By contrast, however, comparisons among nations seem to have been relatively frequent in the nineteenth century, when it was assumed that national histories fit general patterns. In Britain, for example, contemporary Britons and ancient Phoenicians were frequently equated. As Alexander Wilmot wrote in 1896:

In his introduction to Wilmot’s book, the novelist H. Rider Haggard wrote that the Phoenicians were “this crafty, heartless and adventurous race…the English of the ancient world without the English honour”.^[7] Indeed, the British-Phoenician analogy was a commonplace in continental Europe throughout the nineteenth century. Moreover, the Phoenicians were not the only ancient peoples to whom Britons once compared themselves. Pondering the condition of their empire, they attempted to explain why Rome fell, and wondered how to avoid replicating Rome’s errors. Considering ancient Greece, they weighed the merits of the social organizations of Athens and Sparta.^[8] (It is of interest that some academics of British origin who have taken positions in the United States, such as Paul Kennedy and Niall Ferguson, have embraced a similarly moral approach to historical analysis, preaching the lessons to be learned from Britain’s imperial experience to the citizens of what is now an American empire in all but name.)

There is one obvious reason that Britain's educated classes were once wont to compare themselves with the classical ancients: they were educated in the classics. But this explanation is only a partial one. If one can speak in the intellectually vague term of the zeitgeist (and sometimes one must), the nineteenth century was a historically self-conscious age, aware that there was inevitably a “spirit of the age”, in John Stuart Mill's phrase.^[9] And one can only understand the development of the comparative method in anthropology if one sees it as the product of an age with historicist sensibilities. Among the most important questions practitioners of this method asked was: Was it possible to achieve better understanding of the classical ancients who were responsible for laying the basis of western civilization by examining then-contemporary non-western peoples, who were presumed to be in at least some particulars analogous to the ancients?

I will discuss the comparative method in anthropology largely with reference to its use by practitioners who fell within the British sphere of influence. This is not because its practice was restricted to that sphere. The greatest of nineteenth-century American anthropologists, Lewis Henry Morgan (1818–81), worked in a style that resembled nineteenth-century British anthropologists, although he was not an “armchair” scholar in the mould of his British contemporaries; they were able to achieve eminence in anthropological circles without leaving the comforts of home, drawing on information collected by others to produce their generalizations.^[10] Morgan was something of a field naturalist, so that direct observation informed his analysis of Native Americans (and of beavers); arguably, he also reasoned with greater intellectual rigour and used more elaborate documentation than was employed by most British scholars; the informants who imparted their knowledge of exotic peoples both to Morgan and to British armchair anthropologists were apt to be rather contemptuous of the generalizations produced by the latter.^[11] And the greatest of late-nineteenth/early-twentieth century French social scientists, Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) — an armchair scholar whose works are still considered relevant to contemporary disciplinary inquiries by anthropologists, sociologists, and others^[12] — also practised a variant of the comparative method. Certainly, differences obtained among practitioners of this method in different national contexts. But the case of British proto-anthropologists who used the comparative method should serve as generally illustrative.