The Student Historical Journal Volume 36, 2004-2005

The Student Historical Journal Loyola University New Orleans Volume 36, 2004-2005 The Loyola University Student Historical Journal is published annually by the Pi Chapter of Phi Alpha Theta International History Honor Society. Each year the Journal serves as the culmination of the chapter’s scholarly activities. Since 1966, first The Loyola University Student Historical Association, the Phi Alpha Theta have published the Journal to encourage scholarly activity by students and make public the best of their research efforts. The papers selected for publication were chosen from among those submitted to an editorial committee that included members of Loyola’s history faculty and officers of Phi Alpha Theta. The papers were judged on scholarship and writing. Students who wish to submit a paper for the next publication should contact the Department of History at Loyola University, 6363 St. Charles Avenue, New Orleans, LA 70118.

The Student Historical Journal Loyola University New Orleans Volume 36, 2004-2005 Faculty Advisor and Editor……………………………………..…..Dr. David More Layout and Design……………………………………….......….Victoria McCardell Erin L. Landry

Special Thanks to the faculty of the Loyola University History Department For the selection of papers for publication and to Dean Frank Scully of Arts and Sciences and Hauser Printing Company, Inc. for financing this scholarly project Phi Alpha Theta International Honor Society in History Member, Association of College Honor Societies

Officers 2004-2005 President……………………………………………………….……Erin L. Landry Vice-President…………………………………………….……Victoria McCardell Officers 2005-2006 President………………………………………………………..Victoria McCardell Vice-President……………………………………………………...…Alania Willett Secretary………………………………………………………...…Meredith Griffin

Contents “Immanuel Wallerstein’s World Systems Theory”: Outstanding Semester History Research Paper by. Timothy Sullivan

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“How to be Rulers of the World”: Britain’s Lessons from the Roman Empire Outstanding History Senior Thesis by: Katherine Perkins

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“Edward Said and Orientalism” by: Rebecca Duckert

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“R.G. Collingwood”: The Attainment of Knowledge Through Historical Inquiry by: Tracy Kee

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“Frederick Jackson Turner”: Pioneering the Study of the American West by: Alison Koederitz

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“Women and the Third Reich” by: Victoria McCardell

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“Immanuel Wallerstein’s World Systems Theory” Outstanding Semester Research Paper by: Timothy Sullivan Immanuel Wallerstein introduced his world-systems theory in 1974 in the first of his three volumes, The Modern World-System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century. This three-volume work drew from the influence of Fernand Braudel, particularly in its view of capitalism, and integrated it with then-contemporary theories from third-world scholars such as Andre Gunder Frank that concerned the exploitative relationship between colonizing Western European nations, namely England, France, Germany, Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands, and the exploited colonies. This distinction between the European “core” and the third-world “periphery” did not disappear with colonial independence movements; Frank and many of his third-world colleagues were in fact applying coreperiphery explanations to both current and historical international relations. Wallerstein’s world-systems model presents itself as an historical model, and in a limited sense, rightly so. It is an innovative historical explanation for the current world order, tracing it back to the discovery of the New World and the spread of capitalism, defined simply by Wallerstein as the effort to accumulate as much profit as possible, from Europe in the sixteenth century to the basis for the global economy today. The model functions well, though not without criticism, in accounting this era from the sixteenth century to today that Wallerstein terms the “modern” world-system. This is where world-systems theory becomes problematic. Wallerstein briefly acknowledges previous world-systems, such as the Roman Empire, but offers little comparative analysis between world-systems. World-systems theory suggests applicability to all worldsystems, but Wallerstein directs his attention almost solely to the modern-world system. This narrow approach arguably becomes even narrower; Wallerstein’s history of the modern world-system is often criticized as overly teleological, an attempt to impose a post-World War II international economic structure upon the previous four centuries. Perhaps it is unavoidable for a historian to ignore current trends, but Wallerstein’s description of his world-theory as a “protest” against traditional social science and his emphasis on the “world revolution” of 1968, an event hardly a half-decade removed from the introduction of world-systems theory, suggest that Wallerstein seeks more than historical explanation, but also, perhaps, something akin to a political statement within the social sciences. Whether or not this is the case, world-systems theory had and continues to have tremendous influence within the social sciences, and presents a historical model that not only inspires new interpretations of history, but also remains a source of controversy within the social sciences themselves, challenging those within the field to reexamine their methodology. THE ORIGINS OF WORLD-SYSTEMS ANALYSIS Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-systems analysis posits that the rise of capitalism in Europe resulted from the “frontier effect” of overseas expansion in the sixteenth century, following Christopher Columbus’ discovery of the Americas in 1492. The “frontier effect” follows from late-nineteenth century American historian Frederick

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Timothy Sullivan Jackson’s Turner’s theory that the “American character” was predominantly shaped by its western frontier and steady expansion, rather than from factors within the colonies. Following World War II, Walter Prescott Webb expanded Jackson Turner’s thesis to account for European colonial expansion and suggested that Europe’s exploitation of the vast resources in the Americas gave rise to modern capitalism in the sixteenth century and the subsequent four-century boom that followed. This “outside-in” approach contrasted the popular notion that European capitalism resulted from internal factors, and then spread outward. Columbus’ discovery provoked a “boom” in history that, if it did not lead to the rise of capitalism altogether, hurried its development into the economic foundation for what Wallerstein considers the “modern world-system.” This “utterly abnormal phase” in history marks the beginning of the modern world-system, which is defined primarily by the global, capitalist economy we find ourselves in today. The discovery of the Americas not only facilitated Europe’s capitalist development, but it marked the beginning of the end of the frontier. Capitalism developed from European expansion into the Americas. Expansion preceded capitalism, not vice versa, and, according to Wallerstein, saved Europe from falling into anarchy as a result of economic contraction. This perceived crisis, coupled with the establishment of different modes of production adhering to Wallerstein’s three zones and the development of strong states at the core, fulfilled the basic requirements for the formation of a capitalist world-system. 1 Webb determined three essential ingredients for the growth and diffusion of capitalism: land, labor, and capital. 2 William Graham Sumner suggested that the population to land ratio determined the possibilities of development. 3 The sparselypopulated Americas provided densely-populated Europe with a treasure of goods: gold and silver bullion, coffee, cocoa, sugar, timber, furs, cotton, tobacco, rubber, and, following the subjugation of the native populations, slave labor. With this sudden influx of wealth, Europeans businessmen, who, according to Webb, previously had little access to wealth, suddenly became the harbingers of capitalism, defined simplistically by Webb as a “cultural complex involving striving for profit.” Economist John Maynard Keynes’ description of the period from 1550-1650 as the “golden era” of capitalism reinforced the idea that, though Europe may have contained internal pre-conditions for capitalism, it was only with the discovery of the Americas that capitalism truly took hold. 4 Webb’s view was supported and expanded by a Trinidadian scholar, Eric Eustace Williams, in the 1940’s. Williams argued that the wealth from West Indian plantation colonies generated the financial base for the Industrial Revolution.5 In the same fashion as Jackson Turner and Webb, Williams defied the then-popular practice of looking at internal factors to explain the rise of the Industrial Revolution. Third-world scholars, who found in Williams’ theory of European exploitation of the Americas a suitable explanation for third-world underdevelopment, embraced his view. First-world scholars 1

Green, William A. History, Historians, and the Dynamics of Change. (Praeger: Westport, CT 1993), pp. 142-150 Prescott Webb, Walter, The Great Frontier, (Boston, 1952), cited in Green, p.145 3 Sumner, William Graham, “Earth-Hunger or the Philosophy of Land-Grabbing,” in Albert G. Keller, ed., Earth-Hunger and Other Essays (New Haven, 1913), quoted in Webb, p.17, cited in Green p.145 4 Keynes, John Maynard, A Treatise on Money, vol. 2 (New York, 1930), quoted in Webb, p.177; cited in Green p.146 5 Williams, Eric, Capitalism and Slavery, (Chapel Hill, 1944), cited in Green p.146 2

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Timothy Sullivan tended to continue examining internal pre-conditions for Europe’s industrial advancement. Four influential debates marked the transition from post-World War II doubt to the publishing of world-systems theory in the mid-seventies. In 1948 Raúl Prebisch introduced the core-periphery economic concept at the United Nations’ Economic Commission on Latin America, over which he presided. 6 The core-periphery concept explained capitalist development through a process of exploitation; dominant “core” states took advantage of “periphery” states, leading to what Frank termed the “development of the underdevelopment” of the periphery. 7 After Stalin’s death, Soviet scholars grappled over Marx’s concept of the “Asiatic Mode of Production.” Western European historians sought increasingly to understand the transition from feudalism to capitalism, and finally, debates arose over with the emergence of Braudel and the Analles School and its concept of “total history.” 8 From each debate, we derive one of the four central features to Wallerstein’s world-systems theory. First, Wallerstein shares Marx’s belief in economic determinism; second, he assumes Braudel’s view of the longue durée, as well adopting Braudel’s view that the economic determinant of the modern era is capitalism. The rise of the capitalist system derives from the importance of the American continent as a “frontier” for European economic development, and finally, Wallerstein adopts Frank and Prebisch’s dependencia theory and core-periphery structure in order to account for the historical relationship between this frontier and those who exploit it. It is from these four basic premises that Wallerstein formulates his world-systems theory. WORLD-SYSTEMS THEORY World-systems theory focuses on the creation of the modern world via the rise of capitalism. It focuses on social systems, rather than individual states, and has at its foundation a “comprehensive, integrated historical experience (the rise of capitalism) involving Europe and the entire Western hemisphere.” 9 The subsequent history and the force of globalization have integrated the entire world into this system. The bond is not political, but economic, what Wallerstein terms a capitalist “world-empire,” based on the division of labor between core, periphery, and semi-periphery states, all driven by the desire for profit. The modern world-system differs from past world-systems because it lacks a central political structure; whereas, for example, the ancient Roman or Persian economy was essentially synonymous with its respective state, the current worldeconomy, though having actors of varying influence, is nevertheless independent of any political body. This capitalist system is the only one that “gives priority to the endless accumulation of capital.” It is the only world-economy independent of a political equivalent that has survived for any significant duration, and it cannot exist within any framework except that of the world-system. It relies on a special relationship between 6

Prebisch, Raul, The Economic Development of Latin America and Its Principal Problems, (E/CN.12/89/Rev.1), New York, 1950. United Nations Publication, Sales No. 1950. II. G.2 Wallerstein, Immanuel. World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction. (Duke University Press, 2004), pp.11

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Gunder Frank, Andre, World Accumulation, 1492-1789, (London: Macmillan), 1978. Wallerstein cites this as the “clearest and fullest presentation” of Frank’s early work, cited in Wallerstein, Intro, p.102 Green, p.149

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Timothy Sullivan economic producers and politicians that seek to preserve and promote the privileged position of the defining feature of the system, the capitalist world-economy. Indeed, if it failed to preserve it, the system would collapse and be replaced by a new system altogether. 10 Wallerstein argues that capitalism thrived not in spite of the absence of a central political structure, but in fact because of the competition that resulted from the lack of a central dominant state. Wages were central to a state’s development. American bullion increased inflation, which, unaccompanied by a rise in real wages, resulted in huge profits for businessmen. Industrial investment thrived in mid-level states like Holland and England where wages were low enough for businessmen to reap profits, but high enough that a market for their products existed. Despite the competition amongst states, Wallerstein maintains that the whole system was capitalist: No large region produced exclusively for a local economy. All labor forms were calculated to produce the largest quantity of goods in the most efficient manner for a world market, and the governing principle of that market was capitalist. 11

The rise of capitalism and development of strong states were reinforcing events. The plurality of states prevented the capitalist world-economy from devolving into a worldempire. Each state’s interest in self-preservation spurred competition and economic growth, and this growth in turn strengthened the competing states. The most successful among these were those who had developed a secure bourgeoisie dedicated to commerce and industry. States that neglected bourgeoisie development, such as Spain and Austria, fared worse than their competitors. Geographic advantages also influenced economic preeminence; Wallerstein explains England’s advantage over France as a consequence of the former’s maritime economy. 12 States protect the prosperity of their firms through the issuing of patents, protectionist measures, subsidies, and tax breaks. Without these protections, the capitalist system would have been devoid of profit and would not have survived. Instead, capitalist competition proceeds in a “two steps forward, one step back” format. This applies to firms and consolidation, meaning that firms expand in size, until their administrative costs become too great, and they collapse or scale-back, though in the case of the latter, the pattern is that firms do not return to the previously smaller size (before the expansion), but a medium level before repeating the process. Firms exist primarily in the core, where they enjoy almost monopolistic control; the true competition takes place amongst those involved in periphery production, and the consequence of the relationship between the monopolistic core and the less stable competitive periphery is unequal exchange. The monopolistic core firms are protected by more powerful core states, and as such enjoy better protection, enabling exploitative practices, or “plunder.” This protects the core’s control of its processes (more advanced industries, such as technological research and development), as well as their control of peripheral processes (agriculture). Wallerstein rightly recognizes that processes shift over time; the textiles Wallerstein, Intro, pp. 24-28 Wallerstein, The Modern World-System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century. (New York: Academic Press), 1974, cited in Green, p.151 12 Green, p.151-154 10 11

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Timothy Sullivan industry, a core process in the sixteenth century, has now been relegated to a peripheral process. Semi-periphery nations stand between the core-periphery balance, mixing core and periphery processes and engaging in the most intense competition, driven by the possibility of achieving core status, and the fear of descending to periphery status. Wallerstein allowed for greater flexibility in categorizing a state’s position by adding the concept of the semi-periphery to Prebisch’s core-periphery model. 13 A state improves its position primarily by creating stability. The absence of conflict, internal or external, enabled a prosperous business environment that could facilitate economic growth and a “rise” in the world-system. One state’s improvement must come at another’s expense. Wallerstein does not offer his world-systems theory as an exemplary model of human civilization, only as an explanatory model. Commercial growth and the expansion of the world-system do not imply an overall higher level of economic prosperity, nor cultural enrichment. As a consequence of the competition inherent to the capitalist modern world-system, the problem of maldistribution is inevitable. THE MODERN WORLD-SYSTEM The modern world-system consists of six capitalist institutions: markets, firms, states, households, classes, and status-groups or “identities.” 14 Each group has been created and shaped within the framework of a capitalist world-economy, though of course each can be traced historically to a pre-modern world-system form. The importance Wallerstein ascribes to transnational firms implies that the world-system has never been so profoundly interdependent, and that these developments also mark the first time that an actor has transcended the central role of the state, thereby challenging the world order. 15 The market masks a process of exploitation, with firms backed by the military power of periphery states, which derived their power from the military support of core states.1616 This “process of exploitation” in the capitalist world-economy follows a cyclical rhythm, where leading industries arise, the economy expands, prosperity and increased capital enable the rise of new competing firms, overproduction results, profits decline, and a recession ensues before the process repeats itself. Wallerstein uses Kondratieff cycles to describe this process. Kondratieff cycles, which Wallerstein admits are controversial, examine an economy over medium-length periods, typically of 50-60 years in length, characterized by an A-phase of expansion and a subsequent B-phase of stagnation and decline. 17 When a cycle ends, it follows the two steps forward one step back model previously presented—it does not return to the situation at the beginning of the cycle. The cycle does have limits, termed “asymptotes,” which are in effect breaking 13

Wallerstein, Intro, pp.27-28 Ibid, pp. 24-25; Wallerstein considers these groups “institutions,” since they are shaped and formed by a historical system, in this case the modern world-system. 15 Hollist, W. Ladd and James N. Rosenau. “World System Debates.” International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 25, No. 1, World System Debates (Mar., 1981), p.9 16 Chase-Dunn, Christopher, and Peter Grimes. “World-Systems Analysis.” Annual Review of Sociology, Vol. 21 (1995), p.396 17 Wallerstein, Intro, p.30; Kondratieff cycles are considered controversial because they do not consider lags in alternative measures of production, such as prices, production, investment, and profit rates. 14

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Timothy Sullivan points. The system undergoes several cycles, continually expanding, until it reaches a point where it can no longer sustain itself. At this point, the system collapses and gives way to a new world-system. THE DECLINE OF THE MODERN WORLD-SYSTEM Historical systems have “lives.” Eventually, they reach “asymptotes that aggravate considerably the internal contradictions of the system…the system encounters problems it can no longer resolve, and this causes what we may call systemic crisis.”1818 The modern world-system is currently in a crisis, and has been since the late 1950’s. Wallerstein estimates that the system’s downfall may last another twenty-five to fifty years, before it bifurcates. The world revolution of 1968, though not the first sign of the modern world-systems’ collapse, was the first public demonstration of the crisis. The world revolution ended the long period of liberal supremacy, setting off a chain reaction that dislocated the geoculture that kept the political culture intact, which consequently dislocated the underpinnings of the capitalist world-economy, and thereby exposed it to the “full force of political and cultural shocks to which it had always been subjected” but previously sheltered from by political and social order. The 1968 revolution, sharing an ironic similarity to the discovery of the Americas, was not the beginning of a dramatic historic event. Just as Europe must have contained internal preconditions for capitalism, the world-system contained long-term structural problems inherent in capitalism, and the 1968 revolution only expedited the development of the crisis. What were these structural problems? Capitalist producers naturally want increased prices for their products, and lower costs of production. But prices are constrained by the existence of other competitors, who may sell for a better price, and the level of effective demand, or purchasing power of the consumer market. The latter is primarily affected by the distribution of income. The problem for producers is that they want as much profit as possible, requiring they minimize the amount of profit that goes to anyone else, yet they must allow for redistribution, or buyers for their product would not exist. A third factor, called the “elasticity of demand,” refers to the value a buyer places on alternate uses of their money; this accounts in part what products are considered “necessities.” The producer has only limited influence, through marketing, in influencing the “elasticity of demand.” As a consequence of these factors, producers must keep price levels where competitors cannot sell more cheaply and still profit, buyers have sufficient money to purchase the product, and buyers have an interest in paying the set price for the product. Producers typically try to accumulate capital by devising ways to keep production costs cheap and efficient. With increased globalization and the lack of a “frontier,” production costs have been increasingly on the rise.1919 Production consists of three main costs: personnel, inputs, and taxes. Personnel costs, or remuneration, result from a constant struggle between employer and employee. Employees improve their position with rare skills, organization, and by external factors. Their political strength depends on the state machinery and where alliances lie within the state. In general, the power of workers increases with organization and education, both of which are facilitated by urbanization. Repression can, and often has, contained workers’ movements, but repression too comes at a cost, and becomes increasingly 18 19

Ibid, p.76 Ibid, p.78

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Timothy Sullivan expensive the more it is required, not only because the internal costs of repression, but also because of the delays in production that come as a result of workers’ resistance. Firms have long used the tactic of “runaway factories,” shifting factories to areas with cheaper remuneration costs. These areas consist of a large, non-urban population outside the wage economy. Rural populations are displaced and forced into cities, which initially presents a win-win situation for both employer, who obtains cheap labor, and the employee, who receives a better wage than they received in the country. But employees become aware of opportunities for greater strength, and they organize and form, in a sense, a business whose product is its members’ labor. With this resistance comes a rise in remuneration costs. The crisis in the modern world-systems results from having few places left to go; capitalism has forced urbanization and also suffered from it and the accompanied rise in production costs. 20 Input costs have also increased. Inputs are simply the hardware and natural resources required for a product. There are three hidden costs any producer must consider in regard to inputs: how to dispose of his waste, how to renew raw materials, and how to maintain his infrastructure. The first two categories have been largely ignored until recently; though the ecological costs of irresponsibly disposing waste and pursuing raw materials have been high, firms are still able to gain an advantage over competing firms by employing such practices. Ecologically responsible firms must spend greater financial resources, thereby hurting their short-term competitiveness. The capitalist system, from its inception, has thrived from irresponsible exploitation. Only in the past fifty years have ecologists and social scientists realized the consequences of this action. 21 Maintaining roads, communications, and other transport costs are essential to infrastructure, and also increasingly expensive. Infrastructure must be paid for either through taxes, which penalized consumers, or individual firms, which penalized producers. The pressure to externalize costs of production to gain a short-term competitive advantage has thus far outpaced technological advancements that would permit the internalization of costs without critically hindering a producer’s short-term competitiveness. Rising taxation costs have been necessary to pay for this increasing gap. Besides its function in maintaining infrastructure, taxes finance state security and its bureaucracy, as well as satisfy citizens demands for access to health care, education, and lifetime income. The costs of waste disposal, renewing resources, and maintaining infrastructure have been sufficient to raise production costs, but there is yet another negative factor. The rise of capitalism allowed for an expanded number of producers; this has put an even greater squeeze on profits. 22 The crisis in the modern system followed an expansion in production. After World War II, an expanding economy, the progress of anti-systemic movements across the globe, and post-war optimism for continued prosperity and the continued success of popular movements set high expectations. In the case of anti-systemic movements, they gained power across the globe, in populist movements in Latin America and communist 20 Wallerstein does not cite any statistics; however, the Population Resource Center, a Washington D.C. research organization, cites in 1950 thirty percent of the world’s population lived in urban areas, compared to 47 percent today. http://www.prcdc.org/summaries/urbanization/urbanization.html. 21 Ibid, p.81-82 22 Ibid, p.83

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Timothy Sullivan movements in Central Europe and East Asia. They achieved their first task, but once in power, they proved remarkably inept in achieving their ambitious goal of “changing the world” (in the fashion they deemed appropriate). The increasing gap between core and periphery and the failure of these anti-systemic social movements to live up to expectations created a deep sense of disappointment. This disappointment manifested itself in the world revolution of 1968. The revolution had two main themes: rejecting U.S. and Soviet hegemonic power, and drawing attention to anti-systemic movements failure to live up to promises. Uprisings throughout the world Legitimated and strengthened the sense of disillusionment, not only with the old antisystemic movements but also with the state structures these movements had been fortifying. The long-term certainties of evolutionary hope had become transformed into fears that the world-system might be unchanging. 23

