eric hobsbawm - age of revolution 1789 -1848

5/26/2018 Eric Hobsbawm - Age of Revolution 1789 -1848

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The Age ofRevolut ioni 7 8 9 - 1 8 4 8

E R I C H O B S B A W M

V I N T A G E B O O K SA D iv is ion o f R a n do m H o us e , Inc .

Ne w York


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FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITIO N, AU GU ST 1996Copyright 1962 byE.J. Hobsbawm

All r ights reserved under Internat ional and Pan-AmericanCo pyright Co nven tions. Published in the U nite d States by Vintag e Books,a division of Ra ndo m Ho use, Inc. , NewYork.Original ly publ ished inGrea t Bri tain in hardc over by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, Lo ndo n, in 1962.Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hobsbawm, E .J . (Er icJ . ) , 1917-Th e Age of Revolut ion, 1 78 9-1 89 8 / Eric Hobsbawm. 1st Vintage Books ed.p . cm.

Originally pub lished : L on do n : W eidenfeld & Nicolson, 1962.Includes bibl iographical references (p . ) an d ind ex.ISBN0-679-77253-71. Europ e His tory 1789-1 900 . 2 . Indus t ri a l revo lu t ion .I. Title.

D299.H6 1996940 .2 '7dc20 96-7765CIP

Random House Web address : h t t p : / / w w w . r a n d o m h o u s e . c o m / Printed in the United States of America10 9 8 7 6
http://www.randomhouse.com/http://www.randomhouse.com/


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CONTENTS

PREFACE IXINTRODUCTION I

PART I. DEVELOPMENTSI THE W O R L D IN TH EI 7 8 0 S 72 T H EI N D U S T R I A L R E V O L U T I O N 73 THEF R E N C H R E V O L U T I O N 534 WA R 775 PEACE 996 REVOLUTIONS log7 NATIONALISM I32

PART //. RESULTS8 LAND 1499 T O W A R D S A N I N D U S T R I A L W O R L D L68I O T H E C A R E E R O P E N TO T A L E N T 182I I T H E L A B O U R I N G P O O R 2 0 012 I D E O L O G Y : R E L I G I O N 21713 I D E O L O G Y : S E C U L A R 23414 THEARTS 25315 S C I E N C E 27716 C O N C L U S I O N : T O W A R D S 18 48 297

M A P S 309N O T E S 321B I B L I O G R A P H Y 332I N D E X 339


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M APS

pagei Europe in 1789 3092 Europe in 1810 3103 Europe in 1840 3114 W orld Population in Large Cities: 1800 -1850 31a5 Western Culture 1815-1848 : Op era 3146 T he States of Europe in 1836 3167 W orkshop of the W orld 3178 Industrialization ofEurope: 1850 3189 Spread of French Law 320


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PREFACE

T H I S book traces the transformation of the world between 1789 and1848 insofar as it was due to what is here called the 'dual revolution'the French Revolution of 1789 and the contemporaneous (British) Industrial Revolution. It is therefore strictly neither a history ofEurope nor of the world. Insofar as a country felt the repercussions ofthe dual revolution in this period, I have attempted to refer to it,though often cursorily. Insofar as the impact of the revolution on it inthis period w as negligible, I hav e omitted it. Hen ce the rea der w ill findsomething abou t Egypt here, bu t not about Ja p an ; more about Irelandtha n ab out Bulgaria, abo ut La tin Am erica tha n abou t Africa. N aturallythis does not mean that the histories of the countries and peoples neglected in this volume are less interesting or im po rtan t tha n those whichare includ ed. If its perspective is prim arily E uro pea n, o r mo re precisely,Franco-B ritish, it is because in this period the worldnor at least a largepart of itwas transformed from a European, or rather a Franco-British, base. However, certain topics which might well have deservedmore detailed treatment have also been left aside, not only for reasonsof space, but because (like the history of the USA) they are treated atlength in other volumes in this series.

The object of this book is not detailed narrative, but interpretationand what the French call hautevulgarisation. Its ideal reader is thattheoretical construct, the intelligent and educated citizen, who is notmerely curious about the past, but wishes to understand how and whythe w orld has come to be wh at it is today an d w hither it is going. H enceit would be ped antic and uncalled-for to load the text with as heavy anapparatus of scholarship as it ought to carry for a more learned public.My notes therefore refer almost entirely to the sources of actual quotations and figures, or in some cases to the au thority for statements whichare particularly controversial or surprising.Nevertheless, it is only fair to say something about the material onwhich a very w ide-ranging book such as this is based. All historians arem ore expert (or to put it an othe r wa y, more ignoran t) in some fieldsthan in others. Outside a fairly narrow zone they must rely largely on

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P R E F A C Ethe work of other historians. For the period 1789 to 1848 this secondarylitera ture alone forms a mass of pri nt so vast as to be beyond the know ledge of any individual, even one who can read all the languages inwhich it is written. (In fact, of course, all historians are confined to ahandful of languages at most.) M uc h of this book is therefore second- o reven third-hand, and it will inevitably contain errors, as well as theinevitable foreshortenings which the expert will regret, as the authordoes. A bibliography is provided as a guide to further study.Though the web of history cannot be unravelled into separatethreads without destroying it, a certain amount of subdivision of diesubject is, for practical purposes, essential. I have attempted, veryroughly, to divide the book into two.parts.T h e first jdeals broadly .withthe main developments f-the period r-while.lhc_aecond sketches thekind of society produced by the dual revolution. There are, however,deliberate overlaps, and the distinction is a matter not of theory butof pure convenience.My thanks are due to various people with whom I have discussedaspects of this book or who have read chapters in draft or proof, butwho are not responsible for my erro rs; notab ly J . D . Bernal, DouglasDakin, Ernst Fischer, Francis Haskell, H. G. Koenigsberger and R. F.Leslie. Chapter 14 in particular owes much to the ideas of ErnstFischer. Miss P. Ralph helped considerably as secretary and researchassistant. Miss E. Mason compiled the index.

E.J. H.London,December ig6i

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I N T R O D U C T I O N

W O R D S are witnesses which often speak louder than documents.Let us consider a few English words which were invented, or gainedtheir modern meanings, substantially in the period of sixty years withwhich this volume deals. They are such words as 'industry', 'industrialist', 'factory', 'middle class', 'working class', 'capitalism' and'socialism'. They include 'aristocracy' as well as 'railway', 'liberal' and'conservative' as political terms, 'nationality', 'scientist' and 'engineer','proletariat' and (economic) 'crisis'. 'Utilitarian' and 'statistics', 'sociology' and several other names of modern sciences, 'journalism' and'ideology', are all coinages or adaptations of this period.* So is 'strike'and 'pauperism'.To imagine the modern world without these words (i.e. without thethings and concepts for which they provide names) is to measure theprofundity of the revolution which broke out between 1789 and 1848,and forms th e greatest transformation in h um an h istory since the remotetimes when men invented agriculture and metallurgy, writing, the cityand the state. This revolution has transformed, and continues to transform, the entire world. But in considering it we must distinguish carefully between its long-range results, which cannot be confined to anysocial framework, political organiza tion, or distribution of internatio nalpower and resources, and its early and decisive phase, which wasclosely tied to a specific social and international situation. The greatrevolution of 1789-1848 was the triumph not of'industry' as such, butof capitalist industry; not of liberty and equality in general but ofmiddle classor 'bourgeois' liberal society; not of 'the modern economy' or'the modern state', but of the economies and states in a particulargeographical region of the world (part of Europe and a few patchesof North America), whose centre was the neighbouring and rival statesof Great Britain and France. The transformation of 1789-1848 is

* M ost of these either have international currency, or were fairly literally translated intovarious languages. Thus 'socialism' or 'journalism' are fairly international, while the combination 'iron road' is the basis of the name of the railway everywhere except in its countryof origin.I


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I N T R O D U C T I O Nessentially the twin upheaval which took place in those two countries,and was propagated thence across the entire world.But it is not unreasonable to regard this dual revolutionthe rathermore political French and the industrial (British) revolutionnot somuch as something which belongs to the history of the two countrieswhich were its chief carriers and symbols, but as the twin crater of arather larger regional volcano. That the simultaneous eruptions shouldoccur in France and Britain, and have slightly differing characters, isneither accidental nor uninteresting. But from the point ofview of thehistorian of, let us say, AD 3000, as from the po int of view of theChinese or African observer, it is more relevant to note that theyoccurred somewhere or other in North-western Europe and its overseasprolongations, and tha t they could n ot w ith any probability have beenexpected to occur at this time in any other part of the world. It isequally relevant to note that they are at this period almost inconceivable in any form other than the triumph of a bourgeois-liberalcapitalism.It is evident tha t so profound a transformation can not be understoodwithout going back very much further in history than 1789, or eventhan the decades which immediately preceded it and clearly reflect (atleast in retrospect), the crisis of theancien regimes of the North-westernworld, which the dual revolution was to sweep away. Whether or notwe regard the American Revolution of 1776 as an eruption of equalsignificance to the Anglo-Frenchones,or merely as their m ost im po rtantimmediate precursor and stimulator; whether or not we attach fundamental importance to the constitutional crises and economic reshufflesand stirrings of 1760-89, they can clearly explain at most the occasionand timing of the great breakthrough and not its fundamental causes.How far back into history the analyst should gowhether to the mid-seventeenth century English Revolution, to the Reformation and thebeginning of European military world conquest and colonial exploitation in the early sixteenth century, or even earlier, is for our purposesirrelevant, for such analysis in depth would take us far beyond thechronological boundaries of this volume.Here we need merely observe that the social and economic forces,the political and intellectual tools of this transformation were alreadyprepared, at all events in a part of Europe sufficiently large to revolutionize the rest. Our problem is not to trace the emergence of a worldmarket, of a sufficiently active class of private entrepreneurs, or even(in England) ofa state dedicated to the proposition that the maximization of private profit was the foundation of governm ent policy. Nor is itto trace the evolution of the technology , the scientific know ledge, or the

