in China.5 Located on the periphery of the Sinic world, Japan was more sensitive than the Chinese to the expansion of the world at the time. The Chinese, by contrast, remained accustomed to the idea of being the Middle Kingdom under Heaven, and, indeed, the very fact that the Japanese still read Chinese works in their attempt to gain a new knowledge of the expanded world suggests the persistent influence of China in their intellectual life. This Chinese influence would leave a notable imprint in the transformation of modern Japanese historiography as demonstrated in the rise of evidential learning in late Tokugawa Japan. In 1853, Western power finally came to knock on the door of Japan – Commodore Matthew Perry from the United States navy led a small fleet to dock in Tokyo Bay and deliver the US government’s demand for trade. The Japanese response, though not without anxiety, was prudent and cautious; they eventually decided to acquiesce to the US demand. This decision was based on the recognition of the military superiority of the West. This realisation served as impetus for the Japanese to Westernise. One part of such Westernisation was effective nationalisation through the propagation of national history. Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835–1901), in his Outline of a Theory of Civilization (Bunmeiron no gairyaku) (1875), criticised the Confucian tradition of historiography in East Asia for being monarchist and elitist. The biggest fallacy of this monarch-centred moralistic historiography, he argued, was that it failed to present the progress of the nation as a whole and to describe the advancement of public intelligence (minchi). Fukuzawa advocated the writing of national history and deemed it a new direction in historiography. He was

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thus a true precursor in criticising Confucian historiography and advocating nationalist history writing in East Asia.6 Fukuzawa drew on his newly acquired knowledge of modern Western historiography to promote nationalist history. His main source of inspiration came from Henry T. Buckle and François Guizot, two European historians who in the 1860s represented more a scientist than a nationalist school of history writing. Indeed, both Buckle and Guizot focused their writings on the progress of English or European civilisation, rather than that of a nationstate. In fact, Buckle had tried to distance himself from the Rankean influence, or the statist focus in national history writing, and advocated expanding the scope of historical study and adopting a structuralist and positivist approach to historical interpretation.7 Here is not the place to explain why Fukuzawa took a special interest in the works of Buckle and Guizot, which he adopted as basic texts for teaching history and other more general subjects in Keio University, a private institution of higher education founded by him in 1868. Suffice it to say that Fukuzawa seemed aware of the difference between the state-oriented nationalist history (which had been translated and published in Japan prior to the Meiji Restoration) and Buckle and Guizot’s positivist history, though he called it ‘civilisational history’ (bunmeishi).8 His advocacy of the latter suggested that he was interested in seeking a stark contrast to the moralising Confucian tradition in historiography, which he found in the scientific approach to history writing. This interest in scientific history represented an important track of development in the transformation of historical practice not only in Japan, but also in the entire region. At the outset of the book, Fukuzawa openly admitted that of all the cultures in the world, the European culture was the only ‘civilised’ one, whereas Chinese and Japanese cultures were only ‘semi-civilised’ and those indigenous cultures in Africa and Australia were simply ‘barbaric’. These three categories dividing world cultures and peoples were not his invention; rather it was a commonly held belief advanced by certain Europeans in the nineteenth century, to which some travellers from Asia, such as Fukuzawa himself, might have been exposed.9 But Fukuzawa’s admission was unprecedented in East Asia, for it not only showed his interest in and admiration for Western civilisation, but also fundamentally altered the traditional order of the Sinic world, in which China had been regarded as the undisputed world leader. In 1885 Fukuzawa went a step further; he published an essay, openly arguing that it was imperative for Japan to ‘depart from Asia’ (datsu A), or to ¯ ). leave the Sinic world, and to join the civilised Western world (nyu¯ O Fukuzawa’s advocacy of ‘civilisational history’ resonated well in early Meiji Japan, where the interest in Westernisation was robust. He had several noted followers, among them Taguchi Ukichi (1855–1905). Taguchi was well known for his experiment with the writing of ‘civilisational history’. During 1877 and 1882, Taguchi published the influential A Short History of Japanese Civilization (Nihon kaika sho-shi). It represented the first ‘modern’ attempt at

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national history because the author offered an expanded description of the evolution of Japan’s past, and made an effort to cover its cultural and societal development rather than simply delineating the imperial succession. Several years later, Taguchi also attempted to extend the same approach to the writing of Chinese history by publishing A Short History of Chinese Civilization (Shina kaika sho-shi), though this time he was less successful.10 Despite the interest Fukuzawa and Taguchi had aroused in Western approaches to historical writing, historical writing in Meiji Japan remained a state enterprise, extending the tradition of official historiography in East Asia. Fukuzawa and his followers, though influential, were dubbed ‘journalist historians’ and represented a different track of development in modern Japanese historiography. The other track, needless to say, was that of official historical writing.11 The new Meiji government, in spite of its many new policies aiming to emulate and extend the Western institutions, followed the traditional ideas and practice in historiography. In 1869, the second year after its establishment, the government decreed in the name of the emperor that it was to compile a history for the nation, though the decree, judging by its wording, was really intended to renew the tradition of dynastic historiography and reiterate the Confucian view of history as a moral and political guide.12 Its more practical purpose was to legitimate and extol the restoration of power in the emperor family through the Meiji Restoration. A Historiography Office (Shu ¯ shikan) thus was established in the government, for which a group of scholars, who were almost exclusively schooled in Chinese teaching, were assembled, among them Shigeno Yasutsugu (1827–1910), Kume Kunitake (1839–1931) and Hoshino Hisashi (1839–1971). Their task was to collect, criticise and verify sources for compiling, in Chinese, a long chronicle, entitled Dai Nihon hennenshi (A Chronicle History of Great Japan). This was a standard procedure in writing dynastic history established long before in Tang China (618–907).13 And its title also reminds us of Tokugawa Mitsukuni’s unfinished project on Dai Nihon shi. Indeed, if the Dai Nihon shi was introduced to extol and tout the accomplishment of the Tokugawa shogunate in unifying the land and ushering it into a new historical era, the Dai Nihon hennenshi was basically pursuing a similar goal. The only difference was that these were for two different eras, one ruled by a shogun family regent for the imperial house whereas the other was ruled, at least in name, by the imperial family itself. The Meiji leaders, of course, hoped to emphasise this difference, or the coming of the new historical era, because it was essential to its legitimacy in overthrowing the Tokugawa shogunate and restoring the emperor. But they desired more. By returning power to the emperor, they emphasised, they had glorified a unique Japanese political tradition because unlike other countries, especially China for which they now showed contempt, the Japanese royal family was not only of a divine origin – the first emperor, the Jinmu, was a ¯ mikami – but it had also ruled Japan descendant of Sun Goddess Amaterasu O

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continuously for two millennia. China, by contrast, was overrun several times by foreign peoples. This Bansei ikkei (lit. one pedigree of ten thousand generations) political legacy was in fact unseen anywhere in the world. Thus, in addition to the creation myth, which was associated with the age of gods (kamiyo/jindai) and characteristic of the polytheistic belief, modern Japanese leaders created a myth about the origin of government in Japan. This new myth was used to further legitimise its rule, strengthen the loyalty of the Japanese people for their emperor, and boost their pride and confidence for their country.14 To implement it, the government took control of the compilation and publication of history textbooks in schools of different levels and of various kinds. It either commissioned authors to compile them or vetted and authorised those written privately. It was thus little wonder that almost all the history textbooks published during the 1870 and 1880s, except those written by those influenced by Fukuzawa and Taguchi’s ‘civilisational history’ and published unofficially, began with the age of gods and proceeded continuously with regnal successions till the Meiji reign.15 The historians in the Historiography Office understood the need for heightening national confidence through history writing and education. Shigeno Tasutsugu, for example, offered his consultation to one of the history textbooks compiled at the time, appearing unconcerned about the description of the age of gods and the Jinmu Emperor as the vaunted progenitor of the Japanese ruling family. After all, these descriptions drew from Kojiki (records of ancient matters) and Nihon shoki (chronicles of Japan), two of the earliest surviving historical works highly valued by Japanese historians for many generations.16 But insofar as his own work at the Office was concerned, Shigeno began to seek some change. As mentioned earlier, evidential learning reached the peak of its influence in nineteenth-century Japan, in spite of its decline in China during the same period. Shigeno, along with Kume Kunitake and Hoshino Hisashi, had been exposed to the influence of evidential learning in their Chinese training. They took a strong interest, stronger than, for example, that of their colleagues in the Office, such as Kawada Tsuyoshi, a neo-Confucian, in source collection and criticism. Kawada, by comparison, was more concerned with extracting moral/political lessons from the past to provide aid in government. This was an age-old interest not only pursued by Tokugawa Mitsukuni in the seventeenth century but also exemplified by Sima Guang’s (1019–86) Zizhi tongjian (A Comprehensive Mirror for Aid in Government) in Song China. There was thus tension in the Office, which only ended in 1882 after Kawada’s departure.17 Shigeno’s evidential interest in historical study led him to adopt a critical attitude towards the veracity of the historical sources available to him. In fact, he was so preoccupied with his empirical interest in source criticism that he thought to substitute it for moral education and political censure as the primary goal of historical study. To this end, he turned to Western historiography. To his pleasant surprise, Shigeno found, by reading Augustus Mounsey’s

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The Satsuma Rebellion: an Episode of Modern Japanese History (1879), that Western historians seemed more concerned about narrating historical events than expounding moral precepts and political ideals in their works.18 This impression prompted him to seek more knowledge of the development of Western historiography. Through the help of a certain Japanese diplomat in London, the Historiography Office commissioned George G. Zerffi (1820–92), an exiled Hungarian diplomat and a self-made historian in London, to write a history of Western historiography. Zerffi finished the book, entitled The Science of History, in 1879, of which one-third of its copies (100 out of 300) were shipped to Japan, though the Office members were unable to read its complete translation until 1887. Weak on the rise of modern scientific historiography in the West, The Science of History seemed to have failed in its expected role of helping to make historical study in Japan more scientific. However, its brief yet positive mention of Rankean historiography as a scientific model was nevertheless well noted. As a result, Ludwig Riess (1861–1928), a distant disciple of Ranke’s, was brought to Tokyo University to become the university’s first professor in history. After the Historiography Office was moved from the government to the university in 1888, Shigeno Yasutsugu, Kume Kunitake and Hoshino Hisashi also became professors of history. Though they were not working primarily in the same History Department, together with Riess, Shigeno, Kume and Hoshino founded the Japanese Historical Association and published the Journal of History (Shigaku zasshi) in 1889. Thus historical study in Japan embarked on the course of professionalisation, following the German/Rankean model.19 Integrating their evidential interest in source verification with the Rankean agenda of ‘objective history’, which figured centrally and emphatically in Riess’s teaching in Japan,20 Shigeno, Kume and Hoshino set out to establish scientific history in Japan. This scientific history was not as motivated by the positivist belief as we saw in Fukuzawa and Taguchi’s ‘civilisational history’, but was more identified with the Rankean emphasis on Quellenkritik and politics. Indeed, though their task remained the same after the relocation of their office, Shigeno Yasutsugu and his colleagues were quite serious about their academic commitment to the pursuit of truth in history and the Rankean ideal of ‘objective historiography’. In his inaugural speech as the president of the Japanese Historical Association in 1889, Shigeno chose to talk about what he considered an imperative task for the historian at his time to uphold an unbiased stance in dealing with controversies over historical events and personnel, and in winnowing out credible historical sources.21 His colleague, Kume Kunitake, went further; he proclaimed in 1891 that ‘nowadays everyone is aware of the error of viewing history as a record of rewarding the good and punishing the bad.’22 Though their Dai Nihon hennen shi was supposed to continue where the Dai Nihon shi had left off, Shigeno and his comrades virtually turned their project into examining critically the sources used by the latter.

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In other words, though they were civil servants, Shigeno, Kume and Hoshino pursued a task of historical study different from the one the government had assigned them.23 And in no time, they paid a high price for this deviation. In conducting his source criticism, Shigeno became more and more suspicious about the veracity of Kojima Takanori, a renowned historical figure who had allegedly inspired Emperor Go Daigo (c. 1318–39) to pursue the restoration of his throne. Shigeno’s critical analysis led him to conclude that Kojima was non-existent, but was fabricated by a same-named Shinto priest for the sake of vanity. Kume, Shigeno’s young and more radical colleague, again went further. He extended Shigeno’s criticism and challenged the validity of the Taiheiki (records of grand pacification), a historical work on which the Kojima story was based. Another colleague, Hoshino, focused his study on the age of gods, from which he ventured a theory that the supposedly sacred Japanese royal family might actually have originated and immigrated from Korea.24 All these studies led to conclusions that unintentionally went against the government’s expectations in establishing the Historiography Office and its supposed role in promoting national pride and esteem. Instead of expounding and elucidating the national myths, it was instrumental in debunking them. More specifically, Shigeno’s challenge to the existence of Kojima Takanori shed doubts on the credibility of the legend of Emperor Go Daigo’s restoration of power, the very example the Meiji government had aspired to emulate. If Shigeno’s discovery was to hold, it would strike at the core of Meiji legitimacy. Hoshino’s theory was equally devastating; it tarnished the sanctity of Japan’s imperial house by casting doubt on its allegedly divine origin. Because of his critical spirit and ruthless attack on fabrications and fallacies in Japanese history, Shigeno was ridiculed as ‘Dr Obliteration’. Kume’s iconoclastic inclinations actually brought to an end his university career and, indirectly, finished off the Dai Nihon hennen shi project. In 1891 he published an article in the Journal of History, entitled ‘Shinto is an Ancient Custom of Heaven Worship’. It precipitated strong opposition from the general public, especially from the Shinto believers and priests, because Kume, by relegating the origin of Shintoism to a quasi-religious activity of nature worship, decoupled the sacred tie of the Japanese royal family with Shintoism.25 By revealing the historicity of Shintoism as a common religious belief, it not only affected the livelihood of Shinto priests in Meiji Japan, but also questioned the uniqueness of Japanese national culture, grounded crucially in the indigenousness of Shintoism, pitched by the Meiji government in their nation-building project. In response to the public outcry, the government acted swiftly to dismiss Kume. Taguchi Ukichi came forward to defend him, and the principle of academic freedom, but to no avail. A few years later, Shigeno Yasutsugu was also forcibly retired. Kume Kunitake’s dismissal from the university and his public retraction of his position on Shintoism were a setback not only for his career but also the

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entire cause of scientific history writing in modern Japan, for the situation regarding academic freedom and integrity would worsen in the years to come.26 There were, to be sure, some notable changes with regard to the history of Japan’s antiquity. Thanks to several successful archaeological digs, initiated by foreign scholars, the Japanese began to associate their remote past more with such ancient cultures as Yayoi and Jo¯ mon than with the age of gods. From the 1890s the age of gods received a substantial reduction in coverage in most history textbooks. But they still mostly began with Emperor Jinmu and continued their effort to expand on Japan’s national myth that the land had been ruled uninterruptedly by a single royal house from a distant past to the present. In other words, the stature of Japan’s imperium remained inviolable. In fact, the cachet of Emperor Meiji gained a tremendous boost by the country’s successful military aggressions against its neighbours from the 1890s; all of which were launched in his name and honour.

The lore of the Yellow Emperor and the invention of tradition If Japan’s military success was a delight for Emperor Meiji, it was a plight for China, for China was among the defeated. Yet China’s modern woes had begun several decades earlier, and were inflicted first by the West. In confronting the Western incursion, Chinese historians searched in the past for possible resources. But before they could succeed in doing so, they also needed first to comprehend the present, or to assess the significance of the emergence and expansion of the capitalist West. That is, before a new historical view could be constructed, there had to be a new world-view. In contrast to the past experiences, in which China’s pains were caused by its nomadic neighbours from the north, this time China was confronting a challenger from afar, and via the South China Sea. It forced the Chinese to open their eyes to worlds beyond and outside Asia. This posted an unprecedented challenge to their traditional tianxia (all under heaven) belief in perceiving the world. After the West made its presence felt in Asia, especially after Western merchants began trading opium in China, leading Chinese intellectuals, such as Gong Zizhen (1792–1841) and Wei Yuan (1794–1857), soon realised that something must be done in order to contain the detrimental influence of the West. They called for political reform and argued for its need by drawing on the adroit interpretation of Confucianism by the New Text School. Wei, who documented China’s defeat by the West in the Opium War of 1840, advised that his compatriots ‘learn about the barbarians’ knack in order to rein them in’. Open-minded as he was at his time, Wei maintained his belief that China remained the cultural centre in the world, superior to its challenger. But Wei also looked beyond the centre. His seminal work, the Illustrated Treatise of the Sea Kingdoms (Haiguo Tuzhi), was one of the earliest descriptions of the West and the world that ever appeared in East Asia. It was also a popular text in

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Japan and Korea, offering much desired knowledge about the West for the Japanese and Koreans.27 In the ensuing decades after its publication, the Chinese continued to expand their world-view. But prior to the turn of the twentieth century, their world-view remained China-centred and stubbornly monistic, refusing to forsake the tianxia idea and perceive the world as a community of nations. As nationalism quickly took root in such isolated lands as Japan, it was much slower in coming to a colossal empire like China, where the people were accustomed to the idea of living ‘centrally’ under heaven. But all this was about to change, and the change seemed inexorable. Having refused to acknowledge the strength, if not superiority, of the Western world for several decades, the Chinese literati seemed finally ready to embrace the newly changed world in the aftermath of the Qing dynasty’s shattering defeat by Japan in 1895. To most of them, even the conservative ones, the shame brought by the defeat was both unthinkable and unbearable because Japan for centuries had been an earnest student of Chinese civilisation. While differing in their opinions about how to reckon with Japan as a new power in Asia, they all agreed that Japan’s success lay in its effective national formation, after the Western model. Hence, the Chinese began to make similar attempts to promote nationalism, though their approaches varied noticeably. For the revolutionaries, led by Sun Yat-sen (1866–1925), a successful Chinese nation would require the elimination of the alien Qing dynasty founded by the Manchus. The reformers, headed by Kang Youwei (1858–1927) and Liang Qichao (1873–1929), preferred a constitutional monarchy which would, needless to say, retain the rule of the Manchus. The conservatives, with Zhang Zhidong (1837–1909) as their exponent, were high-ranking officials at the Qing court; they wanted not only to maintain Manchu rule, but also to refute and mitigate any serious attempts at shaking the foundations of the time-honoured dynastic political system. Despite the difference, ironically, all their ideas and actions were inspired by their Japanese counterparts. Zhang Zhidong, for example, helped reform China’s educational system by following the Japanese model. Chinese students thus flocked to Japanese schools to receive modern education and prepare themselves for a role, a job, in the new system.28 In promoting political reform for the Qing dynasty, Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao cited Japan as an example where they also took refuge after their reform was brought to an abrupt end by the conservative forces. In waging their cause, the revolutionaries used Japan as its base and the Chinese students studying there became its vanguard. In a word, while the differences were quite visible, these movements represented the upsurge of Chinese nationalism in the wake of the SinoJapanese war of 1895.29 Thus the conservatives, the reformers and the revolutionaries shared a common sentiment that there was an emerging need to adjust their worldview and acknowledge the coming of modernity. After the reformers lost their cause in a coup d’état, the conservatives abolished all the programmes

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introduced by their opponents, but retained the modern-type national university. In the early years of the twentieth century, the Qing court went on with the educational reform initiated by the reformers a decade earlier, establishing ‘new’ schools nationwide and at all levels. In response to the demand for textbooks for these ‘new’ schools, Chinese students, who had studied in and returned from Japan, translated a number of Japanese texts, or wrote their own by plagiarising the ideas and style of Japanese textbook writers.30 From the perspective of historiography, China’s reform in the nineteenth century was launched in a cultural milieu different from that of Japan. As mentioned earlier, evidential learning helped engender the empirical interest among Japanese historians in their experiment with modern historiography. It also led them to discover Rankean historiography. But in China, whence it had originated, evidential learning had declined by the end of the eighteenth century. In its place emerged the New Text School, a form of Confucian learning known for its ingenious and liberal, albeit occasionally intuitive and arbitrary, interpretation of the Confucian tenets. Leading intellectuals through the nineteenth century, ranging from Gong Zizhen and Wei Yuan to Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao, were all followers of the New Text School. Facing the challenges to their country associated with the Western presence in Asia, they all realised the need for new adjustment. Yet almost without exception, they also seemed to agree, drawing on the method of the New Text School, that what they ought to do was to revisit the tradition of Confucian learning, and search in it for ideas compatible with those from the West. In other words, they proposed to reinterpret China’s past for the sake of the present, but failed to see the need to also subject it to a critical overhaul. Their approach therefore differed markedly from that of their Japanese counterparts. Kang Youwei’s reinterpretation of Confucius from the perspective of evolutionism was a salient example. Beginning in the 1880s he published a series of works, presenting a new image of Confucius as a forward-looking reformer, rather than a nostalgic conservative traditionally known for his admiration for the ancient sage-kings. Kang also posited that Confucius had anticipated the idea of progress, or evolutionism, and used the ‘three-age’ (sanshi) theory, advanced by a New Text scholar in the past, to elucidate his finding. Kang’s radical reinterpretation of Confucianism amounted to a gallant attempt to support his advocacy of political reform at the Qing court and justify its compelling need. His aim was not only to save the court, but also to save China from the foreign bullies.31 To this end, he created a myth about Confucius being a reformer and came out to defend the relevance of Confucian teaching in modern China. As the most informed intellectual figure in the country who at one time also had access to the corridors of power, Kang did not show much interest in Western scientific culture, nor did he attempt to adopt it as a model for the study of Chinese culture and history. Nonetheless, Kang Youwei’s reinterpretation of Confucianism addressed the need to adapt the Chinese cultural tradition to the task of nation-building.

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This served as inspiration to a group of young scholars, who returned from Japan to found the National Essence Journal (Guocui xuebao), which was first published in Shanghai in 1905. As its title suggests, the journal was aimed at identifying the ‘national essence’, a term coined in Japan a decade earlier, though its meaning was not agreed upon by the journal’s contributors. What they agreed upon seemed to be two things. One was the need for a cultural revival to deal with China’s modern woes and the other was a historical approach for such a project. By promoting the cause of cultural revival, the journal rejected the Confucian tradition and urged its readers and compatriots to search instead in China’s high antiquity for models to follow in the present. Deng Shi (1877–1951), for example, called for the Chinese equivalent of the European Renaissance and Enlightenment to usher in the modern age in China. The revival of ‘ancient learning’ required a new perspective on China’s past. Many history essays appeared in the National Essence Journal, of which Huang Jie’s (1873–1935) Yellow History (Huangshi) was of great significance, for it attempted to write the first national history of China and used the colour yellow as a symbol for Han China.32 By referring to the Chinese people as a yellow people, Huang showed his familiarity with modern racist theories in the West.33 But Huang might also have drawn upon traditional resources, for in imperial China, yellow had also been the favourite colour for centuries. The Yellow River in north China, for example, had long been regarded as the mother river of Chinese civilisation. Chinese emperors also liked to don themselves with yellow gowns and decorate their palace roofs with golden tiles. In so far as history was concerned, the colour yellow was important because it reminded people of the Yellow Emperor (Huangdi), a legendary figure in China’s high antiquity. Thus, to entitle his history the Yellow History, Huang Jie intended not only to trace the evolution of Chinese history, an idea publicised by Kang Youwei, but also to establish the Yellow Emperor as the common ancestor of the modern Chinese people. In promoting the ancestor-worship of the Yellow Emperor, Huang Jie was not alone, nor was his idea entirely original.34 In fact, in identifying the Yellow Emperor as the ancestor of the Chinese, Huang and like-minded historians built on an age-old mythical tradition. As early as the Warring States period of the fourth century BCE the Yellow Emperor was already revered as the earliest ruler in ancient times.35 But to worship the Yellow Emperor as the ancestor of the modern Han Chinese was clearly an invention of the early twentieth century. It was manufactured by a group of Chinese nationalists, to which Huang Jie belonged.36 At the time when Huang Jie embarked on the writing of the Yellow History, national history had gradually become the favourite genre among Chinese historians; there were many others who joined in the effort to rewrite the history of China from the nationalist perspective. Liang Qichao, one of the leading reformers of the 1890s, was a pioneer who turned to historical study

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in his exile in Japan in the 1900s. In the New Citizen Journal (Xinmin congbao), of which he was both editor and publisher, Liang serialised a seminal text entitled New Historiography (Xinshixue) in 1902, in which he vilified the tradition of dynastic historiography and stressed the need for national history writing modelled on the West. This could be seen as his farewell to the New Text School of Confucianism.37 Moreover, Liang’s change was emblematic. Huang Jie’s writing of the Yellow History could actually be viewed as a response to Liang’s clarion call for a ‘new historiography’, or a ‘historiographical revolution’ (Shijie gemeing). In the same year as Huang serialised his Yellow History in the National Essence Journal, Xia Zengyou (1863–1921), a friend of Liang’s, was commissioned by the Commercial Press, a leading publisher in textbook publication, to write a new history of ancient China from the nationalist, evolutionary perspective. Xia and Huang’s works were just two examples of national histories that appeared in China at the time. Although neither completed their works – Huang only covered China’s high antiquity and Xia ended his work in the Tang dynasty period – their works exerted a significant influence in prefiguring the development of modern Chinese historiography. Many history texts and textbooks appeared in the early 1900s which not only described Chinese history from the same evolutionary perspective, but also delineated the evolution from the days of the Yellow Emperor to the days of their own. Thus, for the generation who received their primary and secondary education in the 1900s and the 1910s, it was taken for granted that Chinese national history followed an evolutionary trajectory, beginning with the Yellow Emperor in China’s high antiquity. This understanding bore a striking resemblance to the Japanese reverence for Emperor Jinmu as the progenitor of the unbroken line of royal succession. Yet different from the earlier generation, Chinese historians of the early twentieth century also attempted to supply a scientific basis for the writing of national history, as their European and Japanese counterparts had done a few decades earlier.38 That is, they were then not only interested in whether or not history is evolutionary, but also in how it evolves and progresses. In order to describe and document historical evolution, they needed scientific method, which they found, interestingly, also in evolutionism. At this juncture entered Hu Shi (1891–1962), a young professor at Peking University who had done doctoral work at Columbia University in the United States and returned to teach in China in 1917. Hu argued that evolutionism was not only a widely held idea, but also a useful method. More importantly, this method was not merely seen in the West, but also in China’s past, especially in the evidential learning of the Qing dynasty. In common parlance, Hu called it the ‘genetic method’, or the ‘method of grandparents and grandchildren’. To demonstrate its existence and usefulness in China, Hu Shi had described in his dissertation the evolution of ancient Chinese learning from a methodological perspective. He now also used it to

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trace and verify the authorship of a few popular novels of the late imperial period. Thus evidential learning was revived this time by Hu Shi and his followers. Armed with his Western academic training, Hu Shi also merged evidential learning with modern Western science, something we observed earlier in Shigeno Yasutsugu, albeit less overtly. Following John Dewey (1859–1952) with whom he studied at Columbia, Hu Shi defined the method of evidential research in pragmatist philosophy, emphasising that it was a scientific method because it accentuates experimentation and verification.39 What Hu Shi mostly wanted to examine and verify at the time was the Chinese literary tradition on which the evolution of Chinese national history rested. He thus initiated the research project on National Studies at Peking University and hired his former student Gu Jiegang (1893–1980) as his assistant. Equally versed as Hu Shi in classical education, Gu Jiegang was asked to sift the literary tradition and winnow authentic texts from forged and falsified ones. What Hu Shi and Gu Jiegang hoped to accomplish in the National Studies was something similar and comparable to what the Renaissance humanists had achieved in Europe.40 In the 1930s when Hu Shi recalled the significance of the National Studies, he indeed compared it with the Renaissance. In the 1940s when Hu became China’s ambassador to the United States, he was widely regarded as the ‘father of the Chinese renaissance’.41 But if we compare Hu Shi’s use of the word ‘renaissance’ in the 1920s and Deng Shi’s use of it in the 1900s, we can see striking differences. For Deng Shi, ‘renaissance’ meant a constructive effort to revive certain forms of ancient learning, including the myth of the Yellow Emperor, on which a modern Chinese nation rested. Hu Shi and Gu Jiegang’s effort, by comparison, was also constructive, for they attempted to base the study of Chinese history and culture on a scientific, reliable basis, which meant on scrutinised historical sources. But to achieve this goal, they had to adopt a critical attitude towards past traditions and apply rigid scientific method in the National Studies. Hu Shi and Gu Jiegang’s critical, iconoclastic view of the Chinese tradition was consonant with the zeitgeist, for the National Studies were launched in the heyday of the May Fourth/New Culture Movement, a cultural movement characterised by its open, enthusiastic embracement of modern lifestyle and Western cultures.42 But the issues and questions they introduced in the National Studies were not immune to controversies. In his critical examination of historical sources, Gu Jiegang became increasingly suspicious about the authenticity and validity of those concerning China’s high antiquity. Buoyed by the iconoclastic spirit of the May Fourth Movement, he ventured a bold hypothesis that the ideal reigns of the ‘Three Dynasties’ of ancient time, vaunted and romanticised by past historians and literati, were not a real, but a trumped-up story.43 Gu’s position was supported by his mentor Hu Shi because Hu believed that a bold hypothesis represents the very first step in scientific research and investigation. If one accepted Gu’s

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hypothesis, in which he claimed that Yu, a historical figure who supposedly founded the Xia dynasty, the first dynasty of the ‘Three Dynasties’, was nothing but a totemic animal, then one would also reject China’s creation myth centring around the Yellow Emperor. Indeed, Gu later extended his ‘doubting antiquity’ (yigu) research to the Yellow Emperor. In an essay, he shed serious doubts on the authenticity of the Yellow Emperor, who had preceded Yu in conventional royal lineage of ancient China.44 Gu Jiegang’s ‘doubting antiquity’ research activities helped launch the ‘Discussions of Ancient History’, a cause cêlèbre in the National Studies movement. This discussion caught the public attention because it dealt with the key issue concerning the foundation of Chinese national history. The Discussions of Ancient History (Gushibian) journal, of which Gu was the first editor, received and published a number of essays, some of which supported Gu’s position and others rejected and even condemned it. By the end of the 1930s when the journal finally came to an end, it had published seven big volumes. The popularity of the journal demonstrated the intensity of the discussion and the interest it had generated among its readers and contributors; the latter included not only historians but also various people of different walks of life, while an academic project, the ‘Discussion of Ancient History’, precipitated heated public discussion and debates. After all, if Gu Jiegang’s hypothesis was true, then the course of Chinese history would begin around the age of Confucius in the fifth century BCE, rather than a much more distant past under the ideal reigns of the Yellow Emperor and the ‘Three Dynasties’. This change would, consequently, have shortened the longevity of Chinese civilisation from five thousand years to two thousand years. A decade or so earlier, when Huang Jie and like-minded nationalist historians embarked on the writing of national history, they had glorified the longevity of Chinese history, deeming it unique to China, just as their Japanese counterparts exalted the continuous royal succession as a unique trait of Japanese civilisation. Thus, Gu Jiegang’s doubts of China’s high antiquity amounted to an assault on the national pride of the Chinese people. Yet Gu Jiegang, as well as Hu Shi, was also a national historian.45 They introduced the National Studies project because they felt it necessary to present Chinese history on a scientific basis. This was perceived to be an urgent task because if they failed promptly to execute the project, then foreign historians would do it for them. Especially Japanese historians were writing Chinese history, or the ‘history of the East’ (T o¯ yo¯ shi) in a scientific fashion.46 Though Gu Jiegang’s exposure to scientific history was rather limited, consisting in a few years at Peking University when he studied with Hu Shi and other Western trained professors, he felt it improper to accept a period of history as real and valid without contemporary and credible documentation. In working as a research assistant for Hu Shi, Gu discovered that almost all the sources pertaining to the existence of the Yellow Emperor and his reign had appeared at least a few centuries after (which explained why Sima Qian

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expressed his doubts on the veracity of the Yellow Emperor). In addition, he found that before him, there had been scholars who had not only questioned the validity of some of the sources, but also revealed the unscrupulous process in which those texts were falsified or forged.47 In other words, as Hu Shi suggested all along, in historical study, Chinese scholars of past ages had expressed a similar interest to their Western counterparts in ascertaining the validity of historical sources. Moreover, they had developed sophisticated methods and techniques that were comparable to those advocated by scientists and historians in the West. Thus, the National Studies was translated into an endeavour to rediscover and represent ‘modern’ elements in the Chinese tradition; or in Hu Shi’s own words, to ‘[re]organize the national past and recreate [its] civilization’ (zhengli guogu, zaizao wenming).48 By emphasising the compatible interest in textual criticism between Chinese and Western historians Hu Shi showed his compatriots that scientific history, or modern science as a whole, was not foreign to Chinese culture. In so doing, he facilitated the transfer of scientific history from the West to China. Inspired by his work, Liang Qichao produced another significant, yet different work in modern Chinese historiography – Methods for the Study of Chinese History (Zhongguo lishi yanjiufa), which was first published in the 1920s. Liang conducted a systematic comparison of the methodological progress, especially in textual criticism, made by historians in the modern West and in traditional China. Thus, the National Studies represented a new development of national history writing in modern China. It offered a new historical vision that blended high enthusiasm for modern science and renewed confidence in the scientific competence of traditional Chinese culture. To paraphrase Hu Shi’s statement quoted above, by [re]organising the national past, he and his associates uncovered a scientific tradition in China’s past, which supported their attempt to rewrite Chinese history and recreate Chinese civilisation with a scientific approach.49

National history: imagined or scientific? In advancing scientific history in China, Hu Shi and Gu Jiegang thus debunked the myth about the longevity of Chinese history and denounced the worship of the ancient ‘Three Dynasties’. Their action was similar to the attempt made by Shigeno Yasutsugu, Kume Kunitake and Hoshino Hisashi in Japan several decades earlier, though the Chinese project seemed to have proceeded more smoothly and successfully. At the turn of the twentieth century, Japanese scholars continued their critical examination of sources in history, although they shifted their attention to Chinese and Korean history. This was understandable if we consider the Kume Kunitake incident and the risk of challenging the national myth in Japanese history sanctioned by the government. Indeed, from the 1890s, following Japan’s military expansion in Asia, there had emerged a considerable interest among Japanese historians in

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the histories of their neighbouring countries. A new field of T o¯ yo¯ shi, or history of the East, had emerged, as we noted earlier. It included the histories of China, Korea, Mongolia, Tibet and some central Asian regions.50 This new historical interest reflected Japan’s ambition in its foreign policy and a new stance on Japan’s relations with the West. Having zealously followed the West for two decades in the early Meiji era, Japan in the mid-1890s had seen a new interest in ‘returning’ to the East. This ‘East’ included Japan’s own cultural tradition and the (Confucian) cultural tradition of East Asia in general. This trend of conservatism resulted in the Imperial Rescript on Education, decreed by Emperor Meiji in 1890. The Rescript emphasised the need to enhance moral instruction against the vigorous Westernisation in Japanese society; the latter was now deemed to be eroding the traditional values of political loyalty, patriotism and filial piety.51 As Confucian values were now at the core of Japanese education, interest in Chinese history also grew in academia and figured centrally in the study of T o¯ yo¯ shi. Shiratori Kurakichi (1865–1942) and Naito ¯ Konan (1886–1934), founding chairs of To¯ yo¯ shi at Tokyo University and Kyoto University respectively, were both historians of China. However, unlike their predecessors, such as Shigeno Yasutsugu, Shiratori and Naito ¯ , they held China in contempt. As early as 1909, Shiratori, a student of Riess and Shigeno, conducted a critical examination of the historical sources regarding China’s antiquity and questioned the historical veracity of the sage-kings in the ‘Three Dynasties’. His work anticipated Gu Jiegang’s in the National Studies movement of the 1920s, though there has hitherto been no direct evidence whether Gu’s scepticism of China’s high antiquity was inspired by the research of Shiratori and other Japanese scholars.52 Armed with his scientific training, Shiratori questioned the validity of the sage-king lore in ancient China. But his scientific history, like that of his predecessors in the West, also served an overt political purpose. In fact, Shiratori’s research on the origins of East Asian people and history not only coincided with but was also facilitated by Japan’s military expansion in Korea and Manchuria. Thanks to Japan’s expansion in Manchuria and its construction of the South Manchurian Railway, Shiratori and other scholars were able to conduct archaeological excavations in northern Korea, Manchuria and northern China. It was no coincidence that in 1894, one year before Japan assumed its dominant position in Korea, Shiratori had raised questions about the historical veracity of Tan’gun, a mythical figure in ancient Korea whom the Koreans traditionally described as their ancestral founder. Shiratori’s attack on the legend of Tan’gun paved the way for him and his compatriots to put forward a theory that Koreans and Japanese shared a common origin in Manchuria. This theory, the Nissen do¯ soron, not only provided a scholarly justification for Japan’s annexation of Korea, it also extended and portended Japan’s ambition in and later claim on Manchuria, a territory of China’s Qing dynasty.53

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If Shiratori’s assault on Tan’gun laid the cornerstone for the integration of Korean history in T o¯ yo¯ shi, or a blueprint for the expansion of the Empire of Japan in Asia, his Korean counterparts considered the existence of Tan’gun the bedrock of their nationalist construction of Korean history. As China’s close neighbour in both geographical and cultural terms, Korea watched attentively China’s defeats by Western powers and experienced intimately the impact of the crumbling of the Sinic world from the mid-nineteenth century. There were Koreans who sought to introduce new ideas from the West and struggled to come out of the shadow of the Confucian tradition in order to embrace the new world. During the second half of the nineteenth century, there emerged three new schools of thought: (1) Thought of Guarding the ˘ng ch’o ˘ksa); (2) Enlightenment Orthodoxy and Refuting the Heterodoxy (Wijo Thought (kaehua sasang); and (3) Tonghak Thought (Thought of Eastern Learning). These schools addressed the need to seek a new position for Korea in view of China’s decline and the West’s presence in East Asia. Thus, they represented, more or less, embryonic forms of Korean nationalism.54 But the differences among them were also quite visible. The first school was advocated by the yangban aristocratic class and known for its insistence on adhering to neo-Confucian teaching. Its position was reminiscent of the earlier attempt by Korean neo-Confucian scholars to establish Confucian orthodoxy in Korea, or ‘little China’, in the aftermath of the fall of the Ming dynasty in seventeenth-century China. The Tonghak Thought represented the attempt to establish a new religion in order to thwart the advance of Christianity and Western culture in general. It drew on such traditional resources as egalitarianism and attracted a large following among peasants. The Enlightenment Thought, by comparison, was most receptive to Western influence. It not only sought for a more independent Korea, shedding off its traditional tributary bond to China, but also hoped to introduce a constitutional government modelled on that of Western countries, as shown in the short-lived Kapsin Coup of 1884. Having rallied peasants behind them, the Tonghak nationalists made a valiant attempt to establish an independent nation in Korea in 1894, only to trigger the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War. After Japan defeated China in the war, it gained a free hand in colonising Korea. The colonisation entered a new phase in 1910, when Japan ended the rule of the Cho ˘ son dynasty (1392–1910) and annexed Korea.55 But Japan’s annexation of Korea did not put an end to the cause of Korean nationalism. Instead, Korean nationalism grew from the 1910s. Indeed, if the outcome of the Sino-Japanese War changed radically the mindset of the Chinese literati, it exerted a similar impact in Korea. For example, after his failed attempt at establishing a constitutional monarchy, Liang Qichao fled to Japan where he, by following in the footsteps of such Japanese social thinkers as Fukuzawa Yukichi, edited and published newspapers, advocating and propagating, inter alia, nationalism and social Darwinism. Liang’s many essays published at the time not only aroused nationalist stirrings in

