Race, Science, and the Nation

Reconstructing the Ancient Past in Britain, France and Germany

Chris Manias

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135054694
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

Across the nineteenth century, scholars in Britain, France and the German lands sought to understand their earliest ancestors: the Germanic and Celtic tribes known from classical antiquity, and the newly discovered peoples of prehistory. New fields – philology, archeology and anthropology – interacted, breaking down languages, unearthing artifacts, measuring skulls and recording the customs of "savage" analogues. This was a decidedly national process: disciplines institutionalized on national levels, and their findings seen to have deep implications for the origins of the nation and its "racial composition." However, this operated within broader currents. The wide spread of material and novelty of the methods meant that these approaches formed connections across Europe and beyond, even while national rivalries threatened to tear these networks apart. Race, Science and the Nation follows this tension, offering a simultaneously comparative, cross-national and multi-disciplinary history of the scholarly reconstruction of European prehistory. As well as showing how interaction between disciplines was key to their formation, it makes arguments of keen relevance to studies of racial thought and nationalism. It shows these researches often worked against attempts to present the chaotic multi-layered ancient eras as times of mythic origin. Instead, they argued that the modern nations of Europe were not only diverse, but were products of long processes of social development and "racial" fusion. This book therefore brings to light a formerly unstudied motif of nineteenth-century national consciousness, showing how intellectuals in the era of nation-building themselves drove an idea of their nations being "constructed" from a useable past.

1 Unveiling the Ancestry of Peoples

Tradition, Language and Ethnology, 1800–1860

Language has persistently played a central role in understandings of humanity. On the one hand, it has been understood as a key feature differentiating humans from animals, and the fundamental conditioner of reason and sociability. However, the existence of different languages also serves as a key marker of diversity, with many modern historians convincingly arguing that language communities provided much of the groundwork for group identity and proto-national sentiment from antiquity onwards. For classical Greeks, their common language was a prime motif of similarity, with a barbarian being by definition someone who spoke incomprehensibly, and in Europe during the medieval and early-modern periods, the idea that gentem lingua facit—‘language makes people’—was a crucial ordering principle. Similarly, this is a concept which has been carried into many typologies of nationalism, in particular Benedict Anderson’s model of standardizing print languages and shared media systems forming the networks which were bound into nation-states from the late eighteenth century onwards.¹

It is therefore not surprising that a major reconfiguration in the understanding of language would also cause a great shift in the way that human communities were conceived. The rise of comparative Indo-European philology in the first decades of the nineteenth century provides a key example, which was central to the reconstruction of the ancient past of Europe both methodologically and conceptually. In this, a group of primarily German scholars enshrined the idea that languages could be clearly arranged into budding familial groups, which developed according to empirically demonstrable principles. Languages were genealogically linked, but also diverged from common points of origin. Their organic transformations could therefore be reconstructed through rigorous methodologies and plotted back to older forms. This assertion of familial relations between languages and peoples was not new. However, comparative philology, rather than basing these relations on vague etymological similarities and often-tenuous ideas derived from historical traditions, looked down into the deepest linguistic structures—grammatical principles and word ‘roots’—to link languages at their most basic compositional level. Moreover, it began to illustrate that ‘the most ancient past’ could be directly knowable through methodologies drawn from the comparative and collational approaches of contemporary science—and therefore offered tools and concepts which could be adopted by other approaches attempting to investigate long-lost periods of history. This therefore provided much of the framework through which later analyses of early development were conducted, and established the first links of personal and institutional connections which were to pull together tightly in later decades. Indeed, one scholar, reflecting in the 1880s on the tremendous extension of knowledge of ancient European history over the previous decades, recalled that ‘philology began this conquest of the past.’²

The Old Authorities

In spite of this novelty, many principles of philological reasoning grew from deeper furrows of engagement with ancient history and the nature of humanity. Across the early-modern period, a range of traditions had developed relating to the ancient populations of Europe, and these informed the later sciences, even as they adopted new methods and source materials. New disciplines and approaches forming over the nineteenth century persistently engaged with these traditions either overtly or covertly, being influenced by them, rooted in their assumptions or consciously reacting against them. One thing the old authorities could not be was ignored. This general process of disciplines and methodologies claiming superiority over their predecessors, while restating or manipulating older assumptions, was to be a persistent theme across the sciences of the human past as they engaged in dialogue with one another and their precursors.

