In recent decades, scholars working in postcolonial history have successfully challenged the primacy of Western historiography and its Eurocentric worldview. With Unsettling History, a group of historians extend that challenge to two central components of work in history: archiving and narrating. Archival resources, they argue, despite their air of impartiality, are the product of established interests and subject to various practices of selection, cataloguing, and preservation. Narrating, too, is more complicated than it might at first seem, especially as the range of genres available to the historians for presenting their findings has expanded in recent years.

Archivieren und Erzählen gelten als zentrale historiografische Praktiken. Sie ermöglichen die Konstruktion, aber auch die Dekonstruktion jener Geschichten, die "Geschichte" darstellen. Es ist dieses Machen von Geschichte, dem die Autorinnen und Autoren des Bandes aus postkolonialen Perspektiven nachgehen. Damit erkunden sie zugleich die Grenzen eurozentrischer Sichtweisen.