The emergence of the Anglo-Saxon

Many academic disciplines contributed to the construction of racial difference within the Anglosphere, which includes Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand,

18 Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (New York:

Knopf, 1985), pp. 3–5; Donald A. MacKenzie, Statistics in Britain, 1865-1930: The Social Construction of Scientific Knowledge (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981), pp. 51–72.

19 These methodological innovations were later integrated into biometrics by Galton’s followers Karl Pearson and Walter Weldon: Kevles, In the Name, pp. 13–40. Examples for Galton’s obsession with measurements include his empirical search for the preparation of the perfect cup of tea, his attempts to measure boredom in audiences, the distribution of beauty in Britain’s counties and his meticulous protocols of his bodily functions. He also discovered the singularity of human fingerprints: Nicholas W. Gillham, A Life of Sir Francis Galton: From African Exploration to the Birth of Eugenics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

20 Francis Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development (London: Macmillan, 1883), p.

17.

21 Richard A. Soloway, Demography and Degeneration: Eugenics and the Declining Birthrate in Twentieth Century Britain (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), pp. 80–85;

William H. Tucker, The Science and Politics of Racial Research (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), pp. 46–49.

South Africa, and the US.²² In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, political struggles had been explained by reputed racial differences between Saxons and Normans. This tradition, according to Reginald Horsman, rendered English and Americans “particularly susceptible to racial explanations of the course of history”.

While American discourses on race centred on the white/non-white binary to justify slavery and westward expansion, an intense discussion about the character of the white race and, in particular, of the English, evolved in Britain in the first half of the nineteenth century. Philologists, political essayists, and historians first and foremost came to reinterpret the English ‘racial essence’. Their analyses provided a

tautological mixture of both historical explanation and proof for the purported Anglo-Saxon superiority, explaining their purported ascent to the highest stage of civilization by genetic predisposition.²³

Historian Edward A. Freeman applied the comparative method to history on a racial basis, characterizing its course as one of continuity instilled by stable characteristics predetermining the history of particular races. In his interpretation, the roots of English political institutions could be found in “the Germany of Tacitus”

where political institutions had already contained “the germs out of which every free constitution in the world has grown”. According to Freeman, the ability for self-government, institutional and constitutional traditions and the drive for expansion were rooted in “principles as old as the days when we got our first sight of our forefathers in their German forests”. These characteristics were shared among “the whole Aryan family of mankind”, a term he used to subsume Angles, Saxons, and Frisians. In Britain, he argued, they had preserved their racial purity and

homogeneity even after the Norman Conquest. Freeman thus equated the history of democratic traditions with mankind’s evolutionary progress, Anglo-Saxons’ cultural and political characteristics formed his evidence for the continuity of racial qualities.

This led him, in the words of Hugh Tulloch, to claim “history as a science which recorded the data of racial progress just as natural science tracked the laws of natural evolution”. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Freeman’s interpretation

22 The concept of the Anglosphere emerged out of political sciences. Despite its foundation on racial theories of the nineteenth century, it is a useful analytic tool: Srdjan Vucetic, The Anglosphere: A Genealogy of a Racialized Identity in International Relations (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), pp. 1–21.

23 Horsman, p. 24; Richard White, ‘Race Relations in the American West’, American Quarterly, 38.3 (1986), 396–416; Patrick Wolfe, ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’, Journal of Genocide Research, 8.4 (2006), 387–409.

would become an important point of reference for historical thinkers and political leaders throughout the Anglosphere. “Saxonism”, Robert Young argues, “was not invented by racial theorists but by historians”.²⁴

By the mid-nineteenth century, this discourse was also used in the racialization of the Irish. Against the backdrop of their struggle, political and historical

commentators began to address differences between white races. Backed by phrenologists such as Robert Knox, the ‘Celtic race’ was described as morally, physically and mentally inferior. These depictions were soon adopted in the US, where Irish immigrants experienced profound discrimination and were frequently compared to or equated with the professedly inferior African Americans.²⁵ In the 1860s, the definition of Englishness slowly began to include all inhabitants of the British Isles. Oxford professor Matthew Arnold argued that the English actually were a hybrid of Saxon and Celtic races, claiming that this amalgamation had been beneficial to racial character. Although this argument only slowly gained ground, the term Anglo-Saxon replaced Saxon as the generic racial reference to the

inhabitants of the British Isles. In the US, it had been used since the 1830s to stress similarities between Americans and Britons.²⁶ This new concept allowed for the inclusion of all white settler colonies in the Anglosphere, praising their drive for expansion and civilizing influence.

