While some of those who lived in the late 1800s and early 1900s noticed the rise in social tensions, most people celebrated the period’s stability and steady progress and were proud of the achievements of their respective nations. That pride led historians to search for national roots and to analyze the development of national identities. As their objects of study they selected the institutions of their
Nations. Understood as the durable relationships between members of a society, these institutions, whether they were constitutions, laws, economic organizations, or voluntary associations, appealed to the temper of the tum-of-the-century West since they reconciled change and continuity in a manner that did not threaten stability. As long as scholars did not notice that these institutions were most often interpreted as expressions of a Volksgeist (the spirit of a nation), conceived of in an idealist manner, they could even see these studies as compatible with the most influential contemporary model of genetic development, Darwin’s evolutionary concept, and thus align institutional history with “scientific” history. A stronger link was that between these new institutional histories and much earlier institutional studies by scholars of the 1500s and 1600s. The concern of these scholars with national identity returned in nineteenth-century France, England, and Germany in the form of the controversy between Romanists and Germanists.
The European versions. In the German area feudalism and the medieval empire was at issue. The numerous and influential German medievalists, with Georg Waitz as their leader, produced a massive body of works on these topics which demonstrated among other things that feudalism, thought to have been a common and crucial shaper of medieval societies, was a primarily Frankish and hence German institution. However, Fustel de Coulanges, as painstaking a scholar as any German, found that the Frankish invasion had little impact on Romanized Gaul and her institutions and culture. Feudalism developed from the Roman clientele system. Fustel knew that such findings would please his French compatriots, dispirited by the defeat in 1870-71, but neither he nor his German counterparts were motivated by mere partisanship.
The nineteenth-century debate over the role of the medieval German empire —the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation as it came to be called--— involved some historians of the Prussian school, most prominently Heinrich von Sybel, and a few Austrian scholars, notably Julius Ficker. The empire had long been a source of pride for German-speaking people because through it German history had been linked to the universal Christian faith and the idea of a universal empire. But in the decade of nationalist struggles prior to the unification in 1871, those historians who sided with the Prussian Hohenzollem found fault with the medieval empire. It drew Germans into Italian politics, costly controversies with the papacy, and futile quests for universal rule. What could be more detrimental to a national sense of dignity, they argued, than the excommunicated emperor, Henry IV, standing in 1077 as a penitent sinner for days outside of a castle at Canossa in order to obtain absolution from the pope? “Going to Canossa” acquired a sinister ring unless one saw in the affair—as nationalists eventually did—a masterful piece of political deception. According to von Sybel, the preoccupation with the empire prevented for too long the development of a genuine national German state. Ficker disagreed, as an Austrian with no Hohenzollem sympathies, as a Catholic with an empathy for universality, and as a scholar who rejected judgments on medieval institutions made on the basis of present controversies, Waitz regretted the whole debate and scolded both camps: “But I am firm in my opinion that these questions have nothing to do with any estimation of the old empire, and that one must strive always and everywhere that historiography should not be misled by the temper and wishes of the present.”®
English history had for a long time been something akin to institutional history what with the concepts of an ancient constitution and the implications of the Whig interpretation of English history. Institutions had also been at the center of the long-standing quest for a clarification of the identity of the English nation. In the 1800s the two themes once more became tightly interwoven in new institutional histories.
Once more the Anglo-Saxons had more champions than the Celts among scholars; they reached from Archbishop Parker in the Reformation period to Sharon Turner and John Mitchell Kemble in the 1800s. Kemble was one of those amateurs who in fact were learned men. A student of Jakob Grimm, he edited Beowulf, lectured on Anglo-Saxon language and literature, compiled the Codex diplomaticus aevi Saxonici, and summarized his knowledge in The Saxons in England (1849). Kemble used a wide range of sources so as to understand fully all facets of Anglo-Saxon life. He emerged with the conviction that the very roots of English political life were the customs of the early Anglo-Saxon peasant society with its assemblies of free people—an organically growing society in which free people could exist. Such Germanist preferences were contradicted by Sir Francis Palgrave, a lawyer and researcher of the Norman p>eriod in English life. Setting out to correct Thierry’s work, he ended up as a proponent of a Romanist interpretation of English institutions; for him, central royal power characterized English history since early British times.
Beginning in the 1860s, two celebrated Oxford historians buttressed the Germanist thesis: William Stubbs, a brilliant scholar in the Rankean tradition who produced the best editions in the Rolls Series of documents and texts as well as a monumental Constitutional History, and Edward Augustus Freeman, who wrote a History of the Norman Conquest of England. The two men differed in many ways but both of them wrote works well within the long-established range of political and constitutional history, although they rejected the usual “highlights in the development of liberty” approach. Instead, they suggested in the German vein that English history was the realization of the English national spirit: a gradual unfolding from its core, which was the Anglo-Saxon institutions with their fortuitous blending of free individuals and the collective. Hence the Norman invasion was for Freeman only a superficial interruption of a powerful process. The cradle of English freedom and greatness remained the Germanic village. But both historians did not in Ranke’s manner perceive a universal historical dimension to English history, not even to the extent of permitting a comparative institutional history.
