Race, Science, and the Nation : Reconstructing the Ancient Past in Britain, France and Germany

Chris Manias

ISBN 10: 0415832993 / ISBN 13: 9780415832991

Published by Taylor & Francis Ltd (Sales) Mai 2013, 2013

About this Item

Neuware - 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.

Seller Inventory # 9780415832991

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Race, Science, and the Nation : Reconstructing the Ancient Past in Britain, France and Germany
• Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd (Sales) Mai 2013
• Publication Date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0415832993
• ISBN 13: 9780415832991
• Binding: Buch
• Condition: Neu
• Dimensions: 229W x 155H x 23D millimeters 229 millimeters width by 155 millimeters height by 23 millimeters depth
• Weight: 544 grams

About this title

Synopsis

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.

About the Author

Chris Manias is Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of Manchester.