The Anxious Triumph

by Donald Sassoon

  Globalization had significant consequences even then. Urban centres, scattered throughout the world, from Shanghai to Buenos Aires, from Alexandria to Naples, were increasingly part of this newly emergent global economy.119

  The gap between the pathbreaker and some of the laggards narrowed. By the end of the Victorian era English industry was faltering. In the years before the First World War, British growth was averaging less than that of the United States, Germany, and Sweden, and productivity was even lower than that of France.

  The surge of the United States was particularly significant. Already in the 1860s the USA had caught up technologically with Britain. By 1870 primacy in technological innovation in Europe had shifted to Germany, which was also on the verge of becoming post-industrial: between 1883 and 1925 the number of white-collar workers increased five times whereas that of industrial workers ‘only’ doubled.120

  Britain retained its lead in shipping, insurance, brokerage, banking, and was still the world’s largest trading power.121 In 1900 it still had the highest GDP per head in the world, but by 1914 it had been overtaken by the United States, Australia, and New Zealand.122

  Why was Britain the pathbreaker? Modern capitalism, it is true, originated in Britain and the Low Countries, but it did so because of exceptional social and economic reasons. It did not have to happen. Had landlords in Britain been unable (for cultural or political reasons) to enclose, with parliamentary support, land hitherto held in common, they might not have been able to increase agricultural yield and promote innovation. Expelled labourers would not have become an industrial workforce and consumers of agrarian surplus.123 Had there not been relatively high wages in Europe entrepreneurs would not have been forced to experiment with technological innovations.

  Coal was widely perceived to have contributed massively to British industrial success, accompanied with an anxiety about the depletion of natural resources. The economist William Stanley Jevons in The Coal Question (1865) did not think that Britain’s lead could possibly last because:

  to disperse so lavishly the cream of our mineral wealth is to be spendthrifts of our capital – to part with that which will never come back. And after all commerce is but a means to an end, the diffusion of civilization and wealth. To allow commerce to proceed until the source of civilization is weakened and overturned is like killing the goose to get the golden egg.124

  These were not solely the preoccupations of a mere economist. On 3 May 1863, William Gladstone, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, in his Financial Statement to the House of Commons, explained the reasons behind British successes. What is remarkable about this speech is that success is not attributed, as it would be today by any of today’s ministers with a rudimentary knowledge of public relations, to the hard work of the people or the prescience and intelligence of the government, but to the luck of having mineral resources. The chief cause of British success, he explained:

  is the possession of our mineral treasures. The fact, not merely of the possession of coal, but of the possession of vast stores of coal under such circumstances that we can raise it to the surface at a lower price than any other country in the world … It is, then, our possession of coal … that has given us this extraordinary pre-eminence in commercial and industrial pursuits.125

  And such circumstances, Gladstone did not need to add, could come to an end. Of course, mineral resources were, at most, a major contributing factor to British success, but the insistence of contemporaries on the importance of coal shows that, while the Victorians may have given the appearance of being a self-satisfied lot, they were, in reality, anxious and perturbed. As Stefan Collini has written: ‘Victorian intellectuals were self-consciously members of a society in the van of progress: the first arrivals in the future cannot be sure what to expect …’126

  Today we think that capitalism is the norm because it is the norm in our era; because it is a state of affairs almost everyone seeks (dissidents are regarded as misfits); because the only recent alternative, communism, failed; because a return to a pre-capitalist era could only occur after a major ecological catastrophe. Yet, it is useful to remind ourselves that, ‘historically speaking, non-development is the rule rather than the exception …’127

  One could easily imagine an economy in which the producers are mainly peasants, who sell part of their product on the market so they can buy some of the goods they cannot produce themselves (for example, salt, the kind of commodity that can be obtained only if one is near a mine or near the sea). Most peasant production, however, is for consumption. Luxury products made by artisans are mainly purchased by the well-off. The income of the upper classes is the chief determinant of the size of this market. This income in turn is determined by the rent they can obtain from the peasants. The level of this rent is determined largely by non-economic variables such as the weather, as well as by cultural and political factors.128 In theory, things could go on like this for ever. Things certainly went on like this for a very long time. Nothing would necessarily propel this economy into a capitalist one.

  But something did. A number of factors converged, and once industrial growth in one area was underway, it transformed at once all other areas and countries into ‘laggards’, while Britain, a small country with a large navy, became ‘advanced’. The world had become global not only in the sense that there was global trade (an ancient phenomenon) but also in the sense that a particular set of economic arrangements came to be seen as the key to success in all other spheres.

  Which other European country could have done the same? The Netherlands, a major commercial power in the eighteenth century? France? Or a small country like Belgium? With its excellent mining resources and abundant labour force Belgium was the second most industrialized country in the world when it was created in 1830. It was ahead of France and not far behind Britain. Like Britain it was committed, by the middle of the nineteenth century, to the kind of economic liberalism which, at the time, meant essentially the elimination of tariffs on agricultural produce.129

  But size matters. Eventually even pathbreaking Britain was not a big enough country. The new leader was America, whose growing power impressed industrialists everywhere. The supremacy of other countries enables domestic producers to scare their own government into doing something about protecting industry, subsidizing it, and making all sorts of concessions. Adversaries, real or imaginary, are often more useful than friends.

