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    History, empire, and Islam: E. A. Freeman and Victorian public morality
    History, empire, and Islam: E. A. Freeman and Victorian public morality
    History, empire, and Islam: E. A. Freeman and Victorian public morality
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    History, empire, and Islam: E. A. Freeman and Victorian public morality

    By Vicky Randall

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    This book offers the first comprehensive treatment of the historian and public moralist E. A. Freeman since the publication of W. R. W. Stephens’ Life and Letters of Edward A. Freeman (1895). While Freeman is often viewed by modern scholars as a panegyrist to English progress and a proponent of Aryan racial theory, this study suggests that his world-view was more complicated than it appears. Revisiting Freeman’s most important historical works, this book positions Thomas Arnold as a significant influence on Freeman’s view of world-historical development. Conceptualising the past as cyclical rather than unilinear, and defining race in terms of culture, rather than biology, Freeman’s narratives were pervaded by anxieties about recapitulation. Ultimately, this study shows that Freeman’s scheme of universal history was based on the idea of conflict between Euro-Christendom and the Judeo-Islamic Orient, and this shaped his engagement with contemporary issues.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherManchester University Press
    Release dateMar 5, 2020
    ISBN9781526135834
    History, empire, and Islam: E. A. Freeman and Victorian public morality

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      Book preview

      History, empire, and Islam - Vicky Randall

      General editors: Andrew S. Thompson and Alan Lester

      Founding editor: John M. MacKenzie

      When the ‘Studies in Imperialism’ series was founded by Professor John M. MacKenzie more than thirty years ago, emphasis was laid upon the conviction that ‘imperialism as a cultural phenomenon had as significant an effect on the dominant as on the subordinate societies’. With well over a hundred titles now published, this remains the prime concern of the series. Cross-disciplinary work has indeed appeared covering the full spectrum of cultural phenomena, as well as examining aspects of gender and sex, frontiers and law, science and the environment, language and literature, migration and patriotic societies, and much else. Moreover, the series has always wished to present comparative work on European and American imperialism, and particularly welcomes the submission of books in these areas. The fascination with imperialism, in all its aspects, shows no sign of abating, and this series will continue to lead the way in encouraging the widest possible range of studies in the field. ‘Studies in Imperialism’ is fully organic in its development, always seeking to be at the cutting edge, responding to the latest interests of scholars and the needs of this ever-expanding area of scholarship.

      History, empire, and Islam

      SELECTED TITLES AVAILABLE IN THE SERIES

      WRITING IMPERIAL HISTORIES

      ed. Andrew S. Thompson

      GENDERED TRANSACTIONS

      Indrani Sen

      EXHIBITING THE EMPIRE

      ed. John M. MacKenzie and John McAleer

      BANISHED POTENTATES

      Robert Aldrich

      MISTRESS OF EVERYTHING

      ed. Sarah Carter and Maria Nugent

      BRITAIN AND THE FORMATION OF THE GULF STATES

      Shohei Sato

      CULTURES OF DECOLONISATION

      ed. Ruth Craggs and Claire Wintle

      HONG KONG AND BRITISH CULTURE, 1945–97

      Mark Hampton

      History, empire, and Islam

      E. A. Freeman and Victorian public morality

      Vicky Randall

      MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS

      Copyright © Vicky Randall 2020

      The right of Vicky Randall to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

      Published by MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS

      ALTRINCHAM STREET, MANCHESTER M1 7JA

      www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

      British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

      ISBN 978 1 5261 3581 0 hardback

      First published 2020

      The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

      Cover image: Vintage World Map, 2015 © Michal Bednarek, bednarek-art.com

      Cover design: riverdesignbooks.com

      Typeset by Newgen Publishing UK

      For Martin

      Contents

      Acknowledgements

      Introduction: ‘History is past politics, politics is present history’

      Part I – The West

      1 The Norman Conquest (1867–79)

      2 The Aryan race and Comparative Politics (1873)

      3 ‘I am no lover of Empire’: the critique of British expansionism

      Part II – The East

      4 Islam and Orientalism in the History and Conquests of the Saracens (1856)

      5 The Great Eastern Crisis and the ‘Oriental conspiracy’

      6 Fear and guilt in the Ottoman Power in Europe (1877)

      Conclusion

      Appendix

      References

      Index

      Acknowledgements

      Over the course of researching and writing this book I have incurred many debts, recorded here chronologically.

