Historiography and Nationalism - Study of Nationalist Historiographies

Study of Nationalist Historiographies

Nationalism was so much taken for granted as the "proper" way to organize states and view history that nationalization of history was essentially invisible to historians until fairly recently (the 1980s or 1990s). Then scholars such as Ernest Gellner, Benedict Anderson, and Anthony D. Smith made attempts to step back from nationalism and view it critically. Historians began to ask themselves how this ideology had affected the writing of history.

Speaking to an audience of anthropologists, the historian E. J. Hobsbawm pointed out the central role of the historical profession in the development of nationalism:

Historians 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.

Martin Bernal's much debated book Black Athena (1987) argues that the historiography on Ancient Greece has been in part influenced by nationalism and ethnocentrism. He also claimed that influences by non-Greek or non-Indo-European cultures on Ancient Greek were marginalized.