In 1907 the twenty-four-year-old Hermynia Isabella Maria, Countess Folliot de Crenneville (1883–1951), the only child of an Austro-Hungarian diplomat descended from an émigré French aristocrat, married the twenty-eight-year-old Viktor von Zur Mühlen (1879–1950), a nobleman from a prominent family of Baltic Germans. Viktor was good-looking and charming, and had cultured relations (one of them a well-known singer and friend of Johannes Brahms). For her part, Hermynia was obviously not unattractive, but she had, not merely in her own mind, been cursed with a rather large nose. ‘With that nose, child,’ her Uncle Anton told her, ‘you absolutely have to become a very cultivated and clever woman.’ Taking this advice to heart, Hermynia grew up bookish, restless and intellectually ambitious: by her early twenties she had mastered several languages, most notably English, during her stays in the foreign cities where her father’s diplomatic postings took the family. In her memoirs, written in the mid-1930s, Hermynia described the incorrigible arrogance of many of her relatives, who treated middle-class people, ‘even when they were millionaires’, with high-handed disdain. Her great-uncle’s wife said to her one day: ‘The bourgeois, you know, are perfectly fine, and I know that before God we are all alike, but I just can’t see them as people like ourselves.’ Seeking to get away from mounting pressure from her father to marry into Viennese high society, she saw in Viktor von Zur Mühlen a means of escape and a passport to independence from her family. The two met at a ball in the resort of Merano in the Austrian Alps while her parents were away, and were instantly attracted to one another. Three weeks later they were engaged to be married.
Her father, returning from his trip, did not approve. The young man was a Protestant German Balt; she should have married a Catholic Viennese aristocrat. ‘Has it occurred to you,’ he asked Hermynia, ‘that your sons can never become chamberlains or your daughters ladies of the Order of the Star and Cross?’ But this was not Hermynia’s ambition. In her romantic imagination she was going to live on a rich estate set in a magical Baltic landscape. The couple wed quietly in Frankfurt and set off for Russia. Hermynia did not think that marriage would constrict her life any more than her parents had done. But she was wrong. On arriving at the von zur Mühlen estate in Estonia, she found only two books in her husband’s country house, ‘the Bible and a pornographic work, The Memoirs of a Singer’. Imported magazines and newspapers were routinely censored by the tsarist authorities, who blacked out almost everything apart from the Court Circular. ‘Even in my encyclopedia,’ she wrote, ‘which was sent after me along with other books, whole sections of “Russia: History” had been blacked out.’ She was shocked by the ignorance of the Baltic German aristocracy in Estonia, who referred to middle-class people, whatever they did, as literati. ‘When I went to Dorpat for the first time,’ Hermynia later remembered, ‘and bought four hundred roubles’ worth of books, and subscribed, on top of that, to magazines in various languages, my husband was genuinely dumbfounded, and my mother-in-law asked in astonishment: “What do you need all those books for? A good housewife has so much to do taking care of the house that she hardly has time to read.”’ Further scandal was caused by her habit of taking two baths a day (‘No decent woman does that!’ exclaimed her mother-in-law) and wearing clothes made of coloured fabrics: ‘“Why don’t you wear black instead?” my mother-in-law asked me when I appeared in one of my prettiest Paris dresses. “You are a married woman now, for goodness’ sake!”’
Relations between the Baltic German nobility and the Estonian peasants and farm workers were not good. Hermynia’s husband gave her a Browning revolver as a wedding present, warning her to carry it every time she went out for a walk on her own. There was no knowing what ‘these animals’ might do, Viktor said. And indeed, ‘whenever one encountered a little farm cart on a country road, the peasant would shout angrily “kurrati-sax!” (German devil)!’ But they soon got used to her and said: ‘The master has married a blonde gypsy; she is crazy, but a good sort.’ Hermynia even became popular when she began to use the medical knowledge she had gained while helping out at the infirmary of the Sisters of Mercy in Florence, treating minor ailments and even assisting a peasant woman in childbirth, to the consternation of the local doctor who lived three hours’ ride away and put hunting before his professional duties. She was appalled by the squalor and ignorance she found, and taken aback by the habitual drunkenness of the peasantry, who were not satisfied with vodka but would even get hold of ether to fulfil their craving for oblivion.
