Historians are to nationalism what poppy-growers in Pakistan are to heroin-addicts: we supply the essential raw material for the market.
Interpretation
Historians contribute to the construction of national identities, similar to how poppy-growers provide the raw material for drug production.
In this quote, Eric Hobsbawm suggests that historians play a crucial role in shaping and supplying the narratives and ideologies that fuel nationalism, just as those who cultivate poppy plants provide the fundamental ingredients for drug manufacturing. The comparison highlights the responsibility of historians in crafting narratives that can both inform and manipulate societal sentiments towards national identity, illustrating the potent and often contentious relationship between history and nationalism.
In practice
This quote can be used in a lecture about the role of historians in shaping national narratives.
It is one of the ironies of this strange century that the most lasting results of the October revolution, whose object was the global overthrow of capitalism, was to save its antagonist, both in war and in peace - that is to say, by providing it with the incentive, fear, to reform itself after the Second World War, and, by establishing the popularity of economic planning, furnishing it with some of the procedures for its reform
It seems that American patriotism measures itself against an outcast group. The right Americans are the right Americans because they're not like the wrong Americans, who are not really Americans.
Impotence therefore faces both those who believe in what amounts to a pure, stateless, market capitalism, a sort of international bourgeois anarchism, and those who believe in a planned socialism uncontaminated by private profit-seeking. Both are bankrupt. The future, like the present and the past, belongs to mixed economies in which public and private are braided together in one way or another. But how? That is the problem for everybody today, but especially for people on the left.
As the global expansion of Indian and Chinese restaurants suggests, xenophobia is directed against foreign people, not foreign cultural imports.
Nations without a past are contradictions in terms. What makes a nation is the past, what justifies one nation against others is the past, and historians are the people who produce it.
If you want to avoid criticism, then you shouldn't be a historian, because historians are trying to understand and explain. If you're trying to please people, then you should go into the fashion business, or the candy business.
Hitler was no inexorable product of a German 'special path', no logical culmination of long-term trends in specifically German culture and ideology. Nor was he a mere 'accident' in the course of German history.
Racial inequity in how the immense benefits of the original G.I. Bill were disbursed are well-documented, and we've all seen how these inequities have trickled down over time, leaving Black World War II veterans and their families without the benefits they earned through service and sacrifice.
History consists of a corpus ascertained facts. The facts are available to the historian in documents, inscriptions and so on, like fish in the fishmonger's slab. The historian collects them, takes them home, and cooks and serves them in whatever style appeals to him.
The epic story of the West is the development in the 19th century of a mass prosperity the world had never seen and its near-disappearance in one nation after another in the 20th.
Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you, because these geography books no longer exist; not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either. Nahalal arose in the place of Mahalul, Gevat - in the place of Jibta, Sarid - in the place of Haneifs and Kefar Yehoshua - in the place of Tell Shaman. There is no one place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population.
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