Historians From England

"To seek the ultimate origin or predisposition of the Indian conviction in the profoundly Hindu world view of endless cyclical change, kalpa and mahakalpas succeeding one another in self-sufficient and unwearying round. For Hindus as well as Taoists, the universe itself was a perpetual motion machine."

"European and America must stand ready not only to share with all Asians and Africans those treasures of understanding and use of Nature which modern science and technology brought forth, but also to learn from them many things concerning individual life and society which they are more than competent to teach. If this is not done, the achievements of Europe (and America) will in any case become the common property of mankind, but our civilization will go down in history as distorted and evil, unwilling to practice what it preached, and worthy of the condemnation of ten thousand generations."

"It is good to remember, therefore, that our own pious founders were not the only men, and that Christendom was not the only culture, to set on foot great and noble institutions of learning where successive generations of students assembled to get the benefits of education and research. When the men of Alexander the Great came to Taxila in India in the fourth century BC they found a university the like of which had not then been seen in Greece ... and was still existing when the Chinese pilgrim Fa-Hsien went there about AD 400."

"Indian culture in all probability excelled in systematic thought about Nature (as for example in the Sarokhya atomic theories of Kshana, bhutadim paramanu, etc.), including also biological speculations ... When the balance comes to be made up, it will be found I believe, that Indian scientific history holds as many brilliant surprises ..."

"We cannot forejudge what the future developments of the history of science will bring forth, but if India was probably less original than China in the engineering and physico-chemical sciences, Indian culture in all probability excelled in systematic thought about Nature (as for example in the Samkhya atomic theories of Kshana, bhutadi, paramanu, etc.), including also biological speculations .... When the balance comes to be made up, it will be found I believe, that Indian scientific history holds as many brilliant surprises as those which have emerged from the recent study of China -whether in mathematics, chemistry, or biology, and especially the theories which were framed about them."

"For three thousand years a dialogue has been going on between the two ends of the Old World. Greatly have they influenced each other, and very different are the cultures they have produced. We have now good reason to think that the problems of the world will never be solved so long as they are considered only from a European point of view. It is necessary to see Europe from the outside, to see European history, and European failure no less than European achievement, through the eyes of that larger part of humanity, the peoples of Asia (and indeed also of Africa)."

"Joseph Needham, has stated, "Future research on the history of science and technology in Asia will in fact reveal that the achievements of these peoples contribute far more in all pre-Renaissance periods to the development of world science than has yet been realized.""

"It was Maitland's good fortune to be only moderately successful academically as a young man, so he escaped the easy assurance of the eminently successful man looking at the world. He had to learn about documents the hard way, in a conveyancer's office. This taught him to keep close to the ground. He learned that the approach to history must be through drudgery, and that no amount of elegance, economy, and precision of mind can take the place of an enormous capacity for hard work. He had no successors. Yet in a sense all modern historical researchers are his successors. Maitland's virtues are the virtues we should all like to possess; his way of doing things is the way of all modern research."

"By the History of English Law, and Domesday Book and Beyond, to say nothing of Roman Canon Law in the Church of England, and his other contributions to legal history, Professor Maitland has laid students of the English constitution under obligations that are incalculable."

"We may safely say that Maitland will remain a force and an inspiration when some, even of those who occupied the woolsack, are mere names. If all his theories could be overthrown, all his positive results peptonized into textbooks, he would still live as a model of critical method, a model of style, and a model of intellectual temper. He shall not be shamed, whatever records leap to light. A century hence his name will stand higher still than it does to-day."

"He was introducing a set of documents and not rewriting the history of parliament."

"While others lingered among the tombs, he drew his knowledge of our law, not from the sepulchres of its sages, but straight from the source itself. For him no fetish blocked the way; for him no vain repetition of statements from the legal Talmud would make those statements true. If “Co. Litt.” was wrong, it was not blasphemy to say so; to treat its “sentence” as a judgment from which there was no appeal was worthy of the Middle Ages. I do not know, nor do I suppose that the famous Downing Professor ever said so much, but one can imagine, had he spoken out, how his witty raillery might have shocked the veterans of Bench and Bar. For in his ever vivid originality, in the daring brilliance of his style, Maitland was the Whistler of the Law."

"It was his long and dazzling introduction to Otto Gierke's Political Theories of the Middle Ages that made me first realize what the history of ideas could be. When Leslie Stephen's wife died Maitland wrote to him, "I have an irrepressible wish, however foolish and wrong it may be, to touch your hand and tell you in two words what I think of you." I have the same foolish and irrepressible wish about Maitland."

"Those who took the road to democracy to be the road to freedom mistook temporary means for an ultimate end."

"It is hard to think away out of our heads a history which has long lain in a remote past but which once lay in the future."

"All Europe over, lawyers were being at once attracted and puzzled by the Roman doctrine of possession... Roman law compels us to hold that there are some occupiers who are not possessors. In an evil hour the English judges, who were controlling a new possessory action, which had been suggested by foreign models, adopted this theory at the expense of the termor... English law for six centuries and more will rue this youthful flirtation with Romanism."

