After Sir William Jones: British Linguistic Scholarship and European Intellectual History

This article addresses a long-standing question in European intellectual history: why, if Sir William Jones formulated the Indo-European idea in Calcutta in 1786, was it developed only by German scholars on the continent several decades later, and not by Jones's compatriots? British scholars, it has been assumed, either failed to grasp the importance of this finding or were too absorbed in etymology as a tool for investigating the philosophy of mind to notice its implications. This article overturns this influential interpretation and shows for the first time that there was a British tradition of comparative philology that descended from Jones and built self-consciously upon his work and approach. It developed in Edinburgh during the late Scottish Enlightenment of the 1790s and 1800s. Ultimately, however, these British scholars placed the Indo-European idea at the base of ethnology and not at the foundation of comparative grammar, as happened in Germany.