      The initial work for this book was undertaken when I was a research student at the University of Manchester, and I would like to thank the following members of staff for their enthusiasm, support, and expertise: Professor H.S. Jones; Professor Bertrand Thaite; Professor Max Jones; and Dr Peter Nockles. I would also like to give special thanks to Professor Peter Mandler, University of Cambridge, for his comments and feedback which helped me to deepen my understanding of specific aspects of Freeman’s thought, most particularly in relationship to race. At the University of Manchester I benefited greatly from a thriving and friendly research culture, so thanks are also due to Dr Catherine Feely and Dr Mathew Adams, who were excellent drinking companions among many other things.

      A scholarship from the Arts and Humanities Research Council supported the completion of the most significant stages of this research.

      I owe a great deal to the archivists who helped me access the Freeman Papers at the John Rylands University Library of Manchester, and the papers of James Bryce at the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. Over the course of several summers, the archival staff offered their knowledge and guidance in navigating the materials.

      At the Universtiy of Gloucestershire, where I revised and completed this book, I have been fortunate to have the help, support, and understanding of some brilliant colleagues. In no particular order, I would like to express my gratitude to Dr Iain Robertson, Dr Anna French, Professor Melanie Ilic, Professor Neil Wynn, Dr Christian O’Connell, and Dr Erin Peters. The work that we do can have its challenges, but you have all been inspirational and encouraging. The friends I have made at the University of Gloucestershire have helped in no small part with the completion of this book, including Dr Will Large and Dr Tyler Keevil. To Lucy Tyler and Dr Michael Johnstone in particular – it is a privilege to know and love you.

      To my parents, Sue and Paul, brother, Craig, and aunt, Jan, thank you.

      This book is for my husband, Martin, who has supported me throughout the process of writing and re-drafting and has also acted as a reliable and excellent proof-reader! All my love and appreciation, always.

      I would like to thank the journal Modern Intellectual History for permission to re-use material which was originally published in an article titled ‘Sanguinary Amusement: E. A. Freeman, the Comparative Method, and Victorian Theories of Race’ (2013) – this material appears in a slightly altered form in Chapter 2 of this book. Similarly I would like to express my gratitude to the Journal of Victorian Culture which has given me permission to re-present material which first appeared in an article titled ‘Eastern History with Western Eyes: E. A. Freeman, Islam and Orientalism’ (2011). Some of the information included in this article re-appears in Chapters 4, 5, and 6 of this work.

      Introduction

      ‘History is past politics, politics is present history’

      ‘History is past politics, politics is present history’ was the favourite saying of the historian and public controversialist Edward Augustus Freeman (1823–92). Over the course of his career, Freeman produced thirty-four historical works, and drew on his knowledge of the past to make frequent contributions to debates on contemporary affairs in the periodical press.¹ Claiming to embody the objectivity of the new ‘professional’ historian while seeking attention as a ‘public moralist’, Freeman occupied a central, but ambiguous, place in Victorian intellectual life which has not been fully explored. The purpose of this book is to deepen our understanding of Freeman and his response to some of the pressing concerns of the later nineteenth century, including the nature of history, issues of race and imperialism, and confrontation with the Islamic East.

      In approaching Freeman, one of my aims is to situate his activities within the framework of ‘public moralism’ delineated by Stefan Collini.² Public moralists were (almost exclusively) men who enjoyed prominence in Britain between 1850 and 1930, and claimed a ‘right to be heard’ on matters of national interest based on their general education. These ‘leading minds’ could pursue four types of public career: they could secure an academic post in a university, become a Member of Parliament, write for the periodicals, or enter the legal profession and civil service.³ Freeman attempted to occupy all these roles, sometimes simultaneously, with varying degrees of success. ‘Public moralism’ also refers to a specific sensibility. Here, Collini identifies five characteristics:

      First, Victorian moralists exhibited an obsessive antipathy to selfishness … Secondly, they were intensely preoccupied with the question of arousing adequate motivation in the moral agent. Thirdly, they accorded priority to the emotions over the intellect as a source of action, and so addressed themselves particularly to the cultivation of the appropriate feelings. Fourthly, they tended to assume that our deepest feelings, when aroused, would always prove to be not just compatible with each other, but also productive of socially desirable actions. And finally, they betrayed a constant anxiety about the possibility of sinking into a state of psychological malaise or anomie.⁴

      Dedicated to ethical ideals, Freeman persistently pointed the moral dimensions of a question and worried that any laxity would have dire consequences for the body politic. As a public moralist who collapsed the past into the present, and the present into the past, however, Freeman’s effectiveness as a historian and political campaigner was severely limited.

