This article seeks to revise the conventional portrait of the historian E. A. Freeman as an arch-racist and confident proponent of Aryan superiority. Focusing on the relatively obscure Comparative Politics, it is argued that, while attitudes towards race were hardening in the later nineteenth century, Freeman combined the insights of the practitioners of the Comparative Method and the Liberal Anglican philosophy of Thomas Arnold to define the Aryan race as a community of culture rather than of blood. Explicitly rejecting biological (...) interpretations of race, Freeman and the practitioners of the Comparative Method used the Aryan concept to denote a community of languages, myths, laws and political institutions and, in recognizing the instability of culture, articulated an account of progress that was cyclical rather than unilinear. It will be demonstrated that Freeman's Aryan universalism issued in anxieties concerning the future stability of the West and a fear that recapitulation might be engendered by contemporary political expansionism and contact with the rival civilization of the despotic East. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The essay elucidates the intellectual and historiographical phenomenon of migration to the forefront by engaging with the perceptions of the Teutonic/germanic migrations of the fifth century among a few major Victorian ethnologists and historians. It focuses particularly on the unique view of the ethnologist and philologist Robert Gordon Latham. While many Victorian historians of the mid-nineteenth century became obsessed with the Teutonic narrative, arguing that these ancient tribes had conquered vast territories of Europe, Latham, in contrast, downplayed the impact (...) of Teutonism, discounted the vastness of the Teutonic expansion in Europe and expressed his doubts regarding the alleged Teutonic purity of the English nation. Instead, Latham advocated for an ethnological investigation, drawing conclusions which were critical of the very influential Teutonic narrative that he considered misleading, since it was founded solely on superfluous ancient historical sources. Latham’s challenge of the prevailing thesis, hence, reflected a heightened mid-nineteenth century debate between ethnology and history. Rather than delving into the historical migrations themselves, the study of the perception of Teutonic migrations contributes to the understanding of how these historians and ethnologists differentiated between ‘ideal’ and ‘destructive’ historical migrations while inserting different meanings to the concepts of ‘race’ and ‘language’. (shrink)

This article aims to integrate discourse analysis of politically instrumental imagined identity geographies with the relational and territorial geography of the communities of praxis and interpretation that produce them. My case study is the international community of nationalist scientists who classified Europe’s biological races in the 1820s—1940s. I draw on network analysis, relational geography, historical sociology and the historical turn to problematize empirically how spatial patterns of this community’s shifting disciplinary and political coalitions, communication networks and power relations emerged, were (...) structured, persisted, changed, interacted and disappeared. I focus especially on core— periphery relations. I argue that if local historical spatial patterns affect those of later phenomena, geographies like that of European integration should be understood in the context of Europe’s complex historical cultural geography. Unlike discourse deconstruction alone, this complementary relational de-essentialization of geography can identify large-scale, enduring associations of cultural patterns as well as cultural flux and ambiguity. (shrink)