The Races of Europe: Anthropological Race Classification of Europeans 1839-1939

532 Pages·2007·14.57 MB·English

Department of History and Civilization
The Races of Europe:
Anthropological Race
Classifi cation of Europeans
1839-1939
Richard McMahon
Thesis submitted for assessment with a view to obtaining
the degree of Doctor in History and Civilisation
from the European University Institute
Florence, June 2007
EUROPEAN UNIVERSITY INSTITUTE
Department of History and Civilization

THE RACES OF EUROPE:
ANTHROPOLOGICAL RACE
CLASSIFICATION OF EUROPEANS
1839-1939

Richard McMahon

Thesis submitted for assessment with a view to obtaining the degree of
Doctor of History and Civilization of the European University Institute

Jury Members:

Professor Peter Becker, EUI (Supervisor)

Professor Bo Stårth, EUI

Professor Claudio Pogliano, Università di Pisa

Professor Hans Bödeker (Max-Planck-Institut für Geschichte)

© 2007, Richard McMahon
No part of this thesis may be copied, reproduced or transmitted without prior
permission of the author
Anthropological Race Classification of Europeans 1839-1939
Richard McMahon
2006
European University Institute doctoral thesis
under the supervision of Professor Peter Becker
iii
Contents
Contents.............................................................................................................................................iv
Acknowledgements.............................................................................................................................v
Introduction........................................................................................................................................1
Race classifiers and anthropologists...............................................................................................13
Concepts, methods and sources......................................................................................................16
Geographical structure of the race classification community........................................................21
History of the Classification community........................................................................................32
An expanding cosmopolitan community........................................................................................62
Breakup of the positivist discipline complex.................................................................................70
Conclusion......................................................................................................................................96
How Classification Worked.............................................................................................................99
The craniological tradition...........................................................................................................108
The ethnic tradition......................................................................................................................120
The positivists expel ethnicity......................................................................................................137
Raciology and völkisch race science............................................................................................150
The scientific rejection of race.....................................................................................................178
Conclusion....................................................................................................................................184
European Race Classifications: Anthropology, Ethnicity and Politics.....................................187
The first superior race: blond Germanic Aryans..........................................................................190
The second superior race: dark brachycephalic Celts..................................................................201
Enemies of the Teutonic blond.....................................................................................................216
Anthropology embittered: the Franco-Prussian War....................................................................236
The Nordic strikes back................................................................................................................244
Expansion and diversity: The Mediterranean and Deniker s races..............................................271
Conclusion....................................................................................................................................279
The Celts: Science and Nationalism in Nineteenth Century Ireland.........................................285
Romanticism and the Celts...........................................................................................................288
Irish Celticism..............................................................................................................................299
The French and Irish dilemma......................................................................................................317
The French fight back...................................................................................................................321
Why the Irish refused the French solution...................................................................................328
Conclusion....................................................................................................................................350
Poland: The rise of an anthropological power.............................................................................353
The Slavs......................................................................................................................................364
Polish nationalist narratives: the Easteuropean............................................................................392
Archaeology the Urnfeld-Lusatian battle.....................................................................................399
Conclusion....................................................................................................................................404
Between International Science and Nationalism: Interwar Romanian race science...............409
Romanian anthropology...............................................................................................................409
Coping with German raciology....................................................................................................421
Nationalist serology......................................................................................................................439
Conclusion....................................................................................................................................456
Conclusion.......................................................................................................................................459
Illustrations.....................................................................................................................................469
Bibliography...................................................................................................................................494
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Acknowledgements
This thesis would have been impossible without the always relevant and incisive advice of my
supervisor, Professor Peter Becker. When he initially suggested this topic, which was very new to
me, I was unsure whether it would be to my taste, but I have found it endlessly facinating and
rewarding. Several other academics also generously offered me useful advice or agreed to read
sections of my work. They include Professor Bo Stråth of the IUE, Professor Claudio Pogliano of
the University of Pisa and the Museum of the History of Science in Florence, Professor Maria
Bucur-Deckard of the University of Indiana, Professor Lucian Boia and Professor Gheorghi