"It was a court of politicians enforcing a policy, not a court of judges administering the law."

"Maitland did not write a history of the constitution nor narrative history like Freeman. He thought that Freeman and most English historians (but not Stubbs) were insular. They had not learnt the German way of interpreting history. It should not be interpreted through their rulers, the battles they had fought and the treaties they had made. It should be interpreted through the origins of their land, their institutions, their language and their folk tales and myths. He did not, like Marx, invest an all-embracing theory that would explain the inseparable processes that determined the direction in which society must move."

"I twitch every time anyone mentions ‘Germanic’ culture."

"The first part of the essay calls into question the idea that the Germanic-speaking barbarians shared any sort of unifying ethos or culture that would allow us to conceive of them as a single entity. This section largely summarizes a particular direction in recent work, but the conclusion is still far from generally accepted or integrated in current study and so requires restating... The comprehensive rejection of the idea of a unifying Germanic ethos and identity among pre-migratory Germani removes the classic basis for nineteenth-century views of the German people as rooted in distant history... One inheritance of nineteenth-century (and earlier) notions of pan-Germanic culture is the unlikely notion that all Germani had access to a common range of cultural traits, upon which they could draw at will... Attempts to change this intellectually careless state of affairs are making only slow process."

"The recent use of scientific (or pseudo-scientific) methodologies to examine migration has added an extra, alarming dimension. DNA, whether ‘ancient’ (from excavated material) or ‘modern’ samples (from living populations), is being used to track migration. The danger, barely addressed (at best dismissed as a purely ‘ideological’ objection), is of reducing ethnicity to biology and thus to something close to the nineteenth- century idea of race, at the basis of the ‘nation state’."

"[T]he writing of history is inescapably political, my aim is partly to provide a basis for a more politically and ethically responsible intervention by historians in modern political debate about migration."

"[I'm] (probably) the most significant historian of early medieval Europe under the age of 60 anywhere in the world... [T]hat's not (just) me being cocky, but a pretty sober assessment of the range and quality of my work."

"One of the problems that has most beset the study of early medieval Europe is, as noted, that of Germanism. This book aims to tackle this issue... To lump all Germanic-speaking tribes together is simply to repeat the assumptions of Roman ethnographers or the politically contingent Germanist interpretations of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There is, furthermore, the danger of assuming a linkage between Germanic-speaking barbarians of antiquity and the Germans of modern Europe. This was an approach adopted equally by nineteenth-century historians working in the context of German unification, by the Nazis and at the same time, polemically, by their enemies... [T]here are many occasions where modern historians and, especially, archaeologists, treat the different Germanic-speaking groups as sharing some sort of unifying ethos... It is implicit in such interpretations that all ‘Germanic’ peoples somehow share a common mentality. In their minds is a common stock of cultural traits which all ‘Germanic’ people can draw upon as and when they see fit. This may be claimed to be a reductio ad absurdam of traditional assumptions. It is, but only because these assumptions are fundamentally absurd."

"There can be no question of a general overriding ‘Germanic’ or ‘Celtic’ identity amongst the different barbarian groups. Shared language might have facilitated communication and alliance but there is no evidence for or reason to suppose a higher level of ethnic identity on this basis."

"The problems of Germanism have long been recognised. Alas, entirely analogous developments are currently taking place, also in the course of modern political movements, with the ‘Celts’. It is presently more fashionable and acceptable to talk of the ‘Celtic’ peoples as sharing a unified culture so that evidence from one area (Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Cornwall or Brittany) can be transferred unproblematically to the elucidation of another, sometimes regardless of chronological context. This is no more acceptable than Germanism."

"Recently, something of an academic counter-revolution... has taken place. Oxford-trained historians have led the way, publishing books repeating the same argument: the barbarian migrations involved real ‘peoples on the move’, which brought down the Roman Empire. This has stimulated traditionalist archaeologists into a backlash against more nuanced interpretations of the material record. Whatever their authors’ politics (though these can be guessed at from their writings and publishing choices) there can be no doubt that these works have—in the most generous interpretation—been written sufficiently carelessly as to provide succour to far-right extremists. What is more, the barbarian migrations have become a popular metaphor among racists and other opponents of modern migration... The Norwegian mass-murderer Anders Behring Breivik’s preferred historical model was the Crusades but it is nevertheless significant that he described the killings as ‘a small barbarian act to prevent a larger barbarian act’,17 the latter being the supposed take-over of Europe by Muslim immigrants."

"Historians are not immune from similarly bizarre reasoning, of course. The counter-revisionist offensive against more subtle ways of thinking about the fifth century has been led by British historians from Oxford. Peter Heather has repeatedly deployed the notion that, because wagons, women and children are occasionally mentioned in sources concerning the barbarians, the barbarians must have been ‘peoples’ on the move... Such are the weakness and double-standards of the arguments in favour of the traditional narrative. You can list many more."

