Race, Science, and the Nation: Reconstructing the Ancient Past in Britain, France and Germany

Description

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. Cover Half Title Title Page Copyright Page Table of Contents List of Figures List of Abbreviations Acknowledgments Introduction The Sciences of the Past Race, Progress and Nationality 1. Unveiling the Ancestry of PeoplesTradition, Language and Ethnology, 1800–1860 The Old Authorities New Traditions of Nature, Humanity and Society Reconstructive Philology The Celtic and Germanic Languages The Varied Bases of Ethnology The Rise of the Indo-Europeans A New Gateway to the Unwritten Past 2. Unearthing Our Forefathers: The Growth of Provincial Archaeology, 1830–1860 The Antiquarian Tradition ‘let Us Go into the Graves:’ Archaeological Authority Collecting with a Definite Purpose The Eras of the Ancient Past Models of Culture and Development 3. The Limits of History: Defining Nations, Races and Peoples, 1820–1850 Gaulish Histories in Post-revolutionary France The Developments and Migrations of the Germanen British Tensions Between Ethnic Models Disentangling Popular Communities 4. Building the Science of Man:National Anthropology and the Ancient Past, 1850–1870 Building Metropolitan Associations: the Anthropological Societies Anthropological Methods The Gaulish Races of France Reconciling the Celt and the Saxon Surveying the German Types The Mixed Nation 5. Geology, Archaeology and Anthropology, 1840–1870 Consolidating the Field Defining and Dividing Prehistoric Time The Oldest Human Condition: Interpreting the Stone Age The Path to Civilization: the Development of Metal Internationalism and Universalism in Prehistory 6. The Fracturing of Common Origins: The Nationalization of the Anthropological Past, 1871–1900 National Integration and Institutionalization Anthropology and National Questions The Aryans: The Clash of Prehistory and Philology Questions of Celts and Neolithics in France The Iberian Ancestry of British Civilization The Branches of the German Nation The Common European Races and National Definition 7. Tension and Diffusion: The Racial and Cultural Sciences, 1890–1914 Anthropometry Undermined The Rise of Racial Essentialism The Problematic Science of Folklore Cultural Migrations and Racial Areas in Archaeology Fragmentation and Refraction Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index