  8

  Russia: The Reluctant Laggard

  Napoleon’s wars provided a major impetus towards modernization, as is often the case with wars. Prussia, Spain, and the Italian states, unable to withstand the emperor, were propelled towards reform. Russia, which did withstand the French armies, remained an absolutist state for decades, until it lost a war, the Crimean (1853–6), and tentative reforms were promulgated to make the state a little less absolute. The complex relationship between political absolutism and economic backwardness has dominated Russia’s hesitant and problematic modernization from the second half of the nineteenth century to the present day.

  Intellectuals dreamt of the awakening of Russia. The country’s greatest poet, Alexander Pushkin, in a poem written in 1818 (he was only nineteen) dedicated to Pyotr Chaadayev (author of the Philosophical Letters, which denounced Russia’s laggard status) wrote:

  My friends, let’s trust! It will rise up,

  This star of charming lucky fortune

  And on the fragments of despotism

  They’ll write all our simple names.1

  More pessimistic was another major Russian poet, Mikhail Lermontov, a contemporary of Pushkin’s. In ‘A Prophecy’, written in 1830 (Lermontov was only 16) and published in 1862, he foretells the terrible fate awaiting Russia:

  A year will come – of Russia’s blackest dread;

  Then will the crown fall from the royal head,

  The throne of tsars will perish in the mud,

  The food of many will be death and blood …2

  In 1860, Russia was the
least developed of the so-called Great Powers with only 860,000 people in industry, out of an adult population of 74 million.3 Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War revealed her backwardness even to those who sought to deny it: Russian battleships were inferior to those of the British and the French; Russian rifles were primitive, the Russian transportation system rudimentary. In 1855, Leo Tolstoy, in his Sevastopol Sketches, celebrated the courage and resilience of the Russian people in defending not the Tsar but Mother Russia.4 Something had to be done, and the state had to do it. State-led growth remained largely determined by military considerations. ‘The state,’ wrote the economic historian Alexander Gerschenkron, ‘moved by its military interest, assumed the role of the primary agent propelling the economic progress in the country.’5 Boris Chicherin, a remarkable liberal conservative, spoke for many when he wrote in 1857: ‘What good is the great valour of the Russian people when their energies are sapped by the general corruption of the state apparatus, by the virtually universal corruption they see on all sides?’ The people should no longer be treated as a child, he continued, but ‘as an adult who thinks and acts independently’. Not that he was suggesting a limitation of tsarist authority (‘about which no one in Russia even thinks’, he added), but a mechanism for the Tsar to find out what it was that ‘his’ people were thinking.6

  The problem, from the point of view of progress, was that in Russia the entrepreneurial bourgeoisie were weak and saw no problem with autocracy, from which all they wanted was a little protection. Liberal ideas were advanced not by the entrepreneurs themselves but by dissident elements of the aristocracy and by the intelligentsia. The ever percipient Paul Milyoukov, writing in 1905, noted, with only a slight exaggeration, that whereas in Europe liberalism originated in the bourgeoisie:

  in Russia though it was directed against the landlord class, as elsewhere, it was started by the members of the same class of agrarian gentry and nobility, and the promoters of the movement, far from supporting the class interests, undermined the social position of the nobility and destroyed the very source of their political power.7

  They were guided by philanthropic considerations and advanced political theories rather than class interest. ‘Russian liberalism was not bourgeois, but intellectual …’8

  The connection between reforms and economic development was obvious to all, but for a long time even the liberal Russian intelligentsia was ambivalent about industrialization, preferring to emphasize the social, cultural, and political problems of backwardness rather than the economic ones. As early as 1842 the radical Russian thinker Alexander Herzen accused Romantic intellectuals of behaving like Don Quixote in their scorn for labour and machines and for the ‘material tendency of the age’. ‘[E]nsconced upon their high belfries,’ he lamented, they ‘failed to observe the romance of industrialization which was unfolding on so grand a scale in North America.’9 Yet even Herzen, anxious about the consequences of industrial growth, thought that it might be possible to skip the dreaded ‘stage’ of private capitalist accumulation and project the country directly into a kind of ill-defined socialistic economy based on the village commune, the obshchina. It was on this basis that, much later, the Socialist Revolutionary Party, the heir to the Narodniks (the Populists), came closest to the aspiration of the peasantry and their apparent desire to hold land in common.10

  Like many intellectuals, Herzen wanted everything: to liberate the individual and to preserve the commune; to have a special Russia, proud of its traditions and yet imbued with English liberalism; to have development without any of its drawbacks.11 He wanted both Western modernity and Slavic tradition:

  Only the mighty thought of the West … is able to fertilize the seeds slumbering in the patriarchal mode of the life of the Slavs … The workmen’s guild and the village commune, the sharing of profits and the partition of fields, the meeting of the mir and the union of villages into self-governing volost, are all the cornerstones on which the mansion of our future, freely communal existence will be built. But these cornerstones are only stones … and without the thought of the West our future cathedral would not rise above its foundations.12