One of the examples for the new “Anglo-Saxon triumphalism” was English Liberal Charles Dilke. He published a travelogue with the telling title Greater Britain in 1868 after visiting English-speaking countries around the globe. Anglo-Saxons’ drive for expansion and their racial superiority, he argued, would inevitably lead to the ultimate destruction of the aboriginal peoples in North America,

Australia and New Zealand since the former were “the only extirpating race on Earth”. In his opinion, the invigorating effect of colonization by “Saxon institutions and the English tongue” brought the Anglo-Saxon to the “full possession of his

24 E. A. Freeman, The Growth of the English Constitution from the Earliest Times (London:

Macmillan, 1873), pp. 10–23; Horsman, p. 75; Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men's Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (Carlton: Melbourne University Publishing, 2008), pp. 50–53; Hugh Tulloch, James Bryce’s

American Commonwealth: The Anglo-American Background (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1988), 54:

Royal Historical Society Studies in History, p. 40; Young, p. 31.

25 Ignatiev, pp. esp. 34-59; Jacobson, Different Color, pp. 48–52; Knobel; Young, pp. 13, 71-139.

For Freeman’s anti-Irish attitude see C. J. W. Parker, ‘The Failure of Liberal Racialism: The Racial Ideas of E. A. Freeman’, The Historical Journal, 24.4 (1981), 825–46.

26 Young, pp. 140–87.

powers”.²⁷ Dilke and authors such as John Seeley and James Bryce thus created an Anglo-Saxon identity that was no longer restricted to England itself, but included all white inhabitants of Britain and its colonies. Anglo-Saxon characteristics were described as a mixture of inherent inclinations, traditions of governmental

institutions and cultural attributes that stretched beyond geographical boundaries and could potentially be extended indefinitely, eventually leading to a global Anglo federation.²⁸

The new racial discourse on Anglo-Saxon superiority circulated within the Anglosphere in publications, articles and correspondence. Many scholars also disseminated their findings in other countries through lectures, visits and personal contacts, especially in the US.²⁹ The theme of Anglo-Saxon identity as transnational racial brotherhood served different purposes in particular settings. In Britain, it was used as a justification for imperial expansion and domination of non-white races. In its white settler colonies, the trope of the innate capacity of Anglo-Saxon males for self-government was applied to canvass for more political autonomy from London.

Simultaneously, the history of the US and the slave trade was used as a cautionary tale of the importation of inferior races to argue against non-white immigration and to justify discrimination against aboriginal people.³⁰ In the US itself, the racial

27 Wentworth C. Dilke, Greater Britain: A Record of Travel in English-Speaking Countries During 1866-7 (London: Macmillan, 1869), p. 260; Lake and Reynolds, p. 76; Young, p. 203.

28 Warwick Anderson, ‘Traveling White’, in Re-Orienting Whiteness: Transnational Perspectives on the History of an Identity, ed. by Leigh Boucher, Jane Carey and Katherine Ellinghaus (New York:

Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 65–72 (p. 68); Leigh Boucher, ‘“Whiteness,” Geopolitical

Reconfiguration, and the Settler Empire in Nineteenth-Century Victorian Politics’, in Re-Orienting Whiteness, ed. by Boucher, Carey and Ellinghaus, pp. 45–61 (p. 54); Young, pp. 196–207. For authors adhering to the theory of ‘climacteric deterioration’, this expansion was obviously limited to the temperate zones. The most prominent exception to these optimistic visions was Charles Pearson, who argued the Chinese and other “colored races” would eventually replace Anglo superiority in the world: Charles Pearson, National Life and Character: A Forecast (London: Macmillan, 1894). For Pearson’s significance for political thought in the Anglosphere, see Lake and Reynolds, pp. 75–94.

29 Freeman was invited to Johns Hopkins in 1881 by Herbert Baxter Adams: Edward N. Saveth, American Historians and European Immigrants, 1875-1925 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1948), p. 22. James Bryce, one of Freeman’s scholars and expert on race relations, visited South Africa and Australia, corresponded with Charles Pearson and became British ambassador to the US in 1907: Tulloch, pp. 38–44; Lake and Reynolds, pp. 56-60, 75-77; David Walker, ‘Race Building and the Disciplining of White Australia’, in The Legacies of White Australia: Race, Culture and Nation, ed. by Laksiri Jayasuriya, David Walker and Jan Gothard (Crawley: University of Western Australia Press, 2003), pp. 33–50 (pp. 46–47). For the exchange of racial knowledge between Australia and the US, see Marilyn Lake, ‘White Man's Country: The Trans-National History of a National Project’, Australian Historical Journal, 34.122 (2003), 346–63; Gregory D. Smithers, Science, Sexuality, and Race in the United States and Australia, 1780s-1890s (New York: Routledge, 2009).

