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7KH 0DNLQJ RI WKH (QJOLVK (QJOLVK +LVWRU\ %ULWLVK ,GHQWLW\ $U\DQ 9LOODJHV ૱ Simon John Cook Journal of the History of Ideas, Volume 75, Number 4, October 2014, pp. 629-649 (Article) 3XEOLVKHG E\ 8QLYHUVLW\ RI 3HQQV\OYDQLD 3UHVV DOI: 10.1353/jhi.2014.0030 For additional information about this article Access provided by University of Manchester (24 Oct 2014 13:48 GMT) http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/jhi/summary/v075/75.4.cook.html
Transcript

Th n f th n l h: n l h H t r , Br t h d nt t ,r n V ll , 8 0 4

Simon John Cook

Journal of the History of Ideas, Volume 75, Number 4, October 2014,pp. 629-649 (Article)

P bl h d b n v r t f P nn lv n PrDOI: 10.1353/jhi.2014.0030

For additional information about this article

Access provided by University of Manchester (24 Oct 2014 13:48 GMT)

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/jhi/summary/v075/75.4.cook.html

The Making of the English: English History,British Identity, Aryan Villages, 1870–1914

Simon John Cook

. . . we are not really ourselves, but somebody else; only at somestage of our life we fell in with ingenious schoolmasters, who cun-ningly persuaded us that we were ourselves.1

The importance of [the ancient agricultural system of Britain] can-not be over-rated. It will help to solve one of the greatest questionsof modern times in England, namely, ‘‘Who is the modern English-man?’’ Is he a survival of those grand old races that peopled theseisles at first, or was he ‘‘made in Germany?’’2

INTRODUCTION

Ideas of race became pervasive in British scholarship in the last quarter ofthe nineteenth century, entering into circulation as a key component of anew model of linguistic diffusion. One instance of the development andapplication of this model has recently been illuminated by Thomas Traut-mann, who has charted changing notions of Aryans and Indians in

1 E. A. Freeman, ‘‘The Latest Theories on the Origin of the English,’’ ContemporaryReview 57 (1890): 37.2 Samuel Andrew, ‘‘The Roman Camp at Castleshaw and the Antiquities of the Saddle-worth District,’’ Transactions of the Lancashire and Cheshire Antiquarian Society 16(1898): 87.

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nineteenth-century British scholarship.3 Mid-century philologists had pos-ited the kinship of English and Bengalis based on affinity of language. Butthe last decades of the century saw the construction of a new racial historyof ancient India, the formative event of which had been a conquest byAryan warriors who had imparted their language to darker aboriginals but,ultimately, had been absorbed into them. The implication of this new his-tory was that there was no substantive blood tie between the ‘‘white Brit-ish’’ and the ‘‘dark Indian’’ of the present day.

In the present essay it is argued that, over roughly the same period,scholars also constructed a new racial history of Britain, in light of whichthe ‘‘Teutonic Englishman’’ melted into the ‘‘British racial mongrel.’’ Theessay further suggests—though it does not attempt to demonstrate in anysystematic fashion—that the British case facilitated a wider paradigm shiftin historical scholarship, such that an earlier philological model of folkmigration and settlement was replaced across the board by a new model ofracial invasion and conquest. As we shall see, by the end of the century thisnew paradigm had not only generated new accounts of the prehistory ofBritain, Greece, and India, but also suggested a revised account of theAnglo-Saxon conquest of Britain.

In contrast to the new racial history of India, which British scholarsconstructed by way of textual exegesis, the new racial history of Britainproceeded in the first instance from the spade of the archaeologist. Theprecondition for the emergence of the new racial history of Britain was themid-century discovery that Britain had enjoyed a long prehistory, and thesubsequent imagining of that prehistory in terms of the migrations andinvasions of a number of different Stone Age and then Bronze Age peoples.This discovery of prehistory provides the starting-point for the presentessay; but I will further argue that what became the standard account ofthe pre-Roman invasions of the British Isles provided a model for a revisedaccount of the Anglo-Saxon conquest of Celtic Britain. For the Victorians,the Anglo-Saxons were simply the English, so what was at stake here wasthe accepted interpretation of the ‘‘English conquest of Britain.’’ In the firstinstance, revision began with the ethnological claim that the modern popu-lation of England was continuous with that of Neolithic times, from which

3 See Thomas R. Trautmann, Aryans and British India (Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 1997). Whilst on the subject of my intellectual debts, I must also give thanks toYoni Eshpar, for leading me to think about ideas of human migration, to ChristopherRichard Donohue, for asking me ‘‘where is Maitland in all this?’’, to Chris Manias forproviding comments, to the wisdom of two anonymous referees for the Journal of theHistory of Ideas, to an obscure Ph.D. dissertation at Duke University on the Nessanapapyri, and to Yuval Wagner for good-neighbourly inspiration.

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it was inferred that the invading English, far from displacing the natives,had first conquered them and then been absorbed into them (just as prehis-toric Aryans were now supposed to have conquered and then melted intothe pre-Aryan population of India). But this revised account of the Anglo-Saxon conquest pointed to the possibility of a revised history of social insti-tutions, the logical conclusion of which was the view, advanced in 1890 byLaurence Gomme, that key social institutions of Indian and English socie-ties were the product of prehistoric conquests of both countries and subse-quent Aryan domination of indigenous agricultural races.

The new paradigm of British history was by no means welcomed andaccepted in all quarters. On the domestic political front the issue can beseen in terms of a conflict between imperialism and nationalism. The newideas of race were conscripted to undermine local nationalisms and so bol-ster the cause of the British union, and as such can be seen as providing aninitial internal plank in the construction of a new imperialist political plat-form. This role became particularly visible in the wake of Gladstone’s 1886commitment of the Liberal party to a policy of home rule in Ireland. Oppo-nents of home rule now invoked the new racial history of Britain in anattempt to counter nascent Celtic nationalism: ‘‘We are all mongrels,’’wrote the Duke of Argyll to The Times in 1887, yet we are ‘‘the result ofthe intermixture of precisely the same breeds all over the United King-dom.’’4 Again, in a series of articles in the Manchester Examiner, the geolo-gist and authority on the British Stone Age, Boyd Dawkins, argued thatbecause both English and Welsh were ‘‘mixed races’’ therefore we mustdismiss the suggestion ‘‘that there is something in the nature of those popu-lations which are called Celtic that prevents them from living under thesame system of laws as those enjoyed by the populations termed English.’’5

But from the English point of view, it was one thing to dismiss claims ofCeltic separateness, quite another to undermine ideas of Anglo-Saxonexceptionalism. Not only did English historians contest the new racial his-tory of Britain as it was constructed but, as we shall see in the last part ofthis essay, they actively distanced themselves from the finished product.After 1900 ideas of race continued to be cultivated by philologists, archae-ologists, anthropologists and classicists, but not by English historians, whonow cut their subject loose from these various studies of the more distant

4 Bernard Quaritch, ed., Mr. Gladstone and the Nationalities of the United Kingdom(London: Bernard Quaritch, 1887), 30.5 See Boyd Dawkins, The Place of the Welsh in the History of Britain (London: Simpkin,Marshall & Co., 1889), 6.