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I N T R O D U C T I O Nideology of an individualist, secularist, rationalist belief in progress.By the 1780s we can take the existence of all these for granted, thoughwe cannot yet assume that they were sufficiently powerful or widespread. On the contrary, we must, if anything, safeguard against thetem ptatio n to overlook th e novelty of the du al revo lution because of thefamiliarity of its outward costume, the undeniable fact that Robespierre's and Saint-Just's clothes, manners and prose would not havebeen out of place in a drawing-room of the ancien rSgime, that theJeremy Bentham whose reforming ideas expressed the bourgeoisBritain of the 1830s was the very man who had proposed the sameideas to Catherine the Great of Russia, and that the most extremestatements of middle class political economy came from members ofthe eighteen th-century British House of Lo rds.Our problem is thus to explain not the existence of these elementsof a new economy and society, but their triumph; to trace not theprogress of their gradual sapping and mining in previous centuries,but their decisive conquest of the fortress. And it is also to trace theprofound changes which this sudden triumph brought within thecountries most immediately affected by it, and within the rest ofthe world which was now thrown open to the full explosive impact ofthe new forces, the 'conquering bourgeois', to quote the title of a recentworld history of this period.Inevitably, since the dual revolution occurred in one part of Europe,an d its most obvious and im m edia te effects w ere most evident th ere , thehistory with which this volume deals is mainly regional. Inevitablyalso, since the world revolution spread outwards from the double craterof En gland and France it initially took the form of a Euro pea n expansionin an d conquest of the rest of the world. Inde ed its most striking consequence for world history was to establish a domination of the globe bya few western regimes (and especially by the British) which has noparallel in history. Before the merchants, the steam-engines, the shipsan d the guns of the west and before its ideas the age-old civilizationsand empires of the world capitulated and collapsed. India became aprovince administered by British pro-consuls, the Islamic states wereconvulsed by crisis, Africa lay open to direct conquest. Even the greatChinese Empire was forced in 1839-42 to open its frontiers to westernexploitation. By 1848 nothing stood in the way of western conquest ofany territory that western governments or businessmen might find it totheir ad vantag e to occupy, just as nothing b ut time stood in the w ay ofthe progress of western capitalist enterprise.And yet the history of the dual revolution is not merely one of thetriumph ofthenew bourgeoissociety.Itis alsothe history of the emergence

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I N T R O D U C T I O Nof the forces which were, within a century of1848,to have turned expansion into contraction . W hat is m ore, by 1848 this extraord inary futurereversal of fortunes was already to some extent visible. Admittedly, theworld-wide revolt against the west, which dominates the middle of thetwentieth century, was as yet barely discernible. Only in the Islamicworld can we observe the first stages of that process by which thoseconquered by the west have adopted its ideas and techniques to turnthe tables on it: in the beginn ings of inte rna l westernizing reform withinthe Turkish empire in the 1830s, and above all in the neglected andsignificant career of Mohammed AIi of Egypt. But within Europe theforces and ideas which envisaged the supersession of the triumphantnew society, were already emerging. The 'spectre of communism'already haunted Europe by 1848. It was exorcized in 1848. For a longtime thereafter it was to remain as powerless as spectres in fact are,especially in the western world most immediately transformed by thedual revolution. But if we look round the world of the 1960s we shallnot be tempted to underestimate the historic force of the revolutionarysocialist and communist ideology born out of reaction against the dualrevolution, and which had by 1848 found its first classic formulation.The historic period which begins with the construction of the firstfactory system of the modern world in Lancashire and the FrenchRevolution of 1789 ends with the construction of its first railway network and the publication of the Communist Manifesto.

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Part IDEVELOPMENTS


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CHAPTER 1T H E W O R L D I N T H E 1 7 8 0 s

Le dix-huittime stick doit lire m is au P anlhion.Saint-Just1

IT H E first thing to observe about the world of the 1780s is that it wasat once much smaller and much larger than ours. It was smaller geographically, because even the best-educated and best-informed menthen livingslet u ss ay am an like the scientist and traveller A lexan dervo nHum bold t (1769-1859)knew only patches of the inha bited globe.(The 'known worlds' of less scientifically advanced and expansionistcommunities than those of Western Europe were clearly even smaller,diminishing to the tiny segments of the ea rth within which the illiterateSicilian peasant or the cultivator in the Burmese hills lived out his life,and beyond which all was and always would forever be unknow n.)M uch of the surface of the oceans, though by no m eans all, had alreadybeen explored and mapped thanks to the remarkable competence ofeighteenth-ce ntury na vigators like Jam es Cook, thoug h hum an knowledge of the sea-bed was to remain negligible until the mid-twentiethcentury. The main outlines of the continents and most islands wereknown, though by modern standards not too accurately. The size andheight of the mo untain ranges in Eu rope were known withsomeapproachto precision, those in parts of Latin America very roughly, those inAsia hardly at all, those in Africa (with the exception of the Atlas) forpractical purposes not at all. Except for those of China and India, thecourse of the great rivers of the world was mysterious to all but a handful of trappers, traders or coureurs-de-bois, who had, or may have had,knowledge of those in their regions. Outside of a few areasin severalcontinents they did not reach more than a few miles inland from thecoastthe map of the world consisted of white spaces crossed by themarked trails of traders or explorers. But for the rough-and-readysecond- or third-hand information collected by travellers or officials inremote outposts, these white spaces would have been even vaster thanin fact they were.Not only the 'known world' was smaller, but the real world, at anyrate in human terms. Since for practical purposes no censuses are

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T H E A G E O F R E V O L U T I O Navailable, all demographic estimates ate sheer guesses, but it is evidenttha t the earth supported only a fraction of today's popu lation; proba blynot much more than one-third. If the most usually quoted guesses arenot too wide of the m ark Asia and Africa suppo rted a somewhat largerproportion of the world's people than today, Europe, with about187 million in 1800 (as against about 600 million today), a somewhatsmaller one, the Americas obviously a much smaller one. Roughly,two out of every three humans would be Asians in 1800, one out ofeveryfiveEuropean , one out of ten African, one out of thirty-three A merican or Oceanian. It is obvious that this much smaller population wasmuch more sparsely distributed across the face of the globe, exceptperhaps for certain small regions of intensive agriculture or high urbanconcentration, such as parts of China, India and Western or CentralEu rope, where densities com parable to those of mo dern times may haveexisted. If population was smaller, so also was the area of effectivehuman settlement. Climatic conditions (probably somewhat colderand wetter than today, though no longer quite so cold or wet as duringthe worst period of the 'little ice age' of c. 1300-1700) held back thelimits of settlement in the Arctic. Endemic disease, such as malaria,still restricted it in ma ny areas , such as So uthe rn Ita ly, where the coastalplains, long virtually unoccupied, were only gradually peopled duringthe nineteenth century. Primitive forms of the economy, notably hunting and (in Europe) the territorially wasteful seasonal transhumanceof livestock, kept large settlements out of entire regionssuch as theplains of Apulia: the early nineteenth-century tourist's prints of theRoman campagna, an empty malarial space with a few ruins, a fewcattle, and the odd picturesque bandit, are familiar illustrations of suchlandscapes. And of course much land which has since come under theplough was still, even in Europe, barren heath, waterlogged fen,rough grazing or forest.

