in Finland and of Germans in many parts of Central Europe. As he explains,
the organizers of the Finnish Literature Society in 1831 were Swedes, and the
data recorded by them were in Swedish (Hobsbawm 1990: 104). Hobsbawm’s
view is most probably right in that not all archaeologists were nationalists as
yet, but the example he proposes may be misleading: it is easy to see a
correlation between this and practices in the colonies which in Parts II and
III of this book have been connected to nationalism. This is because the data
collected by the Swedes allowed a better understanding of the Finns, who
were, for the Swedes, the ‘Other’ (in this case, the ‘Other’ to be re-conquered,
for Finland had passed from being under Swedish control in the seventeenth
century, to be under Russian inXuence in the eighteenth century. Later
Finland had become an autonomous Grand Duchy in the Russian Empire
after the Finnish War between Sweden and Russia in 1809). Societies such as
the Finnish Literature Society also contributed to the modelling of an ethnic
map of Europe which produced a type of knowledge key for the creation of
national identity.
Many of the individuals who have been mentioned in this chapter had been
born around the years of the French Revolution and some had been inXuenced
by its ideals. Despite the conservative reaction, the number of revolutions in
Europe shows that the national argument was gradually becoming accepted as
the basis of the nation-state by a wider spectrum of the population. There was
an awareness that claims for national identity had been used to rationalize the
independence of new countries such as Greece and many in Latin America
(Chapter 4). As a nation needed a past to legitimate its existence, the creation
of most learned societies dealing with subjects such as archaeology might be
seen as one more means by which educated elites expressed their political will
and desires to further promote a sense of national identity—either a separatist
national identity or an integrative one, also including regions as part of the
nation—among a wider population. This process happened in countries such
as Ireland and Czechia which were not independent at that time, but where
ambitions for national independence were high. Learned societies were not
groups of individuals with one voice but loci where discussions and negoti-
ations about national identity took place.
As mentioned in several chapters of this book, discourses about the past are
not static, but throughout the diVerent periods of world history have been an
arena of interaction, something to be remodelled and agreed on. Europe, of
course, is no exception. During these years there was a change of emphasis on
the main periods and themes being studied. The new emphasis of ethnicity
and the national tongue in the deWnition of a successful nation compelled
scholars towards the study of race and language, something that would
increase in tempo until the Second World War (see Chapter 13 for the last
Liberal Revolutions (c. 1820–1860) 365