Empire of Things

by Frank Trentmann

  4

  Cities

  Cities consume. They feed off the surrounding countryside and spit out new goods and tastes. One hundred years ago, the great historian of capitalism Werner Sombart characterized sixteenth- and seventeenth- century Paris, Madrid and London as consuming cities par excellence. These cities were so dominant, he wrote, because they were the home of the two biggest consumers at the time: the court and the Church.1 Catering for luxury made these cities the engine of modern capitalism. In his view, the period after the French Revolution witnessed the decline of the consumption city, as kings were overthrown and cardinals fled. True, there would be seaside resorts and retirement communities, but the future belonged to producing cities and port towns like Manchester and Marseilles. Sombart’s contemporary Max Weber, one of sociology’s founding fathers, similarly defined the consumer city by its ‘non-productive’ clientele, such as rentiers who drew interest on dividends or retirees in the ‘pensionopolis’ of Wiesbaden on the Rhine, the ‘Nice of the North’.2

  This neat distinction between consuming and producing cities, alas, has one weakness. All inhabitants consumed, including workers, traders, housewives and maids. And, in nineteenth-century Europe and the Americas, they did so increasingly in cities. The nineteenth century saw a deepening divide between urbanizing and de-urbanizing regions. In 1800, around 12 per cent of Europeans lived in towns. By 1910, it was 41 per cent. In Latin America, numbers rose more gently, to 20 per cent. China, by contrast, moved in the opposite direction, dropping from 12 per cent in 1600 to 6 per cent by 1900. Africa was largely untouched by cities, but even here there were boom-towns such as Cairo, where the population jumped from 250,000 in 1859 to 700,000 in 1914.3 The period from around 1850 to 1920 saw a great transformation. Cities were not only getting bigger, they were consuming more, and faster. The best-known point of entry into this story has been through the doors of the department store. But this is to start mid-stream. For, in addition to shopping and spectacle, the city transformed the entire infrastructure of consumption and, with it, daily routines, needs and entitlements. What constituted a ‘civilized’ way of life changed for ever.

  FLOW AND DISRUPTION

  Right in the heart of the city a golden spot appeared, another here, a third one there, then a fourth – it is impossible to say how quickly they spread, let alone count them. One cannot imagine anything more beautiful, but now comes the most beautiful part. The spots turn into lines, the lines into figures; sparks join sparks . . . into endless avenues of light. Some, which run across the valley, appear like the richest garlands of sparkling flowers. Others, which crown the heights, resemble the outlines of fantastic buildings.

  Paris had switched on its lights. La ville lumière, the city of light, entranced travellers. Illumination made its temptations irresistible. Paris was like ‘Circe’s magic castle with shining halls full of music and sweet women . . . with brilliant streets, with arcades full of sparkling jewels, shining eyes on one side of the shop windows and longing and yearning on the other.’4

  In 1800, Paris and London made do with a few thousand oil lamps. Most areas were plunged in darkness outside of daylight hours. By 1867, when the above impressions appeared, Paris was lit by around 20,000 gas lamps. By 1907, it had 54,000; London had as many as 77,000 lights, most of them fitted with incandescent burners; each burnt 140 litres of gas a night.5 When the First World War broke out in 1914, Paris was seventy times brighter than during the 1848 revolution. The famous lament by Edward Grey, the British Foreign Secretary, that the lights were going out all over Europe, was as moving in August 1914 as it would have been meaningless three generations earlier.

  Gas, water and transport transformed the emotional and physical space of the city and, with it, the rhythm of urban life. Streets, neighbourhoods and their inhabitants were networked, connected through pipes, gas lines, the omnibus and the tram. Electricity would add another layer, but before the 1920s it was mainly just used to power trams and trains. In the second half of the nineteenth century, any modern city worth the name aspired to be networked. By the 1870s, Buenos Aires, which had around 180,000 inhabitants, had 268km of gas pipes. In Edo (Tokyo), the first gas lights were lit in the Ginza district in 1874. In the most developed corners of Europe, such networks were built in even smaller towns, such as Yeovil in Somerset or Hamilton in Scotland, which in 1913 provided gas to almost 3,000 homes each. British firms were especially active in spreading the know-how and capital from the booming towns at home to cities abroad, an imperialism of gas and water that stretched from Rosario in Argentina to Sydney in Australia.6