Hu m anity was smaller in yet a third respect: Europe ans were, on thewhole, distinctly shorter and . lighter th an they are toda y. To take oneillustration from the abundance of statistics about the physique of conscripts on which this generalization is based: in one canton on theLigurian coast 72 per cent of the recruits in 1792-9 were less than1-50 metres (5 ft. 2 in.) tall. 2 That did not mean that the men of thelater eighteenth century were more fragile than we are. The scrawny,stunted, undrilled soldiers of the French Revolution were capable of aphysical endurance equalled today only by the undersized guerillas incolonial mountains. A week's unbroken m arching , w ith full equipm ent,at the rate of thirty miles a day, was common. However, the factremains that human physique was then, by our standards, very poor,8


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T H E W O R L D IN T H E 1 7 8 0 Sas is indicated by the exceptional value kings and generals attached tothe 'tall fellows', who were formed into the ilite regiments of guards,cuirassiers and the like.Yet if the world was in many respects smaller, the sheer difficulty oruncertainty of communications made it in practice much vaster thanit is today. I do not wish to exaggerate these difficulties. The latereighteenth century was, by medieval or sixteenth century standards,an age of abundant and speedy communications, and even before therevolution of the railways, improvements in roads, horse-drawn vehiclesand postal services are quite remarkable. Between the 1760s and theend of the century the jou rne y from Lo ndon to Glasgow was sho rtenedfrom ten or twelve days to sixty-two hours. The system of mail-coachesor diligences, instituted in the second half of the eighteenth century,vastly extended between the end of the Napoleonic wars and thecoming of the railway provided not only relative speedthe postalservice from Paris to Strasbourg took thirty-six hours in 1833but alsoregularity. But the provision for overland passenger-transport wassmall, that for overland goods transport both slow and prohibitivelyexpensive. Those who conducted government business or commercewere by no m eans cut off from one ano the r: it is estimated tha t twentymillion letters passed through the British mails at the beginning of thewars with Bonaparte (at the end of our period there were ten times asmany) ;but for the great majority of the inhabitants of the world letterswere useless, as they could not read, and travelexcept perhaps to andfrom rrarketsaltogether out of the ordinary. If they or their goodsmoved overland, it was overwhelmingly on foot or by the slow speedsofcarts,which even in the early ninete enth cen tury c arried five-sixths ofFren ch goods traffic at somewhat less than tw enty miles a day . Couriersflew across long distances with dispatches; postillions drove mail-coaches with a dozen or so passengers each shaking their bones or, ifequipped with the new leather suspension, making them violently seasick. Noblemen raced along in private carriages. But for the greaterpart of the world the speed of the carter walking beside his horse ormule governed land transport.

Under the circumstances transport by water was therefore not onlyeasier and cheaper, but often also (except for the uncertainties of windand weather) faster. It took Goethe four and three days respectively tosail from Naples to Sicily and back during his Italian tour. The mindboggles at the time it would have taken him to travel overland in anything like comfort. To be within reach of a port was to be within reachof the world: in a real sense London was closer to Plymouth or Leiththan to villages in the Breckland of Norfolk; Seville was more accessible9


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T H E A G E O F R E V O L U T I O Nfrom Veracruz than from Valladolid, Hamburg from Bahia than fromthe Pomeranian hinterland. The chief drawback of water transportwas its intermittency. Even in 1820 the London mails for Hamburgand Holland were made up only twice a week, those for Sweden andPortu gal once weekly, those for No rth Am erica once a m on th. Yet therecan be no doubt that Boston and New York were in much closercontact with Paris than , let us say, the Ca rpa thia n county of M aram aroswas with B udapest. And jus t as it was easier to trans por t goods and menin qu an tity over the vast distances of the oceans easier, for instance, for44,000 to set sail for America from Northern Irish ports in five years(1769-74) than to get five thousand to Dundee in three generationsso it was easier to link distant capitals than country and city. The newsof the fall of the Bastille reach ed the populace of M adr id within thirteendays; but in Peronne, a bare 133 kilometres from the capital, 'the newsfrom Paris' was not received until the 28th.The w orld of 1789 was therefore, for most of its inhab itan ts, incalculably vast. Most of them, unless snatched away by some awful hazard,such as military recruitment, lived and died in the county, and often inthe parish, of their birth: as late as 1861 more than nine out often inseventy of the ninety French departments lived in the department oftheir birth. The rest of the globe was a matter of government agentsand rumour. There were no newspapers, except for a tiny handful ofthe middle and upper classes5,000 was the usual circulation of aFrench journal even in 1814and few could read in any case. Newscame to most through travellers and the mobile section of the population: merchants a nd hawkers, travelling journ eym en, migratory craftsmen and seasonal labourers, the large and mixed population of thevagrant and footloose ranging from itinerant friars or pilgrims tosmugglers, robbers and fairground folk; and, of course, through thesoldiers who fell upon the population in war or garrisoned them inpeace. Naturally news also came through official channelsthroughstate or chu rch. But even th e bulk of the local agents of such state-wideor ecumenical organizations were local men, or men settled for a lifetime's service among those of their kind. Outside the colonies theofficial nominated by his central government and sent to a successionof provincial posts was only just coming into existence. Of all the subaltern agents of the state perhaps only the regim ental officer hab ituallyexpected to live an unlocalized life, consoled only by the variety ofwine, women and horses of his country.

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T H E W O R L D IN T H E I 7 8 0 SI I

Such as it was, the world of 1789 was overwhelmingly rural, andnobody can u nde rstand it who has not absorbed this fundam ental fact.In countries like Russia, Scandinavia or the Balkans, where the cityhad never nourished excessively, between 90 and 97 per cent of thepopulation were rural. Even in areas with a strong though decayedurban tradition, the rural or agricultural percentage was extraordinarily high: 85 per cent in Lombardy, 73-80 per cent in Venetia, morethan 90 per cent in Calabria and Lucania, according to availableestimates.3 In fact, outside of a few very flourishing industrial or commercial areas we should be h ard p ut to it to find a sizeable Eu ropean statein w hich at least four o ut of every five inha bitan ts were not cou ntrym en.And even in Englanditself,the urba n po pulation only just outnum beredthe rural population for the first time in 1851.The word 'urban' is, of course, ambiguous. It includes the twoEuropean cities which by 1789 can be called genuinely large by ourstandards, London, with about a million, and Paris, with about half amillion, and the score or so with a popu lation of 100,000 or m ore : twoin France, two in Germany, perhaps four in Spain, perhaps five inItaly (the Mediterranean was traditionally the home of cities), two inRussia, and one each in Portugal, Poland, Holland, Austria, Ireland,Scotland, and European Turkey. But it also includes the multitude ofsmall provincial towns in which the majority of city-dwellers actuallylived; the ones where a man could stroll in a few minutes from thecathedral square surrounded by the public buildings and-the houses ofthe notab les, to the fields. Of the 19 pe r cent of Au strians w ho, even a tthe end of ou r pe riod (1834), lived in town s, .well over three -quarterslived in towns of less than 20,000 inhabitants; about half in towns ofbetween two and five thousand. These were the towns through whichthe French journeymen wandered on their Tour de France; whosesixteenth-century profiles, preserved likefliesn am ber by the stagnationof subsequent centuries, the German romantic poets evoked in thebackground of their tranquil landscapes; above which the cliffs ofSpanish cathed rals towered; a mo ng whose mud the Chassidic Jew svenerated their miracle-working rabbis and the orthodox ones disputedthe divine subtleties of the law; into which Gogol's inspector-generaldrove to terrify the rich, and Chichikov to ponder on the purchase ofdead souls. But these also were the towns out of which the ardent andambitious young men came to make revolutions or their first million;or both. Robespierre came out ofArras, Gracchus Babeuf out of Saint-Quentin, Napoleon out of Ajaccio.

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T H E A G E O F R E V O L U T I O NThese provincial towns were none the less urb an for being small. Th egenuine townsmen looked down upon the surrounding countryside withthe contempt of the quick-witted and knowledgeable for the strong,slow, ignorant and stupid. (Not that by the standards of the real man

of the world the sleepy back-country township had anything to boastabout: the German popular comedies mocked 'Kraehwinkel'thepetty m unicipalityas cruelly as the m ore obvious rura l hayseeds.) T heline between town and country, or rather between town occupationsand farm occupations, was sharp. In many countries the excise barrier,or sometimes even the old line of the wall, divided the tw o. In extremecases, as in Prussia, the government, anxious to keep its taxable citizensunder proper supervision, secured a virtually total separation of urbanand rural activities. Even where there was no such rigid administrativedivision, townsmen were often physically distinct from peasants. In avast area of Eastern E urope they were Germ an, Jew ish or Italia n islandsin a Slav, Magyar or Rumanian lake. Even townsmen of the samereligion and nationality as the surrounding peasantry looked different:they wore different dress, and indee d were in m ost cases (except for theexploited indoor labouring and manufacturing population) taller,though perhaps also slenderer.* They were probably, and certainlyprided themselves on being, quicker in mind and more literate. Yet intheir m ode of life they w ere almost a s igno rant of w hat wen t on outsidetheir immediate district, almost as closed-in, as the village.The provincial town still belonged essentially to the economy andsociety of the countryside. It lived by battening on the surroundingpeasantry and (with relatively few exceptions) by very little else excepttaking in its own washing. Its professional and middle classes were thedealers in corn and cattle, the processers of fan?i-products, the lawyersan d n otaries who han dled the affairs of noble estates or the interm inab lelitigations which are part of land-owning or land-holding communities;the merchant-entrepreneurs who put out and collected for and fromthe rural spinners and weavers; the more respectable of the representatives of government, lord or church. Its craftsmen and shopkeepers supplied th e surrou nding p easantry or the townsm en, who livedoff the peasantry. The provincial city had declined sadly since itsheyday in the later middle ages. It was only rarely a 'free city' or citystate; only rarely any longer a centre of manufactures for a widermarket or a staging-post in international trade. As it had declined, itclung with increasing stubbornness to that local monopoly of its mark et

* Thus in 1823-7 townsmen in Brussels were on average 3 cm. taller than men from thesurrounding rural communes, townsmen in Louvain 2 cm. There is a considerable body ofmilitary statistics on this point, though all from the nineteenth cen tury.412


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T H E W O R L D IN T H E I 7 8 0 Swhich it defended against all comers: much of the provincialism whichthe young radicals and big city slickers mocked, derived from thismovement of economic self-defence. In Southern Europe the gentlemenand even sometimes the nobles lived in it on the rents of their estates.In Germ any the bureaucracies of the innum erable small principalities,themselves barely more than large estates, administered the wishes ofSerenissimus there with the revenues collected from a dutiful and silentpeasantry. T he provincial town of the late eighteenth century might bea prosperous and expanding community, as its townscape, dominatedby stone bu ildings in a modest classical or rococo style still bea rs w itnessin parts of Western Europe. But that prosperity came from thecountryside.

