It is well established that ancient pasts became a major preoccupation of Arab intellectuals in the nineteenth century, as a central theme of “nahda” discourse. As Samah Selim has put it in Popular Fiction, Translation and the Nahda in Egypt (2019), “nahda discourse was backward looking: to golden ages, lost empires, and pure languages.” According to existing scholarship on this phenomenon — for example in the work of Stephen Sheehi and Shaden Tageldin — figures such as Rifāʿah al-Ṭahṭāwī in Egypt and Buṭrus al-Bustānī in Lebanon sought to develop accounts of history that established a place for their own social and political worlds within a basically European narrative of civilization. In this paper, I argue that such an understanding of the historical thought of thinkers like Ṭahṭāwī and Bustānī misses an essential aspect of the historiographical project of the nahda; namely, what I characterize as the territorialization of the past. This was a process whereby territory became the basic unit of historical writing, so that all of the pasts within a defined space, such as Egypt or Greater Syria, assumed significance simply by virtue of their geographic location. This marked a partial shift away from an approach to the past in which concepts of virtue and exemplarity were the basic units of historical inquiry. The discursive importance of highlighting this process is that it illuminates how Arabic historical thought in this period was a counter-hegemonic force: the territorialization of the past was a means of affirming local political power, at least as an ideal, against the incursions of European imperialism. To make this argument, the paper focuses on three works: Miṣbāḥ al-Sārī wa-Nuzhat al-Qarī (1855), a personal memoir-cum-history of Turkey by the Lebanese doctor Ibrahim al-Najjār; Khalīl al-Khūrī’s Kharābāt Sūriyā (1859); and Ṭahṭāwī’s history of ancient Egypt, Anwār Tawfīq al-Jalīl (1868). The paper by no means denies that intensive engagement with European universal history was an important dimension of Arabic historical thought in this period. Indeed, each of these works is in large part a translation of a volume from L’Univers, a contemporary French series of national histories that purported to cover the entire world. The point of the paper is that this engagement did not take the form of simply inserting the Arabs into a basically European story, but that it was an exercise in articulating the need for local power against the threat of domination by Europe.