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China, but also exerted great influence in Korea, in the so-called Patriotic Enlightenment Movement taking place at the time.56 Obviously, Japan’s quick ascent to power was achieved at the expense of China and Korea – one defeated and the other colonised. Both realised by then that the only remedy to their sticky situation was nationalism. Since Korea was a Japanese colony until 1945, the Koreans were unable to formally launch the nation-building project as their Japanese and Chinese counterparts had done. But in so far as their interest in national history was concerned, it was comparable to that of their neighbours. Indeed, since the Japanese T o¯ yo¯ scholars had set out to rewrite the history of Korea for the Koreans on a supposedly scientific basis, Korean historians were anxious and eager to combat and refute the interpretations advanced by their Japanese counterparts about their history. This in fact remained an ongoing and compelling task facing the historians in both North and South Korea after the Second World War.57 This difference is shown clearly in the persistent interest and continual study of Tan’gun among Korean historians. After Shiratori Kurakichi offered his interpretation that Tan’gun was but a fabricated figure, Sin Ch’aeho (1880–1936), who was later hailed as ‘the father of modern Korean historiography’, came up with his refusal in the 1930s. While the first mention of Tan’gun appeared in the Samguk yusa (Memorabilia of the Three Kingdoms), a collection of tales and stories by a Buddhist monk in the thirteenth century, Sin used it to construct the history of ancient Korea surrounding the Tan’gun myth.58 Not only did Sin Ch’aeho promote Tan’gun in order to claim a five thousand-year history for Korea, he also dismissed the Kija (C. Qizi) legend according to which Tan’gun’s throne was succeeded by Kija, a Chinese refugee who fled to Korea during the Shang-Zhou dynastic transition around 1122 BCE. Sin refused to accept that the Chinese influence had been present in Korea’s high antiquity.59 What was interesting was that the Kija legend had been widely accepted during the Cho ˘ son dynasty; from the late fourteenth century, after the Cho ˘ son dynasty established its rule, the legend had been used to legitimise the dynasty’s sovereignty over the peninsula and to strengthen Korea’s historical and cultural ties with Ming China.60 In order to promote Korean nationalism, Sin Ch’aeho felt the need to com˘i) in the Korean tradition of political and bat and cleanse ‘flunkeyism’ (Sadaejuu historical thought. That is, he was not only interested in seeking political independence from Japan’s colonial rule, but he was also hoping to rid Korea of its age-old cultural subordination to China. Many of his contemporaries supported his intention. Ch’oe Namso ˘ n (1890–1957), a wunderkind in modern Korea whose intellectual activities spanned from journalism and poetry to history, was one of them. Second only to Sin Ch’aeho, Ch’oe Namso ˘ n was a major proponent of the hypothesis that the Tan’gun myth revealed the historical origin of an independently developed Korean culture in ancient time.61

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If Korean historians attempted to extend their past into a more remote past in order to claim historical longevity and boost national confidence, the same attempt was made by their counterparts in China. That is, despite Hu Shi and Gu Jiegang’s suspicions, the lore of the Yellow Emperor and the belief in the longevity of Chinese civilisation persisted. Now the question was how to prove and expound it with the scientific approach. This perhaps was what interested Fu Sinian (1896–1950) after he returned from Europe to China in 1926. A classmate of Gu Jiegang’s at Peking University, Fu was also a protégé of Hu Shi’s. After graduation from college, Fu went to Europe to receive a scientific education, first in England and later in Germany, where he watched closely the ‘Discussions of Ancient History’ back in China. Though impressed by Gu Jiegang’s courage and insight, Fu was not totally convinced that the historical veracity of Chinese antiquity could be refuted simply because Gu and others discovered several forged historical texts. Armed by newly acquired scientific knowledge, Fu established China’s first research institute in historical study, the Research Institute of History and Philology. The Institute consisted of three programmes: history, philology and archaeology, which suggested Fu’s ambition to expand the work of the National Studies. By combining history and philology, Fu extended the idea that had characterised modern Rankean historiography and the National Studies in China in making philological study, or source criticism, the basis of historiography. But his interest in archaeology suggested that he wanted to go further than that. Indeed, no sooner had Fu acquired more financial support by merging his Institute with Academia Sinica in 1928 than he assembled an archaeological team to Anyang, or Yinxu (the remains of the Shang dynasty), to conduct an excavation. This excavation was of great historical significance, for the Shang dynasty was the second of the ‘Three Dynasties’ that marked China’s high antiquity. At the turn of twentieth century, a number of oracle bone inscriptions also surfaced in Yinxu, which were identified as the primordial form of the Chinese writing system. The discovery of these oracle bone inscriptions caused great curiosity among the scholars of China’s high antiquity both at home and abroad about the Shang culture. In fact, one of the reasons for Fu Sinian selecting Yinxu for the archaeological dig was that he hoped to find more of those bones and turtle shells. But the outcome of the excavation turned out to be much more than he had expected. It did not lead to finding more oracle bones and turtle shells, but to a novel understanding of Shang civilisation and China’s high antiquity. Having examined the potteries, the tools, the soil and the architectural structure of the site, the archaeological team concluded that Shang culture was not only genuinely existent, but also a highly developed and sophisticated civilisation.62 If the Shang dynasty proved to be real and authentic, what about the Yellow Emperor? Of course, this was the question the excavation was unable to answer at the time. But it at least showed that evidence for China’s high antiquity existed not only in written documents, but also in material

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sources. In view of the newly found ‘hard’ evidence, Hu Shi changed his mind and declared that he was ready to believe, rather than disbelieve, the historical veracity of ancient China. Hu’s change surprised Gu Jiegang, though the latter had also admitted before that his ‘doubting antiquity’ position was not meant to be a conclusion, but rather a call for more research. Unfortunately, when the Institute of History and Philology concluded its excavation in Yinxu, Sino-Japanese relations reached their nadir after Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931. Japan’s ambition and aggression in north China prevented Fu Sinian and his archaeological team from continuing their exploration of Shang civilisation and its relation with the Xia and Zhou dynasties before and after it. Nonetheless, what Fu Sinian had accomplished was already quite impressive in the eyes of his compatriots, for he succeeded in extending the longevity of Chinese history, hence defending China’s national pride. Moreover, he proved it with hard evidence obtained by scientific method.

Contemporary resonances During the Second World War, Japan won military victories over many parts of Asia, defeating not only its Asian neighbours but also British, French and American armies. However, academic historical study at home suffered a major setback. In order to prove their loyalty to the emperor and provide service to the Japanese Empire, many historians betrayed the earlier tradition established by Shigeno Yasutsugu and Kume Kunitake and were eager to expound the sanctity and historical uniqueness of the Japanese imperial house.63 After Japan’s defeat in 1945, all this came to an end. As shown in the first post-war history textbook, Kuni no ayumi (The Nation’s Progress) (1946), the age of gods was for the first time expunged. Japanese history now began with a description of the country’s geography, the birth of civilisations in Asia and elsewhere, and early Japanese cultures and peoples based on archaeological findings. The story about Emperor Jinmu, however, was retained, though it was regarded simply as a myth. This remains the case in most history textbooks used in today’s Japanese schools. In academic circles, Marxism gained currency in post-war Japan, which was shown in the endeavour to construct a national master narrative of history according to the Marxist theory of social development, though it seemed to have centred more on a later period, medieval Japan and its incomplete transition from feudalism to capitalism, and how its fallout bore on the tragic course of Japanese history during the twentieth century.64 After Japan began its large-scale invasion of China in 1937, it quickly occupied many coastal cities of China. As a result, scientific research became impossible to conduct, as Chinese universities and research institutes, including Fu Sinian’s Institute of History and Philology, retreated to the south-west regions. In addition, in the face of Japan’s aggression, many

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scholars were no longer interested in holing up in the research towers. Instead, they either offered public service by taking on positions in the government, or published works to aid their government’s fight with Japan. Among their students and junior colleagues, Marxist historiography became increasingly popular, for it offered seemingly more practical solutions to the national crisis.65 After China’s bitter victory over Japan in 1945, the country was plunged again into civil war. When the war was over in 1949, China changed its colour as the communists took over power. In a word, the war in the 1930s and the revolution in the 1940s generated new enthusiasm for the writing of national history, often for the sake of national salvation and/or the communist revolution. Yet they also disrupted the continual scientific investigation into the historical veracity of the Yellow Emperor and the ‘Three Dynasties’. In the histories written at the time and thereafter, the existence of the ‘Three Dynasties’ was readily accepted, though the interpretation of their historical significance varied. The Yellow Emperor, on the other hand, remained a legendary figure, though the worship of him as the ancestor of the modern Chinese was widely practised in both China and overseas Chinese communities throughout the twentieth century.66 After 1949 when the communists took power in China, more efforts were made, often under the aegis of the government, to promote Marxist historiography modelled on the Soviet Union.67 But Chinese Marxist historiography remained highly nationalistic. During the 1950s and 1960s, five historical debates were launched at the national level, which were eulogised at the time as the given ‘golden flowers’ in the garden of historiography. All of them were intended to help construct a new national history from the Marxist perspective, particularly the discussion on the national formation in ancient China. Contrary to the readily accepted notion that nation-states emerged first in Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Chinese Marxist historians made a deliberate attempt in their debate with Russian historians of China to prove that nations had first appeared in Han China (206 BCE–220 CE). Interestingly, in making their argument, Chinese historians referred at times to the works of Lenin and Stalin, though with a different hermeneutic strategy.68 As their energy was clearly consumed by the discussions on the Han nation and on the development of slavery in China’s antiquity, in an effort to extend the Marxist outline of social development to Chinese history, the interest in the Yellow Emperor myth was consequently relegated and receded in historical circles, attracting only the attention of literary scholars. Interestingly, Korea’s case has been distinctly different from that of China and Japan during the post-war era. As a legacy of the Cold War, Korea remains divided into the North and the South. Despite the divergent political and economic differences and interests, historians on both sides of Korea share the same nationalist belief and have worked side by side in reconstructing Korean history and refuting the interpretation of Japanese historians,

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though variations are discernible. To this end, they revisited the Tan’gun myth, broached by Sin Ch’aeho and Ch’oe Namso ˘ n in the 1920s and 1930s, and made a painstaking attempt to establish its historicity. Thus the Tan’gun myth and its historical veracity remains a focal issue in historical study. Both governments have played a leading role in promoting and guiding historical research and sponsoring archaeological excavations. In 1993, for example, North Korean archaeologists actually claimed that they had successfully located Tan’gun’s tomb and made a historic excavation. Based on this discovery, they pushed Tan’gun’s dates further back to 5011 BCE, hence adding an additional 3000-year history to Korea. While different opinions and interpretations do appear from time to time, Korean historians by and large agree with Sin Ch’aeho’s thesis that Tan’gun was not only historical but also crucial for the reconstruction of ancient Korean history. After all, Sin posited this theory to rebut the Japanese colonial claim that the Koreans had lacked independent spirit and had always been subservient (sadae) to the domination of a great power, such as China in the past. Sin’s historiography represents a glorious tradition in which modern Korean historians take pride and which they hope to emulate and extend. They continue to regard the need for nation-building as a lofty and compelling goal in historical study. To them, as long as Korea remains divided, the nation-building project remains incomplete. Notwithstanding the loftiness of their pursuit, however, the challenge remains quite daunting, for between the Tan’gun myth and the recorded history, which was found in early Chinese records, there was an unaccounted historical discrepancy of several thousand years.69 Thus we can only expect that Korean historians and archaeologists will continue their historiographical attempt at nation-building in the years to come. Before concluding this chapter, we may also want to note an interesting and recent development in China. During the mid-1990s, a new project was being introduced to ascertain not only the existence of the ‘Three Dynasties’ but also the exact chronology of their successions. Entitled the ‘Project on the Determination of the Successions of the Xia, Shang and Zhou Dynasties’ (Xia, Shang, Zhou duandai gongcheng), this was a government-sponsored and interdisciplinary project. According to its leader, Li Xueqin, a research fellow at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and a professor of history at Tsinghua University in Beijing, Song Jian, then the director of the Committee for the Development of Science in the government, was directly involved in promoting the project. Song not only named the project, but also dictated a slogan for its goal, which was ‘Going beyond the Doubting Antiquity [Stage] and Going out of the Ambiguity [about Ancient History]’ (Chaoyue yigu, zouchu mimang). That is, Song hoped that the project, using recent archaeological discoveries over the past few decades, including some ancient texts written on bamboo slips, could determine the historical veracity of the ‘Three Dynasties’ and provide indisputable evidence for the longevity of Chinese civilisation. This was a goal that would promote China’s image as the ‘only’ continuous

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civilisation in the world and generate national pride among the Chinese people. Thus, it was part and parcel of the government policy of recent years in promoting nationalism for legitimising its rule in post-communist China. In 1997, when the project was supposedly making progress in reaching its goal, Li Xueqin published a polemical book, entitled Going out of the Doubting Antiquity Age (Zouchu yigu shidai), which was based on his speeches on many occasions in promoting and publicising the ‘Project on the Determination of the Successions of the Xia, Shang and Zhou Dynasties’.70 As its title suggests, Li’s book expanded on Song Jian’s slogan, adding an overt political message. Moreover, Li declared that since Chinese archaeologists had made new, fruitful discoveries after 1949, it was now the time to overcome Gu Jiegang’s ‘doubting antiquity’ sentiment in studying ancient Chinese history. In other words, he deemed Gu Jiegang’s ‘doubting antiquity’ activity outdated and called for ‘rewriting [Chinese] intellectual history’ (Chongxie xueshushi), which meant rewriting the historiography of ancient Chinese history whereby new interpretations based on new archaeological findings could be recognised.71 Over the past few decades, Li Xueqin has established himself as an expert on ancient Chinese history whose research and publications extend from archaeology, cosmology and geography to etymology, paleography and history. But in leading the project, his willing collaboration with the government in promoting Chinese nationalism and his discernible arrogance towards Gu Jiegang, his senior colleague at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences before Gu’s death in 1980, have also been frowned upon and criticised by many, some of whom are Gu’s former colleagues, disciples and admirers.72 More importantly, as a stupendous project with an astronomical budget, the ‘Project on the Determination of the Successions of the Xia, Shang and Zhou Dynasties’ was given five years until 2000 to achieve completion. Li Xueqin and his colleagues did present their research findings on time, which offered specific chronologies of the Xia, Shang and Zhou dynastic successions. However, their conclusions are far from conclusive. By launching and completing the project, Li hoped that it could demonstrate once and for all that the legends about the Yellow Emperor and other figures in ancient China are a ‘distilled form’ of history, which in essence is verifiable and factual.73 But as it stands now, the Yellow Emperor remains a mythical figure that entertains and piques the curiosity of the modern Chinese about the ancient origins of their culture, history and nation, as does Tan’gun for the modern Koreans.

Notes 1. Yü Ying-shih, Zhu Xi de lishi shijie (The Historical World of Zhu Xi) (Taipei, 2003), 2 vols. Peter Bol’s This Culture of Ours: Intellectual Transitions in T’ang and Sung

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2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8. 9.

10.

China (Stanford, 1993) discusses the significance of the neo-Confucian movement in a historical context. See JaHyun Kim Haboush, ‘Contesting Chinese Time, Nationalizing Temporal Space: Temporal Inscription in Late Chosn Korea’, in Lynn Struve (ed.), Time, Temporality and Imperial Transition: East Asia from Ming to Qing (Honolulu, 2005), pp. 115–41. The term ‘golden age’ was mentioned in Masao Maruyama, Studies in the Intellectual History of Tokugawa Japan, trans. Mikiso Hane (Tokyo, 1974), p. 7. For the resistance of ‘National Learning’ to Chinese culture from a historiographical perspective, see John Brownlee, Japanese Historians and the National Myths, 1600–1945 (Vancouver, 1997), pp. 61–7. Benjamin Elman, From Philosophy to Philology: Intellectual and Social Aspects of Change in Late Imperial China (Los Angeles, 2001, rev. edn); On-cho Ng, ‘A Tension in Ch’ing Thought: “Historicism” in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Chinese Thought’, Journal of the History of Ideas 54:4 (1993), 561–83; Hamaguchi Fujio, Shindai ko ¯ kyogaku no shiso ¯ shi teki kenkyu ¯ (A Study of Intellectual History of Qing Evidential Learning) (Tokyo, 1994); and from a comparative perspective, Q. Edward Wang, ‘The Rise of Modern Historical Consciousness: a Cross-Cultural Comparison of EighteenthCentury East Asia and Europe’, Journal of Ecumenical Studies 15:1–2 (2003), 74–95. During the 1860s and 1870s, Chinese books on the West, authored by Wei Yuan, Xu Jiyu and Wang Tao, became very popular in Japan. See Wang Xiaoqiu, Jindai Zhongri wenhua jiaoliushi (A Modern History of Chinese-Japanese Cultural Exchange) (Beijing, 2000), pp. 33–4. A focused study of Wei Yuan is in Wang Xiangrong, Zhongguo de jindaihua yu Riben (China’s Modernisation and Japan) (Changsha, 1987), pp. 150–5. Fukuzawa Yukichi, An Outline of a Theory of Civilization, trans. David A. Dilworth and G. Cameron Hurst (Tokyo, 1973). For a discussion of its historiographical significance, see Wang Qingjia (Q. Edward Wang), ‘Zhongguo jindai xinshixue de Riben beijing: Qingmo de “shijie geming” he Riben de “wenming shixue” ’(Modern Chinese Historiography and its Japanese Connection: the ‘Historiographical Revolution’ of the Late Qing and the ‘Civilisational History’ in Meiji Japan), Taiwan daxue lishi xuebao (Journal of History, Taiwan University), 32 (2003), 191–236, especially 224–6. About the emphasis on statism in Rankean historiography, see Georg G. Iggers, The German Conception of History: the National Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present (Middle Town, Conn., 1968, rev. edn 1983). On Buckle’s positivist historiography and its difference from Rankean historiography, see Eckhardt Fuchs, Henry Thomas Buckle: Geschichtsschreibung und Positivismus in England und Deutschland (Leipzig, 1994). Sakai Saburo¯ , Nihon seiyo¯ shigaku hattsushi (History of the Development of Western Historiography in Japan) (Tokyo, 1969), pp. 44–7. Guo Songtao, a Chinese diplomat working in London at the time, also recorded in his diary that according to the English media, the East Asian culture was regarded as ‘semi-civilised’ in comparison with the European as ‘civilised’ and Africans and Australians as ‘barbaric’. Guo Songtang riji (Guo Songtao’s Diaries) (Changsha, 1982), vol. 3, p. 439. He was less successful because he failed to expand the scope much beyond the traditional focus on the monarch. See Taguchi Ukichi, Shina kaika sho¯ shi (A Short History of Chinese Civilisation) (Tokyo, 1887), p. 286, which recorded the criticism of his book and Taguchi’s response.

Between Myth and History 151 11. About the two tracks of development in modern Japanese historiography, see Ienaga Saburo¯ , Nihon no kindai shigaku (Modern Japanese Historiography) (Tokyo, 1957), p. 67f. Similar opinions have also been expressed in other standard studies – of modern Japanese historiography, Okubo Toshiaki, Nihon kindai shigaku no seiritsu (The Establishment of Modern Japanese Historiography) (Tokyo, 1986) and Ozawa Eichi, Kindai Nihon shigakushi no kenkyu¯ . Meiji hen (Study of Modern Japanese Historiography: Meiji Period) (Tokyo, 1968) and more recently, Nagahara Keiji, 20 seiki Nihon no rekishigaku (Historical Study in TwentiethCentury Japan) (Tokyo, 2005). 12. For discussions of the decree for establishing the Historiography Office, see Brownlee, Japanese Historians and the National Myths, p. 82 and Margaret Mehl, History and the State in Nineteenth-Century Japan (New York, 1998), p. 19. 13. Denis Twitchett, The Writing of Official History under the T’ang (Cambridge, 1992). 14. Cf. Frank Dikötter with Barry Sautman (eds), The Construction of Racial Identities in China and Japan: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (Honolulu, 1997). 15. Over the past two years, I have done studies of history textbooks in Meiji Japan and Qing China and have discussed in more detail the content of those textbooks in my article ‘Narrating the Progress of the Nation: a Comparative Study of New Style History Textbooks in Modern China and Japan’, presented at an international conference on Chinese historiography at East China Normal University in Shanghai, China in October 2005. In addition to Taguchi Ukichi, Saga Sho¯saku (1853–90) was another author who attempted writing a new style history textbook during the period. But they were exceptions. 16. In 1879, Ijichi Sadaka compiled A Brief History of Japan for Elementary Schools (Sho¯gaku Nihon Shiryaku), whose work was supervised and consulted by Shigeno Yasutsugu. Shigeno apparently did not advise Ijichi to leave out the age of gods (kamiyo/jindai). See Tokiomi Kaigo (ed.), Nihon Kyo¯ kasho taikei: kindai hen (A Great Series of Japanese Textbooks: Modern Period) (Tokyo, 1963), vol. 18, p. 261. 17. Nagahara, 20 seiki Nihon no rekishigaku, pp. 13–16. 18. Brownlee, Japanese Historians and the National Myths, pp. 82–3. 19. Mehl, History and the State in Nineteenth-Century Japan, pp. 93–102. 20. Brownlee, Japanese Historians and the National Myths, pp. 73–80. 21. Shigeno Yasutsugu, ‘Shigaku ni jyu¯ ji suru mono wa sono kokoro shiko¯ shihei nara zaru bekarazu’ (Historians Must Maintain an Unbiased and Objective Mind), Shigakukai zasshi 1 (1889), 1–5. 22. See Brownlee, Japanese Historians and the National Myths, p. 80. 23. Stefan Tanaka has offered an in-depth analysis of the ‘newness’ of Shigeno’s and Kume’s pursuit; see his New Times in Modern Japan (Princeton, 2004), pp. 76–82. 24. Brownlee, Japanese Historians and the National Myths, pp. 86–104. 25. Kume Kunitake, ‘Shinto wa saiten no kozoku’ (Shinto was an Ancient Custom of Heaven Worship), Shigaku zasshi 2:23, 2:24, 2:25 (1891), 1–15, 25–40, 12–24. 26. Nagahara Keiji, 20 seiki Nihon no rekishigaku, pp. 38–40. 27. Wang Xiangrong, Zhongguo de jindaihua yu Riben, pp. 150–5; Shin Yong-ha, Modern Korean History and Nationalism, trans. N.M. Pankaj (Seoul, 2000), pp. 17–18. 28. Huang Fuqing, Qingmo liuri xuesheng (Chinese Students in Japan During the Late Qing) (Taipei, 1975); Saneto¯ Keishu¯ , Chu¯ goku jin nihon ryu¯ gaku shi (A History of Chinese People Studying in Japan) (Tokyo, 1960); Paula Harrell, Sowing the Seeds of Change: Chinese Students, Japanese Teachers, 1895–1905 (Stanford, 1992); Abe Hiroshi, Chu¯ goku no kindai kyo¯iku to Meiji Nihon (Modern Chinese Education and Meiji Japan) (Tokyo, 1990).

152 Writing the Nation 29. Douglas Reynolds, China, 1898–1912: the Xinzheng Revolution and Japan (Cambridge, Mass., 1993). 30. Saneto¯ , Chu¯ goku jin nihon ryu¯ gaku shi, pp. 135–70; Yu Danchu, Aiguo zhuyi yu Zhongguo jindai shixue (Patriotism and Modern Chinese Historiography) (Beijing, 1996), pp. 49–56; Hu Fengxiang and Zhang Wenjian, Zhongguo jindai shixue sichao yu liupai (Trends and Schools in Modern Chinese Historiography) (Shanghai, 1991), pp. 256–71. 31. For a good discussion on Kang Youwei’s fusion of evolutionism and the Confucian ‘three-age’ theory, see Kung-chuan Hsiao, A Modern China and a New World: K’ang Yu-wei, Reformer and Utopian, 1858–1927 (Seattle, 1975). 32. Q. Edward Wang, ‘China’s Search for National History’, in Q. Edward Wang and Georg Iggers (eds), Turning Points in Historiography: a Cross-Cultural Comparison (Rochester, 2002), pp. 185–208. 33. Cf. Frank Dikötter, The Discourse of Race in Modern China (Stanford, 1992); Hyung Il Pai, Constructing ‘Korean’ Origins: a Critical Review of Archaeology, Historiography, and Racial Myth in Korean State-Formation Theories (Cambridge, Mass., 2000) and Rebecca Karl, Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the 20th Century (Durham, 2002). 34. Shen Songqiao, ‘Wo yi woxue jian xuanyuan: Huangdi shenhua yu wanqing de guozu jiangou’ (I Shall Sacrifice My Blood for the Yellow Emperor: the Yellow Emperor Myth and the Nation-State Construction in the Late Qing), Taiwan shehui yanjiu jikan (Social Studies in Taiwan Quarterly) 28 (1997), 1–77. 35. Sima Qian (c. 145–87 BCE) established the ancient regal succession in his Historical Records (Shiji), in which the Yellow Emperor topped the list. But as a responsible historian, Sima also expressed his doubts about the historical veracity of the Yellow Emperor. In addition, though the Yellow Emperor was regarded as the greatest of all ancient rulers, he apparently had a few competitive rivals. Some even pre-dated him according to conventional wisdom. In other words, there was an important difference between being the greatest king in ancient China and being the sole ancestor of the Chinese people. Cf. Wang Mingke, ‘Lun panfu: jindai yanhuang zisun guozu jiangou de gudai jichu’ (The Ancient Foundations of Modern NationBuilding in China: the Case of ‘the Offspring of Yan and Yellow Emperors’), Zhongyang yanjiuyuan lishi yuyan yanjiusuo jikan (Bulletin of the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica) 73:3 (2002), 583–624. 36. Shen, ‘Wo yi woxue jian xuanyuan: Huangdi shenhua yu wanqing de guozu jiangou’. 37. A recent discussion of Liang’s change is found in Jiang Guangxue, Liang Qichao he Zhongguo gudai xueshu de zhongjie (Liang Qichao and the End of Classical Chinese Learning) (Nanjing, 2001), pp. 25–6. 38. Q. Edward Wang, Inventing China through History: the May Fourth Approach to Historiography (Albany, 2001); Georg G. Iggers, Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge (Hanover, NH, 1997) and Brownlee, Japanese Historians and the National Myths. 39. Hu Shi, The Development of the Logical Method in Ancient China (New York, 1963, reprinted) and his ‘Shiyan zhuyi’ (Experimentalism); ‘Du Wei xiansheng yu zhongguo’ (Mr Dewey and China), ‘Qingdai xuezhe de zhixue fangfa’ (Qing Scholars’ Research Methods), in idem., Wenti yu zhuyi (Problems and Isms) (Taipei, 1986). 40. Anthony Grafton, Defenders of the Texts: the Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450–1800 (Cambridge, Mass., 1991).

Between Myth and History 153 41. Hu Shi (Shih), The Chinese Renaissance (New York, rep. 1963, orig. 1934) and Jerome Grieder, Hu Shih and the Chinese Renaissance: Liberalism in the Chinese Revolution, 1917–37 (Cambridge, Mass., 1970). 42. Chow Tse-tsung, The May Fourth Movement: Intellectual Revolution in Modern China (Cambridge, Mass., 1960); Vera Schwarz, The Chinese Enlightenment: Intellectuals and the Legacy of the May Fourth Movement of 1919 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1986) and Wang, Inventing China through History. 43. Gu Jiegang (Ku Chieh-kang), The Autobiography of a Chinese Historian, trans. Arthur Hummel (Leiden, 1931). 44. Gu Jiegang, ‘Huangdi’ (Yellow Emperor), Shilin zashi chubian (Essays in the Forest of History, 1st edition) (Beijing, 1963). 45. Laurence Schneider, Ku Chieh-kang and China’s New History: Nationalism and the Quest for Alternative Traditions (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1971). 46. Stefan Tanaka, Japan’s Orient: Rendering Pasts into History (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1993). 47. Gu, The Autobiography of a Chinese Historian. 48. Wang, Inventing China through History, pp. 51–66, 101–11. 49. Wang, Inventing China through History, passim. 50. Nagahara, 20 seiki Nihon no rekishigaku, p. 43f. And also, Tanaka, Japan’s Orient. 51. Cf. Kenneth Pyle, The New Generation in Meiji Japan: Problems of Cultural Identity, 1885–1895 (Stanford, 1969) and Carol Gluck, Japan’s Modern Myth: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period (Princeton, 1985). 52. See Miyazaki Ichisada, Chu¯ goku ni manabu (My Study of China) (Tokyo, 1998; orig. 1986), p. 295. In her detailed analysis, however, Qian Wanyue has disputed the speculation that Gu Jiegang’s study had been inspired by Japanese scholars, ‘ “Cenglei de zaocheng shuo” yu “jiashang yuanze” ’ (‘The Theory of Gradual Expansion’ and the ‘add-on principle’), in Gu Chao (ed.), Gu Jiegang xueji (Essays on Gu Jiegang’s Scholarship) (Beijing, 2002), pp. 195–223. There are, however, Chinese scholars who recognise Shiratori’s work in the ‘lineage’, or the historiography of ancient Chinese history. See, for example, Tian Xudong, Ershi shiji Zhongguo gushi yanjiu zhuyao sichao gailun (An Introduction to the Main Trends in the Study of Ancient Chinese History in the Twentieth Century) (Beijing, 2003). 53. Pai, Constructing ‘Korean’ Origins, pp. 23–41, 261–2, 279. 54. Shin, Modern Korean History, p. 17f. 55. Peter Duus, The Abacus and the Sword: the Japanese Penetration of Korea, 1895–1910 (Berkeley, 1995). 56. Chizuko T. Allen, ‘Northeast Asia Centered around Korea: Ch’oe Namson’s View of History’, Journal of Asian Studies 49:4 (1990), 787–806, especially 789. 57. Pai, Constructing ‘Korean’ Origins, passim. 58. Sin Ch’aeho eschewed not only Chinese historical works ranging from Sima Qian’s Shiji, Chen Shou’s (233–297) Weizhi (History of the Wei Kingdom) to Fan Ye’s (398–445) Hou Hanshu (History of the Later Han) – all of them contain descriptions of ancient Korea – but also the Samguk sagi (Historical Records of the Three Kingdoms), a text compiled by a Korean scholar in the mid-twelfth century. Sin’s decision to reject these historical works and his preference for the Samguk yusa were based on a position he staked out in 1908 in his Toksa sillon (A New Way of Reading History) that those histories were all written didactically for moral education, a task that was now rendered irrelevant in light of nationalism. Sin reiterated the same argument in Cho ˘sonsa yo ˘n’guch’o (A Draft History of Korean History) in 1925, around the same time he elevated Tan’gun’s status as the founder of ancient

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59. 60. 61.

62.

63. 64. 65.

66. 67.

68. 69.

70. 71. 72. 73.

Korea. According to the Samguk yusa, Tan’gun was the son of a heavenly prince and a she-bear who founded the first Korean state, Ko Choso ˘ n, in 2333 BCE. See Sin, Modern Korean History, pp. 211–12; Allen, ‘Northeast Asia Centered around Korea’, 793–4. Pai, Constructing ‘Korean’ Origins, pp. 64–5. Martina Deuchler, The Confucian Transformation of Korea: a Study of Society and Ideology (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), p. 107f. Despite the effort of Sin Ch’aeho and Ch’oe Namso ˘ n, and that of their followers in more recent years, it remains difficult to discount the Chinese influence in the Korean peninsula from 108 BCE onward in shaping ancient Korean culture. See Gina L. Barnes, State Formation in Korea: Historical and Archaeological Perspectives (Surrey, 2001), p. 8 and Pai, Constructing ‘Korean’ Origins, pp. 127–236. Li Ji, Anyang: a Chronicle of the Discovery, Excavation, and Reconstruction of the Ancient Capital of the Shang Dynasty (Seattle, 1977). Also, Wang Fan-sen, Fu Ssu-nien: a Life in Chinese History and Politics (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 114–20. Brownlee, Japanese Historians and the National Myths, pp. 131–85. Nagahara, 20 seiki Nihon no rekishigaku, pp. 140–68. Q. Edward Wang, ‘Historical Writings in 20th Century China: Methodological Innovation and Ideological Influence’, in Rolf Torstendahl (ed.), An Assessment of 20th Century Historiography (Stockholm, 2000), pp. 43–69. For the rise of Marxist history in China, see Arif Dirlik, Revolution and History: the Origins of Marxist Historiography in China, 1919–1937 (Berkeley, 1978). Shen, ‘Wo yi woxue jian xuanyuan: Huangdi shenhua yu wanqing de guozu jiangou’. Cf. Albert Feuerwerker (ed.), History in Communist China (Cambridge, Mass., 1968) and Q. Edward Wang, ‘Between Marxism and Nationalism: Chinese Historiography and the Soviet Influence, 1949–1963’, Journal of Contemporary China 9 (2000), 95–111. Wang, ‘Between Marxism and Nationalism’. A critical view of current Korean historical scholarship is offered in Pai, Constructing ‘Korean’ Origins; Gi-Wook Shin, ‘Nation, History and the Politics’, in Hyung-il Pai and Timothy R. Tangherlini (eds), Nationalism and the Construction of Korean Identity (Berkeley, 1999), pp. 148–65 and, to a lesser extent, Barnes, State Formation in Korea. Li Xueqin, Zouchu yigu shidai (Going Out the Doubting Antiquity Age) (Shenyang, 1997). Li Xueqin, Chongxie xueshushi (Rewriting Intellectual History) (Shijiazhuang, 2002). Wu Rui (ed.), Gushikao (Examinations of Ancient History) (Haikou, 2003), vols 5 and 9. Li Xueqin, Dangdai xuezhe zixuan wenku: Li Xueqin juan (Self-selected Works of Contemporary Scholars: the Volume of Li Xueqin) (Hefei, 1999).

7 Writing the Nation in India: Communalism and Historiography Radhika Seshan

Communalism has been defined as the ‘belief that because a group of people follow a particular religion, they have, as a result, common social, political and economic interests’.1 The group’s religion forms both the unifying and the identifying force, with everything else being subordinated to it. Crucial to this formation is, of course, the shaping of the ‘other’. As Samuel Huntington puts it, ‘We know who we are only when we know who we are not and often only when we know whom we are against.’2 That is, when it is assumed that all religions are automatically opposed to each other, then, in the process of identifying oneself, all those not belonging to the group have also to be identified. Identity is sharpened in contrast, or in opposition to, something or someone else. When identity is defined in terms of religion, then there is, at some level, the creation of a social order predicated on difference, which is identified in religious terms. In such a construction, historiography becomes very important, for it creates a reality that constantly redefines and reshapes the beliefs. Communalism in India has often been treated as a phenomenon peculiar to India, and depending on one’s point of view, a result of either the Muslim invasions of India, or the period of colonial rule and the divide and rule policy followed by the British in India. The latter’s policy, in turn, is seen as a response to the situation in India, where the British, a minority, sought to rule over the majority by disuniting the latter. What is undeniable is that politicisation of difference is definitely a legacy of the British rule in India. What is equally important is that, in historiography, communalism has often been seen as the sub-continent’s version of nationalism – i.e. that nationalism, being a Western quality, could not be replicated in an Asian context, and so, the version of nationalism that came into being in the subcontinent was necessarily distorted. In other words, nationalism, as it grew in South Asia, led inevitably to partition on communal lines.3 It is undoubtedly a cliché to say that consciousness and contestation of difference are shaped by many factors, political, social and economic. It is equally obvious that writing has an important role to play in the creation 155

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of such consciousness. By ‘writing’, I mean not just the histories that were written of the sub-continent, but also newspaper articles, fiction, poetry and the published speeches and writings of many leaders of the national movement. It is important to remember that many of the leaders of the national movement also wrote history – witness Justice Mahadev Govind Ranade’s Rise of the Maratha Power, published late in the nineteenth century, and Jawaharlal Nehru’s Discovery of India. These histories were in no sense ‘communal’, for these writers made a conscious attempt to write ‘objective’ history. However, unbiased writing of history was not always the end result of the various histories that were written, and the various trajectories of both, the reform movements in the nineteenth century, and the national movement of the twentieth century, tended to create a kind of consciousness that often resulted in the growth of communalism. It must be emphasised that in India, nationalism, the national movement, the creation of a ‘national’ consciousness and writing were often virtually simultaneous activities.4

The beginnings History writing as we know it today is one of the legacies of colonial rule – as Gandhi pointed out, the English ‘have a habit of writing history; they pretend to study the manners and customs of all peoples’.5 British writings on India began in the eighteenth century itself, shortly after they got the grant of the Diwani, the right to collect the revenue of the province of Bengal, in 1765. The terms of the grant left civil and criminal justice in the hands of the Nawab, but affairs concerning revenue were shared between the Nawab and the British. However, the British now began to argue that the Muslim conquest had endangered the ‘life and property of the “Gentoos” ’,6 and it was up to the Company to ‘restore the laws and customs’ of the Hindus. The Nawab’s argument, that law was ‘dictated by customs and traditions as evolved through social acceptance and practice’ was ignored, for acceptance of such an argument would have weakened the Company’s position.7 Hindus were thus, from the beginning, identified as separate. As this separation had to be defined, attempts were made to codify the laws of the Hindus. Orders to this effect were passed in 1773.8 These attempts further underlined the differences, because the ‘Gentoos’ did not have a single system of easily defined laws, unlike the Islamic system (which is based on four sources – the Quran, the Hadis, on consensus of opinion or ijma, and analogy or qiyas). The result of such activities was the publication of A Code of Gentoo Laws, or Ordinations of the Pundits, based on Dara Shukoh’s translation (into Persian) of the Manusmriti, defined as the authoritative text on Hindu law, translated into English by Nathaniel Halhed and published in 1776. This was followed, in short order, by translations of the Bhagavad Gita and the Hitopadesha (by Charles Wilkins, in 1785 and 1787, respectively). In 1784 itself, Sir William Jones, who had arrived the previous year to take up the duties of Chief

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Justice at Calcutta High Court, established the Asiatic Society of Bengal. A prolific writer, he translated, within a short time, the Shakuntala, the Gita Govinda, as well as legal texts like the Al-Sirajiyyah, and the Manavadharmashastra. It is noteworthy that many of these were translated as being legal and religious texts, implying, in some way, that there was no such thing in India as ‘secular’ or civil law. Obviously, this also implied a validation of British rule, which provided justice; it should be remembered that one of the first actions of the first Governor-General of India, Warren Hastings, was to set up courts of judicature. Land revenue settlements followed later. Also important is that the British were guided in their choice of subject by the Brahmans, and so absorbed the world-view of the Brahmans, with their emphasis on purity and pollution, on caste, and the primacy of Sanskrit. It was also from these Brahmans that the belief in an unchanging tradition, passed down through word of mouth, took firm hold on Western imagination and writings. Moving from an unbroken religious tradition, to declaring that the tradition was unbroken because society was unchanging, was only a short step. Naturally, part of this entire construction was the emphasis on religion and society, the isolated village community, and therefore, the lack of a strong political tradition, other than that of despotic monarchy. The eighteenth-century writings showed a fascination for India and things Indian. Researches into philology, which continued into the nineteenth century (one of the best examples of this fascination is, of course, Max Muller), emphasised the links between Sanskrit and Latin, and were a very important aspect of the theories of the Aryan race and the migration of that race from a common starting point. The Aryans in India were further identified as the authors of the Vedas, and so, the antiquity of Indian civilisation was clearly established. Associated with this idea of antiquity was the belief in the ‘unchanging’ nature of Hinduism mentioned above, an aspect that was picked up in later colonial writings to validate British rule as necessary to bring about change in India. Obviously, as philology concentrated on the two languages in which religion was practised, there was a continuing interest in the sacred texts, perhaps best epitomised by Max Muller’s A History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature, published in 1859. This book put forward, in clear terms, the understanding that had gained ground in the West, that Indians were unconcerned with the material world, as their energies and thoughts were focused on the transcendental world. In many ways, the eighteenth-century writings continued an earlier tradition. The construction of what may perhaps be termed the ‘idea of India’ in Western writings is linked to Orientalism, defined as ‘the theory and practice of representing “the Orient” ’. Representations of the Orient were, of course, multiple, but there were (and are) certain underlying commonalities to these multiple representations. The first is that Orientalism began with the construction of two fixed categories of ‘West’ or ‘Occident’ and ‘East’ or ‘Orient’. The second is that of the ‘exotic’ Orient. ‘Exotic’ was a convenient umbrella

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word, including everything from climate to religion, from skin colour to jewellery, from wild animals to oriental despots. The word added to the perception of the ‘other’, for it also evoked memories of past writings and descriptions of the Orient – the lands of wealth, the lands of ‘different’ people (physically shorter, and with multiple skin tones, from yellow through brown to black), and with specific reference to India, a great deal more. Representations of India had been varied and fairly frequent through European history, and there is, throughout, a fascination with the ‘exotic’, which is seen not just in the descriptions of the land and the people, but also in the juxtaposition of many disparate things.9 The theme of the lack of structure, and the presence of chaos, was one that was picked up by the later colonial writings as well, for it could then be argued that it was colonialism that brought about order and ‘regulation’ – it is perhaps significant that many of the acts introduced by the colonial rulers were termed ‘Regulations’.

