BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

component of imperialism to which comparative craniologies and evangelical missions lent an
air of scientific and moral validity. The “romantic racism” that defined an intra-European
hierarchy based on national character merely represented the upper tier of a broader prejudice
against “primitive” non-Europeans who lacked any claim to a “civilized” past and thus became
the hapless victims of imperial “philanthropy.” 62 Placement of British Anglo-Saxons at the top
of this racial hierarchy, whether by virtue of “pure” Aryan lineage or a wholesome European
racial synthesis, provided an organic rationale for imperial hegemony to which the United States,
not Germany, could logically be seen as Britain’s Anglo-Saxon heir apparent.
While stereotypes served as building blocks for a hierarchical world view, which
temporarily reduced anxiety and increased “self-esteem” through the denigration of other
nationalities, they also embodied categorical “truths” which ultimately supported a pseudo-
biological, “Darwinian” interpretation of world history. 63 Well before the publication of
Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859, theories about social evolution, lacking any scientific basis,
maintained contemporary conservative racist and sexist ideologies. 64 Blunt statements about the
62 Christine Bolt, “Race and the Victorians,” in Eldridge, British Imperialism in the
Nineteenth Century, 127-30. Stein, From Metaphor to Meaning, 131, also notes the tendency
among early ethnologists to distinguish between “primitive” and “modern” races. In the case of
Macnamara, Origin of the English People, 192-97, the division between the dolichocephalic or
“long-headed” races, including the Iberian and the Teutonic or Aryan (Nordic) subtypes, and the
brachycephalic or “broad-skulled” Mongolian peoples defined a human family tree of
generalized anatomical and national character distinctions.
63 Bolt, “Race and the Victorians,” 130-31. See Adorno, Authoritarian Personality, 807,
and Forbes, Nationalism, Ethnocentrism and Personality, 32, on the externalization of values
projected in stereotypes which offers at best only a temporary escape from self-examination and
anxiety.
64 Peter Dickens, Social Darwinism: Linking Evolutionary Thought to Social Theory
(Buckingham, UK; Philadelphia: Open University Press, 2000), 7-8, 15, 19, 21, refers mainly to
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