Race and Language: Ties of 'Blood and Speech', Fictive Identity and Empire in the Writings of Henry Maine and Edward Freeman

Abstract

This essay examines the views of two nineteenth-century intellectuals, the lawyer Sir Henry Sumner Maine (1822-88), and the historian Edward Augustus Freeman (1823-92). Both were writing at the height of Empire, in the age of the 'comparative spirit' and of the new sciences of comparative philology and comparative ethnology. Neither was a professional linguist nor a race theorist, but both responded to the rise of these new sciences by noting their great impact on European politics. New forms of identity had arisen based on a shared language or a reconstructed linguistic affinity. Maine and Freeman shared the recognition that these new identities were not strictly grounded in accepted scientific fact, and that race could not simply be equated with language. Both Maine and Freeman were concerned with the nature of the British Empire, and Freeman in particular saw a potential conflict between the new language-based identities of Europe and the future of the British Empire. For Freeman saw the ties of Empire as a threat to Britain and to its relationship with the United States within a 'Greater Britain' made up of politically independent but ideologically and linguistically kindred states. It is argued that a key to the understanding of twentieth-century identity politics can be found in the partial dislocation - perceived clearly by Freeman and Maine - of these new identities both from historical reality and from the categories of philological and ethnological science. These identities draw on the prestige of these new sciences, but they are fictive identities constructed as myth and requiring acts of social will and leadership ('the hero') to sustain them.