This book is a history of Europe from 1815 to 1914, following on sequentially in the Penguin History of Europe from the previous volume in the series, The Pursuit of Glory (2007), which covers the period 1648 to 1815. As the author of that brilliant book, my Cambridge colleague Tim Blanning, remarks, every history of Europe has to start at some arbitrary date, but some dates are more arbitrary than others. We speak habitually of ‘the nineteenth century’ or ‘the twentieth century’, but historians know that the period 1801 to 1900 or 1901 to 2000 has no real meaning beyond the merely chronological. History is full of loose ends, and even the outbreak and conclusion of major wars that so often provide the terminal dates for histories covering discrete segments of the European past, including this one, leave many issues unresolved. Different aspects of history have different chronologies, and a date that has a meaning in political or military or diplomatic history may have very little significance in social or economic or cultural history. French historians of the Annales school have become accustomed to speaking of an immobile history which persisted well into modern times in many parts of Europe, so that despite the fall of the ancien régime in European political systems at the end of the eighteenth century, the ancien régime économique et social persisted well into the second half of the nineteenth century. It took until this point, for example, for serfdom to disappear from the scene in most of Europe, while the long-established demographic pattern of high birth rates and high death rates did not begin to change, except in France, until the so-called ‘demographic transition’ of the decades after 1850. On the other hand, industrialization was a marginal process confined to small pockets of the European economy until the same period. Some historians, indeed – notably Arno Mayer in his book The Persistence of the Ancien Régime (1981) – have argued that the dominance of traditional aristocratic elites remained all the way up to the First World War, so that not much of significance changed in the political sphere either, despite all the surface turmoil of the era. But Mayer’s view has not been widely accepted by historians: change there certainly was in nineteenth-century Europe, not just in politics but in other spheres of life as well.
Some, indeed, have decided that the most meaningful period to study is the Age of Revolution, to quote the title of the first volume of Eric Hobsbawm’s survey of the years 1789 to 1914, published in 1962. Hobsbawm’s periodization was followed by Jonathan Sperber in his Revolutionary Europe (2000), covering the years 1789–1848, the same period as Hobsbawm’s first volume. Yet there is a price to pay for choosing these years, for what came after was a very different Europe, one much less easy to conceptualize in a single framework. Not by chance, Sperber’s follow-up volume has a wordy title that conveys, no doubt unconsciously, the difficulty he encountered in finding a unifying theme: Europe 1850–1914: Progress, Participation and Apprehension (2008). Hobsbawm went on to write two more volumes, The Age of Capital (1975) covering the years 1848 to 1875, and The Age of Empire (1987), taking the story up to the First World War. Anyone who attempts to write a history of nineteenth-century Europe has to confront these three magnificent books, which tower over the literature on the period. And, with his uncanny gift for conceptual innovation, Hobsbawm went on to characterize the whole period covered by his trilogy as ‘the long nineteenth century’, a model followed by many textbooks and primers, for example William Simpson and Martin Jones’s Europe 1783–1914 (2000). The long nineteenth century is, however, a broken-backed century, divided into two very different halves by the 1848 Revolutions. Not surprisingly, like Sperber, many historians covering the period from the French Revolution or the defeat of Napoleon to the First World War have given up the attempt to find any kind of conceptual unity, and have chosen anodyne titles such as Europe’s Uncertain Path (2012), to quote R. S. Alexander’s recent political narrative.
