The Transformation of the World (16 page)

Second
, the provisional political emancipation of settler societies in the Western hemisphere around 1830 (with the major exception of Canada, which remained in the British Empire), together with the colonization of Australia around the same time, led to a general strengthening of the “white” position in the world.
⁵⁵
While the American republics remained tied to Europe economically and culturally and assumed functional roles within the world economic system, they acted more aggressively than in colonial times toward the hunting and pastoral societies in their midst. In the United States, this reached a point in the 1820s when “native Americans” were no longer treated as negotiating partners but regarded as objects of military and administrative compulsion.
⁵⁶
Australia, New Zealand, and Russia too, and in some respects South Africa, fit into this picture of repressive, land-grabbing colonization.
⁵⁷

Third
, one of the major novelties of the
Sattelzeit
was the emergence of inclusive forms of social solidarity and a new ideal of civil equality. This “nationalism” stabilized the collective identity and demarcated it from that of neighboring countries and distant “barbarians.” In its early period, until around 1830, this nationalist spirit was especially successful where it could serve as an integrative ideology of an existing territorial state and where it coincided with a missionary sense of cultural superiority. This was the case in France, Britain, and—at the latest by the time of the victorious war against Mexico (1846–49)—in the United States. Everywhere else in the world, nationalism was initially—things would change later—a reactive force: first in the German and Spanish resistance to Napoleon and the Spanish-American liberation movements; then, after 1830, in other continents too.

Fourth
. It was only in the United States that the ideal of civil equality translated into broad popular involvement in political decision making—albeit with the exclusion of women, Indians, and black slaves—and a system of checks on the country's rulers. The presidency of Thomas Jefferson (1801–1809) had given
a particular impetus in this direction. When President Andrew Jackson took office in 1829, the United States found its way to the form of anti-oligarchic democracy that would be the distinctive feature of its civilization. Elsewhere democratic modernity was in a sorry state before 1830. To be sure, the French Revolution was not as innocuous, conservative, or downright irrelevant as a “revisionist” historiography fixated on continuity claims it to have been. But neither did it lead to Europe-wide democratization, let alone world revolution. Napoleon, its executor, ruled at least as despotically as Louis XV, and the restored Bourbon Monarchy (1815–30) was a caricature of bygone times. Until 1832, aristocratic magnates ruled Britain unchallenged. Absolutist reaction held sway in large parts of southern and central Europe and Russia. Not until 1830 did a constitutionalist trend gradually begin to take shape, although even that halted at the “colored” colonies of the European powers. Politically, the
Sattelzeit
did not witness the breakthrough of democracy in either Europe or Asia; rather, it was the last fling of aristocratic rule and autocracy.
⁵⁸
The political nineteenth century began after the
Sattelzeit
was over.

Fifth
. Periodization is more difficult in social history than in political history. The transition from a society dominated by estates to a class society is clearly discernible in countries such as France, the Netherlands, Prussia, and, a few decades later, Japan. But it is not easy to find estates in eighteenth-century Britain, and they existed only at a rudimentary level in the United States and the British dominions, and a fortiori in India, Africa, and China. The model “from estates to classes” therefore lacks universal validity. For several countries, or even continents, the end of the Atlantic slave trade and the emancipation of the slaves in the British Empire in 1834 were of at least similar importance. Over the next five decades, slavery slowly disappeared from Western civilization and the overseas regions under its control. A different way of putting this would be to say that this relic of extreme coercion from early modern times went virtually unchallenged until at least the 1830s.

In terms of social history, a distinctive feature of the
Sattelzeit
was the growing contestation and subversion of traditional hierarchies. It remains to be proved whether the years around 1800 were also a period of agrarian change and rural unrest outside western and central Europe; there is a lot of evidence that they were.
⁵⁹
Notwithstanding the revolutions in France and Haiti, this was a period when social traditionalism was shaken but not yet overthrown. With a handful of exceptions the “rise of the bourgeoisie,” and more generally the emergence of new social forces, would be a feature only of the subsequent period. Fully fledged “bourgeois societies” remained in a minority throughout the nineteenth century. A growing tendency toward class formation was a direct consequence or accompaniment of the gradual spread of industrial capitalism around the world, which did not begin until 1830 and reached the most advanced country in Asia—Japan—only after 1870.

Sixth
. Economic historians must address the question of when the dynamic of England's “industrial revolution” spilled over into one of general growth
beyond British borders. Angus Maddison, a leading statistician of world history, gives a forthright answer: he sees the 1820s as the decade when worldwide stagnation gave way to more dynamic and “intensive” (in the economic sense) development.
⁶⁰
The little reliable evidence we have about income trends supports the thesis that even in England, early industrialization led to a noteworthy economic upturn only
after
1820. So, the years between 1770 and 1820 do indeed count as a period of transition from the slow income growth of the first half of the eighteenth century to the faster rates of the 1820s and beyond.
⁶¹
Almost nowhere other than in northwestern Europe did the industrial mode of production take root before 1830. Historians of technology and the environment point to a similar break when they suggest that the “fossil fuel age” began around 1820; it was then that the use of stored fossil energy (coal) in place of wood, peat, and human or animal muscle power became a visible option in production processes throughout the economy.
⁶²
Coal gets steam engines moving, and steam engines drive spindles and pumps on ships and railroads. The fossil fuel age that dawned in the first third of the nineteenth century not only made possible the production of goods on an unprecedented scale but also greatly boosted the formation of networks, speed, national integration, and imperial control. Until the 1820s, however, an ancient regime still prevailed in the energy sector.