      A second aim of this book is to show that Freeman’s successes and failures, his philosophy of history, and view of the world were all inter-connected, and derived from the influence of the Liberal Anglican theologian and historian Thomas Arnold (1795–1842). Freeman was deeply indebted to Arnold’s doctrine of the ‘Unity of History’, which maintained that European cultural development followed a repetitive pattern as each nation advanced from a state of ‘childhood’ to ‘manhood’ before recapitulating. Following Arnold, Freeman believed that the Western nations had completed this ‘life-cycle’ twice: as ancient civilisation had flourished before collapsing in 476 AD, so, he feared, the expansion of the modern state would lead to disaster because it would prove impossible to reconcile a growing population with the principle of democracy. As I will demonstrate, it was Freeman’s Arnoldian understanding of historical cycles, and his obsession with drawing parallels between the political events of the past and present, which accounts for the pervasive and urgent nature of his public moralism.

      Finally, I hope to reveal the contours of Freeman’s panoramic vision of universal history for the first time. While Freeman is often seen as a panegyrist to English progress and liberty, and as an arch-racist who celebrated Aryan superiority, I suggest that his views were more complex than they seem. This is not an attempt to vindicate Freeman – his statements on race were often intemperate and, by our modern standards, disgusting. Rather, it is to show that Freeman used the idea of the continued existence of an Aryan race to reinforce the theory of the Unity of History. In line with Arnold’s teachings, Freeman defined ‘Aryan’ in terms of culture rather than blood, represented progress as cyclical rather than unilinear, and expressed doubts about European stability. Further, it is only when Freeman’s narratives on Western and Eastern history are juxtaposed that the centrality of Christianity to his view of European identity emerges and is bolstered by contrast with the Judeo-Islamic Orient. Freeman’s account of progress and decline in Europe finds a counterpart in his view of the East, which serves at once to empower the Western ‘self’ while producing anxiety that contact with the ‘other’ posed a threat to Euro-Christendom.

      The pursuit of a profession

      As there has been no detailed biography of Freeman since the publication of W.R.W. Stephens’ Life and Letters of Edward A. Freeman (two vols, 1895), it will be useful to begin with a brief description of his early life, before charting his pursuit of a profession as a public moralist.⁵ Freeman was born in Harborne, Staffordshire, on 2 August 1823, the only son and youngest of five children born to John and Mary Anne Freeman.⁶ Orphaned before he was eighteen months old, Freeman was left to the care of his elderly grandmother and inherited an income of £600 a year from the family’s coal-pit.⁷ In 1829 Freeman’s grandmother moved from Weston-super-Mare to Northampton where he attended a small school kept by the Reverend T.C. Haddon. Here, Freeman proved himself to be, in the words of his master, a ‘most remarkable pupil’, as he dedicated his time to the study of Roman and English history, and learnt Greek, Latin, and Hebrew before the age of eight.⁸

      At the age of fourteen Freeman was sent to Cheam, a preparatory school in Surrey, and moved on two years later to a private tutor, the Reverend Robert Gutch, at Seagrave Rectory in Leicestershire. At Seagrave, Freeman was coached for an Oxford scholarship and enjoyed considerable intellectual freedom. He later recalled reading a book which excited his interest in Eastern history and exerted a long-term impact on his thinking: W.C. Taylor’s History of the Overthrow of the Roman Empire, and the Foundation of the Principal European States (1836).⁹ Of the importance of this work, Freeman wrote: ‘I had already some dim notion of a Western Empire; from Taylor’s book I first learned that there was an Eastern Empire. I learned also what Saracens were. I learned that there were Sassanian Kings of Persia, Bulgarians also, and many things that have been good for me throughout life.’¹⁰