Colonial and imperial histories: the ‘challenge’ In 1817 was published what was probably the most influential book on Indian history, James Mill’s History of British India. Claiming to have written a ‘judging history’, Mill made a strong case for justifying British rule in India. Extremely contemptuous of the earlier Orientalist writings, he castigated India as barbarous, antirational, stagnant and incapable of change from within. The book played a key role in shaping perceptions of India. Mill was also responsible for the periodisation of Indian history into Hindu, Muslim and British periods, laying the basis for later communal historiography. This periodisation was widely accepted, and continues more or less unchanged even in modern writings: the only change that can be seen seems to be more cosmetic than real, for the three terms he used have now been substituted with ancient, medieval and modern. Historiography, as it developed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was located in the ‘modern’, but concerned mainly with the other two periods. Four main strands have been identified in history writing in India, of which three emerged clearly before independence, and one became more important later. Often referred to as ‘schools’ of historiography, they are termed ‘Imperial/Colonial’, ‘Nationalist’ and ‘Communal’, with the last two seen as having emerged in response to the first; and Marxist, which began before independence, but really developed only from the 1950s. As mentioned above, earlier eighteenth-century works are termed ‘Orientalist’; and works by Indian authors, which focused on more or less the same themes as those of the Orientalists, were mainly ‘nationalist’, but were also often termed ‘Indology’. While labels like these are convenient, they often tend to obscure the overlaps in the perceptions visible in all the schools. Mill’s work is perhaps the most important of the first category, but is far from the only one. His work laid the basis for many of the preoccupations of

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the nineteenth-century intellectuals, not just the later historians. For example, his statement that the value of a civilisation was to be judged by the way its women were treated, has often been seen as the underlying reason for the highlighting of women’s issues by the nineteenth-century reformers. More importantly, especially for the later nationalist writers, he dismissed India’s past as being essentially worthless. India, as stagnant and unchanging, had no history, for there was no sense of time, as could be seen in the cyclical concept of yuga (age), which was supposed to be dominant. This ‘timelessness’ was proved by the fact that India’s religion was still practised in the same manner as it had been 2000 or more years earlier. Orientalist writings on India’s philosophy and traditions were thus now subsumed into a newer formulation, which emphasised their worthlessness. Additional proof of this worthlessness was that this tradition was transmitted in Sanskrit, a dead language, and it was this that epitomised the India of the nineteenth century. Thus, India’s history was worth being written about only after British conquest, something that can be seen in Mill’s history itself, for more than one volume is devoted to the history of the British, who had, at the time of the first publication of the book, been rulers of only part of India for just about 50 years. In fact, they were still at war with the Marathas. Other writers were equally contemptuous. Macaulay famously apostrophised the writings of the East as being ‘not worth one shelf’ of Western literature and thought; Hegel argued that the dialectic process was essentially missing in India; Marx formulated the theory of the Asiatic Mode of Production and Oriental Despotism as that which characterised Asia. There was in many of these writings a certain preconceived notion of ‘the East’, which echoed earlier writings, but in a more negative fashion. The European in Asia had a ‘view of violence and mortality in keeping with the Europe of their age’.10 Crucial to such constructions was the notion of change being introduced from outside. Hinduism was a religion that emphasised the other-worldly, non-materialist life, but Islam did not. Contact between the two was necessarily confrontational, for the Muslim, as conqueror, brought in his own systems, and enforced change. That the majority of Hindus remained unchanged was either an accident of geography (India being so vast, not all Hindus were affected by the Muslim conquest, and so they could remain ‘isolated’), or the strength of Hinduism itself, which could turn inwards and resist the change. Of course, there were changes, but these were the result of exposure or opposition to Muslim domination. Colonial history, as it took shape, thus postulated the existence in India of ‘two religiously defined communities. And in that India, British historians imagined Hindus as the original inhabitants and Muslims rather as they, the British, imagined themselves: as foreign rulers, as imperial rulers, who arrived as successful conquerors.’11 The British were the protectors of the Hindus, for they had come to redress the balance caused by centuries of oppression by the Muslims.

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If religion was one of the major concerns of colonial writings on nineteenthcentury India, caste was another. Often, to this was linked the idea of race, which was central to European intellectual consciousness in the late nineteenth century, but had made its appearance in writings on India a little earlier.12 Earlier works of translation and philology now began to be used to talk of the Aryan race, and even more specifically, upper caste Hindus were seen as the descendants of the Aryans. The Dravidians were the indigenous people, who were displaced by the Aryan invaders of North India, and these became the subordinated, lower castes – the dasavarna13 of the Vedas. Bishop Caldwell’s writings in the mid-nineteenth century, on the Brahmans of South India, and his entire postulation of a Dravidian race and culture, are part of this construction. So also is the work of Herbert Risley, the commissioner for the 1901 census of India. In his People of India, published in 1915, he tried to show the connections between race and caste, in which ‘the higher race [was] on friendly terms with the lower, but keenly conscious of the essential difference of type’.14 On the other side, the Aryan race theory was seized on by some Indian intellectuals to claim an affinity with the British rulers – Indians were Aryans, so were the British, and so, they belonged, in some way, on the same side of the fence.15 Obviously, the Muslims were excluded from this kind of construction, for Aryan was pre-eminently linked with the Vedas. Much of colonial writing did show a fascination with Hindus and Hinduism. How much of this was due to the distrust of Muslims as a whole is something that is not clear, even though the distrust itself is. One important point to remember is that politically, the British succeeded the Mughals. While one accepts that the decline of the Mughal Empire had begun well before the grant of the Diwani, the fact remains that the memory of Empire, and the hold that this memory had on the imagination, was a very strong one. This hold has been called the ‘myth’ of Empire, and was best expressed in its legitimising abilities; so, regional rulers of the eighteenth century often claimed legitimacy on the basis of having been part of the Empire’s nobility, and therefore, carrying on the traditions of the Empire. The British too, at the time of the signing of the Treaty of Allahabad (which granted the Diwani), declared themselves to be the ‘Company Bahadur’, but then promptly set about denying the Mughal Empire. History writing naturally became, consciously or unconsciously, part of this attempt at negation. An example of this is perhaps Grant Duff’s History of the Marattas, first published in 1826. According to Grant Duff, the history was written in order to bring to public notice the history of the ‘immediate predecessors [of the British] in conquest’. It was also stated, not without justification, that the British had taken India from the Marathas, not the Mughals. However, legitimacy remained with the Mughals, and it was that, that the British were challenging. Political rule demanded that the British become the dispensers of legitimacy. Also to be remembered is that Islam had been a familiar, if hostile, presence in Europe

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from before the Crusades. The inherited legacy of hostility to Islam in general, and the problems with the Mughals in India in the seventeenth century, combined to reinforce the feeling that the Muslims were not to be trusted, and were, as far as possible, to be sidelined. Proof of the fact that Muslims were not to be trusted was found, finally, in the Mutiny of 1857, in which the rebels rallied around the ageing and ineffective Mughal Emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, to raise the standard of the Mughal Empire. Not surprisingly, the first action of the British on regaining control was the exile of the Emperor. Obviously, the Hindus had to be presented as both the beneficiaries of Empire, and the prime supporters of that Empire. Many Indians did believe that British rule was good for India – Raja Ram Mohan Roy termed it ‘Divine Providence’.16 The later half of the nineteenth century saw the publication of the mammoth work of Sir Henry Elliot and John Dowson, the History of India as Told by its Own Historians.17 This was perhaps the first attempt to shed some light on the ‘Muslim’ period of Indian history, for selections from medieval histories were published in these volumes. The motive behind the selection and publication was laid out very clearly by Elliot in the original Preface, which was to point out to the Hindus how much better off they were under British rule. The passages were very carefully selected, to show ‘Hindus slain for disputing with the Muhammadans, of general prohibitions against possession, worship and ablutions, and of other intolerant measures, of idols mutilated, of temples razed, of forcible conversions and marriages, of proscriptions and confiscations, of murders and massacres, and of the sensuality and drunkenness of the tyrants who enjoined them’.18 In the process of pointing out the problems of the earlier rulers, both in their political and personal lives, the difference between the British and the Muslim rule was highlighted. The stereotypes are clear – the ‘intolerant’ Muslim, who went against the dictates of his own faith by his drunkenness, the submissive Hindu, the lack of justice and the acceptance of that lack, and in general, the existence of rule by force. This last was, of course, in marked contrast to the rule of law of the British. Other labels followed: the ‘crafty’ Brahman, the ‘wily’ Maratha, the ‘degraded’ temple dancers, the ‘seductive’ Muslim woman, hidden behind the veil only to entice. The veil could be used to demonstrate, with equal felicity, the exact reverse, so that it became a symbol of the way women were enslaved, and subjected to inhuman treatment. It is against this background that Katherine Mayo’s Mother India,19 a scathing indictment of women in India, needs to be read. Education was obviously an important aspect of colonial rule over India. In the various acts through which English education was introduced into India, one can see many of the preoccupations of the British. Most famous of all the pronouncements on education is, of course, Macaulay’s Minutes on Education of 1835. Expressing his contempt for Indian forms of education, he stated that the aim of English education was to create a class of Indians who

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were Indian only in the colour of their skin, and British in everything else. In accordance with these aims, the existing institutions of learning had to be restructured. It was pointed out that the ‘systems of science and philosophy which form the learning of the East abound with grave errors’, and that knowledge of Arabic, Persian or Sanskrit was valuable only for ‘historical and antiquarian purposes’. The system of education itself was stated to be hopelessly outdated, ‘the same as the one which was in vogue in Europe during the darkest years’.20 In these reports, too, some of the biases that informed the colonial administrators are visible, as, for example, when mention is made of the introduction of a ‘more strict system of discipline, and alterations in the course of instructions’ in the Madrasa at Madras, when it is stated that such measures were ‘naturally distasteful to the Mahommedans’.21 Implicit in this is the increasing disparity in education levels among Hindus and Muslims, where larger numbers of Hindus took to learning English. Also implied is the belief that the Muslims were resistant to change, and refused to take advantage of what the British were providing. Thus, they were backward looking, for they looked back to their lost glory, and it was this remembered glory that made them intrinsically dangerous. Colonial writings on India thus brought together a large number of very different constructions. The ‘forms of knowledge’, to use Bernard Cohn’s phrase, sprang from a variety of causes, some rooted in the political and other exigencies that the British faced in India, others part of the intellectual trends of Europe. Not all writings on India were as unsympathetic as Mill or Elliot, but through the nineteenth century, what is clear is the distance that was created and maintained between ruler and ruled. History writing played its role in this creation and maintenance, so that early nineteenth-century writings, which were more sympathetic to India, were given little or no publicity, and when published, were rarely reprinted.22

National and communal: the responses Nationalist writings set out to challenge these ideas, but many of the basic presumptions were accepted unquestioningly. For one thing, the periodisation set out by Mill was totally accepted, and so, tacitly, was the idea of an inherent and irreconcilable difference between Hindus and Muslims. So also was the idea of the Hindus being a ‘peaceable’ people, and of Hinduism being a tolerant religion, in contrast to Islam. It must be stated here, that not all nationalist writers accepted such propositions blindly and unthinkingly, but the one thing that was universally accepted was, as mentioned above, the periodisation. Thus, a communal approach to India’s past was part of the entire process of history writing as it developed through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It seems clear that nationalist writings set out to do the following: (a) restore a sense of self-respect by proving that Indians were capable of change, as proved through the socio-religious reform movements; (b) restore

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to Indians their lost past, and instil in them a sense of pride in their own ancient heritage, and (c) prove, through such an exercise, that India had traditions, especially of government, no less than those of Britain, and therefore was capable of governing itself. This last was especially important during the course of the national movement. Among the earliest writers on India was Raja Ram Mohan Roy, often called the Father of Modern India. Roy was a firm believer in the benefits of Western education, and campaigned vigorously for the introduction of that system of education into India. He believed, with the colonial writers, that India was stagnant and lacked rationality, and was convinced of the benefits of British rule over India. This particular idea also had a very long life, for it was reiterated by Gandhi as well, in the twentieth century. Roy was also the earliest to champion the cause of women, reacting, perhaps unconsciously, to Mill’s assessment of the value of a civilisation. He was also the first to champion the cause of social reform through legislation, and was instrumental in garnering public opinion in favour of Lord Bentinck’s Abolition of Sati Act. It is well known that the nineteenth century was the age of social and religious reform movements in India, with the Brahmo Samaj, the Prarthana Samaj, the Arya Samaj, the Satyashodhak Samaj, and the Theosophical Society all being founded in that century. There has also been a great deal of research done, in recent years, on the activities of all these societies, as bringing about a renaissance of sorts in India, but also, especially with regard to the Arya Samaj, as promoting a communal consciousness. In all these societies, however, there is one feature that stands out very prominently – they were aimed at the majority of the population, the Hindus. The introspection that all of them advocated involved a return to the roots of religion, which could be the Upanishads or the Vedas. Obviously, this would imply the exclusion of those who did not partake of this tradition, which included the Muslims, of course, but could also include any other groups who were not part of this tradition. Accepting the Orientalist/colonial constructions, these societies identified Brahmanism with Hinduism, and thus, by extension, excluded all those not part of the Brahmanic traditions. The ‘other’ could thus be constantly redefined to include/exclude anyone else, and could also include differences based on language, region and caste. It is significant that the earliest nationalist writings echoed some of the earliest concerns of the Orientalist writers, religion and society. There was a tacit acceptance of the idea that religion governed Indian life, and so, there had to be either a separation of religion and society, something that was not possible, or there had to be an educated society, able to understand both, and thus able to understand religion as faith, and not as that which governed society. Here again, one can see echoes of European thought, especially after the Renaissance, which had defined religion as irrational, because emotional, and so a hindrance to progress. While the socio-religious reformers did not go so far as to declare Hinduism irrational, they did point to rituals

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and practices as being irrational. Therefore, an attempt was made to separate the ‘pure’ religion from the evils that had crept into it. It is not surprising that Roy advocated a return to the Upanishads, as the philosophical base of a more rational belief, while Dayanand Saraswati and his Arya Samaj advocated a return to the Vedas as a time of pristine Hinduism. Religion and its practices continued to occupy the minds of many people throughout the century and later. So, it was stated, by one of the critics of many of the practices of Hinduism, that ‘religion as a factor of progress [had to be] taken into account in a history of the civilization of any people, especially of a people like the Hindus, with whom the end aim of life has ever been spiritual progress’.23 The same author went on to say that many of the virtues and vices visible in Hindus were due to the ‘sovereignty of religion’ over them.24 Caste, by the end of the century, had been accepted as one of the major problems afflicting Hindu society, and was declared to be the cause of the fact that ‘patriotism . . . never existed among the Hindus’.25 The late nineteenth century saw the beginnings of history writing by Indians, i.e. the emergence of what is called the nationalist school of writing, as opposed to the writings of the earlier socio-religious reformers. History, as a discipline, came to be studied much more seriously, for its own sake, no doubt, but mainly as a reflection of the spirit of nationalism. History at this time was written by a great many people, who would not today be called ‘historians’, but who nevertheless studied and wrote history. The period also saw the beginnings of professional historians, employed in colleges across the country, and writing history the way the British had taught them: based on primary archival, epigraphic or archaeological research, and rigorously following the methodology of empiricism. However, at this stage, the difference between the ‘professional’ and the ‘amateur’ historian was not very sharp, for, as mentioned above, history was seen as a matter of concern for all those concerned with the nation. The beginnings of the national movement are usually traced to the post-1860s period, and it is precisely in that period that much more history came to be written. Not surprisingly, much of it was aimed at proving that the Indians were very much rooted in the material world, and more importantly, had a long tradition of governmental structures. Equally important, were the many attempts to analyse the nature of kingship and monarchy, to refute the ideas of despotism and absolutism. Justice, the key concern of the British, found its reflection in these writings as well. Most of this research focused on the ancient past, on the Hindu period of Indian history, in Mill’s terms. As early as the 1860s, criticism of British rule had begun. Dadabhai Naoroji was the first to launch an economic critique of the policies of Empire. Known to most Indians today as the man who propounded the theory of the Drain of Wealth, the book written by him, titled Poverty and un-British Rule in India was published in 1896, but the lectures and writings on which the entire drain theory was constructed were written/delivered in the late 1860s.

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Other intellectuals followed suit, and many of these writers were also members of the Indian National Congress, established in 1885. However, though these books are today regarded as ‘history’, they were contemporary critiques, reflecting the concerns of that day and time. Most of these intellectuals were involved more with administration than with academics, and much of what they wrote was initially through newspapers. It was left to researchers into ancient India to provide a more academic context to the criticism that was emerging. The writing of history also reflected the various phases of the national movement. In the first phase, usually called the Moderate phase, the focus was on constitutional methods, so as to get more representation for Indians in the Legislative Councils. At this time, Romesh Chandra Dutt wrote an article on ‘Civilization in the Brahmana Period’,26 which tried to show that justice in ancient times was in the king’s hands. In 1894, an article by Purnendu Narayan Singh used, for the first time, the idea of limited monarchy to describe kingship in ancient India.27 Other papers on similar lines followed, such as those of A. C. Das,28 and S. K. Aiyangar on the Chola administration,29 in which he focused on village level administration in particular. The discovery of the Arthashatra of Kautilya in 1905, and its translation and publication by Shamasastry in 1909, was obviously of great help in such activity. Between 1905 and 1945, a large number of books on various aspects of ancient Indian history were published. These included many that are still prescribed for students of both history and political science – Kashi Prasad Jayaswal’s Hindu Polity (1924), P. N. Banerjea’s Public Administration in Ancient India (1916), and U. N. Ghoshal’s Hindu Political Theories (1923), to name just a few. These years also saw much research being conducted on the history of different regions of the country, based on intensive empirical research. Thus, in Maharashtra, Vishwanath Kashinath Rajawade, who started life as a teacher, but later gave up his job to concentrate on research, began his mammoth task of collecting primary sources related to the history of Maharashtra; Ramakrishna Gopal Bhandarkar, a teacher of history first at Elphinstone College, Bombay, and later the Deccan College, Pune, studied the ancient history of the Deccan, and supported the cause of widow remarriage and denied caste through arguments from ancient Indian Sanskrit texts; S. Krishnaswami Aiyangar and K. A. Nilakanta Sastri (both teachers of history in Madras University) worked on inscriptions as a source for, in particular, Chola history. Old Tamil literature was at this time used to talk of a ‘Sangam Age’, and the inner and outer world described in the poetry of that age, as well as the poetry itself, were the subject of considerable debate. Much of this work was not and could not be called communal, for these historians, the first generation of Indian historians, were essentially concerned with putting the record straight. As nationalists, they wanted to prove that India had a history, which was not the history that had until then been written. At the same time, they were not out to glorify a past totally, for they accepted that there were many features of ancient Indian society which could not be

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defended – caste, for one.30 Most of these historians were part of the academic fraternity, for they held jobs in colleges in different cities. They thus established the tradition that continues in India today, of history writing being primarily a concern of the academic establishment, but history being of interest to all. This attitude has had long-term repercussions, for it has resulted in a gap between popular consciousness of what is accepted as historical truth and what academics and historians have identified as fact. The work that these nationalist historians did was of tremendous importance, but the interpretations that could be drawn from their research could lead others into directions altogether unforeseen by them. As much of this research (excluding the work on the Chola Empire) concentrated on the ancient period, and as Mill’s was the periodisation that was generally accepted, this was ‘Hindu’ India. Obviously, the Muslims were left out of this entire research. While research such as this was no doubt laudable, it also must be pointed out that, in some ways, it belonged to the category of what, in colloquial terms, has been called the ‘me too’ syndrome. That is, while establishing the antiquity of India, it had to be proved that Western ideas were not new to India and Indians, or, in other words, setting out to prove that anything the West had, India also had, at the same time, if not earlier. Thus, monarchy in ancient India was ‘constitutional’ (also used by P. N. Banerjea, in 1916), or ‘limited’; there was no parliamentary system, but there were institutions, the sabha and the samiti, which are mentioned in the Rig Veda, and which functioned as a check on the monarchs. Detailed studies were carried out on the systems of administration, and there was both a central and a provincial structure, with clearly specified hierarchies and duties, which meant that the concept of a bureaucracy was not unknown. Justice, the key concept of colonial rule, was declared to be the main responsibility of the monarch. It was also pointed out that, in India, unlike in the West, there was no conception of divine monarchy – kingship was divine, not the king. Challenging the belief that religion dominated state life – in fact, all life – in pre-modern times, it was said that ‘Hindu states were thoroughly secular’.31 In this attempt, the discovery of the inscriptions of Asoka, the Mauryan king of the third century BC, became very important. Asoka became a convert to Buddhism shortly after he became king, and many of his inscriptions are concerned with defining morality and ethical ways of life in society. So, while he did encourage missionary activity in the cause of Buddhism – he sent his son and daughter to Sri Lanka to preach Buddhism – he did, at the same time, make a clear distinction between his personal belief and the requirements of the state.32 At every stage, therefore, the belief of Western writers, including Max Muller, that Hindus were inherently incapable of conceiving the idea of the state, was challenged. Nor was all the research devoted to political systems alone. By the early years of the twentieth century, it had become obvious to many that colonialism

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was rooted in the economic transformation of the colony. No one denied that India was an agricultural country, and had been for centuries, but the difference between ‘then and now’ had to be determined, and so, the agrarian systems were also the subject of much research. In this, the inscriptions of Asoka, with their mention of the Sitadhyaksha, the superintendent of agriculture, and the Arthashastra, with its mention of sita as crown lands, were of great importance. Other aspects of economic life were not neglected either. The existence of craft guilds, called s´ reni, was pointed out, often with the inevitable comparison with the medieval European guilds – with the underlying inference that guilds came into existence in medieval Europe, but were present in ancient India. As guilds were essentially an urban feature, the existence of cities in India from antiquity was proved. Here, the excavations that led to the discovery of the cities Mohenjodaro and Harappa, and the proof thereby acquired of a civilisation in India contemporary to Mesopotamia and Egypt, were obviously very important. Religion could not be ignored altogether, and nor could caste. Happily for the early researchers, ancient India provided clear examples of the challenge to caste through religion. Jainism and Buddhism, religions that emerged in the sixth century BC, began to be considered the earliest anti-caste movements in history. There was an additional benefit with such researches, for the fact of Gautama Buddha and Mahavira living in the sixth century BC meant that in India, as in Ancient Greece, the century was a period of intellectual awakening. Also, the founders of both religions were born in states that were republics, not monarchies, and so, it was clear that the concept of a ‘republic’ was part of the Indian tradition. It could thus be proved, to the satisfaction of a great many people, that ancient India possessed all the qualities necessary to make India great. If Greece had her city states, then India had, not exactly city states, but republics; if the West had its golden age, so did India, between the fourth and sixth centuries AD (the ‘golden age’ of the Guptas); if Europe had produced a military genius like Napoleon, then India had its own Napoleon, in Samudra Gupta (he did conquer all of India, a single country, but one that, in size, matched all of Napoleon’s conquests); if the West was rich, then India had been richer, witness the number of gold coins struck by the emperors, especially of the Gupta dynasty. About literature, art and architecture, there was no question – India’s achievements in these fields were known to all. The last decades of the nineteenth century saw a tremendous increase not just in historical research, but also in print media, with a burgeoning of newspapers, in many of which were articles of a historical nature. These, more than the purely historical research, were instrumental in creating public consciousness. There were in addition a large number of pamphlets and small tracts that were published, and many of these were of a clearly communal nature. It has been estimated that, between 1870 and 1880, the number of newspapers printed and distributed in the city of Bombay alone rose

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from twenty-two to twenty-seven.33 It was also at this time that communal consciousness began to be much more visible, and finally, in 1893, communal riots broke out in the city of Bombay. After the riots were suppressed, the colonial authorities stated that public passions had been stoked by the circulation of a large number of inflammatory pictures and pamphlets. Some of the pamphlets that were in circulation at the time had some very interesting titles – The Killing of the Cow, the Cry of the Cow, and other titles of a similar nature – and pictures, many of which represented an idyllic pastoral scene, with a cow and a laughing baby with its mother near the cow, and a Muslim with knife in hand, eyeing the cow.34 Increasingly, cow protection societies had made their presence felt in various parts of India, and polarisation along religious lines was becoming ever clearer. In the areas that now form part of the modern state of Uttar Pradesh, peasants began to come under pressure from the new Hindu landowners to give up their loyalty to the older Muslim landowners, and district level meetings were organised to try and prevent cow sacrifice.35 While much of this writing was what can be called ‘Hindu’ oriented, the Muslims were not too far behind. Muslims, especially in urban areas like Bombay, had, especially after 1857, become more aware of the gap, particularly in education levels, between Hindus and Muslims. Leaders like Badruddin Tyabji pointed to the few Muslims who were registered on the rolls of schools in Bombay, as compared to the Hindus, and demanded that special concessions, such as waiving of fees, be granted to Muslims for education. There was apparent a widespread awareness that, particularly in education and jobs, there was an increasing gap between Hindus and Muslims. Also in the 1870s was the beginning of the pan-Islamic movement. Many Indian Muslims began to look towards the Ottoman Sultan as the spiritual leader of all Muslims. The same period also saw the beginnings of the Aligarh movement, under the leadership of Sir Syed Ahmad Khan. Initially a strong promoter of the idea of unity, Sir Syed gradually came to believe that unity was not possible, and that Muslims needed the British presence against the Hindus. Gyanendra Pandey, a historian who has worked extensively on communal constructions and colonialism in North India in the early decades of the twentieth century, has pointed to the existence of many local ‘histories’, which asserted community rights and identity.36 These, added to pan-Islamism and to the assertions of Muslims as ‘different’, increasingly led to polarisation between the different communities. The second phase of the national movement, known as the extremist phase, began about 1905, though the differences within the Congress had become visible earlier. History writing as it developed in the post-1905 period tended to heighten communal differences. 1905 had seen the partition of Bengal along religious lines, and the beginning of a spontaneous reaction to this partition, the Swadeshi movement. Often called the first genuine mass movement in India’s national movement, the Swadeshi movement had, as

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its core, the challenge of Britain’s economic control. The movement included boycott and destruction of foreign-made goods, blockades of shops selling foreign liquor, in particular (the word ‘hartal’, meaning strike, became common in these years), and the promotion of indigenous industry. The movement did not emphasise difference; on the contrary, it was a reaction to separation along communal lines. Nevertheless, the movement was seen by some sections of the population as in some way threatening, and 1906 saw the establishment of the Muslim League, followed, a short while later, by the Hindu Mahasabha, both political organisations set up on religious lines. In 1911, when the Partition was reversed, many Muslims felt betrayed by the British, something that worsened the problems, for they felt that the pressure of the majority had worked. As a minority, the Muslims now began to feel more threatened. In many ways, the Khilafat movement, the basis of the pact between the Congress and the League, by which the Congress agreed to support the demand for the restoration of the Caliphate in Turkey, marked the culmination of this process, for it virtually accepted that the Muslims had a loyalty outside that of the nation. So, at the time that nationalists were talking of ‘Home Rule’, the Muslims were, in a sense, being kept out of this ‘home’, by agreeing that their primary loyalty lay to their religious head, and not to the nation in which they were born. Religion, not nation, was the focus of their lives. Colonial writings on religion as the basis of life thus came full circle.

Constructing communalism The interwar years saw the beginnings of more clearly communal writing. The researches on ancient India had proved that India’s past had been ‘glorious’, but the present reality was clearly far from that state. Intellectually, India had a great tradition – by now, the works of Varahamihira and Aryabhatta (both famous astronomers and mathematicians, belonging to the fourth century AD) were well known – but again, there had been no scientific development since then; the Jantar Mantar, an observatory in New Delhi and in Jaipur, built in the eighteenth century by a Rajput king, after the scientific revolution, still stuck to an older, incorrect astronomy. The question before many intellectuals was, where had things begun to go wrong? Here again, colonial historiography gave the answer, because if all these developments had taken place in the Hindu period, then the decline had to be traced to the Muslim period. This idea did have a longer history, for in 1894, one writer had said that there had been ‘decay [in Hinduism] since the Mahomedan conquest . . . there [was] an increase of feebleness, but not prostration’.37 Even earlier, the image of the valiant hero, fighting against his enemies to the death, had begun to be popularised. Given the fact that the national movement was beginning to gather momentum, it was necessary to locate, within Indian history, some kind of resistance to invasion. Though India had been invaded over and over again, and though all of India had

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never united to fight against ‘the enemy’, historians were keen to demonstrate that there was, nevertheless, a history of resistance to invasion and oppression. History therefore talked of the ‘heroic’ resistance of King Porus to Alexander’s troops at the Jhelum river, and how, even though he was defeated, this defence was actually responsible for halting Alexander’s march (never mind if the reality was that Alexander’s troops were on the verge of mutiny). Then there were the Rajputs, whose entire existence was concerned with warfare. Depending on one’s point of view, the Rajputs either exemplified the characteristic identified by the colonial historians, that of constant internecine warfare among Indian princes, or were the valiant defenders of India against the Muslims. Stories about Prithviraj against Muhammad Ghori, of the mass jauhar (voluntary self-immolation, to preserve one’s own and one’s family’s honour, especially after defeat in battle) of Rani Padmini and the other Rajput women when Alauddin Khalji marched into their kingdom, of Rana Sanga against Babar, of Rana Pratap against Akbar, the establishment of the Vijayanagar Empire in the South, as the ‘Hindu Kingdom’ when the rest of India was ruled by Muslims, became the subject of both ‘serious’ history and popular ballads. Most important, of course, was Shivaji, the founder of the Maratha Empire – he had, after all, set up an empire, challenging the might of the Mughal Empire under Aurangzeb. He took on the mantle of the Vijayanagar Empire, of defender of the Hindus against the Muslims. Much was made of his coronation, according to traditional Hindu rituals, as well as the term he used for his empire – Hindavi Swaraj. His image in popular consciousness became so entwined with the idea of ‘defender’ of Hinduism, that the theme of a poem written in the 1920s in Hindi, was a letter supposed to have been written by Shivaji to Raja Jai Singh, the Rajput king who led the successful Mughal army against Shivaji, reproaching the latter for having accepted service under the Mughals. The Maratha Empire was said to have been a reaction to centuries of ‘domination by Mongol, Arab and Turk’.38 Comparisons, overt or covert, between the ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’ ages continued. Where ancient India had been characterised by ‘constitutional’ or ‘limited’ monarchy, the terms used to define kings in medieval India were usually ‘autocratic’ and ‘despotic’. That religion was the dominant factor of medieval life was a given, and so, there were no arguments with the colonial categorisation of the medieval empires as ‘theocratic’, which is accepted by many even today. The Muslim period was portrayed as one of constant oppression, of forcible conversion, and of the deliberate destruction of temples. Kings like Aurangzeb were portrayed as the ultimate in bigotry, and the only exception to the entire record of oppression was Akbar, the ‘Great Mughal’. In his reign, alone, was there ‘liberalism’, and it was because of him that the Rajputs joined hands with the Mughals. No attempt was made to analyse why the Rajputs stayed loyal, even after Akbar’s death. Muslim writings, on the other hand, portrayed the reverse. The medieval was the ‘golden age’, when they ruled the country. Akbar was the worst of the

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rulers, for he had pandered to the Hindus, and had gone so far as to establish a new religion, the Din-i-Ilahi. Aurangzeb was the great Islamic monarch, who had attempted to restore the glory lost by Akbar. The writings of people like Maulana Shibti (1857–1914, a teacher in the Deoband School, the centre of the movement promoting orthodoxy in Islamic education) had a tremendous impact on Muslims, for he ‘resuscitated and praised the great men of Muslim history and their times’. Biographies of the Prophet, of various saints and theologians, and of the great poets, all made their appearance at this time, reminding ‘Muslims unforgettably of their great heritage’.39 Islam as a universal religion was highlighted, and went a long way in garnering support for pan-Islamic movements. The position of women also found its place in such portrayals. So, the ‘Hindu’ period was the age when women had all liberties and all rights, when they were seen and treated as the equals of men in every way. Proof of this was sought and found, again, in the ancient texts, and highly educated women like Maitreyi and Gargi became virtually household names (they continue to find a place in the textbooks). For a very long time, the definitive book on women in ancient India was A. S. Altekar’s The Position of Women in Hindu Civilization (1924). Additional proof, if so desired, was furnished by the fact that, in Buddhism and Jainism, women were permitted to renounce the world and become nuns. However, the position of women, like everything else in Indian society, had worsened with the coming of Islam. It was declared that the purdah system and child marriages were the result of the Islamic invasions, for it was necessary to ‘protect’ one’s women from the rapacious outsider. Women in Islam had, of course, no role at all, for the tenets of Islam permitted a man four wives. Still, even in the Muslim period, there were women who had acquired great power, such as Razia and Nur Jahan, but they were either the exceptions that proved the rule, or ‘powerhungry’ women. By the 1930s, history writing had become much more visibly communal, as can be seen in the writings of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and Muslim League ideologues.40 If one stream of writing portrayed medieval India as a time of continuous communal conflict, there were other trajectories in the writing of history as well, which emphasised the idea of a ‘composite’ culture. These focused on Akbar and his religious policies, of course, but also emphasised the role of the Bhakti movement, especially saints like Kabir and Nanak. The Bhakti movement was an extremely important aspect of the medieval period. Emphasising the importance of personal devotion to a personal god, many of the saints of the movement challenged caste domination, while some also challenged the economic domination of the moneylenders in society. Some women also found a place as saints, and to some extent, therefore, traditional notions of gender roles were challenged. Some of the Bhakti saints also provided social legitimacy for the rulers – many of the metaphors that were used recreated the symbolism of the Mughal courts, as ‘God’s court’.41

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However, by the sixteenth century, the movement had lost much of its force, and the various forms of devotion ended up being cults in society. Sufism, the mystic aspect of Islam, had entered India from about the ninth century, so that, by the time political rule was firmly established in India, Sufis belonging to about four different schools were prominent in India, quite apart from individual Sufi saints. Deferred to by both the common people and by the ruling classes, they seem to have played the role of creating a bridge between different sections in society, as well as between the state and the common people.42 Medieval India had seen the emergence of synthesis, as two communities interacted and found commonalities. Far from being a time of oppression, it was a time of cultural fusion, giving to India much that was to be admired in her culture.43 Nevertheless, by the 1930s, just when Gandhi was talking of the need for communal harmony, Muhammad Iqbal could say that the ‘principle of European democracy cannot be applied to India without recognising the fact of communal groups. The Muslim demand for the creation of a Muslim India within India, is, therefore, perfectly justified.’44 1940 saw the demand for Partition, when Jinnah declared that the ‘Muslims and Hindus are two major nations by any definition or test of a nation . . . We . . . are a nation with our own distinctive civilization, language and literature, art and architecture . . . history and traditions.’45

Changing perceptions, changing histories The post-Independence period saw the institutionalisation of the discipline of history. A ‘historian’ now had to be one associated with a research or teaching institution, who published well-documented research papers at regular intervals. Certain institutions began to be identified with certain specific areas of research, often based on the region: Aligarh, for example, became the centre of studies on medieval India, while Kolkata became the centre for much of the research on colonialism and its impact. In many of these institutions, Marxism began to be very important. Marxist methodologies began to be used in the writing of Indian history from about 1940 onwards, but became more important in the post-Independence era. Among the earliest writers in this ‘school’ were Mohammad Habib, who focused on medieval India, and Dharmanand Damodar Kosambi, who concentrated more on ancient India. However, as stated above, Marxist writings began to be more prominent and widespread only from the 1950s. In keeping with Marxism, the main concerns of the Marxist historians were society and economy. They were the first to break away from the concern with dynastic history, to concentrate on ideas and institutions. Habib was the first to challenge the notion of the medieval Indian state being a ‘theocratic’ one. Pointing out that theocracy involves, among other things, administration by an ordained priesthood, he showed that such a class and concept was alien to India. Kosambi, on the other hand, examined the nature

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of ancient Indian society and economy, and emphasised the links between historical archaeology and history. Emphasising the continuities in some of India’s traditions, such as areas of settlement, he said that archaeology in India was as much a matter of science as of observation of one’s surroundings, to try and see what, if anything, looked slightly out of place in the environment. Ways of life, especially among the more nomadic, were also probably similar to nomadic patterns of an earlier era. So, while a direct correlation was not possible, it was possible to use existing society to try and trace backward linkages. He was also among the earliest to use what had until then been regarded as a ‘religious’ source to construct a history of the time,46 for as religion was a part of society, then an understanding of one would enable greater understanding of the other. Marxist historians also addressed themselves to Marx’s theory of the Asiatic Mode of Production, to argue that the basic premise of this theory was false, for it was not possible to have an ‘unchanging’ society and economy. Rather than the Asiatic Mode, it would perhaps be worthwhile to apply Marx’s theories about the different modes of production. Here again, Kosambi was among the earliest to apply any model, when he talked of feudalism in India, and said that in India, there was ‘feudalism from above’ and ‘feudalism from below’.47 While he himself did not take the argument further, the idea was picked up by Ram Sharan Sharma, who published in 1965 a book called Indian Feudalism.48 The feudalism debate became a hotly debated one in the late 1970s, when Harbans Mukhia challenged the notion altogether, and asked ‘Was there Feudalism in Indian History?’49 The issue of feudalism did spark off a great deal more research into society and economy, and also led to the first questioning of the periodisation that had until then been accepted, and to talk of institutional change being the marker of a change in historical time. The state itself became an area of debate, for, picking up from some of the ideas of the nationalists, who had identified the pre-British Mughal state as the acme of perfection, the state in medieval India began to be studied as both institution and practice. Other historians focused on the economic policies or agrarian systems that prevailed at a given time (for example, Irfan Habib, in The Agrarian System of Mughal India, first published in 1965), or on trading communities and guilds (especially of South India), or on the emergence of new castes/occupational groups, in the early medieval period in particular, or on the various religious movements. The Bhakti movement that was a major feature of the medieval period was the focus of much research, both as an area in which feudal social relations were most clearly seen and as an avenue for asserting and claiming social legitimacy. The idea of the composite culture that had begun to emerge in the early twentieth century, especially in reaction to some of the communal writings, and which emphasised the firm roots that Islam had established in the sub-continent, and its contribution to India’s culture continued, but the features that went to make up this culture began to be re-examined. The impact

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of Bhakti and Sufi saints, for example, began to be studied not just as manifestations of the formation of a new, maybe syncretic, culture, but also as social protests, and as expressions of forms of legitimacy. Other areas of research included caste, social mobility, transitions and regional cultures. A recent result of this is that increasing attention has been paid to the eighteenth century in Indian history, so that the ‘eighteenth-century debate’ is of considerable importance in academic circles. Some of the older areas of concern were also re-examined, especially the question of the ‘religious policy’ of the rulers. Asoka’s Dhamma (from the Sanskrit word ‘Dharma’, usually translated as religion) was re-examined, as was Akbar’s religious policy, and his new religion, the Din-i-Ilahi, was subjected to much closer scrutiny. Particular attention was paid to the use of religion in creating forms of legitimacy, as well as to language and symbolic structures.50 Of particular importance in such writings was the use of a variety of source materials, ranging from myths and folk songs to stories of local heroes.51 Gender as a specific field of study also entered the academy, raising questions of gender in caste and class, of the position of women in different times, and, most importantly, women’s issues in the nineteenth century.52 Among the more important works on gender history, one can include Uma Chakravati’s ‘Conceptualising Brahmanical Patriarchy in Early India: Caste, Class, Gender and the State’,53 and Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid’s Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History.54 Other historians studied aspects of nationalism, including economic nationalism and popular movements: the Swadeshi movement, for instance, could be seen as a manifestation of both. Trade union and peasant movements were also of great interest, both during the national movement and immediately after independence. One of the most important contributions of Indian historians to historiography is what is known as the ‘subaltern school’, which emerged in the 1970s. Based on the idea of the subaltern expressed by Gramsci, these historians questioned the notions of nationalism that had until then dominated academic thought, to say that nationalism was a concept that was identified differently by different groups in society. Emphasising the dependence of historians on the official records of the British in India, they looked for the ‘marginalised’ voices, and explored the possibility of using different kinds of sources to try to reconstruct a history of the subaltern.55 Subaltern writings thus focused on trying to understand the many nationalisms, to challenge the notion of nation itself. Other than the subaltern writings, Marxist historiography tended, on the whole, to emphasise the idea of ‘nation’ and nationhood. In many ways, their writings continued the trend that had begun earlier, of attempting to correct the misconceptions about India and her history that were commonly accepted, by adding to the body of information available on India’s past. That communalism existed was accepted, but it was believed that as the study of the nation took firmer root, communal constructions would become less important.

