Narratives about national character can be traced back to the Middle Ages but it was not until the early nineteenth century that the ‘national paradigm’ began to gain dominance in written history over constitutionalism, feudalism, and religious controversy. Historians such as Hume and Robertson, and after them Burke and Wollstonecraft, had already displayed a keen interest in national characteristics and characterologies, tying their understanding of national character either to classical contrariety models, or to enlightenment developmental frameworks that understood national characteristics as corresponding to more or less ‘civilised’ stages of human development. By the early to mid-nineteenth century, stadial investigations into the synchronic relationship between manners and nations had been extended to wider culturalist interests that legitimated the ‘unique character of nations’ and their ‘alleged superiority over other nations’. As the ‘political instrumentalization of a national self-image’, romantic-era nationalism provided the framework for the distillation of ethnic communities defined by the ‘myth of common ancestry, shared historical memories, elements of shared culture, an association with a specific homeland, and a measure of solidarity’. The ethnicisation of class differences that had gradually stolen into earlier historical accounts was therefore increasingly overlaid by what Joep Leerssen has called ‘romantic ethnogenesis’, whereby debates about ethnic origins and myths provided the ‘stamp of authenticity’ for distinctively national histories.

The long and complicated history of romantic ethnogenesis informed nineteenth-century written history in multiple and often competing ways. Adding a more overtly racialised layer to constructions of national identity, narratives of origin, inheritance, lineage, and descent were used to consolidate various popular and state nationalist agendas, from war propaganda to population and demographic discourse, gradually transforming older ethnies and patriotisms into modern ethnic nationalisms. These narratives of (often) ‘invented traditions’ could also, however, be repurposed by those who sought to promote oppositional or counter-state narratives of national disinheritance, or to develop and sustain regional communities that could not always be comfortably assimilated into state Protestantism and other dominant, metropolitan perspectives of a nation's past. In their attention to alternative identarian models of collective attachment, non-metropolitan historical endeavours—from provincial to colonial histories—raised unresolved questions about the relationship between centres and peripheries in ways that could both reinforce and disrupt the ‘official culture of the ruling elites’.