The 1968 revolution undermined the capitalist world-economy and the “optimism of the oppressed.” The liberal center gave way to more extreme views from the right and left. For the right, these views primarily concerned economic and political issues; for the left, social issues, particularly in regard to race and sexuality. The policy for the right was no longer development but globalization. Speculation, a telltale sign of increasing chaos, became an increasingly prominent source for profits, rather than actual production. The September 11 attacks on the United States also demonstrated the system’s vulnerability. The right took an extremist position in favor of a unilaterist military approach, combined with an effort to counter the left’s counter-revolution. This approach only threatens to increase systemic instability. 24 Wallerstein predicts that the current systemic crisis will result in greater fluctuations, not only financially, but also in terms of social and political behavior. Systems in crisis do not change their behavior, because its actors have a sense of security with the short-term benefits of the system. The system eventually “bifurcates” and leaves two options: “middle-run” adjustments, that have little effect but are more often the favored choice, or taking a transformative path, perhaps disguised as a “middle-run” solution. Transformative paths take advantage of systemic instability and ultimately direct the bifurcation in favor of one path over another. 25 Wallerstein suggests that the key element in the debate over which path wins out depends on the extent that each path promotes the values of liberty and freedom. He distinguishes between the liberty of the majority and liberty of the minority. Few states, according to Wallerstein, have a majority democracy that is based on collective political decisions that truly reflect the active participation of the citizenry. The liberty of the minority favors preserving their privilege (as the minority refers to those with power) in determining issues over which they feel the majority should have no say. Rather, the majority is left out of the decision-making process, except perhaps to “vote” on these issues determined by the minority. In effect, the minority uses the majority to legitimate its power. At times there is struggle between these two camps, and confusion ensues, which favors those in the minority who claim to represent the majority. Wallerstein’s 23 24 25

Ibid, p.84 Ibid, p.89 Ibid, p. 30

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Timothy Sullivan emphasis on liberty as a concept is intended to encourage the majority to achieve the full realization of its liberty, rather than serve as a legitimating vehicle for exclusive policies. 26 CRITICISMS OF WORLD-SYSTEMS THEORY Most of the criticisms of the world-system theory respond to its operation. The strength of the theory rests two conditions: first, that American wealth was a necessary prerequisite for Europe’s breakthrough to capitalism, and second, that the division of labor in the capitalist world-economy favored the core at the expense of the periphery. Critics respond to the first by arguing that European states’ need for gold and silver bullion from the Americas implies the prior existence of an exchange, money-based economy, reflecting capitalism. Nor did capitalism immediately develop after discovery, though the implication of the “abnormal” historical event of discovery of the Americas is that such an immediate boom in fact occurred. Fernand Braudel argues that capitalism must have existed prior to overseas expeditions, for the simple fact that there had to be sufficient wealth within Europe to fund such expeditions. Each of these arguments seems to result from Wallerstein’s overemphasis on the discovery, which leads him to neglect conditions in pre-discovery Europe and ignore a transitional phase for capitalism in favor of a strict line drawn between pre- and post- discovery Europe. Again, the criticisms mostly result from a matter of varying emphasis. 27 Critics have also attacked Wallerstein’s methodology, noting that he tends to reify events, namely Columbus’ discovery, and he accordingly employs teleological explanations of history. He also leaves little room for contingency; all events that occur within the world-system are explainable by the world-system. There are not historical “accidents.” Perhaps Wallerstein leaves little room for accident because his theory indicts core nations for exploiting the periphery. But critics also question the determinations of the world-system: does it reflect de facto economic positions, or does it determine them? Does a world-system analyst begin objectively with a state and proceed to label it “core” or “periphery,” or does one begin with such a classification, which thereby influences all further analysis? Debates over world-systems theory occur both externally and internally. An example of the former is the realists and behavioralists’ position that continues to define international system in terms of the interactions, contacts, and exchanges among the system’s principal actors, its nation-states. An example of an internal debate is what Christopher Chase-Dunn terms the “lumper/splitter” debate amongst world-systems analysts over the number of historical world-systems. 28 Unlike world-systems theory, which begins with the capitalist system and then examines individual states, the traditional approach favored by realists and behavioralists begins with the states and then moves toward postulating an international order.29 Thomas McCormick suggests that this form of interstate theory is not necessarily 26

Ibid, p.89 Green, p.157 Chase-Dunn, Christopher, and Thomas D. Hall. “Comparing World-Systems: Concepts and Working Hypotheses.” Social Forces, Vol. 71, No. 4 (Jun., 1993), p.860 29 Hollist/Rosenau, p.10 27 28

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Timothy Sullivan incompatible with world-systems theory, but that the two are asymmetrical because of their unit of analysis. Whereas interstate theory examines the individual state, worldsystems theory takes a more holistic approach through its examination of a worldeconomy. 30 The state-system within Wallerstein’s world-system may very well be the same as that of the “international system” conventionally studied in international relations, but with the addition that the state-system’s dynamics are the result of its interaction with the processes of capital accumulation and labor division in the context of Wallerstein’s three-tiered model. 31 Chase-Dunn also examines the debate amongst adherents of world-systems theory, the so-called “lumper/splitter” debate. 32 Lumpers lean towards the view that there has historically been only one world-system; splitters tend to focus on local processes, at the exclusion of more distant systemic connections. Most systems theorists operate in the middle of these two poles, though Chase-Dunn rebukes the argument for a single historical world-system. Though supportive of Wallerstein in this respect, he does not withhold his own criticisms. He rejects Wallerstein’s implication that more-developed societies always exploit less-developed societies. 33 James Petras echoes this position, suggesting that this is an overly abstract assertion. Such abstractions result from directing too much focus on external relations between states/social systems and ignoring internal relations. Central to Petras’ argument is the “collaborator class,” those in periphery nations who organize the state and economy in accordance with the core’s definitions. Internal class relations and conflicts between social systems require greater consideration than they are given in Wallerstein’s world-systems theory. Though the interactions of core and periphery states are obviously central to world-systems analysis, the organization of production, class relationships, and the class character of an individual state may be more significant in determining what differentiates societies and how they insert themselves into the world-system. 34 Wallerstein organizes his critics into four camps: nomothetic positivists, orthodox Marxists, state autonomists, and cultural particularists. All, according to Wallerstein, oppose world-systems analysis because it rejects the basic premise of their particular theory. They also share the critique that world-systems analysis lacks a central actor. For nomothetic positivists, the actor is the individual; for orthodox Marxists, the industrial proletariat; for state autonomists, the political man; and for cultural particularists, each person is an actor engaged in an autonomous discourse with everyone else. Wallerstein responds to each: For world-systems analysis, these actors, just like the long-list of structures that one can enumerate, are the products of a process. They are not primordial atomic elements, but 30 McCormick, Thomas J. “World Systems.” The Journal of American History, Vol. 77, No. 1 (Jun., 1990), 125-132. 31 Chase-Dunn, Christopher. “Comparative Research on World-System Characteristics.” International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 23, No. 4 (Dec., 1979), p.603 32 Chase-Dunn/Hall, p.860 33 Chase-Dunn/Hall, p.863 34 Petras, James. “Dependency and World-System Theory: A Critique and New Directions.” Latin American Perspectives, Vol. 8, No. 3 / 4, Dependency and Marxism (Late Summer-Autumn, 1981), p.152

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Timothy Sullivan part of a systemic unit out of which they emerged and upon which they act. They act freely, but their freedom is constrained by their biographies and the social prisons of which they are a part. Analyzing their prisons liberates them to the maximum degree that they can be liberated. To the extent that we each analyze our social prisons, we liberate ourselves from their constraints to the extent that we can be liberated. 35

Wallerstein recognizes that historical systems are historical themselves, and therein lay a paradox for social scientists. For Wallerstein, a social scientist’s “principal task” rests on formulating a response to this paradox. 36 RE-THINKING THE SOCIAL SCIENCES Wallerstein’s formulation of the world-system originated in the early 1970’s, though the conception for world-systems theory dates back to the late-eighteenth century and the emphasis on empirical analysis of reality. The divorce between philosophy and science, advocated by “empiricist” philosophers who favored an inductive scientific approach over deductive metaphysics, shaped the rise of the modern university. An institutionalization of two cultures, one scientific and in pursuit of truth, the other humanistic and concerned with good and beauty, resulted. Left in an uncertain middle were the social sciences. The French Revolution made understanding where to place the social sciences an urgent priority. The Revolution introduced two, truly revolutionary ideas: that political change was normal, not a bizarre aberration in history, and that sovereignty ultimately belonged to the people. These two developments preceded the rise of the social sciences to a privileged position within academia. Scientific approaches, such as Leopold von Ranke’s “history as it truly happened” method, were limited to core nations with the capacity for scientific research; the result was history predominantly of, and at the very least from the perspective of, powerful Western European states and the United States. Within the social sciences, a distinction emerged between history and what can be considered “contemporary studies,” consisting of economics, sociology, and political science. The divisions within contemporary studies follow from the dominant nineteenth-century liberal ideology that defined modernity by the three “spheres”: the market, the state, and civil society. The division of the disciplines had not managed to circumvent its Eurocentric bias, and two new fields, anthropology and ethnography, were created as colonialism created the need to study other parts of the world, outside the Eurocentric core. Both were created to foster greater understanding of previously unstudied regions. World-systems theory and the central significance of globalization reflect the academic shift that accompanied colonialism. Unique to world-systems theory is the fact, with the lack of a frontier and globalization, it not only directs study to other, peripheral regions of the world, but it also requires a re-examination of how to study regions. Wallerstein attributes the historical “Eurocentrism” of academia to the fact that Europe distinguished itself from other empires by its military supremacy that in turn facilitated its economic and cultural dominance and established Europe’s “modernity.” 37

35 36 37

Wallerstein, Intro, p.22 Ibid, pp.19-22 Ibid, p.8

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Timothy Sullivan A series of new challenges to the social sciences arose in the aftermath of World War II. The United States was established as a hegemonic power, with the most influential university system, the third world became the center of political turbulence and geo-political self-assertion, and the expanding world-economy and increase in democratic tendencies led to an expansion of the university system. These new developments challenged the structures of knowledge from the past one hundred fifty years. Pre-World War II structures, according to Wallerstein, were useless in the postWorld War II world. “Area studies” and “development” arose as new academic ideas that integrated with the traditional disciplines to form a new conception of the social sciences. The idea of development was especially unique, in assuming that societies and nations developed in the same fundamental manner, but at varying rates. This enabled social scientists to study “developed” nations and offer them as a model for less developed nations, arguing that eventually, the less developed would reach the developed stage. Contradicting this very notion was the belief that developed states could influence development (the purpose for development studies in the first place), thereby launching underdeveloped states into a historical process foreign to the already-developed nations. Wallerstein argues that the concept of the “developed” state offered the United States and the Soviet Union a strategic tool for accomplishing their own interests, by presenting themselves as models for all other nations. Regardless of the merit of development studies, it added to the confusion within the social sciences that resulted from the growing number and overlapping of its disciplines. The blurring of traditional lines between the disciplines accompanied increased questioning of traditional “truths” within the disciplines. This, combined with the shock that Wallerstein attributes to the 1968 revolution, established the setting for world-system theory’s introduction. CONCLUSIONS Wallerstein freely admits that “concepts can only be understood within the context of their times.” He suggests, reflecting the spirit of the 1960’s and 70’s, that “new perspectives are generally best understood if one thinks of them as a protest against older perspectives.” 38 Wallerstein’s new perspective integrated and developed the ideas of Jackson Turner, Webb, Braudel and Frank to form a historical model that is considered “the most influential…in recent decades” and “certainly among the most controversial.” The world-system model “identifies a long-standing exploitative relationship that assigns moral culpability to the West and sanctions righteous indignation to the wider world.” 39 It is also a model that leaves many questions unanswered, most importantly concerning how social scientists are to use world-systems theory as an analytical and comparative tool, and, reinforcing the importance of the previous question, concerning what follows the apparently inevitable and increasingly-near collapse of the modern world-system. Chase-Dunn feels that world-systems theory presents an advantage because it considers a longer time period over which it analyzes change, but needs further development in order to reply to the ambiguities about systemic transitions. 40 Additionally controversy still exists over such issues as how to measure and 38 39 40

Ibid, p.1 Green, p.148 Chase-Dunn/Hall, pp.851-52

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Timothy Sullivan conceptualize what constitutes a “core” or “periphery” nation, or the role of culture within the world-system. Debra Straussfogel argues for increased examination of culture’s impact and significance, which is of importance due to what she considers the de facto existence of a global culture, and because cultural distinctions determine the nature of a nation-state’s participation within the world-system. 41 She further opines that “world-systems theory remains dissatisfying as a unified conceptual framework for social research…each researcher pursues those concepts of personal interest…there is inconsistency in their definition and application and ambiguity as to what world-systems theory is meant to represent.” 42 This ambiguity derives from Wallerstein’s focus on almost solely describing the modern-world system, as opposed to analysis of other world-systems and transitions between them, which would offer a model applicable both historically and as a predictive tool for social scientists. His anticipation of the modern world-system’s collapse draws attention to this perceived flaw in his model. He has forecasted the end of the modern world-system, but has not provided sufficient explanation for how we can determine when this end will come, how the transition to a new system will occur, and what that system will be. Wallerstein suggest either a hierarchical meritocracy or an egalitarian democracy. Other scholars, such as Chase-Dunn, observe that expanded states have always followed expanded corporations and increased international political organization has increased the level of global governance, leading them to suggest the possibility of an eventual world-state. Whether or not the United Nations will lead or serve as the model for this world-state remains to be seen, and requires further examination. 43 Worldsystems theory not only fails to tell what system will follow, but also whether or not such a prediction is even possible. Straussfogel denies the usefulness of world-systems theory in predicting the future or determining laws of history and limits its use to presenting a model for constructing a theory about historical transformations that can provide a basic guideline for decisions, rather than prediction, regarding the future. 44 World-systems theory continues to inspire new developments and modes of thought within the social sciences, and its influence cannot be doubted. The scholarship that has arisen from Wallerstein’s world-system model has in turn questioned it, and demanded answers not provided within Wallerstein’s initial account. Despite the criticisms made of world-systems theory, Wallerstein still attributes to it a positive legacy for “raising the debate” about how we think of the world, and for fostering more awareness of global issues, prompting more people to struggle for their rights, and view with greater discernment the “rhetoric of the powerful.” 45 The lasting significance of world-systems theory rests not necessarily in its account of history, but rather in its establishment of a new conceptual framework in which social scientists may operate.

41 Straussfogel, Debra. “World-Systems Theory: Toward a Heuristic and Pedagogic Conceptual Tool.” Economic Geography, Vol. 73, No. 1 (Jan., 1997), p.122 42 Ibid, p.118 43 Chase-Dunn/Grimes, p.402 44 Straussfogel, p.118 45 Wallerstein, p.90

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“How to be Rulers of the World:” Britain’s Lessons from the Roman Empire Outstanding Senior Thesis by: Kate Perkins INTRODUCTION "Rome represents conquest," Benjamin Disraeli once said. Those who, like Queen Victoria’s favorite Prime Minister, supported and advocated Britain’s conquest of territories around the world, would keep that city in their minds. Like many imperialists before them, they were inclined to assume the mantle of the Roman Empire. Britain had been a part of that Empire once, and now it was she who was bringing civilization to distant parts of the world. The British ruling classes were quite aware of the Roman historical experience. The elite’s education was a classical education, revolving almost entirely around the ancient Mediterranean civilizations of Greece and Rome. And since the Victorian British imperialists identified themselves far more with the "practical" Romans than the "idealistic" Greeks, Rome served as a model. It also served as a warning. Many historians, at the time and since, have made comparisons between British and Roman imperialism. Among the Victorians and their Edwardian successors, both scholars and public figures, such as Edwardian historian Lord Cromer in his lecture (and later book) “Ancient and Modern Imperialism,” claimed that Britain was following the Roman example, under more difficult circumstances. More modern historians, such as P.A. Brunt in “Reflections on British and Roman Imperialism” emphasized contrast more than comparison, showing the many ways in which British imperialism differed from the Roman example. Steven Patterson’s paper “Born Booted and Spurred: The Roman Ideal in British India,” presented in November 2004, provided an an excellent account of how Anglo-Indians emulated Roman attitudes toward honor and power. This focus on attitudes, on the way the British thought about the Romans and that example’s relationship with the way they thought about themselves, is a subject which merits further discussion and expansion. What is to be discussed here is not just a comparison or contrast of the actualities of the empires, but the place of Rome in the British imperial mind, as a positive and negative example to be used not just in the empire, but for the empire, on Britain's home front. Allusions to Rome were made with great rhetorical flourish during the long nineteenth century, in which Victoria became not just Regina, but Imperatrix. But as attitudes toward the empire and colonized people shifted, so did the use of the Roman example. Britain had possessed an Empire as early as the twelfth century, when King Henry II had acquired land across Europe and his successors had made further conquests. This continental empire was gradually lost over the centuries, but just a few years after the final territory, Calais, was ceded to France by Queen Mary I in 1558, Queen Elizabeth I commissioned colonizing expeditions to such places as Newfoundland, Canada -- which had been "discovered" by John Cabot during a 1497 expedition commissioned by Elizabeth's grandfather, King Henry VII. 1 Such expeditions would take advantage of British sea power in colonizing places all over the world.

1 Clayton Roberts, David Roberts and Douglas Bisson. A History of England. Vol.II. (Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2002). p. 655.

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Elizabeth I also chartered the British East India Company in 1600, the trading company which would by the late eighteenth century control India. Trade was the main motivation in this empire, although the colonies were also an outlet for emigration. As the empire was expanded throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth Centuries, Britain was establishing colonies mostly as part of a mercantilist economic philosophy. Colonies would not only be an excellent source of raw materials, but exclusive markets for the finished British goods. The year 1776 was a very unfortunate year for this incarnation of the Empire. The American colonies declared themselves the independent United States, and Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations, which would begin a major shift in economic thinking away from the mercantilism which had been a driving force in colonial acquisition. Yet just after Britain lost the United States, they colonized Australia. And the wars with France, which involved colonies a great deal, had led to the acquisition of new colonies in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and the Mediterranean. Incidentally, Edward Gibbon in 1776 published the first volume of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which would eventually be read by many Victorian imperialists and be considered quite authoritative, so the year did produce something that would eventually prove useful for imperial rhetoric. But although Britain had possessed its Empire for centuries, and although the eighteenth century had seen a great deal of interest in the classical world, there was in the Napoleonic War period a reluctance to associate Britain with Roman imperialism. No one in early-nineteenthcentury Britain wanted to be associated with the imperial Napoleon, who was trying to conquer the world like some kind of modern-day Caesar. One of the issues which gave Britain trouble with thoughts of the Empire was liberalism. From the Latin word liber, "free," liberalism was an advocation of individual independence, a product of the Enlightenment which still permeated most of Britain's new middle classes. A culture fixated on freedom seemed incompatible with the authoritarian system of an empire. Noting in particular the loss of the American colonies and the shift away from mercantilism, many believed that an Empire was not worth the trouble, and that colonies would drop off one by one as they were prepared for independence. Even Disraeli, who would later be foremost among the “New Imperialists” and grant Victoria the title of Empress, said in 1852, “These wretched colonies are millstones around our necks.” 2 Colonies such as Canada, Australia, and South Africa were given more self-government. Enthusiasm for empire may have decreased, and criticism increased, but there were still imperialists in Britain during the mid-nineteenth century. "Little Englanders," such as William Gladstone, wished Britain to no longer retain these expensive, burdensome colonies, but they had plenty among their fellow educated Britons to argue with. In the discussion and debate of what should be done about the empire, many imperialists drew on the Roman example made so available in their education. They invoked the image in matters of imperial policy: THIS was how empires worked. There was a shift, during the second half of the nineteenth century, in both the attitude of the British public toward the empire and the way in which the British elite used the Roman example. Social Darwinism was involved in this shift. After the publication of Charles Darwin’s theories, the later Victorians, and the Edwardians who emerged from them, would live in a more racialized world. In the 1870s the "New Imperialism" arose, influenced by Darwin and 2 Roberts, p. 656.

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presided over by Disraeli. Nationalism ran high, and imperialism became a part of it. Britain became happy to provide the prime example of a bearer of Rudyard Kipling’s "White Man’s Burden," sending forth the best that she bred. World domination was not merely fun or profitable, it was the right thing for a superior civilization, a superior "race," to do. Britain did not want the emerging powers in competition with her, such as Germany or --heaven forbid-Japan, to prove racially superior. It is in this time that the negative example of Rome’s decline would be invoked more, and with more emphasis on "breeding" and "degeneration." Those not happy with the pervasiveness of liberalism in British society now had an excellent pretext upon which to curb it: the imperial necessity for the improved breeding and character of British men. The British believed that Rome showed what happened when a powerful, manly race sent out the best it had to rule the world, and they believed that Rome showed what happened when that race got sloppy or "effeminate." The lesson switched from "how to run a worldwide empire" to "how to be an imperial race, and avoid the degeneration thereof." This avoidance of degeneration invoked the negative example of the later Roman empire with regards to luxury, gender, sexuality, and dealings with "natives." Britain did not handle the extension of citizenship the way Romans had. The Romans would initially crush the opposition of the conquered people, then, eventually, grant them all the rights of Romans, giving them the ability to go from the very bottom to the top of the system, regardless of ethnicity. To Britons viewing the Roman example before the era of Darwin and Disraeli, this often appeared a useful potential policy, with the exception, of course, of the view of brutality as routine, which they replaced with a great show of humanitarianism. British education in the colonies, established before the arrival of Social Darwinism and the New Imperialism, set out to Westernize the elite among the colonized people, replacing their “inferior” culture with British culture. The sons of upper classes of India could study at Oxford as equals with British boys. Interracial fraternization was not the subject of a great deal of serious concern. To the adherents of the “New Imperialism,” this “mongrelization” seemed more like a part of the degeneration which had brought about the dreaded Fall. Britain had offered the promise of citizenship, but she never fully delivered. So hopes were higher, but full assimilation was impossible because of British racialized views.

Chapter 2: VICTORIAN CLASSICAL EDUCATION “ At St. Paul’s we teach nothing but the classics, nothing but Latin and Greek. If you want your son to learn anything else you must have him taught at home, and for this purpose we give three half-holidays a week.” ~Mr. Sleath, Headmaster, St. Paul’s School, 1837. To understand the British ruling classes’ use of the Roman example, one must first look at how they obtained that example in the first place. Classicism among the British elite was nurtured in its educational system, in "public" boarding schools such as Eton, Harrow, and Rugby, at which the curriculum was based upon translating, memorizing, and composing Latin and Greek poetry (prose was studied only minimally before the mid-nineteenth century), and in the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, where that curriculum more or less continued as every student who planned a public career studied the same ancient authors.

