If necessary, conservative reformers must co-opt the opposition, embrace their cause to make sure that nothing essential changes. In Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s great novel Il gattopardo the young Tancredi reassured his uncle, the novel’s protagonist Prince Fabrizio di Salina, that he had joined Garibaldi’s revolutionary expedition to Sicily in 1860 to contain its radicalism: ‘Se non ci siamo anche noi, quelli ti combinano la repubblica. Se vogliamo che tutto rimanga com’è, bisogna che tutto cambi. Mi sono spiegato?’ (‘If we are not there as well, they will set up a republic. If we want everything to remain the same, everything must change. Do you understand?’)71
Aligned against liberals and conservatives we find ‘the reactionaries’ – I use the term descriptively, not pejoratively. Originally the reactionaries, including those mentioned above such as Thomas Carlyle, as well as a galaxy of French and Italian Catholics, wished to return to a pre-industrial age. The old days were always better and change is always a change for the worse. As the historian Michael Bentley wrote about diehard British Tories in the nineteenth century:
Conservatism has a close and necessary relationship with the end of the world. That everything slides from a better condition to a worse is not merely the Tory’s allegation, after all; it is an important reason for his existence.72
The ‘reactionaries’ longed for an idealized past in which everyone knew their place. They saw every novelty as undesirable (they were not always wrong). They disapproved of the new power of markets because it privileged the power of money instead of aristocratic values. Markets enabled anyone with money to obtain status, enhancing individualism. Although the reactionaries were beating the retreat in the last decades of the nineteenth century, their views influenced all politics, and still do. By decrying change they slowed it down. Lord Salisbury, the great anti-democratic Prime Minister of late Victorian Britain, explained the position admirably:
The perils of change are so great, the promise of the most hopeful theories is so often deceptive, that it is frequently the wiser part to uphold the existing state of things, if it can be done, even though, in point of argument, it should be utterly indefensible.73
Of course, the reactionaries could never hope to win – they lost all the battles they fought – but they had considerable support among the members of the lower orders who felt threatened by the new capitalist social order. Unable to gather sufficient strength to put the clock back, they tried to stop it from ticking on. They made reforms difficult. They put obstacles in the way of democracy, civil rights, female emancipation. They defended traditions as a matter of conviction, thus often ensuring that reforms would be promulgated only when they were seen as absolutely necessary. Their views, however ahistorical, were widely shared and still survive. And while change is one of the few constant elements in the history of the world, a sceptical attitude towards it is not unhealthy since every modification, whether gradual or speedy, is seldom to the advantage of all.
Religion underpinned the beliefs of many reactionaries, who, at least in Europe, included many Roman Catholics. They too were dismayed by modernity. They assumed that religion required the survival of the old rural order, where everyone accepted with grace what fate had ordained. But, as the century progressed, many Christians, popes as well as Protestant bishops, realized that a return to the old status quo was utopian and that the world could not stand still. They moved away from the reactionaries and adopted some of the views of enlightened conservatives. These Christians believed that religion should have social goals and that the everyday life of ordinary mortals should be made more endurable even in this vale of tears. While remaining committed to a religious view of human society, to hallowed traditions, and social deference, they also knew that such attitudes were no longer sufficient in the face of advancing capitalist modernity – a threat they could no longer dispel by ignoring it.
The socialists, above all in Germany, where they were strongest, wanted everything to change and nothing to stay the same, but, like the liberals, they accepted the inevitability of capitalism, which they regarded as a temporarily progressive force. They shared with liberals a commitment to capitalist modernity and industrialization. They praised capitalism’s systematic destruction of tradition. They celebrated the disruption of rural life, with its absurd superstitions and arcane religious beliefs. Following Marx and Werner Sombart, they were convinced that destruction, in this case the destruction of the traditional world, would generate a new spirit of creativity – what Sombart referred to as schöpferische Zerstörung (creative destruction) – a concept later theorized by Joseph Schumpeter, for whom the process of creative destruction was ‘the essential fact about capitalism’.74
Socialists did not celebrate capitalism as an end in itself but as the anticipation of the society of the future, a society without classes and privileges. The capitalist social order, they believed – following Marx – was the necessary antechamber to a socialist society. Some were confident that capitalism would eventually enter into a terminal crisis and collapse under the burden of its own contradictions, enabling humanity to reconstruct society anew. Others believed that only a revolutionary uprising, a final onslaught on the citadel of capitalism, could give birth to the new society. In practice such doctrinal disputes did not matter as much as the participants believed. Revolutionaries and reformists alike were convinced that their chances were intimately connected to the physical expansion in the numbers of the working class and hence dependent on the expansion of capitalism. Most socialist parties were formed in the last decades of the nineteenth century, but almost exclusively in western and central Europe and where Europeans had settled (as in the United States, Australia, and New Zealand). They were weak or non-existent elsewhere.
In the minds of many socialists the model for a socialist party was the German Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands. Created in 1863 it soon became the most successful socialist party in the world in terms of organization, doctrine, and electoral strength.
