If Hutton’s new book were a Hollywood blockbuster, it would be marketed as a prequel. In The people that never were, Hutton traces the origins of the concept of ‘Aryan’, and in doing so fills in the backstory for a key notion in his earlier research into the sociopolitical entanglements of linguistic theory in the twentieth century, in particular in the fevered racial discourse of the self-styled ‘Third Reich’ (e.g. Hutton Reference Hutton1999, Reference Hutton2005). Through detailed examination of Western philological writings, predominantly from the nineteenth century, Hutton’s latest book ‘makes the case that the category Aryan was brought into being by Western philology. Put simply, there never was such a people, race, or language’ (6). It concludes with a discussion of the reception of Aryan theory in India, the home of Sanskrit, the ancient language that first fired the Aryan dreams of European scholars. Along the way, Hutton offers many insightful observations that problematize much scholarly common sense in linguistics about the nature of languages, how they are constituted, connected to their speakers, and ‘related’ to one another.

The book is divided into seven core chapters buttressed by an introduction and conclusion. Chapters 1 to 4 examine the emergence of the Aryan paradigm in European scholarship. The story begins with the rise of the twin—and often rival—disciplines of philology and physical anthropology in the late eighteenth century and follows them to their apogee in the nineteenth century. Both disciplines sought to fashion a new ‘scientific’ (in the sense of rigorous and systematic) understanding of human diversity and its supposed historical origins, which would overturn the classical explanations derived from biblical and mythological traditions. In this endeavour, philology elevated language to the defining criterion of a people, while physical anthropology aimed to reduce human diversity to skin colours, skull shapes, hair types, and other bodily measurements, and used these to classify humans into ‘racial’ groups.

The notion of the Aryans as an ethnic group and ancestor to modern peoples living in regions extending from Europe to India came out of philology. But the figure conventionally cast in the role of discoverer of the affinity between the classical European and Indian languages, Sir William Jones (1746–1794), had no concept of the Aryans. Jones’ model remained the biblical narrative of the repopulation of the earth by Noah’s sons—Shem, Ham, and Japheth—after the deluge. Aryanism was instead an invention of the German Romantics, in particular Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829). In the deep kinship between East and West, proved by commonalities in language, Schlegel saw a unifying and legitimizing force for the German people or Volk, who in the early nineteenth century were politically divided and subject to the universalizing colonial rule of revolutionary France. Language was what united the Germans, and the German language now had a noble pedigree uniting it with that most ancient language Sanskrit.

The term ‘Aryan’ was derived from the Sanskrit word ārya, found in the Vedas, the oldest Sanskrit texts, with apparent cognate forms in the Avesta, the Zoroastrian scriptures composed in the oldest Iranian varieties. With some imagination, nineteenth-century scholars were able to find further cognates in several European languages. It was unclear precisely what ārya referred to. It could be glossed simply as the ‘noble’, ‘virtuous’, or ‘respectable’, but European scholars turned the term into an ethnic endonym. The Vedas were most certainly about the ārya, but there is no reason to suppose that these ārya conceived of themselves as a people in the sense propagated by German Romanticism some thousands of years later, or that the ārya were even a single homogeneous group. Even less likely is the prospect that they can be shown to be our own progenitors.

Up until the 1840s, the term ‘Aryan’ entered into different constellations in various ethnic and linguistic classifications, often competing with alternative terminology that continued to evoke the older biblical paradigm. Aryan as the name for the Indo-European family was ‘definitively popularized’ (70) by the German-born Oxford professor Max Müller (1823–1900), who arrayed it alongside the Semitic and Turanian families. Müller’s scheme preserved both some of the terminology of the biblical narrative (Semitic, the sons of Shem) and its tripartite structure. In genealogies built on biblical sources, Japheth was generally treated as begetter of the Europeans and their congeners (Müller’s Aryans), Shem the father of the Jews and relatives, and Ham the patriarch of everyone else (who Müller called the Turanians). Hutton argues that this tripartite classification reinforced a fateful Aryan/Semitic duality—the true Europeans versus the eternal others—that would later mutate into the catastrophic racial discourse used to justify the genocidal violence of Nazi Germany.

Chapters 5 to 7 investigate the varied interpretations of the Aryan paradigm, both in Europe and in India. Here the putative origins of the Aryans played a crucial role: Did their homeland lie between Europe and India, making them migrants into those regions, or had they spread from one periphery to the other? Answers to this question were inevitably bound up with the contemporary context of nineteenth-century colonialism, which entertained competing ideologies of indigenous authenticity versus the ‘civilizing’ influence of colonial masters. Were the Aryans invaders who had subdued the native populations of India? The contemporary social and ethnic structures of India could be seen as reflecting this presumed history of invasion: the social stratification of the caste system was read as Aryan subjugation rendered static, and in this same period the Subcontinent’s own ethnic duality of Aryan and Dravidian was articulated and elaborated. The status of nineteenth-century British colonizers could also be considered in these terms. Were the British long-lost Aryan cousins who were recapitulating the history of Aryan incursions into India?

Although philology and physical anthropology took different paths to classifying humanity—the former through language and the latter through ‘racial’ variation in the human body—by the second half of the nineteenth century the approaches converged fitfully into a ‘great muddle’ (184). Efforts to harmonize or conflate classifications faced the obvious difficulty that there is no necessary connection between languages and human bodies: a child will learn to speak whatever language they are exposed to, regardless of their parentage, the colour of their skin, or the shape of their skull. An entire people can switch its language. Towards the end of the century, the rising field of archaeology shed new light on the prehistory of Eurasia that further complicated the prevailing Aryan narratives. This muddle splintered into a spectrum of ideas about how human communities are—or ought to be—constituted. At the conservative end of the spectrum were essentializing views that insisted on the importance of common heritage, whether biological or cultural. The most extreme proponents of such positions insisted that there is a natural congruence of language, culture, and biology, which is destroyed by modernity. At the other end of the spectrum were liberal views that conceived of communities as voluntaristic associations and saw no danger in ‘mixed’ societies.

The people that never were is both scholarly and readable, an ideal combination of attributes in a research monograph—and one that is very difficult to achieve. The book is destined to become a standard reference for the emergence of the Aryan concept and its dubious career. The reader can be thankful that Hutton has presented such a masterly narrative in under 300 pages, although the book could have perhaps been rounded out with a few additional passages examining the relentless potency of the Aryan concept in mainstream, non-academic discourse. Hutton does discuss the recent history of Aryanism in India, but much could also be said about the role the term has played in the United States and other Western polities. In other work, Hutton (e.g. Reference Hutton2025) has examined how the scholarly constructions ‘Caucasian’ and ‘Aryan’ escaped the confines of academia and entered mainstream discourse in the United States. Incorporating such material into the book would not have detracted from its contributions to the history of ideas, and it would have helped to place it more firmly in our own historical moment.