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past. The history of ideas of race in late nineteenth-century British scholar-ship is thus also the story of the fragmentation of a Victorian ideal of uni-versal history.

FROM MIGRATION TO INVASION

The year 1859 is conventionally taken as the date when, confronted withevidence of stone tools found together with bones of extinct animals, theBritish scientific establishment accepted the ‘‘antiquity of man.’’ John Lub-bock’s immensely popular Pre-historic Times (1865) provided the Victorianreading public with a tour of the newly discovered human past; but Lub-bock’s authority was by no means uncontested and in 1866 it was stillrespectable to assert that the pre-Roman occupation of Britain amountedto ‘‘a few generations, at most.’’6 In his study of the British reception of the‘‘three age system’’ (imported from Scandinavia), which divided the pastinto eras of stone, bronze and iron, Peter Rowley-Conwy identifies the pub-lication in 1877 of Canon William Greenwell’s British Barrows as theturning-point for English antiquarians. The book consisted of a meticulousarchaeological survey of prehistoric sepulchral mounds, to which wasattached a discussion of the ‘‘prehistoric crania’’ found in the barrows bythe Oxford professor of Anatomy and Physiology, George Rolleston. Afterits publication, observes Rowley-Conwy, English opposition to the threeage system—and hence the very idea of an extensive British prehistory—acquired a distinctly ‘‘backwoods’’ feel.7

Greenwell’s British Barrows did more than simply establish the exis-tence of an extensive British prehistory. In his introduction Greenwell alsolaid down interpretive paths that, over the next few decades, would becomewell-beaten tracks. Where the conventional image of the inhabitants of pre-Roman Britain was that of savage hunters, Greenwell now drew a pictureof a society that manufactured pottery and wove cloth, possessed domesti-cated animals and cultivated grain by the use of terraces ‘‘under a systemof agriculture not quite intelligible to us.’’8 Greenwell also supplied an eth-nological narrative. For some while it had been accepted that long barrows

6 Thomas Wright, ‘‘On the True Assignation of the Bronze Weapons, etc., Supposed toIndicate a Bronze Age in Western and Northern Europe,’’ Transactions of the Ethnologi-cal Society of London (1866), quoted in Peter Rowley-Conwy, From Genesis to Prehis-tory: the archaeological Three Age System and its contested reception in Denmark,Britain, and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 236.7 Rowley-Conwy, From Genesis to Prehistory, 239.8 William Greenwell, British Barrows. A Record of the Examination of SepulchralMounds in Various Parts of England. Together with . . . an Appendix by George Rolles-ton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1877), 110–18.

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were not only older than round barrows, but also—as evidenced by skulltype—the tombs of an older race. Greenwell and Rolleston agreed that thelong barrows were indeed older and that they housed the bones of a long-headed (dolicho-cephalic) race. But many round barrows, they nowinsisted, contained both long and round-headed (brachy-cephalic) skulls.From this and other evidence, such as the association of recently excavatedfortifications with an invasion from the east, Greenwell constructed the fol-lowing narrative: an indigenous long-headed people had been ‘‘intrudedupon and conquered by the more powerfully made round-headed folk’’; the‘‘subdued long-headed people may very possibly, in the earlier times of theconquest, have been kept in a servile condition’’; nevertheless, ‘‘the intrud-ing round-headed people, smaller as they may have been in number, weregradually absorbed by the earlier and more numerous race,’’ for, ‘‘as timewent on’’ so ‘‘intermixture between the peoples became common’’ and, inthe end, ‘‘they would become identified as one people.’’9

Over the course of this essay we shall see, first one and then another ofthese interpretations being developed or generalized, not infrequently farbeyond any point supported by the archaeological (or any other) evidence.Indeed, it is already clear that Greenwell’s racial invasion narrative prefig-ures the new racial history of India described by Trautmann, in whichinvading Aryans conquer, rule over, but are ultimately absorbed into anindigenous pre-Aryan population. But Greenwell’s account of prehistoricinvasion points no less to the revised history of the Anglo-Saxon invasionof Celtic-Roman Britain that, in light of the ethnological ‘‘evidence,’’ wouldgain ground over the next two decades. Ultimately, as we shall see, thesenew racial histories came to include a sociological component, in whichthe relations of agricultural production were explained in terms of racialrelationships between conquered and conquerors. In the first instance, how-ever, the projection of Greenwell’s archaeological model of prehistoricinvasion onto prehistoric India and historic Britain was facilitated by anostensibly quite separate development, in which various Oxford philolo-gists came to insist that language was no guide to race.

In 1875 the Oxford Assyriologist Archibald Sayce delivered a talk tothe Anthropological Institute on ‘‘Language and Race,’’ the gist of whichwas that philologists needed to stop confounding the two terms.10 Twoyears later the English historian Edward Augustus Freeman penned what

9 Greenwell, British Barrows, 122 and 129.10 A. H. Sayce, ‘‘Language and Race,’’ The Journal of the Anthropological Institute 5(1876): 212–20; paper read May 11, 1875.

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amounted to a reply, which took the form of an article in the ContemporaryReview entitled ‘‘Race and Language.’’ ‘‘The doctrine of race,’’ Freemanexplained to his readers, ‘‘is the direct offspring of the study of scientificphilology; and yet it is just now, in its popular form at least, somewhatunder the ban of scientific philologers.’’11 Freeman admitted that, techni-cally, these philologers had a point: examples of the adoption of languagesby immigrants and conquered populations may be found the world over.But for all practical purposes, he went on to argue, language does suggestrace; indeed, he insisted, if we identify race solely in physiological termsthen it becomes something essentially unknowable, and as such a uselessnotion. What is more, the very language of philology ‘‘implies that thestrictly family relation, the relation of community of blood, is at the root ofthe whole matter. We cannot help talking about the family and itsbranches. . . .’’ And Freeman illustrated this last claim by invoking thefamous account of the ‘‘the great Aryan family’’ by another Oxford philolo-gist, Friedrich Max Muller. From this original people ‘‘dwelling in oneplace, speaking one tongue,’’ great branches had colonized ‘‘the Asiaticlands of Persia and India,’’ while the ‘‘remaining mass’’ had sent ‘‘off waveafter wave, to become the forefathers of the nations of historical Europe.’’12

Sayce might be technically correct, Freeman was saying, but in practiceeverybody knew that Max Muller’s picture pointed to the shared blood aswell as the shared language of Indian, Persian, and European.