In France the fragmented socialist movement took some time in separating itself from the radical republican tradition. By the 1880s the Third Republic, born in 1870, had defeated those who wished to re-establish a monarchical regime. Only then did France develop a socialist party, but one that remained deeply divided between various factions, at least until its formal unification in 1905.
In Britain the powerful trade union movement, throughout the nineteenth century, refrained from forming a socialist party, in the belief that the Liberal Party would be able to deliver substantial gains for the labour movement: the British unions had no objections to capitalism per se, only to some of its manifestations (exploitation, unfairness, inequalities). What was required was a political system in which the economic struggle between labour and capital could be carried out within a framework of rules more favourable to the workers. In this sense continental parties were not so different. Although their programmes wanted the abolition of private ownership of the means of production, their immediate aims were the expansion of democracy, the development of a regulatory framework for capitalism, and social reforms. Socialist politics was always paradoxical. The socialists wanted the abolition of capitalism, but the reforms they advocated tended to strengthen it. The more successful they were in their reformist aims the more the final aim of abolishing capitalism receded.
Thus a powerful though disparate range of forces was formed at the end of the nineteenth century, united by a common desire to ameliorate the fate of those affected by capitalism, and by a recognition of the inevitability of capitalist modernity, divided only by a different attitude on its desirability. These various political ‘families’ (liberal, reactionary, socialist), of course, never existed in a pristine state, each patrolling its boundaries with zeal and fervour. In the murky and ever-changing world of politics one often fights with borrowed concepts and with ideas developed on the hoof, making friends with former enemies, revising positions hitherto staunchly defended, and justifying what was, only
yesterday, apparently unjustifiable. Thus in Britain, once they realized that the extension of the suffrage was inevitable, the Conservatives under Disraeli introduced the Reform Bill in 1867 enfranchising almost the whole of the male working class. In Austria-Hungary, pro-capitalist cosmopolitan liberals, faced with reactionary aristocrats, anti-capitalist Social Democrats, anti-Semitic lower middle-class Social Christians and the nationalism of the Slavic minorities, sought (and obtained) the support of the imperial house of Habsburg to protect their positions and modernize the empire.75
What of religion? Social Christianity was a significant force but mainly in (western) Europe. It acquired weight and renown in Latin America only in the last decades of the twentieth century. The Roman Catholic Church remained a bastion of reaction until the last decade of the nineteenth century – a role it continued to play in some countries well into the twentieth. The Russian Orthodox Church was equally a support system for Tsarism, though, here as elsewhere, there were always dissident voices, such as those of Georgy Gapon, an Orthodox priest who was a working-class leader in St Petersburg in 1905.
Protestantism, in its various forms, had always been more socially aware. In its Methodist and Quaker manifestations it inspired many trade unionist and labour activists in late nineteenth-century Britain, while the Anglican Church remained solidly Tory. In the United States, Evangelical and Baptist churches played a leading role among abolitionists. Christianity was also a source of strength and resistance among the slaves themselves and an important component of the American populist movement against the big corporations. (American fundamentalists turned pro-capitalist only in the last few decades of the twentieth century.) Considering the relatively recent alliance between neo-liberal thought and creationism – the rejection of Darwin’s theory of evolution in favour of the biblical account – it is ironic that, in the nineteenth century, much pro-capitalist thought in the United States was influenced by a derivative of Darwinism – social Darwinism – as epitomized by William Graham Sumner’s What Social Classes Owe to Each Other (1883), which extolled capitalism precisely because it was not based on traditional ties but on rational contract.76 Conversely, some strands of progressive thought were implacably opposed to Darwinism, such as that represented by William Jennings Bryan, the leading populist politician, enemy of banks and trusts, a devout Presbyterian, and liberals such as Samuel Wilberforce, son of William Wilberforce, the leader of the anti-slave-trade movement in Great Britain.
*
My narrative opens around 1860, when Europe still regarded itself as the centre of the world and had not yet begun its long voyage towards the periphery. But since capitalist modernization involved most of the planet, this book will avoid, I hope, excessive Eurocentrism. The main focus will be on the decades leading up to the First World War, those halcyon days before the era of murderous wars and massacres of civilians, the decades that the French and others called la Belle Époque, the Americans the ‘Gilded Age’, and the British the ‘Great Victorian Boom’.77 That was the period where global capitalism truly emerged, the period of the first great modern economic globalization. After the 1914–18 war globalization subsided and even went into reverse, capitalism retreating ‘into the igloos of its nation-state economies and their associated empires’.78 Globalization re-emerged after 1945, reaching new heights in the decades following 1980.79 Similarly, capital mobility was very high in the period between 1870 and 1914, dropped during the 1930s, and then expanded gently from 1945 until 1971, before taking off rapidly in the subsequent decades.80
In the decades to 1900, countries that regarded themselves as laggards, determined to catch up with the lead country (Great Britain), had no choice but to strengthen their national state. The idea that capitalist development should be left to entrepreneurs was seldom taken seriously. Capitalists themselves asked to be protected by their state. In any case, in most countries, there were not many capitalists and few willing or able to take risks without state protection. Capitalists had to be nurtured and protected. By the end of the twentieth century, capitalism had grown and matured. Where it was strong and sturdy, the capitalists and their apologists sought, Oedipally, to free themselves from the embrace of the state, demanding a ‘return’ to the minimal state they imagined existed ‘in the good old days’. The fantasy of better days – ‘Before the Fall’ – is a recurring myth in world history, as Walt Whitman wrote in Leaves of Grass (1888):
Then for the teeming quietest, happiest days of all!