Although neither Stubbs nor Freeman founded a “school”—Stubbs left the university to become bishop of Oxford and Freeman simply hated teaching—the Germanist thesis survived through the efforts of Paul Vinogradoff and, especially, John R. Green’s popular Short History of the English People. Sir Frederic Seebohm, a banker-historian, who revived the Romanist interpretation in his The English Village Community (1883), did much less harm to the Germanist thesis than did the anti-German passions aroused by World War I. Those also failed who wished to dislodge the Whig interpretation and Germanist thesis and to see English history in different contexts. James Anthony Froude suggested, as Carlyle had, that change was discontinuous and did not occur simply within the confines of constitutional arrangements. Sir John Seeley’s concern, the empire, could be more easily linked to contemporary political reality. Yet English political life still kept on favoring, above all, the Whig interpretation with its Germanist preferences.
The Germanist thesis also colored the debate over English law, in which Sir Henry Maine battled against those who upheld a timeless natural law and also against those who saw the origin of law in the command of the sovereign. Against them, Maine influenced by Savigny, advanced the historical interpretation that saw all law develop in the context of the whole society. In his works on ancient law, the comparative analysis of village communities in Europe and India, and the history of institutions, Maine demonstrated the relationship between legal and societal changes. The Germanist thesis, never directly espoused, seeped in wherever an opening occurred. A moderate version of the thesis received a more pronounced recognition in Frederick D. Maitland and F. Pollock’s History of English Law of 1272 (1895). But here, too, the main concern was not the Germanist thesis but the historical nature of English law; indeed the work proved to be the high point of the historical interpretation of law in England.
The American versions. American historians, like their European counterparts, came upon institutional history through national pride and the desire to establish their nation’s identity. George Bancroft and other “literary” historians spoke of the nation’s birth, rise, and mission much as if the nation were a whole; a people of one mind and one purpose enjoying a unity that was natural to some, mystical to others. That view accorded well with one aspect of nineteenth-century American life: the people went about building a new nation with vigor, enthusiasm, and national pride despite constant political conflict. The sense of unity even survived the Civil War, that bloodiest of all internal conflicts. Indeed, in the end, that war strengthened national unity by abolishing the divisive institution of slavery.
But an erosion of the quasi-natural sense of unity and wholeness began nevertheless. Like many European countries, the United States became increasingly urbanized with a population that became less and less homogeneous in ethnic composition through large-scale immigration. The rapid economic development brought about an economic and social complexity visible in sharp conflicts of interest-groups—farmers, railroad owners, bankers, merchants, industrial entrepreneurs, and laborers. How long could the concept of the nation as a seamless whole survive before being replaced by a new interpretation of the nation as a complex network of distinct units and their sometimes troubled relationships?
Yet about 1900 the assertion of nationhood still thrived, particularly when the American republic asserted its power in Latin America, Hawaii, and the Spanish Empire. Naval and not social history fascinated those who carried out or applauded the new expansionism. They listened to Alfred Thayer Mahan when he spoke of the importance of seapower. The strength of America’s navy would determine whether the Atlantic and Pacific oceans would be barriers to or avenues for America’s commerce and the extension of her influence. From The Influence of Sea Power upon History Americans learned that between 1660 and 1815 the British Empire had been built on naval superiority. Mahan had always thought that historians should not merely accumulate facts but give guidance to “way-faring man.” Now he taught his fellow citizens the lesson he had learned from history, that of the interdependence of trade, great-power status, and naval supremacy.
The concept of the nation as a historical person was also kept alive by historians with an enthusiasm for the old Manifest Destiny, although in some of their works the term “nation” assumed a more down-to-earth connotation. Theodore Roosevelt’s The Winning of the West (1905) presented an exuberant account of the great westward movement of the nation. And who accomplished it?
The Americans began their work of western conquest as separate and individual people, at the moment when they sprang into national life. It has been their great work ever since. All other questions save those of the preservation of the Union itself and the emancipation of the blacks have been of subordinate importance when compared with the great questions of how. . . they [the people] were to subjugate that part of their continent lying between the eastern mountains and the Pacific.5*
But it was neither the nation as a mysterious whole nor Parkman’s fascinating heroes who accomplished the mastery of the continent but the common people, first the “Indian fighters, treaty-makers, and wilderness-wanderers” and then “the settlers.” Such singling out of the common people would soon become the mark of American history. Before that happened, however, the “national” historians took two other turns in defining the American past.