Through most of the twentieth century, historians regarded the rise of nation states and the conflicts between them as the central features of European history in the nineteenth century. The triumph of nationalism forged new political and cultural entities and inspired revolts against large and, it seemed, outmoded multinational empires, revolts against oppression by other nationalities or ambitions to achieve dominance over them. This model of the nation state was exported across the globe in the twentieth century, making its emergence in Europe in the nineteenth seem even more important. Historians once saw this process in positive terms, putting celebratory accounts of the unification of Italy and Germany, the growth of Czech and Polish national consciousness, and other products of the age of nationalism at the centre of their narrative. As national and ethnic rivalries spilled over into the vast conflagration of the Second World War, however, the rise of nationalism appeared in a darker light, a view underlined by the Balkan wars of the 1990s. But since then we have come increasingly to live in an age of globalization, as the barriers created by the Cold War have crumbled, international institutions, worldwide means of communication, multinational companies, and many other influences have eroded national boundaries and begun to bind us all together as a global human community. Since the turn of the century, this has also altered our vision of the past, which historians have come to see increasingly in a global perspective. The call for the writing of global history is not in itself new: it was issued as long ago as the 1970s by the French historian Marc Ferro and was present in the concept of Universalgeschichte (universal history) as practised by Leopold von Ranke in the nineteenth century or Arnold Toynbee and William H. McNeill in the twentieth. But a global history that links the different parts of the world rather than telling their discrete stories has emerged only recently, as historians have begun to examine subjects such as the effects of empire on European economies, societies, cultures and political systems, notably but not exclusively those of Britain; the global economic ties that bound Europe to other parts of the world in a nexus of mutual interaction; and the rise of worldwide empire as a common European process rather than one specific to any particular European nation. Historians have also been busy rewriting the history of individual European nations in a global context, emphasizing the effects of European diasporas – the millions of Europeans who emigrated to other parts of the globe – on the ‘mother country’, the infusion of European nationalism with elements of racial theory derived from the experience of colonization in Africa or Asia, and the emergence of global geopolitics as a key factor in relations between European states.
A particular influence on my own approach here has been exerted by the German historian Jürgen Osterhammel, whose The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century (2009) is indeed a truly global history, not a Eurocentric one such as Hobsbawm’s trilogy. Covering the nineteenth century, his chapters deal with an astonishing variety of topics, including memory and self-observation, time, space, mobility, living standards, cities, frontiers, power, revolution, the state, energy, work, communications, hierarchies, knowledge, civilization, religion and many more. Osterhammel deliberately picks out common themes, connections between different parts of the globe, shared developments and global processes. Yet the author’s argumentative and reflective presence generally eclipses that of the people who lived in the era about which he is writing. Often, too, historical surveys spend all their time establishing the broad contours of interpretation without attempting to convey how they could be discerned in the lives and experiences of contemporaries. This is perhaps understandable in a brief textbook, whose ultimate purpose is to prepare students for examinations, but a more extensive work such as the present one, aimed in the first place at the general reader, fortunately has the space to provide the detail that conveys the flavour of the period, in its mixture of strangeness and familiarity, and as far as possible to allow contemporaries to speak for themselves.
Other, no less ambitious works of global history written around the same time as Osterhammel’s have offered a rather different approach to the nineteenth century, based on the perception that this was the period above all others when Europe led the world and came to exercise dominion over other parts of the globe. Historians like the late Chris Bayly, in his impressive The Birth of the Modern World (2004), and John Darwin, in his masterly survey of global empires, After Tamerlane (2007), have established with a wealth of comparative evidence the approximate equality in almost every respect, from living standards to cultural achievements, of a whole range of civilizations across the world in the early eighteenth century. The Mughal Empire in India, the Qing Empire in China, the great pre-colonial empires of Benin and its neighbours in Africa, the Ottoman Empire and other states were roughly on a par with Europe around 1700. By 1815 this was no longer the case; Europe had forged ahead, not, as some historians, notably Niall Ferguson in his sweeping survey of Civilization (2011), have maintained, because of its intrinsic superiority, but because of quite specific historical circumstances. Europe maintained and extended its advantage on many fronts right up to the early years of the twentieth century, though by then, as we shall see, that advantage was increasingly coming under attack. The First World War called it into question; the Second World War destroyed it, bringing down the global European empires in its aftermath. This global hegemony is the main justification for taking the years 1815 to 1914 as a distinct and meaningful period of European history. Throughout this book, the global context will be repeatedly emphasized, and events and processes on other continents will be brought into the narrative as a way of helping to explain what was happening in Europe during these decades.