30 Horsman, p. 4; Lake and Reynolds, pp. 137–65; Jeremy Martens, ‘A Transnational History of Immigration Restriction: Natal and New South Wales, 1896-97’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 34.3 (2006), 323–44 (pp. 336–44).

discourse was picked up to lay out an argument against Radical Reconstruction and African-American equality.³¹

The adoption of the racial discourse in the US was accompanied by a fundamental transformation of academia that significantly increased the scientific output of the professionalizing and diversifying academic disciplines. According to Foucault, the validity of discursive statements depends on “enunciative modalities”, comprising the authority of the speaker, the cultural and institutional sites where statements are made and the relations between the speaking subjects and their objects of analysis.

Matthew Hannah has argued that these modalities underwent basic alterations in the second half of the nineteenth century, leading to the new figure of the male scientific expert, the modernization of universities, and a governmental subjectivity.³²

American universities were radically transformed to meet international standards and expanded their research and teaching, reflecting the differentiation within the sciences, a more elaborate curriculum and increasing the number of awarded degrees. The scientific output was further increased by academic associations publishing their own journals. These were augmented by a rise in the numbers of popular magazines, providing academics with new opportunities to popularize their findings.³³

31 Norbert Finzsch, Lois E. Horton and James O. Horton, Von Benin nach Baltimore: Die Geschichte der African Americans, (Hamburg: Hamburger Ed, 1999), p. 338; see also Bruce R. Dain, A Hideous Monster of the Mind: American Race Theory in the Early Republic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002).

32 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 50–53; Matthew G. Hannah, Governmentality and the Mastery of Territory in Late Nineteenth Century America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 32: Cambridge Studies in Historical Geography, pp.

60–83.

33 Burton J. Bledstein, The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America (New York: Norton, 1976), pp. 287–331; John S. Brubacher and Willis Rudy, Higher Education in Transition: A History of American Colleges and Universities (New Brunswick: Transaction, 2006), pp. 111-119, 193-197; Hannah, pp. 64–72; Thomas L. Haskell, The Emergence of Professional Social Science: The American Social Science Association and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis of Authority (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977); Jürgen Herbst, ‘Diversification in American Higher Education’, in The Transformation of Higher Learning 1860-1930: Expansion, Diversification, Social Opening and Professionalization in England, Germany, Russia and the United States, ed. by Konrad H. Jarausch (Stuttgart: Klett, 1983), 13:

Historisch-Sozialwissenschaftliche Forschungen, pp. 196–206; Frank L. Mott, 1865-1885 (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1957), 3: A History of American Magazines, pp. 64–69; Dorothy Ross, ‘The Development of the Social Sciences’, in The

Organization of Knowledge in Modern America, 1860-1920, ed. by Alexandra Oleson and John Voss (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), pp. 107–38 (pp. 107–38); Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 19: Ideas in Context, pp. 61–97. The number of graduate students multiplied from a mere eight students in 1850 to 5668 in 1900.

A new generation of intellectuals applied the Anglo-Saxon discourse to the US. One of the most prominent figures was John Fiske, the best-selling historian of his generation, “leading philosopher of Social Darwinism” and “the most important popularizer of the Anglo-Saxon legend”.³⁴ Fiske interpreted history as the progress of the “Aryan” race, while non-white races supposedly represented lower, but universal, stages of development. In his logic, this was the outcome of differing racial compositions since “the capability of progress [...] is by no means shared alike by all races of men”.³⁵ As an admirer of Freeman, Fiske extended the former’s approach to America, arguing that emigration and detrimental living conditions had further refined the race’s qualities. The natural selection occurring in the emigration of the “sturdiest part of the English stock” to the US and the “complete homogeneity of race”, he argued, had led to New England’s preponderance in American history.

Fiske was convinced that North-western Europeans could be assimilated by white Americans since the latter possessed the “rare capacity for absorbing slightly foreign elements and moulding them into conformity with political type”. American history, Fiske argued, could be compared to “every land where English men have set their feet as masters”, since the Anglo-Saxons’ racial characteristics predetermined them to rule “every land on the earth’s surface that is not already the seat of an old civilization”.³⁶

Fiske was no exception in the application of Anglo triumphalism.