The new university-bred historians of the 1880s and 1890s, with their “scientific” aspirations, were bent on subjecting national history to a more rigorous analysis. They distrusted contemporary historiography with its declamatory character and its assertion of progress without theoretical proofs. The growth of the nation must be traced as it had occurred, step-by-step, through the examination of documents according to the new canon. In the 1880s American historians could find no better guide for their endeavor than the precepts of the European institutionalists in history and political science. Institutional history satisfied the American sense of nationhood and, to some degree, even the contemporary enthusiasm for history as a science, particularly for history as an example of Darwin’s evolutionism. Change, even the bitter conflicts in contemporary American society, could be acknowledged without hesitation because America’s supposedly inevitable “upward bound” direction made all change beneficial while the stable American institutions guaranteed continuity.
When they looked for the origins of American institutions, many of the American institutionalists accepted the findings of Sir Henry Maine and Edward A. Freeman concerning the Germanic ancestry of liberty and democracy. They stipulated that the English settlers had transferred the institutions of liberty to the new world.
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 by Pilgrims and Puritans.
From the 1880s on, students heard this Germanist thesis propounded by their professors, among them Herbert Baxter Adams, Henry Adams (whose title was Professor of Institutional History), John W. Burgess, and Albert Bushnell Hart. Through the work of such men all of American history, not just the colonial period, became firmly anchored in the many centuries of Anglo-Saxon history.
The more seriously the call for a “scientific” history was taken and the more critical historical analysis became, the less well the simple Germanist thesis worked as an explanation. Institutions similar in name and appearance to English counterparts turned out to serve different purposes in American society. In addition, such a transfer theory of institutions left dissatisfied those who stressed the uniqueness of American society over the continuity of English tradition in American history. In the late 1800s and early 1900s that objection took a radical turn with Frederick Turner and the New Historians. It was at about the same time that institutionalists abandoned the Germanist thesis in favor of the views of the so-called imperial school.
American society and its institutions, imperial historians argued, were not bom in the Teutonic forests but were shaped within the matrix of the British Empire. Historians wishing to understand the early American past need not travel back to the Germanic village but could rely on comparative studies between two sets of institutions much closer together in time: those of the British Empire and those of the British colonies in the New World. Such studies demonstrated how the mother country and her colonies had gradually drifted apart. That fact was crucial for understanding the separation during the American Revolution. From 1887 on Herbert L. Osgood suggested to fellow historians the new interpretation which demonstrated the gradual separation of the American colonies from their English mother country despite the substantial remaining similarities between the institutions of the two societies. His student, George Louis Beer, described the shaping influence of British economic policies on early American history. In Beer’s perspective the collision of colonial economic interests and imperial mercantilist interests was a more important triggering mechanism for the American Revolution than all the wishes to be freed of English tyranny.
Osgood’s contemporary, Charles McLean Andrews, produced the most mature statement of the imperial school on American colonial history and was its leader for a generation. His central theme was the gradual but dramatic divergence of American society from British society—the one becoming individualistic, democratic, and flexible; the other remaining aristocratic and relatively static. That basic structural shift turned frictions into incidents and, finally, incidents into a successful revolution. His first major statement in 1912, The Colonial Period, still had the effect of novelty, while the Colonial Background of the American Revolution, coming in the 1920s, was already located in the period of the school’s declining influence. His third work on the colonial period appeared in the 1930s, when many historians were hostile to the imperial school and its emphasis on heritage, continuous development, and measured change. By the 1930s the New or Progressive Historians had been at work for two decades accenting abrupt change, even stressing conflict over continuity. In their portrayal, the American Revolution appeared not as the end point of a gradual development but as a radical break. Other historians, enamored of recent American history, disliked the built-in limitations of the imperial view. The further away from the colonial period an era of American history was located the less the imperial historians could contribute to its explanation.
Institutional history even made its mark on Civil War historiography, in which discontinuity and disruption seemed predestined to dominate. Institutionalists searched for and found much continuity. They emphasized that the Union had been preserved, many institutions had remained stable, and all radical experimentation had failed. Radicalism of the Northern and Southern varieties had foundered on the rock of stable American institutions. Such was the approach to the problem of Reconstruction by William A. Dunning and his school, which included Ulrich B. Phillips. These views were pleasing to Southerners and to a generation tired of controversy. Eager to show continuity and disliking radical changes, the Dunning school was not bothered by the unresolved problem of civil rights for black Americans.
By its very nature, constitutional history proved to be the hardiest remnant of institutional historiography. There, historians such as Andrew C. McLaughlin and, later, Edward S. Corwin traced the gradual shaping of many institutions by the nation’s supreme legal forum and in turn analyzed the layers of “legal sediments” which American life had deposited over the years in the American Constitution.
World History
