Nationalist historiography

Did You Know?

• Nationalist historiographies have been analyzed in countries including Cuba, Indonesia, South Korea, Thailand, and Zimbabwe.
• In 2004, Terence Ranger noted a sustained attempt by the Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe to propagate what is called 'patriotic history'.

Origins

Nationalist history emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries alongside nationalist ideologies. John Breuilly noted that the historical grounding of nationalism was reinforced by its close ties with the emergence of professional academic historical writing. During the French Revolution, a national identity was crafted that identified common people with the Gauls. In Germany, historians and humanists such as Johann Gottfried Herder and Johann Gottlieb Fichte identified a linguistic and cultural identity of the German nation, which became the basis for a political movement to unite fragmented German states.

A significant outcome was the formation of a Society for Older German Historical Knowledge, which sponsored the Monumenta Germaniae Historica (MGH), a massive collection of documents of German history. The MGH editors defined German history broadly, editing documents from territories where German-speaking people had once lived or ruled, from Italy to France to the Baltic. This model of detailed historical and linguistic investigation of national origins was imitated throughout Europe, interpreting historical phenomena as they related to the development of the nation-state and projecting the state into the past.

Time depth and ethnicity

National history faces the difficulty of ethnicity's changeable nature. Ancient writers implicitly acknowledged that one nation may turn into another over time through splitting (colonization) or merging (syncretism, acculturation). Herodotus described the Armenians as colonists of the Phrygians and referred to a time when Athenians were just beginning to be counted as Hellenes, implying a formerly Pelasgian group acquired Greekness. Asinius Quadratus described the Alamanni as originally a conglomerate of various tribes that acquired a common identity over time.

These processes are summarized under the term ethnogenesis. In ancient times, ethnicities often derived their origins from divine or semi-divine founders of a mythical past, such as the Anglo-Saxons deriving their dynasties from Woden. In modern nationalist constructions, such mythical aetiologies were replaced by attempts to link one's own ethnic group to an ancient source known only from archaeology or philology, such as Armenians claiming Urartians, Albanians claiming Pelasgians, or Hungarians claiming various nomadic empires.

Nationalism and ancient history

Nationalist ideologies frequently employ archaeology and ancient history as propaganda, often significantly distorting them to cultivate national mythologies and national mysticism. This involves uncritically identifying one's own ethnic group with some ancient or prehistoric group, whether or not mainstream scholarship accepts the derivation as plausible. Examples include Kurds claiming the Medes, Albanians claiming the Pelasgians, Bulgarians claiming the Thracians, Iraqis claiming the Sumerians, Georgians claiming the Mushki, Turks claiming the Trojans, and Azerbaijanis claiming the Caucasian Albanians.

In extreme cases, nationalists ignore the process of ethnogenesis and claim ethnic identity with a scarcely attested ancient ethnicity. Historically, various hypotheses regarding the Urheimat of the Proto-Indo-Europeans have been a popular object of patriotic pride, regardless of scholarly value.

Study

Historians such as Ernest Gellner, Benedict Anderson, and Anthony D. Smith adopted more critical approaches to nationalism and examined how this ideology affected historical writing. Smith developed the concept of historicism to describe an emerging belief in the birth, growth, and decay of specific peoples and cultures, which became increasingly attractive as a framework for inquiry into the past. Eric Hobsbawm pointed out the central role of the historical profession in the development of nationalism.

Martin Bernal's book Black Athena argued that historiography on ancient Greece has been influenced by nationalism and ethnocentrism, claiming that influences from non-Greek or non-Indo-European cultures on Ancient Greek were marginalized. Medieval historian Patrick J. Geary stated that modern history was born in the nineteenth century as an instrument of European nationalism, and that as a tool of nationalist ideology it has turned understanding of the past into a toxic waste dump filled with the poison of ethnic nationalism.