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There was, in general, a belief that ancient languages were what an education WAS. The oldest of England’s schools had been founded in a time when Latin was not really considered a dead language, and they had not changed very much as time went by. In fact, an 1805 case had decided that Leeds Grammar School was legally obligated to teach practically nothing but Latin and Greek, since that is what grammar schools had been originally founded to do. 3 These laws were changed in 1840, but the nineteenth-century public schools, which assimilated into their ranks the most established and well-reputed of the older grammar schools, were not necessarily eager to change. 4 A curriculum based in the classics was one of the requirements for being officially recognized as a public school in the 1865 Public Schools Year Book. 5 Greek and Latin poetry were not just for those who had a scholarly interest in them: they were what had always defined the background of the sort of person eligible for the positions parents wanted their children to grow up to have. In a way, this was another example of emulation of Rome. The Edwardian historian William Warde Fowler, in his book on Republican Roman society, mentions offhand that while the children of the upper classes, or those who wanted to be the upper classes, studied poetry and rhetoric, the children of those with a little money and no public aspirations focused on arithmetic. "It was only the parent of a higher class who sacrificed anything to the Muses," he said. 6 The wealthy Victorian parent was apparently just as happy to sacrifice nearly everything of their child’s education to the ancient Muses as the wealthy Roman parent. The boys who would grow up to be statesman or otherwise prominent individuals were certainly paying attention. Roundell Palmer, afterwards Lord Selborne, was fairly well grounded in Horace and Virgil by the Age of nine .....Macaulay was reading Xenophon and Homer and doing Latin verse at the age of twelve. 7 Lord Selborne, an Oxford graduate, was Solicitor General under Lord Palmerston and Lord Chancellor under Gladstone (although he broke with Gladstone on the imperial issue of Home Rule). Thomas Babington Macaulay, a Cambridge graduate, was a noted politician (particularly focused in Indian affairs), historian and author and was, like Selborne, eventually given a peerage. That childhood precocity would be focused in classical scholarship while adulthood would be spent in public affairs was perfectly normal; their mastery of the classical vocabulary they shared with their colleagues in Parliament made them extremely well suited for the rhetoric used there. Classical education was a valuable investment not just for the great statesmen, but for anyone hoping to take a civil service exam in the mid-nineteenth century. And for those of a less scholastic inclination, classical education seemed in the first part of the century to be an investment only. The composition of Latin poetry might be necessary to gain the position of running the British empire, but it would not inform one on how to do so. This, however, changed.

3 M.L. Clarke, Classical Education in Britain 1500-1917 (Cambridge: University Press, 1959), p.74 4 Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy, The Old School Tie: The Phenomenon of the English Public School (New York: Viking Press, 1978), p. 31. 5 Gathorne-Hardy, p. 102. 6 William Warde Fowler, Social Life at Rome in the Age of Cicero (New York:Macmillan, 1909), p. 176. 7 Clarke, p. 74.

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Thomas Arnold, headmaster of the elite public school Rugby, expressed his opinion of a classical education in this way: Knowledge of the past is valuable because without it our knowledge of the present and of the future must be scanty; but if the knowledge of the past be confined wholly to itself - if, instead of being made to bear upon things around us, it be totally isolated from them, and so disguised by vagueness and misapprehension as to appear incapable of illustrating them, then indeed it becomes little better than labours trifling. 8 The need to draw moral lessons from history would become more widespread with the gradual push to make the study of the classics relevant for the majority of those who were indoctrinated in them, not just the scholarly minority. Arnold helped lead the way in the movement throughout public schools to emphasize content over style. To the poetry of Horace and Virgil (and Homer on the Greek side), upon which the eighteenth century had been fixated, was added prose, particularly the histories of Tacitus and Livy (and Herodotus and Thucydides) and the rhetoric of Cicero (and Demosthenes). This new curriculum was still stylistically useful, particularly since it was believed that, in the words of classicist J.W. Mackail, “European prose, as an instrument of thought, is Cicero’s creation,” 9 but it also gave substance. Ancient history was "a living picture of things present, fitted not so much for the curiosity of the scholar as for the instruction of the statesman and the citizen." 10 Just as Cincinnatus, the statesman and patriot who left his plow to save Rome, then abandoned dictatorial power to return to the plow, and Scaevola, the legendary hero who willingly lost his right hand on a mission for the honor and safety of Rome, had been exemplars, models of good behavior for a Roman, so would they now serve as models of good behavior for an Englishman. The identification of the elite with Roman imperialism thus began quite early in life and was strongly encouraged. One place where there was a slow push for change was the next step in the elite education after the public school: the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. The universities had recently experienced some decline in quality in classical education. 11 But quality or not, at Oxford in particular, the classics were still the core of everything, even in the face of great pressure to modernize the curriculum. And so there was a gradual push for improvement during the midnineteenth century. Oxford decreased emphasis on such things as verse composition, and, eventually, allowed a great deal more focus in the field of ancient history, especially Roman. 12 Later, Cambridge also decided to call for a little less linguistic skill and a little more actual knowledge of the classical world itself, less form and more substance in the study of classics. This more substantial classicism would remain central in the universities even as natural science and modern history were given an increased place in the curriculum. The push to get more use out of the classics affected not only which genres were given pre-eminence in study, but which civilization. Classical education centered on both Latin and Greek language and literature, and the artistry and intellectual life of the Greeks was very much 8 Arnold, quoted by Michael McCrum,Thomas Arnold, Headmaster (Oxford: University Press, 1989),p. 54. 9 Mackail, quoted by Cyril Bailey, The Legacy of Rome (Oxford: University Press, 1923 ), p. 2. 10 Arnold, quoted by McCrum, p. 54. 11 Clarke, p.111. 12 Clarke, pp. 119-120.

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admired. Greek poetry, drama and philosophy were often considered more original and creative than their Roman counterparts, for which they were often used as a model. However, although "pride of race, which usually accompanies the conception of an Imperial policy, was in no degree wanting among the Greeks," 13 as the Edwardian historian Lord Cromer put it, the classical Greeks had an overall poor track record when it came to imperial matters. To know how not only to conquer the known world, as the Hellenistic Alexander had managed, but to make it stay that way, one went to the Romans. It was the legal genius of Roman citizens, with the conceptions of imperium [authority, the word from which “empire” is derived] and provincia [duty/sphere of administration, the term for a colonized area], potestas [power] and maiestas [grandeur/pageantry], which gave to the Empire the framework and structure of its institutions. 14 Duty, authority, power and grandeur were all of particular importance to the British imperial spirit. So was continuity of tradition. The British could particularly appreciate the Roman’s way of holding to the form of a constitutional monarchy, even when part of the traditional system no longer held any power. In Rome’s case, it was the Senate, in Britain’s case, the Queen, who was ceremonial. This continuity made it easier for the British to identify with Rome. The Romans had seen the Greeks as wonderful for poetry and philosophy, but as inferior in practical concerns, lacking the character necessary for the administration of an empire. British opinion would fall along similar lines, especially in the later Victorian period and among Cromer’s Edwardian contemporaries. The undisciplined and idealistic Greek, with his intense individuality, was far less suitable to carry an Imperial policy into execution than the austere and practical Roman. . . who was surrounded from his cradle to his grave with associations calculated to foster Imperial tendencies. 15 Many poets would wax elegiac about the isles of Greece, but the rest of Britain, especially the politicians, would want to be cast in the Roman mold. While scholars might say, “It is hard to weigh men of action against men of thought: it is no less difficult to weigh a people of action against a people of thought,” 16 Englishmen soon decided that they wanted to be counted among the men of action. And if imperial tendencies had to be fostered from the cradle, the British were going to do so. This became especially important once the remodeling of imperial institutions due to the Roman example became less a concern than the modeling of the "breed." It can hardly be overstated that a classical education provided throughout the long nineteenth century a source that all among the elite classes could understand. One can use as an example the 1897 speech of Joseph Chamberlain, Lord Salisbury’s colonial secretary, to the Royal Colonial Institute on the “True Conception of Empire.” 17 When Chamberlain said, “In the wide dominion of the Queen, the doors of the temple of Janus are never closed,” his educated audience instantly understood the reference to the Roman temple whose doors were always open 13 Evelyn Baring, Lord Cromer, Ancient and Modern Imperialism (London: John Murray, 1910), p. 8. 14 Bailey, p. 45. 15 Cromer, p. 14. 16 Bailey, p. 46. 17 Reprinted in Walter Arnstein, ed., The Past Speaks. Vol. II. (Toronto: DC Heath, 1983), p. 277.

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during wartime, and Chamberlain’s admission that Britain’s conquests had initially required bloodshed quickly paled, in their minds, to the brutality used by the Romans in the initial conquests of places that quickly became part of their successful empire. In 133 BCE, Scipio Aemilius had removed the hands from all a village’s young men to end the Spanish insurrection. General Dyer’s 1919 massacre at Amritsar would seem minor in comparison. When Chamberlain, borrowing a phrase used in 1850 by Lord Palmerston, stated that a Pax Britannica had been achieved and enforced by these conquests, his listeners immediately connected the term to the Pax Romana, “Roman Peace,” which had held the known world in a fairly stable condition for two centuries. These references were capable of provoking a very strong emotional response in such an educated audience. By the late nineteenth century, classical rhetoric ran high in talking about Empire, by that point such a popular top of discussion that many farmers and tradesman, while proclaiming that they wanted a practical rather than classical education for their sons, admitted that they would not mind for the boys to learn a little Latin, “because it is so often quoted in the newspapers.” 18 A full classical background, however, remained of course the provenance of the ruling classes. CHAPTER 3: HOW TO RUN AN EMPIRE: Use of the Roman model before the “New Imperialism” It was an age in so many ways the counterpart of our own, the blossoming period of the old civilization, and on the subject of human interest, ... men thought as we think, doubted where we doubt, argued as we argue, aspired and struggled after the same objects. It was an age of material progress and material civilization; an age of civil liberty and intellectual culture... of senatorial majorities and electoral corruption. ~J.A. Froude, historian For those in the early-to-mid-nineteenth century who held that the empire was much more than a millstone around Britain’s neck, Rome was an excellent example for imperial administration and policy. Since, as Cambridge don John Seeley would eventually joke, “We seem to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind,” 19 Britain clearly needed a model, and the elite’s education presented it. Joseph Chamberlain would credit scholars like Froude and Seeley with helping to maintain the British imperial spirit in a time of little Englanders. The example of Rome helped the “old” imperialists to both justify a positive image of empire and show how that Empire should be operating. Even in the Napoleonic war era, when most imperial rhetoric was avoided, some were already proclaiming that Britain should follow the Roman example. G.F. Leckie, a Scots owner of a Sicilian plantation, did so, even regarding European affairs, in his Historical Survey of the Foreign Affairs of Great Britain of 1808. Leckie asserted that Rome had been at her best when she continued to conquer and assimilate. "We must therefore Britannize every part of insular Europe which suits our purpose," he said. 20 While the British Empire would not go on to include much of Europe, the concept of “Britannization,” of assimilation, was a major factor in early Victorian imperialism. British imperialists discussed the Roman model regarding how 18 Clarke, p. 86. 19 Seeley, The Expansion of England, 1883, quoted at www.bartleby.com. 20 Leckie, quoted by C.A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian (London: Longman, 1989), p.103.

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much autonomy the colonized people should be allowed. Rome had thoroughly Romanized the elite classes of each province and given them a great deal of local control, while allowing the local populace to retain old religions and customs. The issue of what was the proper extent of religious toleration was of course much different for the Christian mindset than for the Roman (who were not averse to adopting foreign gods, much less allowing their continued worship in colonized areas), but still comparisons were drawn. Even those who wanted to give the Empire a more centralized bureaucracy and to convert all "natives" to Christianity, used a Roman example, that of the era of Diocletian and Constantine. 21 The British, of course, put far more effort into the moral justification of empire than the Romans had ever bothered with. The Romans had no need to maintain a moral high ground. But they did provide a precedent for a society which praised freedom domestically while ruling authoritarianly over others in an enforced peace. The clear linking of Rome and Britain added the weight of history to moral arguments about empires and their benefits, while the legacy of Rome seemed to be one of relatively benign institutions that minimally kept the peace so that "citizens" or "subjects" could go about their business undisturbed. 22 The British elite were certainly impressed by the concept of "the citizen." Lord Palmerston’s response to the Don Pacifico affair, in which a Portugese Jew born in Gibraltar, and therefore a British subject, met with difficulty in Greece, is a clear indicator of this. Defending his decision to have a fleet blockade a Greek port until the situation was resolved, Palmerston invoked the image of the Roman who could cross a continent unmolested, protected only by the words "Civis Romanus sum, [I am a Roman citizen]” and believed that a citizen of Britain should be able to cross the world with the words "Civis Britannicus sum." This safeguard would be ensured the same way it had been for the Romans: by force. Palmerston saw no conflict between being a liberal politician and emulating a Roman policy, particularly in the defense of an individual’s liberty. The rest of Parliament, inculcated with a classical education, listened very responsively to this appeal to the Roman example and use of dramatic Latin phrases. Britain also emulated Rome in providing the physical means for a citizen to go across the Empire. The Romans had built an excellent, durable system of roads in the Empire which, proverbially, all led to Rome. Britain would use its technological superiority to provide even better imperial transportation. “Here and there across the Empire, strategic highways built before the steam age carried the proper Roman stamp.” 23 However, Britain’s real equivalents to the Roman roads were her railroads. The comparison has been well-stated with the following: The excellence of the communications between the districts administered from Rome was an important cause of the rapid dissemination throughout the empire of a homogenous civilization. In our own country the improvement in means of transport which has taken place in recent times is the chief cause of the gradual disappearance of local peculiarities... in the task of spreading British

21 Bayly, p. 160. 22 Stephen Patterson, “Born Booted and Spurred: The Roman Ideal in British India,” Presented at the Southern Conference in British Studies, Memphis, TN, Nov. 4, 2004. 23 James Morris, Pax Britannica (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1968), p. 364.

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civilization... Probably at no time in history can a parallel to these phenomena be found except for the time when Rome reigned supreme. 24 These railroads would continue to be built under the New Imperialism by people such as industrialist Cecil Rhodes. Edwardian historian James Bryce would eventually say that British railways would forever, as the Roman roads had, “witness to the skill and thoroughness with which a great nation did its work.” 25 Britain also outdid the great Roman technological achievement of aqueducts, irrigating 20 million acres of India in “the greatest system of waterworks in history.” 26 Thomas Macaulay showed a deep identification of Britain with Rome when he wrote the "Lays of Ancient Rome," a series of ballads of great Roman legends in a style heavily influenced by old English ballads, claiming that the lost ancient poetry of early Rome had doubtless been similar. Likewise, Macaulay, assigned by the British government to the task of handling education in India, felt that what the Latin language had been, the English language now was. English would unite people, as Latin had, through education. Four English-language universities were established in India in 1854. While the idea of teaching all children among the colonized people of the empire to write their own names and do basic arithmetic was neglected or left solely up to missionaries, there were schools along the lines of the English public schools throughout the empire, to which the colonized elites could send their sons. 27 Macaulay wished these English public schools and universities to produce people "Indian in colour and blood, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect." 28 This was a definite adherence to the Roman example, in which, while a great deal of regional autonomy was allowed, these fairly autonomous regions were governed by a cultivated elite who considered themselves Romans and were considered so by their Italian counterparts. They learned Latin and added a few Roman ways to their own (some of which were adopted into Roman customs), so their ethnicity was not really important. "If by culture and sentiment men were Romans, Romans they were. The term "wog"[a British racial slur] cannot be translated into ... Latin." 29 With the Constitutio Antonina, the Emperor Caracalla granted full Roman citizenship to all freeborn imperial residents. And while the privileges of the elite classes were still guarded, the vast empire provided an excellent way for a citizen to make his fortune. Empire thus provided a “levelling force” socially and nationalistically, an idea also seen much later, when many middle-class British men could find success and wealth by going out into the Empire. And so Britain extended the prospect of citizenship, of British identity, to all inhabitants of the empire who, provided with English educations, wished to cultivate such an identity. Britains, unlike Romans, and despite the interest of “orientalists,” imported only material goods, not gods or customs, from its colonies. But Britain did, at first, seem willing to adopt the people 24 Bailey, pp. 145-146. 25 James Bryce, quoted by Morris, p. 365. 26 Morris, p. 362. 27 Morris, p. 141. 28 Thomas Macaulay, Minute of 2 February 1835 on Indian Education, reprinted in the Modern History Sourcebook at http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/modsbook.html. 29 P. A. Brunt, “Reflections on Roman and British Imperialism,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 7, No. 3. (April 1965), p. 287.

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themselves into the British imperial system. In Africa, Anglicized "Afro-Victorians" made up a substantial part of colonial administration and included an Anglican bishop. 30 But by the time the "Scramble for Africa" had begun in earnest in the 1880s, this would no longer be the case. A shift in viewpoint occurred. The idea of assimilation, of the unity of a diversified imperial citizenry, would weaken just as Empire itself was strengthened in the minds of the British public. And the eyes of the classically indoctrinated would turn from the shining beacon of Rome’s glory to the shadow of its Decline and Fall. Social Darwinism played a substantial role in this. In 1859, Charles Darwin published his "Origin of Species," followed up in 1871 with "Descent of Man." The phrase "survival of the fittest" spawned the Social Darwinism which would make racial hierarchies supposedly "scientific." Racism was most certainly already in existence, and most certainly already part of the empire. But the racialized views which sprang up in the wake of Darwinism changed things. The idea that an "inferior" civilization could be improved by the influence of a superior one was much altered when thought of more in terms of a race which was "scientifically" shown to be congenitally "inferior." No rational man, cognizant of the facts, believes that the average Negro is the equal... of the white man. And if this be true, it is simply incredible that, when all his disabilities are removed, and our prognathous relative has a fair field and no favor, as well as no oppressor, he will be able to compete successfully with his bigger-brained and smaller-jawed rival, in a contest which is to be carried out on by thoughts and not by bites. 31 True Anglicization was impossible, and reliance upon colonized people a mistake, Britons in the “New Imperialism” decided. The mutiny which occurred in India in 1857 appeared to the latter Victorians to be analogous to the plight of the Romans, who in their decline could not keep their co-opted "barbarian" forces under control. Rome had, according to James Bryce, assimilated these forces "for want of Roman fighting men." The mutiny, which would feed heavily into the racism of the later Victorian era, was a warning that Britain must keep this in mind as she took over direct control of India in place of the East India Company. "England guards against [the Roman fate] by having a considerable force of British troops alongside her native army." 32 And so, while public enthusiasm for Empire increased, while politicians were, in the words of Cecil Rhodes, “tumbling over each other, Liberals and Conservatives, to show which side are the greatest and most enthusiastic imperialists,” 33 the idea of empire shifted more towards the "pride of race" of which Cromer would speak. It is uncertain whether the assertion of force in the name of "Civis Britannicus" on behalf of a Portugese Jew in 1850 under Lord Palmerston would have been repeated in 1890 under Lord Salisbury. But Rome was invoked under the "New Imperialism" more than ever. The classical world still provided a common language for the British elite to draw on, and education, which Macaulay had imagined as a tool for assimilation, was now in the minds of people such as Cecil Rhodes a way to unite the Anglo-Saxon "race" in keeping itself fit for further world domination. All this led to an emphasis of the example of the Romans as a great people who "degenerated" and became 30 T. Parsons, The British Imperial Century, 1815 - 1914 (London: Rowman&Littlefield, 1999), p. 68. 31 T.H. Huxley, Science and Education, Available at www.gutenberg.org. 32 Bryce, p. 11. 33 Rhodes, quoted by Roberts, p. 676.

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"enfeebled." This idea dealt with concerns about luxury, gender, and sexuality, wrapped up together and included in the theme of race. CHAPTER 4: THE SPECTER OF DEGENERATION Marcus Cato was outraged by this and, in a speech to the people, complained that one might be quite convinced of the decline of the republic, when pretty boys cost more than fields and jars of caviar cost more than plowmen. ~ Polybius, Histories The difference of race is one of the reasons why I fear war may always exist; because race implies difference, difference implies superiority, and superiority leads to predominance. ~Benjamin Disraeli Elliot Mills closed his anonymously published 1905 pamphlet, "The Decline and Fall of the British Empire,"which he wrote under the guise of a 2005 Japanese writer, with an exhortation for Japanese boys and girls to study the decline and fall of the Britain, "as the British should have studied the decline and fall of Rome." 34 He then signed it "For the Good of the Race," which he of course claimed to be a translation. Mills certainly believed that Britain’s fate, if she followed her course at the time, would mimic Rome’s. He claimed in the pamphlet that a lengthy scholarly account of the decline and fall of the British empire was not really necessary, as one could simply read Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire instead. Mills was in this way declaring to Britons that the only way to avoid their downfall was to abandon those qualities which he believed had lead to the downfall of Rome. Only then could the ruin of the "race" be averted. Most of these qualities could be summed up as "going soft." He lambasted them for luxury and self-indulgence. One of his first reasons for the decline of the empire was Britons’ "forsaking the seas except as a health resort,” 35 for replacing their dedication to supremacy with self-indulgence. Those who constantly traveled to “take the waters” at Bath were no better than the immoral late Romans who lounged in the baths all day. Health itself, meanwhile, had declined. Britain had weak and feeble men now. Their minds and souls were no better than their bodies. They had forsaken art and literature for mere entertainment. In Mills’s scenario, the British "race" had degenerated in all aspects, and the Japanese, from their position as one of the current imperial "races," looked on them with pity and invoked them as a warning. Mills implied that Britain was not paying nearly enough attention to the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, but it is hard to imagine how the British elite could have studied it to any greater extent than they did, at least along the lines that Mills wanted them to. Robert BadenPowell, founder of the Boy Scouts in 1907, certainly took Mills’s warning to heart. Having read Mills’s pamphlet, he made the Roman Empire’s decline an explicit part of his 1908 handbook, Scouting for Boys. The handbook warns young scout leaders of the laziness and bad citizenship that destroyed Roman imperialism, and advises them to "Get the lads away from this -- teach them to be manly." Baden-Powell placed a great deal of emphasis on averting "bad citizenship." The good citizen Baden-Powell had in mind seemed to resemble both the early Roman and the classical Spartan. British boys must not be allowed to be indolent, but must be kept physically 34 Elliot Mills, Decline and Fall of the British Empire (Oxford: Aldon, 1905), p. 60. 35 Mills, p. 3.

