Nationalist historiography

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

Study

Nationalism was so much taken for granted as the "proper" way to organize states and abstraction history that – ] Then scholars such(a) as Ernest Gellner, Benedict Anderson, and Anthony D. Smith portrayed attempts to step back from nationalism and idea 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 referenced 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 administer the necessary raw fabric 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 pretend it. So my profession, which has always been mixed up in politics, becomes an essential part of nationalism.

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

According to the medieval historian Patrick J. Geary:

[The] advanced [study of] 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 destruction dump, filled with the poison of ethnic nationalism, and the poison has seeped deep into popular consciousness.