Gean of the University of Bucharest, Dr. Claire O Halloran, Dr. Barra Ó Dhonnabháin and Dr.
Caitríona Ó Dochartaigh of University College Cork, Dr. Hillary Tovey of Trinity College Dublin,
Dr. Robin Boast of the Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology
University, Professor Wolfgang Schmale and Professor Michael Mitterauer of the University of
Vienna and Dr. Joanna Tokarska-Bakir of the University of Warsaw.
I carried out research in the universities libraries of the IUE and the Università degli Studi in
Florence, the Central European University in Budapest, University College Cork, Trinity College
Dublin, the Universities of Bucharest and Warsaw and several libraries of the University of Vienna,
and also at the Italian (Florence), Austrian (Vienna) and Romanian (Bucharest) national libraries
and the libraries of the Museum of the History of Science in Florence and the Acadamia Na ionala
in Bucharest. At the universities of Florence, Bucharest and Warsaw, I made use of the libraries of
the anthropological or archaeological institutes as well as the central collections, and at the Austrian
national library, I was given very generous access to the schoolbooks collection. I wish to thank the
staff of all these libraries and particularly Ruth Nirere-Gbikpi and the other inter-library loan staff at
the IUE and the team at the library of the anthropology institute of the Università degli Studi di
Firenze, for all their patience and friendly helpfulness.
The IUE staff were a great help during these studies, especially in guiding my visiting Romanian
relatives through the laberynthine bureaucracy of the Italian state, whose stability they apparently
threatened. I am also especially grateful for the hospitality of Dr. Margareth Lanzinger of the
University of Vienna and Dr. Maike Sach of the Deutsche Historische Institut in Warsaw, and for
the fruitful discussions and great support and suggestions provided by numerous fellow doctoral
students, friends and family. I owe particular debts of gratitude to my brother Mark, who gave me
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invaluable technical aid with the quantative analysis section of my research, and my sister Naoimh,
who started her doctorate at the same time as me but whom I have pipped at the post.
This thesis is dedicated to my son Iván Grammaticus, who came along after I had started it and
competed with it for my attention.
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Introduction
World history is a part of the history of organic development
Opening quotation from the Darwinist Ernst Haeckel in Politische Anthropologie, by the Nordic supremacist
Ludwig Woltmann (Woltmann 1903: 1).
This is a history of the serious scientific attempt, most intently in the period 1830s-1945, to define
the biological races making up Europe s population. The first three chapters examine the scientific
community engaged in this task, their methods and the classifications they produced. The last three
chapters are case studies of the relationship between political identities and race classifications in
Ireland, Poland and Romania. Enlightenment anatomists established physical anthropology as the
dominant, though not unchallenged authority on race (MacMaster 2001: 17). Classification piped
observations of the human form, and especially skull proportions, through theories of race
definition, formation, migration, inheritance, interaction and mixture. While each ethnic group was
at first expected to have a typical physical type , around which individuals varied, anthropologists
increasingly used statistical mass studies to decipher the originally pure elements of modern mixed
populations. Data on cultural phenomena usually supplemented physical observation, as races were
widely seen as bodies of both biological and cultural inheritance. The precise relationship between
these was one of the most controversial issues in race anthropology, but the connection was vital for
linking scientific race to politics.
Historians differ, sometimes rancorously, when interpreting crucial junctures in the history of
scientific racism. Scientists writing history often stress scientific factors like new evidence,
methodologies and theoretical advances, while historians of science and especially of racism
criticise these [p]alace histories , and claim scientific principles were to a large degree subordinate
to the socio-political context (Stocking 1992: 343 & 349-51; 1988: 5; Malik 1996: 82-89 & 121;
Blanckaert 1988: 20 & 49-50; Proctor 1988: 175; Bernasconi & Lott 2000: vii). The anthropologist
Andrzej Wiercinski blamed Mendelian genetics for extreme racist interwar German raciology,
while Benoit Massin associates it firmly with the general rightward drift of German society and
academia (Wiercinski 1962: 11-12; Massin 1996: 101-2). From this viewpoint, science was taken
very seriously due to belief in progress , but was to a large extent simply the legitimator of prior
conclusions , as scientific racism distorted and selectively adopted techniques, theories and
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evidence to reflect or express the tensions or problems of European industrialisation, urbanisation
and colonialism (Malik 1996: 121; MacMaster 2001: 5-7; Nash 1962; Gould 1981: 85; Ballantyne
2002: 4). I largely agree, especially as the political useful core of race classification models and
methods survived successive paradigm shifts in anthropology, while crises of confidence in political
race models profoundly damaged race anthropology. This is the key conclusion of my second
chapter. Almost all classifiers were nationalists and many were intensely political. Leading
nineteenth-century French, German and Polish anthropologists became parliamentarians,
government ministers and revolutionary leaders and the Polish prehistorian Koz owski even served
as Prime Minister (Lech 1997/98: 42; Massin 1996: 89; Harvey 1984: 400 & 402; Hammond 1980:
121 & 126; Godycki 1956: 12-13; Sto yhwo 1957: 6-7, 12 & 16). One British anthropologist
meanwhile declared that legislation must respect racial distinctions and characteristics, or it will be
a disastrous and mischievous failure (Avery 1869: ccxxiv). However, like Claude Blanckaert and
other historians of science, I see classification as a complex product of politics and science, shaped
by raw evidence, international scientific norms, nationalist narratives, domestic national politics and
interdisciplinary rivalries*. Race anthropology became popular in the mid nineteenth century ,
riding a wave of confidence in natural science and imparting its legitimacy to political narratives of
ethnic groups and classes as biological bodies of descent (Barkan 1992: 4). When rulers, middle
class and all social sciences but economics rediscovered the importance of irrational motivations
after the 1870s, the biologically inclined saw race as the essential nature of a person or a people,
determining their behaviour and tying them to the most ancient possible tradition (Hobsbawm 2005:
268-69). It was therefore expected to determine political allegiances. As chapter II argues, the term
race was systematically used throughout Europe for all kinds of physically, linguistically,
culturally or even politically distinct groups , with the understanding that they were all bodies of
descent. A person s ethnicity or nationality was therefore, in this usage, their race. Outside of
identity politics, European race classification had little practical use. The argument that physical
and psychological race features were inherited together was often used to ascribe superior
biological traits to the classifier s own race, and research concentrated on histories of ethno-racial
groups, giving modern nations and social classes deep prehistoric roots.
Politicised anthropology could win officially-backing for institutional development, which in turn
could bring the international prestige and influence to make one s preferred theories the