The Baltic nobles with whom she now mixed, Hermynia observed, ‘truly believed in aristocracy and in their own place among the elect. It never occurred to them, at any moment in their lives, that other people were also human.’ When her husband came home one day with his cane broken in two, and
I asked him in astonishment what had happened, he replied: ‘I broke it over the back of one of the labourers.’ He could not understand when I cried, half-weeping, half in anger: ‘Have the carriage hitched. I am leaving. I am getting a divorce!’
When Viktor reported on another occasion that he had given another worker ‘the hiding of his life’ because he had ‘dared to whistle the Marseillaise’, Hermynia ‘went to the piano, which was by the open window, and played the Marseillaise over and over again the whole day long. The workers laughed: “The master can’t handle that gypsy”.’ And indeed he could not. She was not interested in bearing and bringing up children, her main purpose in life in the eyes of her husband’s parents (‘What, not yet? You should ride less and above all not bathe so much’). For his part, Viktor was not interested in anything apart from managing his estate and going on elk-hunting expeditions (on one of which, when she was supposed to be looking after the estate, Hermynia allowed the peasants to steal large quantities of goods from the barns because she thought it would alleviate their poverty).
Hermynia’s marriage was unusual in a number of respects, not merely because it was so clearly a marriage of opposites. Marriage within the closed circle of Baltic German families was still the norm in Estonia: 58 per cent of the 2,060 marriages contracted by noblemen between 1860 and 1914 were within the corporate nobility, 20 per cent were sealed with non-noble local women (literati and burghers), and 22 per cent with Russian women. Marriage to a foreigner was so rare that such liaisons did not figure in the general statistics at all. The Baltic German nobility in Estonia still owned 58 per cent of the total land surface of the province in 1914. Nevertheless, by 1902 the corporate nobility, owning 401 manors, had been forced to witness seventy-nine of them falling into the hands of commoners. Some nobles tried going down the legally tricky route of entailing their manors, but the trade in manors could not be stopped. Others began using imported fertilizers, switched from traditional cultivation to a multi-field system, exploited their timber commercially, shifted to dairy production, and started to employ machinery. Overall in the three decades leading up to 1914, agricultural productivity in the three provinces of Estonia, Livonia and Courland increased by 20 to 30 per cent as a result, though this required investment which increased noble indebtedness. The geologist Alexander von Keyserling (1815–91) commented in his diary in 1889 on how ‘hard it was to be a manor lord in Estonia’, because ‘one does not become rich’.
Hermynia’s marriage did not last. The couple’s political differences multiplied until ‘my husband and I were no longer good-humouredly scornful of each other’s opinions or hopeful of bringing the other around to our own position’. They took politically opposed newspapers, Hermynia left-wing, Viktor right-wing: ‘When the mail bag arrived whoever opened it handed the other his newspaper with the fire-tongs so as not to dirty his hands on it. More and more frequently I heard the words: “I will not allow such a thing to be said in my house!”’ Hermynia’s father-in-law tried to intervene: ‘He would stare at me as though he thought I had lost my mind, then he would roar louder than ever: “If I were your husband I should beat you to a pulp.” “If you were my husband,” she replied, “I should either have murdered you a long time ago, or else you would have learned how to behave like a gentleman.”’ Hermynia fell ill with tuberculosis and had to spend many months recuperating at a sanatorium in Davos in Switzerland, where she was still staying in 1914 when the war broke out. She did not return. The Russian Revolution allowed her to obtain a divorce. By 1919 she was in Germany, where she joined the Communist Party and earned her living by translating more than 150 novels from French and English into German, including the entire output of the American writer Upton Sinclair. She lived with the Jewish writer Stefan Isidor Klein (1889–1960) in Frankfurt and wrote many novels and short stories of her own, several of which became best-sellers. In 1933, when the Nazis took over, she left, after publishing a letter condemning the new regime, and eventually made her way to England, where in 1951 she died in poverty and obscurity in Radlett, Hertfordshire, her works entirely forgotten. Viktor, meanwhile, organized an anti-Bolshevik militia after the 1917 revolution, joined the Nazi stormtroopers in the 1930s, and died in 1950, shortly before his ex-wife.