I l lT he a gra rian p roblem w as' therefore the fundam ental one in the worldof1789,and it is easy to see why the first systematic school of co ntin en taleconomists, the French Physiocrats, assumed as a matter of course thatthe land, and the land rent, was the sole source of net income. And thecrux of the agrarian problem was the relation between those who cultivated the land and those who owned it, those who produced its wealthand those who accumulated it.From the point of view of agrarian prop erty relations, we may divideEuropeor rather the economic complex whose centre lay in WesternEuropeinto three large segments. To the west of Europe there laythe overseas colonies. In these, with the notable exception of theN orth ern U nite d States of Am erica a nd a few less significant patches ofindependent farming, the typical cultivator was an Indian working asa forced labourer or virtual serf, or a Negro working as a slave; somewhat more rarely, a peasant tenant, share-cropper or the like. (In thecolonies of the Eastern Indies, where direct cultivation by Europeanplanters was rarer, the typical form of compulsion by the controllers ofthe la nd was the forced delivery of quotas of crops, e.g. spice orcoffee in the Dutch islands.) In other words the typical cultivator wasunfree or under political constraint. The typical landlord was the ownerof the large quasi-feudal estate (hacienda, finca, estancia) or of a slaveplantation. The characteristic economy of the quasi-feudal estate wasprimitive and self-contained, or at any rate geared to purely regionaldemands: Spanish America exported mining products, also producedby what were virtually Indian serfs, but nothing much in the way offarm-products. The characteristic economy oftheslave-plantation zone,whose centre lay in the Caribbean islands, along the northern coasts of

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TH E A G E O F R EV O LU TI O NSouth America (especially in Northern Brazil) and the southern ones ofthe USA, was the production .of a few vitally important export crops,sugar, to a lesser extent tobacco and coffee, dye-stuffs and, from theIndu strial Revolution onw ards, above all cotton . It therefore formed anintegral part of the European economy and, through the slave-trade, ofthe African. F und am entally the history of this zone in our period can bewritten in terms of the decline of sugar a nd the rise of cotton.To the east of Western Europe, more specifically to the east of a linerunning roughly along the river Elbe, the western frontiers of what istoday Czechoslovakia, and then south to Trieste, cutting off Easternfrom Western Austria, lay the region of agrarian serfdom. Socially,Italy south of Tuscany and U m bria, and Southern Spain belonged tothis region, though S candinav ia (with the partial exception of Denm arkand Southern Sweden) did not. This vast zone contained its patches oftechnically free peasants: German peasant colonists scattered all overit from Slovenia to the Volga, virtually ind epen dent clans in the savagerocks of the Illyrian hinte rland , almost equally savage peasan t-warriorslike the Pand urs and Cossacks on wha t had until lately been the militaryfrontier between Christian and Turk or Tartar, free pioneer squattersbeyond the reach of lord and state, or those who lived in the vastforests, where large-scale farming was out of the question. O n the w hole,however, the typical cultivator was unfree, an d indeed almost drench edby the flood of serfdom which had risen almost without a break sincethe later fifteenth or early sixteenth centuries. It was least obvious inthe Balkan areas which had been, or still were, und er the direct adm inistration of the Turk s. Th ou gh the original agraria n system of the T urkishpre-feudalism, a roug h division of the land in which each un it sup porteda non-hereditary Turkish warrior, had long degenerated into a systemof hereditary landed estates under Mohammedan lords, these lordsseldom engaged in farming. They merely sucked what they could fromtheir peasantry. This is why the Balkans, south of the Danube andSave, emerged from Turkish domination in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries substantially as peasant countries, though extremelypoor ones, and not as countries of concentrated agricultural property.Still, the Balkan peasant was legally unfree as a Christian, and de factounfree as a peasant, at least so long as he was within reach of the lords.

Over the rest of the area, however, the typical peasant was aserf,devoting a large part of the week to forced labour on the lord's land,or its equivalent in other obligations. His unfreedom might b esogrea t asto be barely distinguishable from chattel slavery, as in Russia and thoseparts of Poland where he could be sold separately from the land:a notice in the Gazette deMoscou in 1801 advertised 'For sale, three

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T H E W O R L D IN T H E I 7 8 0 Scoachmen, well-trained and.very presentable, also two girls, aged 18and 15, both of good appearance and skilled in different kinds ofmanual work. The same house has for sale two hairdressers, one,aged 2i, can read, write, play a musical instrument and do duty aspostilion, the other suitable for dressing ladies' and gentlemen's hair;also pianos and org an s.' (A large prop ortion of serfs served as dom estics;in Russia almost 5 per cent of all serfs in 1851.8) In the hinterlandof the Baltic Seathe main trade-route with Western Europeservileagriculture produced largely export crops for the importing countriesof the west: corn, flax, hemp and forest products mostly used forshipping. Elsewhere it relied more on the regional market, which contained at least one accessible region of fairly ad van ced manu factu ringand urban development, Saxony and Bohemia and the great capital ofVienna. Much ofit, however, remained backward. The opening of theBlack Sea route and the increasing urbanization of Western Europe,and notably of Eng land, h ad only just begun to stimulate the corn-exports of the Russian black earth belt, which were to remain the stapleof Russian foreign trade until the industrialization of the USSR. Theeastern servile area may therefore also be regarded as a food and raw-m aterial producing 'depend ent econom y' of W estern Europ e, analogousto the overseas colonies.

The servile areas of Italy and Spain had similar economic characteristics, though the legal technicalities of the peasants' status weresomewhat different. Broadly, they were areas of large noble estates. Itis not impossible that in Sicily and Andalusia several ofthese were thelineal descendants of Roman latifundia, whose slaves and coloni hadturned into the characteristic landless day-labourers of these regions.Cattle-ran chin g, corn-p rodu ction (Sicily is an ancient exp ort-granary)and the extortion of whatever was to be extorted from the miserablepeasantry, provided the income of the dukes and barons who ownedthem.The characteristic landlord of the servile area was thus a nobleow ner a nd cultiv ator or exp loiter of large estates. The ir vastness staggersthe imagination: Catherine the Great gave between forty and fiftythousand serfs to individual favourites; the Radziwills of Poland hadestates as large as half of Ireland; Potocki owned three million acres inthe Ukraine; the Hungarian Esterhazy's (Haydn's patrons) at one timeowned nearly seven million acres. Estates of several hundreds of thousands of acres were common.* Neglected, primitive and inefficient

* Eighty estates of over (roughly) 25,000 acres (10,000 ha) were confiscated in Czechoslovakia after 1918, among them 500,000 acres each from the Schoenborns and theSchwarzenbergs, 400,000 from the Liechtensteins, 170,000 from the Kinskys."15


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T H E A G E O F R E V O L U T I O Nthough these often were, they yielded princely incomes. The Spanishgrandee might, as a French visitor observed of the desolate MedinaSidon ia estates, 'reign like a lion in the forests whose roa r frightens awaywhatever might approach him',7 but h e was not short ofcash, even bythe ample standards of the British milord.Below the m agna tes, a class of country gentlemen of varying size an deconomic resources exploited the peasantry. In some countries it wasinordinately large, and consequently poor and discontented; distinguished from the non-noble chiefly by its political and social privileges and its disinclination to engage in ungen tleman ly pursuits such aswork. In Hungary and Poland it amounted to something like one inten of the total population, in Spain at the end of the eighteenth century to almost half a millionor, in 1827, t o 10 per cent of the totalEuropean nobility;8 elsewhere it was much smaller.