"In the reinterpretation of ‘Germanic’ archaeology I have benefited from discussions with, and the encouragement of fellow-subversives... vive la re´volution!"

"The Nazis adopted these ideas with gusto but they did not invent them. Nor have post-Nazi archaeologists entirely abandoned some of their foundational notions. The idea of a really existing Germanic culture, unifying enormously diverse and disparate peoples living between the North Sea and the Ukraine and between the Danube and Scandinavia, has, in spite of its clearly contingent roots in early modern and modern political history, refused to go away. It has, however, now been turned around yet again, by misrepresenting ancient history as a binary opposition between civilized Romans and Germanic barbarians, to support modern xenophobic and anti-immigration policies."

"As social institutions, universities act to maintain the hierarchical nature of the status quo by excluding most of the population from its classrooms while ensuring that a small number are trained and certified to supervise others. In Gramscian terms, in the post-Civil Rights era black academics have functioned and continue to function as intellectuals in particular and politically contradictory ways in the "ensemble of the system of relations in which these activities have their place within the general complex of social relations." Are we meant to function as the black gatekeepers, ensuring the production, perpetuation, and maintenance of a small, black, middle-class elite, in the hope that this elite will act as a force to control the rebellious tendencies of the black oppressed?"

"[Mandhātā pushed past] "the prostrate Paurava realm, and pushing beyond them westwards, he had a long contest with and conquered the Druhyu king who appears to have been then on the confines of the Panjab, so that the next Druhyu king Gandhāra retired to the northwest and gave his name to the Gandhāra country" (PARGITER 1962:262)."

"The Iranians may have been an offshoot from India."

""The Druhyus occupied the Punjab, and Mandhātṛ of Ayodhya had a long war with the Druhyu king Aruddha or Aṅgāra and killed him" (PARGITER 1962:167)."

"The next Druhyu king Gandhāra retired to the northwest and gave his name to the Gandhāra country."

"One branch, headed by Uśīnara established several kingdoms on the eastern border of the Punjab [...] his famous son Śivi originated the Śivis [footnote: called Śivas in Rigveda VII.18.7] in Śivapura, and extending his conquests westwards [...] occupying the whole of the Punjab except the northwestern corner."

"[tradition] makes the Aila power begin at Allahabad and yet distinctly suggests that they came from outside India."

"Tradition or myth… directly indicates that the Ailas (or Aryans) entered India from the mid-Himalayan region."

"All ancient Indian belief and veneration were directed to the mid-Himalayan region, the only original sacred outside land, and it was thither that rishis and kings turned their steps in devotion, never to the northwest."

"Indian tradition distinctly asserts that there was an Aila outflow of the Druhyus through the northwest into the countries beyond where they founded various kingdoms."

"There is nothing in them (Puranic accounts), as far as I am aware, really inconsistent with the most ancient book we possess, namely, the Rigveda, and they throw much light thereon, and on all problems concerning ancient India."

"Indian tradition knows nothing of any Aila or Aryan invasion of India from Afghanistan, nor of any gradual advance from thence eastwards."

"The Aryans began at Allahabad, conquered and spread out northwest, west and south, and had by YayAti’s time occupied precisely the region known as MadhyadeSa… They expanded afterwards into the Punjab and East Afghanistan, into West India and the northwest Dekhan…"

"The river constituted the boundary between the Panjab and the Ganges-Jumna basin."

"The bulk of the Rigveda was composed in the great development of Brahmanism that arose under the succesors of king Bharata who reigned in the upper Ganges-Jumna doab and plain;"

"There is a strong presumption in favor of (Indian) tradition; if anyone contests tradition, the burden lies on him to show that it is wrong."

"Indian tradition knows nothing whatever of the Aryans' invasion of India through the north-west....All this copious tradition was falsely fabricated, and the truth has been absolutely lost, if the current theory is right; is that probable? If all this tradition is false, why, how, and in whose interests was it all fabricated.?"

"There was an outflow of people from India before the fifteenth century BC."

""If the Aryans had entered India from the north-west, and had advanced eastward through the Punjab only as far as the Saraswati or Jumna when the Rigvedic hymns were composed, it is very surprising that the hymn arranges the rivers, not according to their progress, but reversaly from the Ganges which they had hardly reached. " Imam me gange yamune sarasvati sutudri stomam sacata parusnaya asiknya marudvrdhe vitastayarjikiye srnuhya susomaya " (x 75.05) O Ganga, Yamuna, Sarasvati, Sutudri (Sutlej), Parushini (Ravi), hear my praise! Listen to my call, Asikni (Chenab), Marudvridha (Maruvardhvan), Vitasta (Jhelum) with Arjikiya, Sushoma (Sohan)."

"Tradition… makes the earliest connexion of the Veda to be with the eastern region and not with the Punjab."