The two worlds inhabited by Hermynia von Zur Mühlen before the First World War could hardly have been more different from one another: on the one hand, the cosmopolitan, sophisticated, literate and cultured world of the Austrian service nobility, on the other the impoverished, philistine, brutal and provincial world of the Baltic German landowning aristocracy. Yet both were recognizably part of the upper echelons of European society at the beginning of the twentieth century: both, in their very different ways, were holding out against the tides of modernity that had been flowing across Europe for many years. The Baltic German nobility were exceptional only in the extreme nature of their situation. They were not just a small hereditary caste, constituting less than 7 per cent of the population of Livonia, Estonia and Courland, they were also an autonomous feudal corporation whose rights and privileges had only gradually been undermined in the course of the nineteenth century. It was not until the 1890s that their ancient judicial system was replaced with modern Russian courts introduced under Alexander II’s reforms in 1864, though even then the nobles retained some manorial police rights. They ignored the Russification policies of the government in St Petersburg for as long as they could, obstinately celebrating their German culture and Protestant faith despite Russian being made the official language and Orthodoxy the official religion. Moreover, the Baltic German nobility stubbornly resisted conceding any administrative or political power to the local indigenous population. This was a major reason why they were so disliked by the native peasantry. In the course of the 1905 Revolution this hatred broke out into open hostility, when 184 manors were burned in Courland and Estonia and 90 German landowners killed. Reprisals by troops sent from St Petersburg, including Cossacks, were still continuing in some parts as late as 1908, supported by local landowner militias. Altogether 2,000 alleged insurgents from the provinces were sent to Siberia, and at least 900 were executed.
Noble landowners of modest means, like those who made up the majority of the Baltic German community, existed in many parts of Europe. In Russia, where all the children inherited their father’s title and property, princes and princesses abounded; some 890,000 people were legally defined as of noble status in the late nineteenth century; their number virtually doubled between 1858 and 1897. In Hungary, where comparable arrangements obtained, the nobility made up around 5 per cent of the population during the same period. Nobility in parts of the Continent, notably in pre-Revolutionary France, had been conferred by the possession of a state office, and if the office did not generate substantial revenues, the office-holder’s son inherited the noble title without having the resources to sustain the lifestyle that was conventionally supposed to go with it. This system did not exist in England, where until 1871 even army officers had to buy their commissions, while the navy was a socially egalitarian institution where promotion was obtained on merit; indeed, there were almost no poor aristocrats in England, where primogeniture limited the numbers of men with titles, and the legally defined privileges of the nobility, apart from membership in the House of Lords, had vanished well before the nineteenth century. Nobles in some parts of Europe could also lose their titles. Tsar Nicholas I reduced some 64,000 Polish nobles to commoner status as a punishment for their rebelliousness, and by 1864 around 80 per cent of the hereditary noble caste of szlachta had lost their titles and privileges. Prince, later King, Nikola I of Montenegro (1841–1921) had no scruples about removing noble titles from disloyal subjects (of whom there were many), as he did with the Vojvoda (warlord) Duke Marko Miljanov Popović (1833–1901), who lost his title after a quarrel with the prince in 1882. Sometimes titles simply fell into disuse, as with the boyars of Romania, who lost their noble status with the ending of serfdom and were just known thereafter as large landowners. In Sweden no new noble titles were granted after 1902, the last one being given to the explorer Sven Hedin (1865–1952).
Despite the popularity in castle and palace reading rooms of the Almanach de Gotha, the bible of noble genealogy, the aristocracy in most parts of Europe was not always of ancient lineage. In Prussia there were 1,129 ennoblements in the period 1871–1918 alone, all by definition of individuals of bourgeois origins. In France there were no more titles of nobility created after 1848, but attempts to abolish titles by law all failed, apart from during the brief interlude of the 1848 Revolution. A law passed under Napoleon III in 1858 allowed ancien régime nobles to obtain an official confirmation of their title for a substantial sum – 5,000 francs for a duke and 2,000 for a marquis. The relative value of a new imperial title even under the Second Empire was illustrated by the charge made for the confirmation of a Napoleonic dukedom, which came in at a mere 200 francs. Bourgeois pretensions were catered for in France by a law which allowed people to add the noble ‘de’ prefix to their names, so that for example a certain Laurent Delattre (dates unknown) had his name legally changed in 1829 to Lattre de Tassigny, after a small estate he owned. This in turn allowed his descendant, Jean Joseph Marie Gabriel de Lattre de Tassigny (1889–1952), a celebrated general, to obtain a coat of arms and claim noble ancestry. In Spain, Queen Isabella gave noble titles to many leading generals and politicians. But she also ennobled a number of wealthy bankers and industrialists. Between 1886 and 1914, 210 Spaniards received noble titles, most of them from the world of business and politics.
