Koditschek Theodore. Liberalism, Imperialism, and the Historical Imagination: Nineteenth-Century Visions of a Greater Britain
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institutions. “The Parish and the Manor are in truth the ancient Mark,
changed into new shapes according to ecclesiastical, and according to
territorial ideas.” Even villeinage and the spread of servile tenures were
compensated by the rise of the borough, with its system of urban chartered
liberty.
93
Gradually, by a silent change, freedom learned to turn despotism itself to its own
purpose. We see, at every turn in our story, how foreign tyranny worked in the end
for the establishment of native freedom ... Step by step we have thrown off the yoke
only because the yoke was there to be thrown off. And it is the process of throwing
off a yoke which ever makes freedom sweet. Had there never been a time of foreign
tyranny, our liberties might have crumbled away without our knowing it.
94
Feudal Europe had become a quasi-Darwinian arena, in which only the
fittest survived. Unlike other subject peoples, then and later, the English
had proven that they were worthy of autonomy. Their agency and their
evolution had become one and the same.
It was because our old institutions were for a moment perverted rather than
abolished, that we have been able to win them back under new shapes ... Had
the shock of foreign conquest never come upon us, we might have slumbered on
till we woke up to find ourselves under a despotism like that of France, or an
oligarchy like that of Denmark ... We have kept our freedom because we had to
win it; had it never been wrested from us by force, it might have slipped away from
us by force.
95
7 E. A. Freeman: the triumph of Anglo-Saxonism
in the nineteenth century
After the las t volume of Freeman’s History had been published (1879),
he grew despondent at the sluggish sales of his book. He had hoped for
a reception tha t would rival Ma caulay ’s. In the event, his book attracted
a smaller audience than that of the man whom he most detested,
J. A. Froude.
96
Friends and rev iewers complained that his five volumes
were too long and tedious to hold the interest of the general public. Part
of the problem lay in the fact that Freeman was trying to combine
narrative exposition with evolutionary explanation in a medium that
really only sanctioned the first. In contrast to Macaulay, who could
93
FNC, V: 459–81, quote on 462.
94
FNC, V: 458–9.
95
FNC, V: 504–5.
96
In spite of the fact that their positions on race, nationalism, and history were remarkably
similar, Freeman took a violent aversion to Froude, tormenting him on the appearance
of every new volume with a vituperative notice in the Saturday Review. Over many
years Freeman was relentless, disputing Froude’s accuracy and impugning his integrity.
W. H. Dunn, James Anthony Froude: A Biography (Oxford, 1963), 456–70.
E. A. Freeman: the triumph of Anglo-Saxonism 245
play out his glorious revolutionary transformation directly in the
chronicle of great events, Freeman ’s narrative is compromised by its
dependence on a subterranean evolution that must be registered on the
deeper chronometry of the longue durée. Since Freeman’ s men could
never be crushed as individual agents, the narrative had always to be
kept open and crowded with their deeds: Normans busily returning to
their ur-Teutonic essence, or Englishmen frantically renewing their
racial advantage by adapting to the innovations that the Normans have
introduced.
97
Because Froude and Macaulay were abl e to weave transformative pro-
cesses directly into narrative action, they could provide their readers with
a satisfying story that played out over the scale of a human lifetime:
decades, years, or even days. In Freeman, by contrast, the narrative
could not be so readily tethered to a transformative process that was
now measured in multi-century increments. On this scale, even the
most dramatic episodes appear as minute accretions, less important
for themselves than as periodic soundings of the profounder racial or
constitutional changes underneath. The Norman Conquest seemed
remote to Victorian readers, in a way that the Reformation or Glorious
Revolution did not. Freeman’s famous quip that “history is past politics,
and politics present history” was perhaps less anachronis tic than it
sounded, since his continuum between past and present stretched
almost to infinity.
98
So what were the implications of the Norman Conquest for the nine-
teenth centu ry? Though Freeman was uncharacteristically reticent in
laying out lessons, an agenda can be discerned in his subsequent work.
