During World War II, Jacques Stern, a former French Minister of Colonies, wrote almost lyrically of the “patient labor of assimilation” by which France had been “consolidating the moral and material ties which bind together forty million continental Frenchmen and sixty million overseas Frenchmen, white and colored” in the French Empire. When the Brazzaville Conference met in 1944 under the auspices of the Free French government to consider the postwar future of that empire, its final resolution declared that the aims of the work of colonization which France is pursuing in her colonies exclude any idea of autonomy and any possibility of development outside the French empire bloc; the attainment of self-government in the colonies even in themost distant future must be excluded.

The role of a political opposition has proved ambiguous in most newly independent nations. New governments rarely see the necessity for a regular opposition party nor do they always accept the idea of opposition as a normal feature of government. There are many reasons why this is so. Most new nations have come into being after a prolonged period of struggle with colonial authorities which has caused nationalist leaders to monopolize loyalties. Also, opposition groups having themselves been associated with nationalism at some stage of their existence, often have an anti-government reflex common to those whose political actions have been aimed at changing the fundamental character of a country rather than accepting well established rules of political life and working within them. Indeed, many opposition leaders in new nations regard the new government much as they did their colonial nredecessors, i.e. as basically illegitimate.

The diffusion of British institutions, ideas, and values and the spread of the English language and of British peoples are among the major events in modern history. The study of the effects of this diffusion in the New World, Africa, and Asia in shaping political institutions in these regions has attracted many scholars, but the systematic and analytic study of the British themselves and of the societies and cultures they built overseas in their African and Asian colonies has thus far been neglected, except in the memoir and travel literature.

That a similarity underlay local diversities of British society in India during the early 19th century is shown by Bernard S. Cohn's description of the British in Benares. A century ago, George F. Atkinson, in his Curry and Rice, observed:

Let me remind you that, while there are numerous races, each with a different creed, caste, and language, so there are customs and manners peculiar to each: and this variety is not confined to the natives; for the habits and customs of social life among the English in India likewise present their petty diversities; and the “Qui Hye” of Bengal, the “Mull” of Madras, and the “Duck” of Bombay, adhere to and defend their own customs with jealous warmth of feeling … but there are [some ways of life] such as are common to the whole of India.

In this paper I shall attempt to consider how far the history of historiography can be treated as the history of the problems occasioned by men's awareness of the past in different societies, and of their attempts to deal with these problems. This kind of approach has not, so far as I know, been made before. That is to say, the history of historiography has not been approached as primarily a part of the history of social man's awareness of his past and his relations with it; and this is understandable enough, as the historical phenomena we call by the collective name of historiography have been by no means limited to the attempts made by historians and other thinkers to understand the past and its relationship to the present.