Conclusion

This chapter summarises key findings of the volume: the variety of media employed in the production of the past; the usefulness of historical culture as a concept that enables comparisons across cultures and periods; and the insights it offers into wider intellectual, cultural and political debates within a community or culture. The chapter further suggests three potential avenues for future research: the role of women as producers and agents of historical culture; the nature and operation of cultural transfer in the production of historical culture; and the question whether recurrent patterns in the fashioning of the past can be detected across geographical, cultural and chronological boundaries.

Legend and Historical Experience in Fifteenth-Century Ottoman Narratives of the Past

During the course of the fifteenth century, the Ottoman sultanate underwent many transformations in the political and cultural sphere. When the century began, Bayezid I (r. 1389–1402) was making the first serious if ultimately unsuccessful Ottoman bid at empire. By its end, Mehmed the Conqueror’s much more centralised empire was in the hands of his son Bayezid II (r. 1481–1512), who commissioned chronicles documenting its entire history down to his own time. These were largely compilations made up of distinct elements, many of which were much older. This chapter focuses on what such texts can tell us about how the fifteenth-century Ottomans perceived the eastern Roman and Islamic past and their own historical role in the region.

Memory as Theatre

In 1995, the Asante people of central Ghana celebrated a sumptuous first-fruits festival, Odwira. Although the festival is held annually, this one was unusual in that it also marked the 25th year of the reign of their king, the Asantehene. The event was charged with political as well as cultural meaning. Asante and its king had been at the centre of opposition to the radical nationalist party led by Kwame Nkrumah which had taken Ghana into independence in 1957. That opposition had been ruthlessly suppressed and humiliated and this Odwira proved to be a very public opportunity for both an energetic re-assertion of Asante pride and for revenge against a brand of radical politics which remains significantly less popular in the region than it does in other parts of Ghana.

La Rosca de Investigación y Acción Social

This chapter focuses on La Rosca de Investigación y Acción Social, an organisation that functioned in the early 1970s in various locations in Colombia, its purpose to cooperate with indigenous and peasant organisations in the reconstruction of memory and the reintroduction of practices and institutions that would strengthen resistance to large landowners and the state. In particular, the chapter explores La Rosca’s work with the National Association of Peasant Users (ANUC) in the Caribbean coastal region. looking at: (1) how historical material was collected and the role of the different parties in the research process, (2) the process of interpretation of this historical material and the role of ‘science’ as it was articulated by the external researchers, (3) the methodologies employed in the writing/setting on paper in visual or written form of these interpretations, and (4) the life-spans and political trajectories of the results.

The Poetry of History in Early Modern India

This chapter shows how Hindi poetry can be an important resource for understanding the Mughal period (1526–1857). Mughal historians have largely relied on Persian and European sources, but much can be gained by examining the local historical cultures that were cultivated in Indian vernacular languages. Busch focuses on a specific Hindi work, the Binhai Raso of Maheshdas Rao, which tells the story of the Mughal succession war of 1658 from the viewpoint of the Gaur Rajputs who fought (and died) in defence of the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan. Since the materials are primarily literary rather than documentary in nature, they present challenges to would-be historian of historical culture, but they have the potential to contribute new perspectives not only to the field of Mughal history, but to the re-theorisation of Indian historiographical practices.

The Immediacy of a Remote Past

Early in the Third Reich, Nazi ideologues and propagandists proclaimed the rebirth of the German nation. But when was it first born, and when had it died? Nazis, including Rosenberg, Himmler and Darré, looked back to the late eighth and early ninth centuries, constructing an originary myth of a pristine Germanic and pagan Germany, championed by the Saxon war-lord ‘Duke’ Widukind, and its destruction at the hands of Charlemagne, Romanism and Christianity. But, even within the Nazi Party’s leadership, this proved a controversial view. As Nazism began to fulfil its totalitarian ambitions and impose ideological uniformity, a furious public debate broke out. It concerned the origins and meaning of German history, and ultimately German identity. No Nazi doubted that events from which modern Germans were separated by more than a millennium posed urgent questions for the present, and Charlemagne’s Saxon wars acquired other kinds of immediacy in Nazi historical imaginations.

Imagining Rome in Medieval Constantinople

This chapter suggests that interest in the Roman past during the middle Byzantine period was not evidence of idle antiquarianism but rather a meaningful ingredient in the creation of the Byzantines’ imagined community. Focusing on the modulations of Roman themes within the context of Byzantine writing we may therefore better map medieval processes of identity formation. This chapter explores instances of such engagement with the Roman past, and more specifically with the history of the Republic in Byzantine texts from the early tenth to the mid-twelfth centuries. It thus looks at the ways in which distant history was woven onto the fabric of contemporary political narrative, becoming a newly familiar component of an evolving political and more broadly cultural identity.

Chinese History as a Constructed Continuity

The continuity of Chinese history, through the unfolding of the ‘dynastic cycle’ of its successive imperial regimes, has been taken as one of the great truisms of discourse on China. Yet assertions of cultural continuity in China have emerged in recent research much more as tendentious fictions, cultural artefacts themselves designed to stitch together disparate elements over time—the daotong or ‘Transmission of the Way’ proposed by Neo-Confucians, is one good example. And looking at Chinese history as a sequence of political powers, the transmission of what was seen as a form of imperium, zhengtong, or ‘Correct Succession’, has also long been considered as technically problematic. The modern scholar Rao Zongyi has a well-researched monograph on these debates that deserves to be better known, especially as history as an element in Chinese identity is now coming to assume an increased contemporary importance.

Ancient Past, Modern Ceremony

This chapter explores how the royal barge procession, one of Thailand’s most historic cultural events, came to represent both the deep Thai past and the modern Thai nation. With a specific focus on the early Cold War, during a period where power was being openly contested amongst Thailand’s elite, the chapter identifies how the materiality of the barges presented both challenges and opportunities. Certainly, as historic artefacts, the barges promised to secure narratives of authenticity and political legitimacy. Yet, as this chapter illustrates, for the barge procession to be of genuine value to the Thai state, it would first have to be reconciled with the contemporary forces that were determining the course of Thai nation building; namely, the integration of Thailand into a world order based in the United States, and the reorganisation of Thai society around new class arrangements.

The Chronicler and the Count

In 1601 an unusual and unprecedented lawsuit began at the Spanish court in Madrid. The plaintiff: the Count of Puñonrostro; the defendant, Antonio de Herrera y Tordesilla, one of the Habsburg monarchy’s official chroniclers and author of the General History of the Indies. The issue: the veracity and supposedly libellous nature of Herrera’s account of the Count’s grandfather, Pedrarias Dávila, the first Spanish governor of what is now Panama. Herrera defended his interpretation of the available sources, the truthfulness of his history, and more broadly, the right of historians to exercise what we today call free speech. In this respect, the lawsuit questioned the way history was to be written, interpreted, and, more importantly, used.