  These were works in progress rather than perfectly functioning systems. Urban planners and engineers were prone to compare their creations to hearts and arteries. Yet the city was not a body, organic and circular. Miles of pipes meant miles of roads broken up. Water leaked, gas exploded. Water and gas were natural monopolies with huge start-up costs. Networks sparked conflicts about who should run them and who should pay for what. And they impinged on established patterns of everyday life. With the flow of gas and water came battles over the very essence of consumption. Were baths and water closets ‘basic needs’ or ‘luxuries’? For thousands of years, people had lived without gas and running water. Their adoption would not be as simple as flipping a switch.

  Gas and water consumption was rising dramatically in the course of the nineteenth century. Initially, most of it was for industry. Gas had been first used in mills in the 1790s and business remained the main consumer into the 1870s, followed by cities themselves. Many providers overcharged their small private customers to keep their bigger, commercial ones happy. Liverpool was one of the first cities to woo households and small shops with discounts for ‘perennial users’ in the 1840s. It was only in the 1880s and ’90s, however, that gas entered the home in earnest, helped by rising incomes, cheaper prices and the slot meter. The slot meter was ideal for working-class tenants who managed tight and fluctuating budgets and moved house frequently. By 1913, Leeds provided gas to 112,000 consumers, twice the number thirty years earlier; almost half were on the slot meter and 15 per cent had gas cookers. New gas stoves, which doubled the radiant heat of the older convection model, provided warmth and comfort. In Zurich by 1908, most gas was no longer for lighting but for cooking and heating. Three quarters of all tenements now had gas. Consumption had almost tripled in ten years to 1 billion cubic feet per year. London, on the eve of the First World War, consumed a staggering 50 billion. Latin American cities such as São Paulo were not far behind.7

  It was in the same period that cities developed their modern thirst for water. In 1802, it was estimated that the average Parisian made do with five litres of water a day. By the end of the century, it was more than ten times that. Anyone who thinks heavy water use is a recent problem should look at the United States in this period. American cities quickly established themselves as überconsumers. The bigger the city, the greater its thirst. Small New England towns supplied around 35 to 45 gallons per head per day in the 1860s. In Boston, Chicago and other large cities, it ranged from 60 to 100 gallons. Atlanta in 1884 pumped a phenomenal 225 gallons (855 litres) per person, ten times the amount in Madrid or Berlin.8 Growing cities needed bigger reservoirs, aqueducts and ever more distant sources. Wells and water-carriers gave way to piped supply. The initial demand was not from private individuals but from business – factory owners and commercial users, who dominated town councils and pressed for more, better water for their industries. The discovery of waterborne disease also pointed to the need for clean, abundant water for everyone. Public fountains and free water for schools became a matter of civic pride.

  In water as with gas it was in the last quarter of the century that private consumption took over. A broad phalanx of health reformers, philanthropists and commercial interests urged people to consume more. That cleanliness was next to godliness was nothing new in Europe and North America, but in the eighteenth century it had referred to neat appearance and clothing.9
It was in the following century that the emphasis shifted to the body. Washing oneself, reformers argued, was vital for civic life as well as public health: as long as the better-off reached for smelling salts when they passed one of the ‘great unwashed’, social conflict was inevitable. Yet it was not only the poor who were unclean. Three decades after cholera was identified as a waterborne disease in 1854, London’s Dr John Simon was emphatic in his sanitary handbook that many among the better-off classes, too, had yet to reach a ‘high standard of sensibility to dirt’.10

  Epidemiology, the germ theory of disease and sanitary reforms had social democratic implications. Infectious disease could jump classes. No one was safe unless everyone was cleaner. This concerned public authorities, water companies, builders and landlords, but also private conduct. Regular washing meant self-respect and respect for others. Elementary schools held cleanliness checks to inculcate new habits. In France, exercises drummed into pupils the connection between hygiene, decency and love. A mother did not want to kiss a daughter with a dirty face, one dictation read in the 1890s. Being nice and studious, another explained, was no compensation for being dirty: friends would turn away in disgust. ‘Conjugate: I know my duty. I wash my hands.’11 Dirt, then, bred social exclusion as well as disease. The washroom was to be the training ground of little citizens, soap and running water its civic curriculum.

