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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 (1812–88). 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’.
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Notes
1 Nail, The Figure of the Migrant, 236.
2 Ferguson, ‘The Degeneration of Europe’; on Ferguson’s ‘Gibbonian’ idea of western decline, see also Ferguson, ‘Empires Fall’; as well as the exchange between him and Pankaj Mishra. See Mishra, ‘Watch This Man’.
3 Throughout the essay, I will, in most cases, use the term ‘Teutonic’ rather than ‘Germanic’ for describing these historical migrations and people. This is because during the nineteenth century, ‘Teutonic’ was the more popular term.
4 Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, s.v. ‘Robert Gordon Latham, (1812–88)’ (by Ann Margaret Ridler), https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-16094 (accessed April 17, 2020).
5 The display included a variety of human species, such as Tibetans, East Indians, Greenlanders etc. See: Latham and Forbes, Natural History Department of the Crystal Palace Described; Qureshi, ‘Robert Gordon Latham, Displayed Peoples, and the Natural History of Race, 1854–1866’.
6 Qureshi, Peoples on Parade.
7 The term appeared in English for the first time during the eighteenth century (1787). See: Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. ‘ethnology, n.’
8 Rafinesque, Atlantic Journal and Friend of Knowledge.
9 See especially the abovementioned works of Saidah Qureshi (footnotes 5 and 6); Sera-Shriar, ‘Ethnology in the Metropole’; Sera-Shriar, The Making of British Anthropology, 1813–1871.
10 Latham, The Germania of Tacitus, iii.
11 During the nineteenth century various scholars adopted physical characters for differentiating between races, e.g. the Swedish anatomist Andreas Retzius (1796 –1860), who argued that the two shapes of human skulls (dolichocephalic and brachycephalic) denote two different racial groups.
12 Jahoda, ‘Intra-European Racism in Nineteenth-Century Anthropology’, 37–8.
13 Thomas Trautmann named this 'Mosaic Ethnology', see: Trautmann, Aryans and British India, 42; some scholars, like the Scottish naturalist James Hutton (1726–97), refuted the biblical chronology. See: Repcheck, The Man Who Found Time, 4–8, 22.
14 Shalev, ‘The Phoenicians are coming! Samuel Bochart’s Protestant Geography’.
15 Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, s.v. ‘Bryant, Jacob (1717–1804), antiquary and classical scholar’ (by Dennis R. Dean), https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-3795 (accessed July 19, 2020).
16 Among these scholars were Schlegel, Bopp, Max Müller and others. Charles ‘Sanskrit’ Wilkins was considered to be the first European who mastered Sanskrit and, according to Jones, it was due to Wilkins’s influence that he decided to study the language. See: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, s.v. ‘Jones, Sir William (1746–94), orientalist and judge’ (by Michael J. Franklin), https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-15105 (accessed July 19, 2020).
17 Trautmann, Aryans and British India, 13.
18 For instance, ‘Mahometanism was the child of the sword, the soldier was its priest; its existence depended on its advancement: when it stood still, it languished’. See: Warburton, The Crescent and the Cross, or Romance and Realities of Eastern Travel, 90; Freeman, The Ottoman Power in Europe, Its Nature, Its Growth, and Its Decline; Steinberg, ‘The Unity of History or Periods? The Unique Historical Periodization of E.A. Freeman’.
19 Desmond and Moore, Darwin’s Sacred Cause; Manias, Race, Science, and the Nation, 31–2; Richard, The Races of Europe, 106–10.
20 Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, 74–5.
21 Prichard and Latham, The Eastern Origin of the Celtic Nations proved by a comparison of their dialects with the Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, and Teutonic languages, 41–4; Lecourt, Cultivating Belief: Victorian Anthropology, Liberal Aesthetics, and the Secular Imagination, 37–41.
22 Latham, Man and his Migrations, 30.
23 Ibid, 87; ‘Until the Celtic was shown by Dr. Prichard to have the same affinities with the Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, and Zend, as those tongues had with each other, the class in question was called Indo-Germanic; since, up to that time, the Germanic languages had formed its western limit’. See: Latham, English Language, 31; Thomas Young (1773–1829) coined the term for the first time in 1814. Later, Prichard included it in his work (1826). See: Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. ‘Indo-European, adj. and n.’.
24 Prichard, like many of his contemporaries, spelled this as ‘Arian’. See: Prichard, The Natural History of Man, 160ff; Leopold, ‘British Applications of the Aryan Theory of Race to India, 1850–1870’, (footnote I).
25 Crawfurd, ‘On the Aryan or Indo-Germanic Theory’, 268; Trautmann, Aryans and British India, 178–9; Crawfurd, unlike Prichard and Latham, supported the polygenesis theory. On the unique view of Crawfurd and his adoption of polygenesis with his belief in racial equality, see: Knapman, ‘Race, Polygenesis and Equality’.
26 Bryant, The Quest for The Origins of Vedic Culture, 31–2, 142.
27 Latham, Elements of Comparative Philology, 610–22; Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ‘Latham’; on later Victorian scholars, such as A. H. Sayce who following the discovery of European prehistory refuted the Indian origin of the Aryan race, see: Cook, ‘The Making of the English’, 634–5.
28 For instance, Kirshan Kumar argues that English nationalism only emerged during the second half of the nineteenth century. Kumar, The making of English National Identity.