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Unfortunately, as many of these historians did not actually break away from the colonial periodisation, the underlying communal interpretations never disappeared. What also became increasingly clear was the gap between the understanding of the professional historians, and popular consciousness of India’s past. This was shown in the entire Ram Janmabhoomi/Babri Masjid episode, that resulted in the destruction of the latter in December 1992, on the grounds that it was the birthplace of Rama, the hero of the epic Ramayana, and an incarnation of Vishnu, the protector in the Hindu trinity. Colonial writings on India had tended, first, to deny Islam a position in Indian history, second, to deny the existence of an entity called India prior to the arrival of the British, because Indians were incapable of unity, divided as they were by race, caste and language, and third, to declare that all Indians were unconcerned with the material world because they were preoccupied with the hereafter, and therefore, to deny any kind of political theorisation in India. Studies on India therefore had to revolve, as they did, on Indian philosophy and religion, not as living realities, but as distant, esoteric ones. This process is still visible in some of the writings on Indian religions today. When Indians began to write their own histories, they did not break away from many of these parameters, for they accepted that religion was the dominant factor in Indian life, that the North and the South of India were occupied by different races – the Dravidian movement that developed from the nineteenth century in the South had its roots in the Aryan race theories – and that caste was also one of the aspects of race. The nationalists responded to the colonial challenge by attempting to refute the charges, but as the basic foundation was derived from the colonial writings themselves, this refutation could not proceed very far. Most importantly, they were unable to go beyond the divide and rule policy, and proved the lack of unity, even if that unity was a product of colonial times. The spread of Western education furthered the formation of communal identities. Education was a way to gain social status, which was much more readily accepted by the Hindus, as Sir Syed Ahmed Khan had pointed out. From this awareness, to the development of a barricade mentality, was probably just a short step. The spread of communal writing furthered the process. Communal writing of history projected into the past the realities of the present – i.e. the British were outsiders, and the Indians were fighting them, as they had done throughout history. Conveniently, the British had already identified the outsiders. The socio-religious reform movements of the nineteenth century had created awareness, but as the reformers were mainly Hindus, that awareness could, and often did, translate into a communal awareness. Reform movements did begin among the Muslims; some, like the Deoband school, emphasised orthodoxy in education but opposed the formation of Pakistan, while others, like the Aligarh movement, talked of the need for Western education, but emphasised difference, stating that Muslims had to be given separate treatment by the British, for as a minority, they had

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to be protected. In the early years of the twentieth century, ‘protection’ became first separate electorates, and later, a separate nation. In the post-1857 period, the growing challenge to British rule from educated Indians led the British to reverse what they had been doing earlier. Muslims now began to be identified as the beneficiaries of British rule. From orthodox people incapable of change, they now began to be portrayed as people deprived of the benefits of British rule by the Hindus. Of course, a discreet silence continued to be maintained about their political legacy, but as that legacy had already been categorised as despotic, theocratic and autocratic, it had no role to play in the democratic present. By the end of the nineteenth century, therefore, the process of the construction of a communal identity was virtually complete. Not surprisingly, the first major communal riot in India occurred in Bombay in 1893. Communalism, as consciousness, writing and practice, meant the end of the negotiation of difference, and its replacement by contestation. This contestation was in the public sphere, and often militant, resulting in the great number of communal riots that took place both before and after Partition. Western beliefs of East and West, transplanted to the colony, were nurtured by a variety of writings, both historical and non-historical. The inherent superiority of the West (as exemplified by the Industrial Revolution and Christianity) formed, of course, a more or less continuous sub-text in such writings. The construction of Indian history through both Orientalist and colonial writings, the acceptance of some of the underlying presumptions of such writings by both nationalists and others, resulted, ultimately, in accepting, legitimising and practising difference. Marxist writings did change the questions that were asked, and the nature of questioning, but history in the 1990s once again became an ideological battleground for political parties. The ideology of Hindutva demanded, among other things, what has been called a ‘saffronisation’ of history, especially in the history textbooks in schools. The entire controversy has, if anything, proved once again the extent of the hold that communal consciousness has on a great many people in the sub-continent.

Notes 1. B. Chandra, Communalism in Modern India (Delhi, 1993, reprint). 2. Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order (Oxford, 1996), p. 21. 3. See, for example, Louis Dumont, ‘Nationalism and Communalism’, in Religion/Politics and History in India (Paris, 1970). 4. I must also point out here that, throughout this chapter, when I use ‘India’, I do not mean the present-day nation-state, but pre-Partition India. This has been used in preference to the term ‘South Asia’, which, I feel, is not particularly apt in this context, as I am making no mention of the other nations that today constitute South Asia, quite apart from the fact that the term is also a modern one.

Writing the Nation in India 177 5. Anthony J. Parel (ed.), Gandhi – Hind Swaraj and Other Writings (Cambridge, 1997), p. 56. 6. This was the term used for Hindus from the time of the entry of the Portuguese, and is believed to be a variation of ‘Gentile’. 7. Sushil Srivastava, ‘Construction of the Hindu Identity’, Economic and Political Weekly, 16 May 1998, pp. 1189–91. 8. Ibid. 9. See, for example, the travelogue of Ralph Fitch, or the account of Edward Terry, chaplain to Sir Thomas Roe, where lions, tigers and the structured Mughal gardens are mentioned in the same sentence. 10. J. D. Spence, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci (Harmondsworth, 1984), p. 27. 11. Barbara D. Metcalf, ‘Presidential Address: Too Little and Too Much: Reflections on Muslims in the History of India’, Journal of Asian Studies 54:4 (1995), p. 953. 12. The word ‘race’ was used in connection with the Sanskrit word varna, which means colour, and difference based on colour. So, it was believed that a different colour of skin meant a different race. 13. The word literally means ‘of the colour of the slave’. 14. H. Risley, People of India (Calcutta, 1915), p. 5. 15. See Romila Thapar, ‘Durkheim and Weber on Theories of Society and Race Relating to Pre-Colonial India’, in idem, Interpreting Early India (Delhi, 1995), pp. 23–59, for a survey of the literature on the issues of caste and race. 16. Selected Works of Raja Rammohun Roy (Delhi, 1977), pp. 98–9. 17. Published in eight volumes between 1867 and 1877. 18. Henry Elliot and John Dowson, History of India as Told by its Own Historians (London, 1867–77, vol. 2, 2nd edition, Aligarh, 1952), vol. 1. 19. Katherine Mayo, Mother India (London, 1927). 20. Selections from Educational Records of the Government of India, vol. 1, Educational Reports 1859–1871 (Delhi, 1960) p. 20. 21. Ibid., p. 46. 22. A good example of this is the journal of Fanny Parkes, the wife of a junior British administrator in India, titled Wanderings of a Pilgrim in Search of the Picturesque, during four-and-twenty years in the East; with Revelations of Life in the Zenana (London, 1850). 23. Pramatha Nath Bose, A History of Hindu Civilization during British Rule, 4 vols (Calcutta, 1894), Introduction, p. vii. 24. Ibid., p. xi. 25. Ibid., p. xvi. 26. Cited in R. S. Sharma, Aspects of Political Ideas and Institutions in Ancient India, 4th rev. edn (Delhi, 2001), p. 3. This was published in the Calcutta Review of 1887. 27. Ibid. 28. A. C. Das, ‘Limited Monarchy in Ancient India’, Modern Review 2 (1907). 29. S. K. Aiyangar, Ancient India (London, 1911), esp. pp. 158–91. 30. See, for example, V. K. Rajawade’s essay on the institution of marriage, in his Collected Works, or the essay of Rajendra Lal Mitra, who wrote a tract on beef eating in ancient times. Cited in D. N. Jha, Early India: a Concise History (Delhi, 2004), Introduction. 31. N. N. Law, Aspects of Ancient Indian Polity (Bombay, 1921), p. 13. 32. Even today, there are many who say that the essence of Indian secularism is tolerance of the many religious systems that coexist. 33. Bombay Native Newspaper Reports, 12 March 1870, pp. 1–2, in Judicial Department, Bombay, 1807/653, C. 660, and ibid., 3 January 1880, Maharashtra State Archives,

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34.

35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

43. 44.

45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

52.

53. 54. 55.

Mumbai. Significantly, the number of vernacular newspapers rose, from three Marathi and nine Gujarati in the earlier year to five and sixteen respectively in 1816. See Mrunal M. Patnekar, ‘The Construction of Communal Consciousness with Special Reference to the Bombay Riot of 1893’, unpublished MPhil dissertation, University of Pune, 2004. Also see Christine Dobbin, Urban Leadership in Western India: Politics and Communities in Bombay City, 1840–1885 (Oxford, 1972). Cited by G. Pandey, The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India (Delhi, 1997), p. 178. Pandey, The Construction of Communalism. Bose, A History of Hindu Civilization, p. xiv. Dennis Kincaid, The Grand Rebel: an Impression of Shivaji Founder of Maratha Empire (location not known, 1941). W. C. Smith, Modern Islam in India (London, 1946), p. 43. See Chandra, Communalism. See, for example, Harbans Mukhia, ‘The Ideology of the Bhakti Movement: the Case of Dadu Dayal’, in Harbans Mukhia, Perspectives on Medieval History (Delhi, 1994). For example, it was pointed out that the Sultan of Delhi, Alauddin Khalji, was a devout follower of the Sufi saint Nasiruddin Chiragh, and visited that saint whenever he had to leave Delhi, or whenever he needed advice. See Yusuf Husain, Glimpses of Medieval Indian Culture, 2nd edn (Bombay, 1959). Tara Chand, The Influence of Islam on Indian Culture, 2nd edn (Allahabad, 1963). Muhammad Iqbal, Presidential Address delivered at the annual session of the All India Muslim Conference, Lahore, 21 March 1932, cited in Ziya-ul-Hasan Faruqi, The Deoband School and the Demand for Pakistan (Asia Publishing House, 1963), p. 87. Jinnah’s speech at Lahore in 1940, cited in ibid., p. 94. D. D. Kosambi. Myth and Reality (Bombay, 1962). D. D. Kosambi, An Introduction to the Study of Indian History (Bombay, 1956), esp. p. 294. R. S. Sharma, Indian Feudalism (Bombay, 1965, 1980). Harbans Mukhia, ‘Was there Feudalism in Indian History?’, Presidential Address, Indian History Congress, Medieval India Section, 1979. Muzaffar Alam, The Languages of Political Islam in India (Delhi, 2004). However, here too, a debt has to be acknowledged to the colonial historians, who were responsible for the collection of much locally important material, as, for example, the collection known as the ‘Mackenzie Manuscripts’ – the collections of family genealogies, personal memoirs, and stories collected in the Madras Presidency by Colin Mackenzie in the nineteenth century. Gender studies became very important from the late 1960s. Until then, the most important book had been A. S. Altekar’s The Position of Women in Hindu Civilization (Delhi, 1959, reprint). Uma Chakravarti, ‘Conceptualising Brahmanical Patriarchy in Early India: Caste, Class, Gender and the State’, Economic and Political Weekly 30:6, 3 April 1993. Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid, Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History (Delhi, 1989). For a brief review of the subaltern school, see Radhika Seshan, ‘A Survey of the Subaltern Historiography of India’, in K. K. Shah and Meherjyoti Sangle (eds), Historiography Past and Present (Jaipur, 2005).

8 Writing the Nation in the ArabicSpeaking World, Nationally and Transnationally Birgit Schaebler

Introduction The writing of the nation in the Arabic-speaking world was a multilayered exercise that involved multiple inner tensions, more perhaps than the writing of other nations. It has undergone several phases which also reflect the changing nature and professionalisation of history writing there and beyond. Despite the emergence of territorial nation-states in the wake of Empire and colonialism there was always a strong transnational tendency inherent in nationalist thought and endeavour in the region. It is important to note at the outset that the nation, as I see it in this chapter, is more, in Prasenjit Duara’s expression, a contested domain, with nationalism as ‘the site where different representations of the nation contest and negotiate with each other’, than a fixed entity based on language, ethnicity, history and the like.1 Nations (and nationalisms) are complex phenomena, always written, unwritten, rewritten, but not as rigid units. Nations should not be assumed to have been immaculately conceived outside history (Azmeh), and though nations are ‘imagined communities’, they are not entirely imagined either: nations are created by public intellectuals, political movements and organisations. The nation in the Arab world, as every other nation, is imagined differently by different people (women, male politicians in the centre of power, men outside the centre of power, and so forth). It follows that those different people write different accounts of the nation. It was in a long process of what I call self-authentication in the face of a world of emerging nations that the idea of the Arab nation took shape. It was first seen by its Arab activists as an ‘awakening’ or an ‘Arab renaissance’ starting in the second half of the nineteenth century. It was, later, a vision of the ‘Arab nation’ imbued with an ‘eternal mission’ to create a greater Arab nation out of two or more territorial nation-states. And it was also used by the elites of these territorial states who came to pay lip-service to the ideal of the Arab nation, whilst in reality they were concentrating on and content with constructing their own nation. This attitude came to be known as regionalism or provincialism, 179

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iqlimiyya, a derogative term standing in stark contrast to qaumiyya, the ‘true’ nationalism of the Arab nation. But there is also patriotism, love of the homeland, wataniyya (from watan, homeland) which mediates somewhat between the two poles, though it was mostly felt to be closer to qaumiyya.2 Tensions between these two forms of the nation, the greater nation and the smaller homeland, persist until today. In addition all ideas of nation have a somewhat complicated relationship to Islam, or the community of Muslim believers (ummatu-l-muslimin), that also demands the loyalty of the Arabs. The nation in the Arabic-speaking world was negotiated between transnational (pan-Arab), national-territorial-Arab and religious Muslim(-Arab) concepts of the nation. Although it may seem that the Arab nation (al-umma al-r’arabiyya) has lost some of its appeal in the last twenty years or so to the wider community of Islam, discussions with all ranks of people in the Arab world today show very quickly that the sense of the Arab nation and the commitment to it is still going strong. I will concentrate in this chapter on four phases of writing the nation, from the middle of the nineteenth century until the present, and select specific cases and countries in the Arab world. I will also try to show how the different generations differ and develop in their endeavour to write the nation in the Arabic-speaking world into existence. I see this endeavour as part of the movement of nationalism. And with nations and nationalism it is true, all over the world and certainly until very recently, that many historians of the nation seem to be also believers in the nation, even if they are professionals.3 As we shall see, their endeavour took place both in silent and not so silent encounters with Europe, the US and other non-Western parts of the world. This chapter concentrates on what is called the Arab East, or West Asia, and not on North Africa. It would be impossible to give equal space even to the whole of the Arab East, therefore I ask the reader to bear with the examples I have found the most telling.

The cultural phase and its historians When it all began in the Arabic-speaking world, there were no nations yet but diverse populations of the Ottoman Empire, and the hopes of certain elites. The loyalty of Arabs, as that of Greeks, and others, was to the house of Osman and to the Islamic umma (community of believers) over whom this house reigned. The first writings that entail a notion of Arabness in a modern sense were penned by authors of the so-called ‘Arab renaissance’ movement, a movement of ‘Arab awakening’ first in Beirut and then in Cairo. Theirs was a cultural endeavour, a rediscovery of the Arab language and of Arab literature, centring around the notion of ‘civilisation’.4 Odes by Ibrahim Yaziji and, later on, historical novels by Jurji Zaydan sung the praises of the Arabs. A milestone in this movement was a dictionary of the Lebanese Butrus al-Bustani in 1870 in which the word qaum was included, which became the kernel of the future word qaumiyya, nationalism.

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In this first phase, European ideas like the concepts of civilisation, nationhood and patriotism, were taken up and debated by a movement in the Ottoman Empire that attempted to keep the loyalty of its subjects, including the Arabs in the provinces of West Asia: Ottomanism. Ottomanism came in two strands that have been called conservative and modernist. While the conservative strand insisted on the inherent superiority of the lands of Islam, the modernists conceded the superiority of the West, at least in its material aspects. But despite their differences, both camps believed that the unity and continuation of the empire was indispensable to protect the East from Western encroachments. Yet, before long they were overtaken by Turkish nationalism on the one hand, and Arabism, or what has been called ‘early Arab nationalism’, on the other hand. This history has been written first in the influential work of historian C. Ernest Dawn. He used a paradigm that had been conceived as a tool to study power relations in the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire, the ‘urban notables paradigm’.5 The urban notables were big, usually landowning families in the provincial capitals of the Ottoman provinces, who served as the Arab interlocutors between the officials of the empire and its Arab populations. C. E. Dawn concentrated on the urban notables as the element most essential in the political and ideological shift from ‘Ottomanism to Arabism’.6 He explained what he called ‘Arabism’ in a large measure as a product of factionalism within the landowning bureaucratic class, as an intra-Arab elite conflict (not as one against the Turkish element or the like). The paradigm was heavily used by historians who essentially wrote social and political history, for example by Philip Khoury in his work on urban notables and Arab nationalism before and during the French Mandate, and by Muhammad Y. Muslih in his Origins of Palestinian Nationalism.7 Other writers shifted the focus somewhat onto other social groups like the ‘new intelligentsia’, the younger, less well-established and considerably more radical men of the liberal professions, or to the important group of religious reformers and their relations with the ‘Arabists’. Yet, despite suggestions in the debate to reconsider the rise of the Arab nation by distinguishing between cultural, social and political concerns, the emphasis remained strongly on the latter two.8 This is, in fact, what most of the studies cited so far have in common: they concentrate heavily on the social and political dimensions and tend to treat nationalism, even in its nascent stage, as a political ideology. Only recently have there been calls for a paradigm shift away from a social and political and more towards a cultural paradigm in the study of (early) nationalism.9 Youssef M. Choueiri explicitly treats the first phase of nationalism (which he dates from 1800 to 1900) as a cultural one.10 The early nationalist writings themselves had not yet been full-blown attempts to write the Arab nation into being. More specific, and more political, were the writings of Abdul-Rahman al-Kawakibi from 1901/2 and Negib Azoury from 1905. Kawakibi playfully concocts a fictitious conference of twenty-three dignitaries, the Islamic Revival Congress in Mecca in 1316, and writes up the

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‘protocol of its discussions and decisions’ about the state of the Islamic world and its future, making the Arabs of the Arabian Peninsula into the noblest of all races in the process, and extolling the excellences of the Arabs in general, their language, their ancestral lineage, but also their political and religious superiority, all reasons why the leadership, i.e. the caliphate, should be taken from the Turkish Ottomans and returned to the Arabs.11 Negib Azoury follows suit, and defines the Arab fatherland as stretching from the Tigris and the Euphrates to the Suez Isthmus, and from the Mediterranean to the Arabian Sea. While this Arab empire should be headed by a member of the Egyptian dynasty in power, Egypt itself should not be part of that empire, because ‘the Egyptians do not belong to the Arab race’.12 Indeed, until the advent of Nasser, the Egyptians, who themselves extolled their own Pharaonic identity, were largely written out of the Arab nation. Kawakibi’s and Azoury’s writings are the earliest distinct calls for an Arab nation, and both authors were activists. Their texts were geared towards the members of the future nation itself, although Azoury’s text was originally in French; but it was in France, that many of the early nationalist activities, including an actual Arab Congress in 1913, were taking place. It was not until the end of the First World War, which brought about the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and its carving up into spheres of influence (Mandates) of Great Britain and France (Great Britain held a League of Nations Mandate over Iraq and Palestine, France over Syria and Lebanon) that the movement of ‘Arab nationalism’ emerged and evolved as a theoretical and operative system in the period between the two world wars.13

Writing the Arab nation into the minds of Europeans (and others) Making the case for the Arab nation was indeed the major impetus of the early writings. The first sustained endeavour to write the existence of the Arab nation into the Western mind in general, and into the minds of British policy-makers in particular, was undertaken by George Antonius, who penned The Arab Awakening, with a line from Ibrahim al-Yaziji ‘Arise, ye Arabs, and awake!’ on the title page, a book that was to become a long-time classic. Written itself in an almost literary style, it appeared in 1938, and its first sentence read: ‘The history of the Arab national movement opens in Syria in 1847, with the foundation in Bairut of a modest literary society under American patronage.’14 Antonius was but one of several authors writing on Arab nationalism in the 1930s. Yet it was his account which came to be acknowledged as the standard historical account, although it is obvious that his was also a nationalist programme. Sylvia G. Haim (later Kedourie) a British historian of Iraqi Jewish origin (later married to Middle East historian Elie Kedourie of the same background), who edited an influential anthology of Arab nationalism in 1962 that went through numerous reprints, took him politely to task for including in his account of Arab nationalism the earlier attempt of Muhammad Ali of Egypt

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to found an empire of his own (under the heading ‘a false start’). She was also sceptical about the accuracy of other parts of his book, but she did not include him in her anthology and treated him as a fellow historian. Antonius, of Christian Arab descent, was educated at Victoria College in Alexandria and King’s College, Cambridge, and had served fifteen years as an official of the British government in Alexandria and Palestine. He was in a unique position to make the case for the existence of an Arab nation with the right to be independent and unified in the face of the British betrayal of Arab aspirations during and after the First World War, when Britain and France carved out their spheres of influence for their future League of Nations Mandates, despite British promises made before the revolt to the Arabs. As the book appeared on the eve of the London Conference of 1939, it had the effect of a bombshell, and, as was noted at the time, ‘has made history as well as has recorded it’.15 Of less impact, yet covering much of the same ground in a more scholarly manner were the books of Zeine N. Zeine, whom Silvia G. Haim also does not include in her anthology.16 Another of the Arab/British authors, who wrote the Arab nation into the minds of the British, was Edward Atiyah. ‘If any one date had to be chosen as marking the end of the long Arab sleep’, he argued, ‘it would be the day on which Napoleon set foot on Egyptian soil in 1798.’17 This is how he began his chapter on the ‘Arab renaissance’. But the Arab revival, that Atiyah sees as largely launched by Western agencies, did not derive its inspiration solely or mainly from the West. The Arabs had, in their own language and past culture, a great and stimulating heritage on which to draw for the revivification of their faculties, the restoration of their self-respect vis-à-vis both the Turks and the Europeans, and, above all, the recapture of their sense of identity as Arabs. And it was in this field that Atiyah gave credit to the Americans. It was to the Arab peoples ‘that they rendered great services to help them rediscover their past by laying the greatest emphasis on the revival of classical Arabic and its adaptation to modern needs, and on the printing and dissemination of Arab books’. The American University of Beirut was hailed ‘as the principal educational centre’ for the whole Arab Middle East with the exception of Egypt, which, according to Atiyah, ‘in the main found its own schools and universities sufficient for its needs’.18 Edward Atiyah, a Christian Arab, was born in Lebanon in 1903, spending his childhood between Lebanon, Egypt and the Sudan. Educated at Victoria College, Alexandria, and at Brasenose College, Oxford, where he read history, he became a history lecturer at the Gordon College, Khartoum, and later a public relations officer to the Sudan government. In 1945 he left Sudan to organise the Arab Office in London, an information office on Palestine, trying to propagate the Arab view. When it was closed down in 1949, he became a full-time writer. Much like Antonius, he found the right words and images to talk to an AngloAmerican audience about the achievements of the Arab nation. Citing Edward Gibbon’s classic Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, for example, a book wellknown to the educated at the time, he tells of an obscure town in the confines

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of Syria at the time of Emperor Heraclius, a town pillaged by the Saracens who cut to pieces some troops who advanced to its relief. He quotes Gibbon who makes this ‘trifling incident’ into the ‘prelude to a mighty revolution’: ‘These robbers were the apostles of Mahomet, their fanatic valour had emerged from the desert.’ Thus Atiyah, backed by the master historian of classical Rome, has the Arabs projected into world history ‘by the genius of a man who had enthroned the One God where previously a number of pagan deities reigned, and who had compelled the turbulent and divided Bedouin tribes of the Peninsula to accept his rule as the prophet of that God.’19 Even more: the Arab achievement, according to Atiyah, ‘was something greater, in one sense, than the achievement of either Greece or Rome. There is no “Greek world” today, nor a “Roman world”; but there is an “Arab world”.’ The ancient Greeks, after spreading throughout the Mediterranean basin, shrank back eventually into their land of origin. Their language was no longer spoken except in Greece and the islands near it. Similarly, the Romans no longer existed as Romans. Their language was a dead language. But it was different with the Arabs. ‘They still live as a universal society occupying the whole of North Africa and most of the Middle East; and in spite of certain differences of race and religion, they all (with very few exceptions) speak Arabic and call themselves Arabs.’20 The ‘Arab miracle’, greater than the Greek miracle, seems to be a theme among the nationalist writers of the time. Haim, who also excludes Edward Atiyah, by then a fellow British citizen, married to a Scotswoman and living in Surrey, from her anthology, includes Edmond Rabbath with a long piece on the common origin of the Arabs. It was probably easier to see and classify as ‘nationalist’ authors those writing in an academic (national) envir-onment not her own. Edmond Rabbath, writing in French, also marvelled about the Arab miracle: ‘People have spoken of the Greek miracle. With greater awe, they might remember the Arab miracle, the survival of which today produces its political effects. This is the tenacious vitality of a race supremely assimilatory, a vitality which has been transmitted to a mass of peoples spread through two continents and has given them its language and its faith, its own civilization, fashioned with their help.’ This full history itself just had to end up by forming a new nation, which would constitute one of the most important factors in the Near East. And this, Rabbath predicted prophetically in his Unité Syrienne et Devenir Arabe, will be the historic event of the twentieth century.21 His main argument was that a common origin inspired the unity of the Arabs. Citing Western authorities, namely German orientalists of the nineteenth century, he argued that Arabs were not only Semites, but that the Semites came from the Arabian Peninsula.22 Babylonians, Assyrians, Phoenicians in truth were Arab, ‘Arab in the spirit which conceived them, Arab in the hands which set them up.’ Obviously having Ibn Khaldun in mind, Rabbath holds that ‘the Arab-Semitic race’, because it is prolific, rooted in the soil, and constantly renewed by infiltration from the desert, has remained the dominant one. The foreign elements had changed it only at the surface. But race was not

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enough; it needed also common civilisation, and ‘material unity’: ‘Arab Asia, which shelters the nucleus of the nation, has a particular physiognomy . . . Continuous and well-emphasized boundaries define it from all sides. It is like an immense deep saucer surrounded by a belt of mountains, broken by faults in the rock which facilitate access, and by difficult beaches; and in the center green protuberances are scattered which here and there break the monotony of its limitless steppes.’23 Rabbath’s conclusion was that the Arab nation was a social fact not to be denied. It was the fateful end result of history, geography and ethnography, and it tended inevitably towards a political existence which Europeans should accept. It is perhaps important to point out that the writing of the Arab nation into the minds of Westerners does not imply a simple import and take-over of ‘Western notions’, although these writers used Western historical scholarship, in which they were trained, to make their case. The frequent mentioning of the concept of ‘race’ may serve as an example. It is true that European Social Darwinism, then in vogue in Europe, has had some influence on nationalist authors. Yet, a consciousness of race is a strong feature within Arab culture. The importance of ‘common descent’ stems from pre-Islamic Arabia. Arab genealogists over the ages traced the origins of the Arabs back to two lines of descent. One is the Qahtanite line, descended from Qahtan, also called Joktan, in South Arabia. The other line is descended from Ismael, the son of Abraham by Hagar. This line is the North Arabian one, also called Qays. Allegiance to these lines of descent was strong well into modern times. The genealogical traditions conceived of the Arabs as a ‘race’ divided into the two ethnic branches. One of the foremost Arab historians of nationalism, Abdul Aziz alDuri (a former president of the University of Baghdad, which he left for the University of Jordan), writing in 1984, even sees this early ‘ethnic’ phase as the first stage of the formation of the Arab nation.24 Moreover, many of the important nationalist authors are Christians (with the notable exception of Abdul-Rahman al-Kawakibi, Sati al-Husri, and Salaheddin al-Bitar, who were Sunni Muslims), which does not mean, however, that their followers were limited to the Christian community. The early (cultural) writers, like Butrus al-Bustani (a Maronite who later became Protestant) and who was probably the first to write with pride about the notion of Arab blood, had received their primary education at Christian missionary schools which had opened up their minds to the Western canon. Yet, Social Darwinism was not taught at these schools. The later writers were first educated at colonial schools, and then went on to universities in the West.

Educating the Arabs on the nation: Sati al-Husri and Qustantine Zurayq Whereas the writers discussed so far seem to design the Arab nation in a constant silent dialogue with Europe and the Europeans, writing the nation into

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the minds of Europeans and willingly and strategically acknowledging Europe also as a model, the next generation of authors, writing in the 1940s and 1950s, would assume a tougher stance. Sati al-Husri (1880–1968), born and raised in the Ottoman Empire, is still in between these generations. He was the epitome of a cosmopolitan Ottoman and had been an Ottoman patriot before turning to Arab nationalism. He became probably the most influential and prolific theorist of the Arab nation. His audience are the Arabs of West Asia, not the Europeans. He defended the Arab nation both against the idea of Islamic unity and brotherhood, against the European model and against the idea that Arab nationalism was a British plot or import: whoever, then, charges that the idea of Arab unity is a foreign plot utters a greater falsehood than any that has ever been uttered, and he is the victim of the greatest of deceptions. We must know full well that the idea of Arab unity is a natural idea. It has not been artificially started. It is a natural consequence of the existence of the Arab nation itself. It is a social force drawing its vitality from the life of the Arabic language, from the history of the Arab nation, and from the connectedness of the Arab countries . . . The idea of Arab unity is a natural concept springing from the depths of social nature and not from artificial views which can be invented by individuals or by states. It remained latent, like many natural and social forces, for many centuries . . . But everything indicates that this period is now at an end, that the movement has come into the open and will manifest itself with ever-increasing power. It will, without any doubt, spread all over the Arab countries, to whom it will bring back their ancient glory and primeval youth; it will indeed bring back what is most fertile, most powerful, and highest in these countries. This ought to be the faith [sic!] of the enlightened among the speakers of the dad (i.e. the Arabs).25 Al-Husri was perhaps the first author of the Arab nation who wrote and thought as a historian. He was a specialist in pedagogy and education, which made him uniquely suited to become the educator of the Arab nation, promoting a very secular notion of it. In his view, Islam should remain a moral force and not enter the political sphere of the nation. Connecting past and present history he saw as an act of national responsibility. He argued against those who dared to stress the peculiar characteristics of their own state and defended the common identity of the Arab nation as a whole against Syrianism, Egyptianism and the Phoenician brand of Lebanese nationalists. Al-Husri was in a good position to make his views into a programme. In 1921 King Faysal of Iraq brought him into the newly formed Iraqi monarchy and made him director general of education. Al-Husri built up a secular state school system and within ten years doubled the number of enrolled secondary students.26 The first professional historian who lent his voice to the Arab nation was Qustantine Zurayq. Born in Damascus in 1909, he received his training in

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history at the universities of Columbia, Chicago and Princeton, USA. He taught history at the American University of Beirut and later became the president of Damascus University. His book National Consciousness of 1939 was what can be called a nationalist programme of action, geared towards the future. In it he formulated for the first time the idea of a nation’s mission that was taken up by the Ba’th Party after its foundation in the 1940s: It is unthinkable that a nation like this [the Arab nation] should not possess a unique character and a special mission to perform toward the furtherance of human civilization. But if we are to define this mission and to comprehend its true essence, we must engage in profound studies and contemplation entailing the physical environment, heredity, social evolution, and the cultural legacy. We must go beyond these manifestations in an endeavour to discover the ‘spirit’ of the nation and its ‘personality’. It is a shameful delinquency that our leaders and thinkers have not as yet performed this crucial task in our national life, and have not depicted our special mission in a forthright and unambiguous manner.27 Zurayq’s text was written for the young generation, and reached it, too, as it was adopted by the Iraqi Ministry of Education as a textbook to be used in all its schools. Sympathising with the Movement of Arab Nationalists (MAN) that was founded by Palestinian and Arab students and graduates of the American University of Beirut in the early 1950s and led by George Habash until its dissolution into other organisations, he wrote another text that would influence especially the Palestinian movement, The Meaning of the Disaster, in 1948.28

Rewriting the nation as a (socialist) revolution Adding the concept of revolution to the nation, the authors and activists of the 1940s made the old idea of an Arab cultural ‘renaissance’ over into a political ‘resurrection’. In Michel Aflaq’s and Jamal Abdul Nasser’s concepts the Arab nation became a sacred revolutionary duty, for which the individual had to make sacrifices. What was the eternal mission of the Arabs? According to Michel Aflaq it: does not consist in words which we proclaim, it does not consist in principles to be incorporated in programs, it does not constitute matter for legislation. All these are dead, counterfeit things . . . It is our life itself, it is to agree to experience this life with a deep and true experience, great and massive in proportion to the greatness of the Arab nation, in proportion to the depth of suffering undergone by the Arabs, in proportion to the great dangers which threaten its continued existence. This living and true experience will bring us back to ourselves, to our living realities; it will make us shoulder our responsibilities and will set us on the true path in order that we may fight these diseases and these obstacles, these counterfeit conditions, in order

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to fight social injustice, class exploitation, and the eras of selfishness, bribery, and exploitation, in order to combat tyranny, the falsification of the popular will, and the insults to the dignity of the Arab as a citizen and a man; for the sake of a free society in which every Arab will regain consciousness of himself, of his existence, his dignity, his thinking, and his responsibilities.29 Aflaq wrote against the state of the Arab nation, dismembered into different countries and what nationalists called statelets, artificial and counterfeit. He advocated the struggle to reunite these scattered parts, until ‘a wholesome and natural state in which no severed member can speak in the name of all’ was achieved. For the founders of the Ba’th Party, Michel Aflaq and Salaheddin al-Bitar and their followers, it must have seemed like victory when the most charismatic leader of the Arabs and president of the most powerful Arab state in the region, Jamal Abdul Nasser of Egypt, embraced these ideas. In the early 1950s he announced his conversion to Arab nationalism. The 1956 Constitution declared ‘the Egyptian people’ to be part of ‘the Arab nation’ and Egypt ‘an Arab state’. The 1971 Constitution, approved by referendum almost one year after Nasser’s death reaffirmed the same principle. In his philosophy of revolution, Nasser wrote of three circles: there was an Arab circle, ‘surrounding us and that this circle is as much part of us as we are a part of it, that our history has been mixed with it and that its interests are linked with ours. These are actual facts and not mere words.’30 Egypt could not ignore that there is a continent of Africa in which fate has placed it and which is destined today to witness a terrible struggle on its future, he went on. This struggle would affect Egypt whether it wanted it or not. Yet, there was no doubt that the Arab circle was the most important and the most closely connected with Egypt. Its history merged with the history of Egypt. It suffered the same hardships and lived the same crises, and when Egypt ‘fell prostrate under the spikes of the horses of conquerors the Arab circle lay with it’. It was the involvement in the Palestine war of 1948 that widened the outlook of the Young Officers towards its strategic links with other regions of the Arab world. Egyptian pan-Arabists hitched their political preferences to a practical calculation rather than to ideological commitment. In this sense, argues Choueiri, adopting a pan-Arab stance, unlike Syria or Iraq which gave birth to political parties advocating a strong ideology of pan-Arabism, ‘Egyptian nationalist allegiances developed at a different pace and under strong provincial [sic] interests.’31 It was in this ‘revolutionary’ phase that key concepts were introduced in writings about the nation that still play a role in the Arab world today. The notion of ‘uruba, Arabism, for example, is a quasi-mystical term denoting the essence of being an Arab – the sense of belonging to the Arab nation, the possession of Arabic as mother tongue, the fact of having been born an Arab in an Arab land, being a Muslim. (The Ba’th definition, however, omits the last category.) ‘Uruba implies pride in being the inheritor of Arab culture and

