My own book, Rescuing History from the Nation, which probed the close nexus between history and the nation in early twentieth-century China, also sought out suppressed histories within or in the shadow of dominant narratives, often by exploring linguistic transformations in the sources.10 Although China was not formally or fully colonized, from the end of the nineteenth century, imperialism had a deep impact on the consciousness of the Chinese intelligentsia who began increasingly to view the world through the prevalent social Darwinian conceptions of the period. In this discourse, a linear, progressive history of the Chinese nation was not simply necessary in order to make claims on the past. The creation – or the “awakening,” as the nationalist rallying cry would have it – of a national historical subject was necessary for competitive survival (against both imperialism and the slide into barbarism) in the present and the future. History now became a political force in the efforts of modernizing nationalists to either appropriate, subsume or delegitimate popular conceptions and practices of the old society. Thus, for instance, revolutionary nationalists sought to enlist the support of the secret societies which were, in their commitment to restoring a previous dynasty, actually backward looking and often diametrically opposed to the revolutionary conception. Yet by skillful manipulation of the older conceptions and language of these societies the nationalists re-wrote the histories of these societies to reflect revolutionary views