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In moving from an analysis of Freeman’s views on the Teutonic origins of English freedom to the wider context of his Aryanism, we must proceed with caution. Not only are Victorian attitudes towards race notoriously difficult to interpret, but the word ‘Aryan’ has connotations in the twenty-first century which it did not have in the nineteenth. Analysing the only work to contain a systematic articulation of Freeman’s racial theory, the relatively obscure Comparative Politics (1873), I argue that his views were not idiosyncratic or extreme when judged by the
, without word or protest from German church leaders, the German Law for Reconstruction of the Civil Service was issued on 7 April and its first ordnance defining ‘non-Aryan’ according to Jewish lineage of one parent or grandparent appeared four days later. Writing that day to Bishop Ammundsen of Denmark, who was vice-chair of UCCLW and chair of the World Alliance, he described the situation as ‘becoming too serious’ to do nothing but that isolated church protests would be as ‘dangerous’ as ‘no action at all’. His fear, as
, however, which Campbell played an important role in suppressing, led him to modify his views. Thereafter, he focused more exclusively on questions of ethnology, publishing in 1865 a comprehensive Ethnology of India, which combined evidence from physiognomy, language, religion, customs and ‘mental characteristics’ to divide Indians into three basic types: the ‘fine Caucasian’ Aryans, mostly in the north, the ‘Negrito type’ Dravidians, mostly in the south, and a third type consisting of various shades of mixtures in between.26 According to Campbell, this pattern had been
This book seeks to reclaim E. A. Freeman (1823–92) as a leading Victorian historian and public moralist. Freeman was a prolific writer of history, Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, and outspoken commentator on current affairs. His reputation declined sharply in the twentieth century, however, and the last full-scale biography was W. R. W. Stephens’ Life and Letters of Edward A. Freeman (1895). When Freeman is remembered today, it is for his six-volume History of the Norman Conquest (1867–79), celebrations of English progress, and extreme racial views.
Revisiting Freeman and drawing on previously unpublished materials, this study analyses his historical texts in relationship to the scholarly practices and intellectual preoccupations of their time. Most importantly, it draws out Thomas Arnold’s influence on Freeman’s understanding of history as a cyclical process in which the present collapsed into the past and vice versa. While Freeman repeatedly insisted on the superiority of the so-called ‘Aryans’, a deeper reading shows that he defined race in terms of culture rather than biology and articulated anxieties about decline and recapitulation. Contrasting Freeman’s volumes on Western and Eastern history, this book foregrounds religion as the central category in Freeman’s scheme of universal history. Ultimately, he conceived world-historical development as a battleground between Euro-Christendom and the Judeo-Islamic Orient and feared that the contemporary expansion of the British Empire and contact with the East would prove disastrous.
ruthlessly oppressed their subjects, exploiting the fact that the latter's lowliness rendered them incapable of recognising their own confinement. 2 Russian barbarism, slavery, and Asiatic despotism were repeatedly employed to demonise the country. These traits were said to derive initially from a history of Tatar rule, but it was only a matter of time before Russians themselves came to be viewed as Asians, excluded from the category of the impeccably Aryan white. 3
languages, Orientalist scholars fostered the comparative science of religion and mythology that developed a vision of an Aryan race as the originator of Indian and European culture. 1 The belief in Indo-European origins further spurred European interest in Vedic Aryan sources. Certain Enlightenment thinkers idealised the Vedic past in an attempt to find a utopia outside Europe and as an alternative tradition to that of the Bible. Romantic mythographers not only accepted Aryan genius, but prioritised it. Speculation
This book has attempted a reinterpretation of Edward Freeman, analysing his activities as a historian and political campaigner, and positioning him as a leading public moralist of the Victorian age. Previous scholarship on Freeman has tended to dissect his output, focusing on his celebration of English history and his Aryan racialism, and representing him as a confident proponent of the Whig historiographical tradition which celebrated Western progress. In my opinion, this approach privileges some of Freeman’s ideas above others and gives only a partial
evident most famously in Germany's history of National Socialism and the idea of an ‘Aryan race’. This symbiosis is again made visible in the problem of the ‘non-white’ immigrants to European countries and the US, which reinforces the idea of a white nation (El-Haj, 2007 ; Schinagl, 2019 ). More recently, the focus of citizenship and belonging has been reframed within the language of genomics, as observed by scholars looking at Taiwan (Tsai and Lee, 2020 ), India (Subramaniam, 2019 ), South Africa (Erasmus, 2017 ), and Korea (Gottweis and Kim, 2009 ) within the
of David in September 1941. The actual physical removal of German Jews and other ‘non-Aryans’ from German society began with the first deportations in October 1940. Against the background of these ever-radicalising antisemitic policies it became increasingly difficult for the German Catholic hierarchy to retain their neutral position on the ‘Jewish question’, especially since racial discrimination was a principle the Vatican and the bishops had always rejected in their public statements. Moreover, tens of thousands of ‘non-Aryan’ Catholics would fall victim to
the conference convened. 60 Restructure, antisemitism and non-Aryan refugees If awareness of ICCAJ was raised at Oxford by Paton’s plenary address on the Vienna resolution, it was enhanced even more by the restructuring of the ecumenical movement that the conference launched. Coined as a ‘wholly new fact in Christian history’, Oxford lived up to its image by ushering in the World Council of Churches in Formation (WCCIF). It was unanimously agreed that the two main ecumenical bodies concerned with the churches