Within this sphere of culture, bourgeois activities generated powerful currents of self-criticism and pressures for transformation, releasing energies drawn on by the avant-garde movements that emerged in the fin-de-siècle. Although numerous vanguard figures would have bristled to be told so, many of the most determined avant-garde efforts to oppose and transcend bourgeois ideas and practices drew much of their energy and inspiration from the very endeavors and achievements they aimed to controvert and supercede. Marx understood this particular dialectic of bourgeois life very well, but some of those who sought to develop his legacy in the realm of culture have not followed his lead, perhaps unnerved by the surprising persistence of the bourgeois form of life they hoped to see replaced by a “higher” one. I seek to restore this connection in Chapter 14.
I need to make two last observations before closing this Introduction. The first is that this is a book which owes many and large debts to other scholars, on whose work it repeatedly draws to assemble materials for its discussions and arguments. Little of the information provided here is new or based on original research (except for the readings of literary and philosophical texts and visual images, which are my own and may offer some surprises); throughout it is the general argument outlined above that ties the material together and gives the discussion whatever power of illumination it may bear. One reason why I have been able to draw on other people’s work so extensively is that seeds and springs of the interpretation I offer have been developing for some time, if largely unawares, in much of it, so that taken together earlier studies provide more nourishment for the perspective developed here than their authors might have supposed (or in some cases wished). At the same time, giving substance to the ideas developed here entails arguing against some widely accepted notions and the writers who propound them (a task already begun in this Introduction). The need to draw on much earlier work while disputing the claims advanced in some of it shapes my engagement with the existing historical literature; even were it possible to have read all the studies relevant to the large questions I deal with, my aim would not have been to provide up-to-date general accounts of these topics, and I hope readers will not expect to find such accounts here. I follow Max Weber in believing that historians have an obligation to seek objectivity in the sense of dealing responsibly with their materials and taking account of evidence that may call their own views into question, but also that these commitments have to be honored while recognizing that no god’s-eye vision of the past is possible, and that knowledge is only obtainable from some developed point of view.22
At the same time (this is the second observation) certain prominent trends in current historical writing make little or no appearance here. Chief among these is a widespread enthusiasm for dissolving European developments in a larger world-historical narrative so as to develop one or another strategy for “provincializing Europe.” The reasons for such enthusiasm are evident enough in a time when Europe’s once-vaunted supremacy over other regions has collapsed and the justifications offered for it have lost whatever persuasive power they may have possessed, and it deserves to be welcomed to whatever degree it serves to further equality and mutual recognition between different human groups. But the special role played in world history by Europe, and especially by the Western European countries on which I concentrate here cannot be gainsaid. Against those who reject the comparative history of countries and states with national identities on the grounds that it encourages a false or outdated sense of the substantiality and importance of national differences, and that other political forms, notably empires, have been the major frames of experience in the largest part of the world, the history told here reaffirms the importance of the special kind of competition between distinct cities, regions, and states that Europe developed and on which its early and still exemplary emergence into modernity rested. This rivalry was regrettable in many ways to be sure, breeding violence, cruelty, and deception, but it had the crucial effect of visiting failure on every attempt to establish an imperial hegemony in Western Europe itself, whether that of the Habsburgs in the age of Reformation, of Louis XIV in the seventeenth century, or of the French Republic and Empire a century later, giving the continent a character that contrasted with the unitary empires achieved by Seljuks and Ottomans in the Near East and by the series of dynasties that ruled the enormous expanse of China. To be sure wonderful things were achieved in those regions, but the persistence in Europe of competing centers of power, their rivalries exacerbated by religious disunity, undermined attempts to give a unitary direction to the region as a whole, maintained the existence of multiple centers in search of innovation and improvement both in the arts of war and those of peace, endowed the continent with borderlands where competition between authorities weakened the possibility of stable control and gave heterodox people and practices of all kinds – religious, political, and even industrial – better chances to survive, and eventually encouraged rulers, however reluctantly, to tolerate unorthodox ideas and practices in their own lands. Like others I no longer feel comfortable labeling this dynamism and ferment with the title given to the best attempt I know to identify its geographical and historical foundations, E. L. Jones’s The European Miracle, but I freely admit that the current book too is about things that make Europe significant to world history because of its differences from other parts of the globe, and that made it the original home of processes and experiences that increasingly make themselves felt elsewhere.23
Part I Contours of modernity
2 Precocious integration: England
The most bourgeois country and the least
From the perspective just proposed modernity appears both as a singular thing, “everywhere the same,” as Hegel said of spirit, and as a plurality of diverse things, markedly different from place to place. Among the most significant differences were the contributions bourgeois people and activities made to the evolving life around them and the ways this larger context shaped bourgeois or middle-class existence. These contrasts were firmly rooted in earlier history.