      In November 1840 Freeman was beaten in the contest for a scholarship at Balliol by Matthew Arnold, but secured a place at Trinity the following June. While enjoying the High Church atmosphere of the College, Freeman had an undistinguished academic record. He failed to win the Ireland Scholarship for Latin in 1842 and 1844, he tried unsuccessfully, and more than once, for the Latin Verse Prize, and was also beaten in the competition for the Newdigate Prize for English verse. He graduated with a second-class degree in literae humaniores, at Easter in 1845 – a disappointment that was offset by his election as Fellow of Trinity on 19 May. In the autumn of that year, Freeman began work on his submission for the Chancellor’s English Essay Prize, which was set on the question of ‘The effects of the Conquest of England by the Normans’.¹¹ There is no evidence that Freeman was familiar with medieval sources before this point, but he worked hard on his research and writing for over six months.¹² At forty-six pages in length, his essay was the longest of fourteen received by the judges.¹³ While Freeman was, once again, beaten in the contest of 1846, he later recalled the outcome as fortuitous. ‘The Norman Conquest was a subject that I had been thinking about, ever since I could think at all’, he reflected in 1892, ‘I wrote for the Prize; I had the good luck not to get it. Had I got it, I might have been tempted to think that I knew all about the matter. As it was, I went on and learned something about it’.¹⁴ In fact, Freeman went on to study the Anglo-Saxon language and spent thirty years researching the events of 1066, resulting in his magnum-opus: The History of the Norman Conquest of England, its Causes and its Results (six vols, 1867–79).¹⁵

      The years 1845 and 1846 were also significant for Freeman’s career, as at this time he abandoned his plans to become either a clergyman or an architect and conceived his ‘great ambition … to get one of the History Professorships here [at Oxford]’.¹⁶ This aspiration was, however, frustrated for four decades. Freeman was an unsuccessful candidate for the Chair of Modern History at Oxford in 1858; the Camden Professorship of Ancient History in 1861; and the newly established Chichele Professorship in Modern History in 1862.¹⁷ Only in 1884, when the Regius Professor of Modern History, William Stubbs, became Bishop of Chester, was W.E. Gladstone able to overcome the objections of the Queen to the appointment of Freeman (who had once allegedly uttered the words ‘perish India!’)¹⁸ At the age of sixty-one, however, the prospect of the Professorship had lost its attraction. Freeman confided to James Bryce that he had ‘no kind of anxiety for the Professorship (25 years ago I had a great deal), and it was only after a great deal of thought that I made up my mind to take it’.¹⁹ Suffering from gout and bronchitis, Freeman struggled to keep up with competing demands on his time and disliked the ‘whirl of Oxford, as Oxford is now’.²⁰ He was disappointed to find that the Professorship gave him no voice in University affairs, while the wide intellectual range of his lectures made him ineffectual as a teacher. In March 1891 Freeman wrote, ‘I am thoroughly tired of this place and everything in it. It is all so disappointing and disheartening. I have tried every kind of lecture I can think of, and put my best strength into all, but nobody comes’.²¹

      Second only to the ambition for a professorship in history was Freeman’s wish for a seat in Parliament. Believing that practical experience of government would give him an advantage in writing about past politics, Freeman also felt that his knowledge of history gave him a privileged perspective on current political questions. Having abandoned his youthful Toryism and High Church leanings, Freeman’s mature views closely aligned with those of the Liberal Party under Gladstone.²² As analysed by William C. Lubenow, liberalism in this period was characterised by a commitment to making decisions according to the dictates of the individual conscience rather than the demands of the populace, to reforms which acknowledged ‘older restraints and loyalties’, and to actions that were tentative and considered.²³ In common with Gladstone, Freeman was motivated by a deep sense of moral righteousness. He longed, Stephens writes, ‘to be able to raise his voice in the great council of the nation on behalf of the principles of civil and religious freedom, humanity, and justice. He was fully persuaded that the true honour and the highest interests of the country depended on strict adherence to these principles’.²⁴ While Freeman refused to ‘surrender the independence of his conscience or of his reason to any party or to any leader, however eminent’, he cautiously advocated for liberal causes including the secret ballot, shorter parliaments, the extension of the franchise, and the disestablishment of the Irish Church.²⁵ Standing for election twice as an independent Radical in Cardiff (1857) and Wallingford (1859) and, finally, as the Liberal candidate for Mid Somerset (1868), Freeman never achieved his dream of entering the House of Commons.