In 1877, he published an article entitled “Race and Language,” in which
his conclusions on the subject were duly laid out. To a degree that may
have surprised his earlier readers, the doctrines of absolute racial fixity and
purity were now denied. Those who wished to equate race with skin and
skulls were being myopic in Freeman’s view. Race always involved a
cultural element, which interacted with the physical and hereditary com-
ponents in complex and often mysterious ways. For this reason, purist
efforts to separate discussion of “race” from the study of language were
missing the boat. Races did slowly evolve, albeit at different rates, and
cultural or linguistic changes both reflected and sometimes precipitated
97
As he approached the critical year of 1066, Freeman also drastically slowed his narrative
down, perhaps too slowly. Whereas he covers the entire period up to 975 in 147 pages, the
period between 975 and 1087 requires 2,186 pages to traverse.
98
John Burrow, A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past (Cambridge,
1981), 164, 178–87.
246 Greater Britain and the “lesser breeds”
this evolution. In some obvious cases – he cited Africans in America and
Jews in Europe – inferior races might adopt the language of their masters,
without any corresponding racial improvement. In other cases, he
acknowledged, “language is not a test of race [but] it is, in the absence
of evidence to the cont rary, a presumption of race.”
99
Another source of incremental racial change was the slow influx of
foreign influences into every ethnic group. “Every nation will have some
adopted children of this kind,” and “as soon as we allow the exercise of the
law of adoption, physical purity of race is at an end.” Some nations, suc h
as the French, were created entirely out of racial mixtures. In England, the
reintegration of racial cousins kept the nation more ethnically homoge-
neous. Freeman would not even rule out some mysterious Lamarckian
mechanism whereby cultural advance or degradation could work its way
back into the bloodlines. Indeed, he went so far as to acknowledge that
race might even seem an “artificial” construct, since the national solid-
arities on which modern people acted did not always correspond to racial
lines. Who could determine with certainty the racial provenance of any
individual or group? Even the origin al Aryans might not have been con-
sanguineous. “They might have been more like an accidental party of
fellow-travelers.”
100
When Freeman wrote about the European continent these strictures
about racial mixing were generally kept in mind.
101
When it came to
Anglo-Saxons, however, he expressed his recessive penchant for racial
purity. Here race was reinforced by geography, as the English people’s
island existence isolated them from continental currents and – over many
generations – made them unique. “It is the insular character of Britain
which has, beyond anything else, made the inhabitant s of Britain what
they are, and the history of Britain what it has been.” Island life made the
English people into seafarers, and, after the discovery of America, seafar-
ing drove them to replicate the great colonizing deeds of their Saxon
forebears, this time on a truly global scale. In the thirteen North
American colonies of the eighteenth century, and in the Canada and
Australasia of the nineteenth, the English used their mastery of the most
advanced technologies – sail, steam, rail, telegraph, and firepower – to
spread their superior seed around the world.
102
99
E. A. Freeman, “Race and Language,” in Historical Essays, 4 vols. (London, 1892), I:
191–2.
100
Freeman, “Race and Language,” 191, 193, 199.
101
Stephens, Life and Letters, II: 101–70; Burrow, Liberal Descent, 166, 188–92.
102
E. A. Freeman, Greater Greece and Greater Britain, and George Washington the Expander of
England (London, 1886); E. A. Freeman, “Alter Orbis,” Contemporary Review,41
(1882), 1041.
E. A. Freeman: the triumph of Anglo-Saxonism 247
In this most glorious chapter in the history of the race, evolution was
amplified by expans ion. George Washington turned out to be the greatest
“expander of England” in spite of himself. His good Saxon name, taken
from an aboriginal settlement, had given title to the capital of the ultimate
“English” polity. Of course, being good, freedom-loving Saxons, these
American colonists would inevitably revolt against excessive control from
the metropolitan center. No matter. Blessed with the prospect of a vast
open continent, the independent-minded Americans were becoming the
greatest Englishmen the world had ever known. Surely the Canadians and
Australasians would follow the example of the thirteen coloni es, and just
as surely this was not a bad thing.
