Veröffentlicht von De Gruyter Oldenbourg

The Politics of Historical Thinking

Herausgegeben von: Brigitta Bernet, Lutz Raphael und Benjamin Zachariah

ISSN: 2625-0055

e-ISSN 2625-0063

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Historical thinking has a politics that shapes its ends. While at least two generations of scholars have been guided into their working lives with this axiom as central to their profession, it is somewhat of a paradox that historiography is so often nowadays seen as a matter of intellectual choices operating outside the imperatives of quotidian politics, even if the higher realms of ideological inclinations or historiographical traditions can be seen to have played a role. The politics of historical thinking, if acknowledged at all, is seen to belong to the realms of nonprofessional ways of the instrumentalisation of the past.

This series seeks to centre the politics inherent in historical thinking, professional and non-professional, promoted by states, political organisations, ‘nationalities’ or interest groups, and to explore the links between political (re-)education, historiography and mobilisation or (sectarian?) identity formation. We hope to bring into focus the politics inherent in historical thinking, professional, public or amateur, across the world today.

Advisory Board:

Caroline Arni, University of Basel

Amar Baadj, American University Cairo

Berber Bevernage, University of Ghent

Federico Finchelstein, New School for Social Research, New York

Kavita Philip, University of California Irvine

Ilaria Porciani, University of British Columbia

Dhruv Raina, Jawaharlal Nehru University

Jakob Tanner, University of Zürich

Fachgebiete

Buch 2023

Professional Historians in Public

Old and New Roles Revisited

Berber Bevernage, Lutz Raphael

Band 5 in dieser Reihe

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The past decades public interest in history is booming. This creates new opportunities but also challenges for professional historians. This book asks how historians deal with changing public demands for history and how these affect their professional practices, values and identities. The volume offers a great variety of detailed studies of cases where historians have applied their expertise outside the academic sphere. With contributions focusing on Latin America, Africa, Asia, the Pacific and Europe the book has a broad geographical scope.

Subdivided in five sections, the book starts with a critical look back on some historians who broke with mainstream academic positions by combining their professional activities with an explicit political partisanship or social engagement. The second section focusses on the challenges historians are confronted with when entering the court room or more generally exposing their expertise to legal frameworks. The third section focuses on the effects of policy driven demands as well as direct political interventions and regulations on the historical profession. A fourth section looks at the challenges and opportunities related to the rise of new digital media. Finally several authors offer their view on normative standards that may help to better respond to new demands and to define role models for publicly engaged historians.

This book aims at historians and other academics interested in public uses of history.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111186047
ISBN:: 9783111186047
ISBN:: 9783111186054
ISBN:: 9783111185910
Fachgebiet:: Geschichte
Fachgebiet:: Historische Epochen
Fachgebiet:: Neuere Geschichte
Fachgebiet:: Themen der Geschichte
Fachgebiet:: Colonial und Postcolonial History
Fachgebiet:: Public History
Verlag:: De Gruyter Oldenbourg

Buch 2022

‘Greater India’ and the Indian Expansionist Imagination, c. 1885–1965

The Rise and Decline of the Idea of a Lost Hindu Empire

Jolita Zabarskaitė

Band 4 in dieser Reihe

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This book is the first systematic study of the genealogy, discursive structures, and political implications of the concept of ‘Greater India’, implying a Hindu colonization of Southeast Asia, and used by extension to argue for a past Indian greatness as a colonial power, reproducible in the present and future. From the 1880s to the 1960s, protagonists of the Greater India theme attempted to make a case for the importance of an expansionist Indian civilisation in civilizing Southeast Asia. The argument was extended to include Central Asia, Africa, North and South America, and other regions where Indian migrants were to be found. The advocates of this Indocentric and Hindu revivalist approach, with Hindu and Indian often taken to be synonymous, were involved in a quintessentially parochial project, despite its apparently international dimensions: to justify an Indian expansionist imagination that viewed India’s past as a colonizer and civilizer of other lands as a model for the restoration of that past greatness in the future. Zabarskaite shows that the crucial ideologues and elements used for the formation of the construct of Greater India can be traced to the svadeśī movement of the turn of the century, and that Greater India moved easily between the domains of the scholarly and the popular as it sought to establish itself as a form of nationalist self-assertion.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110986068
ISBN:: 9783110986068
ISBN:: 9783110986334
ISBN:: 9783110997156
Fachgebiet:: Asien- und Pazifikwissenschaften
Fachgebiet:: Südasien
Fachgebiet:: Indien
Fachgebiet:: Geschichte
Fachgebiet:: Regionale und nationale Geschichte
Fachgebiet:: Asien-Pazifik
Fachgebiet:: Themen der Geschichte
Fachgebiet:: Ideologien und politische Ideen
Fachgebiet:: Colonial und Postcolonial History
Verlag:: De Gruyter Oldenbourg

