Introduction

The connection between history instruction and the modern nation-state is an intimate one. The quintessential tools for instilling the lessons of the past in the minds of children are school textbooks, perhaps the most widely read and influential of any works of history. They are also amongst the most contested. This special feature focuses on the ways in which school textbooks in different regions of the world reflect and provide a site for conflicts over history and history education; it concludes with a short piece on how states and policymakers in the UK use (or fail to use) the 'lessons of history'.

Most western democracies have seen some version of the 'history wars' since the 1970s: the quest for recognition by under-represented and marginalized groups – women, aboriginal peoples, ethnic and religious minorities, immigrant communities, gays and lesbians – of their contributions to history and their calls for a restoration of their stories to 'national' narratives of the past. The global process of decolonization and the mass immigration from the Third World to Europe and the United States forced national curricula to confront the existence of competing and conflicting narratives of the past and the presence of strangers and outsiders within the national body. Inevitably these countries have also witnessed a conservative backlash, calling for the reassertion of a dominant national narrative. In Britain, for instance, the conservative reaction – emphasizing a singular national narrative and set of 'values', while whitewashing the colonial past – is evident in a recent textbook designed not for school children, but for immigrants taking the new test for British citizenship.¹

The contributions here on the Netherlands and on Germany provide insights into history education in two countries where the 'history wars' are very much current issues. Mieke de Vos describes a struggle within the national history curriculum in the Netherlands, between quests to broaden history teaching to include multiple perspectives, including those of migrants and minorities, gender history and histories of the relationship between Europe and the non-Western world, and a recent counter-reaction which seeks to restore a 'Dutch canon' and which focuses more concertedly on Europe. She argues that recent tensions over the place of Muslim immigrants in the Netherlands, particularly after the assassinations of politician Pim Fortuyn and filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, have strengthened a tendency to treat history education as a way of assimilating immigrants and instructing them in 'true' Dutch values.

In the German cases described by Simone Laessig and Karl Heinrich Pohl, some of the contradictions of teaching German history in a broader European perspective emerge. Recognition that Germany is an 'immigrant nation' came late, and Germany lacks organized lobbies of minority or migrant groups pressing for an incorporation of their narratives into official history. Laessig and Pohl suggest that in most school history textbooks, the position of immigrants, particularly Muslims, remains that of the 'other' in German society. The treatment of the history of German Jews is more fraught; the Holocaust is firmly established at the centre of the curriculum, but as a result, Laessig and Pohl argue, German Jews appear in history textbooks only as victims, and thus they too remain outsiders to the dominant narrative. Yet in the German case, the dominant narrative is less a national or nationalist one than a broader narrative of Europeanization. German history textbooks are chary of nationalism. What emerges in its place is a 'pre-history' of the European Union and an emphasis on an essential European identity based on particular values (tolerance, democracy) and a Latin Christian heritage.

In India's democracy, as the papers by Neeladri Bhattacharya and Romila Thapar show, conflicts over history and history education have taken a different form. After India's independence and the trauma of Partition, early Indian textbooks sought to do two things: to 'decolonize' history, by contesting the colonial perception that India was a society incapable of making history; and to emphasize, in the light of communal conflict and bloodshed, the essential 'unity-in-diversity' that ran through India's history. We are fortunate to have in this feature a personal memoir from Romila Thapar, a courageous participant over many decades – and at considerable...