Seventh
. The smallest degree of worldwide synchronization was to be found in the realm of culture. Contacts and exchange between civilizations, though not negligible, were not yet sufficiently strong to impart a general rhythm to the development of “global culture.” As regards the exchange of experience among articulate minorities—which underlies Koselleck's concept of a
Sattelzeit
—we know little from non-Western settings for the period around 1800. So far it has been difficult to demonstrate such phenomena as a greater awareness of time in worldviews and cultural semantics, or a general experience of the speeding up of human existence, except in relation to Europe and its settler offshoots. The evidence for this starts to come in thick and fast only in the second half of the nineteenth century. Similarly, the discovery of previously hidden depths and causalities—which Michel Foucault highlighted in the natural sciences, linguistics, and economic theory around 1800—was probably peculiar to Europe.
⁶³
In any event, 1830 marks one of the clearest watersheds in the entire history of European philosophy and arts: the end of the heyday of philosophical idealism (Hegel succumbed in 1831 to the global spread of cholera) and strict utilitarianism (Bentham died in 1832) as well as of the “Age of Goethe” in the arts; the weakening of Romantic currents in German, English, and French literature; the end of the classical style in music (when Beethoven and Schubert fell silent in 1827–28) and the shaping of the “Romantic generation” (Schumann, Chopin, Berlioz, Liszt);
⁶⁴
and the transition to realism and historicism in West European painting.

All in all, there are good reasons to consider the “true” or “Victorian” nineteenth century as a shortened trunk: that is—as it has been said about German
history—“a relatively brief, dynamic, period of transition between the 1830s and the 1890s.”
⁶⁵

The 1880s Threshold

The 1880s were a time of especially radical change, a hinge period linking Victorianism and the fin de siècle. Of course, in terms of political and military history, the turn of the century also brought profound upheavals for many parts of the world. It may not have marked a striking break in most European national histories, but the final years before 1900 were certainly momentous for China: its unexpected defeat at the hands of Japan in 1895 resulted in a massive loss of sovereignty, and rivalry among the Great Powers had flung the country's doors wide open and triggered an unprecedented crisis that culminated in the Boxer Rebellion of 1900. In Spain, military failure in its war against the United States caused similar reactions in 1898, and today it is still regarded as a low point in the country's history. In both cases the victorious power—Japan, the United States—felt its path of imperial expansion to have been vindicated. The whole of Africa had been in turmoil ever since Britain's occupation of Egypt in 1882. Its conquest of Sudan in 1898 and the South African War of 1899–1902 basically concluded the “division of Africa” and were followed by a less stormy, less traumatic period of systematic exploitation. In the early years of the new century a wave of revolutions swept across the world: Russia in 1905, Iran in 1905–6, the Ottoman Empire in 1908, Portugal in 1910, Mexico in 1910 (the bloodiest of all, which lasted until 1920), and China in 1911. By the eve of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, all these upheavals had given a new impetus to political democratization; the world war would add little new of substance to it. When monarchies started to collapse east of the Rhine River toward the end of the First World War, they had already disappeared or lost much of their power in parts of the world that Europe considered “backward.”

These processes added up to a cluster of crises in the age that we have called the fin de siècle. The transition to this age in the course of the 1880s may be characterized by a set of further traits.

First
. As in the 1820s, a new threshold was crossed in the history of the environment. Around 1890, minerals (coal and petroleum) moved ahead of biomass in estimates of global energy use—even if most of the world's population still did not directly consume such fuels. The fossil fuel age began after 1820 only in the sense that these became the cutting edge in energy production. Around 1890, however, this tendency gained the upper hand quantitatively on a world scale.
⁶⁶

Second
. Global industrialization entered a new phase. Japan and Russia experienced what economic historians used to call a “takeoff,” that is, a transition to self-sustaining growth. Things were not yet so advanced in India or in South Africa (where large gold deposits were discovered in 1886), but a core of industrial and mining capitalism began to take shape in both countries, for the first time outside the West and Japan.
⁶⁷
At the same time, the organization of the
economy changed in the early industrializing countries of Europe and North America, as a “second industrial revolution” took them beyond steam-engine technology. One can dispute which were the most important inventions, and therefore those most fraught with consequences, but any list would have to include the incandescent lamp (1876), the Maxim gun (1884), the automobile (1885–86), cinematography (1895), wireless transmission (1895), and radiological diagnosis (1895). The most significant for economic history was the technological-industrial application of discoveries in the fields of electricity (dynamo, electric motor, power-plant technology) and chemistry, in both of which the 1880s were the decisive years. The serial production of electric motors alone revolutionized whole branches of industry and commerce that had been little served by the steam engine.
⁶⁸
Science and industry drew closer together; the age of large-scale industrial research was beginning. This was associated in the United States and several European countries with a transition to large capital concentrations (“monopoly capitalism,” critical contemporaries called it) and the spread of limited liability companies that placed managerial employees alongside family entrepreneurs (“corporate capitalism”). New bureaucracies appeared in the private sector, and ever more finely graded hierarchies developed within the growing ranks of the salaried classes.
⁶⁹

Third
. This reorganization within advanced capitalism produced worldwide effects as large European and American companies increasingly opened up overseas markets. The age of multinational corporations was nigh. Steamship ocean travel and the telegraphic cabling of all continents greatly increased the density of world economic links. European global banks, joined around the turn of the century by US institutions, began to export capital on a massive scale across the Atlantic, as well as from western Europe to eastern Europe, to colonies such as South Africa or India, and to nominally independent countries like China and the Ottoman Empire.
⁷⁰
Also in the 1880s, the flow of European immigrants to the United States suddenly shot up,
⁷¹
and new intercontinental systems of contract labor were developed to transfer Asian manpower to North and South America. The fin de siècle would be the most intense period of migration in world history. All in all, the 1880s brought a surge in globalization that for the first time linked all continents into economic and communications networks.
⁷²
The great expansion of international trade lasted until 1914—or for some regions (e.g., Latin America) until 1930.