Global history also means transnational history. Many histories of Europe have consisted of largely separate narratives of different national histories. Arthur Grant and Harold Temperley’s Europe in the Nineteenth Century (1927) falls into this category; William Simpson and Martin Jones’s Europe 1783–1914 is in the same mould, with separate chapters on France, Germany, Italy, Russia and the Habsburg Empire. The German historian Michael Salewski’s History of Europe (2000) is subtitled States and Nations from the Ancient World to the Present and presents a series of histories of its individual countries and the relations between them. This means that the reader largely loses sight of what, if anything, bound Europe together as a whole, what these countries had in common, or what wider processes affected them. The long-established and still incomplete Oxford History of Modern Europe takes a similar approach, with every volume devoted to a single country except for the four volumes that cover the relations between them over different periods. And yet, as well as being an evolving assemblage of individual states, Europe, as this book hopes to demonstrate, also had a definable existence as a collective entity. This was not as a geographical area: Europe’s eastern boundaries in particular were vague and hard to define, and Europe’s social and cultural limits became blurred in the course of mass emigration to other parts of the world. Rather, with these provisos, Europe is best seen as a social, economic, political and cultural region sharing many common characteristics and stretching from Britain and Ireland in the west to Russia and the Balkans in the east.
In taking an approach that as far as possible is transnational, I am consciously following in the footsteps of Lord Acton, the founder of the Cambridge Modern History at the end of the nineteenth century. In his plan for this ambitious enterprise, Acton told his contributors that:
Universal history is not the sum of all particular histories, and ought to be contemplated, first, in its distinctive essence, as Renaissance, Reformation, Religious Wars, Absolute Monarchy, Revolution &c. The several countries may or may not contribute to feed the main stream . . . [but] attention ought not to be dispersed, by putting Portugal, Transylvania, Iceland, side by side with France and Germany . . . My plan is to break through the mere juxtaposition of national histories and to take in, as far as may be, what is extra-territorial and universal.
In the event Acton died before he could realize this ambitious project, and when it was eventually published under the more efficient but less imaginative editorship of Sir Adolphus Ward, the Cambridge Modern History did indeed largely adopt a country-by-country approach, reflecting very much the nation-based vision of a younger generation of historians in the changed political and cultural atmosphere of the Europe they inhabited. It was only with the fall of communism, the extension of the European Union to much of Eastern Europe, and the renewed onward march of globalization, that the possibility of writing a real European history re-emerged. It is no longer possible to equate it, however, as Grant and Temperley and their counterparts elsewhere tried to do, with the history of national politics and international relations. Since the 1970s at the latest, historical investigation has expanded its field of vision until it encompasses almost every aspect of human activity in the past. Already in the early 1960s, Hobsbawm’s Age of Revolution contained chapters on religion, ideology, science, the arts, the economy and much else besides. Subsequently historical research has extended its range even further, as Osterhammel’s list of topics suggests, most recently into the history of landscape and environment. Hobsbawm was able to bind his themes together through an overarching master-narrative that placed the development and determining influence of capitalism at its core. But the historians of the early twenty-first century, a time when grand master-narratives have fallen into disrepute, can no longer enjoy this advantage: the most we can do, as Tim Blanning says, is to trace ‘lines of development’.
Two of the main lines of development Blanning identifies for the years 1648 to 1815, what he calls ‘the relentless march of the state to hegemony’ and ‘the emergence of a new kind of cultural space – the public sphere’, continued through the nineteenth century. They achieved an expansion and a dominance that were almost unthinkable in the eighteenth century. The state structures of the Restoration Europe that emerged in 1815 would in some respects still have been familiar to the continent’s inhabitants of thirty years before, even though appearances in many ways were deceptive. The power and intrusiveness of the state were still relatively limited. Popular participation in politics was still minimal, despite the recent, vivid example of the events of the French Revolution. The public sphere was still confined mostly to a small stratum of the educated and the literate and their institutions, from the periodical publication to the coffee house or the reading club. But by 1914 the state had been transformed. On the one hand there was universal male and in some parts of the continent even female suffrage, and direct popular participation in the shaping of national, regional and local policy, not least through organized political parties. On the other hand there was a vast expansion in the control that the state could exercise over its citizens, in areas ranging from education to health, military service to social work.
