Over the centuries – even in the present – how have the people living in Europe developed a separate “European” identity by contrasting themselves with an external (and/or internal) “other”, defined religiously, culturally, racially, or any other way?
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StockRacialThoughtandtheIdeaofEuropeinBritain1771-1830.docx“Almost a Separate Race”: Racial Thought and the Idea of Europe in British Encyclopedias and Histories, 1771-1830
Paul Stock
Modern Intellectual History , 8 (1), 2011
This essay explores the association between racial thought and the idea of Europe in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Britain. It begins by noting the complexities surrounding the word “race” in this period, before considering whether contemporary race thinkers identified a single “European race” or “races”. The essay then discusses how British encyclopedias, histories and geographies reveal increasing interest in the delineation of European identities, an interest that emerges partly from long-standing eighteenth-century debates about the categorization and comprehension of human difference. In addition, they show the diffusion of racial ideas in non-specialist media, foreshadowing the growing prominence of racial thought in the later nineteenth century.
The Concept of “Race”
To talk of “race” in this period is itself complex and controversial, principally because the term had a number of meanings in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. According to Nicholas Hudson, it most commonly referred to “family lines, lineage, extraction . . . or breeds of animal”, and thus had both dynastic and classificatory connotations. “Races” — that is, lines of descent or groups of peoples — could be “identified and signified through religion, custom, language, climate aesthetics and historical time, as much as physiognomy and skin colour”. For this reason, conceptions of “race” were intertwined with ideas about politics and nation: they “occupied overlapping if not identical cultural and political terrains . . . used to distinguish groups by lineage, common descent or origin and to identify political, social and territorial particularity”. Roxann Wheeler speaks of the “elasticity of race” in the eighteenth century. In particular, she warns against anachronistic and essentialist understandings of “race” as a set of fixed physical characteristics. The word “ethnic”, for instance, originally meant “heathen, ungodly, irreligious”, which emphasizes the importance of religious belief and social practice in distinguishing and categorizing different peoples.
Eighteenth and early nineteenth-century thinkers were thus preoccupied by the tenuous opposition between nature and society, the innate and the acquired, especially the related problems of how supposedly “natural” characteristics could change, and how acquired behaviours and qualities could come to seem innate. In this sense, ideas about manners and society were ambiguously interconnected with notions of inheritance and non-acquired “essence”. Eighteenth century investigations of human difference indicate that ideas about “culture” and “biology” do not occupy separate domains, and that they develop in relation to one another. Indeed, given its close relationship with notions of lineage and bloodline, the language of “race” could simultaneously connote class, dynasty and societal organization, as well as biological “blood ties” or essence inherited through physical relations.
Often these variable understandings of human difference coexist in the same text. In The Spirit of the Laws, for instance, Montesquieu uses the word “race” to make distinctions between social systems across different periods. The “first race” refers to those Franks who followed Frankish and Roman law: “the country that today one calls France was governed under the first race by Roman law, or the Theodosian code, and by the various laws of the barbarians who lived there.” The “second race” allowed these legal structures to decline amidst the rise of fiefdoms: “The Salic [Frankish], Burgundian and Visigothic laws were therefore extremely neglected at the end of the second race”. Montesquieu thus uses “race” in an administrative and legal sense, though the term also carries dynastic connotations and hence the implications of lineage and (royal) blood. The most recent English translators now render “first race” as “Merovingian” and “second race” as “Carolingian” in order to foreground these undertones. Indeed, in distinguishing between peoples — for example, Franks and Romans — who are subject to different laws according to apparent provenance, Montesquieu identifies human groups based upon reputed “descent”. Elsewhere in The Spirit of the Laws, he classifies peoples according to physical characteristics, which in turn indicates their innate “nature”, in this case Africans:
Those concerned are black from head to toe, and they have such a flat nose, that it is almost impossible to feel sorry for them. . . . It is so natural to think that colour constitutes the essence of humanity . . . It is impossible for us to assume that these people are men.
For Montesquieu, therefore, physical appearance can still facilitate the physical, moral and intellectual categorization of different peoples. In turn, the prospect of these classificatory practices allows the potential identification of a “European race” or races.
