Nationalism has always been intimately connected with the sense of past. Whether defined generally as identification with a putative cultural collectivity known as a nation, or all the more particularly as the thought that a given ‘nation’ merits and can appropriately look for self-government, nationalism is constantly bound up with perceptions of the past, and with claims for the present and future made on the premise of those perceptions. One unavoidable impact upon history writing has been nationalism, a set of beliefs about cultural identity and political legitimacy. A significant framework is provided by nationalism for historical writing in Europe, and in those former colonies influenced by Europe since the 19th century, as indicated by the medievalist historian Patrick J Geary: “[The] modern [study of] history was born in the 19th century, conceived and developed as an instrument of European nationalism. As a tool of nationalist ideology, the history of Europe’s nations was a great success, but it has turned our understanding of the past into a toxic waste dump, filled with the poison of ethnic nationalism, and the poison has seeped deep into popular consciousness.” Global historiography (the study of historical writings, not the study of history itself) has not fared so well. For a start, it was legitimately felt by Western historiographers that there is bounty to discuss in our own particular convention, so why squander significant time taking a gander at different cultures. Even where lip service is paid to other historiographical traditions, of which the Sino-Japanese and the Islamic are the best known, correlations are frequently based on the premise of what may be called, to use a term from information technology, “historiographical character recognition.” Thus, Sima Qian and Ibn Khaldun, the two most familiar ?gures from the Chinese and Islamic traditions, are the greater part of ten commanded for composing works that look as though they could ?t effectively into the family tree of present day homo historicus occidentalis. It is not that Westerners dipping into foreign terrain are just colonising the past of other individuals’ pasts; those master in their own particular non-Western national ?elds much of the time receive the self-complimentary point of view of Western historiography. For instance, the corpus of works on Chinese historiography has, with maybe one or two exceptions, hegemonically recognised modern academic ‘scienti?c’ practice as the terminus ad quem. There has been, as Peter C Perdue has noticed, an astounding hesitance to move from Western subversion of essentialist and orientalist myths to deconstruction of their Eastern partners, in actuality keeping up the West as the “privileged site of analysis.” Ideology, language, linguistic context, and the imperfection of surviving sources limit and shape our ability to represent the past; they pretty much as equally influence our reading of past histories. It is not any more feasible for us to grasp on the ‘history in itself’ of a work written by Voltaire or Machiavelli — much less a more linguistically remote one by al-Tabari or BanGu — than it is to go into the pasts that they themselves implied to delineate. We can, obviously, sort out the linguistic and intellectual settings — the pluralist critical — that drove a particular historian to write a particular work and to make particular aesthetic choices of material and contention. Here the question arises why we tend to organise historiography along national lines, and whether and under what circumstances it is legitimate to do so even when the text or texts under analysis originated in geo-chronological circumstances that manifestly did not feature nations, or their associated ideology of nationalism, as we have come to comprehend these terms since the mid-19th century. I will propose that ideas of ‘nation’, ‘nationality’, ‘national character’ and so forth can genuinely ?gure in an account of the past in several very different and in some cases contradicting ways. That because this is the case, there are deficient justifications for expelling them as anachronistic on purely chronological grounds (that is, on account of the author lived before the age of the nation-state); and that it is conceivable to read the country into a history along a few possible interpretative axes that relate to ?ve methods of authorial decision. Both the strength of the nation in historiography and the fact but not the value of historiography’s pre-eminence in the building of nations in the course of last two centuries appear beyond doubt, and are settled upon on both sides of the subaltern divides. “History was the principal mode whereby non-nations were converted into nations,” declaims Prasenjit Duara. “Nations emerge as the subjects of history just as history emerges as the ground, the mode of being, of the nation.” Others agreed. For ‘history’ let us substitute ‘historiography’ since the country is no less in?uential in our comprehension of how historical writing has developed over the past 25 centuries, even down to our specific festival of gallant, perceptive historical minds, for example, Ibn Khaldun, Jean Bodin, Giambattista Vico, and Johann Gottfried von Herder, who could envision nations or national characters beyond their own political boundaries, and hypothesise the differences and likenesses among them. Getting away from the perceptual limits of national horizons still assumes the supremacy of the nation as that which must be escaped. As James J Sheehan has commented, “In every country the dominant historiographical tradition re?ects the forces that de?ne the boundaries of the nation.” It can be presumed that the present day practice of history writing started side by side with the ascent of the nation-state, and the study of history in schools and colleges has generally implied the study of national histories. History is a vision of the forces that have shaped national society. The nation consequently throws a long shadow backwards on our vision of the past, and channels our discernment into a specific spatial framework. The use of the nation-state as the framework for understanding the past, in other words, imposes essential biases on our comprehension of history. The writer is an M. Phil scholar at the Quaid-e-Azam University, Islamabad