IVIn th e rest of Eu rope the agra rian structu re was socially not dissimilar.T ha t is to say tha t for the peasant or laboure r anybody who owned anestate was a 'gentleman' and a member of the ruling class, and conversely noble or gentle status (which gave social and political privilegesand was still nominally the only road to the highest offices of state)was inconceivable without an estate. In most countries of WesternEurope the feudal order implied by such ways of thinking was stillpolitically very alive, thou gh economically increasingly obsolete. Inde ed ,its very economic obsolescence, which made noble and gentle incomeslimp increasingly far behind the rise in prices and expenditure, madethe aristocracy exploit its one inalienable economic asset, the privilegesof bir th and status, with ever-greater intensity. AU over co ntinen talEurope the nobleman elbowed his low-born rivals out of offices ofprofit under the crown: from Sweden, where the proportion of commoner officers fell from 66 per cent in 1719 (42 per cent in 1700) to23 per cent in 1780,*to Fra nce , wh ere this 'feudal reactio n' precip itatedthe French Revolution (see below Chapter 3). But even where it wasin some ways distinctly shaky, as in Fran ce w here entry into the lande dnobility was relatively easy, or even more in Britain where landedand noble status was the reward for any kind of wealth, provided it waslarge eno ugh, th e link between estate-ownership and ruling-class statusremained, and had indeed lately become somewhat closer.

Economically, however, western rural society was very different. Thecharacteristic peasant had lost much of his servile status in the latemiddle ages, though still often retaining a great many galling marks of16


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T H E W O R L D I N T H E I 7 8 0 Slegal dependenc e. Th e characteristic estate had long ceased to be a unitof economic enterprise and had become a system of collecting rentsand other money incomes. T he m ore orlessfree peasant, larg e, mediumor small, was the characteristic cultiv ator of the soil. If a tenant of somesort he paid rent (or, in a few areas, a share of the crop) to a landlord.If technically a freeholder, he probably still owed the local lord avariety of obligations which might or might not be turned into money(such as the obligation to send his corn to the lord's mill), as well astaxes to the prince, tithes to the church, and some duties of forcedlabou r, all of which con trasted w ith the relative exem ption of the highersocial strata. But if these political bonds were stripped away, a largepart of Europe would emerge as an area of peasant agriculture; generally one in which a minority of wealthy peasants tended to becomecommercial farmers selling a permanent crop surplus to the urbanmarket, and a majority of small and medium peasants lived in someth ing like self-sufficiency off the ir ho ldings unless these were so smallas to oblige them to take part-time work in agriculture or manufacturefor wages.Only afewareas had pushed agrarian development one stage furthertowards a purely capitalist agriculture. England was the chief of these.There landownership was extremely concentrated, but the characteristic cultivator was a medium-sized commercial tenant-farmer operating w ith h ired labo ur. A large unde rgrow th of smallholders, cottagersand the like still obscured this. But when this was stripped -away(roughly between 1760 and 1830) what emerged was not peasantagriculture but a class of agricultural entrepreneurs, the farmers, anda large agrarian proletariat. A few European areas where commercialinvestment traditionally went into farming, as in parts of NorthernItaly and the Netherlands, or where specialized commercial crops wereproduced, also showed strong capitalist tendencies, but this was exceptional. A further exception was Ireland, an unhappy island which combined the disadvantages of the backw ard areas of Europ e with those ofproximity to the most advanced economy. Here a handful of absenteelatifundists similar to the Andalusian or Sicilian ones exploited a vastmass of tenants by means of extortionate money-rents.Technically European agriculture was still, with the exception of afew advanced regions, both traditional and astonishingly inefficient. Itsprodu cts were still mainly the traditiona l on es: rye, wheat, barley, oatsand in Eastern Europe buckwheat, the basic food of the people, beefcattle, sheep, goats and their dairy products, pigs and fowl, a certainam oun t of fruit an d vegetables, wine, and a certain num ber of industrialraw materials such as wool, flax, hemp for cordage, barley for beer, etc.

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T HE AGE OF RE VOL UT I ONThe food of Europe was still regional. The products of other climateswere still rarities, verging on luxury, except perhaps for sugar, the mostimportant foodstuff imported from the tropics and the one whosesweetness has created more human bitterness than any other. InEngland (admittedly the most advanced country) the average annualconsumption p er head in the 1790s was 14 lb . But even in E ngland theaverageper capita consumption of tea in the year of the French Revolution was hardly 2 ounces per m onth .

The new crops imported from the Americas or other parts of thetropics had m ade some headw ay. In Southern Eu rope an d the Balkansmaize (Indian corn) was already quite widespreadit had helped fixmobile peasants to their plots in the Balkansand in Northern Italyrice had made some progress. To bacc o was cultivated in various principalities, mostly as a governm ent mo nopoly for revenue purposes, tho ughits use by modern standards was negligible: the average Englishmanin 1790 smoked, snuffed or chewed about one and a third ounces amonth. Silkwork culture was common in parts of Southern Europe.The chief of the new crops, the potato, was only just making its way,except perhap s in Irelan d wh ere its ability to feed m ore people per acreat subsistence level than any other food had already made it a stapleofcultivation. Outside England and the Low Countries the systematiccultivation of root and fodder crops (other than hay) was still ratherexceptional; and only the Napoleonic wars brought about the massiveproduction of beet for sugar.

The eighteenth century was not, of course, one of agricultural stagnation. On the contrary, a long era of demographic expansion, ofgrowing urbanization, trade and manufacture, encouraged agriculturalimprovement and indeed required it. The second half of the centurysaw the beginning of that startling and henceforward unbroken rise inpopulation which is so characteristic of the modern world: between1755 and 1784, for instance, the rural population of Brabant (Belgium)rose by 44 per cent.10 But what impressed the numerous campaignersfor agricultural improvement, who multiplied their societies, government reports and propagandist publications from Spain to Russia, wasthe size of the obstacles to agrarian advance rather than its progress.

VThe world of agriculture was sluggish, except perhaps for its capitalistsector. That of commerce, manufactures, and the technological andintellectual activities which went with both, was confident, brisk andexpansive, and the classes which benefited from them, active, deter-

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T H E W O R L D I N T H E I 7 8 0 Smined and optimistic. The contemporary observer would be mostimmediately struck by the vast deployment of trade, which was closelytied to colonial exploitation. A system of maritime trade currents,growing rapidly in volume and capacity, circled the earth, bringing itsprofits to the mercantile communities of North Atlantic Europe. Theyused colonial power to rob the inhabitants of the East Indies* of thecommodities exported thence to Europe and Africa, where these andEuro pean goods were used to buy slaves for the rap idly growing pla nta tion systems of the Americas. The American plantations in turn exported their sugar, cotton, etc. in ever vaster and cheaper quantities tothe Atlantic and North Sea ports whence they were redistributed eastwards, together with the traditional manufactures and commodities ofEuropean East-West trade: textiles, salt, wine and the rest. From 'theBaltic' in turn came the grain, timber, flax. From Eastern Europe camethe grain, timber, flax and linen (a profitable export to the tropics),hemp and iron ofthis second colonial zone. And between the relativelydeveloped economies of Europewhich included, economically speaking, the increasingly active communities of white settlers in the northern British colonies of America (after 1783, the Northern USA)theweb of trade became ever more dense.T henabob or planter returned from the colonies with wealth beyondthe dreams of provincial avarice, the merchant and shipper whosesplendid portsBordeaux, Bristol, Liverpoolhad been built or rebuiltin the century, appeared to be the true economic victors of the age,comparable only with the great officials and financiers who drew theirwealth from the profitable service of states, for this was still the agewhen the term 'office of profit under the crown' had its literal meaning.Beside him the middle class of lawyers, estate managers, local brewers,traders and the like, who accumulated a modest wealth from the agricultural world, lived low and quiet lives, and even the manufacturerapp eared little better tha n a very poor relation. For though m ining andmanufactures were expanding rapidly, and in all parts of Europe, themerchant (and in Eastern Europe also often the feudal lord) remainedtheir chief controllers.This was because the chief form of expanding industrial productionwas the so-called dom estic or putting -ou t system, in which the m erchantbought the products of the handicraftsman or of the part-time non-agricultural labour of the peasantry for sale in a wider market. Themere growth of such trade inevitably created rudimentary conditions

* Alsotosome extent oftheFar East, where they bought the tea, silks, china, etc.forwhichthere was a growing European demand. But the political independence of China andJapanmade this trade as yet a somewhat less piratical one.'9