“European” Race(s)
How, then, did eighteenth-century thinkers identify European “race(s)”? Broadly speaking, this question encompasses two eighteenth-century debates about human origins and difference. First, it is a part of the monogenesis–polygenesis enquiry into human origins: the scholarly and religious debate about whether humanity is a single species, or whether there are many human species that were created separately. Second, it incorporates related disputes about the extent to which human differences are essentially fixed and unchanging, or whether other factors, such as climate, migration or social structures, can cause diverse human groups to develop and alter over time.
In his Systema naturae (1735) Carl von Linné (Linnaeus) simply divides humans into four groups corresponding to continents (americanus, europaeus, asiaticus and afer), as well as giving a fifth category, monstrosus, which includes giants and other extraordinary varieties. However, these are not straightforwardly geographical distinctions, since they can be distinguished by physical features (especially skin colour), personality, behavior and intellect, as well as by their preferred system of government. Europeans, for example, have white skin, are “intelligent” and “inventive” and are governed by “law”, whereas the asiaticus are “melancholy”, “greedy” and ruled by “opinion” (for example by the lawless will of a despot). Linné’s system therefore distinguishes between people according to several criteria: geographical location, societal differences (e.g. in governmental system) and “natural” non-acquired characteristics. To describe someone as a “European”, therefore, is not only to specify their location and to describe their social system, it is also to make assertions about their disposition, moral conduct and intelligence. From such a basis, it is possible to hypothesize a “European race” in which certain shared mental and physical characteristics are enduringly consistent.
In 1749, Linné’s antagonist Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon insisted that there is “only one species of man” and that varieties have emerged “by the influence of climate, by differences of food, by manner of living, by epidemic diseases, and also by the varied mixing of infinite individuals more or less alike”. In other words, human varieties develop through a combination of environmental factors and hereditary influences. Furthermore, different groups — sometimes referred to by the word “race” — are identifiable by both physical appearance and social practice: “they resemble each other in form, in height, in colour, in manners, and even in peculiarity of customs”. Using these criteria, Buffon includes “les peuples de l’Europe” among a wider category of people “who live in a most temperate climate”, comprising Moguls (Indians), Persians, Armenians, Turks, Greeks and others. This might seem to challenge the idea of a uniquely European “race” by including European peoples into a broader grouping defined by climatological factors, nevertheless, he still occasionally makes undeveloped remarks about the distinctiveness of different European peoples: “it is easy to distinguish a Spaniard from all the other European nations”. More significantly, Buffon asserts that the “temperate peoples” are “the most beautiful, the most white and the most well made of all the earth”. This opens a significant connection between aesthetic judgement and the categorization of humans. In other words, the physical beauty or ugliness of an individual could not only reflect their own “interior moral being”, it could also reveal the generalized qualities of whole peoples. In this way, for Buffon, the identification of a “European” is a matter of physical form, aesthetic evaluation, and spatial and environmental designation.
Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, the most influential theorist of human variety in the late eighteenth century, also identified a human category particular to Europe. In De generis humani varietate native (1775), he identified four “classes of inhabitants”, later adding a fifth class in the second edition (1781):
The first of these and the largest, which is also the primeval one, embraces the whole of Europe, including the Lapps, whom I cannot in any way separate from the rest of the Europeans . . . and that western part of Asia, which lies towards us, this side of the Obi [River], the Caspian Sea, Mount Taurus, and the Ganges; also north Africa; and lastly, in America, the Greenlanders and Esquimaux, for I see in these people a wonderful difference from the other inhabitants of America. . . . All these nations, regarded as a whole, are white in colour, and, if compared with the rest, beautiful in form.