Increasingly, the new nobility married into the old, a transaction that brought status to the former and wealth to the latter. A prime example was the family of the Spanish banker and industrialist Eusebi Güell i Bacigalupi (1846–1918). In 1871 he married the daughter of Antonio López, Marquis of Comillas (1817–83), a shipping magnate. Their son Juan Antoni Güell López (1874–1958) had two sisters, both of whom married into old aristocratic families, one of which, the Castelldosirus family, possessed a title dating back to 1148. In this new marriage market, American heiresses were a particularly sought-after prize. French noblemen entered the lists with gusto; the Duc Decazes (1864–1912), for instance, married Isabelle-Blanche Singer (1869–96), one of the heiresses to the Singer sewing-machine fortune, who brought him a dowry of two million dollars. In Britain the Dukes of Marlborough, who had been obliged to sell off some of their art collection in the 1880s to make ends meet, became past masters at discovering willing American heiresses. The eighth duke, George Spencer-Churchill (1844–92), married an American millionairess, Jane Warren Price (1854–1909), widow of a New York realtor, while his son the ninth duke, Charles Spencer-Churchill (1871–1934), married Consuelo Vanderbilt (1877–1964), who owned $4.2 million of railway stock in the USA; their marriage, conducted for purely mercenary reasons on his part and maternal social ambition on hers, ended in divorce. Altogether, between 1870 and 1914 there were more than a hundred marriages solemnized between the sons of English peers and wealthy American women.
Aristocrats continued to play the major role at Court, supplying monarchs and their spouses with personnel for exotically titled offices like (in Britain, for instance) Lady of the Bedchamber or Silver Stick in Waiting. But these were mainly ceremonial positions with little political significance. Armies underwent a steady process of embourgeoisement. In the Habsburg Monarchy, only two out of the thirty-seven generals active in 1804 were bourgeois; by 1908, twenty out of thirty-nine were. In the Prussian Army in 1806, under 10 per cent of the officers were non-noble; by 1913 the proportion had climbed to 70 per cent, including nearly half the generals and colonels. Similar developments took place in the rapidly expanding bureaucracies of European states. In some states with a bicameral Parliament, the hereditary aristocracy possessed its own rights in the Upper Chamber, such as the Prussian Herrenhaus or the British House of Lords, but these steadily lost legitimacy in comparison with elected Lower Chambers; in Britain the powers of the House of Lords were severely circumscribed by an Act of Parliament in 1910, which the government of the day forced through by persuading the king to agree to swamp the Lords with new creations should they fail to agree. The number of landowners in the House of Commons fell from 209 in 1874 to 78 in 1885. While landowners outnumbered all other members of the British Cabinet in 1868 (twelve against eight), new men joining the Cabinet between 1868 and 1886 included fifteen business and professional men but only nine landowners. After the turn of the century, prime ministers such as Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury (1830–1903), a member of one of Britain’s oldest landed families, and his nephew Arthur Balfour (1848–1930), gave way to new men from a different social background like Herbert Henry Asquith (1852–1928), son of a wool merchant, and Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman (1836–1908), son of a clothier. Meanwhile new politicians from humble or even poor backgrounds such as David Lloyd George (1863–1945), who was brought up by his widowed mother and her brother, a shoemaker, in straitened circumstances in a north Wales cottage, were rising to dominate the political scene.
The power of the ‘landed interest’ in British politics was weakened steadily by extensions of the franchise, in 1832, 1867 and 1884, and by the ongoing processes of industrialization and urbanization. Social change forced aristocrats to engage in parliamentary politics. Adapting to the new political climate in their own country, Russian aristocrats began to engage in the party politics that emerged with the creation of an elected Duma after 1905, with Prince Georgy Yevgenyenich Lvov (1861–1925) heading up the moderate liberal Cadet Party. In Prussia the splendidly named Elard Kurt Maria Fürchtegott von Oldenburg-Januschau (1855–1937), an arch-conservative Junker, publicly branded the German socialists a ‘mob of pigs’ and became notorious for saying: ‘The King of Prussia and German Emperor must always be able to say to a lieutenant: take ten men and lock up the Reichstag’; but he still felt obliged to stand for election to the Prussian Parliament in 1901 and the German Reichstag the following year. Aristocratic landowners such as Oldenburg-Januschau now had to campaign for their seat; they could no longer rely on the habits of deference of the peasants and labourers who lived on and around their landed estates. Secret ballots were introduced by law in England in 1872, and most European countries thereafter (they had existed in France since the 1790s). In Germany it became steadily more difficult to apply coercion and intimidation as the ballot became more secret: Oldenburg-Januschau lost his seat in 1912. Nor did the nobility as such wield much political power in liberal Spain; titled politicians, of whom there were many, did not generally acquire political power because of their titles, but acquired titles because of their political power.