The first set of traditions originated with Greek and Roman accounts on the habits, customs and lifestyles of neighbouring ‘barbarians.’ Ancient authors, including Herodotus, Julius Caesar, Tacitus, Strabo and Pliny, as well as early-medieval writers, such as Gregory of Tours and Saxo Gram-maticus, provided almost the only textual accounts of the ancient Celtic and Germanic peoples, as well as the neighbouring Finns, Iberians, Slavs, Sarmatians and Scythians. Two works were particularly significant. The first, and most frequently cited in the secondary literature, was Tacitus’ Germania, which formed the centrepiece of most interpretations of the Germanic past from its rediscovery in the fifteenth century. Here, the aboriginal Germani beyond the Rhine were presented as ‘free from all taint of intermarriages with foreign nations and that they appear as a distinct, unmixed race, like none but themselves. … All have fierce blue eyes, red hair, huge frames.’³ An independent, virtuous and chaste people living in settled communities, they gave women an important position within society and reached decisions through debating and consulting the entire tribe. Tacitus’ agenda, presenting a noble barbarian in the north to highlight the decadence of Roman civilization, was to have major repercussions when received centuries later by those who saw themselves as the descendants of those same barbarians. During the struggles of the Reformation, these values were bound with Germanic humanism to add credence to the original independence (and separation from Roman authority) of northern religion and politics, offering a deep basis to the anti-Papal feeling and the patriotism of the Protestant north. Motifs from Tacitus and the story of Arminius, or Hermann the Cheruskian, the ancient tribal leader who had massacred the legions of Quintilius Varus in AD 9 and kept Germania Magna free from Roman rule, were used to build up a traditional opposition. As in Klaus von See’s vision of the Germanen-Ideologie, this offered ‘a view in antitheses, a conception that the Germanen cannot be grasped without the counter-type of the Romans … the one is loyal, sensitive, passionate and tribal because the other is economic, rational, cool and individualistic.’⁴ Themes of liberty, virtue and purity were to echo persistently in discourses of national development not only in the German lands themselves, but in all places where Germanic migrations were attested, offering heroic origins to France, England, northern Italy, Scandinavia and Spain.⁵

The second key source was Julius Caesar’s Commentarii de Bello Gallico. Already important owing to the status of the author, this was the fullest work on the customs and organization of the ancient peoples of Gaul and Britain. The Gauls were described as fierce, warlike and heroic, but politically and socially disunited: as well as a plethora of tribal subdivisions, ‘all Gaul is divided into three parts, one in which the Belgae inhabit, the Aquitani another, those who in their own language are called Celts, in ours Gauls, the third. All these differ from each other in language, customs and laws.’⁶ They also maintained a large slave order, dominated by two ruling castes—knights and druids—the former of whom were military and political leaders, while the latter monopolized judicial, religious and scholarly functions. Britain, tentatively suggested as being the home of this druidic order, was discussed as almost culturally identical to Gaul, although less advanced. The Germani were engaged in constant conflict with the Gauls and, while as chaste and warlike as those in Tacitus’ account, were presented as much less developed, lacking agriculture and living a wild pastoral life, with ‘no private and separate land,’ subsisting ‘for the most part on milk and flesh, and … much [engaged] in hunting.’⁷ Both were barbarians, but distinct: one was divided and conquered by Rome to be civilized; and the other, while initially less developed, had progressed in their independence and barbarous liberty.