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active. Rather than watch sports, as the Roman crowds had watched chariot races and gladiatorial combat in their infamous “panem et circenses [bread and circuses]” laziness, British boys should always get in the game themselves. Degeneracy was in particular an urban problem, Mills and Baden-Powell agreed, so the boys must be made capable of a simpler, more rustic style of activity. Baden-Powell himself lived in quite ascetic quarters and slept in the fresh air. The famed Roman statesman Cato the Censor, notorious for his own simple living, would have been proud. Luxury was heavily tied up with gender and sexuality. The problem with luxury was that it caused effeminacy. Which of course led to another problem of liberalism: the increase in the demand for the rights of women. Such publications as philosopher John Stuart Mill's 1869 “On the Subjection of Women” had helped awaken a new feminist movement. The latter half of the nineteenth century saw the end of most legal restrictions on women's property rights and child custody rights, thanks to the Married Women's Property Acts of 1874 and 1882. 36 And now there was talk of the vote. Mill had attempted in vain to put a women’s suffrage amendment in the Reform Act of 1867. Richard Pankhurst, the husband of Emmeline Pankhurst, the militant suffragette who would eventually make the anti-feminists' worst fears come true with her window-breaking demonstrations, had attempted successfully to get married women voting rights for local elections in 1869. Feminist reformers were not interested in stopping there. There was a great deal of concern over this. Even the liberal Gladstone, otherwise quite interested in the extension of the franchise, feared voting rights would compromise female purity. And eugenicists cautioned that for outside concerns to distract women from the domestic sphere, for politics to keep mothers from giving their children their full attention, could lead to the deterioration of British breeding. 37 The “new women” were not as capable of producing a strong, virile race. This, of course, could well ruin the empire. Notorious anti-feminist Eliza Lynn Linton was a very staunch proclaimer of the idea that the emancipation of women would amount to their defeminization, and, by extension, to the emasculation of men. One of her many examples of how any race which allowed female freedom must suffer was Rome. In 1887, she published in Fortnightly Review an article entitled "The Roman Matron and the Roman Lady." In it, she contrasted the behavior of the demure "matron" of Republican and early Imperial Rome with the "lady" of later Imperial Rome. The Roman matron was the ideal woman, who had helped to make the Roman race the great imperial power that it was. Roman matrons had no need for power outside of the domestic sphere, and were exemplars of quiet morality as their husbands were of masculine courage and hardiness. "Weak by their sex, strong by their virtue, they spoke to the better conscience of the world." 38 But as the Empire moved along, women became more powerful, no longer content to stay at home. The Roman lady was an overbearing Jezebel for Linton. The incompetent or immoral actions of a famous Roman could almost always, for Linton, be laid at the feet of his powerful wife. "The decay of morals was due to the increase of freedom among the women...the women were as free as the men." 39

36 Roberts, p. 642. 37 Anna Davin, “Imperialism and Motherhood,” History Workshop Journal 5 (Spring 1978), p. 12. 38 Eliza Lynn Linton, “The Roman Matron and the Roman Lady,” Fortnightly Review. 1887 p. 249. 39 Ibid.

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The didacticism of the article could not be more blatant. Linton had claimed elsewhere that "no one can say of the modern English girl that she is ... retiring or domestic." 40 , and she truly believed that this would contribute to the downfall of the empire. "The manly doctrine of war" was necessary for the maintenance of the power of the British people over others, and unless Englishwomen returned to being "the tacens et placens uxor [silent and pleasing wife]" that the republican matron had been, they would "emasculate this great nation." 41 British women had their own Roman exemplar, Cornelia, mother of noted Republican reformers Gaius and Tiberius Gracchus. She was famous for her complete devotion to her children’s upbringing, as exemplified by an anecdote in which a female guest flaunted her jewelry. When Gaius and Tiberius entered the room, Cornelia embraced them and said THESE are MY jewels. When Linton and those like her lamented that the “new women” were not like Cornelia, they glossed over Cornelia’s own thorough education and knowledge of politics and noted her only as valuing child-rearing over jewelry. Imperialists likewise encouraged British mothers to eschew finery and luxury and dedicate themselves to improving the breeding of British men in the empire, a "deficiency" for which they were reproached when British soldiers were found unfit in the Boer war. “It was the duty and destiny of women to be the 'mothers of the race', but also their great reward.” 42 Victorian England has, of course, the reputation of being extremely squeamish about sexual matters. It is during the late nineteenth century that homosexuality became much more troubling to the British mind than it had ever been before. The struggle for women’s emancipation made the situation even more worrisome to the conservative mindset; gender lines were being blurred far too much already. This escalation in concern can be, perhaps among other things, connected to their obsession with the degeneration of Rome. Somehow, someway, they were sure, Rome’s foundation had been eroded by the fact that leaders got away with being "every woman’s man, and every man’s woman" as Suetonius said of Julius Caesar. And of course, many of the Victorian elite could, like Gilbert and Sullivan’s Major-General Stanley, "recite in elegiacs all the crimes of Heliogabalus,” the later Roman emperor whose named was also spelled Elegabalus and of whom Gibbon had said this: The master of the Roman world affected to copy the dress and manners of the female sex, preferred the distaff to the sceptre, and dishonoured the principal dignities of the empire by distributing them among his numerous lovers; one of whom was publicly invested with the title and authority of the emperor's, or, as he more properly styled himself, of the empress's husband. 43 Gibbon went on to imply Elagabalus’s transvestitism and homosexuality to be the result of his generally decadent habits and his having been put on the throne by "a conspiracy of women and eunuchs." This "effeminate luxury" was also supposedly also the result of Eastern influence, specifically Elagabalus’s Syrian heritage. 44 One can feel fairly certain that Britons raised on Gibbon’s work and living in a more racialized time took this to heart. Gibbon had 40 Linton, “The Girl of the Period,” Saturday Review, 1868, reprinted in Arnstein 191. 41 Eliza Lynn Linton, quoted in Nancy Anderson, Woman against Women in Victorian England: A Life of Eliza Lynn Linton, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), p. 195. 42 Davin, p.13. 43 Edward Gibbon, History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Vol. I, Chap. 6. Available at www.gutenberg.org

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himself attributed a great deal of the responsibility of Rome’s downfall to Christianity’s undermining the aggressive traditional Roman culture, a difficult idea for conservative Victorians. They liked to consider their religion to be fairly masculine. But homosexuality and the influence of “inferior” races? This was much easier to accept. To be foreign, particularly to be "eastern," was to be linked to immorality, effeminacy, and luxury. Rome had not been without a certain amount of this, particularly in the Republic and early empire. Cato the Censor, for instance, had been notoriously xenophobic. But in the period between Nerva and Marcus Aurelius, in which Gibbon certainly thought Rome to have overcome any previous corruption to be at the height of greatness, was extremely assimilative. Rome reached its greatest expansion under Trajan, an emperor of non-Roman stock. Any citizen of the empire, regardless of color, had a chance of raising himself to power. This applied even in the previously suspect "East," to the extent that "the eternal city celebrated its millennium in A.D. 247 under the rule of an Arab sheikh." 45 But this lack of a color barrier, as far as many Britons were concerned, was because the Romans did not properly understand the problem. Rome had not conquered the same places as Britain. They had not experienced as wide a racial variance. And what’s more, the completeness of their assimilation was part of their degeneration. Earlier talk of "Civis Britannicus" and the universalist concept that it had conveyed, had given way to a racialized view. This was the reality which "natives" had to face when they attempted to reach equal status as British citizens. Britain "allowed in some ways less selfgovernment and equality to the ruled than Rome had done, except under pressure when their control began to slacken." 46 Local Indian municipal councils "seem to have resembled the Roman municipal councils only as they were in their later days, miserable instruments of the bureaucracy." 47 They had no real decision-making capacity. Indians had no place in either local or central government analogous to that which provincials could reach under Roman rule. One underlying reason was clearly the British sense of superiority, supported by colour prejudice. 48 Color-consciousness was in the 1890s extremely strong. Admiral Fisher himself, however orthodox his opinions on Abroad, was sometimes looked on with suspicion because of his mandarin face, with its high Mongolian cheekbones and Gobi eyes -- rumor suggested he had a Sinhalese mother. 49 If John Arbuthnot Fisher, made in 1899 Commander-in-chief of the Mediterranean fleet, met with difficulty due to the appearance and rumor of Asian heritage, the Anglicized Indian elite and the “Afro-Victorians” had no hope of acceptance.

44 Ibid. 45 Brunt, p. 274. 46 Brunt, p. 286. 47 Ibid. 48 Ibid. 49 Morris, p. 133.

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If Britain had followed the Roman model, someone like Jawaharlal Nehru could well have ended up Prime Minister of the British Empire. But in the “New Imperialism,” the thorough Anglicization of Indian elites meant nothing. Rather than wish for people “Indian in colour and blood, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect,” as Macaulay had done, those Britons living among Anglicized Indians (and Anglicized Africans) were “repelled by the spectacle of a familiar culture grafted on to an alien root." 50 At the prospect of their being given judicial authority over Europeans by the Ilbert bill of 1883, all "natives" were reduced in the minds of the Anglo-Indians to savage molesters of white women. Apparently, the order which a good empire must keep belonged not to the English language or to British knowledge and customs, but to the British "race." The effect this had on the treatment of colonized people, and the reaction of independence movements to this, shows that the wrong lesson may have been learned. British imperialists drew what lessons they wished to from Rome, whether positive or negative, depending on the attitude of the time regarding their own empire and the people within it. Rome was the shining representation of conquest and the shadowy specter of collapse. It justified empire when empire needed justifying; it provided a model for liberal imperialism when British imperialists desired one. Then, once opinion shifted, racial barriers hardened, and liberalism was thought to have gone too far, it warned against degeneration. And in a 2005 in which the British empire has indeed fallen, one wonders if some future empire will obsess over both Britain and Rome, reworking their examples according to their attitudes toward themselves.

50 Morris, p.143.

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“Edward Said and Orientalism” by: Rebecca Duckert Harems full of scantily clad, olive skinned beauties, sheiks swimming in gold, Aladdin and the Arabian Knights, mysterious veiled figures, brooding, bearded men, chauvinists, religious fundamentalists, militants, terrorists, killers—these are the images so closely associated with the Arab world and its people, the images that have been embedded in the psyche of the Western mind for more than two hundred years. In 1978 Edward Said sought to explain the complex relationship between eastern and western civilization and rectify the flawed representation of the Orient in his book Orientalism. Through his radical approach to Orientalism as a discourse Said illustrates the way in which the West came to know, objectify, and ultimately dominate its “other.” In order to understand Said’s work it is crucial to understand Said’s life. “Said has made the facts of his birth and his experiences a central strand in his work, uniting the personal and the public dimensions of his life in writing which is compelling and often provocative.” 1 Edward Said was born in November 1935 in Talbiya, West Jerusalem, in what was then British Mandate Palestine. His father, Wadie Said, was a middle-class, strict, ultra-conservative from Jerusalem. His mother, Hilda Musa Said, was also middleclass but more liberal and artistically inclined than his father, who fostered within her son a love of the arts and other cultures. The Said family was Anglican Protestant and Said realized early in his life the feeling of being a minority: “Although Palestinians we were Anglicans, so we were a minority within a Christian minority in an Islamic majority setting.” 2 In 1948 the Said family left Jerusalem as a result of the Palestinian-Israeli War

1. Valerie Kennedy, Edward Said: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), 4. 2. Kennedy, 5.

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Rebecca Duckert of 1947, in which thousands of Palestinians were expelled from their homeland, and moved to Cairo. A young Edward Said watched as fellow Palestinians who had lost their homes and families tried to rebuild their lives in a new land that was not their own. In Cairo Said received a strict and unhappy colonial education at the Gezira Preparatory School where there were no Egyptian teachers and where he often got in trouble for speaking Arabic to the few Arab students that attended the school. 3 In 1951 Wadie Said sent Edward to the United States to complete secondary school at Mount Hermon, a puritanical boarding school in Massachusetts.

From there he went on to study at

Princeton and received a scholarship for graduate study at Harvard. After he completed his dissertation on Joseph Conrad at Harvard he accepted a position at Columbia where he became a University Professor of English and Comparative Literature. 4

Said’s

political life was dormant throughout his years of study. The outbreak of war between Israel and Palestine in 1967 proved a major turning point in Said’s life and career. In six days time Israel had defeated the armies of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, and went on to occupy the West Bank, the Golan Heights, Gaza, and the Sinai Peninsula. Said has admitted that until that point he existed purely as a literary academic. With the outbreak of war and the subsequent events in his former homeland Said began to reassess his career in comparative literature and focus more on his cultural origins as a Palestinian, an identity that he had suppressed throughout his childhood and into his professional career. For Said, the Arab defeat magnified his sense of personal loss of identity. Said began to feel personally concerned with and connected to the events in the Arab world and sought to reconcile his responsibility as Arab Palestinian and American citizen. 3. Eds. Moustafa Bayoumi and Andrew Rubin, The Edward Said Reader (New York: Vintage Books, 2000), 65. 4. Kennedy, 7.

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Rebecca Duckert From that time on Said became intensely involved in the struggle for Palestinian rights, a passion that would ultimately make him the voice of the Palestinian people for the rest of his life. It was out of that experience in 1967 that Said, a Palestinian living in the United State, conceived the essential theme of his most prolific work, Orientalism. “The Arab Portrayed,” an article that he wrote in 1968, attacked the way Arabs were presented in the media as sheiks or terrorists. “If the Arab occupies space enough for attention it is a negative value. He is seen as a disrupter of the West’s existence…a surmountable obstacle.” 5 Thus, Orientalism expanded upon the theme of “The Arab Portrayed” and became for Said “a history of personal loss and national disintegration.” 6 It was out of this sense of personal loss and personal responsibility that Orientalism emerged. Orientalism was born into the rather closed world of 1970s America.

The

establishment of Women’s, Cultural, and Ethnic Studies courses, programs, and departments was just beginning to take real shape. The Civil Rights and Feminist movements had barely established themselves as forces for change. On the theoretical front the Anglo-American academics were battling structuralism and post-structuralism through the works of writers like Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida. The literary world was only just beginning to open up to the influences of the outside world “in the form of political, economic, and sexual realities which had hitherto generally been regarded as marginal to serious literary study.” 7 It is no wonder Said’s Orientalism was considered so radical upon its release in 1978.

5. Edward W. Said, Power Politics, and Culture: Interviews with Edward W. Said (New York: Pantheon Books, 2001), 210. 6. Said, 218.

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Rebecca Duckert Though his work brought the matter to center stage, Said was certainly not the first to discuss the topic pf Orientalism. In 1953 Raymond Schwab gave a detailed study of Europe’s nineteenth century experience in the Orient in Le Renaissance Orientale. Ten years later Anwar Abdel Malek provided his Marxist interpretation of Europe’s objectification of the East in his highly influential article entitled “Orientalism in Crisis,” a source which was to be of great inspiration for Said. In 1969 V.G. Kiernan wrote The Lords of the Human Kind, a history of European colonization. Said’s Orientalism is remarkably different from its predecessors in that Said viewed Orientalism as a discourse through which the West sought to understand and ultimately control the East. What is Orientalism? Though Said gives numerous definitions throughout his book the most basic understanding of Orientalism describes the various disciplines, institutions, processes of navigation and styles of thought by which Europeans came to “know” the “Orient” over several centuries and which reached their height during the rise and consolidation of nineteenth century imperialism. 8 Orientalism can be viewed as an academic discipline, a style of thought, and a corporate institution through which the West came to dominate, restructure, and authorize the Orient. The very term “Orient” holds different meanings for different people. As Said points out, Americans associate the term with the Far East, mainly China and Japan, while for Western Europeans, and in particular the British and the French, it conjures up very different images. It is not only adjacent to Europe, “it is also the place of Europe’s greatest and richest and oldest colonies, the source of its civilizations, its cultural contestant, and one of its deepest and

7. Bayoumi and Rubin, 82.

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Rebecca Duckert most recurring images of the Other.” 9 Valerie Kennedy gives a concise and profound summation of the very nature of Orientalism: Orientalism is not merely a European fantasy about the Orient but a created body of theory and practice which, for many generations, there has been considerable material investment…Orientalism is the discipline by which the Orient was (and is) approached systematically, as a topic of learning, discovery, and practice, but also that collection of dreams, images, and vocabularies available to anyone who has tried to talk about what lies east of the dividing line. 10 To understand Orientalism it is pertinent to discuss where, when, and why Orientalism originated. In 1786 William Jones, Justice of the High Court of Bengal and a student of Sanskrit, gave an address to the Bengal Asiatic Society proclaiming the wonders and linguistic superiority of the Sanskrit language. His statement changed the face of European intellectual life forever and ushered in a kind of “Indomania” throughout Europe that would endure well into the next century. European scholars looked to Sanskrit for an origin of European languages that went even deeper than Greek and Latin. Historians, philologers, and ethnologists became obsessed with the “Orient” and the Indo-European civilization itself. “The link between language and identity, particularly the link between the diversity of languages and the diversity of racial identity, gave rise to the discipline of ethnology, the precursor of modern anthropology.” 11 As a group of related disciplines Orientalism was, “in important ways, about Europe itself, and hinged on arguments that circulated around the issue of national

8. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 1. 9. Kennedy, 10. 10. Bill Ashcroft and Pal Ahluwalia, Edward Said (London: Routeledge, 1999), 50.

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Rebecca Duckert distinctiveness, and racial and linguistic origins.” 12 The identification of a group IndoEuropean language in the eighteenth century was highly significant in world history because it generated theories about racial origin, thus uniting the development of race and language. 13 Although passion for the study of Oriental cultures and language brought about the entirely new disciplines of anthropology, ethnology, and philology, it is clear that the investigations of Orientalist scholars all operated within a particular set of parameters. The elaborate and detailed examinations of Oriental language and culture were carried out in a context in which the supremacy and importance of Western civilization was unquestioned. 14 The academic discipline that was to become known as Orientalism operated under the assumption that the Western world was the pinnacle of historical development. Thus Orientalist analysis proceeded to define and confirm the “primitive, exotic, and mysterious nature” 15 of the Oriental societies. For Said the beginnings of modern Orientalism lie not with William Jones’ “disruption of linguistic orthodoxy” but with Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798. Napoleon utilized all the available knowledge of the Koran and Islamic society acquired by French scholars and historians to convince the Egyptians that his occupation of their land was on behalf of Islam rather than against it.16 Said emphasizes that after Napoleon, the very language of Orientalism changed radically.

“Its descriptive realism was

upgraded and became not merely a style of representation but a language, indeed a means

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

Ashcroft and Ahluwalia, 52. Kennedy, 22. Ashcroft and Ahluwalia, 54. Said, Orientalism, 34. Ashcroft and Ahluwalia, 51. Said, 67.

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Rebecca Duckert of creation.” 17 Though Napoleon’s mission in Egypt ultimately failed it gave birth to the entire modern experience of the Orient and illustrated the strategic and tactical power of knowing. Said effectively demonstrates the link between knowledge and power, the idea that in Europe’s process of “knowing” its others, it simultaneously constructs and dominates them. Said sees an indisputable connection between the development of Orientalism as a discipline and Western imperialism and colonialism. 18 explicitly defines imperialism or colonialism in his book.

Said never

Often criticized for his

restricted time frame Said makes it clear that although Eurocentric sense of superiority and Orientalist thought had existed since the Middle Ages, his intent is not to address the whole scope of Orientalism; rather his focus is on the English, French, and, later, American approach to Arab societies of North Africa and the Middle East after the Enlightenment and through the present. He justifies his deliberate omission of German Orientalists by claiming that German scholars came to the field later than the British and the French and merely elaborated on their work. 19 For all intensive purposes “Classical” imperialism as we understand it today constitutes the period of European expansion to the East in a scramble for Africa and Asia. It is defined is the domination of a distant territory by a Western central power that includes varying degrees of economic, political, and military control, as well as cultural dominance, over the particular area. Colonialism constitutes various domains associated with imperialism such as travel, exploration,

17. Kennedy, 27. 18. Kennedy, 28. 19. Keith Windschuttle, “Edward Said’s ‘Orientalism Revisited’” http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/17/jan99/said.htm (accessed March 12, 2005), 6.

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Rebecca Duckert trade, science, humanitarian, and missionary activities, whereby settlers from the imperial power come to play a dominant and privileged role in the life of the territory. 20 Said points out that the upsurge in Orientalist study coincided with the period of extreme European expansion to the East between 1815 and 1914. Englishmen in India and Egypt in the late nineteenth century took interest in those territories founded on their status as British colonies. History and geography texts transmitted imperialist ideology into the classroom. The imperial and Eurocentric experience shaped the collective mind of its audience into thinking that non-Europeans could not produce higher knowledge or govern themselves. 21 Said sites French philologist and historian Ernest Renan (1823-92) as a significant source of continuity and solidification of Orientalist thought centered on the imperialist ideal. Renan writes: “Every person, however slightly he may be acquainted with the affairs of our time, sees clearly the actual inferiority of the Mohammeden countries.” 22 Europeans were seen as possessing a “hard-won, dynamic civilization among inferior races that were seen as inherently indolent (partly because of the climate, partly because of their nature), not fit to rule themselves, and unable to engage in the type of higher thinking that technological and scientific progress allegedly require.” 23 Orientalism, “though purporting to be an objective, disinterested, and rather esoteric field,” functioned to serve political ends to provide Europeans with a means to take over Oriental lands.

20. Kennedy, 30. 21. George Gheverghese Joseph, “Mathematics and Eurocentrism” quoted in Ed. Silvia Federici, Enduring Western Civilization, (Westport: Praeger, 1995), 120. 22. Said, 102. 23. Federici, 121.

36

Rebecca Duckert Said describes the relationship between Europe and the Orient as an entirely Western construction which came with imperialism and colonialism.