      For most of his career, then, Freeman did not hold a professional position and supplemented his income by writing for the periodicals. Freeman resigned his fellowship at Trinity when he married Eleanor Gutch, daughter of his former tutor, in 1847, so his only regular source of money was his £600 a year inheritance. According to Collini, an ‘upper middle-class’ man with a family would need between £500 and £1,000 per annum to live comfortably in the later nineteenth century.²⁶ On this estimate, Freeman’s inheritance would have been insufficient to maintain his wife, six children, and the large house, Somerleaze, in which they settled in Wells, Somerset, in 1860. Writing for the press, however, could bring as much as £25–£50 for a longer piece, and Freeman was a prolific contributor to papers including The Saturday Review; The Edinburgh Review; The Quarterly Review; Macmillan’s Magazine; The Fortnightly Review; and The Contemporary Review.²⁷ Freeman’s connection with the Saturday Review was particularly significant: a record of the articles he wrote for this weekly between 1860 and 1869 reveals that he published 723, the most in one year being 96 in 1862.²⁸ Stephens suggests that Freeman earned ‘not less than £500 a year’ from this work, which explains his anxiety at having to sever ties in 1878.²⁹ As the Saturday Review supported the government’s policy of maintaining Ottoman rule in south-eastern Europe, Freeman felt he could no longer be involved, due to ‘scruples of conscience in being connected with a paper which propagated what he held to be false and pernicious doctrine on a question of vital importance’.³⁰

      Working as a gentleman-scholar in the countryside, there can be no doubting Freeman’s industry. Freeman read and wrote for an average of seven hours a day, the maximum being eleven.³¹ Labouring daily on several undertakings at set times, Freeman recorded in his journal the number of hours he dedicated to each project and noted those on which he spent a disproportionately long time.³² By this method, and with the help of his ‘historic harem’ – a group of young female research assistants – Freeman produced his voluminous works on history, and a lesser number of books on architecture, geography, and poetry.³³ He also maintained a considerable personal correspondence with leading intellectuals including Bryce, J.R. Green, Henry Sumner Maine, Friedrich Max Müller, Goldwin Smith, and William Stubbs, sometimes writing as many as eighteen letters a day. In addition to his scholarly work, Freeman was active in his local community, taking on the roles of Justice of the Peace, Governor of the County Lunatic Asylum, Schools’ Guardian, and member of the Highways Board. He had considerable success leading various ‘crusades’, including campaigns against field sports, vivisection, and the Bulgarian atrocities.³⁴ For his efforts on behalf of the Greeks, Serbians, and Montenegrins in their struggle for independence from the Ottoman Empire, Freeman was made a Knight Commander of the Greek Order of the Redeemer, Member of the Order of Takova, and the Order of Danilo, respectively.³⁵ There were academic awards, too, as the University of Oxford gave him an honorary doctorate in Civil Law in 1870.

      In an age of increasing specialisation and ‘professional’ objectivity, however, the prejudices and partialities which coloured Freeman’s interpretation of past and present politics appeared increasingly out-moded and were subject to mounting criticism.³⁶ The letters he wrote in the last years of his life express his sense of isolation, rejection, and failure. "Tis years’, Freeman wrote to Bryce in December 1883,

      since you or Stubbs or [George] Cox – to name three only – have set foot in this house. It was not so always, and the change is very hard. I know not the reason of it. And as with one’s friends, so with the public in general – I feel cast off; I seem to have lost my position. For a long time past I seem never to be mentioned but with contempt … I don’t understand it and I don’t know where to turn.³⁷

      Freeman died, a somewhat bitter and disappointed man, on one of his frequent research trips abroad, in Alicante, Spain, on 16 March 1892.³⁸

      Thomas Arnold, the Unity of History, and race

      In examining the prejudices and idiosyncrasies which hampered Freeman’s efforts to attain a respected professional status, it is necessary first to consider the influence of Thomas Arnold. Little has been written of Arnold as a historian, and the most important study of his work remains Duncan Forbes’ The Liberal Anglican Idea of History (1952).³⁹ While there has been some commentary on the relationship between Arnold’s thought and Freeman’s, most notably in John Burrow’s A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past (1981), the absolute centrality of Arnold to Freeman’s outlook and to all his activities has not been fully appreciated.⁴⁰ Here I outline the way Freeman adopted Arnold’s ideas on morality, politics, and race, immediately on hearing him lecture as Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford in 1841 and 1842.⁴¹