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T H E A G E O F R E V O L U T I O Nfor an ea rly industria l capitalism . T he craftsman selling his wares m ightturn into little more than a worker paid on piece-rates (especially whenthe merchant supplied him with his raw material, and perhaps leasedout productive equipment). The peasant who also wove might becomethe weaver who also had a small plot. Specialization of processes andfunctions might divide the old craft or create a complex of semi-skilledworkers from among peasants. The old master-craftsmen, or somespecial grou p of crafts, or some group of local interm ediaries might tu rninto something like subcontractors or employers. But the key controllerof these decentralized forms of production, the one who linked thelabour of lost villages or back streets with the world market, was somekind of merchant. And the 'industrialists ' who were emerging or aboutto emerge from the ranks of the producers themselves were petty ope rators beside him , even when they were not directly depe nde nt upon him .There were a few exceptions, especially in industrial England. Ironmasters, men like the great potter Josiah Wedgwood, were proud andrespected, their establishments visited by the curious from all overEurope. But the typical industrialist (the word had not yet beeninvented) was as yet a petty-officer rather than a captain of industry.Nevertheless, whatever their status, the activities of commerce andmanufacture flourished brilliantly. The most brilliantly successful ofeighteenth-century European states, Britain, plainly owed its power toits economic progress, and by the 1780s all continental governmentswith any pretence to a rational policy were consequently fosteringeconomic growth, and especially industrial development, though withvery varying success. The sciences, not yet split by nineteenth-centuryacademicism into a superior 'pure' and an inferior 'applied' branch,devoted themselves to the solution of productive problems: the moststriking advances of the 1780s were those of chemistry, which was bytradition most closely linked to workshop practice and the needs ofindustry. The Great Encyclopaedia of Diderot and d'Alembert was notmerely a compendium of progressive social and political thought, butof technological and scientific progress. For indeed the conviction ofthe progress of human knowledge, rationality, wealth, civilization andcontrol over nature with which the eighteenth century was deeplyimbued, the 'Enlightenment', drew its strength primarily from theevident progress of production, trade, and the economic and scientificrationality believed to be associated inevitably with both. And itsgreatest champions were the econom ically most progressive classes, thosemost directly involved in the tangible advances of the time: the mercantile circles and economically enlightened landlords, financiers,scientifically-minded economic and social administrators, the educated

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T H E W O R L D I N T H E I 7 8 0 Smiddle class, manufacturers and entrepreneurs. Such men hailed aBenjamin Franklin, working printer and journalist, inventor, entrepreneur, statesman and shrewd businessman, as the symbol of theactive, self-made, reasoning citizen of the future. Such m en in Eng land ,where the new men had no need of transatlantic revolutionary incarnations, formed the provincial societies out of which both scientific,industrial and political advance sprang. The LunarSociety of Birmingham included the potter Josiah W edgwood, the inventor of them odern steam engine Jam es W att and his business p artn er M atth ewBoulton, the chemist Priestley, the gentleman-biologist and pioneer ofevolutionary theories Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of a greaterDarwin), the great printer Baskerville. Such men everywhere flockedinto the lodges of Freemasonry, where class distinctions did not countand the ideology of the Enlightenment was propagated with a disinterested zeal.It is significant that the two chief centres of the ideology were alsothose of the dual revolution, France and England; though in fact itsideas gained widest international currency in their French formulations(even when these were merely gallicized versions of British ones).A secular, rationalist and progressive individualism dominated 'enlightened' thought. To set the individual free from the shackles whichfettered him was its chief object: from the ignorant traditionalism ofthe M iddle Ages, wh ich still threw their shadow across the w orld, fromthe superstition of the churches (as distinct from 'natural' or 'rational'religion), from the irrationality which divided men into a hierarchy ofhigher and lower ranks according to birth or some other irrelevantcriterio n. L iberty , eq uality an d (it followed) the fraternity of all menwere its slogans. In due course they became those of the French Revolution. The reign of individual liberty could not but have the mostbeneficent consequences. The most extraordinary results could belooked forcould indeed already be observed to follow fromtheunfettered exercise of individual talent in a world of reason. Thepassionate belief in progress of the typ ical 'en ligh tened' think er reflectedthe visible increases in knowledge and technique, in wealth, welfareand civilization which he could see all round him, and which heascribed w ith some justice to the grow ing ad vanc e of his ideas. A t thebeginning of his century witches were still widely burned; at its endenlightened governments like the Austrian had already abolished notonly judicial torture but also slavery. What might not be expected ifthe remaining obstacles to progress such as the vested interests offeudality and church, were swept away?It is not strictly accurate to call the 'enlightenment' a middle class

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T H E A O E O F R E V O L U T I O Nideology, though there were many enlightenersand politically theywere the decisive onesw ho assumed as a m atte r of course tha t the freesociety would be a capitalist society.11 In theory its object was toset all human beings free. AU progressive, rationalist and humanistideologies are implicit in it, and indeed came out ofit. Yet in practicethe leaders of the emancipation for which the enlightenment calledwere likely to be the middle ranks of society, the new, rational men ofability and merit rather than birth, and the social order which wouldemerge from their activities would be a 'bourgeois' and capitalist one.It is mo re acc urate to call the 'enlightenm ent' a revolutionaryideology, in spite of the political caution an d m oderation of m any of itscontinental champions, most of whomuntil the 1780sput theirfaith in enlightened absolute monarchy. For illuminism implied theabolition of the prevailing social and political order in most of Europe.It was too much to expect the anciens regimes to abolish themselvesvoluntarily. On the contrary, as we have seen, in some respects theywere reinforcing themselves against the advance of the new social andeconomic forces. And their strongholds (outside Britain, the UnitedProvinces and a few oth er places where they had already b een defeated)were the very monarchies to which moderate enlighteners pinnedtheir faith.

V IWith the exception of Britain, which had made its revolution in theseventeenth centu ry, a nd a few lesser states, absolute mona rchies ruled inall functioning states of the Eu rop ean con tinen t; those in which they didnot rule fell apa rt into an arc hy and were swallowed by their n eighbo urs,like Poland. Hereditary monarchs by the grace of God headed hierarchies of landed nobles, buttressed by the traditiona l organization andorthodoxy of churches and surrounded by an increasing clutter of institutions which had noth ing b ut a long past to recomm end the m . It^ istrue that the sheer needs of state cohesion and efficiency in an age ofacute international rivalry had long obliged monarchs to curb theanarchic tendencies of their nobles and other vested interests, and tostaff their state apparatus so far as possible with non-aristocratic civilservants. Moreover, in the latter part of the eighteenth century theseneeds, an d the obvious intern ation al success of capitalist British pow er,led most such monarchs (or rather their advisers) to attempt programmes of economic, social, administrative and intellectual modernization. In those days princes adopted the slogan of 'enlightenment' asgovernments in our time, and for analogous reasons, adopt those of

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TtTE WOR LD IN THE I 78 OS'planning'; and as in our day some who adopted them in theory didvery little about them in practice, and most who did so were lessinterested in the general ideals which lay behind the 'enlightened'(or the 'planned') society, than in the practical advantage of adoptingthe most up-to-date methods of multiplying their revenue, wealth andpower.Conversely, the middle and educated classes and those committed toprogress often looked to the powerful central apparatus of an 'enlightened' monarchy to realize their hopes. A prince needed a middle classand its ideas to modernize his state; a weak middle class needed aprince to batter down the resistance of entrenched aristocratic andclerical interests to progress.Yet in fact absolute monarchy, however modernist and innovatory,found it impossibleand indeed showed few signs of wantingtobreak loose from the hierarchy of landed nobles to which, after all, itbelonged, whose values it symbolized and incorporated, and on whosesupport it largely depended. Absolute monarchy, however theoreticallyfree to do whatever it liked, in practice belonged to the world which theenlightenment had baptizedfiodaliti or feudalism, a term later popularized by the French Revolution. Such a monarchy was ready to useall available resources to strengthen its authority and taxable revenuewithin and its power outside its frontiers, and this might well lead it tofoster w ha t were in effect the forces of the rising society. It w as preparedto strengthen its political hand by playing off one estate, class orprovince against another. Yet its horizons were those of its history, itsfunction and its class. It hardly ever wanted, and was never able toachieve, the root-and-branch social and economic transformation whichthe progress of the economy required and the rising social groupscalled for.T o take a n obvious exam ple. Few ration al thinkers, even am ong theadvisers of princes, seriously doubted the need to abolish serfdom andthe surviving bonds of feudal peasant dependence. Such a reform wasrecognized as one of the prim ary points of any 'enlightened' program m e,and there was virtually no prince from Madrid to St Petersburg andfrom Naples to Stockholm who did not, at one time or another in thequarter-century preceding the French Revolution, subscribe to such aprogramme. Yet in fact the only peasant liberations which took placefrom above before 1789 were in sm all an d untyp ical states like Denm arkand Savoy, and on the personal estates of some other princes. Onemajor such liberation was attem pte d, by Joseph II of Austria, in 1781;bu t it failed, in the face of the political resistance of vested interests andof peasant rebellion in excess of what had been anticipated, and had to

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T H E A G E O F R E V O L U T I O Nremain uncompleted. What did abolish ag rar ian feudal relations allover Western and Central Europe was the French Revolution, by directaction, reaction or example, and the revolution of 1848.There was thus a latent, and would soon be an overt, conflictbetween the forces of the old and the new 'bourgeois' society, whichcould not be settled within the framework of the existing politicalregimes, except of course where these already embodied bourgeoistrium ph, as in Britain. W ha t m ade these regimes even more vulnera ble,was that they were subject to pressure from three directions: from thenew forces, from the entrenched, and increasingly stiff resistance of theolder vested interests, and from foreign rivals.Their most vulnerable point was the one wh ere the opposition of oldand new tended to coincide: in the autonomist movements of theremoter or the least firmly controlled provinces or colonies. Thus in theHabsb urg m onarchy the reforms of Josep h II in the 1780s produce duproar in the Austrian Netherlands (the present Belgium) and a revolutionary m ovement which in 1789 joined natu rally w ith th at of theFrench. More commonly, communities of white settlers in the overseascolonies of European states resented the policy of their central government, which subordinated the colonial interests strictly to the metropolitan. In all parts of the Americas, Spanish, French and British, aswell as in Ireland, such settler movements demanded autonomynotalways for regimes which represented economically more progressiveforces than the metropolisand several British colonies either won itpeacefully for a time, like Ireland, or took it by revolution, like theUSA. Economic expansion, colonial development and the tensions ofthe attempted reforms of 'enlightened absolutism' multiplied the occasions for such conflicts in the 1770s and 1780s.