Napoleon’s

expedition to Egypt, the publication of the twenty-volume Description de l’Egypte (1809-28), and the building of the Suez Canal (1854-69) illustrate the West’s will to power and symbolize “the material and textual European domination of the Orient” 24 characteristic of the imperialist and colonialist period. Said suggests that the morally neutral pursuit of knowledge is, in the colonialist context, “deeply inflected with the ideological assumptions of imperialism.” 25 Thus the construction of the Orient by the West has a distinctly political dimension. “Orientalism was ultimately a political vision of reality whose structure promoted the difference between the familiar (Europe, the West, ‘us’) and the strange (the Orient, the East, ‘them’).” 26 Because Orientalist thought served the interests of imperial power it directly imposed limits upon thought regarding the Orient.

In this way Orientalism acts as a corporate institution for dealing with the

Orient, the Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient. 27 Orientalism is best viewed as a discourse: a system of statements by which the world can be known, a coherent and strongly bounded area of social knowledge. It is a discourse that has been in existence for more than 200 years and one that continues in the

24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

Said, 115. Said, 116. Bayoumi and Rubin, 84. Kennedy, 18. Ashcroft and Ahluwalia, 61.

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Rebecca Duckert present. 28 Said emphasizes that “without examining Orientalism as a discourse it is not possible to understand the enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage—and even produce—the Orient, politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment period.” 29 The idea of discourse can be attributed to the French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926-84), best known for his theory of epistemes, the discursive formations that determine the way in which the world is experienced. 30 Foucault is the single most significant theoretical source for Said. “Said’s work is unimaginable without Foucault’s concepts of discourse and of discursive formations (epistemes), his discussions of the relationships between knowledge and power, and his view that representations are always influenced by the systems of power in which they are located.” 31 The essential feature of the theory of Orientalism as a discourse is the objectification of both the Orient and the Oriental, objects that can be probed, understood, and scrutinized. The very term “Orient” confirms this objectification: the Orient covers a geographical area and a range of populations many times larger and many times more diverse than Europe.

Such

objectification assumes that the Orient is monolithic, stagnant, primitive, and unchanging, while the Occident is dynamic with an active and progressive history, and places the West in a position of superiority and power over the East. 32

Said emphasizes that

Orientalist discourse, “its internal consistency and rigorous procedures, were all designed for readers and consumers in the metropolitan West;” 33 Orientals themselves were never

29. 30. 31. 32.

Said, 3. Kennedy, 34. Ashcroft and Ahluwalia, 45. Ashcroft and Ahluwalia, 47.

33. Kennedy, 20.

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Rebecca Duckert intended as part of the audience. Foucault and Said concur that within a discourse all representations of a subject, since they do not come the subject directly, are tainted by “the language, culture, institutions and political ambience of the representer.” Because it is impossible for any scholar to overcome these innate limitations there can be no absolute truths, only formations, deformations, and representations. 34 As a discourse Orientalism is accorded the authority of academics, institutions and governments, and such authority raises the discourse to a level of importance and prestige that guarantees its identification with “truth.” 35 In time, the knowledge and reality created by the Orientalist discipline produces a discourse “whose material presence or weight, not the originality of a given author, is really responsible for the texts produced out of it.” 36

Said argues that by means of a discourse Western cultural

institutions are responsible for the creation of those “others,” the Orientals, whose very difference from the Occident establishes Europe’s own identity, the identity of a sovereign, superior civilization. 37 The undeniable link between knowledge and power is what characterizes the Orientalist discourse and acts as the core of Said’s entire argument in Orientalism. “European knowledge, by relentlessly constructing its subject within the discourse of Orientalism, was able to maintain hegemonic power over it.” 38 Said aptly demonstrates

34. 35. 36. 37.

Ashcroft and Ahluwalia, 50. Said, 90. Said, 94. Kennedy, 21.

38. Said, 44. 39. Ashcroft and Ahluwalia, 59.

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Rebecca Duckert this point by recalling Prime Minister Arthur Balfour’s defense of Britain’s occupation of Egypt in 1910, when he declared that “We know the civilization of Egypt better than we know any other country. England knows that Egypt cannot have self-government…and confirms that by occupying Egypt.” 39 For Balfour, knowledge meant not only surveying a civilization from its origins but the ability to do just that: “To have such knowledge of such a thing (as Egypt),” Said says, “is to dominate it, to have authority over it…since we know it and it exists, in a sense, as we know it.” 40 In this way Said unites Foucault’s idea of knowledge as power with Antonio Gramsci’s (1891-1937) theory of hegemony. Said feels that hegemony, the domination of one state over another, is precisely how Orientalism could remain a strong cultural and political force in the West’s representation of the Orient. 41 Said links Gramsci’s view of culture operating within civil society to support political domination with Foucault’s idea of discourse in order to try to explain the durability and strength of Orientalism. 42 Said uses the concept of cultural hegemony, the idea of dominant cultural patterns and models, to justify linking the study of culture to political phenomena such as imperialism and colonialism. The knowledge of the Orient created by and embodied within the discourse of Orientalism serves to construct “an image of the Orient, the Oriental, and his world.” 43 This flawed view of the Orient both predates and survives the imperialist expansion of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Said states that Orientalism’s reliance upon images of the East and its inhabitants that are not derived from empirical evidence or 40. Said, 47. 41. Bayoumi and Rubin, 98. 42. Kennedy, 40.

43. Kennedy, 16.

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Rebecca Duckert experience but from other books and sources gives the discourse a decidedly “textual attitude.” 44 Orientalism is, above all, a system of citing works and authors. “The very term ‘Oriental’ shows how the process works, for the word identifies and homogenizes at the same time, implying a range of knowledge and intellectual mastery over that which is named.” 45 The Orient itself is a textual creation, existing as an idea to be researched, discussed and written about. In Orientalist discourse the West is depicted as a site of power and a center distinctly removed from the “other” as the object of knowledge and, inevitably, subordination. The main philological, historical, and creative writers of the nineteenth century drew upon a tradition of knowledge that allowed them textually to construct and control the Orient. The construction served the colonial administration that subsequently used this information to establish a system of rule over the Orient, hence Said’s argument of the connection between knowledge and power. 46 Said focuses on the establishment of the Orient as a textual construct by discussing Orientalism in terms of both an academic discipline and a style of thought. 47 As an academic discipline Orientalism has since created a vast archive of knowledge that has served to perpetuate and reinforce Western representations of the Orient.

By

examining the works and careers of such varied writers as T.E. Lawrence, Aeschylus, Dante, and Victor Hugo, 48 Said aims to show the ways in which the Orientalist writer

43. 44. 45. 46.

Said, 92. Kennedy, 15. Ashcroft and Ahluwalia, 62-63. Kennedy, 31.

47. 48. 49. 50.

Kennedy, 13. Windschuttle, 9. Said, 5. Ashcroft and Ahluwalia, 77.

41

Rebecca Duckert “makes the Orient speak, describes the Orient, renders its mysteries plain for and to the West.” 49 Said condemns this textualism, this belief that representations found in books, newspapers, and on television correspond to the real world. Orientalist text offers a familiarity, even intimacy that draws in readers and assigns the Orientalist enormous status and greater importance than the objects they seek to describe. 50 Orientalist texts, for Said, are representations of the Orient, not natural depictions of the Orient, which itself is not a natural entity but an man-made entity created by the West through these representations. The Orientalist writer formulates the idea of the Orient and the Oriental person through the use of language and representations. 51 He says: “As much as the West itself, the Orient is an idea that has a history and a tradition of thought, imagery, and vocabulary that have given it reality and presence in and for the West,” 52 that is, the Orient exists out of the mind and interpretations of the Orientalist writer. The evidence of this is found just as prominently in the so-called “truthful text” (histories, philological analyses, political treatises) as in the artistic, openly imaginative text. “The exteriority of the representation is always governed by some version of the truism that is the Orient could represent itself it would; since it cannot, the representation does the job, for the West, and faute de mieux, for the poor Orient.” 53 Said urges a clarification between what is assumed to be reality and what truly is the reality. Orientalism has produced false representations and descriptions of Arabs and Islamic

51. Ashcroft and Ahluwalia, 78. 52. Said, 144.

53. Said, 146.

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Rebecca Duckert culture as a result of the “essentialist nature of enterprise,” 54 that is, the belief that it is possible to define and explain the essential qualities of the Arab people and the Orient as a whole. Said condemns this approach as being fundamentally flawed because it is impossible to define, especially from the perspective of an outsider, such a thing as an Islamic society, an Arab mind, an Oriental psyche. He points out that today it would be taboo to place such essentialist clichés on Jews or blacks. 55 Orientalist discourse simplifies the world and the scope of the human experience in a binary and stereotypical way. The division of the world into East and West had been centuries in the making and expressed the fundamental “binary division” on which all dealing with the Orient was based. 56

Orientalist thought formulated an “imaginary

geography,” the idea of an Orient that exists solely to define and demarcate the European. Said asserts that in its pursuit of knowledge and explanation Orientalism served to define Europe’s self-image. What holds the experiences of the entire Western world together throughout all of time and history is the shared sense of something “other,” which is denoted as “the Orient.” He argues that the establishment of opposites and “others” is crucial to the construction of the identity of any society, culture, or people in any age. The existence of a different and competing alter ego gave Europe a sense of its own cultural, moral, and intellectual superiority. 57

53. Kennedy, 33. 54. Said, 20. 55. Windschuttle, 7.

56. 57. 58. 59. 60. .

Kennedy, 41. Windschuttle, 9. Windschuttle, 10-11. Said, 207. Kennedy, 42.

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Rebecca Duckert The Orient therefore serves as a reference point to which the West is able to compare itself. He sites as an example Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand (1768-1848), the founder of French romanticism, who called upon all of Europe in 1810 to teach the primitive East the meaning of liberty which he, and Orientalists after him, believed the Orient knew nothing about nor was capable of achieving without Western intervention. Said says that this thereby provided the justification of Western imperialism in the Orient, which could be described by its perpetrators not as a form of conquest but as the “redemption of a degenerate world.” 58 Said goes on further to analyze the theory of the ‘White Man’ and his civilizing role in the imperial world, as presented by Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936). 59 The West, with its presumed moral and intellectual supremacy over the Orient thus appoints itself an agent for the salvation of the primitive world. It is through this principle of binary opposition and comparison that Orientalism becomes a style of thought based upon the ontological and epistemological distinction made between “the Orient” and “the Occident.” It is through false representations of the Orient and Orientals that the West has been able to place itself in a position of authority and superiority over the East. 60 Said argues that the opposition between “our world,” the world of the European, and “their world,” the world of the Oriental, always implies that “our” world is inherently superior to “theirs” and “their” world depends on “ours.” The Orientalist textual attitude legitimates an entirely new vocabulary, “a representative discourse peculiar to the understanding of the Orient that becomes the way in which the Orient is known. Because Western civilization by its very nature is always accorded intellectual, moral, and cultural superiority, the act of comparing the Orient to the West

44

Rebecca Duckert ultimately ensures that the Oriental culture and perspective is viewed as a “deviation, a perversion,” of the ideal model that is the West, and thus given inferior status. 61 By separating itself and designating the Orient as “the other” Orientalist discourse unleashes a whole plethora of conjured images and stereotypes regarding the East. The major stereotype Said addresses is the intense “sexualization” and “sensualization” of the Orient by the West. Said identifies the connection between the Orient and sex as the primary ingredient of the relationship between the Western (male) writer and the Orient. The sexuality of the Orient becomes something for the West to possess and exploit. 62 Sex in nineteenth century Europe, with its increasing “embourgeoisement” had become increasingly institutionalized.

Said notes that “sex in (European) society was

encumbered by a web of legal, moral, even political and economic obligations.” 63 This fact was mostly true of upper and middle class European society, the section of society that is Said’s main focus throughout Orientalism. Europe searched for a different type of sexuality, one that was more liberal and guilt-free. Said cites French novelist and realist Gustave Flaubert (1821-80) as a proponent of the East as a sexualized region. In all of his novels Flaubert associates the Orient with “the escapism of sexual fantasy.” Images of harems, princesses, princes, sex slaves, half-naked dancing girl and boys—Flaubert employs all the Oriental clichés to conjure up a world of licentious, uninhibited sex, a world that every European yearned to be part of. Said implies that European travelers to the East, both male and female (though obviously more so male) assumed that sex outside the confines of Europe was (and is) freer, and so did not feel bound by the rules 61. Ashcroft and Ahluwalia, 66. 62. Kennedy, 38-39. 63. Ashcroft and Ahluwalia, 103.

45

Rebecca Duckert and conventions of their own society or the society in which they were traveling. Said also discusses the West’s feminization of the Orient as a sexual being/entity and the Western male’s both textual and real exploitation of Oriental women as a result. The Orient is once again objectified through the discourse of Orientalism. 64 In his discussion of modern Orientalism Said makes a direct connection between the institutionalized Orientalism of today and the legacy of the Orientalist discourse of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 65

He notes that the major change in

Orientalism after 1870 was one “from an academic to an instrumental attitude.” The Western world, with its notion of cultural, moral, intellectual, and technological superiority, began to see itself as an instrument of salvation and change for the hopelessly backward Orient. 66 In this latest phase of Orientalism the United States has adopted and adapted the legacies of France and Britain and risen to the world stage as the leading super power, a force of ultimate justice and good to be reckoned with. 67

“The

ecumenical authority of European Orientalism” has been replaced by “the new reality, the new specialized style—Anglo-American, or more narrowly speaking, the American Social Scientese.” 68 Though the center of power and Orientalist strategies has shifted, the discourse of Orientalism, its tripartite identity as an academic discipline, style of thought, and corporate institution, has remained intact.

64. 65. 66. 67.

Said, 188-189. Kennedy, 47. Said, 279. Ashcroft and Ahluwalia, 114.

68. 69. 70. 71.

Said, 225. Ashcroft and Ahluwalia, 104. Said, 229. Ashcroft and Ahluwalia, 105.

46

Rebecca Duckert Since the Second World War, and more noticeably after the Arab-Israeli wars, the Arab Muslim has become the primary symbol of the Orient within American popular images as well as in the social sciences. The emergence and domination of the social sciences after the Second World War shifted the responsibility of Orientalism onto these new fields of study. 69 This “Islamic Orientalism” characterizes the Arab world by its “retrogressive position…its general methodological and ideological backwardness, and its comparative insularity.” 70

The social sciences dehumanized and “conceptually

emasculated” the Orient by reducing it to merely attitudes, trends, and statistics. “Orientalism, then, in its different phases is a Eurocentric discourse that constructs the Orient by the accumulated knowledge of generations of scholars and writers who are secure in the power of their ‘superior’ wisdom.” 71 Said attributes much of the new Orientalist method of thought to the depiction of the Arab Muslim in the harsh and unrelenting American media. On every channel, in every newspaper and magazine are images of the devious, uncivilized Orient, an overcrowded land packed with terrorists and religious fanatics. A kind of “synchronic essentialism” is established through the use of transcendent and often derogatory generalizations; i.e., equating all Muslims as religious fundamentalists and using generalizing terms like “Semitic.” 72 Said argues again that it is impossible to assign “essential qualities” of being to an entire geographic region composed of numerous ethnic and religious groups. The binary opposition between East and West is evident now more than ever as we see images of “their” impoverished, terror-stricken world

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Rebecca Duckert compared to “our” free, peaceful, and logical world. It is “our” world that is portrayed as the model to be emulated by the Oriental society; it is “our” world that has the power to save “them,” who, because of their substandard quality of life, are no doubt in need of saving. The intervention and interference of the United States in particular in Middle East political matters like the Gulf War and the present War in Iraq illustrate the idea of the civilizing mission of the West that still exists today. Said criticizes the excesses of Orientalism for “denying a common, universal, human experience,” 73 to Western and non-Western people and urges all of us to abandon Orientalism and the theories of racial inequality and hierarchy that go with it. For Said, even though Orientalism, through its dehumanization and violence against “the other” is ultimately a failure of humanity, there is still hope for a “collective and plural destiny for all of mankind.” 74 Edward Said has been criticized for many things since Orientalism was first published in 1978: his complete omission of gender and class as an issue, his alleged misappropriation of Foucault’s theory, his narrowed view of the time frame and geographical scope of Orientalism, his inadequate historical support for many of his claims. 75 But with all its faults and shortcomings there can be no denial of the immense impact Orientalism, and in turn, its author, had on the world. Since its inception almost thirty years ago Orientalism has been translated into twenty-five different languages and has become a classic in the study of the West’s relationship with its “others” throughout the world. 76 Said presents his work not only as an examination of European attitudes to

72. 73. 74. 75.

Windschuttle, 15. Said, Power, Politics, and Culture, 164. Said, 328. Windschuttle, 14.

. 76. Kennedy, 3.

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Rebecca Duckert the Orient but also as a model for analysis of all Western discourses on “the other.” It is difficult to articulate the profound influence Edward Said has had on the fields of postcolonialism, comparative literature, and cultural studies as a whole as a result of these writings. Said opened up the world to the plight of the Orient. The intensity and passion that characterize his work come from a writer whose identity has been constructed, in part, by the very discourse he critiques. Rather than wallow in his status as a victim of Western oppression Said sought to move from the politics of blame to the politics of liberation. By the time of his death in 2003 at the age of sixty-eight, Said had produced over twenty books, including a follow up to Orientalism and numerous works on the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict.

Through his prolific writings and dedication to the

experience in the Middle East, Edward Said has become the voice of an entire region and one of the most significant writers and intellectuals of the twentieth century.

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“R.G. Collingwood”: The Attainment of Knowledge Through Historical Inquiry by: Tracy Kee History is for human self-knowledge. Knowing yourself means knowing, first, what it is to be a person; secondly, knowing what it is to be the kind of person you are; and thirdly, knowing what it is to be the person you are and nobody else is. Knowing yourself means knowing what you can do; and since nobody knows what they can do until they try, the only clue to what man can do is what man has done. The value of history, then, is that it teaches us what man has done and thus what man is. -R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History

The multiple books and essays written by Robin George Collingwood in the first half of the twentieth century reveal his elaborate conceptions concerning the philosophy of history. His concepts of action, re-enactment, self-knowledge, and presupposition and their relationships to history have instigated a considerable amount of academic discussion concerning philosophy and history. Born in 1889, Robin George Collingwood was instantly surrounded by a family who perceived exemplary education as essential to life. His father, W.G. Collingwood, was John Ruskin’s secretary and biographer as well as a writer, art historian, archaeologist, and painter. Edith Collingwood, his mother, was a musician and painter. Thus, Collingwood’s intense appreciation of knowledge and art was fostered at a very young age. Until he was thirteen, Collingwood’s parents tutored him at home, where they taught him “to read ancient and modern languages, sing, play the piano, write, sculpt, draw, paint, bind books and sail.” 1 In 1902, he went away to school, which he disliked immensely. In An Autobiography, which Collingwood published in 1939, he wrote, This was a crucial point in my school life…the boys were nothing if not teachable. They soon saw that any exhibition of interest in their studies was a sure way to get themselves disliked, not by their contemporaries, but by the masters…But they must have some compensation for their frustrated and inhibited intellects; and this they got in athletics, where nobody minds how hard you work, and the triumphs of the football field make amends for the miseries of the class-room…I could not reconcile myself to the starvation imposed on me by the teaching to which I was subjected; and as time went on I learnt to devote my time more and more to music and to reading in subjects of my own choice…because I could work at them unhampered by my masters. 2

It was in his unsatisfying years away from home that he began to develop his ideas about education, which would later come across in his writing. Collingwood believed that there

1

Marnie Hughes-Warrington, How Good an Historian Shall I Be? R.G. Collingwood, The Historical Imagination and Education (Virginia: Imprint Academic, 2003), 2. R.G. Collingwood, An Autobiography (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), 8-9.

