What an 'Archive Rat' reveals to us about storying theory and the nature of history

This paper takes the work by Professor Margaret Allen on the transnational connections between India and Australia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to reflect on the relationship between history, facts and fiction. It does this by discussing recent contributions by David Christian, Dirk Moses and Carolyn Steedman to debates over history as an empirical science or a literary genre. The article draws on Joan Scott's recent explication of storytelling as a way of doing decentred history to describe and analyse how Professor Allen's work demonstrates an historical method that bridges these debates in constructive ways. Along the way, her work is shown to add depth and complexity to feminist historiographies of imperialism, modernity and transnationalism.