103
“The tie of national brotherhood, the
abiding feeling of the oneness of the folk lives through physical distance,
through political separation, through political rivalry and [even] through
wasting war.” Formal empire for Freeman is but one intermediate stage in
a longer-term process of racial imperialism, in which Anglo-Saxons
spread out to dominate the earth. But what of the colored dependencies ,
in which small numbers of Englishmen are set out to rule over millions
and millions of “lesser breeds”?
Without any personal stake in the bureaucracy of empire management,
Freeman holds fast to his racial exclusionary dream. Unlike Lubbock,
Campbell, or Maine, he takes no pleasure in the prospect of improving
“lesser breeds.” England’s conqu est of India was a fact of history, incur-
ring obligations that could not be gainsaid. Yet the colored dependencies
were a “burthen” rather than a benefit in Freeman’s view. Their main
function was to illustrate the impossibility of any formal permanent impe-
rial federation, since such a polity would have to include “millions on
millions of dark skinned Mussulmans and Hindoos” while leaving out the
American brethren across the seas.
104
Had Freeman been able to view
India as he viewed continental Europe, he might have deemed these
millions to be Aryan second cousins, and therefore people with sufficient
racial connection for political Union to work. Indeed by subordinating
commonalities of language and culture to differences in skins and skulls,
he was violating his own racial rules. But this was not the way he viewed
the matter. A vague Aryan cousinship might be sufficient for Asians or
European continentals, but Anglo-Saxons were the über-Aryans of the
modern era who had the obligation to stand watch at the gates of racial
nirvana. Just how far Freeman feared the dangers of race-mixing and
race dilution became clear in 1881, when he visited the United States.
“My chief feeling,” he wrote of an environment that reminded him of
103
Freeman, George Washington,64–102.
104
Freeman, Greater Britain,38–49.
248 Greater Britain and the “lesser breeds”
home, “is the strangeness of the lack of strangeness.” One discordant
feature, however, could not be ignored. “The really queer thing is the
niggers who swarm here,” he wrote to his friend Dawkins,
My Aryan prejudices go against them, specially when they rebuke one, and order
one about. And the women and children are yet stranger than the men. Are you
sure that they are men? I find it hard to feel that they are men acting seriously: ’tis
easier to believe that they are big monkeys dressed up for a game.
105
In St. Louis, he acknowledged that “some of them are fairly human and
speak decent English,” while in others he heard only “ the grunt of these
hideous Apes whom Darwin has clearly left unfinished.” In fact, however,
it was the respectable well-dressed Negroes that elicited Freeman’s shar-
pest sarcasm. “At Baltimore we tried the black Methodists till their temple
grew too hot, and then adjourned to black Episcopals,” he recounted to a
friend. “If these half-men, and still more half-women, would instead of a
Frank dress wear something of shawls and turbans they would look one
degree less grotesque.” The problem, then, was not so much the presence
of Negroes, but their presumption in adopting the manners of civilized
Englishmen, in stepping above their properly subhuman state. “The freed
nigger,” he complained, after taking a trip on the railway, “seems to have a
fancy generally for making us feel our Aryan inferiority – I am sure ’twas a
mistake making them citizens. I feel a creep when I think that one of these
great black apes may (in theory) be President. Surely treat your horse
kindly; but don’t make him Consul.”
106
It would be easy to dismiss these twisted words as the ravings of a sick
humor, utterly uncharacteristic of other liberal intellectuals of the day. Yet
closer examination shows that they provide a particularly crude exempli-
fication of a pattern that we have already seen in the more presentable
responses of Lubbock, Campbell, and Maine. In each case, it is not
the pure savage, the wild tribesman, or the traditionalist peasant who
elicits metropolitan unease. Such backward specimens might prove com-
pliant or incorrigible, but they did not disrupt the liberal evolutionist’s
conceptual categories. They might exemplify the possibilities of gradual
progress or the impediments that hindered such advance. Either way,
they offer no cognitive challenge to the ideal of grad ual improvement
under the umbrella of a benevolent Empire. By contrast, it is the colonial
hybrid – the civilized Tahitian, the educated Negro, or the anglicized
Bengali – who dis turbs the liberal imperialist’s equanimity. In his or her
very existence, he or she suggests that improvement may be possible
without compulsory outside intervention, that progress may be achievable
105
Stephens, Life and Letters, II: 234–5.
