P.1
National history is a requirement of a world of nation-states. How It should be written, by whom, for whom, are more controversial matters, as the Southeast Asian experience exemplifies
The emergence of independent states in Southeast Asia stimulated the writing of his tory both through the provision of facilities, such as universities and national archives and through the development of new perspectives. But it also provided a new politi cal context, of which historians outside the region, as well as those inside, had to be conscious. The nation-state, as Ruth McVey put it, became, along with modern isation part of the 'regnant paradigm in the writing of Southeast Asian history Philippe Aries pointed to the impact of the nation-state on historiography in the West. Heralded by the revolution of 1789, the nation-state came to dominate the world, and, he argued, historians commemorated its ascendancy, displacing earlier concepts of community. Just as nation-states colonized territories overseas, so their apologists colonized the past? Historians gave too little attention to 'those small and intermediate-size communities that had dominated traditional European society The demands of the nation-state upon its citizens, as the French revolutionaries called them, were not only novel, but perhaps unprecedented in their intensity. If they too were citizens, historians might find their loyalties divided. What should they render to the state? What did they owe the discipline of history, particularly it took shape under Ranke in the years following the revolution? And if they were not citizens, upon what basis did they comment? The nation-state was then new, and so was the Rankean concept of his Reconstructing the past in the name of the state was not, however, new. For earlie European states had sought to strengthen their present position by increasing their control of the past. In Renaissance England, for example, the Tudors s them selves as heirs, not of classical Rome, but of classical Britain: they looked to its antiquity. Later, England's story was structured, as Butterfield s ert not monarchy. Before their revolution colonial Americans had taken British histor as their own. After the revolution, as Tosh puts it, it gradually became clear that