National feeling in the sense some nineteenth-century people would celebrate (and others decry) was at best embryonic before 1750, but some explicit consciousness of national identity existed in all three of the countries on which I focus here (and in others too), grounded in various mixes of political, economic, or cultural (including religious) relations. To be sure, some of these ties connected people to inhabitants of other countries as well, but this is a point we must leave aside for now. If we were simply to rank the three in terms of the level of consolidation each had achieved by around 1750, there would be good reason to put England at the top, Germany at the bottom, and France between them. But such a quantitative ranking is less informative than a more qualitative comparison, based on the differing modes of integration each territory had developed. An illuminating way to highlight these differences is to note that each one displayed some characteristic paradox, a distinctive, and in some way surprising, set of relations between elements of society and culture; these paradoxes gave a specific tonality to each country’s story and shaped the space occupied by bourgeois or middle class people and activities within it. I will argue in this and the next two chapters that each of these paradoxes was rooted in the kinds of relations with co-nationals at a distance that operated in each instance, and thus in the particular configuration of networks of means through which these connections were established.
In the English case the paradox was that, of all European lands, indeed of any country in the nineteenth-century world, it was at once the most bourgeois and the least. Its early commercial development on a national scale opened the way to stigmatizing it as a “nation of shopkeepers,” and it would be the pioneer in the innovations that gave birth to modern industry; but it was simultaneously the society where the typical pre-modern phenomena of ancient monarchy and dominant aristocracy retained their power with the least travail. Not only did England escape any significant revolutionary outbreak during the nine
teenth century, it also lacked the idea of a “bourgeoisie” as a separate class until the notion was imported from outside. The term “middle class” was much vaguer (even more so in the plural “classes”); alongside its absence of legal identity stood its very permeable boundaries.
Friedrich Engels recognized this paradox when he said that as the “most bourgeois of countries” England had both a “bourgeois aristocracy” and a “bourgeois working class.” One of the things he meant (apart from vexation about the failure to preserve the clear social oppositions he and Marx theorized) was that a wide range of values and attitudes were shared up and down the social scale. This same diffusion was noted by others at the time (and has been since), but in very different terms, attributing it to aristocratic rather than bourgeois predominance and to the widespread impulse of non-aristocrats to “ape their betters.”1 In itself such imitation did not distinguish England from other places, especially France, but the upper class (or at least large sections of it) taken as a model was strikingly different in the island nation, and in ways that make the coexistence of Engels’s view alongside the opposite one understandable. Here many aristocrats displayed a sense of harmony between their involvements in local life and in national affairs that was much rarer on the continent; they often mixed with middle-class people both in Parliament (many towns thought it provident to choose gentry or nobles to represent them in the House of Commons), and in commerce and the professions (in part because younger sons typically inherited neither land nor titles and had to make their way on some other basis). None of these features weakened the aristocracy’s sense of elite privilege and separation, but they created exceptional bonds between it and those beneath them. Some historians of eighteenth-century England have lined up on one side or the other of a debate over whether the age is better characterized as one of aristocratic or middle-class predominance, but Linda Colley persuasively puts these quarrels aside, instead characterizing the relations between traders and merchants on the one hand, and a state still dominated by noble and gentry proprietors on the other, in terms of mutual dependence.2 It is by now common to recognize that the Reform Bill of 1832 was not the middle-class triumph long portrayed in textbooks, since one of its chief effects was to breathe new vitality into the Whig system of rule by nationally connected aristocrats supported by commercial interests that had triumphed in 1688. Until 1914 the largest fortunes in the “first industrial nation” belonged to great landowners, and the power aristocratic values retained is evident in the claims made by some historians – albeit dubiously, as others have recognized and as I too will argue later on – that it was their survival that sapped the country’s entrepreneurial spirit, allowing it to be overtaken by a rapidly industrializing Germany.3
Although no single explanation can account for so many features of English life, what framed and brought them together was the country’s early and multiform integration, effected through the spread of networks of means in every sphere of life. Nowhere else was so large a proportion of the population, and at different social levels, drawn into national connections and linkages, and nowhere else were the effects of such involvement so widespread and pervasive. The chief reasons for these differences were geographical and historical. England is roughly a third the size of France (closer to half if Scotland is included), and internal communication was favored by navigable rivers (the Thames above all, but also the Humber, the Clyde, the Severn) that not only linked inland rural areas to distant places through water transport (long the best means for bulky goods), but also allowed even inland port cities such as London, Newcastle, and Glasgow to communicate with