Race, Nation, History: Anglo-German Thought in the Victorian Era

280 Pages·2019·5.971 MB·English

by  Oded Y. Steinberg

RACE, NATION, HISTORY
INTELLECTUAL HISTORY
OF THE MODERN AGE
Series Editors
Angus Burgin
Peter E. Gordon
Joel Isaac
Karuna Mantena
Samuel Moyn
Jennifer Ratner- Rosenhagen
Camille Robcis
Sophia Rosenfeld
R ACE, NATION,
HISTORY
Anglo- German Thought in the Victorian Era
Oded Y. Steinberg
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia
Copyright © 2019 University of Pennsylvania Press
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used
for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book
may be reproduced in any form by any means without written
permission from the publisher.
Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112
www . upenn . edu / pennpress
Printed in the United States of Amer i ca on acid- free paper
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A Cataloging- in- Publication record is available from the
Library of Congress
ISBN 978-0-8122-5137-1
As you set out for Ithaka
hope the voyage is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
— Cavafy, Ithaka, 1911
For my fellow and beloved travelers:
Rachel, Nadav, Ayala, and Carmel

Contents
Introduction. Racial Time 1
Chapter 1. The En glish Teutonic Circle 21
Chapter 2. Roman Decline and Teutonic Rejuvenation:
The Racial German and En glish Gemeinschaft of Scholars (1850–90) 50
Chapter 3. Racial History: The Convergence of Race
and Periodization 89
Chapter 4. The Unique Historical Periodization of E. A. Freeman 109
Chapter 5. Teutonism and Romanism: James Bryce’s
Holy Roman Empire 134
Chapter 6. The Illusion of Finality: Bury and the Unity of the East 157
Epilogue. Values and Interests 189
Notes 195
Bibliography 233
Index 253
Acknowl edgments 269

introduction
Racial Time
History can only exist as a discipline if it develops a theory
of periodization.
— Reinhart Koselleck
Reinhart Koselleck h ere summarizes the method of history that materialized
in the Enlightenment and was further developed during the nineteenth
century. With this idea of the period, the division of historical time became
dominant. For the first time, according to Koselleck, concepts (Begriffe) such
as the M iddle Ages or the Ren ais sance became associated with a unique and
demarcated historical era. Indeed, it could be argued that this development
in the classification of time contributed to the establishment of history as a
profession or even as an in de pen dent discipline. History suddenly possessed
borders. These “borders of time” defined the main division of history into three
demarcated periods: antiquity, M iddle Ages, and modernity. This Eurocentric
triad dominates our general perception of historical time and corresponds with
the division between antiquity, feudalism, and capitalism. It does not, as Jack
Goody notes, take into consideration other “spaces” or “times” of non-
European civilizations.1 In the modern era, to use this dominant Eurocentric
periodization, especially because of the tendency to trace modernity’s own
alleged origin, this division became almost sanctified and could be referred
to as the historiographical “Holy Trinity.”
Periodization arose as a concept in the nineteenth c entury si mul ta neously
with the emergence of two other, sometimes amalgamated terms: “nation” and
“race.” The significance of nationalism (as a concept), some argue, remained
almost unnoticed by nineteenth- century scholars. For instance, Isaiah Berlin
2 introduction
argues that, with the exception of Moses Hess in his Rome and Jerusalem (1862),
no nineteenth- century con temporary thinker considered nationalism as the
po liti cal force of the f uture.2 Whether or not one accepts Berlin’s assertion,
his argument seems plausible in the sense that, for most nineteenth- century
scholars, nationalism was conceived as merely another stage in h uman pro-
gress. This stage corresponded with the basic natu ral feeling of belonging to
a certain community, or Gemeinschaft. It could be argued that “race,” like
“nation,” was also not identified as a distinct concept until the twentieth
century. However, especially following the “Darwinian revolution” of the
1860s, a somewhat unique and allegedly scientific character was given to the
notion of “race” by late nineteenth- century scholars. Thus, it may be argued,
the concepts of “race” and “periodization” w ere transformed during the
nineteenth century.3
The pres ent book proposes a novel thesis as to how historical periodiza-
tion converged with racial, national, and religious themes and came to inform
the historical perception of certain notable En glish and German scholars
during the second half of the nineteenth century.4 The argument is developed
by way of the exploration of two interlinked themes: how a specific group of
En glish and German scholars employed the Teutonic notion to construct
their past and pres ent communities; and, given this notion, how some of the
En glish scholars came to perceive historical periodization.
In light of t hese two themes, the book is divided into two interlinked
parts: “community” and “time.” “Community” engages with a particularly
close community—or Gemeinschaft— of En glish and German scholars that
emerged around the middle of the nineteenth century. On the En glish side,
this community included Edward Augustus Freeman (1823–92), William
Stubbs (1825–1901), John Richard Green (1837–83), and James Bryce (1838–
1922). On the German side, it comprised scholars deeply involved with En-
glish scholarship, like Christian Karl Josias von Bunsen (1791–1860), Reinhold
Pauli (1823–82), and fi nally the renowned, almost En glish, Oxford scholar
Friedrich Max Müller (1823–1900). Building on the notion of Teutonic kinship,
this community of scholars founded an imagined community of belonging,
composed of several subnations that were nevertheless understood to be united
by racial, ethnic, and cultural bonds. Hence, England’s dominant Anglo-
Saxons— namely, the retrospective identification of the Germanic Saxons,
Angles and Jutes as the nation’s ancestors (Chapter 1)— were imagined to have
racially united most of the British Isles’ inhabitants (excluding the autoch-
thonic Celts of Ireland, Wales, and Scotland) with the Germanic entities of