ABSTRACT
The idea that the nation is the appropriate unit of analysis for the past has been a firmly entrenched aspect of the development of history as a discipline. In the late nineteenth century, the professionalization of history coincided with the general scientific view that nations were natural, inevitable, and highly evolved units of social organization, sociability, and individual subjectivity. History also helped sustain that view. We need only think of the ongoing predominance of nations in the organization of the discipline and in the writing of history, or the ways in which historians have made a practice of commonly evoking national collectivities (the Americans agreed, the English disagreed, for example), and conflating differences that are not regarded as national or “racial.” The eminent historian of race, George Fredrickson, has even stated that there is no getting around the nation.1 Indeed in The Comparative Imagination, Fredrickson claims that the nation and national history are fundamental to comparative history.
