Race, Science, and the Nation by Manias, Chris;

Reconstructing the Ancient Past in Britain, France and Germany

Series: Routledge Studies in Cultural History; 21;

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Product details:

Edition number 1
Publisher Routledge
Date of Publication 22 May 2013

ISBN 9780415832991
Binding Hardback
No. of pages316 pages
Size 229x152 mm
Weight 740 g
Language English
Illustrations 18 Illustrations, black & white; 18 Halftones, black & white

Short description:

This book shows how scholars in nineteenth-century Britain, France and Germany reconstructed their deepest national pasts: the Germanic, Celtic and prehistoric periods. It traces how fields such as archeology, philology, ethnology and anthropology developed around these studies and shaped new meanings for concepts of race, social development and nationality.

Long 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.

Introduction 1. Unveiling the Ancestry of Peoples: Tradition, Language and Ethnology, 1800-1860 2. Unearthing Our Forefathers: The Growth of Provincial Archaeology, 1830-1860 3. The Limits of History: Defining Nations, Races and Peoples, 1820-1850 4. Building the Science of Man: National Anthropology and the Ancient Past, 1850-1870 5. Locating the Peoples of Prehistory: Geology, Archaeology and Anthropology, 1840-1870 6. The Fracturing of Common Origins: The Nationalization of the Anthropological Past, 1871-1900 7. Tension and Diffusion: The Racial and Cultural Sciences, 1890-1914. Conclusion.

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