The brooding and blissful halcyon days!
In the 1880s the prevailing view among the politically conscious was that for liberal capitalism to thrive, it was necessary to strengthen the state. And since the disruption accompanying industrialization would be considerable, the mobilization of people required unprecedented resources, and the benefits were not immediate, it was necessary to involve an important section of the population, perhaps the majority, in economic development. For this to occur, capitalism had to become a collective project. It had to mobilize the people, the whole nation.
Capitalism, as we have seen, is never a matter of mere economics. Its expansion generates social and political problems; its failure to expand creates even more problems, albeit of a different nature. The ruling elites must find ways of ensuring that capitalism develops without excessive political and social disruption and confound those who seek to dethrone them. What is required is the formation of a national community, one in which all groups, regardless of their differences, have a stake in capitalist development. This requires a steady and continuous improvement in the conditions of life of the many, so that individuals regard their own problems as temporary, and can hope that, however bad the present, the future will be better, thus partaking of the optimistic ideology of progress – the ideological foundation of capitalism.
But material improvements for the majority take time and are often not sufficiently well distributed. In any case, the formation of a national community cannot proceed simply by increasing prosperity. A feeling of national togetherness, of social solidarity, requires more than simply the hope of greater wealth in the future. At the end of the nineteenth century, various strategies were deployed, not always consciously, to construct a national community: nationalist state-building, democratization, colonialism and foreign expansion, and social reforms.
These themes provide the backbone of the book.
Part One (‘The Condition of the World’) consists of two chapters. The first surveys the proliferation of states in the nineteenth century, new states such as Germany, Romania, and Italy (Belgium and Greece had been created a few decades earlier); states restructured on a new basis such as the Austrian Empire, which became the ‘dual monarchy’ of Austria-Hungary in 1867, following its defeat by Prussia; and enlarged states such as the USA. These joined older states such as Britain, France, Spain, and Japan. The second chapter examines social conditions, contrasts the situation in the countryside and in cities, and how the rich and the poor lived and what they ate: in other words the kind of society capitalism had to work with.
Part Two (‘Becoming Modern’, Chapters 3–9) provides a comparative analysis of the involvement of the state in the economy throughout the world in the decades preceding the First World War. It examines the novel allure of industry, the new role of the state in managing the economy, the question of taxation, and, above all, the anxieties caused by the perception that some countries were more advanced than others, anxieties focused on the modern image of America and exemplified by the great debates on modernization that marked the Tsarist Empire.
Part Three (‘Involving the Demos’, Chapters 10–16) deals with various strategies devised to cope with the disruptions and anxieties of capitalist industrialization: nation-building and its limits (who is part of the ‘nation’ and who is not); democratization, that is, the extension of the suffrage and the development of political, social, and economic rights, including welfare rights that gradually transformed people into citizens, and the rol
e of religion in this process.
Democratization enhanced the appeal of nationalism, essentially a nineteenth-century construct. The precise make-up of nationalism would differ from country to country, but the early exponents of European and Latin American nationalism assumed that it would be democratic (in the nineteenth-century sense of the word, that is, with numerous exclusions). Nationalism could become the ideological glue that held the people together regardless of other differences, by excluding ‘the others’ not on religious or class grounds, as was traditional in pre-modern societies, but on a more or less invented ethnic basis. Not for nothing had Marx and Engels concluded their famous 1848 Manifesto with their rallying cry to the Proletarier aller Länder (‘proletarians of all countries’) to unite, an internationalist appeal that went quite unheeded – not surprisingly since, in the same text, they called upon the proletariat, if it wanted to ‘acquire political supremacy’, to become ‘the leading class of the nation’ and ‘constitute itself the nation’.
Nation-building could also involve projecting the nation’s power overseas by acquiring colonies (principally by Great Britain, France, Belgium, and, much later, Germany, Japan, and Italy), or internally by extending its territories contiguously, for instance the Tsarist Empire to the east and the United States to the west, or by protecting national capitalism with tariffs in the hope that it would benefit some strata of the population. Such themes are dealt with in Part Four (‘Facing the World’, Chapters 17–20). Colonialism, of course, existed in various forms independently of industrial capitalism. The Dutch, Spanish, and Portuguese empires were in reality remnants of an earlier era when these countries had considerable power. During the nineteenth century, Spain lost most of its empire, while Portugal and the Netherlands managed to keep some of their colonies, at great expense. They contributed little to national pride or to industrialization.
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