Chapter 2 explores the politics of history in wartime Venice, focusing on the processes of documentation and representation that articulated the meaning of war in official and popular accounts. It charts how the two state historiographers, Michele Foscarini and Pietro Garzoni, incorporated the war into the official narrative of the Republic and patrician image-making. It then provides a detailed overview of popular histories, with emphasis on the political and commercial imperatives that determined their publication. Finally, it considers the role of censorship and shows how official historiography became a site of contestation between competing elite groups. The chapter argues that state-sponsored and popular histories compel us to rethink the colonial conditions of the production of Venetian historical sources and the close relationship between historical discourse and overseas empire-building.

Chapter 4 examines the Kemalist appropriation of Ottoman history, beginning at the moment the empire itself ceased to exist and building up to the 1953 quincentennial of the Ottoman conquest of Istanbul. From the 1930s, Turkish historians used a narrative of fatal decline to not only justify Kemalist reforms but also facilitate the selective incorporation of the Empire’s triumphs into Turkish nationalist history. By 1953, the Kemalist appropriation of the Ottoman past had reached a point where it was possible to celebrate Fatih Sultan Mehmet II as a secular, pro-Western sultan who laid the groundwork for Turkey’s membership in NATO.

Chapter 5 explores the visual and rhetorical styles through which Ottoman history was modernized. Faced with enduring Western Orientalism, Turkish authors, architects, and illustrators took a number of distinct stylistic steps to celebrate their history while presenting their relationship to it as an unequivocally modern one. The explosion of popular history magazines and historical novels during the 1950s provided a forum in which the act of reading about the past could itself become a performance of modernity. Whether blending popular history with pulp fiction or encouraging Turkish citizens to approach their country from the perspective of Western tourists, Turkish authors pioneered approaches to re-appropriating their own past that remain popular today.

Paralleling the developments in evolutionary biology, cultural anthropologists abandoned the model in which modern Western culture was the goal of development, recognizing the diversity of cultures around the world. Archaeologists realized that different cultures had been shaped by different technological innovations. Thinkers from a range of backgrounds began to see social evolution in Darwinian terms, as a process driven by occasional innovations that were unpredictable on the basis of any general trend. H. G. Wells popularized a view of history on similar foundations, openly acknowledging the parallel with Darwinism. He and others suggested that the linkage of science and invention that had occurred in the West and led to its dominance was an example of such an unanticipated breakthrough. Counterfactual histories imagined worlds in which the key transformations had come out differently. It was now recognized that the ongoing flood of new technologies was transforming society at an accelerating rate, making it hard to predict the course of future progress.