This chapter starts by arguing that traditionally the writing of history has a strong connection to the construction of identities, be they national, class, ethnic, gender or spatial identities. The theory of history has also re-inforced that link until a range of diverse thinkers came to question this. I am discussing in particular Hayden White, Michel Foucault, Mikhail Bakhtin, Chris Lorenz, Chantal Mouffe, Michel de Certeau, Pierre Bourdieu, Stuart Hall, Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida. The collective impact of these authors has been to produce a greater self-reflexivity about the relationship between history and identity formation in many historians. The book, however, is not about a whiggish story of progress towards self-reflexivity, but it highlights that work which, in the author’s view, has been successful in being self-reflective about the historians’ part in the construction of identities.
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