In Race, Nation, History, Oded Y. Steinberg examines the way a series
of nineteenth-century scholars in England and Germany first constructed
and then questioned the periodization of history into ancient, medieval,
and modern eras, shaping the way we continue to think about the past and
present of Western civilization at a fundamental level. Steinberg
explores this topic by tracing the deep connections between the idea of
epochal periodization and concepts of race and nation that were
prevalent at the time--especially the role that Germanic or Teutonic
tribes were assumed to play in the unfolding of Western history.
Steinberg shows how English scholars such as Thomas Arnold, Williams
Stubbs, and John Richard Green; and German scholars such as Christian
Karl Josias von Bunsen, Max Müller, and Reinhold Pauli built on the
notion of a shared Teutonic kinship to establish a correlation between
the division of time and the ascent or descent of races or nations. For
example, although they viewed the Germanic tribes' conquest of the Roman
Empire in A.D. 476 as a formative event that symbolized the
transformation from antiquity to the Middle Ages, they did so by
highlighting the injection of a new and dominant ethnoracial character
into the decaying empire. But they also rejected the idea that the fifth
century A.D. was the most decisive era in historical periodization,
advocating instead for a historical continuity that emphasized the
significance of the Germanic tribes' influence on the making of the
nations of modern Europe. Concluding with character studies of E. A.
Freeman, James Bryce, and J. B. Bury, Steinberg demonstrates the ways in
which the innovative schemes devised by this community of Victorian
historians for the division of historical time relied on the cornerstone
of race.