In the third edition of this work (1795), Blumenbach labels this group “Caucasian” (the other 4 were Mongolian, Ethiopian, American and Malay). Blumenbach describes white people as one variety who inhabit the whole geographical space of Europe. But this variety cannot be described in any straightforward way as “European”, because it encompasses people from outside the continent. Moreover, Blumenbach suggests that “the cradle of the human race lay in the Caucasus whence the species had dispersed over the globe, climactic differences bringing about human variations”. In other words, he argues for the unified origins of the human race by refusing to identify separate human species, while simultaneously asserting the aesthetic and historical primacy of one particular variation. In this respect, Blumenbach strives to demonstrate the original unity of all human peoples, while also legitimizing the separation of those peoples into various groups. By definition, Blumenbach’s theory could not imply the permanency of differences, since it was premised upon deviation from an original norm. Nevertheless, his categorizations downplay variety within groups in order to underscore “distinctions between groups”, an implication that could encourage a “larger effort to fix racial types”.
In the mid-eighteenth century, Pierre-Louise Moreau de Maupertuis had begun to explore the problems of biological inheritance. He concluded that some unknown biological mechanism causes characteristics to be passed on through the generations and he also realized that, in animals and birds, certain natural variations could be deliberately bred and accentuated to create creatures with slightly different characteristics. But how do such variations arise? Maupertuis speculated that environmental factors have an influence:
I do not exclude the possible influence of climate and food. It would seem that the heat of the torrid zone is more favourable to the particles that compose black skin than to those that make up white skin. And I simply do not know how far this kind of influence of climate and food may go after many centuries.
For Maupertuis, then, environmental circumstances give rise to variations that then become hereditary: “It is only by some accident that black has become a hereditary colour in the great families which populate the torrid zone”. William Lawrence (1833) follows a similar line of thinking: humans are of one species, but have undergone changes “by the influence of climate, food, mode of living, epidemic diseases”. Like Maupertuis, Lawrence fuses environmentalism with hereditary biology, proposing a solution based on “race”, which he uses in the sense of “congenital variety of a single species”. Thus there are three “races” in Europe: Celts, Germans and Slavs, all part of the same species, but congenitally different from one another. Races are distinct in a moral sense too: the Negro disposition is “cruel and barbarous”, although Lawrence is undecided whether this is a cause or an effect of congenital variation. For him, it is entirely legitimate to speak of a single human species and culturally and biologically distinct races.
A related idea is evident in James Cowles Prichard’s Researches into the Physical History of Man (1813). He speaks of “Negroes” and “Europeans” as dissimilar variations of a single human species. This “obvious gradation” is identifiable “in the shape of the skull, from the European to the Negro, bearing a ratio to the degree of colour”. However, such physical variation is dependent upon circumstantial influences: “in races which are experiencing the effects of civilisation, a temperate climate increases the tendency to the light variety [of skin colour]”. In other words, the development of (European) civilization directly causes physical variation. In the same way that “local causes” form new “races” from existing animal species — for example, white mice will be produced if their parents are kept in the dark — so too do new human varieties emerge from changes in social organization. For this reason, the original pair were black, and “the progress of nature has been the gradual transmutation from the Negro to the European . . . whenever we see any progress towards civilization, there we also find deviation towards a lighter colour”. Humans change according to environmental and societal circumstances, but then settle into hereditary (and thus near permanent) differences of intellect, cultural refinement and physical appearance. Those consolidated differences, in turn, facilitate further distinctive change: “the influence of moral causes in modifying the efficacy of natural causes is . . . very considerable”. Prichard’s ideas act as a bridge between social and biological theories of difference: culture and climate initiate change, but also legitimize the distinction and description of various congenital “races”.
For Prichard, the primary intellectual challenge is to maintain an orthodox monogenetic perspective while still adequately explaining human difference. Polygenesis offers a different solution, though it still encompasses similar questions about climate and human adaptability. In 1778 Lord Kames, for instance, used “race” in the sense of “species”: there are many distinct human races, he says, each “fitted for different climates” and with different “tempers and dispositions”. These “races” are permanently hereditary and do not change according to social or spatial factors: a European can “for years expose himself to the sun in a hot climate, till he be quite brown, [but] his children will nevertheless have the same complexion with those in Europe”. In this way, Kames reconfigures climatological arguments: human forms and behaviours are not shaped by climates; instead humans are created with different appearances and qualities in order to fit particular environments better. Unlike Prichard, Kames separates human categories absolutely: there is no possibility of change and a limited capacity for interaction between races. Horses, he suggests, can breed together, because they are of “one kind”. But “men are not all of one kind; for if a White mix with a Black” the result will be “a mongrel breed differing from both parents”. Kames’ theories make “European” into a distinctive biological category, identified principally by skin colour and other physical features.