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recipient of the Muslim heritage; it also involves an awareness of a special destiny. Thus, according to the Constitution of the socialist Ba’th (Arab Resurrection) Party’s general principles (third principle), the Arab nation has an immortal mission which has manifested itself in renewed and complete forms in the different stages of history and which aims at reviving human values, encouraging human development, and promoting harmony and co-operation among the nations of the world.32 Unity, wahda, is implicit in the feeling and awareness of Arabism: it involves political unity, but also the aspiration for a more profound unity transcending the merely political or economic. This has deep psychological roots that must be sought in the idea of the Muslim community advanced by Muhammad’s early teachings and embodied in the community of his first followers. Arabism posits the indivisibility of the Arab nation; the longing for unity reflects the will to restore to wholeness what has been violated by history, adversity and accident. Among Arab nationalists there is absolute unanimity as to Arabism and unity, but not as to their doctrinal content or the concrete means whereby they should be implemented. This, argues Sharabi, made it possible for Nasser, Hussein and the Ba’th Party to proclaim their adherence to Arab nationalism and strive to realise its objectives, but still be enemies. The conflict over methods and means does not nullify the existence of profound ideological agreement – which accounts at least in part for the swiftness with which enemies become friends and friends suddenly turn into enemies in the Arab world.33 In this context regionalism, iqlimiyya, denotes the almost shameful concentration on one country only, thereby renouncing the Arab nation. Writing in the 1950s, Abd al-Latif Sharara climbs philosophical heights in order to explain this: ‘Man’, he says, ‘is linked, in the first place, to the spiritual unit out of which he grows, that is, to his nation primarily; because man is mind, or soul, or spirit – call him what you will – more than he is body.’ The regional sentiment (r’atifa iqlimiyya) ‘which binds man to a particular spot or a particular region of the earth’, is: a survival of animality in him; and every man, whoever he is, is an animal who must necessarily be reared in a region or locality with geographical limits and distinctive natural landmarks. By reason of his origin, man loves the earth which has nourished him and the skies which have sheltered him, the people who have cherished his infancy, who have been the companions of his youth, and whose environment formed his mentality. But this regional sentiment is not an ultimate human truth, because man is not bound to the earth like a plant, that is, in a way that does not admit of the separation of a man from his soil, even though he springs from it and to it he returns. . . . The ultimate truth, the genuine spirit and all the manifestations which give expression to it, such as language, the identity of feelings, hopes, memories, aims, and aspirations, is what the Arabs have been used to call by the word umma and the Westerners by the word nation.34

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A little less lofty is the term patriotism, wataniyya, which refers to love of the homeland, which was more often than not the greater, transnational one; yet the term could also be referred to the smaller one, and was then more respectable and legitimate than regionalism. Given the strength of the pan-Arab sentiment, it is not surprising that once independence from foreign powers war reached in the Arab world, the political elites indeed tried their hands at political unity. Muhammad A. Shuraydi, whose text, written for Arab-American graduate students, is a good example of panArab sentiment in the 1980s, quotes a popular poem that captures the political feelings of the 1950s: My beloved homeland (watan) My larger homeland Day by day she is growing larger Her smiles filling her life My homeland grows and gets liberated.35 Yet, the United Arab Republic, the experiment of political unity undertaken by Nasser and the Syrian Ba’th in Februray of 1958 failed after three years. And the Federation of Arab Republics, undertaken in 1971 by Hafis al-Asad of Syria, Anwar al-Sadat of Egypt and Muammar al-Gaddafi of Libya, never really materialised. These failures were a shock to all those who shared the dream of the Arab nation with an eternal mission. It became clear, writes Shuraydi, ‘that this was essentially a theoretical slogan incongruent with the prevailing realities of the Arab world which continued to be governed by divisiveness, rivalries, ideological squabbling, bickering and a deep sense of mistrust and deception’. The obstacles to Arab unity were now characterised as reactionism (raj’iyya), opportunism (intihaziyya) and provincialism (iqlimiyya). Shuraydi argues that these apparent failures led to myths, namely to the myth that there was no diversity in the Arab nation; to the myth that the needs, desires and ambitions of Arab people could be gratified within the confines of simple, emotionally charged ideological doctrines such as those shared by the Nasserists and the Ba’th, as liberation, unity, socialism and revolution. Although he concedes a certain magical appeal of these words at a theoretical level, in practice they remained ‘ambiguous verbal categories devoid of substantive concretization’.36 Yet, writing in the US for the annual convention of the Association of Arab-American University Graduates in 1984/85, Shuraydi still saw the pan-Arabism of the 1960s and 1970s as ‘a dream massacred but not buried’.37 There was nothing wrong with dreams. The Arab nation had only to be redefined to include secularism, democracy, socialism, individual wellbeing and unity with respect for diversity, including avoidance of imposing cultural uniformity. The Arab nation was still the right vessel to hold all these ideas.

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Since the 1960s the Arab nation was embodied in a triad: Nasserism, the Arab socialist Ba’th Party, and the Movement of Arab Nationalists. While the combination of the Arab nation and revolution came to naught, there had been an even earlier test case for the sentiment of Arab unity and brotherhood: the war of 1948 in Palestine and the plight of the Palestinian refugees. It was telling that refugees who fled to neighbouring countries were in more than one way treated as foreigners and discriminated against by the Arab host countries. The well-known Arab poet Muzaffar al-Nawwab described this hypocritical token commitment of the Arab leaders in rather drastic words, gendering Palestine (‘Jerusalem’) as a maiden bride: Jerusalem is the bride of your pan-Arabism But why did you allow all the criminals of the night into her room And stand behind the doors to stealthily hear The cries over her loss of her virginity. Then you withdrew your daggers and honorably Boasted And shouted at her to be silent for the Protection of the family honor. How honorable of you! Sons of bitches How could a raped woman be quiet?38 Palestine was a part of the Arab nation, and the Palestinian dilemma came to be viewed as a cornerstone of this nation. The Palestinian struggle against Israel was seen as an integral part of their wider struggle to liberate the whole Arab East. At the same time, the Palestinian struggle was a struggle for the liberation of Palestine, ultimately for a nation-state. And it is perhaps in the Palestinian case that the new and latest awakening, the religious one (as-sahwa), is most visible at present. This makes the Palestinian example a showcase for the changing faces of the Arab nation and the tensions inherent in its forms.

The nation and Islam When Palestinians rose up for the first time in the Palestinian Revolt of 1929–36 against the British Mandate, it was a popular religious leader, an Islamic modernist, who became the face of the revolt. This was Izzeddin al-Qassam, who became something like a site of memory for Palestinians.39 After 1948,

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the Palestinians started to become active in the wider Arab movement. Two of their leaders, George Habbash and Nayif Hawatima, were students at the American University of Beirut and founders of the Movement of Arab Nationalists in the early 1950s. The foundational event, or ‘formative catastrophe’ behind the creation of the Movement of Arab Nationalists was what Palestinians call the nakba (disaster, catastrophe) of 1948. Most of the MAN’s founding members had been students of Zurayq while he was a history professor at the American University of Beirut. Zurayq’s second widely influential book The Meaning of the Disaster, first published in the summer of 1948, had a profound impact on the movement’s ideological development. According to Zurayq, the 1948 catastrophe was a result of Arab backwardness vis-à-vis the modern industrialised West. It had both a general Arab dimension (i.e. the military defeat of the Arab states by Israel) and a Palestinian dimension (i.e. the expulsion and flight of 700 000 Palestinians). The Arab dimension was the decisive one, with the Palestinian dimension simply being the visible expression of the Arab material and moral collapse. Only through radical self-criticism would the nation be able to understand the causes of the catastrophe and to change. The main recipe was Arab unity, in the sense of a united greater and progressive Arab nation-state, which should be industrialised, where politics and religion should be separate, and where culture and science should be the major fundament of the state.40 Yet, although the Palestinians were at first politically active within the wider Arab nation, given their treatment in the Arab host countries they soon acted as Palestinian nationalists and formed a Palestinian national movement and organisation in their struggle with Zionism and Israel. The Movement of Arab Nationalists was overtaken by Nasser’s initiative to establish the PLO in 1964, which itself was eventually taken over by the new movement of Fatah under Yassir Arafat. While the Arab nationalists had believed that ‘Arab unity was the way to the liberation of Palestine’, Fatah’s slogan was ‘the liberation of Palestine is the way to Arab unity’. The programme became more Palestinian-national, the vision was a secular Palestine. Since the founding of Hamas, the Movement of Islamic Resistance, in 1987, the face of that nation has changed yet again. Now the nation is an explicitly Islamic one, the struggle for liberation is not only a national but a religious duty. It is not the Palestinian flag but the ‘banner of God’ that is to be raised in Palestine. And according to the Hamas charter Palestine is ‘an Islamic land entrusted to the Muslim generations until Judgment day’, i.e. a religious foundation (waqf). In the words of a preacher: ‘The land of Palestine that we should fight for is a mosque not a soil and not an orange tree.’41 The preacher is denouncing the Palestine of the secular movements here. In patriotic poetry and the political iconography of the PLO, Palestine had commonly been presented as (agricultural) land, like an orange grove, or an orange itself.

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At this point a look at the two major theorists of the Arab nation, Sati al-Husri and Zurayq, is in order with regard to the Arab nation’s relation with Islam. For Sati al-Husri it was clear that he had to draw on Muslim sentiment if he wanted to convert Arabs, whose primary loyalties were to Islam, to Arab nationalism. In fact, it was the great strength of Arab nationalism that it could draw on Muslim sentiment. Husri argued that Arab unity was a prerequisite for Muslim unity. Islam was defined as the product of the Arab national genius, and Muhammad as the hero of the Arab nation. The latter point was taken up especially by Christian writers, such as Zurayq and Michel Aflaq. In a famous address ‘on the occasion of the anniversary of the birth of the noble Arab Prophet’ Zurayq stated that ‘true nationalism cannot in any way contradict true religion, for it is nothing in its essence but a spiritual movement . . . Nationalism, therefore, spiritual movement as it is, must converge toward religion and draw from it strength, life, sublimity, and excellence.’42 All of this was firmly embodied in the Prophet, who therefore was the ultimate and shining example for leaders of the national struggle, which was why ‘the Arab nationalists must honour the memory of Muhammad b. Abdullah, the Prophet of Islam, the unifier of the Arabs, the man of principle and conviction’.43 When the nation was rewritten as a socialist revolution in the 1970s, Islam and Muhammad were used less to legitimise the nation. Choueiri is pointing in the right direction when he says that with the rise of socialism a ‘silent divorce took place between Islam and Arabism, releasing the former from its association with a secular partner, thereby allowing it in due course to demarcate its own ideological space’.44 This is not at all to say that Islamist movements in general are in fact crypto-nationalist, and Islamism in essence a form of nationalism. The Palestinian case is probably exceptional, in that the national goal (a Palestinian national state) has not been reached yet and is therefore the ultimate aim of both secular nationalists and Islamists, with greater numbers of secular-minded people supporting the Islamists for national and political reasons.45 Unlike other Islamists who are currently challenging the legitimacy of the national state, the Islamic movement in Palestine assimilated even from the very beginning of the British Mandate a nationalist discourse. For the massive number of those who after having been disappointed by the Arab national failures turned to Islam (Fatah now also has an Islamic armed wing, the al-Aqsa Martyr’s Brigade) this did not require any change in their perception of what and who they were. Identity, or, rather, a struggle between religious and national identity, was not the problem, as argued by Musa Budeiri, a professor of al-Quds University, Jerusalem, who was among the first graduates of Bir Zeit University in the West Bank.46 The radical preachers of the Islamic movement today paint a dark picture of the Arab nation, attacking it as a Western plot, a modern progeny of the age-old Crusading idea, part and parcel of the West’s ongoing onslaught upon

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Islam, intended to pervert the latter’s mindset. That the Arab nation and the movement propagating it were ‘conceived in sin and born in corruption and dissolution’ is being preached in mosques and on audio-cassettes.47 Those who wrote the Arab nation into existence are branded traitors of Islam because they had allegedly brought down the Ottoman Empire, which still was an Islamic empire. Prominent among those ‘Syro-Lebanese agents of doom’ are Jurji Zaydan, George Antonius and Edward Atiyah, who of course, conveniently for radical Islamists, were also Christians. Their successors in the 1940s were hardly better and are held responsible for all the failures and misfortunes besetting the Arabic-speaking and the Islamic world. In the eyes of radical Islamists Arab nationalism then was first a tool of European colonialism. After 1945 it turned into a tool of American imperialism and Arab nationalists (including Nasser) consequently are now turned into spies of the CIA. Such enmity towards Arab nationalism is not the least rooted in Nasser’s persecution of the Muslim Brothers in Egypt in the 1960s. It was here that the break between the concepts of Arabism and Islam would become irreparable. Arabism and the Arab nation were declared incompatible with Muslim values.

The new nation as a response to the Islamist challenge But radical Islamism is still not the only game in town. It is precisely because the vision of the Arab nation is still strong that Islamists attack it with such passion. And it is not so much the greater Arab nation that Islamists have to battle in political reality, but the smaller nation-states, such as Syria, Iraq and the Palestinian territories which have, in spite of the misgivings of transnational pan-Arabists, developed a sense of patriotism. The Islamic nation of believers has in some ways similar problems (of loyalty) as the Arab nation before, since it would also encompass millions of non-Arab Muslims, whose loyalty could very well be more towards the people they share a common language with. In response to Islamism many prominent pan-Arabists have redefined the idea of the Arab nation by merging it with the concept of civil society, which Choueiri and others call ‘neo-Arabism’. Such ‘neo-Arabism’ is being advocated in particular by the Arab National Conference. Its State of the Arab Nation Reports tackle issues such as human rights, economic development, science and technology, and the repercussions of corruption. Its stated aims are: Arab unity, democracy, independent economic development, social justice and cultural renewal.48 Neo-Arabists do not give up the idea of unity, yet the political existence of separate Arab states is being granted. And the most important issue seems to be building an autonomous civil society in the repressive Arab states. The results of such endeavours remain to be seen. Yet, the nation in the Arab-speaking world is presently once again being rewritten, nationally and transnationally.

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Notes 1. P. Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago, 1995), p. 8. 2. Qaum is the old Bedouin term for the group a person is born into and owes allegiance to. Qaumiyya, therefore, refers to the nation as community, whereas watan, fatherland, refers to the territory. 3. For a comparison between European and Eastern historiography as national historiographies, see Birgit Schaebler, ‘Coming to Terms with Failed Revolutions: Historiography in Syria, France and Germany’, Middle Eastern Studies 35:1 (1999), 17–44. 4. B. Schaebler, ‘Civilizing Others: Global Modernity and the Local Boundaries (French, German, Ottoman, Arab) of Savagery’, in Birgit Schaebler and Leif Stenberg (eds), Globalization and the Muslim World (Syracuse, 2004), pp. 3–29. 5. The ‘urban notables’ were discovered by Ira M. Lapidus, Muslim Cities in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1967) and Albert Hourani, ‘Ottoman Reform and the Politics of Notables’, in William R. Polk and Richard L. Chambers (eds), Beginnings of Modernization in the Middle East: the Nineteenth Century (Chicago, 1968). 6. C. E. Dawn, From Ottomanism to Arabism: Essays on the Origins of Arab Nationalism (Urbana, 1973). 7. P. S. Khoury, Urban Notables and Arab Nationalism: the Politics of Damascus, 1860–1920 (Cambridge, 1983) and idem, Syria and the French Mandate: the Politics of Arab Nationalism 1920–1945 (Princeton, 1987), M. Y. Muslih, The Origins of Palestinian Nationalism (New York, 1988). 8. M. Haddad, ‘The Rise of Arab Nationalism Reconsidered’, IJMES 26 (1994), 201. 9. B. Schaebler, ‘From Urban Notables to Noble Arabs: Shifting Discourses in the Emergence of Nationalism in the Arab East (1910–1916)’, in Thomas Philipp and Christoph Schumann (eds), From the Syrian Land to the States of Syria and Lebanon (Würzburg, 2004), pp. 175–98. 10. Y. M. Choueiri, Arab Nationalism, a History: Nation and State in the Arab World (Oxford, 2000). 11. A. Al-Kawakibi, Umm al-qura: wa huwa dabt mufawadat wa-muqarrarat mu’tamar al-nahda al-islamiyya al-munaqid fi makka al-mukarrama sana 1316 (Beirut, 1991). Sylvia Haim gives a part of umm al-qura in her anthology. See S. G. Haim, Arab Nationalism: an Anthology (Berkeley, 1964), pp. 78–82. 12. N. Azoury, Le Réveil de la Nation Arabe dans l’Asie Turque en Présence des Intérêts et des Rivalitès des Puissances Etrangères, de la Curie Romaine et du Patriarcat æcuménique (Paris, 1905), p. 245. 13. I. Gershoni, ‘Rethinking Arab Nationalism, 1920–1945’, in James Jankowski and Israel Gershoni (eds), Rethinking Nationalism in the Arab Middle East (New York, 1997), p. 4. 14. G. Antonius, The Arab Awakening: the Story of the Arab National Movement (London, 1938), p. 1. 15. W. L. Cleveland, ‘The Arab Nationalism of George Antonius Reconsidered’, in Jankowski and Gershoni (eds), Rethinking Nationalism, p. 83. 16. Z. N. Zeine, The Emergence of Arab Nationalism: With a Background Study of ArabTurkish Relations in the Near East, 3rd edn (Delmar, 1973); Z. N. Zeine, Arab-Turkish Relations and the Emergence of Arab Nationalism (Beirut, 1958). 17. E. Atiyah, The Arabs: the Origins, Present Conditions, and Prospects of the Arab World (Harmondsworth, 1955), p. 73. 18. Ibid., p. 82. 19. Ibid., p. 19. 20. Ibid., p. 209.

196 Writing the Nation 21. E. Rabbath, Unité Syrienne et Devenir Arabe (Paris, 1937), quoted from Haim, Arab Nationalism, p. 119. 22. Ibid., p. 105. 23. Ibid., pp. 116, 118. 24. Duri, Abd al-Aziz, The Historical Formation of the Arab Nation: a Study in Identity and Consciousness (London, 1987). 25. S. Al-Husri, Ara’ wa ahadith fi’l-wataniyya wa’l-qaumiyya (Views and Addresses on Patriotism and Nationalism) (Cairo, 1944), pp. 88–98. 26. On Sati’ al-Husri see: W. L. Cleveland, The Making of an Arab Nationalist: Ottomanism and Arabism in the Life and Thought of Sati’ al-Husri (Princeton, 1971); also B. Tibi, Arab Nationalism: Between Islam and the Nation State (London, 1997). 27. Q. Zurayq, Al-wa’i al-qaumi (National Consciousness) (Beirut 1938), p. 54. Perhaps it should be noted that the idea of a programme and a mission was not altogether uncontested. Raif Khoury, for example, attacked Zurayq’s programme, and argued that instead of a special Arab mission the Arabs had ‘special needs’. R. Khouri, Maalim al-wayi al-qaumi (The Features of National Consciousness) (Beirut 1941), p. 55. 28. Q. Zurayq, The Meaning of the Disaster (Beirut, 1956); the Arabic original (Ma’na al-nakba) appeared in August 1948. 29. Michel Aflaq, Fi sabil al-ba’th (Towards the Ba’th) (Beirut, 1959); this essay is from 1940, quoted in Haim, Arab Nationalism, p. 248. 30. Jamal Abdul Nasser, Falsafat al-thaura (Philosophy of Revolution) (Cairo, n.d.), pp. 53–6, 71–3, quoted in Haim, Arab Nationalism, pp. 229–32. 31. Choueiri, Arab Nationalism, p. 181. 32. H. Sharabi, Nationalism and Revolution in the Arab World (Princeton, 1966), p. 97. 33. Ibid. 34. Abd al-Latif Sharara, Fi’l-qaumiyya al-arabiyya (On Arab Nationalism) (Beirut, 1957), pp. 10–16. Quoted in Haim, Arab Nationalism, p. 225. 35. Muhammad A. Shuraydi, ‘Pan-Arabism: “a Theory in Practice” ’, in Hani A. Faris (ed.), Arab Nationalism and the Future of the Arab World (Belmont, Mass., 1987), p. 100. 36. Ibid., p. 100. 37. Ibid., p. 111. 38. Quoted in ibid., p. 103. 39. The memory of Izz al-Din al-Qassam was appropriated by different generations in various ways. His memory peaked with the first intifada and, especially, the emerging Islamist movement of Hamas which named its armed wing the al-Qassam brigades; there is also an al-Qassam rocket. 40. H. Baumgarten, ‘The Three Faces/Phases of Palestinian Nationalism, 1948–2005’, Journal of Palestine Studies 136:34 (2005), p. 27. 41. Quoted in E. Sivan, ‘Arab Nationalism in the Age of the Islamic Resurgence’, in Jankowski and Gershoni (eds), Rethinking Nationalism, p. 225. 42. Zurayq, National Consciousness, quoted in Haim, Arab Nationalism, p. 168. 43. Ibid., p. 171. 44. Choueiri, Arab Nationalism, p. 209. 45. There is not enough space in this chapter to discuss the complicated but fascinating relation between nation and religion/Islam, which has to be taken up elsewhere. 46. M. Budeiri, ‘The Palestinians: Tensions Between Nationalist and Religious Identities’, in Jankowski and Gershoni (eds), Rethinking Nationalism, p. 206. 47. Quoted in Sivan, ‘Arab Nationalism’, p. 211. 48. Choueiri, Arab Nationalism, p. 213 f.

9 Writing National and Transnational History in Africa: the Example of the ‘Dakar School’ Ibrahima Thioub*

Introduction For more than half a century, African scholars working in university institutions have been engaged in the writing of their societies’ history. In the case of the Dakar historians, the texts that heralded their entrance into the academic sphere were produced by Abdoulaye Ly and Cheikh Anta Diop in the mid-1950s. While their contemporary Léopold Sédar Senghor, one of the leading lights of the Négritude movement founded in Paris in the 1930s, concentrated more on linguistics, literature and ethnology, his approach to history is also of some interest here. The thinking of these three figures, seen as the founding fathers of the Dakar School, continues to exert a degree of influence over the currents and tendencies found in contemporary African scholarship. Each of them constitutes a major intellectual pole, and their legacy has lost none of its vigour in Senegalese academic circles.1 The growing strength of the anti-colonial movement following the Second World War shaped the context within which the first texts of the Dakar School of history writing were produced. As the exclusion of Africa and of African societies from the historical domain was an integral part of colonial ideology, African historians aligned their research with anti-colonial struggles from the very outset, and made academic writing a project that was at once scientific and openly militant. Even before these African states received their independence, the crisis in the nationalist movement and the increasingly evident plurality of interests among its various segments had led to a diversification of the approaches and modes of questioning practised by historians of the Dakar School. However, we should not let the plurality of these currents mask the unity brought to its structure by the paradigms that dominated the ideologies of the independence movements, foremost among these being the central role of the state in the construction of the nation and the consequent implementation of centralised development projects, conceived of in terms of catching up with the West. Cocooned in the certainties of the early post-colonial years, historians focused their efforts more 197

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on the content of history than on criticising the ways in which it could be written. The model of history writing that had been elaborated in the context of European history was thus only very rarely questioned. The first critical analyses of the Dakar School’s history writing did not appear until the mid1980s.2 This period coincided on the one hand with the re-evaluation of the dominant paradigms in the social sciences and on the other with the series of ever more complex changes that had been occurring in African societies since the mid-1970s. The present chapter sets out to provide a critical review of the three intellectual poles that centred on Léopold Sédar Senghor, Cheikh Anta Diop and Abdoulaye Ly. By revealing the paradigms that informed their relation to history writing, we will be able to analyse the different approaches they adopted with regard to the study of the Atlantic slave trade and colonial conquest. Our study will conclude with an examination of the questions raised by recent developments within the history writing of the Dakar School. The principal challenge faced by the founding fathers of the Dakar School can be defined in these terms: how could the history of Senegal and of Africa be written using a set of academic norms that had been elaborated in the context of the historical trajectories of European societies? Or, in other words, was it possible, with the tools and methods available to the discipline at that time, to write a history of an African nation-state and an African continent that would possess sufficient credibility to be accepted by the academic authorities of the time? Abdoulaye Ly has provided an account of the problems he faced in this respect, describing the tribulations and difficulties that accompanied his work, starting with the choice of his thesis subject, continuing through the elaboration of his arguments and the collection of source materials, and indeed the actual writing-up of his thesis.3 As for Cheikh Anta Diop, the ideas presented in the thesis he submitted to the Sorbonne in 1954 are still the object of intense controversy and debate today. In this sense, Barry is quite correct in stating that the publication of Cheikh Anta Diop’s Nations nègres et cultures and Abdoulaye Ly’s La Compagnie du Sénégal constituted ‘a major epistemological rupture in colonial historiography’.4

Léopold Sédar Senghor: constructing the national history of Senegal With the Négritude movement, African socialism and the post-colonial Francophonie network, Léopold Sédar Senghor brought a culturalist orientation to the bases on which the development of the Senegalese nation would be built, giving particular prominence to disciplines such as linguistics, literary studies and ethnology.5 Senghor’s historical discourse was limited to certain highly circumscribed references that were widely disseminated among the Senegalese public through the various media outlets under his control. The sending of a cahier de doléances (list of grievances) to the États Généraux by Senegal during

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the French Revolution of 1789, and the combination of references praising the role both of the builders of France’s West African empire and that of Africans who resisted French colonial penetration thus form the cornerstone of Senghorian historical discourse. The first of these references allows him to construct a historical foundation for Senegalese democracy, thereby drawing a veil over the negation of this same democracy by the one-party regime that he instituted. The second allows him to celebrate two great figures, whose position and role in the Senghorian conception of colonisation were at once opposed and complementary. These were, respectively, Lat Joor Diop, the last damel of the Kajoor,6 a symbol of resistance and of the preservation of African identity, who was decreed a national hero of Senegal, and Louis Faidherbe, the governor of the colony and ‘builder’ of Senegal’s primary infrastructure and its administrative and educational institutions, who provided the preface, so to speak, to the ‘developmentalist’ vision to which the Senghorian state saw itself as heir. These selective references to a past that was of only secondary importance to Senghorian ideology fulfilled very precise functions within the latter. They lent legitimacy to Senghor’s adherence to the French Francophonie network by inscribing this attachment within Senegal’s historical heritage, without, however, bringing into question his local ‘rootedness’ that was inspired by indigenous pre-colonial regimes, in particular those of the Wolof kingdom from which his regime drew its heroes, heroes possessed of atemporal values and virtues to whom Senghor attributed deeds that he intended to be celebrated in perpetuity by the independent state of Senegal. Largely uninterested in academic history writing, Senghor filtered historical events either to didactic ends or in order to legitimise his political power. Some well-known examples will illustrate this approach to history. The recurring references in Senghor’s discourse to the cahier de doléances written in 1789 by the Habitants (inhabitants) of Saint-Louis and addressed to the États Généraux of Revolutionary France are a perfect example of the instrumentalisation of history performed by Léopold Sédar Senghor. The social group in whose name the cahier was sent to the French Assemblée Constituante, had been formed as an indispensable intermediary in the commercial activities of the French concession of Saint-Louis that lasted from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Made up of Africans and mixed-race Franco-Africans, the Habitants, as they referred to themselves, constructed their own group identity that was distinct not only from that of the white Frenchmen who worked as merchants or agents of the companies granted privileged commercial rights in Senegal, but also from the Africans of the hinterland. This social group formed its own set of traditions drawn from a variety of cultural repertoires, European as well as African. By means of petitions and public demonstrations, both peaceful and violent, this native commercial elite within the colony began progressively to assert its corporate interests and managed to force first the British, and a little later the French authorities of the Island

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of Saint-Louis, to recognise its right to citizenship. The remarkable victories won in this period of struggle, including, among others, the right to elect a mayor who would represent their interests, the forcing from power of Governor O’Hara in 1775 and the massacre of the British garrison in 1779, shone forth in the memories of the Habitants and cemented their group identity.7 Given these recent events, it is unsurprising that they should have eagerly grasped the opportunity offered by the French Revolution of 1789 to present a Cahier de Doléances et Remontrances des Habitans du Sénégal aux Citoyens français tenant les États Généraux.8 In Senghor’s rhetoric at the time of independence, this event allowed him to requisition for his regime a symbolic past of participation on an equal footing with French citizens in an event of universal importance through an eminently democratic act. He also identified it as being a very early expression of the contribution of the ‘Senegalese’ to the genesis of ‘Francophonie, [which] would not be real if it were not subjectively felt to be so. And it has indeed been so for longer and more vigorously than one might think. As early as 15 April 1789, in the Très humbles Doléances et Remontrances des Habitans (sic) du Sénégal aux Citoyens français tenant les Etats Généraux, Negro-Africans boldly proclaimed themselves to be “Negroes” and “French”. Today we say “Francophones”.’9 This operation was only made possible by a dual process in which the cahier was mythologised, while its actual contents were hidden from view. Very few Senegalese realise that not one copy of the cahier has ever been found, and that its contents are only known thanks to the transcription by Dominique Harcourt Lamiral, a French commercial agent from outside the social group of the Habitants.10 Entrusted with delivering the cahier to Paris, Lamiral was only able to complete his mission after a considerable delay. The grievances of the Habitants were finally examined by the Comité d’Agriculture et de Commerce, which on 18 January 1791 granted freedom of trade to Senegal. What is less well known among the Senegalese is that the freedom in question is that of the trade in African slaves that had brought the Habitants their wealth. Senghor of course refrained from mentioning the opinions of the authors of the cahier with regard to the humanity of blacks: ‘stupid people, incapable of forethought or calculation and close to brute beasts’, opinions which justified keeping them in ‘servitude, given that they stand up better than others to the work that comes with it’.11

Cheikh Anta Diop: the search for an authentic African civilisation Senghor’s vision of the relation of Africans to French culture contrasts radically with that developed by the intellectual pole that was structured around the Egyptologist Cheikh Anta Diop. This Senegalese scholar sought to substantiate the idea of an African cultural unity having its foundations in the Nilotic cradle of the Pharaonic civilisation, from which the peoples of the continent

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supposedly sprang. The European cultural influence that had been brought in on the back of colonial domination thus constituted a veil that should be torn away to reveal once more a truly African civilisation. Cheikh Anta Diop devoted the greater part of his work to the challenge of writing a history of Africa that would stand up to scrutiny according to the academic canons of the time. When he submitted the work that made up his thesis to the Sorbonne,12 the vast majority of the scholarly elites that produced and validated scientific knowledge with regard to Africa conceived of the history of African societies purely in terms of the latter being subject to an external dynamic: Arabo-Islamic before the fifteenth century, European after. Any civilisation or culture that achieved the slightest level of complexity within African cultural boundaries was attributed to historical forces from outside the continent. The refutation of this theory in Cheikh Anta Diop’s writings is based on the demonstration of the existence of an African antiquity pre-dating that of Greece and Rome, and able at least to equal their spiritual and material achievements. This ancient civilisation, he argued, had a direct genetic link with modern-day African societies. The civilisation that developed in the Nile valley in antiquity was the work of Africans ‘of negro race’. Furthermore, the creators of this civilisation also possessed direct genealogical links with the rest of the African continent, in a historical trajectory that was uninterrupted until the advent of colonisation. Cheikh Anta Diop’s argument was that the humanity that emerged from the East African palaeoclimate could only have been darkly pigmented. Following the same line of reasoning, and basing his remarks on solid sources, he shows that the brilliant Pharaonic civilisation originated in the upper Nile valley, and would only transfer its knowledge to other Mediterranean societies after a long period of autonomous development. Citing ancient authors, archaeological data and ethnological evidence, sources that were all considered reliable by the social sciences of his time, and hence impossible for the followers of colonial ideology to challenge, the Senegalese Egyptologist argued that from the available historical evidence it was clear that the Egyptians had black skin. Indeed, as far as Cheikh Anta Diop was concerned, the opposition to this thesis by those whom he termed ideologues arguing in the face of scientific truth had only very recent origins in the project of colonial domination. Up until the eighteenth century, none of the European Nile valley specialists questioned this fact, and it is also referred to by most of the authors of antiquity. Thus the ideological bases of the position that would seek to deny, obscure or restrict the debate over the colour of the Egyptians were contemporaneous with colonial imperialism.13 Cheikh Anta Diop also supported the notion of Africa’s cultural unity, establishing a historical basis for this theory in the common passage of the continent’s societies through the Nile valley, rather than the Sahara, which was judged to be too primitive.14 In the wake of Cheikh Anta Diop’s work, two tendencies became apparent in the Dakar School. The first presented Egypt as a starting point from which to understand the history of African nations. This branch of the School compared

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the accomplishments and features of the valley civilisation with the material and spiritual cultures, and the political institutions, of the societies of contemporary Senegambia.15 This historiographical tendency does not question the approach championed by its inspirational founder. It very frequently concentrates on the ethnic groups of Senegambia in an attempt to establish a genetic link to Pharaonic material and spiritual cultures. Its object of study, namely the ethnic group, is discussed very little, and any of its historical transformations and experiences that are non-Egyptian in origin are erased by a discourse of immobility that removes the essential elements of its historical dynamic. The second tendency adopts the perspective wherein Egypt becomes the ‘final destination’ of a long evolutionary process that started in the upper valley. Embarking on an investigation of the early relations between the geopolitical and/or geographical entities that were Egypt, Ethiopia and Libya, as referred to by the Ancient Greek authors, it attempts to demonstrate that Pharaonic Egypt was the oldest of the offspring of a set of Nilotic and African cultural currents, and the first great success of humanity as it came out of pre-history.16 The historical perspective thus developed authoritatively disregards the notion of race as an explanatory factor in history. This represents a profound departure from the theories of Cheikh Anta Diop. This tendency, then, sought to establish that, in its general features, predynastic Egypt was clearly part of the wider Ethiopian cultural universe. In addition, representatives of this tendency also acknowledged the strong likelihood of extra-African influences, in particular influences from Asia, in the ‘making of Egypt’. If Asian influences contributed to the making of African nations, purely ethnic definitions of the continent could no longer be sustained. In future, these historians argued, one would have to go beyond attempts to find Egypt unchanged in black Africa.

Abdoulaye Ly: situating Senegambia in an Atlantic dynamic Taking a different perspective from that adopted by neo-Pharaonic theories, the historiographical current initiated by Abdoulaye Ly questioned the origins of the subaltern position of African societies within the present-day structure of the world. He drew attention to ‘the capitalist connection of the three continents via the Atlantic’, an idea that has since occupied a central position in the history writing of the Dakar School. Senghor and Cheikh Anta Diop converge as far as their desire to affirm the presence of an African civilisation is concerned: the former gave prominence to a culturalist approach that somewhat turned its back on history, while the latter produced a philosophy of history with a view to restoring Africa’s historical consciousness. Taking a quite different approach, Abdoulaye Ly differs from them in so far as he implements an approach which is more unequivocally that of a historian. These different pathways explain to some extent the international fame to which the first two men rose, whereas it was in fact the third

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who opened up the field of historical enquiry that the Dakar School really made its own. Where the Dakar School made its name, then, was in its investigation of the multiple processes set in motion in Senegambia by the interconnection via the Atlantic of the continents of Europe, Africa and America. The founding text of this current in history writing is devoted to a French company, the Compagnie du Sénégal, which came into being in the context of seventeenth-century African trade. The economic policy of the French state under Colbert provided Abdoulaye Ly with a point of empirical reference that would allow the relationships within the global capitalist system in its construction and consolidation phase to be analysed. The role of colonial trade in the accumulation of capital constitutes the implied object of this thesis. The Compagnie du Sénégal, which operated above all in Senegambia, provided a key to the understanding of capital accumulation and its destructive effects in the region. The impact of colonial trade on Senegambia was not only economic, but also social, cultural and political, and these latter aspects in particular interested Abdoulaye Ly. The Dakar historians subjected the role played by the involvement of African societies within this Atlantic dynamic between the fifteenth and twentieth centuries to intense analysis. They showed that this historical period could be regarded neither as an inconsequential parenthesis when compared, as Cheikh Anta Diop argued, to the overriding influence of a Pharaonic heritage, nor as a ‘necessary evil’ leading to colonial transformation as in the view of Senghor. Basing their arguments on the contradictory nature of historical processes, over the 1970s and 1980s the Dakar historians moved away from the ‘golden legend’ of a history of Africa that was reduced to the deeds of great men. Engaging and interacting with French, British and North American currents in African history and with African historical schools (Ibadan, Dar-es-Salam, Makerere), they studied wider socio-economic and politico-institutional structures and transformations. The accession of African countries to independence and the various projects for the construction of nation-states in the space of former colonial territories led, after a decade of experimentation, to political and economic deadlock, with often tragic consequences. African historians felt compelled to shed light on the historical roots of the present situation.17 The various Marxist schools, very much in vogue in this period, and in particular the ‘dependentist’ theory that drew on studies of underdevelopment in Latin American countries, provided a theoretical framework within which the qualitative change that occurred with the passage of African societies from the ‘pre-mercantilist’ phase, dominated by trans-Saharan commerce, to their integration within the global capitalist economy through the transatlantic slave trade, could be analysed.18 The Dakar historians contributed to the vast intellectual movement that sought to understand the role of the slave trade in establishing the dependency of African societies. Among the works that exerted particular influence

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on the Dakar historians was Walter Rodney’s thesis on slavery and the slave trade on the ‘Upper Guinea Coast’, as well as his later work carried out at the University of Dar Es Salam. In the 1960s and 1970s, Dakar also hosted American and British scholars who participated in the debates concerning the transformations undergone by Senegambian societies in the face of the Atlantic dynamic. Martin Klein published his thesis on the Sine-Saloum (Klein, 1968), David Robinson, Lucie Colvin and V. B. Coifman carried out reseacrch respectively on the Fouta Toro from the Torodo revolution up until colonial conquest, on the relations between the Kajoor and the colony of Senegal, and on the Jolof. The recognition of the multiplicity of dimensions involved in historical processes and of the complex and contradictory nature of these processes led historians to give greater attention to approaches developed by other disciplines within the social sciences. The sheer power of the influence of the transatlantic slave trade on the transformations undergone by African societies, the importance of the colonial period in forming their later trajectories, and the strong link between this period and the era of independence that began in the 1960s, make up the explanatory framework of this mode of history writing.