An equally powerful source of traditions was Christianity. As has been argued by Colin Kidd, theories and concepts derived from the Bible, and particularly the accounts of Genesis, underlay many views of human diversity well into the modern period.⁸ Scriptural understandings provided a central, and for Christian writers impeccably authoritative, means of understanding and ordering the world. A deep tradition of Mosaic ethnography drew directly from the Old Testament, explaining the development of humanity within Bishop Ussher’s 6,000-year chronology. That God ‘hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth’ worked against ideas of radical divergence. This did not, however, prevent strong notions of difference, particularly occasional attempts to link some peoples—particularly the natives of North America—with the ‘Preadamites’ or another separate creation.⁹ In less extreme terms, religious distinctions remained hugely significant in separating peoples, and the idea that all modern ethnic groupings descended from Noah’s three sons, Shem, Ham and Japheth, with the ‘table of nations’ in Genesis 10 provideing lineages for all peoples, remained a constantly investigated issue—even if there was often some uncertainty as to precisely which sons and grandsons of Noah had fathered which modern peoples, or the exact routes of their wanderings. This common idea, of underlying unity coexisting with important variations of ancestral groups, gave a firm structure to understand human difference.

Classical and Biblical traditions were far from mutually exclusive, and the filling of the wide chronological gap between Genesis and the appearance of named peoples in classical texts offered great opportunities to blend them together: the myths of the Trojan origins of the Franks and ancient Britons, or that the Celtic and Germanic peoples sprung from Japheth’s son Gomer (with the Germans further traced through Gomer’s son Ashkenaz), were just a few of the invoked traditions.¹⁰ While these could be inconsistent or contested, a common feature throughout was the importance of migration: according to Biblical ethnology, the world had been populated by wanderings of peoples after the Deluge; Greek and Roman authors described the migrations of Cimmerians, Trojans and Scythians across Europe in the depths of the past; and new states, often the precursors of modern nations and kingdoms, had been established by invading Germanic, Slavonic and other tribes at the fall of the Roman Empire. These all provided dramatic examples of the pulse of history being driven by conquest, migration and expansion, which became seen as central developmental mechanisms. This was frequently given strong ideological connotations, especially in the case of the migrating Germanic tribes of the Völkerwanderung. Despite their destructive power, these were often presented as fulfilling a liberating and regenerational role over the decadence of Roman civilization, before being tempered under the guiding force of Christianity. The free barbaric nomad therefore held the necessary qualities for the rejuvenation of society, and the establishment of new invigorating elites.¹¹

These models of succession and conflict were frequently given a political edge, justifying contemporary class divisions. Assertions that the nobility of a country descended from the last set of invaders, while the common folk were the subjugated remnants of an earlier population, were widespread in the early-modern period. These conditioned such ‘myths’ as Sarmatianism in Poland, Gothic ideas in Scandinavia and Spain and the Varangian origins of Rus. The most famous example was presented in France by the eighteenth-century noble Henri, comte de Boulainvilliers, who argued that the noble estate derived its rights and liberties from the Frankish conquest, and could therefore both legitimately dominate the Third Estate of conquered Gauls and resist royal absolutism seeking to infringe its liberties.¹² Yet these views that the ruling class were foreign invaders could acquire unintended resonance when combined with developing concepts of popular sovereignty. Thus, calling for the reclamation of Anglo-Saxon freedoms and the throwing off of the ‘Norman Yoke’ became a common motif in English radical discourse during the Civil War and beyond, and during the French Revolution, as fully articulated by Abbé Sièyes in Qu’est-ce que le tiers état? of 1789, Boulainvilliers’ model was denounced to show that Germanic usurpation and right by conquest was both illegitimate and fictitious, with true sovereignty lying in the entirety of the people. These shifts in interpretation show both the intense politicization of these ideas, but also their flexibility, with the core mechanisms of conquest, migration and ethnic relations being used across a variety of agendas.

