AHR Forum “History Is Past Politics”? Archives, “Tainted Evidence,” and the Return of the State TODD SHEPARD IT REMAINS EXCEEDINGLY RARE that historiographies anchored outside the West res- onate widely. In the last two decades, however, debates about South Asian histories have done just that, repeatedly intervening in the ways that historians from diverse fields discuss and practice their craft. 1 This breakthrough had both textual and con- textual causes. On the one hand, a series of forceful interventions by the Subaltern Studies Collective made historians look toward South Asia, inspiring controversy, reflection, and a fair amount of imitation. On the other hand, this conversation took place at a time when attention to empire was coming to seem ever more useful to historical study, perhaps even necessary; today, Anthony Pagden’s 2006 claim that “imperial history,” long “relegated to the wastelands of the academy[,] now seems to be on the point of capturing the center” seems even less of an exaggeration. Such factors help explain why, as Clifton Crais remarked recently in these pages, “South Asia, and particularly India, now largely dominates the new history of the British Empire, so much so,” he suggested, “that at times India comes to stand for . . . other colonial societies, in toto.” 2 The articles here, all by South Asianists and on South Asian histories, seek to move beyond most of the spirited debates that drew so much outside attention to their field. They stiff-arm a set of South Asianist contretemps that Robert Travers terms “aging” over questions “such as collaboration versus resistance, ‘Indian agency’ versus ‘colonial intervention,’ continuity versus change,” and largely avoid choosing between elites or subalterns, or what Mithi Mukherjee refers to as “the four major schools of historiography on modern India—Marxist, Cambridge, nationalist, and subaltern.” None of these authors want to stake their claims on this heavily mined terrain. Nor do they directly engage the implications of what many scholars 1 My comments here primarily address Anglophone discussions. On subalternist success and on the limited circulation of most non-Western historiographies, see Georg G. Iggers and Q. Edward Wang, A Global History of Modern Historiography (Harlow, 2008), esp. 281–300; on subaltern influence among Africanists, see Christopher J. Lee, “Subaltern Studies and African Studies,” History Compass 3, no. 1 (2005): 1–13. On historiography in the twentieth century, see also Donald R. Kelley, Frontiers of History: Historical Inquiry in the Twentieth Century (New Haven, Conn., 2006). 2 Anthony Pagden, “The Empire’s New Clothes: From Empire to Federation, Yesterday and To- day,” Common Knowledge 12, no. 1 (2006): 36– 46, 36; Clifton Crais, “Review: Making Empire: Colonial Encounters and the Creation of Imperial Rule in Nineteenth-Century Africa,” American Historical Review 114, no. 4 (October 2009): 1023–1025; Sugata Bose, “Post-Colonial Histories of South Asia: Some Re- flections,” Journal of Contemporary History 38, no. 1 (2003): 133–146. 474