But Sayce’s argument appeared much more substantial when, in 1883,he avowed his ‘‘entire conversion’’ to the theory of Karl Penka ‘‘that theAryan race had its first seat not in Asia, but in the Baltic provinces andnorthern Germany.’’13 According to Isaac Taylor’s review of the scholarlyarguments of the 1880s in his The Origin of the Aryans (1890), bothSayce’s conversion and its wider implications should be situated in thecontext of the discovery of European prehistory. Enthused by the newlydiscovered marvels of Sanskrit, Taylor suggests, early nineteenth-centuryphilologists assumed that the Aryans had originated in Asia and gradually

11 E. A. Freeman, ‘‘Race and Language,’’ Contemporary Review 29 (1877): 711–41, 718.12 Ibid., 722–23. For the account of the original Aryans that inspired Freeman, see F. MaxMuller’s contribution to the 1856 Oxford Essays, ‘‘Comparative Mythology,’’ reprintedin Selected Essays on Language, Mythology, and Religion (London: Longmans, Green,and Co., 1881), 2:299–424.13 See A. H. Sayce, Introduction to the Science of Language, 3rd ed. (London: KeganPaul, 1890), preface to the 2nd edition (1883), 1:xxii. See also Sayce’s article in theAcademy, December 8, 1883. The work of Penka that sparked Sayce’s conversion is:Origines Ariacae (Vienna: K. Prochaska, 1883); but see also his slightly later Die Her-kunft der Arier (Vienna: K. Prochaska, 1886).

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spread out into Europe. But the ‘‘geographical centre of human history hasnow been shifted from the East to the West’’; for the ‘‘most ancient recordsof any actual events which we possess are no longer the slabs with cunei-form writing disinterred from the Babylonian mounds, but the immeasur-ably older memorials of successful hunts, preserved in the caverns of theDordogne,’’ and compared with which ‘‘the records on Babylonian tablets,or in Egyptian tombs, much more the traditions preserved in the Avesta,are altogether modern.’’ In other words, people were painting on cave wallsin Europe long before any Aryan literature was being composed in Persiaor India. Furthermore, Taylor explained, the ‘‘new science . . . of Craniol-ogy’’ has now revealed ‘‘that the same races which now inhabit Europehave inhabited it continuously since the beginning of the neolithic period,when the wild horse and reindeer roamed over Europe.’’14 But if Europehad been continuously inhabited from such remote ages, what sense couldbe made of Max Muller’s picture of successive Aryan migrations intoEurope?

‘‘Our own heads bewray us,’’ complained Freeman in his deliberatelyarchaic English, ‘‘telling all mankind that we are somebody else and notourselves.’’15 This is the ‘‘Hamlet moment’’ in the prehistoric paradigmswitch of the late nineteenth century when, gazing upon the recentlyexhumed skulls of various prehistoric Europeans, archaeologists and phi-lologists came to two distinct conclusions. Firstly, and as Taylor pointedout, these skulls appeared pretty similar to those of recently deceased Euro-peans, suggesting a continuity of population since Neolithic times. But sec-ondly, as Greenwell and Rolleston had observed, these skulls seemed notall of one sort, and could be made to tell a story of prehistoric invasionfollowed by eventual assimilation. Such cranial reflections prompted areturn to the ancient texts and a renewed interest in recent archaeologicaldiscoveries, the result of which was that skulls and words and artefactswere pulled together in order to construct an alternative to Max Muller’smigratory account of the dissemination of the Aryan languages. In place ofthe migration of an entire folk, who either moved into virgin land orentirely displaced the original occupiers, scholars now posited widespreadinvasions of bands of Aryan warriors, who conquered indigenous popula-tions, ruled them as warrior aristocracies and imposed their language upon

14 Isaac Taylor, The Origin of the Aryans: an Account of the Prehistoric Ethnology andCivilisation of Europe (London: Walter Scott, 1890), 18–19.15 E. A. Freeman, Four Oxford Lectures (London: Macmillan, 1888), 71; Freeman is hereexplicitly responding to Sayce’s 1887 BAAS address (see note 17).

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them, but whose blood was eventually assimilated into the pre-Aryan nativepopulations.

Although the same invasion model of prehistory was now elaboratedfor both India and Britain, different local applications rested on differentkinds of evidence. In India, as Trautmann shows, the new racial history wasbuilt upon a handful of words in the Rig Veda, dubiously interpreted andexaggerated in importance.16 In Britain, as we have seen, the evidence con-sisted of artefacts and skulls. Ancient Greece, however, would eventuallyprovide a meeting point for the different sciences, a place where words,things and bones could all be pulled together in order to tell a new racialstory of the origin of Western civilization. The classic study here is WilliamRidgeway’s The Early Age of Greece, the first volume of which appearedin 1901. Ridgeway, the Disney Professor of Archaeology at Cambridge, setout to rescue Homer’s Achaean warriors from the luxurious palaces andgaudy treasures that Heinrich Schliemann had unearthed at Mycenae somequarter of a century earlier. This he achieved by identifying the people whoproduced the objects called Mycenean with the aboriginal Pelasgians whoseearly Aegean civilization, he insisted, had been overrun by fair-haired Celtsa couple of generations before the Trojan wars. These Celts, who Ridgeway(confusingly) regards as Germanic tribesmen, are identified as the Achaeanwarriors described by Homer. Ridgeway supported his thesis with enor-mous erudition, drawing upon archaeology, philology and much elsebesides. But his endless digressions on British racial history, as well as occa-sional forays into the Rig Veda, make clear that his story of the early age ofGreece is but a particular application of a new, Eurasian Aryan invasionstory.17

At the same time that the new invasion model was first being elabo-rated with regard to British and Indian prehistory, so it also began toencroach upon established orthodoxies of English history. Specifically, overthe course of the 1880s the received wisdom as to the nature of the Anglo-Saxon conquest of Britain was seriously challenged. The received wisdomhad been handed down by Freeman in the first volume of his monumentalHistory of the Norman Conquest (1867–76), which covered the Anglo-Saxon period and which described how the invading Teutonic warriors had‘‘exterminated’’ and ‘‘displaced’’ the Britons. Here was a historical instance

16 See chapter 7 of Trautmann’s Aryans and British India.17 William Ridgeway, The Early Age of Greece, Volume I (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-sity Press, 1901); the second volume was published posthumously in 1931. For furtherdiscussion see Simon John Cook, ‘‘Squaring the Shield: William Ridgeway’s Two Modelsof Early Greece,’’ History of European Ideas 50 (2014): 683–713.