  By 1900, the tap and the gas light were as much symbols of urban modernity as the museum and the department store. The volumes of water pumped to city dwellers increased dramatically. Water closets and bathrooms added exponential pressures – with every flush, two to three gallons went down the pan. One London engineer found that, on average, taking a public or private bath used between 90 and 120 US gallons.12 ‘Constant supply’ was first introduced in London in the 1870s–’90s. Instead of having intermittent service, pumped during certain hours, then stored in tanks and cisterns, cities set out to provide water at high pressure around the clock, on demand. Constant supply epitomized the universal ambition of networked consumption: flow was to be a twenty-four-hour reality for everyone. London in 1913 pumped over 200 million gallons to its 7 million inhabitants every day and night. By 1912, Leeds supplied its 480,000 inhabitants with 26 million gallons a day via 510 miles of pipes. The Alexandria Water Co. took 5 billion gallons from the Nile to 400,000 people.

  Such triumphs of engineering, however, should not distract from limits and failures. In most cities, constant supply remained the exception. On the eve of the First World War, when all of London was on it, only every fifth Parisian was. Foreign students visiting Paris were advised to boil their water for at least fifteen minutes. In Hamburg, water was pumped unfiltered from the Elbe, spreading cholera in 1892. In Shanghai, a city of a million people, the waterworks company supplied only 30,000 premises – in the thousands of squatter huts, occupants dug their own shallow water holes. Hangzhou, the big city at the southern end of the Grand Canal, got its waterworks only in 1931; twenty years later, a mere 1 per cent there had piped water. Even in inter-war Europe, where running water had become a defining distinction between city people and country folk, many cities lacked a complementary sewage system; in Italy, two thirds of homes had no running water as late as the 1950s.13

  To understand the changing patterns of urban consumption we cannot look at the network just from the centre outwards, as engineers and urban planners tended to do. We also need to view it from the other direction, that is, from the point of view of the women, men and children who opened the tap, went to the standpipe or ran a bath. Aggregate demand was made up of many diverse everyday practices. There was no typical networked city, just as there was no universal consumer.

  Cities, districts – even neighbouring streets – had unequal access to water. Location, class and housing type mattered. In the Berlin neighbourhood of Louisenstadt in 1900, for example, workers fortunate enough to live at the back of an apartment block with more prestigious, already connected flats at the front were twice as likely to have running water as their comrades elsewhere in the city. Moreover, running water is one thing, having a private bathroom, toilet and hot water something else. Water closets spread quickly from the 1860s in some cities, such as Liverpool, London, Boston and New York. In others, toilets strained already overstretched systems and led the authorities to discourage, even prohibit them, as in Manchester. By the 1880s, most urban Americans still emptied their waste into cesspools. In Tampere, Finland’s first industrial city, dry and ash toilets continued to predominate well into the twentieth century. The Municipal Council in Shanghai passed ‘Foreign Building Rule 76’ in 1905: ‘no connection shall be made to any drain, public or private, whereby ordure will be discharged into the same.’ It reserved the right to grant special permission for ‘an approved watercloset system’ upon condition that the content of any cesspool was removed by the council at whatever cost it saw fit. In British slums in the 1950s, homes had televisions and vacuum cleaners but neither indoor toilets nor hot water. Across Europe, a separate bathroom remained a luxury into the 1960s.14

