Introductory session with PowerPoint presentation from lecturer setting out the prehistory of the 18th-19th century debate over progress, degeneration and the idea of the “primitive.” Reading: Lucretius, De Rerum Nova + Hesiod, Works and Days in Lovejoy, Arthur O. & George Boas. Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1935: 192-242. Assignments/deadlines: Lecturer Introductory Presentation.

John Locke, the subject of our second seminar, has long been the target of postcolonial scholarship for his alleged role as the principal ideologist of native land dispossession. In more recent years, Thomas Hobbes has been added to this list of villains, being characterised as “apologist for English colonialism.” What did Hobbes actually say about the American Indian? Is Hobbes’ “State of Nature” really identical to the American Indians’ state of “savagery?” Was Hobbes’ philosophy one that advocated for and enabled imperialism and colonialism? This seminar explores Hobbes’ writings on America and the debate over what role – if any – the played in early English colonial expansion. Reading: Maloney, Pat. “Hobbes, Savagery and International Anarchy.” American Political Science Review, Vol. 105, no. 1 (2011): 189-204; Liu, Jiangmei. “An Apologist for English Colonialism?: The Use of America in Hobbes’ Writings.” History of European Ideas, Vol. 50, no. 1. (2023): 17-33. Assignments/Deadlines: Lecturer led, non-presentation class seminar. Groups A-E will do assigned readings.

Some scholars have seen in John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government a radical new doctrine associating the right to possess land with prior labour and improvement. According to this interpretation of Locke, the doctrine of Vacuum domicilium afforded the legal and moral basis to dispossess the indigenous peoples or the world. But is this a fair and accurate reading of Locke? Was Locke really the ideologist of aboriginal dispossession? Had the doctrine of Vacuum domicilium been anticipated in earlier Protestant thought? This seminar investigates the controversies around Locke, property, progress and race. Reading: Corcoran, Paul. “John Locke on Native Right, Colonial Possession, and the Concept of Vacuum domicilium.” The European Legacy, Vol. 23, No.3 (May 2018):225-250, + Squadrito, Kathy. “Locke and the Dispossession of the American Indian.” In Ward & Lott, Philosophers on Race: 101-125. Assignments/deadlines: Seminar 2 Presentation – Group A; Groups B-E read assigned readings.

What is a man? How did he become civilised? Is the civilised state preferable to the “state of nature?” This week’s seminar examines the work of James Burnett, Lord Monboddo, one of the few Enlightenment thinkers to speculate on the possibility of a simian-like men lacking the attributes almost universally deemed essential for humanity: language. Monboddo’s thought will be examined alongside Rousseau’s much-misunderstood concept of the “noble savage.” Monboddo’s strikingly advanced speculations about ape-men – put to paper almost a century before Darwin – will be contrasted with his belief in Egyptocentric civilisational diffusionism, demonstrating the continued influence of this ancient theory. Reading: Mills, R. J. W. “Egyptomania and religion in James Burnett, Lord Mondboddo’s ‘History of Man.’” History of European Ideas, Vol, 47, No. 1 (2021): 119-139; Wokler, Robert. “Perfectible Apes in Decadent Cultures: Rousseau’s Anthropology Revisited.” Daedalus, Vol. 107, No. 3 (Summer, 1978): 107-134. Assignments/deadlines: Seminar 3 Presentation – Group B; Groups A, C, D & E – assigned readings.

Examines the theories of the Scottish Enlightenment and the French 18th century Physiocrats. With significant variations, both groups held to a theory of human progress whereby mankind advanced through a series of universal technological and economic stages. Many of these ideas would be subsequently incorporated into Karl Marx’s materialist theory of history. Reading: Excerpts of Adam Smith’s Lectures on Jurisprudence (pp. 116-126), Adam Ferguson’s Essay on the History of Civil Society (pp. 150-55) and John Millar’s The Origin of Ranks pp. 160-173) in Meek, Ronald L. Social Science and the Ignoble Savage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976. Assignments/deadlines: Seminar 4 Presentation – Group C; Groups A, B, D & E – assigned readings.

In the early 19th century, a group of Danish antiquarians advanced a materialist theory of progress based upon the progressive sequences of Stone, Bronze and Iron Ages. Like Darwin’s theory of evolution, the theory is still valid today. What is less appreciated is the strong initial association of this theory with theories of racial conquest and supersession. The seminar looks at the spread of this theory in the English-speaking world in the mid-Victorian era, exploring the differences between its reception in Scotland, Ireland and England. Reading: Trigger, Bruce G. A History of Archaeological Thought. 2nd Ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, 80-165 (121-165 esp.). Assignments/deadlines: Seminar 5 Presentation – Group D; Groups A, B, C & E – assigned readings. .

The work of the “Father of British Anthropology” James Cowles Prichard shows the influence of the near-forgotten theories of linguistic, religious and social evolution associated with the circle of scholars surrounding the Prussian ambassador to London in the 1840s, Baron C. C. J. Bunsen. Prichard and Bunsen’s theories show the tensions between linguistics, material cultural and physical race as explanatory factors in human progress in the early Victorian era. Reading: Stocking, George W. Victorian Anthropology. New York: The Free Press, 1987: 46-77; Eddleston, William Frederick. “From Theurgy to Totemism.” University of Sydney PhD, 2001. Chapter 2, pp. 35-67 esp. Assignments/deadlines: Seminar 5 Presentation – Group E; Groups A-D – assigned readings.