Polygenesis, of course, remained a relatively unorthodox theory, not least because it contradicted the Christian Genesis creation story. It still held appeal, however, for thinkers looking to justify imperialism by reference to supposed differences between humans. In his History of Jamaica (1774), for example, Edward Long edges towards polygenesis when he suggests,
When we reflect on the nature of [black people], and their dissimilarity to the rest of mankind, must we not concluded that they are a different species of the same genus? . . . Every member of the creation is wisely fitted and adapted to their certain uses, and confined within their certain bounds.
Long insists on permanent and innate differences in physical appearance, and social and intellectual capacity: black people, he says, are “void of genius, and seem incapable of making any progress in civility or science”, an assumption that legitimizes their exploitation by purportedly superior Europeans.
Most racial thinkers, however, step back from the unconventional doctrinal implications of polygenesis. John Bigland, writing in 1816, suggests that “race” — in the sense of “bodily and mental faculties . . . perpetuated in hereditary descent”, such as “strength, courage, genius and other gifts of nature” — is a more accurate way of dividing peoples than social custom, since “we are sometimes unable to discover any difference in government, laws or religion”. Accordingly, he decides that “Europeans . . . are a visible distinction of race” in comparison to Asiatics, Africans and Americans, although, in a nod to orthodoxy, it is “not improbable” that all are descended from Noah. However, he immediately admits that “among the European nations . . . all distinctions of race, which might once have existed, are long since confounded” — Greeks and Romans are a mixture of Egyptians, Phoenicians and Celts; Franks and Saxons a blend of Gauls, Celts, Britons and Normans. Bigland proposes an overarching European identity, but then instantly collapses this into competing factions. Despite his own principle not to divide by social custom, he also uses civilizations (“Greek”, “Roman”) as the foundation for racial groupings, a strategy that shows how, for Bigland and other racial thinkers, societal and essential differences between peoples are interdependent and mutually illuminating.
In summary, then, discussion of human difference — and the identification of “European” people — is related to several recurring and interlocking debates about human “nature”, hereditary qualities, climatic influence and aesthetic judgements.
Encyclopedias and the “European Race”
The questions under dispute during this period — particularly whether there are specifically European forms of behaviour and physical appearance — were not restricted to specialist works but also received serious attention in review magazines and books targeted at a general readership. British encyclopedias completed between 1771 and 1830 show how certain racial ideas about “Europe” and “Europeans” were disseminated in general reference texts. In their articles on “Europe”, some encyclopedias argue that Europeans can be considered collectively as a distinctive human variety. The second edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica (1777-84) declares that European “inhabitants are all white; and incomparably more handsome than the Africans, and even most of the Asians”, echoing the aesthetic arguments of Buffon and others. The English Encyclopaedia (1802) proclaims that Europeans “are much better made than the Africans, or even the Asiatics”, which implies a distinctiveness and superiority from the moment of creation rather than acquired advantages. Due to vagaries of vocabulary, it is not always clear whether these texts are arguing, in the polygenist manner, for a separate European race or for a distinctive subdivision of the whole human race. Either way, the articles identify unique physical features particular to Europeans (skin colour, physical beauty).