The linked processes of the improvement of communications and the growth of the economy delineated by Blanning accelerated faster in the nineteenth century than anyone in the eighteenth century could have imagined. In 1815 the railway, the telegraph, the steamship and the photograph were barely visible over the historical horizon. By 1914 Europe was entering the age of the telephone, the motor car, radio and cinema. In 1815 we are still in the age of the Newtonian understanding of the universe, of representational art and classical music. By 1914 Einstein had propounded his Theory of Relativity, Picasso had painted his Cubist works, Schoenberg had composed his first atonal pieces. Europe was also in an even more immediate sense entering the age of the machine gun, the tank, the submarine and the fighter plane. The first aerial bombardment of an enemy was recorded in 1911, during the Italian invasion of Libya, and the first European concentration camps were opened in South Africa by the British and in South-West Africa (Namibia) by the Germans. Such developments, foreshadowing the immense violence and destructiveness of the first half of the twentieth century, stand as a warning against treating the nineteenth century as most of its inhabitants treated it, as an age of linear progress and open-ended improvement. Progress had its price, and in the succeeding period, between 1914 and 1949 – as Ian Kershaw shows in To Hell and Back, the next volume in this series – Europe paid it in full measure.
Blanning’s volume ends on a gloomy note as far as the condition of life of the vast majority of Europeans was concerned, with the beginnings of industry and the effects of rapid population growth bringing ‘a new kind of poverty . . . not a sudden affliction by famine, plague or war but a permanent state of malnutrition and underemployment’. The nineteenth century, indeed, as this suggests, was relatively free of major European famines, plagues and wars, and one task of this book will be to explain why. As in so many other aspects of this period, the changed relationship of Europe with the rest of the world was an important determining factor here. Famines there were, notably in Ireland, Scandinavia and Russia, and plagues too, in the form of periodic outbreaks of cholera that swept the continent, but these too were neither so frequent nor so devastating as in some previous eras, and by the end of the century they had largely vanished from Europe.
This did not mean, however, that social, economic and other forms of inequality vanished along with them. Running through this book is the representation of the shifting contours of inequality in the nineteenth century, with its older forms, such as serfdom on the land, giving way to newer ones, such as wage labour in the factory. The nineteenth century can be seen as the age par excellence of emancipation, with millions of people being given greater equality of status, including in key respects the majority of the rural population, women, and religious minorities, notably the Jews, and this book will explore in detail these enormous changes and how they came about. But equality and emancipation were only ever partial and conditional, as the years after 1914 were to show, and describing the limitations people experienced in this process of liberation is also a central task for the historian of nineteenth-century Europe.
Arguments and disputes about inequality were at the centre of nineteenth-century European politics. Building on the legacy of ideas bequeathed by the French Revolution, increasing numbers of political thinkers and actors began to conceive and tried to implement ways and means of overcoming the inequalities they witnessed. The spectrum of solutions ranged from aristocratic paternalism and the sense of noblesse oblige at one extreme to the anarchist attempt to destroy the state at the other. Socialism, liberalism, communism, nationalism and many other doctrines prioritized one method or another of freeing people from the yoke of oppression and exploitation according to how they defined it. Those who put stability and hierarchy first recognized they could not survive simply by clinging to the old order, or at least, most of them did; and so they too became participants in the great debate on inequality. Religions offered a variety of answers to problems rooted in the temporal world, or advocated escape from it altogether. What all these many different strands of thought had in common was a desire to acquire and wield power so that they could put their ideas into action. Thus while Tim Blanning calls his history of Europe from 1648 to 1815 The Pursuit of Glory, signifying the priorities of the dominant political elites of the age, this book has the title The Pursuit of Power.
The pursuit of power permeated European society in the nineteenth century. States grasped for world power, governments reached out for imperial power, armies built up their military power, revolutionaries plotted to grab power, political parties campaigned to come to power, bankers and industrialists strove for economic power, serfs and sharecroppers were gradually liberated from the arbitrary power exercised over them by landowning aristocrats. The central social process of the century, the emancipation of vast sections of the oppressed from the power of their oppressors, found its most widespread manifestation in the emancipation of women from their imprisonment in a nexus of laws, customs and conventions that subordinated them to the power of men. Just as feminists fought for equality before the law, so too in the new world of industry, labour unions went on strike for more power over wages and conditions of work, modernist artists challenged the power of the Academies, and novelists organized their work around struggles for power within the family and other social institutions.