The slave trade and colonial conquest: two key themes in the history writing of the Dakar School Bearing in mind its implied, but nevertheless fundamental objective – to de-colonise the history of Africa while remaining within the dominant canons of university history writing – post-colonial history writing could not accept or accommodate either accounts of events as they were remembered by ethnic groups, or, even less so, knowledge passed on by the ideologues of colonialism whether in their analysis of the slave trade or that of colonial conquest and domination. As regards the meaning of the slave trade, several versions were in circulation within the Dakar School.19 The nationalist, colour-based approach pointed an accusing finger at the European powers that had funded the companies that in turn put in place this evil and obviously inhuman system. This thesis lets African states and aristocratic elites off the hook with regard to their central role in the setting-up and day-to-day functioning of the system, which is presented as an obligation imposed on them by European demands. It conceals the participation of African elites in the transatlantic slave trade, an activity which aided their political and economic interests and for which they formulated an ideology that legitimised their depredations. This reading, which was based on somewhat inconsistent data, followed the line of least resistance and founded the thesis of the resistance of the Senegambian aristocracies to the transatlantic slave trade.20 Going against nationalist theorisations and their colour-based visions of history, the dependentist approach set the system of the transatlantic slave trade

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within the development of capital accumulation in Europe, consequently subordinating African political regimes to this same economic logic. This approach set out a particularly merciless critique of the ceddo regimes that served as African intermediaries in the establishment of the system to which they remained fiercely loyal.21 While building on the results that had been accumulated by their predecessors, combined with archaeological data, the Dakar School developed innovative approaches to the transatlantic slave trade by studying how it was inscribed in space or in processes of technological transformation, and charting the economic and socio-political consequences of this transformation in Senegambia. Brahim Diop thus examines actual spatial modifications as a source of information on the socio-cultural transformations brought about by the transatlantic slave trade.22 In spite of its limitations – the difficulties involved in finding and interpreting remains, the predominance of surface as opposed to sub-surface archaeology, the often hesitant nature of the conclusions drawn – this spatially based approach has not only contributed to our knowledge of the slave trade but has in particular, and more effectively than other sources, made comparisons with earlier periods possible, allowing the likeliest paths of development to be established, thanks to its use of ‘hard’ sources. Placing particular emphasis on archaeological data, Hamady Bocoum has put forward a novel theorisation of the causes of the subordination of Senegambian societies to the logic of accumulation at work in the transatlantic slave trade.23 Starting with an analysis of the economy of a single strategic product, iron, he explains how the economic and socio-political interests of the elites of the coastal regions of Senegambia were manifestly linked to the establishment of the slave economy in this space. These elites acquired the means to break the chains of their dependence on the African hinterland, and chose to tie their destiny to the Atlantic dynamic, which gave them access to Western goods. However, by benefiting from involvement in the transatlantic slave trade they also destroyed the region’s social architecture, isolated its dynastic powers and opened the way for colonial conquest and domination. In the study of colonial penetration, the nationalist vision adopts a reductive approach that consists in seeing the conquest as a series of classical wars that pitted the colonial armies, with their technical superiority, against the African armies that were characterised by their dashing courage and the tactical ingenuity of their leaders. A critical reading of the sources reveals the predominance of wars based on looting and pillage and destructive raids rather than regular battles between enemy armies.24 The focus on political affairs, meanwhile, prevents this historical perspective from including in its analysis the role of the badolo, who were statutorily excluded from the competition for power. The nationalist interpretation of Africa’s experience in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has difficulty in taking into account the wars and conflicts that occurred between indigenous protagonists. Instead of analysing what the interests of the different factions fighting for power were, and what bearing

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these had on their diplomacy and the alliances they formed, this interpretative strand emphasises the corrupting effect of external intervention on a world whose traditional harmony was based on relations of kinship. The interpretation proposed by Mbaye Guèye in order to explain the causes of the battle of Guilé illustrates this difficulty perfectly. Arguing against Duguay Clédor, he considers that ‘this war between the Kajoor and the Jolof forcefully underlines the hypocrisy of the colonial administration which, under the pretext of “civilising peoples”, instead brought them death and ruin. Kinfolk that had every reason to be drawn together became enemies who hated each other with venom.’25 Once conquest was achieved, the colonial order was set up through the inclusion of indigenous elites within the processes of an accommodation that was implemented by religious leaders who disciplined local populations and thus furthered the interests of colonial exploitation. The recycling within the colonial administrative apparatus’ system of coercion of personnel from defeated African secular states opened up a space that favoured this peaceful inscription of religious brotherhoods in the new system. Nationalist history writing has difficulty in dealing openly with these facts, which contradict its ideological assumptions and risk fracturing the historical bases of the social coalition that dominated the anti-colonial struggle in the 1950s. This is certainly where one must look in order to explain the silence of the Dakar historians with respect to brotherhoods. Work on this subject is dominated by other university disciplines, and historians have restricted themselves to commenting on the persecution suffered by the founders of brotherhoods in order to reinforce the idea of cultural, non-violent or passive resistance and celebrate the tactical ingenuity of the brotherhoods’ cheikhs in the battle for the preservation of indigenous cultures against foreign cultural aggression. The first master’s dissertation on the brotherhood of the Mourides dates from 1993.26 Penda Mbow has set out some innovative thoughts on the question of succession in the Sy branch of the Senegalese Tijaniyya, but pressure placed on this historian has forced her to delay publication. Mbaye Guèye has worked on the exiles of Ahmadou Bamba, but his work has not broken free of its positivist and hagiographic shackles.27 In complete opposition to these approaches a critical current that was quite ahead of its time emerged in Dakar School history writing. Through an analysis of relations with Europe, this current revealed the complexity of the highly effective processes of appropriation, adaptation and accommodation during the different phases of the Atlantic dynamic that operated in the various segments of Senegambian societies. This historiographical current, which thus succeeded in freeing itself from nationalist exigencies, examines the mechanisms of the slave trade and of colonial domination in terms of group interests.28 Borrowing most of its investigative tools from the different variants of Marxism, its exponents have interpreted such group interests within the framework of the expansion of the capitalist system. They have thereby avoided the dual dangers inherent in writing the history of relations between Africa and

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Europe: adopting a colour-based reading of events and trying to absolve the African ruling classes of their involvement in the disastrous consequences of the slave trade and colonial exploitation. This current in history writing shows that the ruling classes indeed bear responsibility for the slide into dependency of Senegambia, which became a victim of the narrow-mindedness of the leaders of its dynastic regimes, unable as they were to see beyond the limited horizon of their immediate gain from trading slaves for Western goods.29 In this respect, it is interesting to note how in the afterword to the second edition of La Compagnie du Sénégal, Abdoulaye Ly establishes a dual connection between, on the one hand, his text and the later work of Boubacar Barry and Abdoulaye Bathily, and on the other hand between the Senegambian elites who drove the transatlantic slave trade and the elites who inherited power following the colonial period, and who still govern the states of the region. Here, then, a militant engagement resurfaces without, however, detracting from the scientific worth of his analysis. Approaching this question from another angle, Mamadou Diouf shows how the Senegalese ruling classes attempted to impose a different reading of this past in order to give themselves legitimacy.30 Putting the heroes celebrated in the nationalist memory back in their place, he presents them as the actors of a history in which the struggle of interested parties for the control of power disproves the idea that colour decided the side on which the protagonists fought. This work of deconstructing nationalist memory remains very much at a preliminary stage. In Senegambian history writing, then, the confrontation between two trends in the analysis of the relations established with Europe in this region from the fifteenth century onwards may be discerned. However, both approaches remain enclosed within the vision of nations with centralised state hierarchies. Thus, the Dakar historians of the 1970s and 1980s developed a strong tendency to leave the history of the Lower Casamance region out of their studies. The history of this omission must be seen in relation to the colonial definition and management of space that exerted considerable influence over a large part of the Dakar School’s production which remained dominated by the paradigms of the ideology of national construction.31 The task of assembling knowledge about the Lower Casamance region was largely left to the curiosity of ethnologists and anthropologists, and its historians are exclusively European and American Africanists.32 However, Dakar historians have recently shown a new interest in the regionalist separatism that has been raging there since the beginning of the 1980s.33 The constitution of space as an object of study and the development of an understanding of it as a historically determined entity have come to the fore in recent work on the Lower Casamance region by historians. This new approach is explained by the fact that the rebellion that sprang up in this area set out this question in terms that obliged historians both to concern themselves with the geopolitical context of the problem and to question the legitimising discourses that

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underpinned the geopolitical identity of the contested spaces, as the separatist movement had itself embarked upon the production of a historical discourse to counter that of the Senegalese state. One cannot fail to be struck by the phenomenon of oppositional identity-construction that has developed as part of the separatist movement’s memory-formation, with its recourse to events drawn from the colonial past of the territory they claim. This movement of opposition to Senegalese rule employs a different periodisation of colonial domination that allows it to set Casamance outside the French colonial project, thereby dating Casamance resistance back to the days of the Portuguese presence in the region. The crisis of the nation-state expressed through Casamance separatism has also led to the appearance of new historical actors, particularly in urban areas, opening up new fields of invesigation for the historian.

New trends in Dakar School history writing In Senegal, the last two decades of the twentieth century have witnessed vigorous growth in the competition between different collective memories, as different groups have come forward to claim official public recognition and celebration of their past. This period has been marked by celebrations and commemorations of personalities that have been elevated to the rank of emblematic figures of the Senegalese nation: the anniversary of the demonstrations against General de Gaulle by placard-bearers in the constitutional referendum of 1958, the centenary of the death of Lat Joor, the bicentenary of the French Revolution, the centenary of the creation of the AOF (Afrique Occidentale Française), the bicentenary of the death of El Hadji Oumar, the centenary of Ahmadou Bamba’s exile and the exile and death of Aliin Sitoe Jatta. It is difficult, given the fervour and the pressing demands for unity that accompany these events, to mark the boundary between academic historical accounts and memorial discourses. Operations of this kind often succeed in involving the authorities to such an extent that these localised memories come across as representations of the feeling of the nation in its entirety, or at least of significant parts of it. This phenomenon is linked to the crisis of political power and the transformations that are occurring at various levels in society, as well as assertiveness of new actors who are either seeking a past upon which to base their claims to national leadership or defending old positions that are now being brought into question. The public authorities have found this competition between different collective memories to be an effective way of widening the bases of their legitimacy and restricting dissidence and subversive action. The authorities have tried to follow or even on occasions second-guess the opposition movement. Under the direction of the Ministry of Education, then headed by the unabashedly nationalist historian Iba Der Thiam, numerous educational establishments originally named after colonial figures were renamed after national heroes. Historians either contribute of their own volition or are

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requested to give academic legitimacy to such mobilisations of memory. The most important mobilisation of this recent period has been the celebration of the centenary of the death of Lat Joor Joop, who was elevated to the status of a national hero of Senegal. On this occasion, the dominant ideological discourse was able temporarily to render almost inaudible the rare protesting voices that were raised.34 Such an atmosphere tends to reduce historians to mere bearers of the memories of their identity groups, whether ethnic, religious or even national. This orientation, which is reaching ever greater proportions in the output of universities (dissertations and theses), is neither neutral nor impartial. The most serious threat facing the dynamics of Dakar School history writing today is the confusion between history and memory. However, while the question of identity remains at the heart of the School’s enquiries, it is important to point out the arrival on the historical scene of new actors who have up until now escaped the attention of historians, such as young people, Muslim reformers, women, marginalised people, students, those who work in what is termed the informal sector, and also new themes, such as disease, civil society, mentalities, prisons, local powers, fashion, sexuality, social deviance, dreams, etc. These transformations reflect the lines of enquiry that, on the international scene, opened up new fields of study to research in the social sciences. One of the most important consequences of this is that the history of the immediately contemporary period is becoming more and more dominant in the work of historians of the Dakar School, to the detriment of work on older periods.

Conclusion Léopold Sédar Senghor, Cheikh Anta Diop and Abdoulaye Ly are the three great intellectual figures whose work left a lasting mark on the Dakar School. They were all concerned with reintroducing Africa into a historiographical field from which colonial ideology had expelled it. Their academic project is very much situated in a post-war context marked by the flourishing of nationalist movements throughout the continent. Their mode of enquiry forms part of the quest undertaken by this movement to find a past worthy of its ambitions. In their own way, each of them answered this need by founding a specific pole of thought. Léopold Sédar Senghor and Cheikh Anta Diop have more in common than their respective disciples are prepared to admit as regards their assertion of the necessity for the rehabilitation and recognition of an African civilisation that had been denied by the colonial order. Admittedly, they differed radically as to the ideological premises of this enterprise, as well as the means of carrying it out. It must, however, be recognised that they shared a similar approach, emphasising notions of race, and skin colour as a determining factor in the interpretation of the historical situations that they studied. The construction

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of a negro-African nation that Senghor held so dear is echoed in Cheikh Anta Diop’s work right from the very beginning, with his Nations nègres et cultures. For both of these men, history, or the philosophy of history, exists to serve the cultural project. In this respect, they differed radically from Abdoulaye Ly, who was more concerned with explaining the role of Africa in the origin of its subaltern position within the system put in place by the capitalist interconnection of the three continents via the Atlantic dynamic. By so doing, he inscribes his work in a more strictly historical perspective. The intellectual poles thus formed developed very different approaches to the writing of history. These differences are visible in the different themes covered by African history writing. Cheikh Anta Diop, Senghor and their disciples postulated the civilisational unity of African societies, and indeed of their diaspora, constructed on a harmony and balance that was upset by the aggressive incursion of Europe. Both asserted the essentially radical nature of the difference between African and European civilisation once their basic humanity is affirmed. Abdoulaye Ly broke free of this colour-based reading imposed by the European conquest of the eighteenth century in favour of an analysis that takes into account the internal conflicts of interest within African societies. This approach re-examined the social architecture of African societies, systems of production and exchange, domestic modes of domination and hierarchy, and allowed a greater understanding of the involvement of Africans in the transatlantic slave trade, and also of the establishment of the colonial order, to be reached. As for contemporary historians, they must confront new challenges, in particular the fierce competition between communities seeking to impose their memories within the discourse of the nation-state, and the arrival en masse of new actors in the public arena, whose past must be written.

Notes * Translated by Jonathan Hensher 1. B. Barry, ‘Ecrire l’histoire dans l’Afrique postindépendance. Le cas de l’Ecole de Dakar’, in Problematising History and Agency: From Nationalism to Subalternity (University of Cape Town, 1997); I. Thioub, ‘L’école de Dakar et la production d’une écriture académique de l’histoire’, in M. C. Diop (ed.), Le Sénégal contemporain (Paris, 2002), pp. 109–53. 2. M. Mbodj and M. Diouf, ‘Senegalese Historiography: Present Practices and Future Perspectives’, in B. Jewsiewicki and D. Newbury (eds), African Historiographies: What History for Which Africa? (London, 1985), pp. 207–14. 3. B. Fall, Dialogue avec Abdoulaye Ly. Historien et homme politique Sénégalais (Dakar, 2001). 4. Barry, ‘Ecrire l’histoire dans l’Afrique postindépendance’. 5. S. B. Diagne, ‘La leçon de musique. Réflexions sur une politique de la culture’, in Diop (ed.), Le Sénégal contemporain, pp. 243–59. 6. The Kajoor is also known as a Wolof kingdom situated on today’s Senegalese Atlantic coast. It got its independence from the Jolof empire in the sixteenth century until its conquest by the French colonial troops at the end of the nineteenth century. The head of the kingdom carried the title damel.

The ‘Dakar School’ 211 7. See M. Diouf, ‘Assimilation coloniale et identités religieuses de la civilité des originaires des Quatre Communes du Sénégal’, in C. Becker, S. Mbaye and I. Thioub (eds), AOF: réalités et héritages. Sociétés ouest-africaines et ordre colonial, 1895–1960 (Dakar, 1997), pp. 837–50. 8. On the deconstruction of the myths woven around these cahiers de doléances see T. Diallo, Les institutions politiques du Fuuta Djallon (Dakar, 1972); M. Diouf, ‘Le cahier de doléances des Habitants de Saint-Louis contexte et signification’, unpublished paper presented at the conference ‘La Révolution française, l’Afrique et les Droits de l’homme’, Dakar, 26–29 April 1989; R. Bonnardel, ‘1789: Le Cahier de doléances des Saint-Louisines (Sénégal): Mythe et réalité’, unpublished paper presented at a conference at the University of Paris VIII, L’Harmattan on 24–26 February 1990. 9. L. S. Senghor, ‘Pour un humanisme de la Francophonie’, lecture held at the Sorbonne on the occasion of the foundation of the Chair of Francophone Studies, 11 December 1974, unpublished document. 10. D. H. Lamiral, L’Affrique et le peuple affriquain considérés sous tous leurs rapports avec notre commerce & nos colonies . . . De l’abus des privilèges exclusifs, & notamment de celui de la Compagnie du Sénégal. Ce que c’est qu’une société se qualifiant d’Amis des noirs (Paris, 1789). 11. Ibid., annexe. 12. C. A. Diop, Nations nègres et culture, 2 vols (Paris, 1979; 1st edn, 1954). 13. C. A. Diop, Civilisation ou barbarie (Paris, 1981). 14. C. A. Diop, L’unité culturelle de l’Afrique noire (Paris, 1960). 15. Senegambia here and subsequently refers to the nation-states of Senegal and Gambia which formed a short-lived confederation between 1982 and 1989. 16. B. Sall, Racines éthiopiennes de l’Égypte ancienne (Paris, 1999), p. 18 f. 17. A. Bathily, Les portes de l’or. Le royaume de Galam (Sénégal) de l’ère musulmane au temps des négriers (VIIIe–XVIIIe siècle) (Paris, 1989), p. 9. 18. See Samir Amin’s preface in B. Barry, Le royaume du Waalo. Le Sénégal avant la conquête, 2nd edn (Paris, 1985). 19. For more details on the analysis of African readings of the slave trade, see I. Thioub, ‘Letture africane della schiavitù e della tratta atlantica’, Passato e Presente 62 (2004), 129–46. 20. See the analysis presented by Mbaye Guèye, ‘Les résistances à la traite négrière en Afrique’, in Saint-Louis et l’esclavage, actes du Symposium international sur ‘la traite négrière à Saint Louis du Sénégal et dan son arrière-pays’, Saint-Louis, 18–20 December 1998 (Dakar, 2000), pp. 199–216. 21. See the afterword to the reprint of Ly’s thesis in which the author targets the ‘despicable and cruel slaving monarchies whose power rested in the final analysis on their shameful exchanges with capitalist Europe’. Abdoulay Ly, La Compagnie du Sénégal, 2nd edn (Paris, 1993), p. 357. 22. B. Diop, ‘Traite négrière, désertions rurales et occupation du sol dan l’arrière-pays de Gorée’, in Gorée et l’esclarvage, actes du Séeminaire sur Gorée dans la traite atlantique: mythes et réalités, Gorée, 7–8 April 1997 (Dakar, 1997), pp. 137–53; idem, ‘Les villages désertés de l’espace sénégambien. Contribution à l’histoire de l’habitat et de l’occupation du sol’, Archéoafrica. Bulletin de l’Assocation interdiciplinaire d’Archéologie africaine (AIPA) 1:2 (1997), 35–44; idem, ‘L’impact de la traite négrière sur l’habitat en pays wolof’, in Saint-Louis et l’esclavage, actes du Symposium international sur ‘la traite négrière à Saint Louis du Sénégal et dan son arrière-pays’, Saint-Louis, 18–20 December 1998 (Dakar, 2000), pp. 177–96. 23. H. Bocoum, ‘Stagnation technologique et traite atlantique (l’exemple de la sidérurgie)’, in Saint-Louis et l’esclavage, pp. 51–66. 24. M. Diouf, Le Kajoor au XIXe siècle. Pouvoir ceddo et conquête coloniale (Paris, 1990).

212 Writing the Nation 25. See preface to A. Duguay-Cledor, La bataille de Guîlé suivi de De Faidherbe à Coppolani ou les Gandiols-Gandiols au service de la France (Dakar, 1985). 26. C. A. Babou, ‘Le Mouridisme jusqu’en 1912’, mémoire de maîtrise, Université Cheikh Anta Diop, Département d’Histoire (Dakar, 1993). 27. M. Gueye, ‘Les exils d’Ahmadou Bamba au Gabon et en Mauritanie: 1895–1907’, Annales de la Faculté des Lettres et Sciences Humaines 25 (1995), 41–57. 28. M. Diouf, ‘Demba Waar Sall, Lat Joor Joop: trahison ou conflit d’intérêt?’, Afrique Histoire 4 (1981), 47–54. 29. Ly, La Compagnie. 30. Diouf, ‘Demba Waar Sall’. 31. I. Thioub, ‘L’espace dans les travaux des historiens de l’“École de Dakar”: entre héritage colonial et construction nationale’, in J.-C. Waquet, O. Goerg and R. Rogers (eds), Les Espaces de l’historien (Strasbourg, 2000), pp. 91–110. 32. For a long time, the indispensable reference with regard to the Joola people was the thesis written by Louis-Vincent Thomas, Les Diola. Essai d’analyse fonctionnelle sur une population de Basse-Casamance (Dakar, 1958); see also P. Mark, A Cultural, Economic and Religious History of the Basse Casamance since 1500 (Stuttgart, 1985); C. Roche, Conquête et résistance des peuples de Casamance, 1850–1920 (Dakar, 1976). 33. O. Faye, ‘L’instrumentalisation de l’histoire et de l’ethnicité dans le discours séparatiste en Basse Casamance (Sénégal)’, Africa Spectrum 29 (1994), 65–77; idem, ‘Mythe et histoire dans la vie de Kaan
Fay du Cangin (Sénégal)’, Cahiers d’études africaines 34:4 (1994), 613–37. 34. See the special issue of the Senegalese government journal, Le Soleil, devoted to this event.

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214 Select Bibliography Confino, Alon, The Nation as a Local Metaphor: Württemberg, Imperial Germany and National Memory 1871–1918 (Chapel Hill, 1997). Confino, Alon and Ajay Skaria, ‘The Local Life of Nationhood’, National Identities 4:1 (2002), 7–24. Conrad, Sebastian, ‘Entangled Memories: Versions of the Past in Germany and Japan, 1945–2001’, Journal of Contemporary History 38:1 (2003), 85–99. Davies, Martin L. and Claus-Christian W. Szejnmann (eds), How the Holocaust Looks Now: International Perspectives (Basingstoke, 2006). Di-Capua, Yoav, ‘“Jabarti of the Twentieth Century”: the National Epic of Abd al-Rahman al-Rafi and Other Egyptian Histories’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 36:3 (2004), 429–50. Donnan, Hastings and Thomas M. Wilson, Borders: Frontiers of Identity, Nation and State (Oxford, 1999). Duara, Prasenjit, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago, 1995). Durrant, Stephen W., The Cloudy Mirror: Tension and Conflict in the Writings of Sima Quian (Albany, NY, 1995). Duus, Peter, ‘Whig History, Japanese Style: the Min y` u ¯ sha Historians and the Meiji Restoration’, Journal of Asian Studies 33 (1974), 415–36. Eckert, Andreas, ‘Historiker, “Nation-Building” und die Rehabilitierung der afrikanischen Vergangenheit: Aspekte der Geschichtsschreibung in Afrika nach 1945’, in Wolfgang Küttler et al. (eds), Geschichtsdiskurs, vol. 5: Globale Konflikte: Erinnerungsarbeit und Neuorientierungen seit 1945 (Frankfurt/Main, 1999), pp. 162–87. Frank, Tibor, Ein Diener seiner Herren: Werdegang des österreichischen Geheimagenten Gustav Zerffi (1820–1892) (Vienna, 2002). Fuchs, Eckhardt and Benedikt Stuchtey (eds), Across Cultural Borders: Historiography in Global Perspective (Oxford, 2002). Geyer, Michael, ‘Historical Fictions of Autonomy and the Europeanisation of National History’, Central European History 22:3–4 (1989), 316–42. Gordon, David C., Self-Determination and History in the Third World (Princeton, NJ, 1971). Go¯ rny, Maciej, ‘Past in the Future: National Tradition and Czechoslovak Marxist Historiography’, European Review of History 10 (2003), 103–14. Hardy, Grant (ed.), World of Bronze and Bamboo: Sima Quian’s Conquest of History (New York, 1999). Harvey, John L., ‘An American Annales? The Revue internationale d’histoire économique of Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre’, Journal of Modern History 76 (2004), 528–621. Havemann, Axel, ‘Historiography in Twentieth Century Lebanon: Between Confessional Identity and National Coalescence’, Bulletin of the Royal Institute for Inter-Faith Studies 4:2 (2002), 49–69. Hermet, Guy, ‘Histoire de l’Europe et Histoire des Nations’, Vingtième Siècle 71 (2001), 73–8. Howe, Stephen, ‘The Politics of Historical “Revisionism”: Comparing Ireland and Israel/Palestine’, Past and Present 168 (2000), 225–53. Iggers, Georg and Q. Edward Wang (eds), Turning Points in Historiography: a CrossCultural Perspective (Buffalo, 2002). Jarausch, Konrad and Michael Geyer, Shattered Past: Reconstructing German Histories (Princeton, 2003). Johnson, Lesley and Alan V. Murray (eds), Concepts of National Identity in the Middle Ages (Leeds, 1995). Kaelble, Hartmut, ‘European Diversity and the Path to a European Society’, in idem (ed.), The European Way: European Societies during the 19th and 20th Centuries (Oxford, 2002).

Select Bibliography 215 Keita, Maghan, Race and the Writing of History: Riddling the Sphinx (Oxford, 2000). Kennedy, Paul, ‘The Decline of Nationalistic History in the West 1900–1970’, Journal of Contemporary History 8:1 (1973), 77–100. Kwong, Luke, ‘The Rise of the Linear Perspective on History and Time in Late Qing China’, Past and Present 173 (2001), 157–90. Lal, Vinay, The History of History: Politics and Scholarship in Modern India (Oxford, 2005). Lewis, Bernard and P. M. Holt, Historians of the Middle East (New York, 1962). Lim, Hyunsoo, ‘Rethinking the Concept of Time: Modern Historical Consciousness and Historiography in Korean Society’, Korea Journal 41:1 (2001), 44–68. Lingelbach, Gabriele, Klio macht Karriere: die Institutionalisierung der Geschichtswissenschaft in Frankreich und den USA in der zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Göttingen, 2003). Lomnitz, Claudio, ‘Nationalism as a Practical System: Benedict Anderson’s Theory of Nationalism from the Vantage Point of Spanish America’, in M. A. Centeno and F. Lopez Alves (eds), The Other Mirror: Grand Theory through the Lens of Latin America (Princeton, NJ, 2000), pp. 329–59. Lönnroth, Erik, Karl Molin and Ragnar Björk (eds), Conceptions of National History (Berlin, 1994). Lorenz, Chris, Konstruktion der Vergangenheit. Eine Einführung in die Geschichtstheorie (Cologne, 1997). Lovejoy, Paul, ‘The Ibadan School of History and its Critics’, in Toyin Falola (ed.), African Historiography: Essays in Honour of Jacob Ade Ajayi (Burnt Mills, 1993). Lyons, Martyn and Penny Russell (eds), Australia’s History: Themes and Debates (Sydney, 2005). Mehl, Margaret, History and the State in Nineteenth-Century Japan (New York, 1998). Miller, Joseph C., ‘History and Africa/Africa and History’, American Historical Review 104 (1999), 1–32. Miller, Nicola, ‘The Historiography of Nationalism and National Identity in Latin America’, Nations and Nationalism 12:2 (2006), 201–21. Morse, Ronald A., Yanagita Kunio and the Folklore Movement: the Search for Japan’s National Character and Distinctiveness (New York, 1990). Müller, Michael G., ‘The Joint Polish–German Commission for the Revision of School Textbooks and Polish Views of German History’, German History 22:3 (2004), 433–47. Pelley, Patricia M., Postcolonial Vietnam: New Histories of the National Past (Durham, NC, 2002). Plokhii, Serhii, Unmaking Imperial Russia: Mykhailo Hrushevsky and the Writing of Ukrainian History (Toronto, 2005). Ranger, Terence, ‘Nationalist Historiography, Patriotic History and the History of the Nation: the Struggle Over the Past in Zimbabwe’, Journal of Southern African Studies 30:2 (2004), 215–34. Rappaport, Joanne, The Politics of Memory: Native Historical Interpretation in the Colombian Andes (Durham, NC, 1998). Reinkowski, Maurus, ‘Late Ottoman Rule over Palestine: its Evaluation in Arab, Turkish and Israeli Histories, 1970–1990’, Middle Eastern Studies 35:1 (1999), 66–97. Riasanovsky, N. V., Historical Consciousness and National Identity: Some Considerations on the History of Russian Nationalism (New Orleans, 1991). Riis, Carsten, Religion, Politics and Historiography in Bulgaria (Boulder, 2002). Schissler, Hanna and Yasemin Nuhoglu Soysal (eds), The Nation, Europe and the World: Textbooks and Curricula in Transition (Oxford, 2005). Schneider, Axel, ‘Reconciling History with the Nation: Historicity, National Particularity and the Question of Universals’, Historiography East and West 1 (2003), 117–36.

216 Select Bibliography Schöttler, Peter, ‘Französische und deutsche Historiker-Netzwerke am Beispiel der frühen Annales’, in Hamit Borzarslan (ed.), Regards et Miroirs: Mélanges Rémy Leveau (Leipzig, 1997). Sethi, Rumina, Myths of the Nation: National Identity and Literary Representation (Oxford, 1999). Sfeir-Khayat, Jihane, ‘Historiographie Palestinienne: la Construction d’une Identité Nationale’, Annales 60:1 (2005), 35–52. Sinha, Mrilinina, ‘Gender and Imperialism: Colonial Policy and the Ideology of Moral Imperialism in Late Nineteenth Century Bengal’, in M. Kimmel (ed.), Changing Men: New Directions on Men and Masculinity (London, 1987), pp. 217–31. Smith, Anthony D., Chosen Peoples: Sacred Sources of National Identity (Oxford, 2003). Stelzel, Philipp, ‘Fritz Fischer and the American Historical Profession: Tracing the Transatlantic Dimension of the Fischer Kontroverse’, Storia della Storiografia 44 (2003), 67–84. Suny, Ronald Grigor, ‘Constructing Primordialism: Old Histories for New Nations’, Journal of Modern History 73:4 (2001), 862–96. Thapar, Romila, Interpreting Early India (Oxford, 1994). Thurner, Mark and Andrés Guerrero (eds), After Spanish Rule: Postcolonial Predicaments of the Americas (Durham, NC, 2003). Torstendahl, Rolf (ed.), An Assessment of Twentieth-Century Historiography: Professionalism, Methodologies, Writings (Stockholm, 2000). Twaddle, Michael, ‘On Ganda Historiography’, History in Africa 1 (1974), 85–100. Werbner, Richard, Postcolonial Identities in Africa (London, 1996). Woll, Allen, A Functional Past: the Uses of History in Nineteenth Century Chile (Louisiana, 1982). Woolf, Daniel, ‘Of Nations, Nationalism and National Identity: Reflections on the Historiographic Organisation of the Past’, in Q. Edward Wang and Franz Leander Filafer (eds), The Many Faces of Clio: Festschrift for Georg G. Iggers (Oxford, 2006), pp. 366–81.

2 The Power of National Pasts Antohi, Sorin (ed.), Narratives Unbound: Historical Studies in Post-Communist Eastern Europe (Budapest, 2006). Bentley, Michael, Modernising England’s Past: English Historiography in the Age of Modernism 1870–1970 (Cambridge, 2006). Bentley, Michael (ed.), Companion to Historiography (London, 1997). Berger, Stefan, The Search for Normality: National Identity and Historical Consciousness in Germany since 1800, new pb edn (Oxford, 2002). Berger, Stefan, ‘A Return to the National Paradigm? National History Writing in Germany, Italy, France and Britain from 1945 to the Present’, Journal of Modern History 77:3 (2005) 629–78. Berger, Stefan (ed.), A Companion to Nineteenth Century Europe (Oxford, 2006). Berger, Stefan, Mark Donovan and Kevin Passmore (eds), Writing National Histories: Western Europe since 1800 (London, 1999). Berger, Stefan, Heiko Feldner and Kevin Passmore (eds), Writing History: Theory and Practice (London, 2003). Berger, Stefan, Peter Lambert and Peter Schumann (eds), Historikerdialoge: Geschichte, Mythos und Gedächtnis im deutsch-britischen kulturellen Austausch 1750–2000 (Göttingen, 2003).

Select Bibliography 217 Berger, Stefan and Angel Smith (eds), Nationalism, Labour and Ethnicity 1870–1939 (Manchester, 1999). Bhabha, Homi (ed.), Nation and Narration (London, 1990). Bloch, Marc, ‘Pour une histoire comparée des sociétés européennes’, Revue de Synthèse Historique 46 (1928) 15–50. Blom, Ida, Karen Hagemann and Catherine Hall (eds), Gendered Nations: Nationalisms and Gender Order in the Long Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 2000). Bock, Petra and Edgar Wolfrum (eds), Umkämpfte Vergangenheit (Göttingen, 1999). Bohn, Thomas M., Russische Geschichtswissenschaft von 1880 bis 1905: Pavel N. Miljukov und die Moskauer Schule (Cologne, 1998). Branch, Michael (ed.), National History and Identity: Approaches to the Writing of National History in the North-East Baltic Region, Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Helsinki, 1999). Brunnbauer, Ulf (ed.), (Re)Writing History in South-East Europe (Essen, 2004). Burke, Peter (ed.), History and Historians in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 2005). Campos Matos, Sérgio, Historiografia e memória nacional (1846–1899) (Lisbon, 1998). Chakrabarty, Dipesh, Provincialising Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, 2000). Chatterjee, Partha, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, 1993). Chickering, Roger, Karl Lamprecht: a German Academic Life, 1856–1915 (Atlantic Highlands, 1993). Clark, Chris and Wolfram Kaiser, Culture Wars: Secular–Catholic Conflict in Nineteenth Century Europe (Cambridge, 2003). Conrad, Christoph and Sebastian Conrad (eds), Die Nation schreiben: Geschichtswissenschaft im internationalen Vergleich (Göttingen, 2002). Downs, Laura Lee, Writing Gender History (London, 2004). Duchhardt, Heinz and Andreas Kunz (eds), Europäische Geschichte als historiographisches Problem (Mainz, 1997). Eley, Geoff, ‘Nazism, Politics and the Image of the Past: Thoughts on the West German Historikerstreit 1986–87’, Past and Present 121 (1988), 171–208. Elton, Geoffrey, ‘The Historian’s Social Function’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, 27 (1977), 197–211. Erdmann, Karl Dietrich, Toward a Global Community of Historians: the International Historical Congresses and the International Committee of Historical Sciences, 1898–2000 (Oxford, 2005). Eriksonas, Linas, National Heroes and National Identities: Scotland, Norway and Lithuania (Brussels, 2004). Evans, Martin and Ken Lunn (eds), War and Memory in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 1997). Evans, Richard J., Forever in Hitler’s Shadow: West German Historians and the Attempt to Escape from the Nazi Past (New York, 1989). Flacke, Monika (ed.), Mythen der Nationen, 1945: Arena der Erinnerungen, 2 vols (Mainz, 2004). Gazi, Effi, Scientific National History: the Greek Case in Comparative Perspective 1850–1920 (Frankfurt/Main, 2000). Geary, Patrick, The Myths of the Nations: the Medieval Origins of Europe (Princeton, 2002). Gellner, Ernest, Encounters with Nationalism (Oxford, 1986). Giesen, Bernhard (ed.), Nationale und kulturelle Identität: Studien zur Entwicklung des kollektiven Bewußtseins in der Neuzeit (Frankfurt/Main 1991). Gikandi, Simon, Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism (New York, 1996).

218 Select Bibliography Hadler, Frank and Mathias Mesenhoeller (eds), Vergangene Größe und Ohnmacht in Ostmitteleuropa: Repräsentation imperialer Erfahrung in der Historiographie seit 1918 (Leipzig, 2006). Haupt, Heinz-Gerhard and Dieter Langewiesche (eds), Nation und Religion in der deutschen Geschichte (Frankfurt/Main, 2001). Hawkesworth, Celia, Muriel Heppell and Harry Norris (eds), Religious Quest and National Identity in the Balkans (Basingstoke, 2001). Helmrath, Johannes, Ulrich Muhlack and Gerrit Walther (eds), Diffusion des Humanismus: Studien zur nationalen Geschichtsschreibung europäischer Humanisten (Göttingen, 2002). Hettling, Manfred (ed.), Volksgeschichte im Europa der Zwischenkriegszeit (Göttingen, 2003). Hewittson, Mark and Tim Baycroft (eds), What is a Nation? Europe, 1789–1914 (Oxford, 2006). Hill, Roland, Lord Acton (Yale, 2000). Hobsbawm, Eric and Terence Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983). Hooson, D. J. M. (ed.), Geography and National Identity (Oxford, 1994). Howard, Thomas Albert, Religion and the Rise of Historicism (Cambridge, 2000). Hubbard, William H., Jan Eivind Myhre, Trond Nordby and Sølvi Sogner (eds), Making a Historical Culture: Historiography in Norway (Oslo, 1995). Hunink, Maria, De Papieren van de Revolutie: Het International Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis 1935–1947 (Amsterdam, 1986). Hürter, Johannes and Hans Woller (eds), Hans Rothfels und die deutsche Zeitgeschichte (Munich, 2005). Iggers, Georg, The German Conception of History: the National Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present, 2nd rev. edn (Middletown, CT, 1983). Iggers, Georg G. and James M. Powell (eds), Leopold von Ranke and the Shaping of the Historical Discipline (Syracuse, 1990). Janowski, Maciej, ‘Three Historians’, CEU History Department Yearbook (2001/2), 199–232. Jarausch, Konrad H. and Michael Geyer, Shattered Past: Reconstructing German Histories (Princeton, 2003). Kedourie, Elie, Nationalism (Oxford, 1993). Keßler, Mario, Arthur Rosenberg: Ein Historiker im Zeitalter der Katastrophen (1889–1943) (Cologne, 2003). Klimó, Árpád von, Nation, Konfession, Geschichte: Zur nationalen Geschichtskultur Ungarns im eurpäischen Kontext 1860–1948 (Munich, 2003). Krapauskas, Virgilis, Nationalism and Historiography: the Case of Nineteenth-Century Lithuanian Historicism (New York, 2000). Krzoska, Markus and Hans-Christian Maner (eds), Beruf und Berufung: Geschichtswissenschaft und Nationsbildung in Ostmittel- und Südosteuropa im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Münster, 2005). Kuzio, Taras, Nation-Building in the Ukraine: the Search for Identity (London, 1998). Lamont, William (ed.), Historical Controversies and Historians (London, 1998). Leersen, Joep, Remembrance and Imagination: Patterns in the Historical and Literary Representation of Ireland in the Nineteenth Century (Cork, 1996). Leersen, Joep, ‘The Rhetoric of National Character: a Programmatic Survey’, Poetics Today 21:2 (2000), 267–92. Liakos, Antonis, ‘The Construction of National Time: the Making of the Modern Greek Historical Imagination’, Mediterranean Historical Review 16:1 (2001), 27–42. Linden, Marcel van der and Lex Heerma van Voss (eds), Class and Other Identities: Entries to West European Labour Historiography (Amsterdam, 2001).