New Traditions of Nature, Humanity and Society

The reworking of Boulainvilliers’ theory in line with revolutionary notions of the rights of the people was not the only way in which traditions were reconfigured alongside new trends. They were also strongly affected by a broader expansion of vision, as early-modern Europe saw a massive growth in connections with the rest of world through extending trade, exploration and colonization. Artefacts, objects, commodities, trade goods and people flooded in, and travel accounts, cosmographies and geographies became immensely popular literary genres. The expansion of European knowledge therefore needed to engage with a range of new societies and social systems, which were not always easily reconcilable with classical or Biblical traditions: colonial relations with previously unknown indigenes and the buildup of massive new systems of slavery in the Americas; encounters with complex societies in Asia which demonstrated vastly different social forms and religious practices (not to mention the Hindu and Chinese chronologies which stretched some way beyond Biblically-deduced history); conflict and trade with the expanding Ottoman Empire; and the exploration of far-off regions and landscapes of radically different climate and environment. Ordering all this into a comprehensible framework was a major project, forcing society, history and nature to be understood within a series of global processes.

This affected views of not only humanity, but creation itself. Especially significant was the development of natural history, which was particularly spurred by the discovery of new animals, plants and environments. As natural material was collected, compared and organized, authority became based around the gathering of specimens in ever-larger assemblages. There was a general drive by ‘naturalists to group animals, plants, and minerals according to shared underlying features and to use rational, systematic methods to bring order to the otherwise overwhelming variation found in nature’—with something of an apogee reached by Carl Linnaeus’ systemization of all organisms into typological hierarchies of kingdoms, orders, genera and species.¹³ Scientific life was gripped by a drive for collection in which the post-revolutionary Louvre and Muséum d’histoire naturelle in Paris, and the British Museum in London, were only the largest expressions of more general trends. Intellectual centres such as Oxford, Cambridge and Göttingen developed their own extensive collections, as did many scholars, travelling showmen, academies and royal courts.

While natural history was becoming defined by arrangement and collection, explaining varieties of organism also became a significant issue. Ideas of innate creation and that all organisms originated from a series of fixed types jostled with notions that some measure of developmental, creative or degenerational change was necessary to fully explain nature’s variety— something spurred and complicated by intense interest in acclimatization and hybridization of plants and animals.¹⁴ That environments and climates conditioned the growth, temperament and size of particular organisms was a widespread idea, although the way in which this was thought to have occurred was highly contested. In eighteenth-century France, Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, director of the Jardin du Roi, presented a complex model of an unevenly cooling earth, whose varied temperatures had caused the degeneration of a range of initial types into their modern forms—with the swampy and unhealthy New World being particularly singled out for its malproportioned monstrosities, such as the toucan. In the next revolutionary generation, Georges Cuvier postulated a series of catastrophes radically altering the earth’s surface and landscape, causing dramatic shifts in the dominant fauna and flora by eliminating many formally extant species. In Britain over the 1820s and 30s, similar catastrophist ideas were given greater credibility by William Buckland’s systematic studies of rock strata and cave deposits, and tied to exciting and provocative finds of extinct animals like cave hyenas and ichthyosaurs.

These notions were, however, increasingly contested by schools of gradualists, evolutionists and transformists, who presented models of the slower, continuous development of new forms from old ones. The most prominent of these was Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who argued that characteristics developed or atrophied during the life of an organism would be pas...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Unveiling the Ancestry of Peoples: Tradition, Language and Ethnology, 1800–1860
• 2. Unearthing Our Forefathers: The Growth of Provincial Archaeology, 1830–1860
• 3. The Limits of History: Defining Nations, Races and Peoples, 1820–1850
• 4. Building the Science of Man: National Anthropology and the Ancient Past, 1850–1870
• 5. Locating the Peoples of Prehistory: Geology, Archaeology and Anthropology, 1840–1870
• 6. The Fracturing of Common Origins: The Nationalization of the Anthropological Past, 1871–1900
• 7. Tension and Diffusion: The Racial and Cultural Sciences, 1890–1914
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index