  In Asia, it was the treaty-ports – colonial mini-states where Europeans and Japanese enjoyed trading privileges and extraterritorial sovereignty – that introduced piped water. In Tianjin (Tientsin), near the Bohai Gulf, a British company started to provide the British settlement with tap water in 1899. Four years later, it was joined by the Tientsin Native City Waterworks Company. Few Chinese residents had the money or fittings necessary for running water in the home. Instead, this Chinese–Western joint venture built a network of street hydrants. People went to a ‘water shop’, where they bought a ticket, allowing them to fill their buckets at a hydrant; Beijing operated a similar system. Instead of dealing with thousands of individual customers, the Tientsin water company took its earnings from one or other of the five hundred franchised ‘water shops’, a kind of liquid McDonald’s. Neither the British nor the Tientsin system, however, managed to make a clean break with established customs. British elites had water pipes going into their homes, but no pipes taking the sewage away. Water carriers, well organized in guilds, were understandably reluctant to collect the dirty water only. The hydrants, meanwhile, offered carriers new commercial opportunities. Buckets were filled halfway then topped up from the river and the mix sold on as company water to unsuspecting customers.15 Networks, in other words, were porous, not closed, and self-regulating. There was a flow between imported, modern systems and established local ones. Most people washed and drank from both.

  In Europe and North America, water carriers disappeared from city streets, but running water did not always flow smoothly. Many working-class families shared a tap in the yard. Water pressure could be uneven or lacking altogether. In Philadelphia in the 1880s, a respectable engineer had the water brought up in cans to his bathroom, to the amazement of a visiting English colleague.16 And constant supply brought new vulnerabilities. Not only did tenants come to expect running water around the clock, but so did landlords. Cisterns were troublesome to look after and took up valuable space. Much better to rip them out, landlords concluded, in poorer neighbourhoods like the East End of London, with the full support of local authorities keen to eliminate potential reservoirs of dirt and disease. When a series of frosts and droughts in the 1890s brought the constant system to its knees and forced water companies to switch back to intermittent service during the summer, East Enders were left in a stinking mess, unable to catch the water when it was turned on, let alone flush their toilets (see Plate 26).17

  The spread of gas and electricity networks was similarly uneven. Gas, like water, promised to civilize the home. Adverts for early gas stoves showed housewives leaping in joy from the dirty hell of coal to the paradise of clean fuel. Sometimes, men, too, were urged to throw off the shackles of the time-consuming routine of heating their bathwater with briquettes or charcoal. What running water did for water closets, baths and, later, showers, gas did for toasters, irons and other domestic helpers. The home turned into a ‘consu
mption junction’.18 Gas and electric labour-saving devices entered American homes in earnest only in the 1920s, and Europe and Asia after the Second World War. When Georges Brassens, the singer-songwriter, moved to the 14th arrondissement in Paris in 1944, the house in impasse Florimont had neither gas, electricity nor running water.19 As late as 1949 in Shanghai, a mere 2 per cent had gas. The foundations, however, were already being put in place by gas networks fifty years earlier. For social reformers, gas brought happiness to the home and safety to the streets. The slot meter enabled the poor to enjoy better light, promoting domestic happiness. Temperance advocates held out the slot-gas stove as the greatest enemy of the publican. One penny cooked a healthy meal. Instead of running off to the pub for a bite to eat and a bit of warmth, and getting drunk in the process, husbands stayed at home. Economy, family life and public morals all gained – it was even a step towards female emancipation. Women lecturers stressed how gas freed housewives from staying at home to start and maintain a fire. Outside, it was hoped, gas lights would eliminate the hiding places of thieves and prostitutes.20

  Yet light and darkness bounced off each other. Illumination was incomplete and had paradoxical effects. Gas lighting most effectively enhanced the spectacular atmosphere of spaces devoted to entertainment. Our visitor to Paris was not for nothing so taken with gas-lit shop windows and restaurants. Gas lights expanded the repertoire of magical illusion. In Buenos Aires, the Argentine Theatre on Reconquista Street switched on its lights in 1856. Libraries extended their hours, although the sulphuric acid produced by the combustion of frequently impure gas had the unfortunate side effect of destroying more than one fine book.21 In the home, however, the much-lauded social benefits of lighting were counteracted by fears that gas, when burnt, overexcited the organs and led to blood clots. For decorators, almost as terrifying was the effect on wall hangings and soft furnishings; they championed electricity instead. In bourgeois apartments in Paris, gas in the 1880s was mainly used in corridors and antechambers – in the dining room and intimate spaces, candles were said to be much better for illuminating the faces of guests.22