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of Max Muller’s mid-century model of language dissemination, in whichthe English language was brought to Britain by folk migration—that of theAnglo-Saxons, which is to say, the English. Now, if we turn to Grant Allen’sAnglo-Saxon Britain, which was published in 1884, we are told how ‘‘oflate years’’ the idea of the conquest ‘‘as an absolute change of race’’ has‘‘met with strenuous opposition.’’ It is true, Allen continues, that ‘‘many ofour greatest historians still uphold the Teutonic theory,’’ but if ‘‘Mr. Free-man’’ is correct, ‘‘how comes it that at the present day a large proportionof our people, even in the east, belong to the dark and long-skulled type?’’Upon ‘‘this subject the historians are largely at variance with the anthropol-ogists; and as the historical evidence is weak and inferential, while theanthropological evidence is strong and direct, there can be very little doubtwhich we ought to accept.’’18 British skulls were undermining traditionaltextual interpretations, and in doing so helping to transform the Anglo-Saxon conquest from a genocidal migration into an invasion and subse-quent overlordship.

At the most basic level, Allen simply took it for granted that the‘‘unequivocal testimonies of modern research’’ trumped the ‘‘early his-torical authorities, on which the Teutonic theory mainly relies.’’19 In otherwords, no written word from the past could compete with contemporaryCraniology. Nevertheless, he did feel compelled to explain why much ofthis written record was misleading. His basic strategy should serve as awarning against any too easy conflation of the new theories of racial mixingwith rejection of the old ethnic stereotypes. Allen argued that in theiraccounts of ethnic cleansing Bede and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle were, inthe main, drawing upon Gildas. But this ‘‘British monk,’’ he insisted, hadcombined a ‘‘florid and inflated Latin rhetoric’’ with a ‘‘hyperbolical Celticimagination.’’ The implication was that, while Gildas ‘‘abounds with wildand vague declamation about the extermination of the natives,’’ in realityhe ‘‘says little that can throw any light on the question as to whether theWelsh were largely spared.’’20 Allen’s strategy seems in conflict with hisbasic argument as to the continuity of British population before and afterthe invasion. It might be argued that he drew a sharp division betweenethnicity and culture, contending that while ‘‘much Welsh blood survivedin England . . . yet it is none the less true that the nation which rose uponthe ruins of Roman Britian was, in form and organisation, almost purely

18 Grant Allen, Anglo-Saxon Britain (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowl-edge, 1884), 55–57.19 Ibid., 60.20 Ibid., 60–61.

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English.’’21 But it is by no means obvious that Allen regarded Gildas’s‘‘Celtic imagination’’ as a product of Welsh social organisation as opposedto Welsh blood.

The debate over the Anglo-Saxon conquest can, once again, be viewedthrough the lens of a spat between Freeman and Sayce, both of whom wereby now honored as well as distinguished scholars. Delivering the 1887 pres-idential address to the anthropological section of the British Association forthe Advancement of Science (BAAS), Sayce turned in his closing commentsto the debate over the conquest. ‘‘A few years ago,’’ he began, ‘‘it was thefashion to assert that the English people were mainly Teutonic in origin,and that the British population had been exterminated.’’ But the evidenceof both institutions and ethnology had now established that ‘‘the Britishpopulation, instead of being exterminated, lived under and by the side oftheir Teutonic invaders.’’22 This was a red flag to a Teutonic bull and Free-man, now the Oxford Regius Professor of Modern History, was moved todeliver two lectures later that same year entitled ‘‘Teutonic Conquest inGaul and Britain.’’ Here he insisted that, while in France the conqueringFranks had been absorbed by the Gauls, the conquered Britons—whosurvived—had been adopted into the English nation. His basic argumentwas that adoption changed nationality, but not blood; so while many of theskulls of the inhabitants of the land might indeed be Celtic or Iberian (i.e.pre-Celtic), this had no logical bearing on whether or not the possessors ofthese skulls belonged to the English nation. Freeman, we might note, wasquietly revising his argument of a decade earlier: where he had previouslyinsisted that language was an indication of race, he was now positing acomplete separation between factors of nationality such as language andthe physiological idea of race (precisely the same shift was made aroundthis time by Max Muller). Freeman’s Oxford lectures thus revolved aroundthe claim that, while not all Britons had been exterminated or driven fromthe land, nevertheless the Anglo-Saxon conquest did indeed ‘‘involve dis-placement of one people by another.’’23 Displacement of a people, appar-ently, could be carried out by adoption, as well as by fire and sword.

Freeman’s Oxford lectures were, ultimately, a sorry affair, signallingthe passing of an older orthodoxy. True, Freeman met the ethnologicalarguments head on. But Sayce had also invoked ‘‘the continuity of laws

21 Ibid., 69.22 A. H. Sayce, ‘‘Address by Professor A. H. Sayce, M.A., President of the Section,’’Report of the Fifty-Seventh Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement ofScience (London: John Murray, 1888), 885–95, 892 and 893.23 Freeman, Oxford Lectures, 68–69.

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and customs and territorial rights between the Roman and the Saxon eras’’pointed out by ‘‘Mr. Seebohm, in his ‘English Village Community.’ ’’24 But‘‘I cannot undertake to enter into Mr. Seebohm’s theories now,’’25 Freemanhad declared in his second lecture, thereby leaving unchallenged Sayce’s keyassertion that those Britons who had survived the conquest lived on ‘‘underand by the side of their Teutonic invaders.’’ This was a sociological claim,albeit one that had been implicit in the new invasion model from the start.Grant (with Greenwell) that even in prehistoric times both conquerors and(most especially the) conquered had been agricultural peoples, then theassertion of the enslavement of the conquered is, in effect, the assertion thatthe conquered natives were forced to become agricultural laborers, allow-ing the new owners of the soil to reap where they had never sown. Implicitwithin the new invasion model was thus an explanation of the origin ofagricultural serfdom and, presumably, the key to much subsequent agrarianhistory. So when Sayce described the defeated Britons as ‘‘living under andby the side’’ of the invaders he meant, quite simply, that the Britons hadbeen made into serfs. Of course, Freeman might have argued that serfdomwas the first step to adoption (which, actually, is more or less the line thatAllen had taken),26 but in fact he simply refrained from entering into anydiscussion of British and Anglo-Saxon agricultural life. This was the moresurprising because Freeman had previously exerted great efforts in not onlydescribing but also celebrating the Anglo-Saxon village community.