Select Bibliography 219 Lüdtke, Alf (ed.), The History of Everyday Life: Reconstructing Historical Experiences and Ways of Life (Princeton, 1995). Maier, Charles, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust and German National Identity (Cambridge, MA, 1988). Mandler, Peter, History and National Life (London, 2002). Marchal, Guy P., Schweizer Gebrauchsgeschichte. Geschichtsbilder, Mythenbildung und nationale Identität (Basel, 2006). Marchal, Guy P. and Aram Mattioli (eds), Erfundene Schweiz: Konstruktionen nationaler Identität (Zurich, 1992). Meyer, Frank and Jan Eivind Myhre (eds), Nordic Historiography in the Twentieth Century (Oslo, 2000). Middell, Matthias, Weltgeschichtsschreibung im Zeitalter der Verfachlichung und Professionalisierung. Das Leipziger Institut für Kultur- und Universalgeschichte 1890–1990, 3 vols (Leipzig, 2005). Moses, John A., The Politics of Illusion: the Fischer Controversy in German Historiography (London, 1975). Núñez, Xosé Manoel, Historiographical Approaches to Nationalism in Spain (Saarbücken, 1993). Nützenadel, Alexander and Wolfgang Schieder (eds), Zeitgeschichte als Problem: Nationale Traditionen und Perspektiven der Forschung in Europa (Göttingen, 2004). O’Dowd, Mary and Ilaria Porciani, History Women, special issue of the Storia della Storiografia 46 (2004). Patriarca, Silvana, ‘Italian Neo-Patriotism: Debating National Identity in the 1990s’, Modern Italy 6 (2001). Pekora, Vincent P. (ed.), Nations and Identities (Oxford, 2001). Perrie, Maureen, The Cult of Ivan the Terrible in Stalin’s Russia (Basingstoke, 2002). Piskorski, Jan M. with Jörg Hackmann and Rudolf Jaworksi (eds), Deutsche Ostforschung und polnische Westforschung im Spannungsfeld von Wissenschaft und Politik: Disziplinen im Vergleich (Osnabrück, 2002). Pistohlkors, G. von, T. U. Raun and P. Kaegbein (eds), The Universities in Dorpat/Tartu, Riga and Wilna/Vilnius 1579–1979 (Cologne, 1987). Porciani, Ilaria, L’Università tra Otto e Novecento: I modelli europei e il caso italiano (Naples, 1994). Prymak, T., ‘Hrushevsky and the Ukraine’s “Lost” History’, History Today 39 (1989), 42–6. Raphael, Lutz, Geschichtswissenschaft im Zeitalter der Extreme: Theorien, Methoden, Tendenzen von 1900 bis zur Gegenwart (Munich, 2003). Robbins, Keith, History, Religion and Identity in Modern Britain (London, 1993). Sabrow, Martin, Ralph Jessen and Klaus Große Kracht (eds), Zeitgeschichte als Streitgeschichte: Grosse Kontroversen seit 1945 (Munich, 2003). Schöttler, Peter (ed.), Geschichtsschreibung als Legitimationswissenschaft 1918–1945 (Frankfurt/Main, 1997). Smith, Bonnie, The Gender of History: Men, Women and Historical Practice (Cambridge, MA, 1998). Stibbe, Matthew, German Anglophobia and the Great War, 1914–1918 (Cambridge, 2001). Stråth, Bo and Øystein Sørensen (eds), The Cultural Construction of Norden (Oslo, 1997). Todorova, Maria, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford, 1997). Tollebeek, Jo, ‘Historical Representation and the Nation-State in Romantic Belgium (1830–1850)’, Journal of the History of Ideas 59 (1998), 329–53. Velychenko, Stephen, National History as Cultural Process: a Survey of the Interpretations of Ukraine’s Past in Polish, Russian, and Ukranian Historical Writing from the Earliest Times to 1914 (Edmonton, 1992).

220 Select Bibliography Wallerstein, Imanuel, The Modern World System, 3 vols (London, 1974–1988). Woolf, Daniel (ed.), A Global Encyclopedia of Historical Writing, 2 vols (New York, 1998). Woolf, Daniel, Reading History in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2000). Woolf, Stuart, ‘Europe and its Historians’, Contemporary European History 12 (2003), 323–37. Zac
ek, J. F., Palacký: the Historian as Scholar and Nationalist (The Hague, 1970). Zimmer, Oliver, A Contested Nation: History, Memory and Nationalism in Switzerland, 1761–1891 (Cambridge, 2003).

3 Seven Narratives in North American History (a) Canada Berger, Carl, The Writing of Canadian History: Aspects of English-Canadian Historical Writing 1900 to 1970 (Toronto, 1976; 2nd edn., 1986). Brooke Taylor, M., Promoters, Patriots, and Partisans: Historiography in Nineteenth Century English Canada (Toronto, 1989). Brooke Taylor, M. (ed.), Canadian History: A Reader’s Guide. Vol. 1. Beginnings to Confederation (Toronto, 1994). Careless, J. M. S., ‘Frontierism, Metropolitanism, and Canadian History’, Canadian Historical Review 35:1 (1954), 1–21. Creighton, D. G., The Commercial Empire of the St. Lawrence (Toronto, 1937). Innis, H. A., The Fur Trade in Canada (New Haven, 1930). Kingsford, William, History of Canada, 12 vols (Toronto, 1887–98). McMullen, John, The History of Canada: From its First Discovery to the Present Time (Brockville, 1855). Morton, W. L., The Canadian Identity (Toronto, 1961). Owram, Doug (ed.), Canadian History: a Reader’s Guide. Vol. 2. Confederation to the Present (Toronto, 1994). Shortt, Adam and A. G. Doughty (eds), Canada and its Provinces: a History of the Canadian People and their Institutions, by One Hundred Associates, 23 vols (Toronto, 1914–17). Smith, Allan, ‘Organizing Ideas and How They Work: the National–International Binary, the Rise of Transnationalism, and the Imagining of the Canadian Community’, in Damien Claude Bélanger, Sophie Coupal and Michel Ducharme (eds), Les idées en mouvement: perspectives en histoire intellectuelle et culturelle du Canada (Quebec, 2004), pp. 29–52. Wright, Donald, The Professionalization of History in English Canada (Toronto, 2005).

(b) Quebec Brunet, Michel, La présence anglaise et les Canadiens (Montreal, 1958). Fecteau, Jean-Marie, ‘Between Scientific Enquiry and the Search for a Nation: Quebec Historiography as seen by Ronald Rudin’, Canadian Historical Review 80:4 (1999), 641–66. Frégault, Guy, La civilisation de la Nouvelle France, 1713–1744 (Montreal, 1944). Gagnon, Serge, Quebec and its Historians: 1840 to 1920 (Montreal, 1982). Gagnon, Serge, Quebec and its Historians: the Twentieth Century (Montreal, 1985). Garneau, F.-X., History of Canada [1845], trans. Andrew Bell (Montreal, 1860). Groulx, Lionel, Notre maître, le passé. 3 vols (Montreal, 1977–8). Lemieux, Denise and Lucie Mercier, La recherche sur les femmes au Québec: bilan et bibliographie (Quebec, 1982).

Select Bibliography 221 Levesque, Andrée, ‘Historiography: History of Women in Quebec Since 1985’, Quebec Studies 12 (1991), 83–91. Régimbald, P., ‘La disciplinarisation de l’histoire au Canada français, 1920–1950’, Revue del’histoire de l’Amérique française 51:2 (1997), 163–200. Rudin, Ronald, Making History in Twentieth Century Quebec (Toronto, 1997). Rudin, Ronald, ‘On Difference and National Identity in Quebec Historical Writing: a Response to Jean-Marie Fecteau’, Canadian Historical Review 80:4 (1999), 666–76. Sulte, Benjamin, L’histoire des Canadiens français, 1608–1880, 8 vols (Montreal, 1882–84).

(c) United States of America Bancroft, George The History of the United States of America, from the Discovery of the Continent, 6 vols (New York, 1891–2). Beard, Charles, The Rise of American Civilization, 2 vols (New York, 1927). Bender, Thomas (ed.), Rethinking American History in a Global Age (Berkeley, 2002). Boorstin, Daniel J., The Genius of American Politics (Chicago, 1953). Degler, Carl N., ‘Modern American Historiography’, in Michael Bentley (ed.), Companion to Historiography (London, 1997), pp. 709–27. Hartz, Louis, The Liberal Tradition in America: an Interpretation of American Political Thought Since the Revolution (New York, 1955). Higham, John, History: the Development of Historical Studies in the United States (Englewood Cliffs, 1965). Higham, John, ‘The Future of American History’, Journal of American History 80:4 (1994), 1289–1309. Hofstadter, Richard, The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington (New York, 1968). Hollinger, David A., ‘How Wide the Circle of the “We”? American Intellectuals and the Problem of the Ethnos Since World War II’, American Historical Review, 98:2 (1993), 317–37. Jardins, Julie des, Women and the Historical Enterprise in America: Gender, Race, and the Politics of Memory, 1880–1945 (Chapel Hill, 2003). Novick, Peter, That Noble Dream: the ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession (New York, 1988). Ross, Dorothy, ‘Grand Narrative in American Historical Writing’, American Historical Review 100:3 (1995), 651–77. Thelen, David, ‘The Nation and Beyond: Transnational Perspectives on United States History’, Journal of American History 86:3 (1999), 965–75. Turner, Frederick Jackson, The Frontier in American History (New York, 1920). Tyrell, Ian, ‘American Exceptionalism in an Age of International History’, American Historical Review 96:4 (1991), 1031–55.

4 The Mirror of History and Images of the Nation Abreu, Capistrano, Capítulos de História Colonial (1500–1800), 5th edn (Rio de Janeiro, 1969). Aguiar, Ronaldo Conde, O Rebelde Esquecido. Tempo, Vida e Obra de Manoel Bonfim (Rio de Janeiro, 2000). Anderson, Benedict, Nação e Consciência Nacional (São Paulo, 1989). Andrews, George Reid, The Afro-Argentines of Buenos Aires, 1800–1900 (Wisconsin, 1980).

222 Select Bibliography Araújo, Ricardo Benzaquen, ‘Ronda Noturna. Narrativa, Crítica e Verdade em Capistrano de Abreu’, Estudos Históricos 1 (1988). Araújo, Ricardo Benzaquen, Guerra e Paz – Casa Grande & Senzala e a Obra de Gilberto Freyre (Rio de Janeiro, 1994). Benítes, Augustín Basave, México Mestizo:Análisis del Nacionalismo Mexicano en torno a la mestzofilia de Andrés Molina Henríquez (Mexico, 1992). Blancarte, Roberto (ed.), Cultura e Identidad Nacional (Mexico, 1994). Bonfim, Manuel, América Latina. Males de Origem (Rio de Janeiro, 1993; 1st edn, 1905). Bonfim, Manuel, O Brasil Nação (Rio de Janeiro, 1996; 1st edn, 1931). Botana, Natalio R., El Orden Conservador. La Política Argentina entre 1888 y 1916 (Buenos Aires, 1986). Donghi, Tulio Halperin, ‘Mitre e a Formulação de uma História Nacional para a Argentina’, Estudos Avançados 8 (1994). Dutra, Eliana de Freitas, ‘La fusion des races comme lieu de mémoire’, Diogène 191 (2000), 32–46. Dutra, Eliana de Freitas, Rebeldes Literários da República. História e Identidade Nacional no Almanque Brasileiro Garnier (1903–1914) (Belo Horizonte, 2005). Fell, Eve Marie, ‘Primeras reformulations del pensamiento racista al despertar de la consciencia revolucionária’, in Ana Pizarro (ed.), América Latina: Palavra, Literatura e Cultura (São Paulo, 1994), vol. 2. Florescano, Enrique, El Nuevo Pasado Mexicano (Mexico, 1991). Franco, Stella Maris Scatena, Luzes e Sombras na Construção da Nação Argentina: Os Manuais de História Nacional (Bragança Paulista, 2003). Freyre, Gilberto, Casa Grande & Senzala – Formação da Família Brasileira sob o Regime Patriarcal (Rio de Janeiro, 1969; 1st edn, 1933). Gellner, Ernest, Nations et Nationalisme (Paris, 1989). Gomes, Ângela Maria de Castro, História e Historiadores (Rio de Janeiro, 1996). Guimarães, Manoel Luis Salgado, ‘Nação e Civilização nos Trópicos’, Estudos Históricos 1 (1988), 5–27. Guimarães, Lúcia Maria Paschoal, Debaixo da Proteção de Sua Magestade Imperial. O Instituto Histórico Geográfico Brasileiro (1838–1889) (Rio de Janeiro, 1997), vol. 1. Guimarães,Lúcia Maria Paschoal, ‘Um Olhar sobre o Continente: O Instituto Histórico e Geográfico brasileiro e o Congresso Internacional de História da América’, Estudos Históricos 20 (1997). Hobsbawm, Eric, Nações e Nacionalismo desde 1780 (Rio de Janeiro,1990). Lafforge, Edmund, La Escuela popular: su évolution y proyección (Buenos Aires, 1980). Lima, Oliveira, Formation de la Nationalité Brésilienne (Paris, 1911). Llorens, Antonia Pi-Suñer, ‘Una Gran Empresa Cultural de Mediados del siglo XIX: el Diccionario Universal de Historia y Geografía’, in Laura Beatriz Suarez de la Torre (ed.), Empresa y Cultura en Tinta y Papel (1800–1860) (Mexico, 2001), pp. 409–18. Maristany, José, Las Ficciones el Pasado en los Manueles de la Historia Argentina:1880–1910 (www.univ-tours.fr/Maristany-29-01-2005). Martius, Friedrich Philipp von, Como se deve escrever a História do Brasil (Rio de Janeiro, 1991). Mitre, Antônio, O Dilema do Centauro. Ensaios de tória da História e pensamento latinoamericano (Belo Horizonte, 2003). Mitre, Bartolomé, História de Belgrano y de la Independencia Argentina, 5th edn (Buenos Aires, 1902). Mora, Arturo Sóberon, ‘Las Armas de la Ilustración: folhetos, catecismos, cartilhas y dicionarios en la construction del México moderno’, in Laura Beatriz Suarez de la Torre (ed.), Empresa y Cultura en Tinta y Papel (1800–1860) (Mexico, 2001).

Select Bibliography 223 Mora, José Maria Luís, México y sus revoluciones (Mexico, 1950). Odália, Nilo (ed.), Varnhagen (São Paulo, 1979). O’Gorman, Edmund, ‘La Revolución Mexicana y la Historiographie en México’, in México, 50 anos de Revolução (Mexico, 1960). Ortega y Medina, Juan A., ‘Indigenismo e Hispanismo en la Consciencia Historiográfica Mexicana’, in Roberto Blancarte (ed.), Cultura e Identidad Nacional (Mexico, 1994). Quijada, Mónica, Carmen Bernand and A. Schneider (eds), Homogeneidad y Nation: Con un Estudio de Caso: Argentina, Siglos XIX y XX (Madrid, 2000). Reis, José Carlos, As Identidades do Brasil de Varnhagen à FHC (Rio de Janeiro, 1999). Ribeiro, João, História do Brasil, Curso Superior, 14th edn (Rio de Janeiro, 1953, 1st edn, 1900). Rodrigues, José Honório, ‘Varnhagen: Mestre da História Geral do Brasil’, Revista do IHGB (April/June 1967). Romero, Jose Luis, Las Ideas Políticas en Argentina (Buenos Aires, 1975). Romero, Sílvio, História da Literatura Brasileira, 3rd edn (Rio de Janeiro, 1943; 1st edition, 1888). Rouanet, Maria Helena, Eternamente em Berço Esplêndido: a Fundação de uma Literatura Nacional (São Paulo, 1991). Schwarcz, Lilia Moritz, O Espetáculo das Raças. Cientistas, Instituições e Questão Racial no Brasil, 1870–1930 (São Paulo, 1993). Schwarcz, Lilia Moritz, As Barbas do Imperador (São Paulo, 1998). Skidmore, Thomas, Preto no Branco. Raça e Nacionalidade no Pensamento Brasileiro (Rio de Janeiro, 1976). Smith, A. D., Theories of Nationalism (London, 1983). Smith, A. D., ‘O Nacionalismo e os Historiadores’, in Gopal Balakrishnan (ed.), Um Mapa da Questão Nacional (Rio de Janeiro, 2000). Solari, Horacio, Historia de la educación argentina (Buenos Aires, 1949). Sommer, Doris, Ficções de Fundação. Os Romances Nacionais da América Latina (Belo Horizonte, 2004). Southey, Robert, História do Brasil (Rio de Janeiro, 1862). Suarez de la Torre, Laura Beatriz, ‘Lectores-actores mexicanos, lecturas extranjeras: influencias para la formación de una cultura nacional’, in Eliana Freitas de Dutra and Jean-Yves Mollier (eds), Política, Nação e Edição (São Paulo, 2006). Süsskind, Flora, O Brasil não é Longe Daqui: o Narrador, a Viagem (São Paulo, 1990). Süsskind, Flora and Roberto Ventura, História, e Dependência. Cultura e Sociedade em Manoel Bonfim (São Paulo, 1984). Varnhagen, Adolfo Francisco, História Geral do Brasil, 5 vols, 6th edn (São Paulo, 1957). Ventura, Roberto, Estilo Tropical (São Paulo, 1991). Vianna, Oliveira, Evolução do Povo Brasileiro (São Paulo, 1923). Vianna, Oliveira, Raça e Assimilação (São Paulo, 1938). Wehling, Arno, A Invenção da História.Estudos Sobre o Historicismo (Rio de Janeiro, 1994). Zavala, Lorenzo, Ensayo Histórico de las Revolutiones de México (Mexico, 1985).

5 Writing the Nation in Australia Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities (London, 1983). Atkinson, Alan, The Europeans in Australia, 2 vols (Oxford, 1997, 2004). Atkinson, Alan, The Commonwealth of Speech: An Argument about Australia’s Past, Present and Future (Melbourne, 2002). Attwood, Bain (ed.), In the Age of Mabo (Sydney, 1996).

224 Select Bibliography Blainey, Geoffrey, ‘Drawing Up a Balance Sheet of Our History’, Quadrant (July–August 1993). Blair, Dale, Dinkum Diggers (Melbourne, 2001). Clark, Manning, ‘Rewriting Australian History’, in Manning Clark, Occasional Writings and Speeches (Melbourne, 1980). Collins, Rebecca, ‘Concealing the Poverty of Traditional Historiography: Myth as Mystification in Historical Discourse’, Rethinking History 7:3 (2003). Connell, R. W. and T. H. Irving, Class Structure in Australian History (London, 1980). Crawford, R. M., The Study of History: a Synoptic View (Melbourne, 1939). Curthoys, Anne, ‘We’ve Just Started Making National Histories, and You Want Us to Stop Already?’ in Antoinette Burton (ed.), After the Imperial Turn: Thinking With and Through the Nation (Durham, 2003). Davison, Graeme, The Use and Abuse of Australian History (Sydney, 2000). Dixson, Miriam, The Real Matilda (Melbourne, 1976). Dixson, Miriam, The Imaginary Australian (Sydney, 1999). Fitzpatrick, Brian, The Australian Commonwealth (Melbourne, 1956). Foucault, Michel, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, in Michel Foucault, Aesthetics: Essential Works, vol. 2 (London, 2001). Gare, Deborah et al., The Fuss That Never Ended (Melbourne, 2003). Grimshaw, Patricia, Marilyn Lake, Ann McGrath and Marian Quartly, Creating a Nation (Melbourne, 1996). Hancock, W. K., Australia (London, 1930). Lake, Marilyn, ‘Mission Impossible: How Men Gave Birth to the Australian Nation – Nationalism, Gender and Other Seminal Acts’, Gender & History 4:3 (1992). Lake, Marilyn, ‘On Being a White Man, Australia, circa 1900’, in Hsu-Ming Teo and Richard White (eds), Cultural History in Australia (Sydney, 2003). Lake, Marilyn, ‘White Man’s Country: the Trans-National History of a National Project’, Australian Historical Studies 122 (2003). Macintyre, Stuart, A History for a Nation: Ernest Scott and the Making of Australian History (Melbourne, 1994). Macintyre, Stuart and Anna Clark, The History Wars (Melbourne, 2004). Macintyre, Stuart and Julian Thomas (eds), The Discovery of Australia, 1890–1939 (Melbourne, 1995). Manne, Robert (ed.), Whitewash: On Keith Windschuttle’s Fabrication of Aboriginal History (Melbourne, 2003). McQueen, Humphrey, A New Britannia (Melbourne, 1970). Melleuish, Gregory, Cultural Liberalism in Australia (Melbourne, 1995). Murrie, Linzi, ‘The Australian Legend and Australian Men’, in Richard Nile (ed.), The Australian Legend and Its Discontents (St Lucia, 2000). Palmer, Vance, The Legend of the Nineties (London, 1954). Reynolds, Henry, The Other Side of the Frontier (Melbourne, 1981). Reynolds, Henry, The Law of the Land (Melbourne, 1987). Rowse, Tim, Australian Liberalism and National Character (Melbourne, 1978). Scott, Ernest, A Short History of Australia (London, 1916). Shann, Edward, An Economic History of Australia (Cambridge, 1930). Somers, Margaret R., ‘Deconstructing and Reconstructing Class Formation Theory: Narrativity, Relational Analysis, and Social Theory’, in John R. Hall (ed.), Reworking Class (Cornell, 1997). Ward, Russel, The Australian Legend (Oxford, 1958). White, Richard, Inventing Australia (Sydney, 1981).

Select Bibliography 225 Windschuttle, Keith, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History. Vol.1. Van Diemen’s Land, 1803–1847 (Sydney, 2002).

6 Between Myth and History Beasley, W. G. and E. G. Pulleyblank (eds), Historians of China and Japan (Oxford, 1961). Brownlee, John S. (ed.), History in the Service of the Japanese Nation (Toronto, 1983). Brownlee, John S., Japanese Historians and the National Myths, 1600–1945: the Age of the Gods and Emperor Jinmu (Vancouver, 1997). Chow, Tse-tsung, The May Fourth Movement: Intellectual Revolution in Modern China (Cambridge MA, 1960). Dikötter, Frank, The Discourse of Race in Modern China (Stanford, 1992). Dirlik, Arif, Revolution and History: the Origins of Marxist Historiography in China, 1919–1937 (Berkeley, 1978). Fogel, Joshua A., Politics and Sinology: the Case of Naito¯ Konan (1866–1934) (Cambridge MA, 1984). Fogel, Joshua A., The Cultural Dimension of Sino-Japanese Relations (Armonk NY, 1995). Fogel, Joshua A. (ed.), The Role of Japan in Liang Qichao’s Introduction of Modern Western Civilization to China (Berkeley, 2004). Fuchs, Eckhardt and Benedikt Stuchtey (eds), Across Cultural Borders: Historiography in Global Perspective (Lanham MD, 2002). Grafton, Anthony, Defenders of the Texts: the Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450–1800 (Cambridge MA, 1991). Grieder, Jerome, Hu Shih and the Chinese Renaissance: Liberalism in the Chinese Revolution, 1917–37 (Cambridge MA, 1970). Gu, Jiegang (Ku Chieh-kang), The Autobiography of a Chinese Historian (Leiden, 1931). Gu Jiegang, ‘Huangdi’ (Yellow Emperor), in Shilin zashi chubian (Essays in the Forest of History, 1st edition) (Beijing, 1963), pp. 176–84. Hu, Shi (Shih), The Chinese Renaissance (New York, 1934, rep. 1963). Hu, Shi, The Development of the Logical Method in Ancient China (New York, 1963, rep.). Hu Shi, Wenti yu zhuyi (Problems and Isms) (Taipei, 1986). Huang, Chun-chieh and John B.Henderson (eds), Notions of Time in Chinese Historical Thinking (Hong Kong, 2006). Iggers, Georg G., Historiography in the 20th Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge (Hanover NH, 1997). Karl, Rebecca, Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the 20th Century (Durham, 2002). Kim, Yong-ha, Modern Korean History and Nationalism (Seoul, 2000). Li, Ji, Anyang: a Chronicle of the Discovery, Excavation, and Reconstruction of the Ancient Capital of the Shang Dynasty (Seattle, 1977). Li, Xueqin, Zouchu yigu shidai (Going Out the Doubting Antiquity Age) (Shenyang, 1997). Li, Xueqin, Dangdai xuezhe zixuan wenku: Li Xueqin juan (Self-selected Works of Contemporary Scholars: the Volume of Li Xueqin) (Hefei, 1999). Li, Xueqin, Chongxie xueshushi (Rewriting Intellectual History) (Shijiazhuang, 2002). Luo, Zhitian, ‘Qingji kejuzhi gaige de shehui yingxiang’ (The Social Impact of the Reform of the Civil Service Examination System in the Late Qing), Zhongguo shehui kexue (Chinese Social Sciences) 4 (1998). Mehl, Margaret, History and the State in Nineteenth-century Japan (New York, 1998). Nagahara, Keiji, 20 seiki Nihon no rekishigaku (Japanese Historiography of the Twentieth Century) (Tokyo, 2005).

226 Select Bibliography Ng, On-cho and Q. Edward Wang, Mirroring the Past: the Writing and Use of History in Imperial China (Honolulu, 2005). Pai, Hyung Il, Constructing ‘Korean’ Origins: a Critical Review of Archaeology, Historiography, and Racial Myth in Korean State-Formation Theories (Cambridge MA, 2000). Reynolds, Douglas, China, 1898–1912: the Xinzheng Revolution and Japan (Cambridge MA, 1993). Saneto¯ , Keishu¯ , Chu¯ gokujin Nihon ryu¯ gakushi (A History of Chinese People Studying in Japan) (Tokyo, 1960). Sato¯ Masayuki, Rekishi ninshiki no jiku¯ (Time and Space in Historical Epistemology) (Tokyo, 2004). Schneider, Laurence, Ku Chieh-kang and China’s New History: Nationalism and the Quest for Alternative Traditions (Berkeley, 1971). Schwarcz, Vera, The Chinese Enlightenment: Intellectuals and the Legacy of the May Fourth Movement of 1919 (Berkeley, 1986). Shen, Songqiao, ‘Wo yi woxue jian xuanyuan: Huangdi shenhua yu wanqing de guozu jiangou’ (I shall sacrifice my blood for the Yellow Emperor: the Yellow Emperor Myth and the Nation-State Construction in the late Qing), Taiwan shehui yanjiu jikan (Social Studies in Taiwan Quarterly) 28 (1997), 1–77. Tanaka, Stefan, Japan’s Orient: Rendering Pasts into History (Berkeley, 1993). Tanaka, Stefan, New Times in Modern Japan (Princeton, 2004). Torstendahl, Rolf (ed.), An Assessment of 20th-Century Historiography (Stockholm, 2000). Wang, Fan-sen, Fu Ssu-nien: a Life in Chinese History and Politics (New York, 2000). Wang, Mingke, ‘Lun panfu: jindai yanhuang zisun guozu jiangou de gudai jichu’ (The Ancient Foundations of Modern Nation-Building in China: the Case of ‘the Offspring of Yan and Yellow Emperors’), Zhongyang yanjiuyuan lishi yuyan yanjiusuo jikan (Bulletin of the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica) 73:3 (2002), 583–624. Wang, Q. Edward, ‘History, Space and Ethnicity: the Chinese Worldview’, Journal of World History 10:2 (1999), 285–305. Wang, Q. Edward, Inventing China through History: the May 4th Approach to Historiography (Albany, 2001). Wang, Q. Edward, ‘China’s Search for National History’, in Q. Edward Wang and Georg Iggers (eds), Turning Points in Historiography: a Cross-Cultural Comparison (Rochester, 2002), pp. 185–208. Wu, Rui (ed.), Gushikao (Examinations of Ancient History) (Haikou, 2003), vols 5 and 9. Yü, Ying-shih, Zhu Xi de lishi shijie (Zhu Xi’s Historical World), 2 vols (Taipei, 2003).

7 Writing the Nation in India Alam, Muzaffar, The Crisis of Empire in Mughal North India: Awadh and the Punjab, 1707–1748 (Delhi, 1997). Alam, Muzaffar, The Languages of Political Islam in India (Oxford, 2004). Alam, Muzaffar and Sanjay Subrahmanyam (eds), The Mughal State (Delhi, 2000). Alavi, Seema, The Eighteenth Century in India (Oxford, 2002). Altekar, A. S., State and Government in Ancient India (Delhi, 1949, reprint, 2001). Altekar, A. S., The Position of Women in Hindu Civilization (Delhi, 1959, reprint). Chakravarti, Uma, Gendering Caste Through a Feminist Lens (Calcutta, 2003). Chandra, Bipan, Rise and Growth of Economic Nationalism in India (New Delhi, 1969). Chandra, Bipan, Communalism in Modern India (Delhi, 1993, reprint). Chattopadhyaya, B. D., The Making of Early Medieval India (Delhi, 1997).

Select Bibliography 227 Chattopadhyaya, B. D., Studying Early India: Archaeology, Texts and Historical Issues (Delhi, 2003). Cohn, B., An Anthropologist Among the Historians and Other Essays (Oxford, 1988). Eaton, Richard (ed.), India’s Islamic Traditions, 711–1750 (Oxford, 2003). Grewal, J. S., Medieval India: History and Historians (Amritsar, 1975). Guha, Ranajit, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in India (Oxford, 1983). Guha, Ranajit (ed., first six volumes), Subaltern Studies: Writings on South Asian History and Society (Delhi, 1982–1997). Jha, D. N. (ed.), The Feudal Order: State, Society and Ideology in Early Medieval India (Delhi, 2002). Jha, D. N., Early India: a Concise History (Delhi, 2004). Marshall, P. J., The British Discovery of Hinduism in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1970). Marshall, P. J. (ed.), The Eighteenth Century in Indian History: Evolution or Revolution? (Oxford, 2003). Mukhia, Harbans, Perspectives on Medieval History (Delhi, 1994). Mukhia, Harbans, The Mughals of India (Oxford, 2005). Pandey, Gyanendra, The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India (Delhi, 1997). Rao, Velchero Narayan, David Shulman and Sanjay Subrahmanyam (eds), Textures of Time: Writing History in South India 1600–1800 (Delhi, 2001). Sangari, Kumkum and Sudesh Vaid, Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History (Delhi, 1989). Sarkar, Sumit, Writing Social History (Oxford, 1997). Sharma, R. S., Indian Feudalism, 2nd edn (Madras, 1980). Sharma, R. S., Aspects of Political Ideas and Institutions in Ancient India (Delhi, 2001, reprint). Sharma, R. S., Early Medieval Indian Society: a Study in Feudalisation (London, 2001). Thapar, Romila, Interpreting Early India (Delhi, 1995). Thapar, Romila, The Penguin History of Early India, from the Origins to AD 1300 (Delhi, 2002). Tharu, Susie and K. Lalitha (eds), Women Writing in India 600 BC to the Early 20th Century (Oxford, 1991).

8 Writing the Nation in the Arabic-Speaking World Abu Ghazaleh, A., Arab Cultural Nationalism in Palestine during the British Mandate (Beirut, 1973). Abu-Rabi’, I. M., Contemporary Arab Thought: Studies in Post-1967 Arab Intellectual History (London, 2004). Aflaq, Michel, Fi sabil al-ba’th (Toward the Ba’th) (Beirut, 1959). Al-Husri, S., Ara’ wa ahadith fi’l-wataniyya wa’l-qaumiyya (Views and Addresses on Patriotism and Nationalism) (Cairo, 1944). Al-Kawakibi, A., Umm al-qura: wa huwa dabt mufawadat wa-muqarrarat mu’tamar al-nahda al-islamiyya al-munaqid fi makka al-mukarrama sana 1316 (Beirut, 1991). Amin, S., The Arab Nation: Nationalism and Class Struggle (London, 1983). Anderson, B., Imagined Communities (London, 1993). Antonius, G., The Arab Awakening: the Story of the Arab National Movement (London, 1938). Arnoni, M. S., Arab Nationalism and the Nazis (Tel Aviv, 1970). Atiyah, E., The Arabs: the Origins, Present Conditions, and Prospects of the Arab World (Harmondsworth, 1955).

228 Select Bibliography Ayyad, ‘Abd al-’Aziz, Arab Nationalism and the Palestinians, 1850–1939 (Jerusalem, 1999). Azoury, N., Le Réveil de la Nation Arabe dans l’Asie Turque en Présence des Intérêts et des Rivalités des Puissances Étrangères, de la Curie Romaine et du Patriarcat Œcuménique (Paris, 1905). Baumgarten, H., ‘The Three Faces/Phases of Palestinian Nationalism, 1948–2005’, Journal of Palestine Studies 136:34 (2005), 25–48. Budeiri, M., ‘The Palestinians: Tensions Between Nationalist and Religious Identities’, in J. Jankowski and I. Gershoni (eds), Rethinking Nationalism in the Arab East (New York, 1997), pp. 191–206. Choueiri, Y. M., Arab Nationalism, a History: Nation and State in the Arab World (Oxford, 2000). Cleveland, W. L., The Making of an Arab Nationalist: Ottomanism and Arabism in the Life and Thought of Sati’ al-Husri (Princeton, 1971). Cleveland, W. L., ‘The Arab Nationalism of George Antonius Reconsidered’, in J. Jankowski and I. Gershoni (eds), Rethinking Nationalism in the Arab East (New York, 1997), pp. 65–86. Dawn, C. E., From Ottomanism to Arabism: Essays on the Origins of Arab Nationalism (Urbana, 1973). Duara, P., Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago,1995). Duri, Abd al-Aziz, The Historical Formation of the Arab Nation: a Study in Identity and Consciousness (London, 1987), Arabic edition 1984. Faris, Hani A., Arab Nationalism and the Future of the Arab World (Belmont, MA, 1987). Fleischmann, E. L., The Nation and its ‘New’ Women: the Palestinian Women’s Movement, 1920–1948 (Berkeley, 2003). Gershoni, I., ‘Rethinking Arab Nationalism’, 1920–1945’, in J. Jankowski and I. Gershoni (eds), Rethinking Nationalism in the Arab East (New York, 1997), pp. 3–25. Haddad, M., ‘The Rise of Arab Nationalism Reconsidered’, IJMES 26 (1994). Haim, S.G., Arab Nationalism: an Anthology (Berkeley, 1964). Hopwood, D., Arab Nation, Arab Nationalism (Basingstoke, 2000). Hourani, A., ‘Ottoman Reform and the Politics of Notables’, in W. R. Polk and R. L. Chambers (eds), Beginnings of Modernization in the Middle East: the Nineteenth Century (Chicago, 1968), pp. 41–65. Jankowski, J. P., Nasser’s Egypt, Arab Nationalism, and the United Arab Republic (Boulder, 2002). Jankowski, J. and I. Gershoni (eds), Rethinking Nationalism in the Arab East (New York, 1997). Kanaaneh, R. A., Birthing the Nation: Strategies of Palestinian Women in Israel (Berkeley, 2002). Khalidi, R., L. Anderson, M. Muslih and R. Simon (eds), The Origins of Arab Nationalism (New York, 1991). Khouri, R., Maalim al-wayi al-qaumi (The Features of National Consciousness) (Beirut 1941). Khoury, P. S., Syria and the French Mandate: the Politics of Arab Nationalism 1920–1945 (Princeton, 1978). Khoury, P. S., Urban Notables and Arab Nationalism: the Politics of Damascus, 1860–1920 (Cambridge, 1983). Lapidus, I. M., Muslim Cities in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1967). Leer, P. van der and H. Lehmann, Nation and Religion: Perspectives on Europe and Asia (Princeton, 1999). Muslih, M. Y., The Origins of Palestinian Nationalism (New York, 1988). Nasser, J.A., Falsafat al-thaura (Philosophy of Revolution) (Cairo, n.d.).

Select Bibliography 229 Peteet, J., Gender in Crisis: Women and the Palestinian Resistance Movement (New York, 1991). Philipp, T. and C. Schumann (eds), From the Syrian Land to the States of Syria and Lebanon (Würzburg, 2004). Podeh, E., Rethinking Nasserism: Revolution and Historical Memory in Modern Egypt (Gainesville, 2004). Rabbath, E., Unité Syrienne et Devenir Arabe (Paris, 1937). Sayigh, A., Palestine and Arab Nationalism (Beirut, 1970). Schaebler, B., ‘From Urban Notables to Noble Arabs: Shifting Discourses in the Emergence of Nationalism in the Arab East (1910–1916)’, in T. Phillip and C. Schumann (eds), From the Syrian Land to the States of Syria and Lebanon (Würzburg, 2004), pp. 175–98. Schaebler, B., ‘Coming to Terms with Failed Revolutions: Historiography in Syria, France and Germany’, Middle Eastern Studies 35:1 (1999), 17–44. Schaebler, B., ‘Civilizing Others: Global Modernity and the Local Boundaries (French, German, Ottoman, Arab) of Savagery’, in B. Schaebler and L. Stenberg (eds), Globalization and the Muslim World (Syracuse, 2004), pp. 3–29. Schaebler, B., and L. Stenberg (eds), Globalization and the Muslim World (Syracuse, 2004). Sharabi, H., Nationalism and Revolution in the Arab World (Princeton, 1966). Sharara, Abd al-Latif, Fi’l-qaumiyya al-arabiyya (On Arab Nationalism) (Beirut, 1957). Sheehi, S., Foundations of Modern Arab Identity (Gainesville, 2004). Shuraydi, M. A., ‘Pan-Arabism: “A Theory in Practice” ’, in H. A. Fairs (ed.), Arab Nationalism and the Future of the Arab World (Belmont, MA, 1987), pp. 95–115. Sivan, E., ‘Arab Nationalism in the Age of Islamic Resurgence’, in J. Jankowski and I. Gershoni (eds), Rethinking Nationalism in the Arab East (New York, 1997), pp. 207–28. Tibi, B., Arab Nationalism: Between Islam and the Nation State (London, 1997). Zeine, N. Z., Arab-Turkish Relations and the Emergence of Arab Nationalism (Beirut, 1958). Zeine, N. Z., The Emergence of Arab Nationalism: With a Background Study of Arab-Turkish Relations in the Near East, 3rd edn (Delmar, 1973). Zurayq, C., Al-wa’ i al-qaumi (Nationalist Consciousness) (Beirut, 1938). Zurayq, C., The Meaning of the Disaster (Beirut, 1956); Arabic original 1948.

