Focusing on Japan, France, and the United States, Christopher L. Hill reveals how the writing of national history in the late nineteenth century made the reshaping of the world by capitalism and the nation-state seem natural and inevitable. The three countries, occupying widely different positions in the world, faced similar ideological challenges stemming from the rapidly changing geopolitical order and from domestic political upheavals: the Meiji Restoration in Japan, the Civil War in the United States, and the establishment of the Third Republic in France. Through analysis that is both comparative and transnational, Hill shows that the representations of national history that emerged in response to these changes reflected rhetorical and narrative strategies shared across the globe.
Delving into narrative histories, prose fiction, and social philosophy, Hill analyzes the rhetoric, narrative form, and intellectual genealogy of late-nineteenth-century texts that contributed
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“National History and the World of Nations is an important book. I know few in globalization studies who have managed to articulate so complex and clear a framework for the analysis of the possible global determinants of specific cultures’ narrative texts. This book will be read as much for its methodological interest as for its holdings about nationalism.”—Frederick Buell, author of National Culture and the New Global System
“National History and the World of Nations is one of the most exciting books I have read for some time.”—Patrice Higonnet, author of Sister Republics: The Origins of French and American Republicanism
“National History and the World of Nations is one of the most exciting books I have read for some time.”—Patrice Higonnet, author of Sister Republics: The Origins of French and American Republicanism
“This is a learned and sophisticated meditation on the ways in which comparable practices of national history writing emerged in three locations tied together by global capitalism and the formation of a worldwide system of nation-states. Christopher L. Hill demonstrates why we must reject national exceptionalisms even as he unveils the particularities of each of the nations he studies with rare insight and linguistic skill. This is an important study that should be read far beyond the parochial boundaries of area studies formations.”—Takashi Fujitani, author of Splendid Monarchy: Power and Pageantry in Modern Japan
“This is a learned and sophisticated meditation on the ways in which comparable practices of national history writing emerged in three locations tied together by global capitalism and the formation of a worldwide system of nation-states. Christopher L. Hill demonstrates why we must reject national exceptionalisms even as he unveils the particularities of each of the nations he studies with rare insight and linguistic skill. This is an important study that should be read far beyond the parochial boundaries of area studies formations.”—Takashi Fujitani, author of Splendid Monarchy: Power and Pageantry in Modern Japan
“This is a remarkably accomplished, broad-ranging, and provocative study that makes important claims about three of the key societies of modernity. It will energize an important theoretical and empirical debate about fundamental questions in a—still further—globalizing world.”—Richard Terdiman, author of Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis
Table of Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xv
1. National History and the Shape of the Nineteenth-Century World 1
Part I. Spaces of History
2. Liberal Social Imaginaries and the Interiority of History 47
3. The Nationality of Expansion 82
4. Decline, Renewal, and the Rhetoric of Will 119
Part II. Times of Crisis
5. The Rupture of Meiji and the New Japan 155
6. Americanization and Historical Consciousness 194
7. French Revolution, Third Republic 233
Conclusion: National History and Other Worlds 269
Notes 283
Bibliography 309
Index 329