An account of the Anglo-Saxon village community—or Teutonicmark—stood at the heart of what later generations of English historianscame to regard as the Anglo-Saxon origin myth of English history fashionedby their mid-Victorian predecessors. This was a story told, in addition toFreeman, also by J. R. Green and Bishop Stubbs (the last introducing anoft-noted word of caution),27 and it was a story that began in the woods ofGermany but turned upon the planting of English village communities onBritish soil. Such communities were supposedly composed of free andarmed men, connected in some way by blood, organizing their own affairsand, in some sense, holding their land in common. The core scholarshipbehind this picture rested on the mid-century German work of G. L. vonMaurer, which was taken up and significantly developed in England in the

24 Sayce, ‘‘Address,’’ 892.25 Freeman, Oxford Lectures, 98.26 Allen, Anglo-Saxon Britain, 44.27 See John Richard Green, A Short History of the English People (London, Macmillan,1874), 39–41; William Stubbs, The Constitutional History of England in its Origin andDevelopment (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1880 [1874]), 1:2 and 94.

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early 1870s by Henry Maine. He, in the words of Frederic Seebohm, recog-nized ‘‘the fundamental analogies between the ‘village communities’ of theEast and the West, and sought to use actually surviving Indian institutionsas typical representatives of ancient stages of similar Western institu-tions.’’28 Maine’s comparative work was developed yet further in Freeman’sComparative Politics (1873), which presented an account of Aryan socialdevelopment in which the ancient city-states and modern European nationsof Europe stood at the end of two very different paths of development outof the same archaic Aryan village community.29

Freeman presented his Comparative Politics as an attempt to provide agenealogy of social institutions similar to that which comparative philolo-gists had provided for (what Max Muller had called) the Aryan family oflanguages. But if comparative philology provided the Aryan frame, Free-man’s actual comparisons built upon the work of the historians Niebuhrand Savigny. At the start of the century, they had demonstrated that Romanlaw distinguished possession from property and suggested that, as a generalrule, private property developed out of an original, or primitive, commonownership. Building on these various sources, Freeman now posited anarchaic Aryan village community, which was bound by ties of kinship andheld its land in common, and then described the comparative developmentof the social institutions of the ‘‘three great branches’’ of the Aryan family:the ancient Greeks, the ancient Romans and the Teutons. Where the twoformer had seen the evolution of village community into city state (in whichcitizenship remained a matter of blood), Teutonic evolution had witnessedthe gradual transformation of bonds of kinship into ties based simply onshared territory, alongside the gradual transformation of public into privateproperty. At the time of the Anglo-Saxon conquest, as a result of which the

28 Frederic Seebohm, The English Village Community (London: Longmans, Green & Co.,1905 [1883]), xii. Freeman described Maine’s book as ‘‘a sort of sponsor’’ of von Maur-er’s work ‘‘to English readers,’’ Freeman, Comparative Politics (New York: Macmillanand Co., 1874), 408; and see Henry Maine, Village-communities in the East and West(London: John Murray, 1871).29 For further discussion of the development of the village community model in Englishhistorical writing see the section on ‘‘English Comparative Scholarship’’ in my ‘‘FromAncients and Moderns to Geography and Anthropology: the Meaning of History in theThought of Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and Alfred Marshall,’’ 45 (2013): 311–43; and thesection on ‘‘Comparative Historical Scholarship’’ in Simon John Cook, ‘‘Race and Nationin Marshall’s Histories,’’ European Journal of the History of Economic Thought 20(2013): 940–56. Also useful is John Burrow, ‘‘The ‘Village Community’ and the Uses ofHistory in Late-Nineteenth Century England,’’ in Historical Perspectives: Studies inEnglish Thought and Society in Honour of J.H. Plumb, ed. N. McKendrick (London:Europa, 1974), 255–84.

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Teutonic form of this Aryan institution had been planted on British soil,neither of these processes was fully complete. Thus the early Anglo-Saxoncommunity as described by Freeman was a community of free cultivators,bound by ties of kinship and holding some land in common.

Frederic Seebohm’s English Village Community (1883) struck at thevery heart of Freeman’s vision of the origins of the English nation. Seebohmpresented his book as an attempt ‘‘to put English Economic History on truelines at its historical beginning, viz.: the English Conquest.’’ This he set outto do by ‘‘trying to solve the still open question whether it began with thefreedom or with the serfdom of the masses of the people.’’30 The solutionthat Seebohm came to was that English history had begun with the serfdomof the masses of the people who were not, in fact, native born English folk.

It is most probable that whenever German conquerors descendedupon an already peopled country where agriculture was carried onas it was in Britain, their comparatively small numbers, and stillfurther their own dislike to agricultural pursuits and liking forlordship, and familiarity with servile tenants in the old country,would induce them to place the conquered people in the positionof serfs, as the Germans of Tacitus seem to have done, makingthem do the agriculture by customary methods.31

Seebohm thus developed the sociological side of the new invasion model.His key argument was that, with the Anglo-Saxon conquest, ‘‘the continu-ity between the Roman and English system of land management was notreally broken.’’32 In words that would be echoed in Grant Allen’s book onthe Anglo-Saxons published the following year, only directed in the firstinstance at ploughed fields as opposed to ploughmen, Seebohm complainedthat it was too often assumed ‘‘that the English invaders of Roman Britainnearly exterminated the old inhabitants, destroying the towns and villages,and making fresh settlements of their own, upon freshly chosen sites.’’ Butif this were so, he argued, the conquest would have entailed ‘‘the destruc-tion of the open fields round the old villages, and the formation of freshopen fields round the new ones’’—and this, he maintained, was refuted bythe ‘‘gradually accumulating’’ archaeological evidence that ‘‘our modernvillages are very often on their old Roman and sometimes probably pre-Roman sites.’’ Such archaeological evidence of the continuity of village set-tlement and agricultural practice provided the sociological equivalent to the

30 Seebohm, English Village Community, 437 and ix (emphasis in original).31 Ibid., 418–19.32 Ibid., 418.

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ethnological claim of continuity in skull type, and hence of population,from Neolithic to modern times.