More important still in the decline of aristocratic power was the growing might of the state, which over the course of the century abrogated noble rights of self-governance in feudal corporations, and replaced the ties of feudal dominance over the bodies of serfs and subjects with basic freedoms of movement, labour and inheritance, and equality before the law. Increased taxation and other burdens devised by the centralized apparatus of government further impinged on the autonomy of noble estate-owners. Professionalized local administration replaced manorial bailiffs and courts. Noble corporations were pushed aside by elected parliaments, which in many countries boosted their legitimacy by extending the franchise to wider groups of voters. There could be no question of what some historians have argued was a ‘persistence of the old regime’ all the way up to 1914. The decline of the aristocracy was a standard topic of social commentators all over Europe well before the end of the century. Historically, noble status had derived its meaning from the lord’s dominion over his serfs, but over the decades the main functions of the seigneur had been assumed by the state, leaving nobles legally not much different from other subjects.
Despite its general loss of political power, the aristocracy in late nineteenth-century Europe remained in some areas at least a force to be reckoned with. In England, for example, a country long dominated by capitalist agriculture and almost entirely lacking a class of subsistence farmers or peasants, 363 individuals, all of them with titles, owned almost a quarter of all the land in 1873, with an average of more than 10,000 acres apiece. Magnates such as the Duke of Bedford or the Duke of Devonshire owned vast estates which brought in sufficient income for them to maintain grand country houses teeming with servants, cooks, scullery-maids, butlers, footmen, valets, chambermaids, gardeners, gamekeepers, and many more. Some of them, like Chatsworth House in Derbyshire, were palaces in all but name. In east-central Europe there were even greater landed magnates. On the eve of the First World War, the Schwarzenberg family owned 315,000 acres in southern Bohemia, while in Hungary the Esterházy family’s landed estates extended to some 750,000 acres in all. In Silesia the eleven biggest landowners owned 20 per cent of the surface area of the province. Yet while a boom in grain prices that continued through the 1850s and 1860s allowed larger proprietors to make considerable profits, the sharp downturn of the 1870s brought trouble for many of them. In Britain the price of wheat fell by half between 1871 and 1901, and wheat acreage was reduced from 3,500,000 acres to less than 1,500,000. Many tried to adapt by modernizing, but the investment needed was possible only for large farms and estates producing for the market. The British engineer Thomas Aveling (1824–82) devised the first self-propelling steam traction engine in 1859, enabling threshing and other machines to be moved from place to place and operated under steam power. Soon he was doing business all over Europe. In Germany from 1882 to 1907 the number of threshing machines increased by 385 per cent, seed drills by 450 per cent, and mechanical reapers by 1,500 per cent. Imports of agricultural machinery into Italy rose more than twentyfold between 1888 and 1910. Landowners in northern France began to import threshing, reaping and binding machines from America in the 1870s: by 1892 there were 262,000 horse hoes, 234,000 threshing machines and 39,000 mechanical reapers in use in France, and the total weight of imports of agricultural machinery increased more than tenfold between 1890 and 1913. Increasingly, too, Continental countries began to manufacture their own farm machines: the value of the output of agricultural machinery factories in Russia rose more than tenfold between 1890 and 1913, a development paralleled in less dramatic form in other areas of commercially farmed large estates.
These developments left peasant farming largely untouched. Two-thirds of all ploughs used in Russia in 1910 were still wooden, and only 2 per cent of peasant households were using seed drills. The fact that in the late nineteenth century the total number of farms in France stood at 3.5 million indicated that machinery was used only by a tiny minority; most peasant farms carried on doing things by hand. Agricultural credit banks began to enable at least some investment here too, even if agricultural modernization continued to be confined mainly to the larger estates. Improvements were more rapid and far-reaching in Germany, where more than 10 million people worked in agriculture in 1913. While the increase in output that had taken place earlier in the century was largely the consequence of bringing more land under cultivation, from the 1870s it continued despite a fall in the total land area in agricultural use. Output of potatoes nearly doubled from 1875 to 1884 and 1905 to 1914, while that of sugar beet trebled. By 1910, indeed, Germany was producing a third of the world’s entire output of potatoes. Much of this produce went into the distillation of spirits, in factories erected on the noble landowners’ estates. Some of it was for export. Nearly 200,000 litres of grain and potato spirit were imported into southern Africa through the Portuguese entrepôt of Lourenço Marques in 1894. Almost half a million litres were imported at the peak of the trade, in 1896, to dull the senses of the thousands of African labourers drafted in to work in the goldmines of the Rand, where, diluted with water, tincture of prunes, green tea and creosote, the potent spirit was sold as ‘kaffir brandy’.