2

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Tracy Kee were “obvious faults” in the English public school system that stifled the growth of students’ minds, and he spent the remainder of his life working to get rid of those faults. 3 In 1908, Collingwood was “let out of prison” to attend the University College at Oxford, to focus on classical studies. 4 He graduated first in his class and was granted a fellowship in philosophy in 1912. During World War One, Collingwood served in the Admiralty Intelligence Division. From then on, he reentered the world of academia, where he earned many honorable distinctions for his teaching and his writings. Collingwood died in 1943, after suffering from multiple strokes in the last five years of his life. Despite his weakening health, Collingwood continued to write about philosophy until his death. In 1978, his second wife donated a number of unpublished manuscripts to the Bodleian Library at Oxford, and even more documents were discovered in 1995. Those manuscripts continue to have a profound impact on current historiographers. Philosophy of History In the Middle Ages, according to Collingwood, philosophy was wholly concerned with theology and “the relations of God and man.” 5 From the sixteenth century through the nineteenth century, philosophy was more concerned with the relationship of the human mind to the natural world. During these periods, people may have been thinking historically, but theirs was an elementary kind of historical thought, in that it never reflected on itself. In the eighteenth century, people started to think critically about history, which “began to be regarded as a special form of thought.” 6 Once this change occurred, the idea that mathematics, theology, and science could explain everything was no longer satisfactory. The past “cannot be apprehended by mathematical thinking,” because mathematical thinking pertains to things that have no special place in space and time. 7 It cannot be understood by theological thinking, which is single and infinite, because the past is “finite and plural.” 8 Moreover, scientific thought cannot apprehend the past because what it sees as true is found through observation and actual perception, and ideas about the past cannot ever be verified or observed. In an essay on Collingwood, E.W.F. Tomlin calls the transition from science to history inevitable, due to a realization that the abstract must rest upon the concrete; that the hypotheses of science must have a categorical basis; and that the foundation of all speculation, all conceptual knowledge, is a particular and concrete fact. 9

Ultimately, none of the scientific, theological, or mathematical theories could exist if it was not for human experience. Notably, Collingwood did not call history superior to these other forms of knowledge, just necessary for them. Additionally, he upheld that 3

Collingwood, An Autobiography, 11. Collingwood, An Autobiography, 12. R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (London: Oxford University Press, 1946), 4. 6 Collingwood, Idea, 5. 7 Collingwood, Idea, 5. 8 Collingwood, Idea, 5. 9 E.W.F. Tomlin, R.G. Collingwood (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1953), 23. 4 5

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Tracy Kee every historian, must “regard reality as something wholly external to himself,” despite his own experience. 10 The historian, then, is still subject to abstractions. This might seem contradictory at a glance, but Collingwood believed the contradiction could be surmounted in philosophical thinking. Collingwood took issue with a typical view of history, which he called a “scissors-and-paste” view or common sense theory of history. 11 This is the commonly accepted idea that history is “knowledge of past events, based on the report or testimony of someone who actually observed the occurrence of the events.” 12 Collingwood believed that accepting this view made history simply “the believing some one else when he says that he remembers something.” 13 He considered this an inadequate view of history. The common sense theory of history makes authority the only source for information about the past. Additionally, it does not allow the historian to come to his own conclusions about the past. He can only duplicate statements that have previously been made by a source. Moreover, this view of history does not allow the historian to contradict the authority. It places value on certain sources over others, but this is a contradiction. Following the limitations of the theory, the historian is not authorized to place more importance on one source. In Collinwood’s view, this is an innate problem within the common sense view of history. Collingwood acknowledged that most philosophers and historians differ on their perception of the philosophy of history. His concept of the philosophy of history is that it is the inquiry that developed with the new interest in organized historical research that emerged during the Enlightenment. He called history a knowledge of the past. The past is a collection of events that are over and therefore no longer exist. The past cannot be perceived, observed, or verified by experiment. The past can only come to be known by interpreting evidence, which exists in the present and can therefore be perceived and interpreted. Interpreting evidence requires principles, some of which are scientific in character, such as archaeology, and some of which are philosophical in character. Data and the principles of interpretation “are the two elements of all historical thought,” which must exist together. 14 The historian must have a problem in his mind before he can search for data that pertains to it. Collingwood called “the historian’s data…the entire present.” 15 Historical research stems from asking questions, looking for data to answer the questions, and interpreting the data. Although there are large amounts of evidence to be studied, Collingwood argued that the past in itself does not exist as a group of facts waiting to be understood or selected by historians. Selection and specialization of facts come about as questions

10

Tomlin, 23. Collingwood, An Autobiography, 79. William Debbins, “Introduction,” Essays In the Philosophy of History, R.G. Collingwood (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1965), xii. 13 Collingwood, Idea, 235. 14 R.G. Collingwood, Essays in the Philosophy of History (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1965), 137. 15 Collingwood, Essays, 137. 11 12

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Tracy Kee arise during historical study. Those things that are left out are not being neglected because they may not have arisen during his course of study. Because facts do not actually exist, “there is no such thing as a total body of past facts which a sufficiently accomplished historian might know in its totality.” 16 Therefore, any attempt to create a universal history would be fruitless. Also, no history can be final. There is, of course, an exception in that every history can be universal in the sense that it can really cover the ground it professes to cover, and can be final in the sense that it can really state where our knowledge of its subject stands at the present time. 17

The universality and finality would be subject to change. History creates a narrative that relates to the present day. In this way, history is both a narrative and a history of history. This is why, Collingwood argued, history must be written anew with every age, as each generation will write it differently according to its point of view. There is really no way to eliminate this subjectivity, and Collingwood believed that is acceptable. Despite different arguments that can be made about it, history is not arbitrary. History is genuine knowledge. When people’s views differ, it does not automatically mean that one is wrong. Each person’s historical thought is based on his own past, and every person has an individual past. Therefore, it is actually impossible for two people to reach the same historical thoughts. In and of itself, the past is not anything; thus, knowledge of the past cannot be the ultimate goal. The goal “as the goal of a thinking being, is knowledge of the present,” particularly, how it “came to be what it is.” 18 Under this theory, the past is an aspect of the present. Collingwood created an inseparable link between history and philosophy. He considered a philosopher a historian who can overcome the gap between subject and object and realize “that he is a part of the process he is studying.” 19 Through philosophical thinking, historical thinking will eventually lead to self-knowledge. Action as history Collingwood asserted that the events in history are a special kind of event called actions, and that “there is no history where there is no action.” 20 Additionally, there cannot be action without independent agents. The exclusive subject matter of history is human action. Perception is important to history, but it cannot lead to an assertion of the truth. Collingwood distinguished historical events from natural events, which he said are observable and often reduced to a law of nature. Collingwood insisted that “to the scientist, nature is always and merely a ‘phenomenon’…in the sense of being a spectacle presented to his intelligent observation.” 21 Historical events, however, only 16

Collingwood, Essays, 138. Collingwood, Essays, 138. Collingwood, Essays, 139. 19 Tomlin, 23. 20 Tomlin, 30. 21 Collingwood, Idea, 214. 17 18

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Tracy Kee allow people to perceive the traces and evidence that have been left behind. They are never phenomena. Historical events are what the historian must look through to discern the thought within them. Any investigation by an historian requires a distinction between the outside and the inside of an event. The outside of an event is “everything belonging to it which can be described in terms of bodies and their movements,” and the inside of an event is “that in it which can only be described in terms of thought.” 22 Both the outside and inside of an event are important, and should not be considered exclusively from the other. Collingwood called action the unity of the outside and the inside of an event. In order to understand events in history, one has to be able to penetrate them. In science, events are discovered when they are perceived. In history, the event is not what needs to be discovered; rather, the thought expressed in the event needs to be uncovered. If the thought is discovered, the event can be understood. In The Idea of History, Collingwood offers an example: When a scientist asks ‘Why did that piece of litmus paper turn pink?’ he means ‘On what kinds of occasions do pieces of litmus paper turn pink?’ When an historian asks ‘Why did Brutus stab Caesar?’ he means ‘What did Brutus think, which made him decide to stab Caesar?’ 23

The cause of the event is the thought of the person who created the event. The event and the thought are inseparable, as the thought is inside of the event. This is what Collingwood means by penetrating events of history. Sequence is important to both science and history. It is what initially grabs a person’s attention, and a “necessary condition of progress.” 24 Historians, however, are required to step outside of sequence when trying to penetrate historical events. The historian has to get inside of the thoughts of the historical agent, searching for processes of thought. In this way, Collingwood concludes that, “all history is the history of thought.” 25 In his analysis of Collingwood, Stein Helgeby reinforces the connection between action and history, by suggesting that “to give an account of history is to give and account of action” and vice versa. 26 Nor can either idea stand alone, as they are dependent on each other. He also reflects that the idea of action as history reveals the possibilities and boundaries of history. If history, as Collingwood suggested, is “created through action, the boundaries of history are boundaries of what can be done and of what can be understood.” 27 He also makes further statements regarding the difference between history and nature that Collingwood contemplated. Helgeby believed that to show that thought is objectified in history, and that reason is therefore immanent in history, is to conceive history and action as 22

Collingwood, Idea, 213. Collingwood, Idea, 214. Tomlin, 30. 25 Collingwood, Idea, 215. 26 Stein Helgeby, Action as History: The Historical Thought of R.G. Collingwood (Virginia: Imprint Academic, 2004), 2. 27 Helgeby, 62. 23 24

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Tracy Kee jointly dependent, and to conceive action in terms that move from emotion to thought and logic. History is composed of self-creative actions, differentiated from the processes of nature because they involve thought. 28

Collingwood’s concept of action was at the center of his philosophy, and Helgeby writes that historical thinking is essential to construct a world of action and create possibilities for more action. Helgeby believes that Collingwood’s theory was an attempt “to develop an account of thought that places it squarely within the world of history and action.” 29 Helgeby thinks that if this theory was correct, thought needed to “be seen as a process, and more specifically as action.” 30 If thought is not seen as action, it will be seen as in its own distinct sphere of eternal objects. He suggests that Collingwood’s solution to this problem was to put thought into the context of consciousness, and to emphasize the development of consciousness. Helgeby also emphasizes the difference between thinking and knowledge, noting that thinking itself is not knowledge, but action. He supposes that “this kind of action has value only as leading to knowledge.” 31 Collingwood, however, would be likely to give more value to action. History as Re-enactment Collingwood is perhaps best known for his idea of history as re-enactment, which stemmed from the assertion that all history is the history of thought. It is important to consider that the historian is not an eyewitness. He has not observed the things he wants to know. Additionally, an historian cannot “know the past by simply believing a witness who saw the events in question and has left his evidence on record.” 32 Any belief stemming solely from the testimony of a witness would not be entirely credible. In order to arrive at knowledge, “the historian must re-enact the past in his own mind.” 33 The only way for an historian to understand how an historical character was thinking is to think it for himself. The historian must determine what thoughts in a person’s mind compelled him to act the way he did, which requires picturing himself in that person’s situation. Because of this procedure, Collingwood would claim that “the history of thought, and therefore all history, is the re-enactment of past thought in the historian’s own mind.” 34 William H. Dray deals with Collingwood’s theory of history as re-enactment in his 1995 book. He believes that the “idea itself is basically sound,” and indispensable “to any adequate account of historical understanding.” 35 Also, he indicates Collingwood’s ideas are a clear improvement over previous similar doctrines. Finally, 28

Helgeby, 17. Helgeby, 62. Helgeby, 63. 31 Helgeby, 71. 32 Collingwood, Idea, 282. 33 Collingwood, Idea, 282. 34 Collingwood, Idea, 215. 35 William H. Dray, History as Re-Enactment: R.G. Collingwood’s Idea of History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 32. 29 30

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Tracy Kee he writes that some of Collingwood’s claims need further explanation and development, which can be supplied. Dray’s biggest criticism of Collingwood is that he “leaves most obscure…where he thinks the limits of its legitimate application lie,” often writing as if it is unlimited in scope. 36 Dray acknowledges the criticisms that have been made about Collingwood’s idea of re-enactment, but insists that the theory “points to features of historical understanding that no account of history as a mode of inquiry should ignore.” 37 He believes that those who have a problem with re-enactment are interpreting it as a method for discovering new historical facts. Dray writes that sometimes Collingwood’s language makes it seems that way; however, he did not believe that is Collingwood’s intention. Dray’s interpretation is that Collingwood does not believe that “whatever the historian thinks, when he imagines himself in an agent’s place” is what the agent must have thought; rather, “it is that whatever the agent thought, the historian who wishes to understand” the agent must also think. 38 Dray writes that even those who admire Collingwood “have often complained that his idea of re-enactment is relevant only to a small part of what is normally regarded as history.” 39 It seems almost exclusively concerned with what people did and their reasons for doing it, disregarding irrational human behavior and ignoring the part that natural events and conditions might play in history. Dray concedes that reenactment “does not, in itself, provide a satisfactory overall theory of historical understanding.” 40 Marnie Hughes-Warrington discusses two popular views of re-enactment that simply do not align with Collingwood’s idea. First, some people interpret re-enactment as a suggestion “that the historian can achieve identity of thought with historical agents via analogy.” 41 The example she gives is that if behavior such as extending one’s palm in front of another person is associated with the request for that person to stop, then any instances where an historical agent is doing the same thing will lead to the conclusion that he is requesting the same thing. She points out, however, that though Collingwood sometimes uses analogical reasoning, he leaves it out of his discussion of re-enactment. It leads to too many problems, as any analogous argument is non-deductive, and incapable of establishing with absolute certainty what another person is thinking. The historical agent, for example, might not be signaling for someone to stop, rather they are exhibiting compliance with the Nazi regime. Also, the analogical approach “provides very weak inductive reasoning, for its conclusions are drawn from one case only, that of the historian.” 42 She calls generalizations irresponsible. Moreover, arguments for analogy imply that historians can learn only from their cases what it means to have a mental attribute, and would not be able to identify with that attribute in any other way.

36

Dray, 32. Dray, 52. Dray, 53. 39 Dray, 108. 40 Dray, 109. 41 Hughes-Warrington, 57. 42 Hughes-Warrington, 58. 37 38

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Tracy Kee Secondly, Hughes-Warrington writes that a popular explanation of re-enactment grants the historian “special penetrative powers of intuitive insight.” 43 It is argued that because “no deliberative process connects the historian with the historical agent,” the historian would have to have some additional way of knowing how to penetrate the historical agent’s mind. 44 Hughes-Warrington points out the additional problem that since the publication of Collingwood’s The Idea of History, the word re-enactment has taken on a new meaning. It has come to suggest, in common usage, a staged recreation of events. These recreations are sometimes even parodies of historical events. This context makes it very difficult for some people to take Collingwood’s ideas seriously. The Historical Imagination Collingwood believed that the historian had two more tasks that go beyond what authorities reveal to him. The historian must be both constructive and critical. Constructive history is building between the statements borrowed from our authorities, other statements implied by them. Thus our authorities tell us that on one day Caesar was in Rome and on a day later in Gaul; they tell us nothing about his journey from one place to the other, but we interpolate this with a perfectly good conscience. 45

Interpolation, he wrote, is necessary, or a priori. The construction must consist only of those things that are necessitated by evidence. The things that are inferred are essentially imagined, and Collingwood names this activity a priori imagination. A priori imagination is what gives historical narrative its continuity, and Collingwood believed the narrative to be indispensable to history. He saw a priori imagination in all fields, but said the historical a priori imagination had a special task in imagining the past, “since it does not now exist,” but can “become an object of our thought” through this activity. 46 He did lay out three “rules of method” concerning the a priori imagination: first, the imagined picture of the past “must be localized in space and time,” second, it must be consistent with other acceptable pictures of the past, and third, it must make sense in relation to evidence. 47 The picture of a historical subject “appears as a web of imaginative construction stretched between certain fixed points provided by the statements” of authorities. 48 This causes another problem, however, because Collingwood did not believe that the truth came directly out of authoritative statements. According to Collingwood, criticism can lead to the truth. It is important to listen to what authorities have to say, but criticizing those points is what eventually leads to the truth. So it is the historian’s conclusions based on his own a priori imagination that must justify sources and find the truth. The truth, he believes “is what

43

Hughes-Warrington, 59. Hughes-Warrington, 59. Collingwood, Idea, 240. 46 Collingwood, Idea, 242. 47 Collingwood, Idea, 246. 48 Collingwood, Idea, 242. 44 45

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Tracy Kee differentiates history in the higher sense of the word from the mere absorption and repetition of stories.” 49 Critics of Collingwood have suggested that his “claim that historical inquiry requires an exercise of the historian’s imagination” is simply another way of stating his ideas about re-enactment. 50 Dray argues, however, that this is not the case, and while the two ideas are connected, they require independent consideration. Dray also touches on Collingwood’s idea of the a priori imagination, saying that on the surface it does not seem that controversial because it seems somewhat obvious that historians take for granted some things that have happened in the past. The problem Dray has with the idea of the a priori imagination is its connection to some of Collingwood’s other statements. Dray claims that Collingwood “fails to distinguish at all clearly between two senses in which he want to” claim that historians use with an a priori picture of the past. 51 Also, Dray says that Collingwood blurs the distinction between “having an idea simply of the past, and having an idea of a specifically historical past.” 52 Lastly, Dray is concerned with Collingwood’s contention that an a priori picture of the past is necessary to historical work. History as self-knowledge Collingwood once wrote, “Man, who desires to know everything, desires to know himself.” 53 If a man does not know himself, then he has imperfect knowledge, for to know something without knowing that one knows it is only a halfknowing, and to know that one knows is to know oneself. Selfknowledge is desirable and important to man, not only for its own sake, but as a condition without which no other knowledge can be critically justified and securely based. 54

Collingwood’s concept of self-knowledge is concerned with understanding one’s own thoughts and reason. Because all history is the history of thought, it follows that “all knowledge is historical knowledge.” 55 The historian brings into his experience historical knowledge, so “the activity of historical thinking is simultaneously a means to self-knowledge.” 56 If the historian knows what someone else has thought, he has also contemplated what he would think of it. The historian who thinks through situations receives a new kind of knowledge: in re-thinking what somebody else thought, he thinks it himself. In knowing that somebody else thought it, he knows that he himself is

49

Collingwood, Essays, 51. Dray, 191. Dray, 202. 52 Dray, 204. 53 Collingwood, Idea, 205. 54 Collingwood, Idea, 205. 55 Tomlin, 32. 56 Tomlin, 32. 50 51

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Tracy Kee able to think it. And finding out what he is able to do is finding out what kind of a man he is. 57

An historian who can delve into the minds of many different people must have many different qualities. The historian’s self-knowledge is his knowledge of the world. For historians, events that are studied are experiences to be lived. Collingwood concluded, “historical inquiry reveals to the historian the powers of his own mind.” 58 Dray cautions against thinking that Collingwood’s perception of self-knowledge is a way of claiming “the true object of historical knowledge is something present rather than something past.” 59 Instead, Dray reads Collingwood as “maintaining that selfknowledge is attained through the reconstruction of the past in a person’s own mind.” 60 Helgeby also comments on the idea of self-knowledge. He suggests that historical thinking has developed throughout history and led to the development of historical knowledge, which is Mind reflecting on its own action and development, and thereby coming to know itself (to know its abilities), by knowing what the human mind has been capable of in the past.

History provides self-knowledge and helps determine human nature. Metaphysics and history One of the reasons Collingwood is so well respected is his “grasp of the intimate relationship between philosophy and the sciences.” 61 Collingwood believed that “all fields of knowledge are shaped by fundamental presuppositions,” which are part of conceptual claims and practices. 62 The historian, however, might not be able to explain these presuppositions, even if he is able to recognize them. The presuppositions are so fundamental, that everyone just knows them even without expressing them. Usually, they are wholly ignorant of the presuppositions that they hold. Collingwood asserted that all thinking is an attempt to answer questions. At the base of every question is a presupposition, which could very well be an answer to a previous question. Behind that presupposition, there might be another, more fundamental, presupposition, and possibly another behind that presupposition. The chain comes to an end with an absolute presupposition, behind which another presupposition cannot be found. Absolute presuppositions are the most basic ideas that are not generally open to more inquiry. For Collingwood, the study of absolute presuppositions is known as metaphysics. Absolute presuppositions are “ideas that stand in a particular kind of relation to particular kinds of activities, undertaken at particular times.” 63 All of them relate to particular historical activities of the mind. Scientific thought cannot exist without these absolute presuppositions for 57

Collingwood, An Autobiography, 114-115. Collingwood, Idea, 218. Dray, 256. 60 Dray, 256. 61 Tomlin, 7. 62 Hughes-Warrington, 85. 63 Helgeby, 43. 58 59

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Tracy Kee To understand what science is means understanding what science does, and to do that we need to understand what our scientific activities presuppose absolutely. 64

In the past, all absolute presuppositions were hidden; however, with progress in science, they have been investigated. Collingwood believed that absolute presuppositions are all answers to historical questions, and the reason they have meaning in other areas is that all areas of thought depend on historical thinking. Dray discusses the problem with the idea of absolute presuppositions. His biggest criticism is that the “view of them as non-propositional, non-verifiable, neither true nor false, seems to rule out the possibility that anyone might have reasons” to retain or change them. 65 It would not make sense to try to understand them using Collingwood’s re-enactment method. There is no room in Collingwood’s theory for examining absolute presuppositions in a critical way. Dray argues that if one was able to scrutinize an absolute presupposition, it would lose its status as such; and if an historian claimed an historical agent was right or wrong in making absolute presuppositions, it would be from the standpoint of the historian’s own absolute presuppositions, “not from the standpoint of the agent, as re-enactive understanding requires.” 66 Collingwood’s Legacy R.G. Collingwood developed his ideas in a “nineteenth-century culture in which historical studies and historical ways of thinking were pervasive, popular and politically significant.” 67 His worked in a period that “saw the emergence of professional academic history,” and he made significant contributions to that field. 68 Collingwood is well respected for his involvement in education. Perhaps in part because of his own schooling experience, he was passionate about education. Collingwood did not get involved in public debates and policy issues concerning education. He did not lecture or write a book on the principles of education, but education was “the very raison d’etre for many of his writings.” 69 Educators today recognize his passion for education in his writings and his devotion to his students as a professor and a lecturer. Additionally, his attempts to move history outside of the realm of academia are appreciated by many historiographers today. The sheer volume of work that has been written in response to Collingwood’s writings and lectures is indicative of the impact he had on the academic world. His ideas are still constantly studied and analyzed, over fifty years after his death. His key concepts of action, re-enactment, self-knowledge, and presupposition continue to influence historical writers today.