Distinguished scholars such as William Graham Sumner, Francis Parkman, Herbert Baxter Adams and Hubert Howe Bancroft agreed with Fiske on innate Anglo-Saxon qualities purportedly demonstrated by the course of history.³⁷ The idea that

Americans were meant to take up the civilizing mission because of their racial

34 Donald K. Pickens, Eugenics and the Progressives (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1968), p. 16; Solomon, p. 62. For Fiske, see also Adams, pp. 202–06; Michael D. Clark, ‘The Empire of the Dead and the Empire of the Living: John Fiske and the Spatialization of Tradition’, American Studies, 38.3 (1997), 91–107 (p. 92); Hofstadter, Social Darwinism, pp. 19–24; Saveth, pp. 32–42.

35 John Fiske, ‘The Progress from Brute to Man’, North American Review, October (1873), 251–319 (pp. 255, 260-261).

36 John Fiske, The Beginnings of New England or the Puritan Theocracy in its Relation to Civil and Religious Liberty (Boston; New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1899), pp. 143–44; John Fiske, American Political Ideas Viewed From the Standpoint of Universal History: Three Lectures Delivered at the Royal Institution of Great Britain in May, 1880 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1911), pp. 97, 113, 135;

Clark, pp. 98–99; Saveth, p. 41.

37 Hannaford, pp. 336–37; Saveth, pp. 21-22, 95-111; Pat Shipman, The Evolution of Racism: Human Differences and the Use and Abuse of Science (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), p. 110. For Sumner’s role in modernizing Yale University, see Ross, Origins, p. 63.

identity was also put forward in 1890 by John W. Burgess, a renowned professor at Columbia University and founder of Political Science Quarterly. In his opinion, the US as a “Teutonic nation” was “particularly endowed with the capacity for

establishing national states” and thus had to fulfil the “mission of conducting the political civilization of the modern world”. Within the US, however, the exercise of political power should not be regarded as a right of man, but only came with racial qualifications “based upon capacity”.³⁸ Another prominent historian who

contributed to the racial knowledge was Nathaniel Shaler, teaching at Harvard. He frequently addressed the problems putatively caused by the multiracial composition of the US, as did his colleague Henry Adams.³⁹ Shaler stated that guidance provided by Anglo-Saxons could harness the “imitative faculties” of America’s “lower races”

– which in his view included African Americans, Native Americans and Asians.⁴⁰ In an article published in 1893, Shaler extended his racial hierarchy to “European peasants” arriving in America “essentially in the same state as the Southern negro”.

For Shaler, it was more than doubtful whether the new immigrants could ever rise to Anglo-Saxon standards. Therefore, immigration put nothing less than the future of country and race at stake:

Compare the origin and nurture of these freemen with those of the ordinary laborers of Europe […]. The American commonwealth would have never been founded if the first European colonists had been of peasant stock. It is doubtful whether it can be maintained if its preservation comes to depend on such men.⁴¹

Shaler’s statement indicates that the racial discourse became increasingly important in discussions about new immigration and its consequences; it would provide the crucial tool for the racialization of new groups in the US.

38 John W. Burgess, Political Science and Comparative Constitutional Law: Volume 1: Sovereignty and Liberty (New York: Baker & Taylor, 1890), pp. 44–45. On Burgess’s influence on Bryce, see Marilyn Lake, ‘The White Man under Siege: New Histories of Race in the Nineteenth Century and the Advent of White Australia’, History Workshop Journal, 58.Autumn (2004), 41–62 (pp. 53–57).

39 Lee D. Baker, From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896-1954 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), pp. 45–48. On Henry Adams, see George Cotkin, Reluctant Modernism: American Thought and Culture, 1880-1900 (New York: Twayne, 1992), pp.

132–34; Solomon, pp. 23–41; Garry Wills, Henry Adams and the Making of America (Boston:

Houghton Mifflin, 2005).

40 Nathaniel S. Shaler, The Neighbor: The Natural History of Human Contacts (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1904), pp. 120-121, 185. Shaler’s paternalistic view followed Southern traditions of legitimizing slavery due to its allegedly civilizing effect on slaves.

41 Nathaniel S. Shaler, ‘European Peasants as Immigrants’, Atlantic Monthly, May (1893), 646–55 (pp. 649–55).