Schlozer was the first to feel history as one great whole. . . . His writing was like the lightning that illuminates objects almost at once. . . . He destroyed his enemies with one word of thunder. . . . Schlozer's genius had to be in opposition. . . . Him, rather than Kant, it is fair to call all-destructive. (Gogol 1984: 6/88-9)
After the end of Seven Years War (see Chapter 9), Schlozer returned to Germany. He developed "universal history" and social statistics in Gottingen; he was also a prolific journalist, one of the creators of the pan-German public sphere. He wrote Nestor before any comparable edition of a German chronicle was produced; for his analysis of the Russian chronicles, he appropriated the Protestant methods of critical reading of the New Testament (Butterfield 1955: 56). He also wrote a study of the north, from Iceland to Kamchatka. Following Pufendorf, he was one of the first to distinguish between the state and the people. He originated the term ethnography and, starting in 1772, exchanged hostile reviews with Herder, who disliked the word (Stagl 1995).
Within Nestor and on a broader scale of lifelong scholarship, Schlozer made pioneering use of the epistemological boomerang, an interpretative method that applies colonial knowledge to the understanding of metropolitan societies.
Uvarov and the Black Athena
In 1812, Sergei Uvarov, a career official as well as a self-trained classicist, applied the concept of colonization to the emergence of ancient Greece:
It is probable that, of all the European countries, Greece was the first peopled by Asiatic colonies. . . . We know that Greece, peopled by Asian colonists, was subjugated in turn by races of men different among themselves, but of one common origin. These new colonies brought with them the elements of their religious worship. . . . The Egyptian and Phoenician colonies imported into Greece, with their religious modes of faith, their languages and their traditions. (Uvarov 1817: 73-4)
Uvarov had studied in Gottingen with Schlozer in 1801-3. The idea that ancient Greece produced myriads of Mediterranean colonies had been well established in classicist scholarship. However, Uvarov made a deeper and more radical claim, that ancient Greece was itself the result of colonization. Two oriental peoples, Egyptians and Phoenicians, invaded Greek lands in several waves and mixed with the local population, which Uvarov identified with the Pelasgians. He also learned from Schlozer, who was the first to describe the Semitic language family, that Egyptians and Phoenicians were "of one common origin." To name these processes, Uvarov used the term "colonization" extensively and with no sign of hesitation or novelty. He saw the analogy between the colonial situation that he described as the emergence of Greece, and the colonial situation that Schlozer described as the emergence of Russia; recent studies also indicate this analogy between Hellenistic and Russian colonization (Malkin 2004). Under Uvarov's influence, Schlozer's historiography became mainstream reading in the empire. In 1804, Alexander I ennobled Schlozer and gave him a coat of arms with Nestor, the legendary author of the Primary Chronicle, in the center (Kliuchevsky 1956: 8/448).
Figure 4: Sergei Uvarov between an Oriental tablecloth and a Classical column. Portrait by Orest Kiprensky (1815), in the Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. Source: Wikimedia Commons
Later, Uvarov published a proposal for the setting up of an Academy of Asian Studies in St. Petersburg (Whittaker 1984; Maiofis 2008). "It is to Asia that we owe the foundations of the great edifice of human civilization," wrote Uvarov (1810); studying and enlightening continental Asia is Russia's task, its civilizing mission. The German linguist Julius Klaproth, who had just returned from a trip to Mongolia and the Caucasus, helped Uvarov in this venture (Benes 2004). In 1932, the Soviet scholar and former Orthodox priest, Sergei Durylin, interpreted Uvarov's project as if he had just read Foucault: "With Napoleon or against Napoleon, with England or against England, Russia had to know its own and the neighboring East in order to reign over it: this is the idea of the Asian Academy" (Durylin 1932: 191). Forging an illustrious career, Uvarov became President of the Imperial Academy of Sciences (1818), an organizer of St. Petersburg Imperial University (1819), and Minister of the People's Enlightenment (1833-49). Seeing his role as the promotion of the ancient languages and classical education, he described Greece using the historical concepts that he had acquired in Russia and understood Russia in terms that he had learned from classical scholarship. Colonized and colonizing, both countries had much to share.
Uvarov's ideas matured in the international Romantic circles that - as Edward Said (1978: 98) told us with irony - were fascinated with "nations, races, minds, and peoples as things one could talk about passionately - in the ever-narrowing perspective of populism first adumbrated by Herder." In 1813, when Russian troops were fighting all over Europe, Uvarov composed a plan for perpetual peace. Referring to Hobbes, the abbe de Saint-Pierre, Rousseau, and Kant, whose projects of perpetual peace he knew but deemed outdated, Uvarov singled out one new idea that could provide a purpose for the postwar world. The idea was the colonization of the east, a sublime project that would keep the victors in business well after the war. Nations perform their noblest deeds after long and bloody conflicts, declared Uvarov. The war with Napoleon was large and its outcome, peace, would be proportional. Uvarov's Eurocentric project amounted to a project of colonization so large that it would be proper to call it, globalization. "The world is still spacious. . . . One half of the earth consists of deserts, of wild lands and . . . of barbarian societies. Powerful states will create a new world," wrote Uvarov (cited in Maiofis 2008: 78).
An alliance between two empires, the Russian and the British, was crucial for this project of global imperialism. But Great Britain suspected Alexander I of plans to create a world empire, declined to take part in the Holy Alliance of 1815, and prevented Russia from taking Greece from the Ottomans. Uvarov's idea of perpetual peace and his historical analogy between Russia and Greece became dated. In his correspondence with the highest authority among his contemporaries, Goethe, Uvarov reformulated the role of Russia as "the new Egypt" rather than Greece - not the "center" of the modern world but rather the "bridge" between its two separate halves, the east and the west. Like a bridge, Egyptians brought Asian culture to Greece and Europe; Russia should play the same role between Europe and Asia (Durylin 1932: 202). Three worlds were clearly on Uvarov's map, - the First World, Europe; the Third World, Asia; and the Second World, Russia. The new Egypt, Russia, would bring civilization to Asia in the same way as historical Egypt had brought it to Greece.
Beginning in 1987, the Sinologist Martin Bernal published several volumes of a controversial work that argued essentially the same thesis that had been proposed by Uvarov in 1812. Bernal's historical argument stated that the land of Greece had indeed been colonized by the Egyptians and Phoenicians and that the mixing of these peoples with the Pelasgians gave birth to ancient Greek civilization. This late twentieth-century study employed the same terminology of colonization that Uvarov had used much earlier. In the light of Bernal's his- toriographical argument, his proximity to Uvarov is not that surprising. Until about 1800, European classicists shared the belief in the eastern roots of Greece, asserts Bernal. Then, some scholars realized that this genealogy made Greeks the descendants of the Egyptians and the Phoenicians, i.e. the Africans and the Semites. Because of the growing racism of the pan-European intellectual elite, a new era started that Bernal described as the rise of India and the fall of Egypt. Denying the idea of the black and Semitic Athena, historians and linguists invented the Indo-Europeans.