"We're All Basques"
Because I never read the paper yesterday, I breezed through it this morning and didn't read Nicholas Wade's "A United Kingdom? Maybe" until Eric pointed to it this afternoon. The article reports findings that the DNA of the English and the Irish doesn't significantly differ. The English aren't a "later" people who forced the Irish, the Welsh and the Scots into the hinterlands. What if there were no Irish or British "people"? As in "race"; as in "nation." What if the Gaelic tongue came to the Atlantic Isles as part of the agricultural division of labor package? Unaccompanied by a handful of farmers from the Continent?
I was reminded of a wonderful little book that I picked up at the National Gallery (DC) bookshop a few years ago. In The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe (Princeton, 2001, 2003), Patrick Geary more or less explodes the idea pf great throngs of biologically related Huns, Vandals and Visigoths, sweeping out of central Asia and forcing the current occupants of Europe to find somewhere to sweep to. It is a nightmare concocted by Roman historians and Christian annalists as they grappled with the disorders that followed the collapse, very much from within, of the Roman Empire.
As the boundaries between Roman and Barbarian dissolved, what today is called "identity politics" became one means of organizing and motivating followers. New constellations claimed names of "ancient" peoples. Old polities vanished into the melting pot of Gothic, Hunnic, or Frankish lordship. Some were never to reappear. Heterogeneous groups of adventures and defeated enemies agreed to accept a common leader and, in time, a common identity. In other circumstances, opposition leaders, claiming to embody the ancient tradition of a people, might lead their followers to conquest and a new future or else to annihilation.
This is all a reminder that the Europeans who embarked on the Age of Exploration were already exponents of highly developed racism.
A century ago, the United States was not a nation in the traditional sense. Its inhabitants came from all over. Time seems to have clouded that distinction. Americans whose families have occupied this country for four generations or more think of themselves as more "American" than other people. (The same thing happened in the early Nineteenth Century, before the great influx of European immigrants.) I wonder how many kids today are unaware that the United States was not established when Noah's Ark touched dry land.