each other by coastal shipping. By contrast French rivers, including the Seine and the Loire, harbored rocks and currents that made them more difficult to navigate. Paris never became a major ocean port, and had no easy communication with Bordeaux or Marseilles. Germany’s situation (we will come to details later on), was still worse in this regard.4 In addition the successful conquest of England by William of Normandy and his band of some six or seven thousand landless knights in 1066 laid the basis for a unified political elite whose most powerful figures had good reason to cooperate with the monarch, generating a more positive and mutually supportive relationship between central and local power than existed where kings had to extend their sway by competing with already-established lesser lords and princes. Even efforts by ambitious or unscrupulous rulers to impose their will on dukes and earls did not lead to attempts to dismantle central authority (as would occur in France during the Hundred Years War); the barons who forced King John to issue Magna Carta in 1215 combined their insistence on limiting royal power with a determination to preserve it. They and their dependents retained leadership in their areas, providing the Justices of the Peace who long served as local agents of the central power; in contrast, the succession of French bureaucrats (of whom the intendants of the seventeenth century are perhaps the most famous) appeared as foreign intruders in many regions of that country. Serious divisions and conflicts existed to be sure, but the underlying sense of unity in the upper reaches of society re-asserted itself when they were settled, after the Wars of the Roses in the fifteenth century and again following the expulsion of the Stuarts in 1688. The early and continuing development of Parliament owed much to this history.5
Geography and politics also favored the development of perhaps the main vehicle of English national integration in practically every sphere, namely the city of London, at once the generator of vital energies that spread through the country and the nodal point of connection between its regions and classes. London’s growth and its role in national life rested on the unique mix of activities that made it at once a commercial city, reaching out from the wharves and docks of the Thames to every accessible region of the world, a center of manufacturing both for the supply of its own population and for the refinishing and export of imported goods, and a political and administrative capital, the seat of power. The multiform nature of the city’s distant connections would make it a locus of imperial power unique in its range and continuity. Medieval London was smaller than Paris, reaching only around 200,000 people by 1600, when the French capital had twice that many, but a century later it had surpassed the city on the Seine, boasting well over half a million people compared with something under that for its rival. During the eighteenth century Paris remained at around 500,000, whereas London continued to grow rapidly, to 900,000 at the first reliable census in 1801 (a figure Paris would reach in the 1840s, but by then London was growing much faster, to 4.5 million by 1881). London’s pre-1800 growth was largely responsible for the British Isles being the only European area that underwent continuous and accelerating urbanization through the whole of the early modern period, when other regions displayed seesaw patterns of alternating expansion and stagnation.6 What made its size especially significant, however, was the proportion of the overall English population it contained, already around 7% in 1650, and 10% in 1750 (compared with the roughly 2.5% of French who lived in Paris at both those dates). Given the high mortality rates prevalent in early modern cities, London’s expansion could only be fed by immigration, its newcomers arriving from both nearby and distant British points (along with smaller groups of Jews from Spain and Eastern Europe, French Protestants, and Irish). The Thames city’s ability to draw people from counties both close and far away gave it a role in national life and a familiarity to people throughout the country that Paris would acquire only in the later nineteenth century; many big London merchants were immigrants in the sixteenth century, and three-quarters of the city’s Elizabethan mayors had not been born there.
So striking was London’s growth in relation to the rest of England that many early modern Britons feared the city was parasitically draining resources from the provinces, a judgment in which recent historians find some merit, but only for the period up to the mid or late seventeenth century; after this point the stimulation of the London market and the funds the city furnished to finance improvements elsewhere gave it a pos
itive influence on the national economy as a whole. Only in the eighteenth century would Daniel Defoe write of the “general dependence of the whole country upon the city of London … for the consumption of its produce,” but the synergy through which the city’s expansion fostered economic activity elsewhere was already operative a hundred years before, and even earlier in nearby areas. By 1681 London had road links to eighty-eight other towns, a number that rose to 180 by 1705, even before the great age of turnpike-building. A similar level of geographic and economic integration came to continental countries only in the era of the railroads.7 The draw of the London market encouraged agricultural and commercial improvements elsewhere, more productive farming techniques (the use of animal fertilizer and the enclosure of commons) to increase supply, and industrial advances too: by 1650 London was consuming over 300,000 tons of Newcastle coal each year (the smoke from which added to the city’s health problems), and twice that a century later. This early development of coal mining would later be important in making England the first home of modern industry by virtue of the cheaper fuel prices that obtained there.8
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