106
Stephens, Life and Letters, II: 242, 236–7.
E. A. Freeman: the triumph of Anglo-Saxonism 249
by indigenous means. In the case of Freeman, it is worth noting that he
voiced no objection to blacks serving as field-hands or coal-haulers. His
ire was raised by the railroad-conductor in smart uniform inspecti ng the
tickets of white passengers, and by the Baltimore congregants dressed in
their Sunday finest, with their own adaptations of the Englishman’s
Protestant Creed. From there it was but a short step in Freeman’s imag-
ination to the freedman’s induction into Anglo-Saxon citizenship, and
even to “a great black ape” in the White House.
Of course, it would be a mistake to make too much of Freeman’s gross
invective, since most other liberals wore their prejudices – and their
notions of civilizational hierarchy – more lightly. Yet it may be here, rather
than at the level of overt racism, that Anglo-Saxon exclusionism stigma-
tized most effectively. This can be seen in the work of the two other main
Anglo-Saxonist historians of the 1870s, J. R. Green and William Stubbs.
Close friends of Freeman, these two scholars eschewed his overt obsession
with race. Yet their more complex vision of Anglo-Saxon history may have
contributed more than Freeman’s tirades to excluding racial others from
constitutional rights in the late Victorian Empire.
8 The failure of hybrid evolutionism : a tale of two Greens
Although J. R. Green found a mentor in Freeman, his experience led him
to see the world more in class than in racial terms. As a poorly paid curate
in an east London slum, Green saw that his parishioners’ struggles for
survival could not be unders tood through the lens of Darwin. Poverty,
unemployment, pollution, and low wages were the primary causes of their
high mortality. Working people responded with makeshift expedients –
scrimping, saving, searching for bargains, collective organization, and
informal reciprocity. Drawing his vision of the past from the contempo-
rary world around him, Green allowed his historical eye to rove more
freely over everyday medieval scenes. “We see the mills grinding along the
burns, the hammer rings in the vi llage smithy, the thegn’s hall rises out of
its demesne, the parish priest is at his mass-book in the little church that
forms the center of every township.”
107
Here was a vision of the old English peasantry that not only conjured
up a merrier England, but also bore comparison with R. C. Dutt’s
nineteenth-century ryot. Yet where Dutt labored unsung in remote
107
Anthony Brundage, The People’s Historian: John Richard Green and the Writing of History in
Victorian England (Westport, 1994); and Letters of John Richard Green, ed. Leslie Stephen
(London, 1901), 1–206; J. R. Green, The Conquest of England (London, 1884),
8; Rosemary Jann, The Art and Science of Victorian History (Columbus, 1985), 141–69.
250 Greater Britain and the “lesser breeds”
outposts of the Empire, Green distilled his vision into a Short History of the
English People that sold half a million copies over the next few decades. Not
only was this popular history àlaMacaulay, but it was also a populist
revision of Macaulay, adapting his Whiggism to the democratic liberalism
of the Gladstonian age. “It is a history,” Green announces in his opening
sentence, “not of English kings or English conquests, but of the English
people.”“In England more than elsewhere,” he continues, “constitu-
tional progress has been the result of social development.” What he aims
for is an embryonic social history.
108
Where Freeman’s narrative was
driven by the political relations between Normans and Saxons, Green’s
is driven by class relations between a freedom-seeking people and the
feudal lords who try to keep this people yoked and constrained. Driven
into serfdom by political centralization, a section of the people found a
new basis for freedom in the burge oning towns. Capitalizing on conflicts
between kings and barons, they were able to play one off against the other
and to lay a new foundation for popular liberty. In many ways, the
Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 is the pivot of Green’s social history, much as
the Norman Conquest was at the center of Freeman’s account. In the
short term, the peasants were defeated, but their descendants obtained
almost everything that the rebels had sought. “During the century and a
half after the Peasant Revolt, villeinage became a rare and antiquate d
thing. A hundr ed years after the Black Death, the wages of an English
labourer could purchase twice the amount of necessaries of life which
could have been obtained for the wages paid under Edward the Third.”