29 Hechter, Internal Colonialism.
30 Ellis and Kirchberger, Anglo-German Scholarly Networks in the Long Nineteenth Century; Pinkerton, A Dissertation on the Origin and Progress of the Scythians or Goths being an Introduction to the Ancient and Modern History of Europe, 90–2.
31 On Teutomania, see: Kidd, ‘Teutonist Ethnology and Scottish Nationalist Inhibition, 1780–1880’; Mandler, The English National Character, 86–9.
32 Arnold praised ‘Celtic genius’ identifying it as belonging to English literature and ‘spirit’ see Arnold, On the Study of Celtic Literature; Leerssen, ‘Englishness, Ethnicity and Matthew Arnold’.
33 Arnold, Introductory Lectures on Modern History, 26.
34 Carlyle, Chartism, 24.
35 Carlyle, On Heroes, and Hero Worship and the Heroic in History, 17.
36 Horsman, ‘Origins of Racial Anglo-Saxonism in Great Britain Before 1850’. Dugger, ‘Black Ireland's Race’.
37 Steinberg, Race, Nation, History, 116–118.
38 Kingsley and Müller, The Roman and the Teuton, 53.
39 Ibid.
40 Burns of Glasgow, The Scottish War of Independence, its Antecedents and Effects, 277; Kidd, ‘Race, Empire, and the Limits of Nineteenth-Century Scottish Nationhood’, 886–7.
41 Knox was not infamous for his extreme racial ideology but due to his involvement in a scandal that erupted at Edinburgh in 1828 when it was revealed that he received twelve murdered bodies for anatomical dissection. See: Taylor, ‘Knox, Robert (1791–1862), anatomist and ethnologist’.
42 Knox, The Races of Men, 18–19.
43 Ibid, 66.
44 Latham, Man and His Migrations, 49–52.
45 Ibid., 170. emphasis added by author.
46 Latham, Ethnology of the British Islands 8; emphasis added by author.
47 Crawfurd, ‘On Language as a Test of the Races of Man (Read December 2, 1862)’, 1.
48 Crawfurd, ‘On the Commixture of the Races of Man as Affecting the Progress of Civilization (Europe)’, 204.
49 Ibid, 205.
50 Ibid, 204–5.
51 Crawfurd. ‘On the Commixture of the Races of Man’, 211.
52 Wright, The Celt, the Roman, and the Saxon.
53 Nicholas, The Pedigree of the English People.
54 Manias, ‘“Our Iberian Forefathers”’, 929.
55 Dawkins, ‘The English Conquest of Britain’, 106.
56 Dawkins, The Place of the Welsh in the History of Britain, 6.
57 See the following examples: Green, A Short History of the English People, 10; Freeman, ‘Address to the Historical Section of the Annual Meeting of the Institute Held at Cardiff’, 188; Stubbs, The Constitutional History of England; Freeman in his ‘Race and Language’ (1879) presented a far more composite argument, claiming that there was no certainty of any Teutonic purity among the English. See: Freeman, ‘Race and Language’, 191–2.
58 Conlin, ‘An Illiberal Descent (Report)’, 167–87.
59 Freeman, ‘Mr. Kingsley’s Roman and Teuton’.
60 On the rise of ‘scientific history’, see: Hesketh, The Science of History in Victorian Britain; Young, ‘History’.
61 Sera-Shriar, ‘Race’, Ibid, 65.
62 Latham, Germania of Tacitus: xxxiv; emphasis added by author.
63 Kingsley and Müller, Roman and the Teuton, 51.
64 Latham, Germania of Tacitus, xvi. See also: Latham, Opuscula, 108.
65 Heffter, Der Weltkampf der Deutschen und Slaven seit dem Ende des fünten Jahrhunderts Nach Christlicher Zeitrechnung, 464–8; Liulevicius, The German Myth of the East, 78–9.
66 Kemble, Latham, and Franks, Horae Ferales; or Studies in the Archaeology of the Northern Nations, vii–viii.
67 Stocking, Victorian Anthropology; Urry, Before Social Anthropology; Anthropology came to be known as ‘Mr. Tylor’s Science’. Tylor was the first ever Oxford reader in anthropology (1884–95). From 1896 he held the first Oxford professorship of anthropology. See: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, s.v. ‘Tylor, Sir Edward Burnett (1832–1917), anthropologist’ (by Charles Holdsworth); Boas, ‘The Methods of Ethnology’.
68 Latham, Man and His Migrations, 4.
69 Ibid, 5–7; Latham referred to the similarity between man and ape less than a decade before Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859), as part of his discussion on anthropology. See: Ibid, 49–51.
70 Ibid, 27.
71 Ibid, 78–9.
72 Prichard and Latham, Eastern Origin of the Celtic Nations: 33.
73 Kemble, Latham, and Franks, Horae Ferales, 16, 25.
74 Ibid, 20.
75 Ibid, 18.
76 Ibid, 217–18.
77 Latham, Ethnology of the British Islands, 201–2.
78 Latham, The Ethnology of the British Colonies and Dependencies, 6–7.
79 Ibid, 9.
80 Latham, Ethnology of the British Islands, 182–99.
81 Latham, Ethnology of the British Colonies, 15.
82 Kingsley and Max Müller, Roman and the Teuton, 47–8.
83 Appadurai, ‘Traumatic exit, identity narratives, and the ethics of hospitality’.