Evolution was one of the most consequential ideas of the 19th century. But theories of social and technological evolution associated with E. B. Tylor and John Lubbock drew from a variety of intellectual traditions – the majority of them pre-Darwinian. This unit examines the rise and triumph of the materialistic theory of human social, technological and religious evolution in the context of the ascendancy of Victorian industrialism and liberalism. Reading: Stocking, George W. Victorian Anthropology. New York: The Free Press, 1987, 144-274 passim; Burrow, J. W. Evolution and Society: A Study in Victorian Social Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966, 228-59. Assignments/deadlines: Seminar 7 Presentation – Group A; Groups B-E – assigned readings.

This seminar looks at the way that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels used the anthropology of the American Republican anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan to lay the foundations of a materialist theory of prehistory. The seminar will examine their common grounding in the theories of the Scottish Enlightenment (see Seminar 4), relationships with other evolutionary thinkers (Seminars 5 and 7), and the significance of the theory of primitive matriarchy for all three men. Morgan’s dispute with Sir Henry Maine on the question of primitive matriarchy vs. patriarchy means that this seminar forms a vital introduction to the following class on the Aryans. Reading: Shaw, William H. “Marx and Morgan.” History and Theory: Studies in the Philosophy of History. 23/2. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1984: 215-28 + Trautmann, Thomas R. “Whig Ethnology from Locke to Morgan.” Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford. Vol. 22, no. 1 (1992): 201-218. Assignments/deadlines: Seminar 8 Presentation – Group B; Groups A, C, D & E - assigned readings.

From the time of Sir William Jones’ discovery of the connection between Sanskrit, Persian and the languages of Europe, a wave of “Indomania” had swept the West. In 1861, the English legal scholar Sir Henry Maine published his influential Village Communities East and West, which argued that the origins of European progress and parliamentary systems lay in the Aryan institutions of India. By the later stages of the 19th century, however, this and other relatively liberal views of Europe’s debt to India had been replaced by a new, darker vision: of an India grounded in racial hierarchy and division, and the subjugation of darker by lighter races. This seminar explores this intellectual transition in the context of British imperialism and the influence of Gobineau and racial anthropology. Reading: Kuper, Adam. The Reinvention of Primitive Society: Transformations of the Myth. London: Routledge, 2005, 39-82 [GM.] + Stocking, George W. Victorian Anthropology. New York: The Free Press, 1987, 56-62, 117-28. [GM.] Assignments/deadlines: Seminar 9 Presentation – Group C; Groups A, B, D & E – assigned readings.

The French polymath Arthur, Comte de Gobineau was the first European thinker to find the origins of human civilisation in racial division and domination – and the ultimate seeds of the destruction of civilisation in racial miscegenation. A correspondent of Renan and Tocqueville, Gobineau was an extremely subtle and misunderstood thinker. But it would be a simplified and debased Gobinism, manifest in the works of racial elitists like Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard, which would exercise a malign influence on European and American thought for the next century. The seminar will examine precisely this type of debased Gobinism in the writings of the pioneering archaeologist, Egyptologist and eugenicist Matthew Flinders Petrie (1853-1942) and the Biblical scholar, Assyriologist and early stalwart of the racist Anthropological Society of London, Archibald Henry Sayce (1845-1933). A student and colleague of Max Müller, Sayce’s works represent the late racist turn of the ideas we have examined in Seminars 6 and 9. Reading: Challis, Debbie. Challis, Debbie. The Archaeology of Race: The Eugenic Ideas of Francis Galton and Flinders Petrie. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013, 85-106; 129-28 & 167-86 esp. Assignments/deadlines: Seminar 10 is a Lecturer Presentation –Groups A-E – assigned readings.

One of the perennial questions in the history of civilisation was whether it arose in one place and was spread – by conquest and/or trade and exploration – to other, less advanced peoples; or whether mankind generally followed a uniform pattern of social, economic and technological development. Unusually for a Marxist, the Australian prehistorian Vere Gordon Childe defended a diffusionist model of civilizational development, with prehistoric Europe following developments in the Near East. The seminar explores Childe’s intellectual legacy in relationship to both diffusionism and Marxism. Particular attention will be given to the way Childe advanced the ideas of Morgan, Marx and Engels (see Seminar 8), building a comprehensively Marxist theory of prehistory – albeit one which eclectically incorporated insights of other traditions. Reading: Trigger, Bruce G. Gordon Childe: Revolutions in Archaeology. London: Thames and Hudson, 1980, 20-55; 91-135. Assignments/deadlines: Seminar 11 Presentation Group D - Groups A, B, C and E – assigned readings.

The Australian anatomist and Egyptologist Grafton Elliot Smith advanced a “hyperdiffusionst” theory of early history, arguing that almost all of humanity’s early religious, technological and social advanced had arisen in ancient Egypt, from whence they had been brought to other areas of the globe by the trading and colonising activities of this singular, advanced race. The seminar examines Smith’s ideas in the broader context of the diffusionist movement in British anthropology associated with the work of W. H. R. Rivers. Reading: Crook, Paul. Grafton Elliot Smith: Egyptology and the Diffusion of Culture: A Biographical Perspective. Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2012, 88-106 esp; Langham, Ian. The Building of British Social Anthropology. Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1981, 118-199. Assignments/deadlines: Seminar 12 Presentation – Group E; Groups A-D – assigned readings.

A final “coffee and cake” informal discussion will wrap up the various themes of the course and briefly examine the Boasian challenge to the notion of progress, and the battles Franz Boas and his followers waged with Madison Grant and his allies over the soul of American anthropology. Reading: Stocking, George W. Race, Culture and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968, 195-233; Spriro, Jonathan Peter. Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics and the Legacy of Madison Grant. Burlington, Vt., University of Vermont Press, 2009, 297-354. In addition to submission on NEO, students will be required to submit a physical, printed copy of their essays at the beginning of class at 11.15 am