Guardians of the Tradition

The early twentieth century witnessed a proliferation of historical writing in Africa and Asia, suggesting the emergence of a new historical consciousness. Early nationalists, modernisers and colonial collaborators all turned to historiography as their tool of choice for shaping the present and envisioning the future. The causes of these new bodies of global historical writing, often marked by curiously Rankean inflections, have become the subject of heated discussions, particularly perhaps among historians of India. How should we understand these new expressions of historical consciousness? Did they represent a mark of westernisation, or did they stand in continuity with indigenous historiographic traditions? Did European ‘academic’ historiography colonise and displace vernacular modes of understanding and of communicating the past, or did it rather synergise with these, as Peter Burke would have it, to generate a truly global historical paradigm? James de Lorenzi examines these questions engagingly in this masterful survey of modern Ethiopian and Eritrean historiography. His area of focus, the highland societies of the Horn of Africa, provides an instructive vantage point on these wider questions; for not only were they heirs to centuries-old traditions of writing history (tarik), they also encountered European forces of colonialism and their associated narratives of history and ‘progress’ more gradually and partially than other parts of Africa and Asia. In the writings of Ethiopian and Eritrean intellectuals of the early twentieth century, processes of continuity, change and adaptation thus took unique forms; arguably, they may here also be traced with greater clarity than in other regions

Archaeology · Art · Colonialism · Consciousness · Historiography · Indigenous · Literature · Narrative · Political science · Vernacular · Westernization · African history and culture analysis · African history and culture studies · History · Law · Philosophy