‘HISTORY IS A COLLECTIVE REPRESENTATION of what happened’, wrote John Tosh in 1991 (The pursuit of history). Two years later, John Greyston shaped his arguments in agreement with Tosh when he made this important judgement on the historian's vocation: ‘history is what we make by telling a story, not a story of what actually happened.’ What Tosh and Greyston are stressing here is the fact that language mirrors and replicates differentperceptions of the world that surrounds us. Language, Tosh and Greyston seem to be saying, is always in the process of being produced and reproduced, constructed and reconstructed – or, to use Paula Treichler's phrase in How to have theory in an epidemic, language is always in the process of being ‘modified, institutionalized and put to use’. Another way of saying this is that history is based on ‘prior social constructions routinely produced within specific discourses’. A parallel argument runs through Edward Said's ‘Worldly humanism and the empire builders’. History, according to Said, ‘cannot be swept clean like a blackboard, clean so that we might inscribe our own future there and impose our own forms of life for people to follow;’ history is made by men and women, ‘just as it can also be unmade and rewritten’.