* The Actor-Network theory in the sociology of science strongly stresses this diversity of relevant factors (or even
actors) in scientific processes and outcomes. An ANT study of the development of an electric car for example
considered the participating electricity and car companies, consumers, social movements and ministries , visions of
post-industrial society , lead accumulators, fuel cells and electrolytes as all equally important to the project (Callon
1986: 22-23).
In Italian, the word even broadened to the general meaning of type or sort .
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international norm. However it sinned against the apolitical universalism of international science.
Squaring the circle of conflicting nationalist and self-consciously scientific universalist identities
was a major challenge for classifiers. Producing patriotic findings through scientific fraud was
probably too risky and shameful for the majority who took their identity as objective scientists
seriously. Among the innumerable critics of race science, I found just one accusation of outright
cheating. Wijworra says the German Nordic supremacist Ludwig Wilser, assisting Ammon s
anthropometric survey, wrote in higher values for stature and head-length to confirm the Germanic
stereotype (Wijworra 1996: 170). The flexibility of social science in any case made such deception
unnecessary. Typically, scientists seldom expressed their patriotic intentions and stressed their
objectivity, but let ideology and politics influence their interpretations and choice of research
problems (R czkowski 1996: 189-90). Race classifiers were genuinely constrained by empirical
evidence, but circumvented it with elaborate arguments that laundered their politically and
socially relevant conclusions. A Romanian archaeologist argued for example that while the
intensely Romanised but ethnically mixed Pannonians fled to Italy after Rome fell, the ancestors of
Romanians held their ground by rallying around their powerful indigenous nation (Pârvan 1937:
169). Selective blindness also helped ensure nationalist results. Chapman says Scottish nationalist
historiographers are locked into a historical discourse within which only certain kinds of event
happen, but genuinely cannot see contradictory evidence (Chapman 1992: 104). Gould agrees
that leading nineteenth century craniologists (skull measurers) like Paul Broca manipulated their
empirical data unconsciously (Gould 1981: 85).
The bio-cultural-historical amalgam of race required anatomical physical anthropology to
collaborate with emerging social sciences like linguistics, archaeology and sociology, in tight
disciplinary coalitions centred around the study of race, which I examine in chapter I.
Anthropological disciplinary complexes succeeded ethnological ones in the nineteenth century, but
split into several competing alliance systems in the twentieth. The inherent instability behind this
turbulent history had many causes. Allied disciplines produced contradictory sets of evidence and
competed for state support. Sciences wanted to concentrate on issues raised by their own research
while simultaneously harnessing other disciplines to this agenda, and so competed to press their
own specialist evidence as the ideal racial taxonomic criterion. The natural scientific positivism of
biology, though prestigious, proved particularly problematic to apply to the study of cultural
phenomena like languages and political groups. As a result, cultural and biological determinism
edged apart by fits and starts, though it was the mid-twentieth century before race narrowed down
to a purely physical meaning. The theoretical positions of each discipline reflected its scientific
methodologies and practices, but very often also its political orientation, as political factions fought
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