In itself provincial or colonial dissidence was not fatal. Old-established monarchies could survive the loss of a province or two, and themain victim of colonial autonomism, Britain, did not suffer from theweaknesses of the old regimes and therefore remained as stable anddynamic as ever in spite of the American revolution. There were fewregions in which the purely domestic conditions for a major transfer ofpower existed. What made the situation explosive was internationalrivalry.For international rivalry, i.e. war, tested the resources of a state asnothing else did. When they could not pass this test, they shook, cracked ,or fell. One major such rivalry dominated the European internationalscene for most of the eighteenth century, and lay at the core of itsrecurrent periods of general war: 1689-1713, 1740-8, 1756-63,1776-83 and, overlapping into our period, 1792-1815. This was the

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T H E W O R L D IN T H E 1 7 8 0 SConflict between Britain and France, which was also, in a sense, thatbetween the old and the new regimes. For France, though rousingBritish hostility by the rapid expansion of its trade and colonial empire,was also the most powerful, eminent and influential, in a word theclassical, aristocratic absolute mbnarchy. Nowhere is the superiority ofthe new to the old social order more vividly exemplified than in theconflict between these two powers. For the British not only won, withvarying degrees of decisiveness in all but one of these wars. They supported the effort of organizing, financing and waging them with relative ease. T he French m onarchy, on the other han d, though very m uchlarger, m ore populous, a nd , in terms of her potential resources, wealthierthan Britain, found the effort too great. After its defeat in the SevenYears' War (1756-63) the revolt of the American colonies gave it theopportunity to turn the tables on its adversary. France took it. Andindeed, in the subsequent international conflict Britain was badlydefeated, losing the most important part of her American empire; andFrance, the ally of the new USA, was consequently victorious. But thecost was excessive, and the French government's difficulties led itinevitably into that period of domestic political crisis, out of which, sixyears later, the Revolution emerged.

VIIIt remains to round off this preliminary survey of the world on the eveof the dual revolution with a glance at the relations between Europe(or more precisely North-western Europe) and the rest of the world. T hecomplete political and military domination of the world by Europe(and her overseas prolongations, the white settler communities) was tobe the product of the age of the dual revolution. In the late eighteenthcentury several of the great non-European powers and civilizations stillconfronted the white trader, sailor and soldier on apparently equalterms. The great Chinese empire, then at the height ofits effectivenessunder the Manchu (Ch'ing) dynasty, was nobody's victim. On thecontrary, if anything the current of cultural influence ran from east towest, and European philosophers pondered the lessons of the verydifferent but evidently high civilization, while artists and craftsmenembodied the often misunderstood motifs of the Far East in their worksand adapted its new materials'Cchina') to European uses. The Islamicpowers, though (like Turkey) periodically shaken by the militaryforces of neighbouring European states (Austria and above all Russia),were far from the helpless hulks they were to become in the nineteenthcentury. Africa remained virtually immune to European military pene-

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T H E A G E O F R E V O L U T I O Ntration. Except for small areas round the Cape of Good Hope, thewhites were confined to coastal trading posts.Yet already the rapid and increasingly massive expansion of European trade and capitalist enterprise undermined their social order; inAfrica through the unprecedented intensity of the awful traffic inslaves, around the Indian Ocean through the penetration of the rivalcolonizing powers, in the Near and Middle East through trade andmilitary conflict. Already direct European conquest began to extendsignificantly beyond the area long since occupied by the pioneercolonization of the Spaniards and Portuguese in the sixteenth century,the white North American settlers in the seventeenth. The crucialadvance was made by the British, who had already established directterritorial control over part of India (notably Bengal), virtually overthrowing the Mughal empire, a step which was to lead them in ourperiod to become the rulers and administrators of all India. Alreadythe relative feebleness of the non-European civilizations when confronted with the technological and military superiority of the westwas predictable. W hat has been called 'the age of Vasco da G am a', thefour centuries of world history in which a handful of European statesand the European force of capitalism established a complete, thoughas is now evident, a temporary, domination of the entire world, wasabout to reach its climax. The dual revolution was to make Europeanexpansion irresistible, though it was also to provide the non-Europeanworld with the conditions and equipment for its eventual counterattack.

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CHAPTER 2

THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTIONSuch works,however their operations, causes, and consequences, have infinite merit,

an ddogreat credit to the talents of this v eryingeniousand useful man, who willhavethe merit,whereverhe goes, of set t ing men to think. . . . Get rid of that dronish,sleepy, and stupid indifference, tha t lay/ negligence , w hich enchains m en in the exactpaths of theirforefathers, without enquiry, w ithout thoug ht, and w ithout ambition,andyouare sureo fdoinggood.What trains of thoug ht, what a spirit of exertion, w hata m ass and power ofeffort havesprun g in every path of life, from the worksofsuchmenas Brindley, Watt, P riestley, Harrison, Arkwrigh t.... In what path of lifecana manbe found that will not animate his pursuit from seeing thesteam-engine of Watt?A r t h u r Y o u n g , Tours in England and Wales1

From this foul drain the greatest stream of hum an industry flows out to fertilize thewholeworld.From thisilthysewerpuregoldlows.Herehumanity attains its most completedevelopmentand its most brutish, here c ivilization wo rks itsmiraclesandcivilizedman is turned almost into a savage.

A. de Toquevi l l e on Manches ter in 1835*

IL E T US begin with the In du strial Revolu tion, t ha t is to say withBritain. This is at first sight a capricious starting-point, for the repercussions of this revolution did not make themselves felt in an obviousand unmistakable wayat any rate Outside Englanduntil quite latein our period; certainly not before 1830, probably not before 1840 orthereabouts. It is only in the 1830s that literature and the arts beganto be overtly haunted by that rise of the capitalist society, that worldin which all social bonds crumbled except the implacable gold andpa pe r ones of the cash nexus (the phrase comes from Ca rlyle). Balzac'sComidie Humaine, the most extraordinary literary monument ofits rise,belongs to that decade. It is not until about 1840 that the great streamof official an d unofficial literatur e on th e social effects of the In du str ia lRevolution begins to flow: the major Bluebooks and statistical enquiriesin England, Villerme^s Tableau deVetat physique et moral des ouvriers,Engels's Condition of the Working Class inEngland, Ducpetiaux's work inBelgium, and scores of troubled or appa lled observers from Germ any toSpain and the USA. It was not until the 1840s that the proletariat, thatchild of the Industrial Revolution, and Communism, which was now

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T H E A G E O F R E V O L U T I O Nattached to its social movementsthe spectre of the CommunistManifestowalked across the continent. The very name of the Industrial Revolution reflects its relatively tardy impact on Europe. Thething existed in Britain before the word. Not until the 1820s did Englishand French socialiststhemselves an unprecedented groupinvent it,probably by analogy with the political revolution of France. 3Nevertheless it is as well to consider it first, for two reasons. First,because in fact it "broke ou t' to use a question-begging phrase beforethe Bastille was stormed; and second because without it we cannotunderstand the impersonal groundswell of history on which the moreobvious men and events of our period were borne; the uneven complexity ofits rhythm.What does the phrase 'the Industrial Revolution broke out' mean?It means that some time in the 1780s, and for the first time in humanhistory, the shackles were taken off the productive power of humansocieties, which henceforth became capable of the constant, rapid andup to the present limitless multiplication of men, goods and services.This is now technically known to the economists as the 'take-off intoself-sustained growth'. No previous society had been able to breakthrough the ceiling which a pre-industrial social structure, defectivescience and technology, and consequently periodic breakdown, famineand death, imposed on production. The 'take-off' was not, of course,one of those phenomena which, like earthquakes and large meteors,take the non-technical world by surprise. Its pre-history in Europe canbe traced back, depending on the taste of the historian and his particular range of interest, to about AD 1000, if not before, and earlierattempts to leap into the air, clumsy as the experiments of youngducklings, have been flattered with the name of 'industrial revolution'in the thirteenth century, in the sixteenth, in the last decades of theseventeenth. From the middle of the eighteenth century the processof gathering speed for the take-off is so clearly observable that olderhistorians have tended to date the Industrial Revolution back to 1760.But careful enquiry has tended to lead most experts to pick on the 1780srather than the 1760s as the decisive decade, for it was then that, so faras we can tell, all the relevant statistical indices took that sudden,sharp, almost vertical turn upwards which marks the 'take-off'. Theeconomy became, as it were, airborne.To call this process the Industrial Revolution is both logical and inline with a well-established tradition, though there was at one time afashion among conservative historiansperhaps due to a certain shyness in the presence of incendiary conceptsto deny its existence, andsubstitute instead platitudinous terms like 'accelerated evolution'.