Nineteenth-century society increased its power over nature: governments gained the power to avert or alleviate hunger and natural disasters such as fires and floods; medical researchers reached out in their laboratories for power over disease; engineers and planners channelled rivers, drained marshes, drove out wild animals and levelled forests, they built towns and cities, railway and sewer networks, ships and bridges, to extend humankind’s power over the natural world; and in a different sense, scientists and mechanics devised and exploited new sources of power, from steam to electricity, from the power loom to the internal combustion engine. Power could be formal or informal, it could be exercised through violence or persuasion, it could be consensual or majoritarian, it might take economic, social, cultural, political, religious, organizational or a host of other forms. But as the nineteenth century progressed, people increasingly prioritized power over glory, honour and comparable values that had been dominant through most centuries before 1815. By the end of the century, too, power was being reconceptualized in racial terms, as Europeans came to regard their hegemony over much of the rest of the world as evidence of their superiority over its inhabitants. How and why all this came to be, and how power relations within Europe affected and were affected by the rapidly changing power relations between Europe, Asia, Africa and other parts of the globe, are the themes that stand at the centre of this book.
The book is divided into eight chapters, each of which is subdivided into ten sections. Chapters 1, 3, 7 and 8 deal primarily with political history, Chapters 2 and 4 with social and economic history, and Chapters 5 and 6 with what might broadly be called cultural history. The first chapter takes the story of European politics from the final defeat of Napoleon in 1815 to the last aftershocks of the 1830 Revolutions; the third chapter takes the story up to the 1848 Revolutions and follows their aftermath in the conflict-ridden and unstable years up to the early 1870s; the seventh chapter examines how European states responded to the growing challenge of democracy between 1871 and 1914; and the eighth and final chapter turns to Europe’s subjugation, however partially realized, of most other parts of the globe in the age of imperialism, and its ultimately devastating effects on Europe itself with the coming of the First World War. In between the first two of these chronologically defined narratives there is a chapter on the development of European economy and society from 1815 to 1848 – though full coverage of the key change of the period, the emancipation of the serfs in many parts of the Continent, demands that some strands of development in the rural world have to be followed all the way up to 1914. The fourth chapter deals with the major structures of Europe’s society and economy from mid-century onwards and the massive changes they underwent during these years. Chapter 5 ranges over the whole period in a discussion of society’s attempt to impose order and control over nature, from the wild forests, rivers and mountains of the Continent to the struggle for mastery over human nature in its many forms of expression. The sixth chapter contrasts the century as an age of emotion with the age of reason that preceded it, dealing with the various manifestations of the human spirit, religion, belief, culture, education, and ideas of humanity itself, that shared this fundamental characteristic.
To underscore the human dimension of this history, each chapter begins with the life story of an individual whose beliefs and experiences raise many of the topics the chapter discusses. Each of the eight individuals comes from a different country, and there are four men and four women. This balance is quite deliberate. Women formed over half the population of Europe during this period, as in almost every other period in history. Just as important is another fundamental feature of the period, namely that the overwhelming majority of Europeans, even on the eve of the First World War, lived in and off the countryside. Peasants, farmers and landowners often get pushed to the margins in histories of nineteenth-century Europe, particularly those structured around the rise of industrial society, but to consign these millions to a category labelled by Karl Marx as ‘the idiocy of rural life’ or to portray them as nothing more than the victims of historical change seems to me to be fundamentally misguided.
