Can I recover the WhatsApp chat history from a damaged phone? My phone has suffered physical damage and it will no longer turn on. I have given it to a phone repair shop in the hope that the data is still alive in there and that it can be extracted using external means. Assuming I can get a copy of the internal storage of that phone into a thumb drive, one of the things I would like to recover from it is the WhatsApp chat history. The standard procedure, however, requires a working Android system on the old phone to work, and this might be a little too much of a stretch given the damage.

Is there a way to recover the chat history given these circumstances? Or is it lost to history due to WhatsApp's encryption mechanisms?
You can, if you can save everything in the /data/data/com.whatsapp folder. Your logs will be in /data/data/com.whatsapp/databases but they are encrypted as you mentioned and encryption key is in /data/data/com.whatsapp/files/key. Proper transfer of these files will mean a successful operation. Once you start Whatsapp on another phone with the /data folder from your broken phone and start Whatsapp, it will prompt you to activate Whatsapp on this phone with a text like "This account wasn't activated on this phone, please activate" and once you do, it'll be successfully done.