Anglo-Saxonism in the 19th century

Anglo-Saxonism is a cultural belief system developed by British and American intellectuals, politicians, and academics in the 19th century. Racialized Anglo-Saxonism contained both competing and intersecting doctrines, such as Victorian era Old Northernism and the Teutonic germ theory which it relied upon in appropriating Germanic (particularly Norse) cultural and racial origins for the Anglo-Saxon "race".

Predominantly a product of certain Anglo-American societies, and organisations of the era:[1]

An important racial belief system in late 19th- and early 20th-century British and US thought advanced the argument that the civilization of English-speaking nations was superior to that of any other nations because of racial traits and characteristics inherited from the Anglo-Saxon invaders of Britain.

In 2017, Mary Dockray-Miller, an American scholar of Anglo-Saxon England, stated that there was an increasing interest in the study of Anglo-Saxonism in the 19th century.[2] Anglo-Saxonism is regarded as a predecessor ideology to the later Nordicism of the 20th century,[3] which was generally less anti-Celtic and broadly sought to racially reconcile Celtic identity with Germanic under the label of Nordic.[4]

  1. ^ Kaufman, Will; Macpherson, Heidi Slettedahl (2005). Britain and the Americas: Culture, Politics, and History, Volume 2. ABC-CLIO. pp. 90–91. ISBN 978-1851094318.
  2. ^ Cite error: The named reference Dockray-Miller was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  3. ^ Luczak, Ewa Barbara (2015). Breeding and Eugenics in the American Literary Imagination: Heredity Rules in the Twentieth Century (1st ed.). Palgrave Macmillan. p. 164. ISBN 978-1137545787. Nordicism replaced the older concepts of Anglo-Saxonism promulgated by David Starr Jordan and Aryanism espoused by Charles Woodruff.
  4. ^ Kassis, Dimitrios (2015). Representations of the North in Victorian Travel Literature. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. p. 28. ISBN 978-1443870849. In the Nordicist discourse, what can be noticed is the attempt to racially unite the English with the Celts, a rather pioneering element considering the earliest theories which were ideologically constructed on a strictly anti-Celtic basis.