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Helgeby, 43. Dray, 141. Dray, 142. 67 Helgeby, vii. 68 Helgeby, viii. 69 Hughes-Warrington, 202. 65 66

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“Frederick Jackson Turner”: Pioneering the Study of the American West by: Allison Koederitz “For so long as young hearts shall beat a little faster at the recital of the exploits and adventures of the trappers, argonauts, and cowboys…or so long as men and women thrill to the story of the pioneers driving their covered wagons out into the sunset…just so long will it be remembered that Turner first taught us the significance of these things.” 1 Frederick Jackson Turner contributed a great deal to the study of history, not the least of which the founding of the first Western history program in our nation. His philosophies about the nature, purpose and relationship of history and all other social sciences are still seen in practice and influence today. The effects of growing up in the newly settled Wisconsin led Turner to formulate a hypothesis in which he interpreted the American character through the collective experiences and opportunities of our nation in settling the frontier. The continuous debates over this hypothesis left in Turner’s legacy have served to keep the field of Western history relevant and alive as scholars support or criticize the ideas left for us at the close of the American frontier over one hundred years ago. The social atmosphere of the late 19th and early 20th centuries was one of change. The frontier was closing, signaling to the nation the end of cheap land. With this, the ideal of American prosperity had to change. 2 As expansion Westward slowed, growth in cities rose. This led to the growth of slums in cities, along with a deepening class division between the working poor and the rich. 3 In his paper “Social Forces in American History,” published in 1911, Turner himself describes recent events that were influencing the social atmosphere of his time. With the West having been conquered in the century before, he describes the new politics of the Pacific Ocean, as he called them. This includes America’s New Imperialism: influence and involvement in the Philippines and the Gulf of Mexico, the building of the Isthmian Canal to connect the Atlantic and Pacific in Central America, and the US’s acquirement of the Hawaiian Islands.4 America is a new World power. The Depression of 1873-1896 left a lasting impression on America. In combination with the closing of the frontier, Americans were realizing that there was no home of new domestic expansion. 5 As industry in America grew stronger, companies shifted into trusts and the new self made man now meant being a king, magnate or baron of the industries. These businessmen regarded themselves as the modern pioneers, applying business to the historical ideals of Americans. 6 Politically, there were many dramatic changes taking place. A movement was sweeping the country to end immigration. This shows the resistance of the time to the Southern and Eastern Europeans who had recently begun to enter the country. 7 Between 1

Bogue, Allen G., "Frederick Jackson Turner Reconsidered," The History Teacher 27 (1994) 204. Billington, Ray Allen, Frederick Jackson Turner (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 108. Billington, Ray Allen, Frederick Jackson Turner p. 185 4 Turner, Frederick Jackson, Frontier and Section (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall Inc., 1961), p.157. 5 Billington, Ray Allen, Frederick Jackson Turner p. 109. 6 Turner, Frederick Jackson, Frontier and Section p. 159. 7 Billington, Ray Allen, Frederick Jackson Turner p. 110. 2 3

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1900 and 1910, eight million immigrants entered our country and most concentrated in cities. 8 Labor movements were ones of unrest, with dramatic and violent strikes such as the Homestead Strike of 1892 and the Pullman Strike of 1894. Many regulatory movements were happening in politics at this time. The government was taking active steps in limiting individual and corporate freedom for the good of society. 9 This was seen in the attack on trusts and monopolies, as in the case of the Sherman Act of 1890, also in the institution of food and meat inspection for the public good. 10 In the 1880s and 1890s, a new trend in recreation arose, called the “wilderness cult.” This was spurred by growth of the National Parks system and promotion of the outdoor lifestyle by politicians such as Teddy Roosevelt. 11 The early production of automobiles grew to mass production. Born in November of 1861, Turner grew up on the edge of civilization in the frontier town of Portage, Wisconsin. While growing up Turner experienced the frontier firsthand. He and his father would routinely share fishing spots with local Indian tribes who refused to be relocated to the West. At the same time he was aware of his family’s heritage, which was deeply rooted in Puritan New England (his ancestors arrived in Massachusetts in 1634). 12 His family and his experiences in frontier Wisconsin would greatly influence his academic life as he grew older. 13 This influence can be seen in a passage from 1887: “I am placed in a new society that is just beginning to realize that it has made a place for itself by mastering the wilderness and peopling the prairie, and is now ready to take its great course in the universal history.” 14 His father was the owner of the local newspaper and as a boy, Frederick was taught to set type and even contributed a column of favorite literary quotes. Turner was an avid reader beginning when he was young, and his reading skills soon developed into excellent oratorical skills as well. 15 Turner excelled in school and was able to go to college at the nearby University of Wisconsin in Madison, where he enrolled in the fall of 1878. The state of college education at that time was much different from what we know today. Students learned by rote memory with large amounts of time in the classroom spent reciting information and reason was thought to be unnecessary. 16 In his history classes with the only history professor at the University of 500 students he learned important lessons about scholarship that would influence his entire career. Professor William Francis Allen taught his students to search for the subsurface social and economic forces shaping the politics studied in history. Students were encouraged to use all tools available, including comparative studies and maps to search for reasons behind institutional growth. 17 From Professor Allen, Turner would also learn to view history as a living organism that changes (these changes could also be measured and studied) in

8

Turner, Frederick Jackson, Frontier and Section p. 158. Turner, Frederick Jackson, Frontier and Section p. 161. Hofstadter, Richard , The Progressive Historians (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), p. 59. 11 Billington, Ray Allen, Frederick Jackson Turner p. 186. 12 Billington, Ray Allen, Frederick Jackson Turner p. 3. 13 Billington, Ray Allen, Frederick Jackson Turner p. 12. 14 Billington, Ray Allen, Frederick Jackson Turner p. 17. 15 Billington, Ray Allen, Frederick Jackson Turner p. 10. 16 Billington, Ray Allen, Frederick Jackson Turner p. 20. 17 Billington, Ray Allen, Frederick Jackson Turner p. 26. 9

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response to forces governing evolution. 18 After graduation in 1884, Turner chose a brief career as a journalist. Although a very good journalist, Turner realized he wanted to be a professional historian. At the time, this involved either directing students in rote memory at the grade school level or living in poverty at the college level. History was very young as an independent subject or department, with only 15 professors and 5 assistant professors of the subject in the United States. 19 He managed to secure an assistant position in rhetoric and was able to complete a Master of the Arts in History. He then went on to receive his Doctor of Philosophy from Johns Hopkins, where he would meet many of the country’s influential historians. At Johns Hopkins, Turner learned fully about the current historical trends going on both nationally and around the world. In the 1880s, a new scientific method was being encouraged for the study of history. This was a reaction against the romanticism that had been previously prevalent in the field. The historian Leopold von Ranke, a leader in German school of historiography, taught that history should be completely objective. A historian should strive for unaltered accounts of the past. Darwin’s theories of evolution were also extremely influential to the young historians gathered at Johns Hopkins. They learned that history can be learned with a methodology based on experimentation and inductive reasoning. This supports the idea of society as an organism and applies an evolutionary hypothesis to history. 20 Also discussed at the time was the question of how to connect events in history. The answer to this was the extremely popular Teutonic, or “germ” theory of history of the 1870s and 1880s. This technique uses a comparative technique in which modern institutions are compared with ancient institutions. If similarities are found (the germ of the institution discovered) then the current institution is said to have evolved from the ancient. 21 The prophet of this school of thought at Johns Hopkins, Herbert Baxter Adams, wrote in 1883, “The science of biology no longer favors the theory of spontaneous generation. Wherever organic life occurs, there must have been some seed for that life. History should not be content with describing effects when it can explain causes. It is just as improbable that free local institutions should spring up without a germ along American shores as that English wheat should have grown here without planting. Town institutions were propagated in New England by old English and Germanic ideas brought over by Pilgrims and Puritans.” 22 It was with the influence of all of these life experiences and current theories that Turner returned to Madison with a Ph.D. and a teaching position in the expanding department of history. He had begun to formulate definite ideas about approaching facts and practicing history. Under the influence of University of Wisconsin scientist T.C. Chamberlain, Turner understood the importance of looking for a variety of causal forces behind a historical event. Chamberlain published a paper entitled “The Method of Multiple Working Hypotheses” which Turner took to heart and applied to his own studies. Chamberlain argues for avoiding self-fulfilling hypotheses by testing every possible explanation for a phenomenon being studied. He argues that in doing this, you will usually find several causal forces at work. 23 Turner describes how this applies to his 18

Billington, Ray Allen, Frederick Jackson Turner p. 27. Billington, Ray Allen, Frederick Jackson Turner p. 34. Billington, Ray Allen, Frederick Jackson Turner p. 64. 21 Billington, Ray Allen, Frederick Jackson Turner p. 65. 22 Hofstadter, p. 66. 23 Billington, Ray Allen, Frederick Jackson Turner p. 161. 19 20

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own work as a historian: “We are now coming to recognize the vital forces in American society whose interaction and transformation have called political institutions into life and molded them to suit changing conditions. Our history is that of a rise and expansion of a huge democracy in an area unoccupied by civilization, and thus affording free play to the factors of physiography, race and custom.” 24 He ascribed to a new class of historian, led by Wilhelm Roscher, who would use economics to look at determining factors such as growth, prosperity, distribution of wealth and social conditions. 25 In his paper “The Significance of History,” Turner shows that his interests as a historian were universal and his views modern. Turner saw history as both beautiful and practical. He thought of the study of the past as a guide for the public conscience and agreed with Droysen’s statement that history is the self-consciousness of humanity. Turner urged scholars to focus on producing a “usable” history. This was an obligation, he believed, of the profession. 26 The utility of history is that of training for good citizenship. This is the function of our public school system and must be fulfilled. He believed that teachers are called to make history “living” for students. A successful popularization of historical knowledge would be a revolution and an intellectual regeneration that will generate good quality politics. 27 It was the past, he also believed, that bound mankind towards traditionalism by connecting man with the history and selfconsciousness of humanity, a balance between the past and the future. 28 Turner agreed that all historians are influenced by experience, although this could be minimized by striving towards objectivity. Turner believed that there are no single laws with which to unlock history and human behavior. Even about his area of interest, American history, he states: “In truth there is no single key to American history. In history, as in science, we are learning that a complex result is the outcome of the interplay of many forces. Simple explanations fail to meet the case.” 29 In the broad meaning of history, Turner felt that individuals are insignificant and narrative unimportant. He believed that the focal point of modern interest should be the masses of the people. 30 Turner believed in the theory of relativism, that everything is understood only from the standpoint of a person’s own culture and experiences. He describes the necessary relativity of American history, for example, in the paper “Problems in American History:” “Our history is to be understood as a growth from European history under the new conditions of the New World. How shall we understand American history without understanding European history?” 31 Each age, he stated, looks at the past only in reference to the current relevant conditions. Just as American history is relative to European history, Turner believes that local history necessitates world history. 32 History is never completed. The present is only the developing past and the

24

Billington, Ray Allen, Frederick Jackson Turner p. 173. Turner, Frederick Jackson, Frontier and Section p. 12. Turner, Frederick Jackson, Frontier and Section p. 1. 27 Turner, Frederick Jackson, Frontier and Section p. 27. 28 Billington, Ray Allen, Frederick Jackson Turner p. 178. 29 Billington, Ray Allen, Frederick Jackson Turner p. 179. 30 Turner, Frederick Jackson, Frontier and Section p. 14. 31 Billington, Ray Allen, The American Frontier Thesis: Attack and Defense (Washington, DC: American Historical Association, 1971), p. 12. 32 Turner, Frederick Jackson, Frontier and Section p. 26. 25 26

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past, only the underdeveloped present. 33 Turner can also be given credit for the modern use of multiple causation in history, for he was one of the first to preach the need for interdisciplinary studies and techniques. 34 It is with these tools and models of history with which Turner formulated his famous theories about the significance of the frontier and sections in American history. His main ideologies are outlined in several essays, including “The Significance of History,” “Problems in American History,” “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” and “Frontier in American History.” Turner’s frontier theory is most clearly laid out in “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” published in 1893 after being given as a speech at the Chicago World’s Fair in the summer of 1893. This essay begins with Turner quoting from the census of 1890 showing that the frontier of our West had been settled and no longer existed. “Up to and including 1880 the country had a frontier of settlement, but at present the unsettled area has been so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line”. 35 American institutions, because of our country’s growth, have been forced to adapt to changing conditions. This has led to a fluidity of American life caused by the ever-moving Westward settlement of the frontier line, the boundary before the remaining free, unsettled wilderness. 36 He envisioned the process of the wilderness mastering the pioneer, and then being reversed, so that the pioneer eventually triumphs over the wilderness in settlement. This progress witnessed on the American frontier can be thought of as a small-scale example of the human progress of the civilization of man. Nowhere in our country was this Americanization more apparent than at the frontier line, where it occurred at the most rapid and effective pace, quickly changing settlers from Europeans into Americans. The Eastern coast of the United States can be seen as Europe’s frontier, but it is clear that once Americans began to migrate from there the West truly became America’s frontier. This mastery of environment developed qualities in the settlers that were unique to the frontier and decreased dependence on the Eastern region of our country and Europe. 37 Turner also explains another phenomenon he sees as affecting American development: the safety valve theory. This is the idea that all Americans, recent immigrants or settled Easterners, laborers or agrarians, were given an equal opportunity of success on the frontier due to readily available land and resources. 38 Turner states that The American frontier has the proper circumstances for a complete study of social development. He sees the story of the settlement of the frontier as an epic of the civilization of mankind, the record of social evolution. 39 He shows the progression of our frontier as an evolution from the Indian to the hunter, to the trader, to ranch life, to exploitation of the land, to farming communities, to manufacturing, to the city and finally the factory system. 40 Turner sees the Indian frontier, our country’s first 33

Turner, Frederick Jackson, Frontier and Section p. 17. Billington, Ray Allen, The American Frontier Thesis: Attack and Defense p. 16. Turner, Frederick Jackson, Significance of the Frontier in American History (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1963), p. 27. 36 Turner, Frederick Jackson, Significance of the Frontier in American History p. 28. 37 Turner, Frederick Jackson, Significance of the Frontier in American History p. 29. 38 Turner, Frederick Jackson, Significance of the Frontier in American History p. 12 39 Turner, Frederick Jackson, Significance of the Frontier in American History p. 33. 40 Turner, Frederick Jackson, Significance of the Frontier in American History p. 34. 34 35

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frontier, as being especially important in this progress, because it is by trade with Indians that our frontier was first explored, opened and settled. Our commercial framework we see today is built upon the trading systems put in place by the first European explorers while engaging in trade with Native Americans. 41 This trade relationship continued to affect later settlers of the frontier, as the Native American population became increasingly dependent on goods such as guns from the traders. These weapons also allowed the Indian populations surrounding the shifting frontier to be very resistant to new settlements such as farming communities. 42 The Indian frontier had some important consolidating effects to these early pioneers. They gained many similar characteristics, such as a common measure of defense, the need for military organization and training and the power of resistance to outside forces, all of this lending to the rugged qualities of the frontiersmen produced in these conditions. 43 The next frontier movement seen in our history was the rancher’s frontier. This frontier expanded rapidly due to the non-reliance on still-lacking transportation facilities (with the rancher’s guidance, their product could drive itself to market). The farmer’s frontier was next, with an uneven advance due to Indian resistance and geography. The pioneers of this frontier relied on army posts for protection and government exploratory expeditions for suitable areas of settlement. 44 America’s frontier had a great deal of influence on the East and the “old world” mentality of many early Americans. Turner argues that the frontier lent a composite nationality to our country in which many different kinds of European immigrants all become American. 45 America’s industrial independence is found to be originated in the frontier. While the Eastern coast was dependent on Europe for many supplies, the South and West’s dependence on the East for finished goods led to a merchant culture being established in the East so that England was no longer a direct supplier to all or even a majority of America. 46 The frontier affected our national legislation, as the frequent travel of goods and people lent to internal improvements and railroad legislation. 47 The idea of the public domain in our country was propagated by the frontier, states Turner. With the shift from the states creating the Federal government to the Federal government creating the states, the sale and disposal of public lands became a national issue. 48 Turner points out the difference between the sectional northeast and the non-sectional west. He says that the conditions on the frontier were nationalizing, so that when a sectional issue such as slavery attempted to spread to the West it caused a major conflict. The sectionalism of the East and South could not survive in the West. 49 The growth of democracy in America was the most important effect of the frontier. A rise in democracy can be attributed to the triumph over the previously free land, lending a sense of individual democratic ideals that are intolerant to excessive administration or education. Turner shows that this has negatively effected our Turner, Frederick Jackson, Significance of the Frontier in American History p. Turner, Frederick Jackson, Significance of the Frontier in American History p. Turner, Frederick Jackson, Significance of the Frontier in American History p. 44 Turner, Frederick Jackson, Significance of the Frontier in American History p. 45 Turner, Frederick Jackson, Significance of the Frontier in American History p. 46 Turner, Frederick Jackson, Significance of the Frontier in American History p. 47 Turner, Frederick Jackson, Significance of the Frontier in American History p. 48 Turner, Frederick Jackson, Significance of the Frontier in American History p. 49 Turner, Frederick Jackson, Significance of the Frontier in American History p. 41 42 43

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government as well, lending a lack of civic spirit and a lack of business honor to national politics. 50 The missionary culture of the frontier has also affected our national experience. Missionary activity was the center of educational and religious activity on the frontier. With such a large area of influence, Turner argues, this leaves the nation’s religious and political destiny to be decided in the West, in combination with a growing lack of control by the East on the intellectual life of the majority of the country. 51 Turner sees the American intellect as being highly influenced by the frontier. Turner describes some of the unique characteristics Americans have gained directly from the frontier experience: “That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance with comes with freedom – these are traits of the frontier, or traits called out elsewhere because of the existence of the frontier.” 52 In his essay “Problems in American History,” Turner points out the peculiarities of American history and how it should be properly studied. He first establishes the importance of American history for understanding the process of social development. He sees American politics, what was most commonly focused on in historical studies at that time, as a contest between economic and social factors. In American history, we need to study our national character, including forces behind composite nationality, growth of the American intellectual character and economic and social conditions. Turner points out that there are many important fields behind American history that are not adequately studied, such as the histories of the Negro, law, religion and labor. 53 With this essay Turner is not only appealing to the growth of American history as an area of study, but to a comprehensive survey that details all aspects of American life, not just political history. This interdisciplinary approach was revolutionary at the time. Turner presents his second well-known theory in his essay titled “Significance of the Section in American History.” In it he argues that America is comparable to Europe, only we are an empire of sections rather than nations, so nationalism in America now becomes like internationalism in Europe. After the frontier closed and with continued immigration, our country experienced a saturation of population that led to sectionalism becoming increasingly political. 54 Turner sees this sectionalism as desirable, for it is a check against mob psychology on a national scale and is essential to growth and originality. 55 Turner points out that geography is the leading cause behind sectionalism, with sections as geographic groupings of public opinion. 56 Turner also notes that in this characteristic, America is influencing Europe. While we are becoming aware of our sections, Europe is attempting to build nations into a cooperative league. 57 In the essay “Section and Nation,” Turner continues the comparison of America’s sections and Turner, Frederick Jackson, Significance of the Frontier in American History p. 52. Turner, Frederick Jackson, Significance of the Frontier in American History p. 56. Turner, Frederick Jackson, Significance of the Frontier in American History p. 57. 53 Turner, Frederick Jackson, Significance of Sections in American History (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1932), 18. 54 Turner, Frederick Jackson, Significance of the Frontier in American History p. 40. 55 Turner, Frederick Jackson, Significance of Sections in American History p. 45. 56 Turner, Frederick Jackson, Significance of the Frontier in American History p. 183. 57 Turner, Frederick Jackson, Significance of Sections in American History p. 203. 50 51 52

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Europe’s nations. He describes sections as potential nations, and asks, how, then, does America retain its national unity? Turner points out that America, unlike Europe, is free from what he calls the “burden of history.” 58 America is a living response to European international relations, born of conflict within and between nations in Europe. Through this experience, the development of America presents to Europe better ways of solving conflict. Reaction to Turner’s theories were overwhelmingly positive during his lifetime. His theories gained support during the 1890s and were popular until his after his death. The frontier thesis reflected the optimism of the frontier spirit that many people still believed in and younger historians were enthusiastic about his scholarly research into our romantic past. 59 Woodrow Wilson, a colleague of Turner’s at Johns Hopkins, was one of the first major academics to support Turner. Schoolteachers, socialists and economists then zealously used his method of multiple causation as it was reprinted. 60 A series of articles in Atlantic Monthly created a national interest in his theories. 61 Turner influenced college departments of history throughout the US. His influence can be seen in these statistics: From 1830-1870, only 2.2% of the subject of history was focused on Western history. From 1900-1925 93% of American history being taught stressed the frontier theory as the dominant force. 62 Turner’s theories had elevated the status of the University of Wisconsin and the American Historical Society all over the world. In 1903, Turner was listed as one of America’s “most important living historians.” 63 It is said that by the end of the 1920s, Turner had the scholarly world at his feet. 64 Turner’s theories are still regarded as some of the most useful and controversial for understanding and interpreting American history. Today, knowledge of the theories are necessary for a full survey of US history. In a study of American historiography published during the 1920s, Arthur M. Schlesinger and Harry E. Barnes credit Turner with lending “a new direction…to American historical research.” Turner “introduced more vitality and realism into the study of American history than any other American historian of this or any earlier generation.” 65 Many historians cannot bear to part with the some of the simple truths held in Turner’s theories: “Whatever the merits of the Turner thesis, the doctrine that the United States is a continental nation rather than a member with Europe of the Atlantic community has had a formative influence on the American mind and deserves historical treatment in its own right.” 66 After his death in 1932, however, criticisms of the Frontier and Sectionalism theories were strong. A group of younger scholars began their challenge after World War I. Critics claim his theses are too simple, his safety valve theory not realistic, and argue that Turner is unclear about many important terms in his work, for example what he means by the terms democracy and frontier. 67 Popularity of the Marxist doctrine 58

Turner, Frederick Jackson, Significance of Sections in American History p. 316. Billington, Ray Allen, Frederick Jackson Turner p. 186. Billington, Ray Allen, Frederick Jackson Turner p. 188. 61 Billington, Ray Allen, Frederick Jackson Turner p. 191. 62 Billington, Ray Allen, Frederick Jackson Turner p. 285. 63 Billington, Ray Allen, Frederick Jackson Turner p. 286. 64 Billington, Ray Allen, Frederick Jackson Turner p. 446. 65 Bogue, Allen G., 201. 66 Bogue, Allen G., 206. 67 Turner, Frederick Jackson, Significance of the Frontier in American History p. 19. 59 60

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undermined Turner’s reliance on environmental factors. Trends of intellectual history and history focused on Eastern civilization do not have much use for Turner’s theories, which seem to encourage isolationism. The real-life experience of the depression beginning showed the public that society is extremely complex and hard to pin down with one theory of origin. 68 Most attacks on Turner’s thesis are on his presentation and terminology. Critics claim that to be usable in a modern interpretation, we need a satisfactory definition of frontier. Turner describes two different frontiers in his work. The first is a physical place where the settled region of the continent meets the unsettled region of the continent. The second is the process through which individuals and institutions were altered by contact with an environment that provided opportunity for economic improvement through exploitation of abundant natural resources. 69 Limited reading of Turner can lead some to see shallow theses with not much to support them. Critics of the safety valve theory have said that eastern laborers could never have become western farmers in the time of the frontier because they did not have the capital or skills necessary to establish a farm in the West. They have also proven that migration to the West occurred more rapidly in times of prosperity, not in depression, as Turner suggested. 70 Recent scholarship has proven that there was in fact no direct safety valve of the frontier, but rather an indirect one, where labor jobs were available in the East for immigrant and poor workers because of other, more able Americans, migrating to the West. 71 More modern critics such as Robert Berkhofer Jr. have challenged the influence of the frontier over the long term, claiming that capitalism brought by European immigrants has had more of a long term effect on the character of our nation. 72 Current trends in Western history are moving away from the Turner thesis. The new Western history views Turner as incomplete, an overly optimistic view of the American frontier. Donald Worster has said that Turner produced an “agrarian myth,” failed to see the “shameful side of the westward movement” and left out “those unsmiling aspects” of Western history. 73 Others dislike Turner’s description of the frontier as a meeting point between savagery and civilization, and would prefer rather, a cultural mingling at the frontier line. Turner’s trivialization of the West is yet another modern criticism of Turner’s work, all of these understandable contemporary criticisms of a theory that evolved at the end of the 19th century. Turner’s place in historiography is one of distinction. As the first person to offer a University course in Western history, Turner defined a genre used to interpret American history for more than one hundred years. His ability to create fresh explanations and solve traditional problems with unusual techniques regenerated and also gave the field of history tools that we still employ today. When he began his career, historians generally believed in a single motivating force dominating each separate period of the past. Historians focused on the distant past, were not concerned with the near present and preferred politics to social forces as the shaping force of behavior. When Turner’s career ended, most of his historical concepts popular today were widely accepted. He popularized important modern historiographical concepts such as relativism, presentism, 68

Billington, Ray Allen, The American Frontier Thesis: Attack and Defense p. Billington, Ray Allen, The American Frontier Thesis: Attack and Defense p. Billington, Ray Allen, The American Frontier Thesis: Attack and Defense p. 71 Billington, Ray Allen, The American Frontier Thesis: Attack and Defense p. 72 Bogue, Allen G., 204. 73 Bogue, Allen G., 210. 69 70

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multiple causation and the recognition of social and economic pressures directing political behavior. 74 It is interesting that Turner’s most important academic contribution concerns the philosophy of history, for he often said “I have never formulated a philosophy of history, or of historical research.” 75 Turner’s ideas that social progress is a product of a collective people’s thoughts and actions and has nothing to do with the individual is a strikingly original way of viewing human progress. His belief is that that historical contributions come more from social forces than accident and personality and that the problems of a developing society should be taken more seriously in historical record than a narration of events or stories of individuals. 76 Turner’s complete work shows him to go way beyond criticisms of his narrow thesis or outdated frontier ideals. The contributions Turner has made in terms of historical tools, methods and philosophy are some of the most important ones in use today.