Buch 2020

Anatomy of Eminence

French Liberalism and the Question of Elites

Daniel Rosenberg

Band 3 in dieser Reihe

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Despite its prominence in public discourse, the notion of elites remains a highly contested and ambiguous part of modern political discourse. This monograph rehabilitates the idea of elites and gives it a solid theoretical footing, while relating it with the historical development of liberal thought in the west. The analysis offered in the book concentrates on the tradition of liberal political thought in France, which has consistently tackled the question of the elites, their role in society, and the process of their formation.

Combining theoretical insights with practical wisdom, French liberal thinkers have seen the elite as an indispensable social category and as a vehicle for the development of human liberty. In their different prescriptive doctrines, French liberal thinkers have sought to reconcile the emergence of social elites with the requirements of social and political equality, as well as with the ongoing modernization of mores and institutions. The monograph offers a unique contribution to scholarship in modern political thought by engaging analytically with the notion of elites, as well as by offering a structured discussion on the historical development of liberalism in France.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110680348
ISBN:: 9783110680348
ISBN:: 9783110680263
ISBN:: 9783110680423
Fachgebiet:: Geschichte
Fachgebiet:: Historische Epochen
Fachgebiet:: Neuere Geschichte
Fachgebiet:: Themen der Geschichte
Fachgebiet:: Ideologien und politische Ideen
Verlag:: De Gruyter Oldenbourg

Buch 2020

What’s Left of Marxism

Historiography and the Possibilities of Thinking with Marxian Themes and Concepts

Benjamin Zachariah, Lutz Raphael, Brigitta Bernet

Band 2 in dieser Reihe

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Have Marxian ideas been relevant or influential in the writing and interpretation of history? What are the Marxist legacies that are now re-emerging in present-day histories? This volume is an attempt at relearning what the “discipline” of history once knew – whether one considered oneself a Marxist, a non-Marxist or an anti-Marxist.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110677744
ISBN:: 9783110677744
ISBN:: 9783110677621
ISBN:: 9783110992595
ISBN:: 9783110677799
Fachgebiet:: Geschichte
Fachgebiet:: Historische Epochen
Fachgebiet:: Neuere Geschichte
Fachgebiet:: Themen der Geschichte
Fachgebiet:: Ideologien und politische Ideen
Verlag:: De Gruyter Oldenbourg

Buch 2019

After the Last Post

The Lives of Indian Historiography

Benjamin Zachariah

Band 1 in dieser Reihe

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This book is about the production and consumption of history, themes that have gained in importance since the discipline's attempts to disavow its own authority with the ascendancy of postmodern and postcolonial perspectives. Several parallel themes crosscut the book’s central focus on the discipline of history: its intellectual history, its historiography, and its connection to memory, particularly in relation to the need to establish the collective identity of ‘nation’, ‘community’ or state through a memorialisation process that has much to do with history, or at least with claiming a historicity for collective memory. None of this can be undertaken without an understanding of the roles that history-writing and history-reading have been made to perform in public debates, or perhaps more accurately in public disputes. The book addresses a discomfort with postcolonial theories in and as history. Following are essays that examine the state of the discipline, the art of reading and using archives, practices of tracking the history of ideas, and the themes of history, memory and identity.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110643404
ISBN:: 9783110643404
ISBN:: 9783110638707
ISBN:: 9783110639889
Fachgebiet:: Geschichte
Fachgebiet:: Regionale und nationale Geschichte
Fachgebiet:: Asien-Pazifik
Fachgebiet:: Themen der Geschichte
Fachgebiet:: Ideologien und politische Ideen
Fachgebiet:: Colonial und Postcolonial History
Verlag:: De Gruyter Oldenbourg