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10 - ‘Race’ and ‘nation’ in mid-Victorian thought

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 December 2009

Stefan Collini
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Richard Whatmore
Affiliation:
University of Sussex
Brian Young
Affiliation:
University of Sussex
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Summary

How central were organic concepts of race and nationality to the Victorians' sense of self before the age of high imperialism at the end of the nineteenth century? Until comparatively recently intellectual historians had hardly even considered this question. In dissecting English thought they had tended to focus either on the persistence of Enlightenment themes or upon the development of social-evolutionary thinking, both of a marked liberal-universalist character relatively unfissured by sharp national, still less racial distinctions. But historians writing in post-colonial and post-modern modes are now making the case that even at mid-century English thought was profoundly imbued with strong concepts of race and nation, formerly associated with contemporary thought in Germany, France and Italy, but not with England. This case has been made without, on the whole, engaging closely with the ‘high’ intellectual history of the period, partly because intellectual historians had not made explicit the racial and national implications of social-evolutionary thinking. In this essay, I want to bring out these implications more clearly, demonstrating how the vitality of the social-evolutionary tradition inhibited the development of biological racism and organic nationalism in England. Beyond that, I will attempt to specify where, and to what degree, nationalist views could develop in the systematic social, political, and historical thought of those crucial years between the revolutions of 1848 and the Home Rule crisis of 1886.

In the half-century before 1848, the English were already lagging well behind other Europeans in thinking seriously about ‘nationality’. Without the impetus provided by new revolutionary elites seeking to mobilise a popular following or social movements seeking emancipation through national unification, they had no powerful motive to do so.

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Chapter
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History, Religion, and Culture
British Intellectual History 1750–1950
, pp. 224 - 244
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2000

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