Seebohm’s economic history was only accidentally ethnological. Cer-tainly, he set out to challenge Freeman’s claim that the modern Englishnation was an essentially Teutonic growth, and he believed that his ‘‘strictlyeconomic inquiry’’ had demonstrated ‘‘that more things went to the ‘mak-ing of England’ than were imported in the keels of the English invaders ofBritain.’’33 Furthermore, much of his research came out of the same stableas the ethnological and archaeological studies we have reviewed above; apedigree hinted at by the dedication of his book to the Society of Antiquar-ies of London (the book was actually developed out of two papers pre-sented to this society).34 More concretely, Seebohm’s starting-point couldbe said to have been the archaeological discovery of Greenwell and othersthat agriculture had been practised in Britain even before the Roman inva-sion, while his claims for the continuity of village settlement made use of awealth of recent antiquarian scholarship.35 Nevertheless, Seebohm was veryclear that the purpose of all this research was to establish ‘‘a sound under-standing of English Economic History as the true basis of much of the prac-tical politics of the future,’’36 by which latter he meant, not the politics ofrace but of democracy and socialism. The question that he asked waswhether the freedom of the masses that seemed to be dawning in his ownday was the original state of affairs or the culmination of the evolution ofthe ages. In denying historical validity to Freeman’s vision of the Anglo-Saxon village community Seebohm was opting very firmly for the latterscenario. Thus the categories that mattered to him, that helped frame theissue that he took to be at stake, were those of freeman, slave and serf;ethnological categories such as Celt or German were only of indirect rele-vance.37 Ultimately, Seebohm’s work is a striking demonstration that thesociological side of the new invasion model could excite the scholarly andpolitical imagination quite independently of any racial connotations orimplications.

But Laurence Gomme’s The Village Community (1890) soon followed

33 Seebohm, English Village Community, xv.34 Frederic Seebohm, ‘‘On the Open-Field System of Agriculture Traced to its Source,’’Proceedings of the Society of Antiquities of London (1879), 8:88–91, and ‘‘On Serfdomin its relations to the Open-Field System,’’ Proceedings of the Society of Antiquities ofLondon (1880) 8:355–58.35 See section II of Seebohm’s conclusion: ‘‘Local Evidence of Continuity between Romanand English Villages,’’ Village Community, 424–36.36 Seebohm, Village Community, 437.37 See, for example, Village Community, 422–23.

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in the wake of Seebohm’s English Village Community. Gomme, a civil ser-vant and founding member and leading light of the Folklore Society, pushedthe story back into prehistory, brought the racial dimension to the fore andturned the older story of the Aryan village community as told by Maineand Freeman on its head. He took it as given that Seebohm had successfullydemonstrated that (in Gomme’s words) a ‘‘nineteenth-century village com-munity is only an unchanged sixth-century institution.’’ But by turning tothe study of what he called comparative custom (the anthropologicalmethod of the folklorist who searched for archaic survivals in the songs,stories and rituals of the nineteenth-century countryside), Gomme now pro-posed to ‘‘go back into the unknown periods of British history.’’ Such aninquiry into the prehistoric, Gomme declared, would ‘‘explain the parallelbetween the villages of Britain and of India, both lands being the battle-ground of races, where the results of the conflict show the non-Aryan agri-culturist subordinated to an Aryan overlordship.’’38 So where Freeman twodecades earlier had described the village community of an Aryan folk,branches of which had migrated—together with their social institutions—into modern India, Persia, and Europe, Gomme was now describing thevillage communities of India and England as the product of Aryan invasionsof Asia and Britain of the kind described by Greenwell.

Gomme essentially mixed together what he took to be the choice ele-ments provided by Greenwell and Seebohm, extending his analysis toinclude prehistoric India as well as Britain and adding pinches of variousadditional spices as his personal taste directed. His basic vision of the vil-lage community was that of an Aryan ‘‘tribal community with a villageof non-Aryan serfs under it.’’39 One starting-point here was Greenwell’sspeculation that in prehistoric Britain some kind of terrace agriculture hadbeen practiced. Gomme now associated such terrace agriculture with thepre-Aryan populations of both India and England which, he insisted, werein both cases ‘‘a hilltop people, residing on the top of the hills and sendingtheir cultivation down the hillsides.’’40 In the British case, these pre-Aryanswere identified with the long-headed skulls unearthed by Greenwell in bothlong and round barrows, while the round-headed skulls became Gomme’sAryans, which in this case meant Celts. Gomme’s next step was to assumethat the invading Aryans had been a tribal community more given to warthan to farming—an image, in other words, of Seebohm’s Anglo-Saxons.

38 Laurence Gomme, The Village Community, with Special Reference to the Origin andForm of its Survivals in Britain (London: Walter Scott, 1890), 56–57.39 Gomme, Village Community, 137.40 Gomme, Village Community, 72 and 75.

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Indeed, just as with Seebohm’s Anglo-Saxons, Gomme’s Aryans now pro-ceeded to impose their tribal rule over the native agricultural communitiesthat they had conquered. Developing a hint in Seebohm’s English VillageCommunity (which was subsequently developed also by Seebohm), theinstitution of serfdom, which denies freedom to the serf and yet acknowl-edges him some rights, was explained in terms of the customary status ofan outsider (i.e. one not related by blood) who resides within the triballands.41 Quite why in India the relationship between conquering Aryan andconquered pre-Aryan found its social expression, not in the institution ofserfdom, but in the system of caste, is a question that Gomme does notseem to address.