109
Such was the popularity of Green’s attractive volume that it sold well,
not only in Anglo-Saxon colonies, but also in India. Incorporated into the
curriculum of the universi ties of Calcutta, Bombay, and Punjab (and
probably others), it was read by man y undergraduates as the set text in
English history.
110
Of course, we do not know what these students made
of Green’s Short History, but if they applied it to their own situation they
might have drawn a number of controversial conclusions: that national
liberation is an arduous process, that it is achieved only through organi-
zation and stru ggle, and that panchayats or other officially sanctioned
institutions are unlikely alon e to bring it within reach. These inferences,
however, would have to be made by the reader, since Green is exclusively
focused on the Englishness of his story and has nothing to say about its
relevance to other parts of the globe. Even Freeman, with his interests in
108
J. R. Green, A Short History of the English People (New York, 1912), xvii; Stephen, Life and
Letters, 209–383.
109
Green, Short History,1–303, quote on 257.
110
Report of the Indian Education Commission (Calcutta, 1883), 270–2.
The failure of hybrid evolutionism: a tale of two Greens 251
continental Europe and his fear of inferior races, was not so parochial in
his conception of history.
Indeed, it is hard to shake the feeling that there may be a connection
between the generosity of Green’s democratic sentiments and the insu-
larity of his anglocentricity. Is the exclusion of others no more than an
oversight, or is it necessary for his saga of English liberty? Since his
story begins with the Anglo-Saxon invasions there is some cognitive
dissonance between the violence exhibited by these barbarians and
their oppressed descendants’ quest for justice. Had Green confronted
this contradiction between external violence and internal democracy, he
might have actually strengthened his argument. The rise of feudalism
could then have been depicted as the price of England’s foreign aggres-
sions, and English serfdom as the final fruit of reducing the indigenous
Britons to slavery.
111
Green’s failure here to radicalize the comparative m ethod rendered his
work less innovative than it might hav e been. Green himself was a rad ical
in the context of the 1870s, expressing his distaste for British aggression
and his support for the fledgling cause of Irish Home Rule. His premature
death in 1883, however, made it impossible to know how he would have
responded to the political challenges of the 1880s and 1890s. Would the
enthusiasm of his Indian readers have drawn him into support for their
national aspirations, or woul d the vehemence of the Irish Home Rulers
have tested the limits of his genial inclusivity? Green’s wife, Alice
Stopford, whom he m arried in 1877, was certain that she knew her
husband’s mind. “No one could come in contact with Mr. Green,” she
observed, “without a deepened sense of how free peoples should rightly
live.” Alice Stopford herself was the daughter of an Anglo-Irish Protestant
family, and was moved by the fi rst stirrings of the Celtic revival that was
just beginning in her youth. During her marriage to Green, she set these
interests aside to serve as his assistant. After his death, however, she
became absorbed in the Irish Question, and the experience she gained
in revising her husband ’s manuscripts led her to apply the same methods
to Iris h history.
112
Before the advent of the Tudors, Alice argued, in a book that she finally
published in 1908, the Anglo-Irish relationship had been fundamentally
healthy. Like England, Ireland had been subject to a long string of inva-
sions, from the Belgae to the Celts, the Danes, and finally the Anglo-
Normans. In each case, however, the invaders assimilated to the existing
culture, always adding a new racial element into what became an ever
111
Green, Short History,2–16; see also his Conquest of England.
112
Brundage, Green, 157; Stephen, Life and Letters, 390–2.
252 Greater Britain and the “lesser breeds”
richer ethnic mix. In contrast to her husband’s Anglo-Saxonist account,
she laid great stress on the hybrid character of the Irish people, attributing
their high civilization in the middle ages to the many diverse in fluences
they received.
113
It was only during the Tudor period, according to
Green, that the English destroyed this rich cultural mixture and imposed
an imperial m ono-culture of their own: Irish schools were shut down, Irish
customs were proscribed, attacks were launched on the Irish language,
culture, and poetry. Irish trade was cut off for the benefit of English
merchants, and English monopolies were allowed to crush the most
lucrative Irish industries. Worst of all, the land was stolen from the tradi-
tional Irish and Anglo-Irish chieftains. When it was handed over to a new
breed of greedy English proprietors, the life of the ancestral peasantry
collapsed.