      In his inaugural lecture, attended by the undergraduate Freeman, Arnold set out his opinions on the nature of history, articulating his belief that the study of the past would reveal the workings of God’s plan for humankind. The first point Arnold made which resonated with Freeman was that the proper focus of history is the state, and that states, like individuals, can be judged as good or bad according to the extent to which they are ethical. For Arnold, the life of an individual is pointless if it does not ‘tend to God’s glory and to the good of his brethren’, and every person ought to put a ‘moral object’ before any ‘external benefits’.⁴² Similarly, Arnold held that a state’s existence is meaningless if it is unfit for the ‘great purposes of God’s providence’ and fails to promote the well-being of its citizens above economic and territorial considerations.⁴³ ‘[S]‌uppose’, Arnold mused,

      that a nation as such is not cognizant of the notions of justice and humanity, but that its highest object is wealth, or dominion, or security. It then follows that the sovereign power in human life, which can influence the minds and compel the actions of us all, is a power altogether unmoral; and if unmoral, and yet commanding the actions of moral beings, then evil.⁴⁴

      In Arnold’s view, the state supersedes and embodies the life of the individual and, consequently, it has a greater responsibility to act morally. The state must have ‘a sense not only of the right or wrong of this particular action now commanded or forbidden, but generally of the comparative value of different ends, and thus of the highest end of all’.⁴⁵ The role of the historian, according to Arnold, is to extract a narrative from past events to show how some states have advanced this highest end, which ‘appears to be the promoting and securing a nation’s highest happiness’ but ‘is conceived and expressed more purely, as the setting forth God’s glory by doing His appointed work’.⁴⁶

      The second, and related, idea that Freeman took from Arnold’s lecture was that the study of the outward action of a state could reveal the condition of the ‘inner life’ of a nation.⁴⁷ Arnold held that the character of the people is shaped by the institutions and laws of the state, so that ‘if these are faulty, the whole inner life is corrupted; if these be good, it is likely to go on healthfully’.⁴⁸ As an example of how the historian might study the effects of institutions on national character, Arnold pointed to the significance of customs relating to property. For Arnold it was important to consider whether a society endorsed the principle of primogeniture or not, and to determine whether legislation favoured the ‘stability of property or its rapid circulation’.⁴⁹ The question of property distribution was critical, in Arnold’s view, because ownership was educative:

      It calls forth … so many valuable qualities, forethought, love of order, justice, beneficence, and wisdom in the use of power, that he who possesses it cannot live in the extreme of ignorance or brutality; he has learnt unavoidably some of the higher lessons of humanity. It is at least certain that the utter want of property offers obstacles to the moral and intellectual education of persons laboring under it … Laws, therefore, which affect directly or indirectly the distribution of property, affect also a nation’s life very deeply.⁵⁰

      Noting the additional influence of science, art, and literature on ‘national virtue’, Arnold reiterated his belief that ‘perfection in outward life is the fruit of perfection in the life within us’.⁵¹ As such, the lessons that could be derived from examining the political, economic, and cultural arrangements of a nation, are of the utmost importance and constituted, in his opinion, ‘the noblest subjects of history’.⁵²

      Turning from the nature of history in general, to modern history specifically, Arnold began to expound his theory of the Unity of History which would influence Freeman for the rest of his life. According to Arnold, the ancients are always relevant as they are the founders of Western civilisation. For the last 1800 years, he observed, Greece has shaped the human intellect, while Rome has been the most important source of European systems of law, government, and social organisation.⁵³ Nevertheless, he felt that there was a dividing-line between ancient and modern history, because ancient history is the ‘biography of the dead’ and modern history is the ‘biography of the living’.⁵⁴ For Arnold, the collapse of Rome in 476 BC was followed by a reconstitution of the four great elements of national identity – race, language, institutions, and religion – which coalesced into a novel shape that the modern European nations had maintained ever since.⁵⁵ While many elements of the ancient civilisation were preserved in this new world, other features were blended with them.⁵⁶ Most significantly, Arnold contended, ‘[w]‌hat was not there [in antiquity] was simply the German race, and the peculiar qualities which characterize it. This one addition was of such power, that it

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