9 Writing National and Transnational History in Africa Barry, B., Le royaume du Waalo. Le Sénégal avant la conquête (Paris, 1972). Barry, B., La Sénégambie du XVe au XIXe siècle. Traite négrière, Islam, Conquête coloniale (Paris, 1988). Bathily, A., ‘Aux origines de l’Africanisme: le rôle de l’œuvre ethno-historique de Faidherbe dans la conquête du Sénégal’, in Le mal de voir. Ethnologie et orientalisme: politique et épistémologie, critique et autocritique (Paris, 1976), pp. 77–105. Bathily, A., Les portes de l’or. Le royaume de Galam (Sénégal) de l’ère musulmane au temps des négriers (VIIIe–XVIIIe siècle) (Paris, 1989). Becker, C., ‘Histoire de la Sénégambie du XVe au XVIIIe siècle: un bilan’, Cahiers d’Etudes africaines 98 (1985), 213–42. Becker, C. and V. Becker, ‘La Sénégambie à l’époque de la traite des esclaves’, Société Française d’Histoire d’Outre-Mer 235 (1977), 203–24. Becker, C. and V. Martin, ‘Kajoor et Baol: royaumes sénégalais et traite des esclaves au XVIIIe siècle’, Revue Française d’Histoire d’Outre-Mer 226–227 (1975), 270–300. Becker, C., S. Mbaye and I. Thioub (eds), AOF: réalités et héritages. Sociétés ouestafricaines et ordre colonial, 1895–1960 (Dakar, 1997).

230 Select Bibliography Bernault, F., ‘L’Afrique et la modernité des sciences sociales’, Annales de la Faculté des Lettres et Sciences Humaines 29 (1999), 73–87. Bonnardel, R., ‘1789: Le Cahier de doléances des Saint-Louisiens (Sénégal): Mythe et réalité’, Colloquium at the University of Paris VIII, 24–26 February 1989 (Paris, 1990), pp. 51–9. Chakrabarty, D., ‘Postcolonialité et artifice de l’histoire: qui parle au nom du passé “indien”’, in M. Diouf (ed.), L’historiographie indienne en débat. Colonialisme, nationalisme et sociétés postcoloniales (Paris, 1999), pp. 73–107. Copans, J., ‘Les noms de géer: essai de sociologie de la connaissance du Sénégal par lui-même, 1950–1990’, Cahiers d’Etudes africaines 123 (1991), 327–62. Coquery-Vidrovitch, C., ‘Réflexions comparées sur l’historiographie africaniste de langue française et anglaise’, Politique africaine 66 (1997), 91–100. Coquery-Vidrovitch, C., ‘The Rise of Francophone African Social Science: From Colonial Knowledge to Knowledge of Africa’, in W. G. Martin and M. O. West (eds), Out of One, Many Africas: Reconstructing the Study and Meaning of Africa (Urbana, 1999), pp. 39–53. Curtin, P., Economic Change in Precolonial Africa: Senegambia in the Era of Slave Trade, 2 vols (Madison, 1975). Curtin, P., The Atlantic Slave Trade: a Census (Madison, 1969). Diagne, S. B., ‘La leçon de musique. Réflexions sur une politique de la culture’, in M. C. Diop (ed.), Le Sénégal contemporain (Paris, 2002), pp. 243–59. Diallo, T., Les institutions politiques du Fuuta Djallon (Dakar, 1972). Diop, Amadou Bamba, ‘Un des méfaits de la tactique de division employée par le colonisateur’, Afrique Histoire 6 (1982), 53–6. Diop, B., ‘Traite négrière, désertions rurales et occupation du sol dans l’arrière-pays de Gorée’, in Gorée et l’esclavage, actes du Séminaire sur Gorée dans la traite atlantique: mythes et réalités, Gorée, 7–8 April 1997 (Dakar, 1997), pp. 137–53. Diop, B., ‘Les villages désertés de l’espace sénégambien. Contribution à l’histoire de l’habitat et de l’occupation du sol’, Archéoafrica. Bulletin de l’Association interdisciplinaire d’Archéologie africaine (AIPA) 1:2 (1997), 35–44. Diop, B., ‘L’impact de la traite négrière sur l’habitat en pays wolof’, in Saint-Louis et l’esclavage, actes du Symposium international sur la traite négrière à Saint-Louis du Sénégal et dans son arrière-pays, Saint-Louis, 18–20 December 1998 (Dakar, 2000), pp. 177–96. Diop, C. A., L’unité culturelle de l’Afrique noire (Paris, 1960). Diop, C. A., Antériorité des civilisations nègres. Mythe ou vérité historique? (Paris, 1967). Diop, C. A., Nations nègres et culture, 2 vols (Paris, 1979, 1st edn 1954). Diop, C. A., Civilisation ou barbarie (Paris, 1981). Diop, C. A., L’Afrique noire précoloniale (Paris, 1987). Diouf, M., ‘Demba Waar Sall, Lat Joor Joop: trahison ou conflit d’intérêt?’, Afrique Histoire 4 (1981), 47–54. Diouf, M., Le Kajoor au XIXe siècle. Pouvoir ceddo et conquête coloniale (Paris, 1990). Diouf, M., ‘Fresques murales et écriture de l’histoire: Le Set/Setal à Dakar’, Politique africaine 46 (1992), 41–54. Diouf, M., L’historiographie indienne en débat. Colonialisme, nationalisme et sociétés postcoloniales (Paris, 1999). Duguay-Cledor, A., La bataille de Guîlé suivi de De Faidherbe à Coppolani ou les GandiolsGandiols au service de la France (Dakar, 1985; 1st edn 1912–13). Fall, B., Le travail forcé en Afrique Occidentale Française (1900–1946) (Paris, 1993). Fall, B., Dialogue avec Abdoulaye Ly. Historien et homme politique Sénégalais (Dakar, 2001). Fall, R., Le royaume du Bawol du XVIe au XIXe siècle. Pouvoir wolof et rapports avec les populations serer (University of Paris, Thèse de troisième cycle, 1983).

Select Bibliography 231 Fall, Y. K., ‘L’histoire et les historiens dans l’Afrique contemporaine’, Actes du Colloque de Nice (1986), 81–207. Faye, O., ‘L’instrumentalisation de l’histoire et de l’ethnicité dans le discours séparatiste en Basse Casamance (Sénégal)’, Africa Spectrum 29 (1994), 65–77. Faye, O., ‘Mythe et histoire dans la vie de Kaañ Fay du Cangin (Sénégal)’, Cahiers d’études africaines 34:4 (1994). Gueye, M., Les transformations des sociétés wolof et sereer de l’ère de la conquête à la mise en place de l’administration coloniale 1854–1920 (University of Dakar Thèse d’État, 1990). Gueye, M., ‘Les exils d’Ahmadou Bamba au Gabon et en Mauritanie: 1895–1907’, Annales de la Faculté des Lettres et Sciences Humaines 25 (1995), 41–57. Jewsiewicki, B. and D. Newbury (eds), African Historiographies: What History for Which Africa? (London, 1985). Kane, O., Le Fuuta-Toro des Satigi aux Almaami (1512–1807) (University of Dakar Thèse d’État, 1986). Lam, A. M., Le Sahara ou la vallée du Nil? Aperçu sur la problématique du berceau de l’unité culturelle de l’Afrique noire (Dakar, 1994). Lamiral, D. H., L’Affrique et le peuple affriquain considérés sous tous leurs rapports avec notre commerce & nos colonies . . . De l’abus des privilèges exclusifs, & notamment de celui de la Compagnie du Sénégal. Ce que c’est qu’une société se qualifiant d’Amis des noirs (Paris, 1789). Ly, A., La Compagnie du Sénégal (Paris, 1993; 1st edn, 1958). Mark, P., A Cultural, Economic, and Religious History of the Basse Casamance since 1500 (Stuttgart, 1985). Martin, W. G. and M. O. West (eds), Out of One, Many Africas: Reconstructing the Study and Meaning of Africa (Urbana, 1999). Niane, D. T., Soundiata ou l’épopée mandingue (Paris, 1961). Robinson, D., La guerre sainte d’Al-Hâjj Umar. Le Soudan occidental au milieu du XIXe siècle (Paris, 1988). Roche, C., Conquête et résistance des peuples de Casamance, 1850–1920 (Dakar, 1976). Rodney, W., A History of the Upper Guinea Coast 1545 to 1800 (Oxford, 1970). Sall, B., Racines éthiopiennes de l’Égypte ancienne (Paris, 1999). Senghor, L. S., ‘Pour un humanisme de la Francophonie’, lecture held at the Sorbonne on the occasion of the inauguration of the Chair of Francophone Studies, 11 December 1974. Thiam, I. D., L’évolution politique et syndicale du Sénégal coloniale de 1840 à 1936, 9 vols (University of Paris Thèse de doctorat d’État, 1983). Thioub, I., ‘L’espace dans les travaux des historiens de l’ École de Dakar: entre héritage colonial et construction nationale’, in J.-C. Waquet, O. Goerg and R. Rogers (eds), Les espaces de l’historien (Strasbourg, 2000), pp. 91–110. Thioub, I., ‘L’école de Dakar et la production d’une écriture académique de l’histoire’, in M. C. Diop (ed.), Le Sénégal contemporain (Paris, 2002), pp. 109–53. Thioub, I., ‘Letture africane della schiavitù e della tratta atlantica’, Passato e Presente 62 (2004), 129–46. Thioub, I. and P. Boilley, ‘Pour une histoire africaine de la complexité’, in S. Awenengo et al. (eds), Ecrire l’histoire de l’Afrique autrement? (Paris, 2004). Thioub, I. and B. Diop, ‘L’égyptologie dans l’enseignement et la recherche au Département d’Histoire de l’UCAD. Analyse des mémoires de maîtrise soutenus depuis le Symposium de 1982’, Revue Sénégalaise d’Histoire, new series 4 (2001). Thomas, L. V., Les Diola. Essai d’analyse fonctionnelle sur une population de Basse-Casamance (Dakar, 1958).

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Index Aberystwyth, University of 32 Abreu, Capistrano de 84, 91–2 Abusch, Alexander 47 Acton, Lord 38, 40 Aflaq, Michel 187 Africa 197–212 see also Senegal African history writing colonialism and 16, 205 French influence on 198–200 historical schools of 203 Marxism and 203 origins of 197 professionalisation of 203 race and 21, 200–1 religion and 206 search for authentic 200–2 slavery and 204–5, 207 see also Dakar School and Senegalese national history writing Afrique Occidentale Française 208 Aiyangar, S. Krishnaswami 165 al-Asqa Martyr’s Brigade 193 al-Bustani, Butrus 180 al-Duri, Abdul Aziz 185 al-Husri, Sati 186 al-Kawakibi, Abdul-Rahman 181 al-Qassam, Izzeddin 191 al-Rafi, Abd al-Rahman 19 Alamán, Don Lucas 94 Alamán y Escalada, Lucas Ignacio 89 Alexandria, Victoria College 183 Allahabad, Treaty of 160 Alsace 36 Aljubarrota (1385), battle of 35 Altekar, A. S. 171 American University of Beirut 7, 183, 186, 192 Movement of Arab Nationalists (MAN) at 187, 192 Annales School of history writing 43, 51, 52 Anderson, Benedict 3–4, 116, 179 Andrews, C. M. 69 Antonius, George 182

Arab history writing Arabian Empire and 182 Arabism and 181 Christian influence on 185 history textbooks and 187 Islam and 186, 189, 192–4 language and 184 Marxism and 19 neo-Arabism and 194 origins of 7, 182–5 professionalisation of 186–7 plight of Palestine in 16 race and 21, 185 radicalising of 191–4 regionalism and 189–90 religion and 185, 189, 191–94 socialist revolution and 187–91 Arabic-speaking world 179–96 challenges to nationalism 190–1 competing forms of nationalism 180 emergence of nationalism 180–1 nation-states in 7 Arafat, Yassir 192 Argentina national historical institutions of 96 Revolution of 1810 96 River Plate region of 96 see also Latin America Argentinian national history writing Colégio Nacional 89 history textbooks and 97 Junta de História y Numismática 88 race and 9, 20, 95–6 the ‘self’ and the European ‘other’ in 89 Arquivo Nacional (Brazil) 85 Asia see East Asia Atiyah, Edward 193 Atkinson, Alan 118 Australia 103–25 Anglo-Celtic origins of 104, 116 British imperial history of 16, 105 Commonwealth of 105 ‘History Wars’ in 15, 119 war memorials in 109

233

234 Index Australian national history writing Aborigine peoples and 110, 119–21 Australian Labor Party and 110–11, 115, 119, 120 ‘black armband’ history and 119–22 Britain and 110, 118 class and 9, 19, 109, 118 Cold War and convicts and 107 critical revisionism of 12 economic rationale of 110–11 Federation and 105 First World War and 107–9, 118 gender and 115–18, 121 Greek mythology in 105 history teaching and 107–8 immigration and 116, 120 insularity and 103 journals of 107–8 Marxism and 112 ‘mateship’ and 9, 19, 109, 114–15, 118 myth and 104, 116, 120 New Left and 19, 115–17 origins of 5, 104 race and 9, 20–1, 105, 118, 120–1 religion and 17, 106, 113 ‘scientificity’ and 11–12 State Library of New South Wales and 107 ‘White Australia’ 110 Australian National University 113 Australasian history 106, 108 ANZAC myths and 105–6, 109 Ayala, Tadeo Oritz de 89 Azoury, Negib 181 Baghdad, University of 185 Bamba, Ahmadou 208 Bancroft, George 64 Banerjea, P. N. 165 Barry, Boubacar 207 Basque national history 37 Bathily, Abdoulaye 207 Bean, Charles 109 Beard, Charles 69 Bemis, Samuel Flagg 70 Berkeley, University of 70 Berlin, University of 32 Bernstein, Eduard 42 Bhandarkar, Ramakrishna Gopal

165

Biblioteca Nacional (Brazil) 85 Bismarck, Prince Otto von 35 Blainey, Geoffrey 15, 120 Blair, Dale 118 Bloch, Ernst 39 Boadicea 35 Bobrzynski, Michael 38 Bocoum, Hamady 205 Bolton, Herbert 70 Bombay 167 Bouchard, Gerald 5 Bouillet, Nicholas 88 Braudel, Fernand 52 Brazil abolition of slavery (1888) in 93–4 historical institutions and archives in 85–7, 91 historical exhibitions in 86–7 Revista Trimestral do Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro 89 see also Latin America Brazilian History (1881), Exhibition of 84, 86 Brazilian national history writing Academia Brasileria de Letras and 88 Arquivo Nacional and 91 Colégio Nacional and 89 Colégio Pedro II (Ginásio Nacional) and 89 colonialism and 86–7, 93 history textbooks and 93 Instituto Histórico e Geografico Brasileiro (IHGB) and 85, 88, 90 mixed identities within 92–4 race and 20, 84, 90–2 religion and 86, 94 slavery and 91 the ‘self’ and the European ‘other’ in 85–7 Britain, League of Nations mandate (Iraq and Palestine) 182 British imperial and national history class and 43–4 decline of empire and 53 ‘four nations’ approach to 53 ‘Indology’ and 158 legitimation of colonial rule in 16 origins of 37 post-war approaches to 48, 52 race and 9, 21

Index 235 religion and 14, 17–18 Thatcherite patriotism and 52 see also Australia and India British Labour Party, post-war reforms of 48 Buckle, Henry Thomas 129 Budeiri, Musa 193 Buenos Aires 96 Bustamante, Don Carlos Maria de 95 Butterfield, Henry 43 Cambridge, University of 38 King’s College 183 Canada British conquest of 63 Confederation of 64 1812 war with United States 63 see also North America Canadian national history writing borders and frontiers in 23, 71–2 geography of 66–7 Laurentian school of 67 pluralism and 73–4 Romanticism and 64 transnationalism and 75 see also Quebec and Québécois national history writing Canadian Pacific Railway, impact of 67 Catalonia, national narratives of 14, 37 Ceaucescu, Nicolae 47 Celtis, Conrad 31 Cervantes, Miguel de 35 Ch’aeho, Sin 144 , 148 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 2 Chakravati, Uma 174 Chapais, Thomas 68 Charlemagne 31 Chateaubriand, François-René 89 Chatterjee, Kumkum 2 China historical journals in 137–9 Opium Wars and 128, 134 see also East Asia Chinese national history writing 17 Academia Sinica and 145 Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and 149 communist revolution and 16, 147 contemporary approaches to 149

expansion of education and 135–6 history textbooks and 138 invasion by Japan (1937) and 146 Japanese historians’ challenge to 141–2 Marxism and 19, 147 May Fourth Movement and 139 New Text School and 136–8 origins of 3, 6 professionalisation of 138–41, 145 race and 21, 137 Research Institute of History and Philology and 145–6 rejection of the ‘Three Dynasties’ and 140–1 Romanticism and 10 Russian historians of China and 147 ‘scientificity’ and 12 Second World War and 147 Sino-Japanese War and 135 ‘Three Dynasties’ and 126, 138–9, 148–9 Western imperialism and 128, 134 Yellow Emperor and 137–41, 145–6, 149 see also Confucianism Choueiri, Youssef M. 181, 188 Churchill, Winston 35, 53 citizenship 115–16 Clark, Anna 119 Clark, Manning 12, 112–14, 119 class and history writing 9, 12, 18–19, 42–6, 51, 109, 111, 118, 174 Cohn, Bernard 162 Cold War 47-51, 56, 112, 147–8 Cole, George D. H. 43 colonialism 5, 15–16, 86–7, 93–4, 143–5, 204–8 indigenous peoples and 20–1 Columbia, University of 69, 138 Commonwealth (British) 110 Confucianism national narratives and 6, 17, 126, 130 neo-Confucianism criticisms of 6, 126, 128, 129 parallels to Romantic narratives 10 Cortés, Hernándo 94 Cousin, Victor 89 Crawford, R. M 107–9

236 Index Curthoys, Anne 118, 120 Czech national history, gendering of

35

Dakar School Abdoulaye Ly and the 19, 202–3 class and 19 colonialism and 204–8 critical analyses of 198 emergence of 197 influence of Western historians on 203–4 new trends in 208 origins of 197–8 scientific positivism and 12 slavery and 204–8 transnational agenda of 8, 12 see also African history writing Damascus, University of 187 Dante (Durante Degli Alighieri) 35 Dar Es Salam, University of 204 Das, A. C. 165 Daukantas, Simonas 39 David, Laurent-Olivier 66 Dawn, C. E. 181 Deakin, Alfred 110 Denmark, post-war approaches to national history of 48 Dewey, John 139 Diop, Braham 205 Diop, Cheikh Anta 10, 197, 200–2, 209–10 Diop, Lat Joor 199 Diouf, Mamadou 207 Dixson, Miriam 115–16 Dostoevsky, Fyodor Mikhailovich 114 Dowson, John 161 Duara, Prasenjit 2 Du Bois, W. E. B. 8 Duff, Grant 160 Dutt, Romesh Chandra 165 East Asia 126–54 change of intellectual interest in 127 racial constructions of the nation in 21 East Germany, national history of 47 see also Germany Eastern Europe history writing border conflicts and overlaps in 36–7

communism and nationalism in 18, 50 imperialism and 37–8 post-communist historians in 22 race and 46 religion and 40 Romanticism and 34–5, 39 Egypt Constitutions of 188 Egyptian national history writing, 188 Marxism and 19 Elliot, Sir Henry 161 English national history Celts in 30 Glorious Revolution (1688) in 45 Norman influence on 30 see also British national and imperial history Enlightenment, historians and historiography 9, 33 Estonia, origins of nation history in 39 ethnicity 73 and the nation-state 5 and national narratives 20–2, 34, 46 see also race Eton, Geoffrey 52 European history writing borders of 23 Cold War division of 47–51 origins of and challenges to 2–4 Reformation and 4 European Science Foundation 1–2 European Union 13, 49, 56 borders of 23 Fatah 192 Feldner, Heiko 32 Feltrinelli Institute (Italy) 51 First World War 105, 107–9, 118 Arab nationalism and the 183 impact on national history of 46, 55 national historians and the 13 peace treaties of the 20 Fischer, Fritz 48 Fitzpatrick, Brian 112–13 Foucault, Michel 104 France 11 post-war historical narratives of 48, 53 West African Empire of 199–200

Index 237 Franklin, Benjamin 6 Frederick II of Prussia 36 French Revolution historical narratives of 45 impact on national history of 33–4, 199 Finnish national history Kalevala 34 post-war approaches to 49 Friedrich-Ebert Foundation 51

Guèye, Mbaye 206 Guizot, François 89, 129

9,

Gagnon, Serge 69 Gallipoli 105, 108 Galvão, Ramiz 87 Gandhi, Mahatma 156, 163, 172 Garibaldi, Giuseppe 35 Garneau, François-Xavier Gaulle, Charles de 35, 208 gender and national history 10–11, 35–6, 52, 115–18, 121, 171, 174 geography, national history writing and 33 German national history 13 ancient tribes in 31 class in 42 gendering of 35–6 Historikerstreit and 52 holocaust and 22 post-war approaches to 47, 48–9, 51 race and 20, 46, 55 religion and 40–1 re-unification and 22 revolutions of 1848 and 45 unification and origins of 37 Ghoshal, U. N. 165 Ghurbal, Muhammad Shafiq 7 Gibbon, Edward 183 Gollan, Robin 112 Göttingen, University of 32 August Ludwig Schlözer, chair in history at 33 Gramsci, Antonio 174 Grant, G. M. 65 Grimm, Robert 42 Greek national history Orthodoxy and 41–2 race and 46 revolution and 45 Grouix, Lionel 68 Grünberg manuscript 34

Habash, George 187 Habib, Ifran 173 Habib, Mohammad 172 Habsburg empire history writing of the 37 language and the 44 religion and the 40 Haim, Sylvia G. 182–4 Halhed, Nathaniel 156 Hamas, the Movement of Islamic Resistance 192 Hammond, Barbara and Lawrence 43 Hancock, Keith 12, 109–10 Hanka, Vàclav 34 Harvard, University of 68 Hastings, Warren (first Governor General of India) 157 Hawatima, Nayif 192 Henríquez, Andrés Molina 95 Herder, Johann Gottfried 34, 39, 54 Hegel, Frederich 8 Hisashi, Hoshino 131–3 historical journals 87, 89, 107–8, 137–9 historical institutions and archives 43, 51, 85–91, 95–6, 107, 126–7, 131–2, 145–6, 149, 157, 203 history textbooks 93, 97, 107–8, 119, 131, 134, 138, 146, 187 politicisation of 15–16 Hobsbawm, Eric 51 holocaust, national history and the 22 Holy Roman Empire 37 see also Charlemagne Howard, John 121 Hrushevsky, Mykhailo 39 Humboldt, Wilhelm von 89 Hugo, Victor 89 humanist scholars 30–1 human rights history 22 Humas, Alexandre 89 Hume, David 30 Hungarian national history communism and 47 Habsburg aristocracy and 44 origins of 37 race and 55 religion and 40, 42

238 Index Hus, Jan 35 Hutten, Ulrich von

31

Ienaga, Saburo 14 immigration, national history writing and 23, 116, 120 imperial history writing 23–4, 53, 86–7, 93 national challenges to 6–8, 37–8 India 155–78 British colonial history of 7, 155–62 British imperial education in 161–2 Hindu Mahasabha in 169 Indian National Congress 165 Muslim conquest of 159 Muslim League in 169 socio-religious reform movements in 163 Indian national history writing Asiatic Society of Bengal and 157 Brahmanism and 163 Buddhism and 166–7 caste and 160, 164, 175 class and 174 communalism and 155–6, 163, 169–72, 175–6 criticism of British colonialism in 164 gender and 171, 174 Hinduism and 17–18, 159, 163–4 influence of the print media on 167–8 Islam and 160–2 language and 157, 162 Marxism and 7, 13, 19, 159, 172–5 medieval India and 171–2, 173 Mughal Empire and 160–1 Muslim nationalism and 168–9 Orientalism and 157–8 origins of 2–3, 7 independence and 172–6 professionalisation of 164–7 race and 160–2 religion and 17–18, 156, 159–67, 170–5 ‘saffronisation’ of 176 Swadeshi movement and 168 translation of 156–7 Institut français d’historie sociale 51, 88

International Institute of Social History (Amsterdam) 43 International War Crimes Tribunal (The Hague) 22 internationalist historians 13 Iorga, Nicolae 38 Iraq Ba’ath Party in 188 invasion of 22 King Faysal 186 Ministry of Education 187 Ireland British imperial history and 37 nationalist myths of 15 Israel legacy of the holocaust in 22 nationalist myths of 15 Italian national history post-war approaches to 47–8, 52 Jacques, Amadeo 89 Japan invasion of China (1937) by 146 Second World War atrocities and 14 ‘Six National Histories’ of 3 Tokugawa 126–7 see also East Asia Japanese national history writing Chinese influence on 128 Confucian teaching and 127 Historiography Office and 131–2 history textbooks and 131, 134, 146 Japanese Historical Association and 132 Manchuria and 142 Marxism and 19, 146 Meiji state and 12, 129–30, 133, 142 monarchy and 130–1 National Learning (kokugaku) school of 126–7 origins of 6, 128–9 professionalisation of 131–3 race and 21, 129 ‘scientificity’ and 12 Second World War and 146 Shintoism and 17, 133–4 Western approaches to 128–9 Western contamination of 24 Jatta, Aliin Sitoe 208 Jayaswal, Kashi Prasad 165

Index 239 Jerusalem, al-Quds University 193 Jian, Song 148–9 Jie, Huang 137–8 Jiegang, Gu 138–41, 145, 149 Joan of Arc (Jeanne d’Arc) 35 Jones, Sir William 156 Joop, Joor Lat 208, 209 Jordan, University of 185 Karamazov, Ivan 113 Keating, Paul 119 Redfern Park speech (1992) 119 Kehr, Eckart 42 Khaldun, Ibn 21, 184 Khartoum, Gordon College 183 Khoury, Philip 181 Kocka, Jürgen 51 Konan, Naito ¯ 142 Königinhof manuscript 34 Kopp Eutych 38 Kordatos, Yanis 45 Korea
Choson dynasty (1910), end of 143 Kapsin Coup (1884) 143 Sojunghwa (Little China) 126 see also East Asia Korean national history writing communism and anti-communism in 16 Cold War and 147–8 competing views of 143 impact of Japanese colonisation on 143–5 origins of 144 race and 21 Sino-centric origins of 6 Western influences on 143 see also East Asia Kosambi, Dharmanand Damodar 172 Kosovo, ethnic cleansing in 22 Kruss, Hans 39 Kuczynski, Jürgen 51 Kulagranthas (of Bengal) 3 Kunitake, Kume 131–4 Kurakichi, Shiratori 142 Kyoto, University of 142 Lake, Marilyn 117 Lamprecht, Karl 43 Lang, John Dunmore

104

language 9, 44, 71, 157, 162, 184 Latin American history writing 84–102 colonialism in 15 creole nationalisms of 3–4 emergence of nation-states in 84–5 human rights in 22 legacy of dictatorships in 22 professionalisation of 5 race and 20, 97–8 racialising of class in 19 religion and 17 ‘scientificity’ and 5 Latvian national history post-war 50 Laval University 68 Lawson, Henry 105 Lebanon confessional pluralism in 18 nationalism in 186 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 34 Lelewel, Joachim 36, 38, 44 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich 147 Lincoln, Abraham 65 Lithuania, origins of national history in 39 Lomonosov, Mikhail 44 London 1939 Conference of 183 Arab Office 183 Louise Auguste Wilhelmine Amalie (Queen of Prussia) 35, 36 Luther, Martin 35 Lwów (Lviv) 36 Ly, Abdoulaye 197, 202–4, 207, 209–10 McIntyre, Stuart 119 McMullen, John 94 McQueen, Humphrey 115 Mabo, Eddie 120 Macauley, Thomas Babington 159, 161 Mack Smith, Dennis 49 Madras 162 University of 165 Maharashtra 165 Malmesbury, William of 30 Maria Theresa of Austria 35 Martius, Carl von 86, 90–1 Marx, Karl Heinrich, Asiatic Mode of Production 159, 173

240 Index Marxist history writing 7, 19, 50, 19–20, 112, 147, 159, 172–5, 203 Eastern Europe and 50 higher education and 13, 19 internationalism and 12–13 positivism and 12 Mayer, Gustav 42 Mayo, Katherine 161 Mbow, Penda 206 Mecca, Islamic Revival Congress (1316) 181 medieval national histories 31–2 Melbourne, University of 105, 107 Mendes, Justo Sierra 95 Mexico nation-building in 88, 94 Revolution (1910) in 97 see also Latin American history writing Mexican national history writing Academia de Létran and 88 Archivo General de la Nación and 95 Aztecs, Cuauhtémoc and 94 Biblioteca Nacional and 95 borders of 23 Diccionario Universal de Historia y Geografia and 87 national archives and historical institutions and 88, 95 race and 20, 94–5 Romanticism in 9 Sociedad Mexicana de Géographia y Estadística and 88 the ‘self’ and the European ‘other’ in 87–8 Mexican Society of Geography and Statistics 88 Michelet, Jules, imitation of 64, 89 Middle East religious history of the 18 Mill, James 158–9 Ming dynasty, fall of 126 Mitre, Bartolomé 96 Mitsukuni, Tokugawa 127 Mohacs (1526), battle of 42 Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin) 35 Moltke, Helmuth von 35 Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat 33, 89 Montreal, University of 70 Moran, Cardinal Patrick 113

Mounsey, Augustus 131 Movement of Arab Nationalists 192 Mugabe, Robert 9 Mukhia, Harbans 173 Muller, Max 157 multiculturalism 5, 7, 116, 120 Murrie, Linzi 116 Muslih, Muhammed Y. 181


Namson, Ch’oe 144, 148 Nanjing (1842), Treaty of 128 Naoroji, Dadabhai 164 Narbutas, Teodor 39 Nasser, Jamal Abdul 16, 187–8 nation-states and their origins 5 and multinational states 37 and white settlers 4–5 national historical institutions 32–3, 38–9, 51–2, 85, 88, 91, 96 national history writing apogee of 38–46 arrival of modernity and 32–8 borders of 23–4, 36–7, 71–2 empires and 37–8 exiles and 45–6 internationalisation of 51 ‘inventions of tradition’ and 34 national saviours in 35 pluralisation of 52 politicisation of 15–16 post-colonialism and 53 revolution and 44–6 21st century approaches to 24 see also individual national and transnational case studies nationalism 180–1, 190–1 anti-colonialism and 3 civic and ethnic forms of 23 minority groups and 14 religious tensions within 40–1 ‘scientific’ history and 11–13 Nehru, Jawaharlal 156 New England 64 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm 114 Nigeria, confessional narratives of 18 Nishio, Kanji 14 North America 63–83 class histories of 18 historical discourses of race in 20 origins of national history in 4–5

Index 241 religion and national history in 17 Romanticism imperative in 9, 63 North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), values of 49 North Korean national history 148 see also Korea and East Asia Novick, Peter 73 Occidentalism 37, 157–8 Olivença 36 Orientalism 157–8, 163 Orthodox Church, national history and 40–1 Ottoman Empire collapse of 182 competing nationalisms in the 38 religion and 41, 194 Ottomonism and the 181 Oumar, El Hadji 208 overlapping national narratives 36–37 Oxford, University of 107, 109 Brasenose College 183 Palacký, František 37, 38 Palestine 14, 191–3 British Mandate over 191, 193 contemporary political organisation in 192–3 revolt of 1929–36 191 Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) 192 Palmer, Vance and Nettie 111–12 pan-Africanism 13 pan-Arabism 4, 13–14, 18 pan-Islamism 4 Pandey, Gyanendra 168 Paparrigopoulos, Konstantinos 38 Pâquet, L.-A. 67 Pekar, Josef 38 Peking, University of 138, 145 Perry, Commodore Matthew 128 Polish national history aristocracy and 44 empire and 37 gendering of 35 religion and 40–1 Portuguese national history colonialism and 5, 208 religion and 42

positivism and national history 11–12, 55 post-modernism and post-structuralisam 52 Prescott, William H. 89 professionalisation of national historians 39, 131–3, 138–41, 164–7, 186–7, 203 Protestantism role in national history of 39–40 see also religious history writing Protochronism 37 proto-nationalism 30–2, 126 Qian, Sima 3, 140–1 Qichao, Liang 135, 137–8, 143 Quebec British conquest of 1760 of 71 nation-building in 66 see also North America Québécois national history writing borders and identities of 70–1 ‘Gallic spirit’ in 64 geography and 68 language and 71 New France and 69–70 pluralism and 73 Quebec or Laval school of 71 religion and 17, 66, 69 transnationalism of 74 Qing dynasty 128, 135 Quiroga, Facundo 96 Rabbath, Edmond 184 race and history writing 9, 14, 17–18, 20–3, 34, 46, 55–6, 84, 90–2, 94–8, 105, 118, 120–1, 129, 137, 160–2, 175, 185, 200–1 see also ethnicity Rajawade, Vishwanath Kashinath 165 Randade, Justice Mahadev Govind 156 Ranger, Terrence 8 Ranke, Leopold von 32, 107, 132 Reformation, the 4, 31 Reiß, Ludiwg 6, 132 religion and history writing 10, 17, 39–42, 66, 69, 72, 86, 94, 106, 113, 133–4, 158–67, 170–5, 185–6, 189, 192–4, 206 nationalising of 16–18 Renan, Ernest 41

242 Index Reynolds, Henry 120 Ribeiro, João 84, 92–3 Rio de Janeiro 84, 85, 89, 91 Risley, Herbert 159 Riva Palácio, Vicente 95 Rodney, Walter 204 Romanian national history writing communism and 47 Orthodox church and 41 Protochronism in 37 Romanov, Petr Alexeyevich (Peter the Great) 35 Romantic history writing 63–4 challenges to 11, 38–9, 55 origins and impact of 9–11 Rome 69 Rosenberg, Artur 43 Rothfel, Hans 42, 46 Roy, Raja Ram Mohan 163–4 Russian imperial and national history borders of 24 competing nationalisms in imperial 37 gendering of 36 Orthodox Church in 40 Soviet historiography in 43–4 Sangari, Kumkum 174 Sarmiento, Domingos Faustino 89 Sastri, K. A. Nilakanta 165 Schiller, Friedrich 35 Schleswig 36 Schlözer, August Ludwig 33 Schnabel, Franz 40 scientific history writing 2–3, 5–6, 11–13, 32–3, 55, 129 Scott, Ernest 103–6 Second World War 72, 106, 116, 144, 147 and post-war national narratives 13–14, 46 strengthened nationalisation of historiography after 50 Senegal Ministry of Education 208 see also African history writing and Dakar School Senegalese national history writing Négritude movement of 198 origins of 198–200 search for antiquity in 200–2

Senghor, Léopold Séngar 197–200, 209 Shakespeare, William 35 Shann, Edward 110 Sharara, Abd al-Latif 189 Sharma, Ram Sharan 173 Shi, Deng 137, 139 Shi, Hu 138–41, 145 Shibti, Maulana 171 Shukoh, Dara 156 Singh, Purnenedu Narayan 165 Sinian, Fu 145–6 Slav nationalism competing conceptions of 37, 43–4 slavery 85, 91, 97–8, 198, 204–8 abolition of 93–4 Slovak national history Habsburg aristocracy and 44 Smith, Goldwin 67 Social Darwinism 20, 46, 143, 185 South Africa legacy of apartheid in 22 ‘white settler’ societies in 10 Soviet Union ‘Great Patriotic War’ and 50 historiographies of the 18, 43–4 Spanish national history 14 Catalonia and 14 colonialism and 5, 94 gender and nation history in 36 post-Franco revisionism 49 religion and national history in 40 St Lawrence (Canada) 68 St Petersburg (Russia) 33 Stalin, Joseph 43, 147 Starkey, David 53 Stein, Freiherr vom 35 Sulte, Benjamin 66 Swedish national history religion and 40 welfarism and 49 Swiss national history post-war revisionism of 49 Sydney, University of 106, 107 Syria 7 Tacitus 31 Tamil nationalism 2 Tartu, University of 39 Tasmania, Australian history and Tawney, Richard H. 43 Taylor, Alan J. P. 47

121

Index 243 Tehran (2006) international conference of holocaust deniers 22 Thiam, Iba Der 208 Tocqueville, Alexis de 89 Tokyo, University of 128, 142 Toronto, University of 67 Toynbee, Arnold, 7 Trainon, treaty of 55 transnational history writing 8, 12, 13–15, 74–6 adoption of 53–4 conflict with national history writing 16, 39 Treitschke, Heinrich von 38 Turkey Armenian genocide 22 secular and national narratives of 18 Turner, Frederic Jackson 23 Ukichi, Taguchi 12, 129–30 Ukrainian national history writing origins of 11 peasantry and 44 religion and 40 United Arab Republic 190 United States Civil Rights movement in the 73 publications celebrating 1876 centenary of 65 see also North America United States national history writing American civil war and 65 American Studies movement and 72 borders and frontiers of 9, 23, 72 ethnicity and 73 fragmentation of 73 isolationism and 24 origins of 6 politicisation of 15 pluralism and 73 religion and 17, 72 Romantacism and 11 ‘scientificity’ and 11 transnationality of 15, 75 values promoted in 23 Uppsala, University of 33 Vaid, Sudesh 174 Varnhagen, Francisco Adolfo de 86–7, 91–2 Vasconcelos, José 95

84,

Versailles, post-war settlements of 55 Vietnam, ethnic-based history of 21 Vigil, José Maria 95 Voltaire, François-Marie Arouet 33 Wallace, William 35 Ward, Russel 114–15 Warrnambool (Australia) 120 Wasa, Gustav 35 Watson, Don 119 Webb, Beatrice and Sidney 43 Weimar Republic 42 Wentworth, William Charles 104 Western European history post-war approaches to 50–1 West German national history post-national approaches to 22 post-war 47 see also Germany West, John 104 White, Richard 116 Whitlam, Gough Wilkins, Charles 156 Wimpfeling, Jakob 31 Wisconsin, University of 68 Windschuttle, Keith 15, 120 Winkler, Heinrich August 53 Wood, George Arnold 106–7 World Historical Congress origins of (1898) 39 Sydney (2005) 1 Xueqin, Li

148–9

Yale, University of 70 Yasutsugu, Shigeno 131–3 Yat-sen, Sun 135 Yinxu 145 Youwei, Kang 135 Yuan, Wei 134–6 Yugoslavia, racialised historical narratives of 21 Yukichi, Fukuzawa 128–30 Zaydan, Jurji 194 Zengyou, Xia 138 Zerffi, Gustav 6, 132 Zhidong, Zhang 135 Zizhen, Gong 136 Zurayq, Qustantine 186, 192