114
By setting the work of the two Greens side by side, we might show how
their arguments can be brought into alignment: true Englishness was
created not by imperial elites, but by the people who have struggled
through the centuries to regain the freedoms that their ancestors lost.
This struggle must be fused wi th the efforts of colonial peoples to recover
their own national cultures and identities, which have been suppressed
by the same English ruling oligarchy. In short, genuine movements for
national liberation do not conflict with one another, and must join
together against the common enemy in creating new forms of subaltern
hybridity. Had any such Greater British history been written at the time, it
would have bee n of enormous relevance to India, as well as Ireland. Yet
neither the Greens nor anyone else in the metropolis succeeded in crafting
such a comparative method from below. Whatever the quality of their
marriage, the historiographical union between the Greens was never
consummated.
115
Of course it would be anachronistic to fault the Greens for their
failure to write a social history of subalterns such as became histor-
iographically possible only at the end of the twentieth century. Yet the
insistence of the franchise question in their lifetimes did raise more
limited questions of civic agency. Were English workingmen to be
inducted into the full rights of citizenship? Was the vote to be extended
to women? Should anglicized Indians be granted real representative
institutions? How far were the Irish to be allowed to manage their
own affairs? The force of these contemporary questions required a
fundamental re-examination of British constitutional evolution and a
113
Alice Stopford Green, The Making of Ireland and its Undoing (London, 1909), 1–122.
114
Green, Making of Ireland, 123–324.
115
Brundage, Green, 136–59; Stephen, Life and Letters, 396.
The failure of hybrid evolutionism: a tale of two Greens 253
consideration of the extent to which hitherto subordinated groups now
displayed a fitness for political agency.
116
9 William Stubbs and the evolution of the English
Constitution
From this pers pective, the most notable achievement of the 1870s was
neither the completion of Freeman’s Norman Conquest, nor the appear-
ance of Green’s Short History, but the publication of a new Constitutional
History of England, in three volumes, by William Stubbs. Born in 1825,
two years after Freeman, Stubbs became acquaint ed with Freeman at
Oxford, and mutual interest in medieval sources deepened this friendship
over the next twenty years . Yet differences in orientation and personality
gradually appeared, for while Freeman dashed off his fiery screeds, Stubbs
worked quietly in a rural Essex vicarage, editing and annotating medieval
charters and other documents. On the strength of this painstaking scholar-
ship, Stubbs was appointed Regius Professor of Modern History at
Oxford in 1866, over the candidacies of Freeman and Froude.
117
It was his new duties as a university professor that turned Stubbs’s mind
to the relationship between history and citizenship. In his audience, after
all, the future rulers of Britain were likely to be found. What might a
historian teach them to enhance the quality of their future work? Though a
moderate Tory himself, Stubbs insisted that it was a historian’s duty to
show that the politics of the past could be examined with relative dispas-
sion, in a manner that enabled the student to broaden his understanding
of the contemporary world. Froude and Macaulay, for all their talents,
had failed in this task, and it had to be re-engaged on a more neutral
historiographical ground. According to Stubbs, the medieval period was
well suited to this pedagogical mandate, since it was “ sufficiently akin
to modern life to engage lively feeling and yet sufficiently apart from it
to prevent party views from being predominant.” Let the students “learn
the hist ory of early England and early France before they are called on to
exert their tender judgments on the Great Rebellion, or the French
Revolution.”
118
The job of the history professor was to dampen adolescent enthusiasms
by showing the complexity of life and the merits of those who took a
116
Catherine Hall, Keith McClelland, and Jane Rendall, Defining the Victorian Nation: Class,
Race, Gender, and the Reform Act of 1867 (Cambridge, 2000).
117
Heyck, The Transformation of Intellectual Life, 120–54; Soffer, Discipline and Power,
78–127; Bentley, Modernizing England’s Past,23–32.
118
William Stubbs, Seventeen Lectures on the Study of Medieval and Modern History (Oxford,
1887), 254.
254 Greater Britain and the “lesser breeds”