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Billington, Ray Allen, Frederick Jackson Turner p. 476. Billington, Ray Allen, Frederick Jackson Turner p. 476. Brewer, William M., "The Journal of Negro History," The Historiography of Frederick Jackson Turner 44 (1959) 250.

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“Women and the Third Reich” by: Victoria McCardell The early twentieth century is marked by two major wars begun by German aggression. World War I and World War II left no hemisphere of the world untouched by war. After the tremendous losses amassed in the first of the great wars, it seems that nations would have been eager to avoid any additional conflict. However, the Nazi infiltration of the Weimar Republic in the early 1930’s meant another war would engulf the world. Only after the fighting ended in 1945 could the devastation and interconnectedness of the two wars be fully appreciated. Soldiers lost their lives by the thousands to protect and preserve their nations. Many who stayed behind also perished as the tactics of war began inflicting mass casualties at the expense of non-combatants. World War II also brought a premature end to millions of innocent lives in Nazi death camps. The world remains perplexed as to how such hateful sentiments could be so stirred as to motivate the fighting of two devastating wars within decades of each other. When wars are retold by history, pitched battles and soldiers are usually the main focus. However, World War II cannot be understood with an examination of leaders and a body count. The social and political ideas of the Nazi party have left a substantial mark on the world. The Nazi philosophy and political ideology motivated men and women alike to action against fellow citizens and the rest of the world. Although German women did not serve in the military, they still played a very active role in the Nazi regime. Women worked in industry to keep the German economy afloat and prepared for war. As the idea of an Aryan state took shape, German girls joined the Hitler Youth organization to honor and preserve their purely German heritage. Women were the wives of generals and the mothers of soldiers. Nazi propaganda, social ideology and German culture were passed on through the mothers of the German state. Women also held some aggressive roles within the Third Reich. Women served as guards, assassins and spies for the Nazi regime. Women acted in differing forms within the Third Reich; however, no role was without contribution to the Nazi cause. Despite their achievements for the regime, women were not always welcome allies of the Nazi Party. After World War I and the fall of the Hohenzollern monarchy in 1918, the Weimar Republic was established to govern Germany. The Weimar Republic was ineffective in rebuilding the structures and heart of Germany especially when confronted with the Great Depression, and as a result the Nazi party rose as consolation to the people of Germany. As the Nazis began to infiltrate the ranks of the Weimar political structures, they were less than open to female assistance. The Nazi takeover was to be a strictly male event which would result in a “state of men.” 1 Leaders were afraid that having women in the movement would distract from their masculinity and make them appear weak. “Toughness and brutality” became the prescribed characterization for a Nazi male with in Hitler’s regime. 2 The liberal practices of the Weimar Republic were extremely ineffective in governing Germany in the post World War I years and as a result the people of Germany 1

Pauwels, Jacques R. Women, Nazis, and Universities: Female University Students in the Third Reich. 1933-1945. (Westport: Greenwood Press. 1984), 11. 2 Pauwles, 12

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Victoria McCardell were willingly accept the controlling and confining principles of Nazism,. A major economic depression struck the world just a few years after the end of the first Great War. “The link between the onset of the Great Depression and the advance of National Socialism cannot be disputed. Without an agrarian crisis in the countryside, without the unemployment of millions of German for two or more years, and without the slump in business revenues that followed it is difficult to imagine the Nation Socialists exploding on the political landscape.” 3 Germans were desperate for economic assistance in any shape or form. As unemployment rose, Germans became more ready to accept restrictive policies if jobs were created. During the years of depression the rate of suicide for women was at 19 percent, as compared to 14 percent for men. Women had to try to pick up the slack left by their unemployed husbands, and thus the harshest realities fell on women as they attempted to run the households, raise children and seek employment. 4 The Nazi infiltration of the Reichstag through democratic means was also made possible by the Treaty of Versailles, which ended the First World War. Some Germans felt that the war was not completely lost by the Central Powers, thus any settlement which sited Germany as defeated was not acceptable. In addition, the harsh reparations placed on Germany were resented by the German people. If Germany had not decisively lost the war then she should not have to pay reparations to any other nation. Germany was also shamed by being kept out of the League of Nations in 1926 and the Olympics of 1928. 5 Germany was a war torn nation with economic struggles and wounded pride. Hitler was able to use each of these sympathies to convince the German people to accept more restrictive policies in return for relief and retribution. The Nazi party hoped to develop a pure Aryan race, one that would be superior to all other races of the world. The new Aryan race would lead the people of Germany out of depression and into the glory stolen from them in the First World War. However, with the desire for an Aryan race, the need for women in Nazi Germany became apparent. “It reflects two simultaneously operative factors: on the one hand, women’s active participation in National Socialism, and on the other, a patriarchal society and a National Socialist ideology, both of which were reductionist and hostile toward women.” 6 German men in the Weimar Republic remained gentlemanly toward women because women were useful; however, there continued to be great distrust and fear of females. 7 The distance seen between men and women stemmed from the Nazi belief that some blame for the decline of German state lay with women’s desire to work outside of the home instead of being wives and mothers. 8 Fears existed that the New Woman, independent and self aware, would not “provide the haven in a heartless world” for men as she had done before. 9 The idea of a woman without male restraint, either sexually or financially, was a curse to the German order. So instead, women were encouraged to “find their true femininity in subordination to their husbands or their role as mother.” 10 3

Fritzsche, Peter. Germans into Nazis. Cambridge: (Harvard University Press. 1998), 165. Fritzsche, 157. Fritzsche, 151. 6 Frederiksen, Elke P and Martha Kaarsberg Wallach. Facing Fascism and Confronting the Past: German Women Writers from Weimar to the Present. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 64. 7 Pauwles, 13. 8 Pauwles, 16. 9 Frederiksen, 37. 10 Frederiksen, 39. 4 5

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Victoria McCardell The hope was to remake German women into the housewives and mothers of the new Aryan nation. 11 The Nazi desire for women to serve only as wives and mothers was coupled with a belief that women were intellectually inferior. “Hitler himself developed a rudimentary epistemology of sorts, which held that man arrived at knowledge through intellect, women through feeling, instinct and faith.” 12 A professor at the University of Berlin added to the idea about the second-class intellectual status of women with his 1917 report that the female brain was actually smaller than male brains. For these reasons the Nazi party considered women neither capable of desiring or completing higher studies. 13 Women were simply not capable of the same intellectual feats as men. A further concern for the Nazi party during the time of the Weimar Republic was that university study would actually make women less fertile and thus jeopardize their role as mothers. They feared that sitting in a desk for many hours could make women less biologically capable of having children. Also, it was believed that “intellectual overexertion” of the simple female mind could leave her barren. 14 The education of women posed a physical threat to the goals of the Nazi party. Leaders of the Nazi party did begin to breathe easier and reduce restrictions on women as the Aryan birthrate increased, 15 but, the majority of women’s livelihood in the German state would always remain tied to the home. When Adolph Hitler was chosen as chancellor in 1933, the Nazi party gained access to authoritarian power in Germany. Hitler quickly established an absolute rule over the nation, and life changed for both the women and men of Germany. The same night that he was appointed chancellor, foreign embassies received complaints that Communists, Socialists and Jews had been brutalized in the streets of Germany. 16 These tragedies seem small in comparison to the Holocaust, which the Nazi party would become most associated, but they are in sharp contrast to the more liberal policies of the Weimar Republic, which would have never allowed such practices. Communist newspapers were canceled and offices were searched without reason, yet protests against the Chancellor were still carried out. 17 With the suppression policies of the Nazi party, support or opposition of the Reich were the only choices. “Participation in National Socialism was in no way neutral; rather, everyone was forced into making a public commitment either for or against it.” 18 Even neutrality within the Third Reich was unacceptable. In a speech about the new Ministry of the Third Reich a German officer states, “It is not enough to reconcile people more or less to our regime, to move them towards a position of neutrality towards us, we would rather work on people until they are addicted to us.” 19 Women could not merely be complacent with the Nazi party; they had to actively do their part to contribute to the state. Most of the typical German woman’s participation came in the form of service as wives and mothers. Propaganda went out to women stating that only they 11

Frederiksen, 37. Pauwles, 13. Pauwles, 14. 14 Pauwles, 16. 15 Pauwles, 27. 16 Fritzsche, 142. 17 Fritzsche, 144. 18 Frederiksen, 65. 19 Housden, Martyn. Resistance and Conformity in the Third Reich. (London: Routledge.1997), 4. 12 13

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Victoria McCardell could create the Aryan race to govern the nation. The desire for a pure race allowed the Nazis to forcibly sterilize “undesirable” women in Germany. 20 It is estimated that over 27,000 women were forcibly sterilized by the end of 1934, and five percent of sterilizations resulted in death. Jewish women were the most common victims of sterilization, as the Jewish race was seen as a threat to pure Aryan bloodlines. For this reason, Jewish women were also allowed to bypass the strict prohibition on abortions in the Nazi state. 21 In addition to sterilization, euthanasia was practiced. Philanthropic work was often done by German women, especially those with affluent husbands. However, the benefactors of these works of charity were limited to those of Aryan descent. There was no reason for Nazis to help those of lesser races. 22 The idea was disseminated that the only people whose lives were worth saving were those people fortunate enough to be part of the Aryan race. 23 In the name of purity, no part of an Aryan’s life was out of state control. Young German soldiers’ fiancés were questioned by officers. A soldier needed a wife and family, but each was to enhance the life of the soldier. For any soldier to be burdened with questioning the morals of his wife or the legitimacy of his children was out of the question. 24 In order to even receive a marriage loan, the couple was subjected to a medical examination to ensure claims of Aryan descent were true. Aryan women were even forbidden to smoke while pregnant. 25 Women had to surrender control of their bodies to a government dedicated to the production of healthy Aryan children. Prostitution was illegal under the Third Reich for fear of contaminating Aryan bloodlines. The severity of punishments for prostitutes differed; however prostitutes were most harshly treated when they were discovered to have passed a sexually transmitted disease on to a German soldier. 26 Sex appeal in general was considered “Jewish cosmopolitanism.” 27 Even the private life of Germans fell under the umbrella of state control. If a superior Aryan race was to be created, submission to moral codes was required. As the Nazis took control of the Weimar Republic, the economy was quickly turned around and women found a greater role within the Nazi state. The Four Year Plan to make Germany ready for war created jobs for the many unemployed men in Germany; the economy began to improve as men went to work in munitions factories, despite restrictions from the Versailles, to fuel the German war machine. Another provision of Hitler’s Four Year Plan was mandatory military service. Men were thus taken out of the workforce, and women were left to fill the void. 28 Aryan women were now encouraged to attend universities upon high school graduation. An appeal was made to women to

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Housden , 11. Stibbe, Matthew. “Women and the Nazi State,” History Today. (1993 EBSCO HOST. Loyola University. 15 March 2004), 2. 22 Owings, Alison. Frauen: German Women Recall the Third Reich. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. 1993), 21. 23 Housden , 11. 24 Housden , 6. 25 Stibbe, 2. 26 Housden , 19. 27 Stibbe,2 28 Pauwles, 28. 21

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Victoria McCardell promote their academic and professional goals. 29 Trained specialists such as doctors and lawyers were needed to supplement the number of men in service. 30 Senior female medical students were recruited to work with the Hitler Youth program to teach health care. 31 Female teachers were also recruited to serve as models of community and selfsacrifice. 32 The Working Community of National Socialist Women Students was founded in August of 1930. The organization was able to recruit women and spread the Nazi ideals to women experiencing the college life for the first time. 33 Indoctrinating women with Nazi ideals at the college level paled in comparison to the youth programs in the Nazi state. A League of German Maidens was established in 1930 as part of the National Youth Movement in the hopes of teaching girls at a young age the privilege of serving the Third Reich. Girls from 14 to 18 years old of Aryan descent were recruited to join the League. Leaders hoped to instill Nazi ideals and attitudes while personalities were still malleable. 34 The stock market crash hit middle class families especially hard. Middle class girls often joined the League as a means of escaping the harsh realities of difficult family life. Other girls joined as a form of rebellion against the authority of their parents. Little did the girls know, they were merely shifting authority rather than escaping it. No matter the reasons for joining, the League of German Maidens gave German girls experiences they would never received outside the group. A former member of the League states that “within the organization, ‘girls did what hitherto only boys were allowed to do.” 35 The new freedoms and experiences girls found were not without a price. Girls had to accept Nazi values without question. Girls were told they would learn leadership, but in actuality, they learned obedience to the state. Girls had to be “physically fit, healthy, clean and dressed in an orderly manner.” Girls were allowed to participate in sports to keep healthy; however the good of the team was always emphasized over individual achievements. Any strays from regimented, structured sports and dance were crushed for being outside the prescribe order. Women were expected to be the guardians of German culture and heritage, thus girls were taught traditional German songs, folk tales, dances and cooking. 36 In an eight to ten day summer camp girls were taught the political history of Germany through the lens of Nazi ideals. They were taught that the Treaty of Versailles was an oppressive agreement forced on an undefeated German nation. Girls were taught a sense of homeland pride and unity with a compulsory one year term of work in the countryside. 37 Girls of the League of German Maidens were also met with similar responsibilities and restrictions in accordance to with future roles as mothers. Girls were trained in the art of running an efficient, patriotic German household. 38 If girls were to 29

Pauwles, 29. Pauwles, 96. Pauwles, 75. 32 Owings, 19. 33 Pauwles, 55. 34 Pine, Lisa. “Girls in Uniform,” History Today. (1999 EBSCO HOST. Loyola University. 15 March 2004), 1. 35 Pine, 2. 36 Pine, 2. 37 Pine, 4. 38 Pine, 4. 30 31

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Victoria McCardell grow up into respectable German mothers, they must be taught to accept regulations of their private lives as well. Girls were first discouraged from associating with people of inferior races. Lust and sexual desire became shameful. Sex was reduced to a biological function of reproduction in support of the German state. As focused on children as the Nazis were, Aryan girls were taught that giving birth to non Aryan children was inexcusable and a slap in the face to their government. 39 Despite all warnings against promiscuity, it was not uncommon for League girls to become pregnant by German soldiers. Nicknames given to the League, using its German name, like “Requisite for German Males” suggest that fornication between Aryan youth occurred with the knowledge of Nazi leaders. 40 Children of Aryan blood born out of wedlock were said to be “donated to the Fuhrer” and adopted by Aryan families because an Aryan child was too valuable to be disposed of no matter the circumstances of conception. 41 Adult women served the Third Reich in many different capacities, most commonly as wives and mothers. Several wives of high-ranking Nazi leaders held extra responsibility within the regime. Magda Goebbels, First Lady of the Third Reich, was the wife of the Propaganda Minister of Berlin. 42 She used her status to set fashion trends. She shifted women’s styles from a more masculine look to truly feminine dress. 43 She spent her last days of the war in a bunker with Hitler, her husband and her six children. She poisoned all six children before she and her husband committed suicide themselves. Magda confided in her sister-in-law that she had to kill her children because “they are too good, too lovely for the world which lies ahead.” 44 Another influential wife of the Third Reich was Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, “the Perfect Nazi Woman” 45 . She bore eleven Aryan children and was the leader of the Nazi Women’s Group which led six to eight million Nazi women in support of the Reich. 46 Other wives were less active in the Nazi party, but they were no less supportive. Vera Wohlauf married Captain Julius Wohlauf in 1942, and she spent her honeymoon witnessing daylong massacres of Jews in Miedzyrec. 47 Isle Koch, “Bitch of Buchenwald,” was married to the camp commander of Buchenwald. In the Nuremburg trials, established to try people for the war crimes of World War II, Koch was sentenced to life in the for her part in support of the Nazi regime, but she committed suicide in 1967 because she felt “death is the only deliverance.” 48 Women did take more active roles than just wives to officers. Women are not seen in military roles in the Third Reich, but their work was equally as violent as men’s in creating and sustaining war. The idea that “Male monopolization of warfare is evidence that war is a product of biology is a politically useful myth that has allowed men

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Pine, 3. Pine, 4. Stibbe, 4. 42 Duncan, George. “Women of the Third Reich,” http://members.iinet.net.au/~gduncan/women.html, (accessed 12 February 2004), 8. 43 Stibbe, 2. 44 Duncan, 8. 45 Duncan, 13. 46 Stibbe, 3. 47 Duncan, 5. 48 Duncan, 6. 40 41

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Victoria McCardell monopoly over the tools of war,” 49 but some Nazi women succeeded in accruing some of this power for themselves. Irma Grese served as a concentration camp guard at Ravensbruck, Belsen and Auschwitz. In 1945, at the age of twenty-four, she was captured, tried and executed by the British at the Belsen trials. 50 Hermine Braunsteiner also served as a camp guard. She was a supervisor at Ravensbruck and later at the extermination camp at Maidanek in Poland. After serving three years for infanticide, she married an American man and moved to New York. She was granted United States citizenship in 1963. However, she was brought up on charges again, and in 1973 she became the first US citizen to be extradited for war crimes. 51 Ilse Hirsch served the Third Reich as an assassin. She organized and led a mission into Monschau, though she did not actually carry out the assassination. Hirsch was tried but not secentenced for her crimes, and she lived out the rest of her life in her homeland. 52 After the end of World War II, women from differing walks of the Nazi regime were arrested. Female members of the Hitler Youth and wives of prominent Nazi leaders who were sentenced or executed at the Nuremburg trials were all arrested and sent to Goggingen camp. The camp that had previously served the Third Reich as a labor camp, now housed some of the most affluent women of the Nazi party. 53 These women were taken without notice and forced to leave behind their children. 54 Their arrival at the camp for interrogation made for an eerie reunion of the Nazi elite. 55 All status was stripped as women listened to the announcements for the death notices of their husbands. 56 The Third Reich was now only a memory, but it remains a haunting reminder of the results of hatred and neutrality. In the days of the Nazi regime, complacency was just as lethal as active participation. Wives and mother fueled the home fires and encourage other German women to do the same. The wives of officers served as witnesses to the horrible crimes against humanity carried out by the Nazi regime. These women may not have sentenced the innocent to death, but their silence was a tacit consent. Even more unsettling are the women in active participation. They willfully joined the Third Reich in persecution and hate. The roles of mother, nurturer to the new generation, stand in sharp contrast to alternate roles as guard and assassins for the Nazi party. The ideals of Hitler had to have been all enveloping to have women so willing to support the cause as to offer it her young and kill to protect it. The aggression shown by women in the Third Reich seems to invoke an even more unsettling feeling than does the crimes of war committed by men. The reason for such a double standard is unequal standards of behavior. “The notions of the nonaggressive woman is a myth perpetuated by sociohistorically rooted cultural attitudes and values.” 57 Men are more likely to display aggression more publicly and physically 49

Kowalski, Robin M and Jacquelyn W. White. “Deconstructing the Myth of the Nonaggressive Woman,” Psychology of Women Quarterly, 18 (1994), 492. 50 Duncan, 6. 51 Duncan, 5. 52 Duncan, 9. 53 Lebert, Stephan and Norbert. My Father’s Keeper. (Boston: Little, Brown and Company. 2000), 57. 54 Lebert, 52. 55 Lebert, 55. 56 Lebert, 58. 57 Kowalski, 492.

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Victoria McCardell than women, 58 but women are not without aggressive behaviors or tendencies. It is true, that within the Nazi state women were not as aggressive or violent as men; however women were not without such displays. Women were guards who carried out death sentences, and wives who watched as those unjust acts were committed. Perpetration and acceptance of violence are tantamount in the Nazi regime. Another reason for women’s undue characterization as nonaggressive is that “aggressive women are labeled more deviant and pathological than are comparably aggressive men.” Deviance is a behavior that strays from cultural and societal norms thus reflecting the engrained belief that an aggressive woman must be mentally ill because otherwise she could never display such behavior. 59 Women of the Third Reich committed aggressive and violent acts in support of their cause, and the success of the Nazi party is in part to their behavior. The Nazi party never intended to allow women to have active participation within the party. Had the Four Year Plan not forced women into the universities and work forces, women may have had no active roles, but in time the work of women became a driving force in the Third Reich. Women were the guardians of all that was pure and true in the German nation. Everything Aryan, right down to a woman’s body, was preserved as tribute to the great state that was to come. Women, young and old, were devastated by the great losses of World War I, and in an attempt to avoid future causalities, they supported and participated in an even more horrific political regimes. Although, most work of women for the Third Reich was in a secondary supportive role, such a distinction does not free women from the guilt and blame for the Nazi regime.

58 59

Kowalski, 497. Kowalski, 493.

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