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.
The Negro was freed and turned loose as a penniless, landless, naked, ignorant laborer. Ninety-nine per cent were field hands and servants of the lowest class.
There comes a time in the life of every nation when it stands at the crossroads of history and must choose which way to go.
It is with deep grief I watch the clattering down of the British Empire with all its glories and all the services it has rendered to mankind.
Slavery is nothing to joke about. The history of this nation's involvement with slavery is nothing to pass off in a joke.
History knows no scruples and no hesitation. Inert and unnering flows towards her goal. History knows herway. She makes no mistakes.
The American people, North and South, went into the [Civil] war as citizens of their respective states, they came out as subjects ... what they thus lost they have never got back.
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