Crucially, however, this identification often accompanies an assertion of social superiority. The Edinburgh Encyclopaedia (1808-30) suggests that European “progress in knowledge and arts raised them above the inhabitants of other divisions, that they seem almost a separate race”. The key word here is “almost”, for shortly afterwards the writer reiterates the monogenist theory that the human race emerged from Asia and that all peoples are traceable to the same genesis. In this respect, he is working firmly within established traditions that lent Asia Minor and the Caucasus the status of man’s origin: not only was it the apocryphal location of the Garden of Eden, Jason’s quest for the Golden Fleece and Prometheus’ punishment by Zeus, it was also the reputed place where the Ark came to rest, and was hence the wellspring for the repopulation of the world by Noah’s sons. Yet the Edinburgh Encyclopaedia does not believe that all these descendents have the same innate capabilities: Europeans excel in “activity of mind”, and this has enabled them to attain the “most perfect form”. For this encyclopedia, therefore, Europeans’ mental and moral advantages facilitate their social advances, which in turn leads to further “progress in knowledge”. The Modern Encyclopaedia (1816-20) repeats the Britannica’s suggestion that Europeans are “incomparably . . . handsome”. Additionally, “Europeans surpass [Africans and Asians] in arts and sciences . . . in trade, navigation, and in military and civil affairs, being, at the same time, more prudent, more valiant, more generous, more polite and more sociable”. Similarly, the Encyclopaedia Edinensis (1816-27) declares that in Europe “the state of civilisation, of science, literature, arts, military tactics, and commercial enterprise, is more perfect, and on a more extensive scale . . . and the moral character more dignified and pure than any other quarter of the globe”.
Moral qualities (valour, generosity) are associated with the advantages of an allegedly superior civil system. In this respect, “European” does not just denote a kind of society or behavioural code, it also signifies a type of person: these texts fuse together developmental progress with the concept of an unchanging European nature: Europeans have distinguished themselves through their “inborn faculties” or “natural abilities” and the sociological application of those talents. The roots of this fusion are evident in eighteenth-century geographical works. The 1747 Complete System of Geography claims that Europeans have asserted themselves through social triumphs (military conquests, “scholastic sciences”, “the invention and improvement of many useful and ingenious Arts”) and their innate “genius”. In the eighteenth century the word “genius” meant, amongst other things, “natural ability or capacity”, “natural aptitude” and “characteristic disposition” of a person or people. Europeans, in other words, have distinguished themselves in both “genius and industry” — through their “inborn faculties” or “natural abilities” and the application of those talents. These two factors are intimately connected: pre-eminent civic structures reveal the capabilities of “genius” and those same social forms enable the demonstration of further innate brilliance.
As with the racial thinkers examined above, these accounts reveal an attempt to integrate “innate” and “acquired” qualities in identifying “Europeans”. Britannica’s fourth edition (1800-09) proclaims that the “benevolent Parent of the universe” granted Europeans “greater bodily vigour and intellectual strength”. This implies that Europeans have always been more intelligent, vigorous and advanced, because they were created that way. However, it also describes the long European drive towards progress in “diffusion of knowledge, the extension of industry and the civilisation of manners”. “Europe” is thus understood partly as a developmental process of ideas, conventions, discussions and discoveries, and partly as a static entity, granted certain benefits by God. Europeans are both dynamic participants in a superior social network, the agents and subjects of “progress”, and unchanging created beings, made with specific characteristics or advantages that are never lost. As well as revealing divergent ideas about “Europeans”, this tension also reflects broader eighteenth-century debates about how to understand human difference in terms of societal participation, developmental progress, and unchanging “natural” qualities.
As part of this wider debate, other works explore how “racial” notions of Europe interact with ideas about space and migration. In his System of Geography (1777), Charles Middleton suggested that “when the Asiatics and African regions became the seats of tyranny and despotism”, more “liberally-disposed” Asian and African peoples migrated “northwards and sought for that liberty in less prolific climates”. For this reason, “Europe, the less extensive and wealthy, became more polished and powerful than the other two parts of the world”. The theory is dependent upon essential difference: early Europeans were distinguished from ordinary Asians by their “liberal” disposition and were thus distinct even before they moved into European space. When Middleton says that Europeans are “better made” or that in Europe “the human mind has made the greatest progress”, he means that their innate abilities have inclined them towards particular social systems: Europeans were identifiable long before “Europe” became a social or spatial term.
The Dictionary of Arts and Sciences (1806-07) also identifies dispositional differences between Asians and Europeans. Having concluded that no obvious spatial boundary between Asia and Europe exists, the distinction is instead “ethical, as the manners of the Asiatic subjects of Russia, and even Turkey, differ considerably from those of the European inhabitants”. This might seem to suggest contrasting forms of customary behaviour, but in fact the implication is more complex. According to the author, Asian and European peoples in the same community or locale still behave differently, which suggests that Asian and European “manners” are partly related to dispositional and not just circumstantial factors. In this sense, the words “Asian” and “European” signal capabilities and behaviours not fully explicable by social or geographical context — an implicit rejection of environmental theories of difference.