THE PARTING OF THE WAYS

After 1900 English historians increasingly gave ideas of race the cold shoul-der; an act of dismissal facilitated by a retreat from the Anglo-Saxonmarches and accompanying declaration that the foundations of modernEngland were actually to be discovered in the political and legal documentsof the thirteenth century. The prime mover in this shift of scholarly atten-tion was the greatest of modern English historians, Frederic William Mait-land. A recent study of English history in this period has labelled it‘‘modernist,’’42 and the epithet seems particularly appropriate for Maitland.Not only did Maitland direct attention away from the Anglo-Saxon villagecommunity and on to the medieval courts of law, he also challenged thepresupposition of continuity upon which later Victorian ‘‘big history’’ hadbeen founded. Reviewing Maitland’s Domesday Book and Beyond (1897),the economic historian W. J. Ashley juxtaposed the Victorian Seebohm withthe modernist Maitland: Seebohm’s vision of agrarian history, Ashleyexplained, had ‘‘been characterized by the permanence of relations’’ and,as such, was in agreement with the spirit of late Victorian evolutionarythought; with Maitland, however, English history ‘‘becomes more cata-strophic as we trace it backwards.’’43 The denial that the more distant past

41 See Seebohm, Village Community, 190–91. For Seebohm’s development of this ideasee his ‘‘The Historical Importance of the Cymric Tribal System,’’ Transactions of theHonourable Society of Cymmrodorion (1895–96): 1–22, (1897): 10–11; The Tribal Sys-tem in Wales (London, 1896); Tribal Custom in Anglo-Saxon Law (London, 1911).42 Michael Bentley, Modernizing England’s Past: English Historiography in the Age ofModernism, 1870–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).43 ‘‘Professor Maitland’s ‘Domesday Book and Beyond’ ’’ (1897), reprinted in Surveys:Historic and Economic (London: Longmans, Green, and Co, 1900), 87–91, 89; and F. W.Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond: Three Essays in the Early History of England(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1897), 365.

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had much relevance for the explanation of the modern world entailed theredundancy to the modern historian of any idea of race, a scholarly cate-gory associated with archaic and ancient social organization.

Maitland dedicated significant effort to discrediting a large part of theliterature that we have discussed in this essay. Gomme, ‘‘to whom we allowe many thanks for his courageous and ingenious speculations,’’ wasgiven the shortest shrift: in an article in the Law Quarterly Review of 1893Maitland demonstrated the modern origin of several of Gomme’s supposedsurvivals of prehistoric institutions.44 Seebohm, who had worked primarilywith documents rather than customs, was accorded much greater respect,with Maitland suggesting that in much of his Domesday Book and Beyondhe had ‘‘been endeavouring to answer Mr Seebohm.’’45 At bottom, how-ever, Maitland simply turned a deaf ear to a quarter of a century of philo-logical discussion of the relationship between language and race anddeclared that, against ‘‘those who would make the English nation in themain a nation of Celtic bondmen,’’ ‘‘the English language and the names ofour English villages are the unanswered protest.’’ For Maitland, then, ‘‘ourtrue villages, the nucleated villages with large ‘open fields’, are not Celtic,are not Roman, but are very purely and typically German.’’46 And yet hewas in no sense returning to earlier ideas of the Anglo-Saxon village com-munity. Building upon Paul Vinogradoff’s 1893 article, ‘‘Folkland,’’ whichhad denied that English folkland was public land (the English equivalent,as Freeman had put it, of the Roman ager publicus),47 Maitland furtherargued that Anglo-Saxon society had not been divided into clans and thatthe English ‘‘village community was not a gens.’’ In fact, ‘‘so far back as wecan see, the German village had a solid core of individualism.’’48 In otherwords, social life in the villages of English history had been based uponneither shared land nor shared blood: ideas of race had not been a constitu-tive element even of England’s early history.

Maitland’s modernism was in part methodological. That is to say, hisshift of focus away from the more distant past was related to a determina-tion to distinguish the historian, who worked with documents, from the

44 ‘‘The Survival of Archaic Communities,’’ reprinted in: H. A. L. Fisher, ed., The Col-lected Papers of Frederic William Maitland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1911), 2:313–65; quote on 328.45 Maitland, Domesday, v.46 Maitland, Domesday, 222.47 Paul Vinogradoff, ‘‘Folkland,’’ The English Historical Review 8 (1893): 1–17.48 Maitland, Domesday, 349 and 348; and see Pollock and Maitland, History of EnglishLaw, ii, 238, and Township and Borough (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1898), 15.

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philologist, the anthropologist and the archaeologist, who worked withlanguages, kinship systems and artefacts. Applying to these latter subjects aturn-of-phrase more familiar from turn-of-the-century Cambridge studiesin mathematics and logic, Maitland suggested that students of the moredistant and primitive past developed speculations that, on the whole,‘‘should be placed for our race beyond the limit of history.’’49 Maitland wasestablishing a new disciplinary border. Henceforth the academic study ofhistory was to be largely associated with inquiry into the genesis of themodern political state as told through the medium of archival documentsof a predominantly legal and constitutional nature. Professionally, therespectable historian would be uninterested in oral poetry or surviving folktradition, uncontaminated by contact with primitives and unconcernedwith their genealogies, and untouched by either pot shards or skull frag-ments newly excavated from the soil. If we are to picture correctly the rela-tionship of race to polite English historical scholarship established at theturn of the twentieth century we need to frame an image of Maitland, onehand holding his nose and the other dropping a ragtag bag of anthropologi-cal, archaeological, philological, and ethnological theories into a large aca-demic waste paper basket. For if much of this assorted jumble might passin the catalogue for ‘‘humanities,’’ Maitland was for all that cleansing thehistorian’s stables.

But if Maitland swept clean the historian’s lumber room, his broomleft large swathes of the modern academy untouched. As late as 1922, wefind the popular but by no means disreputable archaeologist Harold Peakeannouncing, in the preface to his The English Village, that he ‘‘found him-self in substantial agreement with the suggestions put forward by the lateSir Laurence Gomme’’ as to the origin of the village community in England,and that the subsequent ‘‘evolution of the community was a strugglebetween two racial ideals.’’50 Peake here testifies to an institutional andintellectual bifurcation, born of the professionalization and intensifying dis-ciplinary specialization of the modern English university, and reflecting thefragmentation of the late Victorian idea of universal history. Put somewhatsimplistically, it might be said that in the decade or so after 1900 racialideas were discarded from the study of England’s modern history, but con-tinued to play an important role in many accounts of Britain’s ancient heri-tage. Such a neat formulation, however, belies the complexities of both the

49 F. Pollock and F. W. Maitland, The History of English Law before the time of Edward(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1895), 2:240.50 Harold Peake, The English Village: the Origin and Decay of its Community. AnAnthropological Interpretation (London: Benn Brothers, 1922), 7.

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institutional and the intellectual facets of the post-Victorian study of theancient past.

