Victorian Historiography and Rome

If this was the lesson Bryce drew from the history of the British and Roman imperial constitutions, what was the mindset that led him to it? Why look to Rome in the first place? The study of classics - the history, philosophy, lan­guage and literature of ancient Greece and Rome - had enjoyed a special sta­tus in European learning since the Renaissance.

The Victorian era saw the spectre of Rome haunt imperial debates on both sides. What Norman Vance has called the �rich unstable ambiguity' of Roman political history meant that figures from all sides could draw from it moral les­sons that supported their own positions, accruing for themselves the prestige and authority of Roman precedent.^[1220] Not only could the dissolution of Rome's Empire be adduced by those aiming to strengthen Britain's, but the transition from Republic to Empire presented an open-ended case that strong imperial­ists and Little Englanders alike could put to use, portraying it alternatively as the tragic fall of a free republic or the triumphant rise of a prosperous and glorious empire. On the anti-imperialist side in 1850, Gladstone took aim at Lord Palmerston's likening of British and Roman imperial citizenship by point­ing out that such a high view of citizenship involved the brutalization of non­citizens in the Roman Empire^^[1221] Striking a similar chord in 1881, Robert Lowe warned that forcing the Irish Coercion Bill through Parliament by the use of closure represented the same effrontery as Roman consuls abusing their power on the grounds of an alleged emergency and thus �paved the way for the ruin of the Republic' and the onset of Empire.^[1222] On the other hand, imperialists like J.A.

Among those Victorians who thought about current affairs in terms of the Roman example, one deserves special attention for our purposes. The histori­an E.A. Freeman tutored James Bryce at Oxford, and the two remained lifelong friends and correspondents. Two central features of Freeman’s historiography bear special importance for Bryce’s engagement with imperial constitutional history: the unity of history and the centrality of Rome. His emphasis on the unity of history involved a critique of prevalent historical periodisations - �meaningless and unnatural divisions’ like the distinction between ancient and modern, living and dead languages, and the very notion of �classics’. In his in­augural lecture upon being appointed (ironically) Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, Freeman credited his predecessor Thomas Arnold with the idea of the unity of history and heralded it as �the truth which ought to be the centre and life of all our historic studies’.^[1223] As a concession to the �imperfect world’ in which he found himself at Oxford, to be sure, he defined �modern’ history for practical purposes as beginning with the fall of the Roman Em- pire.6^[1224] This way, he avoided encroaching on the turf of colleagues. But ideally, the only acceptable line between �ancient’ and �modern’ could be no later than the first Olympiad, for by this point had clearly begun �the recorded history of Aryan Europe’^[1225] Thus the political history of the world could be read �as a sin­gle whole’ - as �one great and unbroken drama’ and �one long series of cause and effect’^^[1226] Earlier in his Rede Lecture at Cambridge, he had grounded this diachronic unity in a fixed idea of human nature.

To be sure, Freeman’s universalising language betrayed what was really a more limited claim. Arnaldo Momigliano has pointed out that Freeman may not have actually meant a unified history of all mankind but rather only what Freeman called �Aryan man’.^[1228] Freeman's concept of race is key to understand­ing the boundaries of his concept of unity, as Oded Steinberg has more recently argued^{[1229] [1230] Indeed, Freeman blithely - or, for Momigliano, �surreptitiously’ - elided the distinction between Aryan man and all mankind, between Europe and the world, saying in the same lecture that �the political history of the world should be read as a single whole’ and then referring to �one great and unbroken drama which takes in the long political history of European man'.6s Likewise in his Rede lecture he described his approach as looking �at the history of man, at all events at the history of Aryan man in Europe, as one unbroken whole’[1231] [1232] [1233] [1234] And by the end of the Rede lecture he had found it necessary to acknowledge the tension and confess that �European history forms one whole in the strictest sense, but between European and Asiatic history the connexion is only occa­sional and incidental’?0 So though more boundless than the conventional ap­proach to the study of European history in Freeman’s day, his was ultimately a bounded unity - a wider periodisation, to be sure, but still ultimately a perio­disation, as we will see below?1}

Far from lessening the value of Freeman’s historical outlook for Bryce, rec­ognising this boundedness draws our attention right to the second important trait of Freeman’s historiography, the centrality of Rome.