Like some of the texts above, the 1824 Supplement to Britannica suggests that European denotes mental capacity:
It is only in Europe . . . that the powers of the human mind . . . have developed that principle of progressive improvement . . . . It is only in Europe that knowledge and the arts seem to be indigenous. Though they have appeared at times among some of the nations of Asia, they have either stopped short after advancing a few steps, or they have speedily retrograded and perished, like something foreign to the genius of the people.
These sentences postulate that European social achievements depend upon inherent capabilities not possessed by other peoples. Moreover, they imply that “European” is a single “racial” category: Europeans can be identified as a collective because they all have broadly similar “indigenous” talents. In this sense, therefore, “European” alludes to a person’s “nature”, and not just their circumstances or acquired skills. Later, however, it talks of the “different races of inhabitants” of Europe, distinguishing them by “language, manners or physical constitution”. Southwestern Europeans are, for instance, naturally “more inventive and less persevering”. This establishes a Europe in which a variety of distinct tribal groups compete with one another, weakening the racial totality formerly implied. The Supplement thus presents conflicting understandings of Europe’s people: are they “by nature” alike, or driven to competition because they are essentially distinct?
Encyclopedias and the “Europe of Many Races”
Many encyclopedia articles reject the idea of a single European people in order to identify competing ethnic groups in “Europe”. These works use the word “European” to refer collectively to all these groups, not to mark out a single European “race”. This usage invests the idea of Europe with spatial connotations: dissimilar groups are connected only because they share the same space. Several works argue that there are three “ancient peoples of Europe”: Celts, Finns and Laplanders. Subsequently, these tribes were pushed westwards by migrating Asians, specifically Goths and “Sclavonics” (Slavs). The encyclopedias seek to build divergent European identities on these movements and confrontations: “European” alludes both to a complex ethnographic mixture caused by millennia of such interactions and to distinct groupings identifiable throughout history and in the modern period.
These analyses bear significant resemblance to the racial ideas of the historian and geographer John Pinkerton. The encyclopedias employ the theory, expressed in Pinkerton’s Modern Geography (1802), that most modern Europeans are descended from Asian Goths (also known as Scythians). This was not in itself a unique hypothesis: the idea that the human race originated in Asia, and that Noah’s son Japhet fathered peoples who migrated westwards, became relatively conventional in the early eighteenth century. Pinkerton, however, disconnects this premise from its monogenist, theological connotations. His thesis is outlined most fully in A Dissertation on the Origin and Progress of the Scythians or Goths, which identifies four “Grand Races of Men” in ancient Europe: Celts (“who were to the other races of men what the savages of America are to the Europeans”), Iberi (“who had passed from Africa”), Sarmatae or Sclavonics (who occupied Russia and Poland) and Goths–Scythians, who are the founders of nearly all European societies (including Greece and Rome). These reflections place heavy emphasis on migration since only one people, the Celts, are indigenous to European space. He also speaks explicitly about biological categories, not social groups:
The Scythians were neither Celts, Sarmartians, nor Tartars, no more than a horse is an elephant, a lion or a tiger. . . . A Tartar, a Negro, an American, &c., differ as much from a German, as a bull-dog, or lap-dog, from a pointer. The differences are radical; and such as no climate or chance would produce.
These theories edge towards polygenism: “the author of nature . . . gave various races of men as inhabitants of several countries” — in other words, each human variety was created separately to suit particular circumstances.
