British classics dominance crowded out Oriental studies at universities

Evidence

British university life, in so far as there was a university life at all, was dominated by biblical studies and the classics. Classical studies, in particular, thrived. From the late eighteenth century onwards there was a revival of interest in Greek and Roman culture, fostered in part by the Romantic enthusiasm for the Greek revolt against the Turks, by the Romantic cult of ruins and the mid-eighteenth-century discovery of the ruins of Pompeii, and, above all, by the growing importance of the public schools (in American terms, expensive private schools) and the stress that those schools placed upon study of the classics as character-building. As Richard Jenkyns has pointed out, authors such as Cardinal Newman (Apologia pro Vita Sua), Thomas Hughes (Tom Brown’s Schooldays) and Thomas Hardy (Jude the Obscure) could use Greek type in their texts in the confident expectation that their readers, mostly public-school-educated, would be able to read it. Greek and Latin trained the mind and made good citizens and a detailed knowledge of the history of the Roman empire shaped the thoughts of the rulers of the British Raj. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 283

Categorization

• XREF: The idea that the Roman Empire was the governing template for the British Raj resonates with broad themes of imperial self-fashioning through classical precedent.

Related

• Classical Greco-Roman education shaped British imperial governance (similarity 0.82)