Historiography is the study of how history is written. One pervasive influence upon the writing of history has been nationalism, a set of beliefs about political legitimacy and cultural identity. Nationalism has provided a significant framework for historical writing in Europe and in those former colonies influenced by Europe since the nineteenth century. Typically official school textbooks are based on the nationalist model and focus on the emergence, trials and successes of the forces of nationalism.

Quotes

• Modern history was born in the nineteenth century, conceived and developed as an instrument of European nationalism. As a tool of nationalist ideology, the history of Europe's nations was a great success, but it has turned our understanding of the past into a toxic waste dump, filled with the poison of ethnic nationalism, and the poison has seeped deep into popular consciousness.
  • Patrick J. Geary, The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe (2003), Princeton University Press, p. 15.

• [H]istorians are to nationalism what poppy-growers in Pakistan are to the heroin-addicts: we supply the essential raw material for the market. Nations without a past are contradictions in terms. What makes a nation is the past, what justifies one nation against others is the past, and historians are the people who produce it. So my profession, which has always been mixed up in politics, becomes an essential component of nationalism.
  • Eric Hobsbawm (February 1992). "Ethnicity and Nationalism in Europe Today". Anthropology Today.

• Nationalism seeks legitimacy from the past and history therefore becomes a sensitive subject.
  • Romila Thapar, Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300 (2003), Penguin Books, p. 19.

External links

Encyclopedic article on Nationalist historiography on Wikipedia