Pinkerton himself confirmed that these unorthodox views derived indirectly from “ancient accounts”. The Scythians were a familiar presence in classical texts. Furthermore, because their traditional homeland in the Caucasus was the reputed place where the waters of the flood receded, the Scythians were necessarily one of the most ancient peoples on earth from whom others derived. Importantly, too, Tacitus’ Germania had legitimized a connection between German peoples and the ancient Scythians and Sarmatians of central Asia: his account of German society and behavior closely matches Herodotus’ much earlier descriptions of the Scythians. Later, in the sixth century, Jordanes and Isidore of Seville amplified this relationship, arguing that Scythians and German Goths shared a common ancestry and that they had populated all Europe following widespread migrations. “From this time onwards”, says James Johnson, “the Scythian enjoyed new glory as the parent of virtually every nation in Europe”.
It would be misleading, of course, to ascribe uniformity to these various retellings of Scythian–Gothic ancestry. Jordanes, for example, argued that the Scythians derived from Scandinavia and moved from there to central Asia. Furthermore, there was significant controversy regarding the relationship of the Scythians to other ancient groups. Scythians and Celts were often conflated, creating what Colin Kidd calls “a recipe for ethnological confusion”. In his Germania antique (1616) Philip Cluverius grouped Scythians and Celts together, but, unlike Tacitus, distinguished them sharply from the Sarmatians or Slavs. By contrast, Leibniz separated Celtic–Germans from Scythian–Slavs. Despite these bewildering complexities, caused partly by vague and shifting terminologies, the Scythian–Gothic theory has one particularly significant implication. By assuming that most peoples in Europe are traceable to a common (biblical) ancestry, the theory presumes that Europeans are closely interrelated. In the eighteenth century, it was therefore possible to speak about “Europe’s shared Gothic origins”: “historians agreed that most of the political nations of Europe shared common ethnic origins. The people of Europe, they argued, were largely the descendants of “libertarian Gothic peoples”. Furthermore, the Scythians’ migrations even posited connections between European and Asian peoples: eighteenth-century travellers and geographers even associated the Chinese with the “ancient Scythians”.
These implications make Pinkerton’s use of the Scythian–Gothic theory all the more startling. His identification of Europe’s Gothic heritage is motivated not by a straightforward conception of European racial unity, but by a virulent distaste for Celts and an urge to account for the separate derivation of European peoples. In contrast with earlier thinkers, he firmly separates Scythians–Goths from Celts, arguing that the former, in the guise of Picts and Saxons, displaced the barbaric Celts in England and lowland Scotland. This has an Anglophile purpose in that Pinkerton tries to blur the differences between Lowland Scots and the English, and to sharpen differences between Highlanders and Lowlanders among the Scots. However, Pinkerton also asserts the intractable racial diversity of peoples in Europe. He speculates that “there are many races of men of quite different form and attribute” and the supposition that all races of men descended from one parent “is as absurd as to suppose that an ass may become a horse, or an ouran-outan”.
What makes Pinkerton remarkable is that he takes the Scythian–Gothic idea – with its implications of common origins – and combines it with explicit polygenesis to argue for absolute and unchanging biological distinctions between different peoples in Europe. Versions of this basic thesis — the displacement of Celts by migrating Goths — were reproduced in mainstream reference encyclopedias well into the nineteenth century. The theory’s dissemination lends an underlying ambiguity as to whether, in identifying different groups, the encyclopedias are arguing for variations of a single European race or for distinctive and separate groups. The problem is heightened because Pinkerton’s ideas both confirm and unsettle the principle of European racial totality. He argues that one race has shaped Europe above all others: the Goths are “the real foundation of almost all European nations”. But he also shows how migration and social interaction complicate this apparent wholeness. If, as Modern Geography asserts, Slavs and Scythians originated in Asia, then the racial, social and linguistic identities of Europe are consequently the result of migrating Asians. Clearly, this complicates any racial definition of Europe, suggesting that spatial movement and inhabitancy – rather than intrinsic abilities – make one European.
