6 SOCIAL SCIENTIST discipline and the circumstances in which it originated within Europe, in the first instance. Not surprisingly, humanist scholars in the West have speculated about the past of their society since classical times. Indeed, we have seen in a work by Herodotus an exercise in contemporary history which fully meets the requirements of modem scholarship. Yet the discipline acquired a form recognisable as such to present-day scholars in the first half of the 19th century. Besides the crystallisation of a tradition of hermeneutics, a crucial factor behind the development of modern historiography was the recognition of archival documentation as the authentic basis of exploring the past. Such a narrative, so Ranke and others believed, would possess a rigour which was comparable to the rigour with which the physical sciences could explain the behaviour of matter and the character of natural phenomena. Perhaps the positivist vision which shaped the mind of the historian, at this juncture, can best be illustrated by Ranke's observation that he sought to construct the past as it actually was.1 A similar sense of selfconfidence was reflected in the communication which Lord Acton addressed to the contributors to the Cambridge Modern History. Staking a claim to a level of objectivity which appears wholly unwarrantable today, Acton observed: Our scheme requires that nothing shall reveal the country, the religion, or the party to which the writers belong. It is essential not only on the ground that impartiality is the character of legitimate history, but because the work is carried on by men acting together for no other object than the increase of accurate knowledge.2 Apart from the philosophical milieu which characterized the genesis of modern historiography, a few other characteristics of the climate in which the discipline took root need to be highlighted in the present context. Perhaps the most significant fact about modern history was that it took birth in a context in which the emergence of nation-states was the most conspicuous feature of the European landscape. What this inevitably meant was that so much of the scholarship of those times— as well as the scholarship of subsequent times—was devoted to the exploration of emerging nation-states in the West. Not surprisingly, such an emphasis in historical writing created several problems. While civilisations and empires had characterized the course of human history since ancient times, nation-states were relatively late arrivals on the scene. Indeed, so much of the historical scholnrhip of the 19th century, in the period subsequent to the genesis of modern historiography, was a part of the praxis which created new forms of political consciousness—more particularly, consciousness of nationhood—among different linguistic communities within European