The National Story and Who Wrote It

Massimo d'Azeglio is supposed to have said, in 1861, that having made Italy they must now make Italians. Whether or not he put it that way, it is an exact statement of the problem. A state whose borders were fixed within living memory has a legitimacy problem, and an ancient story solves it.

So the national histories of Europe were largely written in the nineteenth century, by people for whom this was the point. The programme was deliberate and thoroughly documented: national school curricula, standardised languages with dialects demoted, systematic folklore collection, anniversaries, museums, monuments, and a great deal of scholarly effort spent recovering traditions that were in fact being composed. The professionalisation of history as a discipline happened in the same decades and in the same institutions, which is why the field has been arguing with its own origins ever since.

Eric Hobsbawm's term for the product is the invented tradition: a practice presented as ancient and actually recent, created to establish continuity with a chosen past. The inventions cluster around periods of rapid change, when a society most needs to feel continuous with itself. Calling something an invented tradition is not a debunking, incidentally. It is a dating.

The Scottish clan tartan is the cleanest example available. Highland dress had been proscribed after 1746; the specific mapping of setts to families was substantially a nineteenth-century commercial creation, promoted around a carefully staged royal visit in 1822. It is genuinely a tradition now, with two centuries behind it and real meaning to the people who wear it. Both things are true, and they only conflict if you believe authenticity comes from age.

Benedict Anderson supplied the mechanism. A nation is an imagined community: you will never meet almost all of its members and yet feel real solidarity with them. What makes that possible is a standardised print language, and above all the daily newspaper, which allows millions of strangers to perform the same ritual simultaneously in the confident knowledge that others are doing it. No earlier technology permitted anything like it, which is why nations in the modern sense are younger than the countries they are named after.

All of which puts school history in an awkward position that it has never escaped. Historically its purpose was citizenship: a shared story producing belonging. The discipline, meanwhile, teaches doubt about stories, who made this one, what for, what does it leave out. The two aims are not fully compatible, and the compromise between them is renegotiated in public every few years.

Which is why curriculum arguments are so much fiercer than the evidence ever warrants. When a minister objects that a proposed change will damage national cohesion, the objection concedes the whole point: the curriculum is being defended for what it does to belonging rather than for whether it is accurate. That is a legitimate thing for a state to want. It is a different argument from the historical one, and separating the two is the only way these disputes ever get anywhere, which is exactly what both sides most reliably avoid doing.