Pinkerton’s formulation is not the only vision of a divided Europe. Fenning and Collyer’s New System of Geography (1765-66) investigates how different nations behave according to “manners and disposition”, a phrase that suggests the interdependency of socially acquired and innate differences. For this reason, when they discuss “Saxons, Picts and Britons” in ancient England, the distinctions are simultaneously social (related to cultural mannerisms) and dispositional (innate). The 1747 Complete System also identifies differences between states — Frenchmen, for example, are “brisk, gay and airy” and the British are naturally brave, as if Britishness is an ancient trait, extant before the state existed and thus not entirely traceable to social development. Importantly, this assertion connects racial identity with political states, suggesting that inhabitants of different state systems are essentially distinct from one another. The Complete System devotes considerable space to formulating complex racial histories, making differentiations based on complexion and mythological origins (for example, descent from Noah, which might imply the unity of humankind). Paradoxically, however, the work also stresses the multiplicity of “ethnic” groups within one country: modern Britain, for example, contains Celts, Britons, Saxons, Danes, Picts, Irishmen and Welshmen. Faced with this vast array of different peoples, the work makes no categorical distinction between Asians and Europeans: there are so many “racial” groups that it is a hopeless generalization to speak of dichotomous Asian or European ethnicities.
European Languages, European Races
Thus far this article has demonstrated the complexities of “Europe” in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as a racial category but the identification of multiple European “races” in the period also closely matches the philological categorization of language families. Some thinkers, Pinkerton among them, sought to establish connections between language and racial origins. Discussing the development of nineteenth-century philology, H. F. Augstein notes how linguistic theories were employed to justify rivalries between ancient races: Franks and Gauls in France, Anglo-Saxons and Celts in Britain. In the early 1830s, J. G. Lockhart used Ernst Jäkel’s The Germanic Origin of the Latin Language and the Roman Peoples (1831) to identify five “races” or “nations of Christendom” in Europe based on language: Celts, Teutons (Germans), Sclavonics, Laplanders/Finns and Greeks/Romans. Mid-eighteenth-century works favour a sixfold partition: the Complete System and Middleton and William Guthrie’s New System of Modern Geography all list Greek, Latin, Teutonic, Celtic, Slavonic and Gothic as the principal language groups. Early nineteenth-century encyclopedias, however, generally prefer three such “language families”: Latin, Teutonic and Slavonic.
Classification of languages closely follows the terms used to differentiate “races”. The same terminology is therefore used to identify intrinsically distinct human groups and developmental social characteristics like language: acquired characteristics and essentialist ideas about “nature” are seen in terms of one another. The Encyclopaedia Londinensis, for example, defines “European” as both “an inhabitant” and “a native” of Europe, suggesting that “Europeanness” is both hereditary and socially acquired. Such apparent conceptual tension is partly a reflection of an eighteenth-century intellectual environment in which Maupertuis, Lawrence and others saw social causation and inherited “essence” as inseparably (though mysteriously) interdependent. In other words, it was possible for environmental or societal factors to indicate, or even cause, “essential” hereditary characteristics, and for innate disposition to define social development.
This explains why it made sense in this period to connect discussions of “race” with analysis of language. For Prichard, ethnological theories of human variety could be supplemented and refined by linguistic study: “the history of languages was the key to the history of the human species”. Pinkerton’s methodology in the Dissertation is also very revealing, since he distinguishes and delineates racial groups (especially Goths from Celts and Slavs) according to “identity of language”, “familiar manners” and “the testimony of ancient authors”. Later he claims that “language is a most permanent matter, not even total revolution in nations can change it.” This highlights how eighteenth-century racial thought believed that human societal developments and essential qualities were, to some extent, defined by one another, and that “race” can be extrapolated from language.
However, by closely associating “essential” characteristics with language and other societal developments, early racial ideas also potentially legitimize later nineteenth-century nationalist discourses about the unbridgeable divides between speakers of different languages. Maurice Olender notes that by the mid-eighteenth-century “it had become impossible to speak of nations or national histories without discussing the instrument with which they maintained their identity over time and conveyed ancestral values from generation to generation: namely language”. By the later nineteenth century, Olender continues, “comparative philology frequently neglected history”; it regarded linguistic systems as “rigid structures that could not be eroded by time” and through which one could “stereotype” civilizations and behaviour. The connection between language and permanent human difference culminated in the idea of the “linguistic race”, where biological categories were identified by language, “intellectual aptitude” and “moral instinct”, rather than by physical features. Ideas about the Indo-European language family, for example, would eventually mutate into theories about the “white race”.
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