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T H E I N D U S T R I A L R E V O L U T I O NIf the sudden, qualitative and fundamental transformation, whichhap pen ed in or ab out the 1780s, was not a revolution then the word hasno commonsense meaning. The Industrial Revolution was not indeedan episode with a beginning a nd an end . To ask when it was 'com plete'is senseless, for its essence was that henceforth revolutionary changebecame the norm. It is still going on; at most we can ask when theeconomic transformations had gone far enough to establish a substantially industrialized economy, capable of producing, broadly speaking,anything it wanted within the range of the available techniques, a'mature industrial economy' to use the technical term. In Britain, andtherefore in the world, this period of initial industrialization probablycoincides almost exactly with the period with which this book deals,for if it began with the'take-off' in the 1780s, it may plausibly be saidto be concluded with the building of the railways and the constructionof a massive heavy indu stry in Britain in the 1840s. But the Revo lutionitself, the 'take-off period ', can p robably be da ted with as mu ch precision as is possible in such matters, to some time within the twentyyears from 1780 to 1800: con tem pora ry w ith, bu t slightly prior to , theFrench Revolution.By any reckoning this was probably the most important event inworld history, at any rate since the invention of agriculture and cities.And it was initiated by Britain. That this was not fortuitous, is evident.If there was to be a race for pioneering the Industrial Revolution in theeighteenth century, there was really only one starter. T he re was plentyof industrial and commercial advance, fostered by the intelligent andeconomically far from naive ministers and civil servants of every enlightened monarchy in Europe, from Portugal to Russia, all of whomwere at least as much concerned with 'economic growth' as present-dayadministrators. Some small states and regions did indeed industrializequite impressively for example, Saxony and the bishopric of Liege,though their industrial complexes were too small and localized toexert the world-revolutionary influence of the British ones. But it seemsclear that even before the revolution Britain was already a long wayahead of her chief potential competitor inper capita output and trade,even ifstill comparable to her in total output and trade.Whatever the British advance was due to, it was not scientific andtechnological superiority. In the natural sciences the French werealmost certainly ahead of the British; an advantage which the FrenchRevolution accentuated very sharply, at any rate in mathematics andphysics, for it encouraged science in France while reaction suspectedit in England. Even in the social sciences the British were still far fromthat superiority which madeand largely kepteconomics a pre-

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T H E A G E O F R E V O L U T I O Neminently Anglo-Saxon subject; bu t here the Ind ustrial Revolution pu tthem into unquestioned first place. The economist of the 1780s wouldread Adam Smith, but alsoand perhaps more profitablythe Frenchphysiocrats and national income accountants, Quesnay, Turgot,Dupont de Nemours, Lavoisier, and perhaps an Italian or two. TheFrench produced more original inventions, such as the Jacquardloom (1804)a more complex piece of apparatus than any devised inBritainand better ships. The Germans possessed institutions of technical training like the Prussian Bergakademie which had no parallel inBritain, and the French Revolution created that unique andimpressive body, the Ecole Poly technique. English education was a jokein poor taste, though its deficiencies were somewhat offset by the dourvillage schools and the austere, turbulent, democratic universities ofCalvinist Scotland which sent a stream of brilliant, hard-working,career-seeking and rationalist young men into the south country:Jam es W att, Thom as Telford, Lou don M cAdam , Jam es M ill . Oxfordand Cambridge, the only two English universities, were intellectuallynull, as were the somnolent public or grammar schools, with theexception of the Academies founded by the Dissenters who were excluded from the (Anglican) educational system. Even such aristocraticfamilies as wished their sons to be educated, relied on tutors or Scottishuniversities. Th ere w as no system of prim ary education w hatev er beforethe Quaker Lancaster (and after him his Anglican rivals) establisheda sort of voluntary mass-production of elementary literacy in the earlynineteenth century, incidentally saddling English education foreverafter with sectarian disputes. Social fears discouraged the education ofthe poor.

Fortunately few intellectual refinements were necessary to make theIndustrial Revolution.* Its technical inventions were exceedinglymodest, and in no way beyond the scope of intelligent artisans experimenting in their workshops, or of the constructive capacities ofcarpenters, millwrights and locksmiths: the flying shuttle, the spinningjenny, the mule. Even its scientifically most sophisticated machine,Jam es W att's rotary steam-engine (1784), required no more physicsthan had been available for the best part of a centurythe proper* 'On the one hand it is gratifying to see that the English derive a rich treasure for theirpolitical life, from the study of the ancient authors, however pedantically this might beconducted; so much so that parliamen tary orators not infrequently cited the ancients to goodpurpose, a practice which was favourably received by, and not without effect upon, theirAssembly. On the other hand it cannot but amaze us that a country in which the manufacturing tendencies are predominant, and hence the need to familiarize the people with thesciences and arts which advance these pursuits is evident, the absence ofthesesubjects in thecurriculum of youthful education is hardly noticed. It is equally astonishing how much isnevertheless achieved by men lacking any formal education for their professions.' W.Wachsmuth,Europatischc SittengcschichU5, 2 (Leipzig 1839), p. 736.

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T H E I N D U S T R I A L R E V O L U T I O Ntheoryof steam engines was only developed expost facto by the Frenchman Carnot in the 1820sand could build on several generations ofpractical employment for steam engines, mostly in mines. Given theright conditions, the technical innovations of the Industrial Revolution practically made themselves, except perhaps in the chemicalindustry. This does not mean that early industrialists were not ofteninterested in science and on the look-out for its practical benefits.*But the right conditions were visibly present in Britain, where morethan a century had passed since the first king had been formally triedand executed by his people, and since private profit and economicdevelopment had become accepted as the supreme objects of government policy. For practical purposes the uniquely revolutionary Britishsolution of the agrarian problem had already been found. A relativehandful of commercially-minded landlords already almost monopolized the land, which was cultivated by tenant-farmers employinglandless or smallholders. A good many relics of the ancient collectiveeconomy of the village still remained to be swept away by EnclosureActs (1760-1830) and private transactions, but we can hardly anylonger speak of a 'British peasantry' in the same sense that we canspeak ofaFrench, German or Russian peasantry. Farming was alreadypredominantly for the market; manufacture had long been diffusedthrough out a n unfeudal countryside. Agriculture was already prep aredto carry out its three fundamental functions in an era of industrialization: to increase production and productivity, so as to feed a rapidlyrising non-agricultural population; to provide a large and rising surplusof potential recruits for the towns and industries; and to provide amechanism for the accumulation of capital to be used in the moremodern sectors of the economy. (Two other functions were probablyless important in Britain: that of creating a sufficiently large marketamong the agricultural populationnormally the great mass of thepeopleand of providing an export surplus which helps to securecapital imports.) A considerable volume of social overhead capitalthe expensive general equipment necessary for the entire economy tomove smoothly aheadwas already being created, notably in shipping,port facilities, and the improvement of roads and waterways. Politicswere already geared to profit. The businessman's specific demandsmight encounter resistance from other vested interests; and as we shallsee, the agrarians were to erect one last barrier to hold up the advanceof the industrialists between 1795 an d 1846. O n the whole, however, itwas accepted that money not only talked, but governed. All the industrialist had to get to be accepted among the governors of society wasenough money.

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T H E A G E O F R E V O L U T I O NThe businessman was undoubtedly in the process of getting moremoney, for the greater part of the eighteenth century was for most ofEurope a period of prosperity and comfortable economic expansion;the real background to the happy optimism of Voltaire's Dr Pangloss.

It may well be argued that sooner or later this expansion, assisted by agentle inflation, would have pushed some country across the thresholdwhich separates the pre-industrial from the industrial economy. Butthe problem is not so simple. M uch of eighteenth-cen tury indus trialexpansion did not in fact lead immediately, or within the foreseeablefuture, to industrialrevolution,i.e. to the creatio n of a mechanized 'factorysystem' which in turn produces in such vast quantities and at suchrapidly diminishing cost, as to be no longer dependent on existingdem and , b ut to create its own m arket.* For instance the building trade ,or th e num erous sm all scale industries producing domestic metal goodsnails, pots, knives, scissors, etc.in the British Midlands and Yorkshire, expanded very greatly in this period, but always as a function ofthe existing market. In 1850, while producing far more than in 1750,they produced in substantially the old manner. What was needed wasnot any kind of expansion, but the special kind of expansion whichproduced Manchester rather than Birmingham.Moreover, the pioneer industrial revolutions occurred in a specialhistorical situation, in which economic growth emerges from the crisscrossing decisions of countless private entrepreneurs and investors, eachgoverned by the first commandment of the age, to buy in the cheapestmarket and to sell in the dearest. How were they to discover thatmaximum profit was to be got out of organizing industrial revolutionrather than out of more familiar (and in the past more profitable)business activities? How were they to learn, what nobody could as yetknow, that industrial revolution would produce an unexampled acceleration in the expansion of their markets? Given that the main socialfound

eric hobsbawm - age of revolution 1789 -1848

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