Vorlesung: Historical Writing and National Identity: a Global Perspective

Prof. Dr. Stefan Berger
14.00-16.00, Montags

Ort Haus der Geschichte des Ruhrgebiets, Clemensstr. 17-19, 44789 Bochum

Few ideas have been as powerful and have developed such a global significance as the idea of the nation. In this lecture course we shall examine the emergence and development of the idea of the nation in global perspective and ask specifically how historical writing has contributed to and/or challenged ideas of national identity. In Europe we can trace back ideas about national history as a vital element of national master narratives to the Middle Ages, whereas outside Europe most historians agree that the only place which had a developed idea of national history was China. Pre-modern ideas of nation and national history can also be found in the writings of Italian, French and German humanists, and in the Protestant national histories seeking to deflate the universalist claims of the Catholic counter-Reformation. However, much of this course will be concerned with the modern discourse on the nation in historical writing, which we can trace back to the eighteenth century and Enlightenment concerns that prepared the intellectual ground for the American War of Independence and the French Revolution. We shall discuss the main characteristics of this modernist historical discourse on the nation and how national histories spread within Europe and ‘the West’, and from there to the rest of the world. How can we compare those national histories? How important were they in framing national identity discourses? To what extent did they contribute to the emergence of libeal democatic political regimes, and to what extent were they responsible for forms of ethnic cleansing, war and genocide? These are some of the questions that we will investigate in the lectures.

Einführende Lektüre:

  • A.D. Smith and John Hutchinson (eds), Nationalism. A Reader, OUP, Oxford, 1995.
  • Stefan Berger (ed.), Writing the Nation: Towards Global Perspectives, Palgrave MacMillan, Houndmills, 2007.
  • Daniel Woolf, A Global History of History, Cambridge UP, Cambridge, 2011.