The institutional situation, it would seem, has never been satisfactorilyresolved. Such at least is suggested by the shifting borders of the shadowland inhabited by twentieth-century students of Anglo-Saxon England.Edwardian Cambridge witnessed the publication of H. M. Chadwick’sseminal The Origin of the English Nation (1907), which provided a novelexplanation of the pre-conquest origins of English individualism as result-ing from the corruption of traditional agricultural societies on the NorthSea and Baltic coasts.51 Chadwick’s book appeared within the ‘‘CambridgeArchaeological and Ethnological Series,’’ and around the time of its publi-cation he was lecturing for the newly established Board of Anthropology.52

But anthropology would soon be fashioned into a study of ‘‘primitive oth-ers,’’ thereby leaving students of the primitive English self to seek refuge inthe residual lecture courses of the new English faculties. The subsequentbirth in Cambridge in 1957 of a Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse, andCeltic, nested within the English Faculty, points to this residual status, as itdoes also the arbitrary component of modern disciplinary divisions. Still,Chadwick’s successors in Cambridge appear to have had a better time ofit than J. R. R. Tolkien and his philological followers in Oxford, whoseprofessional life has been presented as a slow defeat in a long-running disci-plinary civil war fought with the professors of English literature.53

Intellectually, there can be no question but that after 1900 ideas of racecontinued to play a central role in scholarly discussion of prehistoric andprimitive life. Nevertheless, the invasion model increasingly became but oneof a number of interpretative frameworks. To some extent accumulatingscholarly criticism simply qualified and revised the invasion model out ofits paradigmatic status. For example, in The Growth of the Manor (1905)Paul Vinogradoff astutely argued that the reduction of a conquered popula-tion to a state of agricultural slavery demands a more complex social orderthan that found in prehistoric Britain, and so concluded that ‘‘the result ofprehistoric invasion was not the generation of a racial class of agricultural

51 H. Munro Chadwick, The Origin of the English Nation (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-versity Press, 1907).52 See Pamela Jane Smith, A ‘‘Splendid Idiosyncrasy’’: Prehistory at Cambridge 1915–50(Oxford: Archaeopress, 2009).53 See the first chapter of T. A. Shippey, The Road to Middle-Earth (London: GeorgeAllen & Unwin, 1982); and Shippey, ‘‘Fighting the Long Defeat: Philology in Tolkien’sLife and Fiction,’’ in Roots and Branches: Selected Papers on Tolkien (New York: Walk-ing Tree Publishers, 2007), 139–56.

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serfs,’’ but rather the subjection of aboriginal clans and chiefs to ‘‘a tribu-tary state.’’54 More generally, the first decade or so of the twentieth centurywitnessed a growing conviction that, far from following but one pattern,population movements and ethnic encounters have taken a fairly wide vari-ety of forms throughout history.55 Most notably, scholarly attention in theseyears became increasingly concerned with the cultural dimension of theinteractions of different groups of people.

While further research is needed here, initial inspection suggests thatthe new models of cultural diffusion grew out of, rather than emerged as achallenge to, the older racial invasion model. For example, in 1905 FrancisHaverfield, the founding father of modern studies of Roman Britain, gavea lecture that was subsequently expanded into the now classic The Roman-ization of Roman Britain (1912). Haverfield here broke with a long tradi-tion of scholarship that conceived of Roman occupation in terms of islandsof colonies, occupied by Romans, set amidst a sea of native British barba-rism. Some at least of the native Britons, he insisted, had been ‘‘Roman-ized,’’ by which he meant assimilated into the culture of the invaders and,as such, civilized.56 But for Haverfield such enculturation had racial precon-ditions. In the East, he explained, ‘‘mankind was non-European,’’ and theresult was that, in a country such as Egypt, the process of Romanizationwas only superficial. In Britain, however, ‘‘Rome found races that were notyet civilized, yet were racially capable of accepting her culture.’’57 Racialkinship was for Haverfield the precondition of cultural assimilation.

It seems possible that continuity between racial and cultural modelswas the case also in the development of the so-called hyper-diffusionistschool of anthropology. In 1914 the psychologist and anthropologist W. H.Rivers suggested that Stonehenge in England and the pyramids of bothEgypt and Peru were the work, not of a single race, but rather of a single‘‘megalithic culture,’’ carried around the globe, ‘‘not by vast movements ofa conquering people, but by the migrations of relatively small bodies of

54 Paul Vinogradoff, The Growth of the Manor (London: Macmillan, 1905), 27 (and seealso p. 25).55 See, for example, W. M. Flinders Petrie’s six-fold racial classification of migrationsin his ‘‘Migrations. The Huxley Lecture for 1906,’’ reprinted from the Journal of theAnthropological Insittute 36 (1906): 3.56 F. Haverfield, The Romanization of Roman Britain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912).For Haverfield’s thoughts on Maitland’s Domesday, see his ‘‘Quarterly Notes on RomanBritain,’’ The Antiquary 33 (1897): 103–5. For useful discussion of Haverfield’s work seeRichard Hingley, Roman Officers and English Gentlemen: The Imperial Origins ofRoman Archaeology (London: Routledge, 2000).57 Haverfield, Romanization, 11–12.

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men.’’58 This suggestion would be amply developed by Grafton ElliotSmith, W. J. Perry, and others, who would link the sites of megalithic monu-ments to deposits of valuable raw materials, and posit prehistoric prospec-tors as the entrepreneurial agents of the diffusion of an archaic megalithicculture, the center of origin of which had been ancient Egypt.59 Again, whatwe appear to encounter here is not some revolutionary positing of cultureas an alternative category of social analysis to that of race (as was perhapsoccurring at this time with Franz Boas and his students in North America),but rather a fairly continuous development of explanatory model. For oncethe model of invasion by a relatively small group had replaced that of themigration of an entire folk, it was not such a big step to invoke, as the keyagents of cultural diffusion, peaceful trading bodies in place of conqueringwarrior bands. Thus an initial glance suggests that, within early-twentieth-century British studies of the primitive and prehistoric, the racial invasionmodel was not discarded, but was to some extent eclipsed by its intellectualprogeny.

Luzit, Israel.

58 W. H. Rivers, ‘‘The Ethnological Analysis of Culture, Presidential Address to SectionH of the BAAS,’’ Science 34 (1911): 385–96, 487.59 See, for example, Grafton Elliot Smith, ‘‘The Evolution of the Rock-cut Tomb andthe Dolmen,’’ in E. C. Quiggin, ed., Essays and Studies presented to William Ridgeway(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914), 493–546; W. J. Perry, The Children ofthe Sun: A Study of the Egyptian Settlement of the Pacific (London: Methuen & Co.,1923); chap. 4 of Peake, English Village; and see also Childe’s The Bronze Age (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1930).

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