The article examines the relationship between history, nationalism, and empire by addressing the conditions and limits under which it is possible to write one’s “own” history. Proceeding from the premise that history is never a neutral or self-evident reality, the article argues that national historiography is shaped not only by internal demands of identity formation but also by imperial and modern regimes of power. Nationalism is thus conceptualized not as a natural convergence of the national and the political, but as an expression of the structural impossibility of such convergence within imperial arrangements. Within these arrangements, national identity both resists imperial domination and internalizes its epistemic frameworks and governing techniques. Drawing on the Armenian historical experience, the article analyzes the formation of national self-perception within a multilayered imperial context, structured by intersecting religious, communal, and legal affiliations, and examines the emergence of the imperative to define the national in the nineteenth-century context of modernization. Engaging postcolonial theory, the article demonstrates that national self-narratives are never fully emancipated from imperial legacies; postcolonial inquiry, therefore, does not offer a definitive identity but instead exposes the fractures, silences, and internal contradictions through which national narratives are continuously reconstituted. By critically assessing the principles of “people’s history” and the “national liberation struggle,” the article highlights their methodological limitations, particularly the dependence of political subjectivity and emancipatory claims on external recognition. It concludes that the aspiration to write a fully autonomous history functions less as an attainable project than as a regulative horizon. Accordingly, the primary task of historiography is not the construction of a unified national narrative, but the recovery of marginalized experiences and the preservation of the freedom of historical thought as a fundamental condition of political existence.