The book is designed to be read through from start to fini sh; those who wish to use it as a work of reference are advised to consult the index. In conformity with the overall format of the series, there are no footnote or endnote references. As in any synthetic work of this nature, the author is reliant principally on the work of others; such originality as it possesses is to be found in the arguments and interpretations that the book advances, and in the range and juxtaposition of the themes it treats. I hope the many other historians whose specialized research and writing I have plundered will forgive me for not crediting their work explicitly. At least, however, I may be permitted to reference the sources for the biographies that open each chapter (full details in the Further Reading here): The Diary of a Napoleonic Foot Soldier, ed. Marc Raeff (New York, 1991), for here; A Life under Russian Serfdom, transl. and ed. Boris B. Gorshkov (Budapest, 2005), for here; Máire Cross and Tim Gray, The Feminism of Flora Tristan (Oxford, 1992) and The London Journal of Flora Tristan, transl. and ed. Jean Hawkes (London, 1992), for here; Hermynia zur Mühlen, The End and the Beginning, transl. and ed. Lionel Gossman (Cambridge, 2010), for here; Wendy Bracewell, Orientations (Budapest, 2009), for here, also here and here; Brita K. Stendhal, The Education of a Self-Made Woman (Lewiston, NY, 1994), for here–7; Martin Pugh, The Pankhursts (London, 2001), for here; and Ivor N. Hume, Belzoni (Charlottesville, VA), for here. Other lengthy quotations are taken from original sources, except for here (Dirk Blasius, Der verwaltete Wahnsinn [Frankfurt, 1980]); here (Andrew Scull, The Most Solitary of Afflictions [London, 1993]); here (John A. Davis, Conflict and Control [London, 1988]); here (F. S. L. Lyons, Charles Stewart Parnell [London, 1977]); here (Hartmut Pogge-von Strandmann, ‘Domestic Origins of Germany’s Colonial Expansion under Bismarck’, Past and Present, February 1969); here (Franco Venturi, Roots of Revolution [London, 1960]); here (Edvard Radzinsky, Alexander II [New York, 2005]); and here (Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost [New York, 1998]).
I began writing this book in 2009, but its origins go back much further, to the decades I spent teaching the history of nineteenth-century Europe at a number of universities before my interests shifted to the twentieth century with my move to Cambridge in 1998. I have been fortunate to be able to draw on the many lectures I have given on the history of nineteenth-century Europe over the years, at the University of Stirling in Scotland, at Columbia University in the City of New York, at the University of East Anglia at Norwich, at Birkbeck, University of London, and most recently at Gresham College in the City of London. I am grateful to the students who listened patiently to my ideas in lectures and seminars in all these institutions and helped firm up, or change, my arguments and my general approach with their comments. A project as wide-ranging as this one could not have been completed in so short a time without research assistance, and I am especially grateful to my former students Daniel Cowling, Niamh Gallagher, Rachel Hoffman, Susie Lada and Georgie Williams for supplying me with material. Cambridge University’s History Faculty and Wolfson College provided invaluable time to write by granting me sabbatical leave in 2012, and the University Library’s inexhaustible resources and helpful staff made it the first port of call for information on many subjects.
Many friends and colleagues have read all or part of this book, suggested improvements and corrected my errors. Simon Winder at Penguin Books, a prince among editors, has suggested many improvements. I owe a huge debt to Rachel Hoffman for her careful and detailed reading of Chapters 1, 3 and 6, to David Motadel for the many corrections he made to Chapters 2, 4–5, 7–8, to Joanna Bourke for commenting incisively on Chapter 5, and to Tim Blanning, Lucy Riall and Astrid Swenson for their very helpful reading of the entire manuscript. Any remaining mistakes are entirely my own responsibility. Cecilia Mackay provided invaluable help with the illustrations, which have been chosen to offer additional insights on the topics discussed, and selected to follow the sequence of the chapters. The paintings `and photographs referred to in the text can easily be located on the Internet, if so desired. Andras Bereznay, as ever, proved a learned and stimulating cartographer. Richard Mason has been a meticulous copy-editor; he corrected many errors and helped materially improve the readability of the text at a number of points. Christine Shuttleworth produced a splendidly comprehensive index. Richard Duguid has put me in his debt by overseeing the process of production. Several knotty problems of orthography had in the end to remain unresolved, most notably the transliteration of Russian names: we opted for the traditional forms, since the modern Library of Congress system is still unfamiliar to the majority of readers. As far as possible, people’s original names are used – thus for example Wilhelm rather than William, or Franz rather than Francis – but in a few exceptional cases, notably those of the Russian tsars, this would seem strange, so the English forms have been preferred. In the case of place names, the most widely used contemporary appellations have been used, with their modern equivalents provided in the Index.
Finally I am, as always, deeply indebted to Christine Corton for taking time off from her own work to check the proofs, and, with our sons Matthew and Nicholas, for sustaining me throughout the long process of gestation.
Richard J. Evans
Cambridge, May 2016