Nationalism and the Science of History in the Representation of the Valencian Past

Modern historiography and nationalism are closely connected to one another. Both had their origins in the final decades of the eighteenth century and were fostered by the same process of far-reaching intellectual change which led to the emergence of a radically new way of thinking about the world and participating in it. It was this change that brought us the unquestionably modern concepts which we still use to perceive and interpret events to this day. The way the nation thought of itself began to change as the dynastic kingdoms and ideas based on religion went into decline. The nation as an entity linked to the person of the monarch was replaced by an abstract concept which—recalling the words of Benedict Anderson—breathed life into an imagined political community, inherently limited and sovereign. ‘Imagined’ because the members of that community would never meet the majority of their fellow countrymen, yet they never gave up their conception of something fundamental—traditions, a language, civilization, culture—that bound them fraternally into a ‘political community’. Such a political community was ‘limited’ and ‘sovereign’ because it had borders, beyond which lay other nations, while its identity was expressed through