The Races of Europe

Construction of National Identities in the Social Sciences, 1839-1939

Richard McMahon

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780230363199
• eBook ISBN: 9781137318466
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

This book explores a vital but neglected chapter in the histories of nationalism, racism and science. It is the first comprehensive study of the transnational scientific community that in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries attempted to classify Europe's biological races. Anthropological race classifiers produced parallel geographies, histories and hierarchies of European peoples that were crucial to the creation of national identities and to the overtly political race discourses of eugenics and popular racist ideologues. They lent nationalism the invaluable prestige of natural science, and traced the histories, conflicts and relationships of 'national races' back into prehistory. Racial national character stereotypes meanwhile supported competing political ideologies. The book examines the interplay between class, gender and national identity narratives and the tensions and interactions between the scientific and political agendas of classifiers. Within the elaborate transnational networks of scientific communities, for example, they had to reconcile competing national narratives.

© The Author(s) 2016

Richard McMahonThe Races of Europe10.1057/978-1-137-31846-6_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Rediscovering a Lost Science

Richard McMahon¹

(1)

University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth, UK

Where be your gibes now, your gambols, your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now, to mock your own grinning?

Hamlet to Yorick’s skull (V.1.186–90).

End Abstract

This book is a transnational history of national identity. It tells the strange story of a Europe-centred scientific community which, roughly from the 1830s to the 1940s, investigated human biology in order to reveal the racial ‘true’ identities of European nations. Race classification was especially central to the construction of ethnic families (e.g. Celts, Teutons, Slavs), a key component of national identity. Biologists lent ethnic nations the prestige of natural science, and justified them as natural ‘national races’ (my term), whose psychological characteristics, conflicts and geopolitical relationships extended back into prehistory.

The book contributes to a very recent efflorescence of historical literature on the race classification of Europeans and the political influence of national race narratives, bringing to light these almost entirely forgotten parallel geographies and histories and the communities of scholars that devised them.¹ Like much of the best of this literature, I draw on several insights from the related fields of history and sociology of science and sociology of knowledge. These include my central theme, the mutual influences of science and politics,² but I also emphasise the transnational organisation of science,³ the role of practices and network connections, especially in the constitution of disciplines,⁴ and the importance of specific contexts, and therefore of empirical history and geography.⁵

Deep intradisciplinary divides between the historical literatures on science, nationalism and racism partly explain why interest in the scientific race classification of Europeans has taken so long to emerge. Historians of science have tracked state pressure on science since the early Cold War, but studies have only turned since the millennium to how science and politics have influenced one another, and these rarely focus on the social sciences.⁶ When the flourishing racism and nationalism literatures examine historical race narratives meanwhile, they very understandably concentrate on the overtly political discourses of influential eugenists and racist polemicists like Count Arthur de Gobineau, Madison Grant and Houston Stewart Chamberlain.⁷ All three literatures have generally ignored how such ‘high profile’ racist scholarship, politics and popular ideas ‘thrived’ within a ‘force field’ of more morally ambiguous and technical, anthropological race classification, which ‘deeply influenced’ and scientifically legitimated them.⁸

Philological classifiers for example ‘created’ important ‘cultural and political realities’ like Scottish, Irish and Welsh identification with Celts, downplaying obvious affinities with the English.⁹ The novels of Disraeli, who told parliament in 1849 that ‘Race implies difference, difference implies superiority, and superiority leads to predominance’,¹⁰ promoted a Caucasian biological race category developed by the craniologist (skull scientist) Johann Blumenbach.¹¹ Unlike Aryan race narratives, the Caucasian race incorporated Disraeli’s Jewish and British identities. Halford Mackinder’s seminal 1904 geopolitical text¹² meanwhile cited William Ripley’s canonical Races of Europe (1900), whose title I borrow. Friedrich Nietzsche used anthropological research to identify a blond Aryan ‘conqueror and master race’ and denounce the ‘monstrous atavism’ of socialism as an attempt by the inferior ‘brown people to rule the blond’.¹³ Definitions by scientific experts of the natural characteristics of national races were politically useful for legitimising the liberal, conservative, peaceful or militaristic policies of nation states. My research for example suggests that the nineteenth-century transnational cultural communication and power dynamics of disciplines like anthropology, philology and history help to explain why different nationalist discourses emphasised ethnic purity or cosmopolitan civilisation.¹⁴

The ‘territorial trap’ of ‘methodological nationalism’¹⁵ has nevertheless been a second reason for historians’ neglect of race classification. Since the nineteenth century, historians have generally been trained and organised to specialise in the sources and languages of particular nations and nation states. The vast bulk of historical work on anthropology,¹⁶ race classification and the social sciences more generally¹⁷ are thus ‘strongly locked within national contexts’. Mine is therefore one of just three book-length studies since the 1940s that attempt to conceive of race classification as a transnational whole. Like Chris Manias’s Race, Science and the Nation (2013) and Carole Reynard-Paligot’s De l’identité nationale (2011), I examine the core race classification countries of France, Germany and the United Kingdom. However I also move beyond the core to view the classification community from the perspective of its peripheries.

To escape methodological nationalism, I use the inductive, ideographic approach of self-consciously transnational history, which has emerged since the 1990s in response to factors like globalisation, European integration and changes within the discipline of history.¹⁸ I study specific networks, communities, discourses and processes, which may stretch across multiple countries and endure for decades, but nevertheless emerge, evolve and disappear at particular moments and have geographical limits and borders. My most innovative transnational methodology is a quantitative analysis of these communities’ networks (see Chapter 2). However I do also use national case studies to examine interaction between local impulses and transnational interchange, not least because interactions with nationalism were crucial to race classification.

By contrast, most scholarship on national identity¹⁹ and anthropology²⁰ has attempted to escape methodological nationalism by comparing national cases, in order to identify general rules or ‘major traditions’.

General rules are problematic. It may just about make sense to talk ab...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction: Rediscovering a Lost Science
• 1. Networks, Methods and Narratives
• 2. Peripheral Case Studies
• Backmatter