  The great debate between the Slavophiles and the Westernizers dominated Russian thought throughout the nineteenth century. At the heart of the Slavophile outlook was an almost mystical belief in the Russian peasant, the muzhik, and the communal ownership of land through the village commune, the mir or obshchina, which was one of the central institutions of rural Russia. Slavophiles believed in ‘the people’ from a position of reaction to modernity, they believed in the idyllic village, the obshchina, where decisions were taken by the local sobornost or spiritual community, and where individualism had no role. They decried the Westernizing sentiments of Tsar Peter the Great (r. 1682– 1725) and Catherine the Great (r. 1762–96). The Westernizers had cut the connection between the aristocracy and the people, the narod. They claimed the aristocracy had turned their back on the Russian people. They had turned to the West. They imitated the Europeans. They were in awe of the French, the Germans, and the English. They were ashamed of being Russian, of being Slavic. In the 1830s religious writers such as Konstantin Aksakov and the poet Aleksey Khomyakov glorified the distinctiveness of the Slavic East, in its pure and uncontaminated Christianity, in the absence of all traces of Roman law or of what they regarded as ‘pagan’ irrationalism.13 One can, at once, recognize a form of resistance to modernity that is not peculiar to Russia. In Russia, however, it was articulated with particular intensity. There was a strong belief among Slavophiles that it was among the simple people, among the peasantry, not among the ruling classes, that the idea of Russia and of the Orthodox Church was preserved.14

  The Slavophiles moved with the times. As true reactionaries they devised new ways to stop the new. They wanted to preserve the obshchina but they wanted it precisely because it was a traditional non-capitalist, non-individualistic way of organizing and maintaining the rural economy. This debate on the development of capitalism between Slavophiles and Westernizers was almost a dress rehearsal for the grand issues of the following century on whether the road to capitalism (or socialism) would be more or less the same for all.15

  Like so many other concepts embraced by the Russian intelligentsia, the idea that the obshchina might be of great significance for Russian development had to be legitimized from abroad, by foreign visitors such as August von Haxthausen. His Studien über die innern Zustände, das Volksleben und insbesondere die ländlichen Einrichtungen Russ-lands (Studies on the Internal Conditions, the People and especially the Rural Institutions of Russia, 1847–52), translated into French and English shortly after publication, was widely read among the educated classes, even though he was far from being the first to extol the commune.16 Von Haxthausen had an idyllic view of peasant life derived from proto-Romantics such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Johann Gottfried Herder. He believed that the muzhik, the peasant, was morally superior, the quintessential Russian. Von Haxthausen enthused particularly about the patriarchal nature of the obshchina in the belief that the principles of this communal institution might ease the shock of industrial development. He was reassured in this by his perception of the non-revolutionary nature of the muzhik, whom, he thought, condescendingly, had:

  a childlike fear and veneration for the Czar; he loves him with devoted tenderness … The celebrated expression ‘Prikazeno’ (It is ordered), has a magical power over him. Whatever the Emperor commands must be done … The profound veneration felt for the Czar is also shown in the care of everything belonging to him …17

  Such views were eagerly embraced by those who either did not want Russia to undergo any form of capitalist development at all, or hoped that the promised land of industrialization would be reached in a novel and original way, less individualistic, less destructive of the past, less harsh, avoiding the horrors described by Karl Marx:

  the highest development of productive power together with the greatest expansion of existing wealth will coincide with depreciation
of capital, degradation of the labourer, and a most straitened exhaustion of his vital powers. These contradictions lead to explosions, cataclysms, crises, in which … capital … is violently reduced to the point where it can go on.18

  The fear of such upheaval may explain why so many, in Russia, put their hopes in the people, the narod, the repository of wisdom, the embodiment of the Great Russian Soul. As Nikolai Berdyaev wrote in The Russian Idea (written during the Second World War), ‘There are in the Russian people germs … of common life, of a possible brotherhood of man, things which are not yet to be found among peoples in the West.’19

  In Ivan Turgenev’s 1867 novel Smoke (Dym) the Westernizer Sozont Potugin points out that, while a group of Englishmen would discuss technological innovations, the Germans the unification of their country, and the French their amorous adventures, the Russians would discuss:

  the significance and the future of Russia … then, of course the rotten West comes in for its share. It’s a curious thing, it beats us at every point, this West – but yet we declare that it’s rotten! And if only we had a genuine contempt for it … but … the opinion of the West is the only thing we value, the opinion, that’s to say, of the Parisian loafers … but the habits of slavery are too deeply ingrained in us; … And our pride is slavish, and slavish, too, is our humility.

  And the rant continued:

  and Russia for ten whole centuries has created nothing of its own, either in government, in law, in science, in art, or even in handicraft … But wait a little, have patience; it is all coming. And, why is it coming …? Why, because we … the cultured classes are all worthless; but the people … Oh, the great people! You see that peasant’s smock? That is the source that everything is to come from. All the other idols have broken down; let us have faith in the smock-frock. Well, but suppose the smock-frock fails us? No, it will not fail.20