Smaller farmers by contrast found it easier to turn to animal husbandry. The number of cattle in Germany increased from 16 million in 1873 to 21 million in 1913, and the number of pigs from 12 million in 1892 to 26 million on the eve of the war, more than compensating for a sharp fall in the number of sheep kept. Pigs required much less land, and pork could be used for a variety of purposes, most notably of course the many hundreds of different kinds of sausage consumed by the Germans, who almost entirely lost their taste for mutton and lamb during this period. In Germany too, producer co-operatives and rural banks, both founded by Friedrich Wilhelm Raiffeisen (1818–88), began to help peasant farms modernize, but the process was a very slow one; farming strips were still not consolidated in many areas by 1914, and tiny holdings predominated, with two-thirds of the farms in the Prussian Rhine province occupying only a quarter of the cultivated area on the eve of the war. Raiffeisen had a European impact, with the co-operative agricultural banks founded by his Italian follower Luigi Luzzatti (1841–1927) pioneering a movement that saw more than 700 of them in existence by 1908, almost all in Lombardy. They also made a major impact in Hungary, where the name Raiffeisen can still be seen in streets throughout Budapest today.
In all these areas of agriculture, the advent of chemical fertilizers played a key role in improving productivity. Phosphates, pioneered by the German chemist Justus von Liebig (1803–83) and the British agronomist Sir John Bennet Lawes (1814–1900), began to replace guano as companies such as Fisons, dating back to 1843, started to manufacture the fertilizer on an industrial scale. In Italy the value of imported fertilizer rose from 4 million lire in 1887 to 60 million by 1910, and there was comparable growth elsewhere. This was also a period of countless small, now largely forgotten inventions that improved agricultural output in various ways. Dairy farming was made easier, for example, by the centrifugal cream separator, perfected by the Swedish inventor Gustaf de Laval (1845–1913), which was particularly useful for small farmers who switched to animal husbandry in this period, unable to compete with large grain producers. Only the larger farmers could afford machinery and fertilizer, however. Some 505 of the 511 steam-driven agricultural machines in Austrian Galicia in 1902 were on farms covering more than 120 acres. Even with improvements of this kind, noble estates and market-oriented farms across Europe were increasingly unable to withstand the rising tide of cheap grain imports from America, where the vast Great Plains of the Midwest were brought under cultivation in the second half of the century. Russian grain production also increased rapidly, more than trebling between the 1860s and the 1880s and nearly doubling again by 1910–13. Much of this produce was exported. Wealthier Russian peasants quickly became attuned to the need to price the wheat they grew for export so as not to be undercut by imports from America. An American observer standing at the quayside at Nikolayev, a Ukrainian port on the Black Sea, noted how ‘the peasants on arrival at the market with their grain were asking: “What is the price in America according to the latest telegram?” And, what is still more surprising, they knew how to convert cents per bushel into kopecks per pood.’ Yet as the population of Russia grew apace, grain was required to feed its insatiable demand for bread, so that the percentage of wheat exported fell from over a third to less than a quarter between 1897 and 1913. Still, Russia, along with Germany, remained a major grain exporter right up to 1914.
European trade had been facilitated over the decades by the dismantling of tariff barriers in a lengthy series of bilateral trade treaties – twenty-four concluded by Italy in the 1860s, for example, eighteen by Germany, fourteen by Austria-Hungary. But the situation changed dramatically with the economic downturn of the 1870s and the precipitous rise in American grain exports to Europe. In Germany, Bismarck, yielding to pressure from Junker and other landowning interests, introduced protection in 1879 and increased duties again in 1885 and 1887, by which time the import duty on grain stood at 30 per cent. Nevertheless, on the eve of the First World War, 40 per cent of all wheat consumed in Germany still had to be imported, most of it from Russia. The landed interest also secured tax concessions for its estates, and managed to ensure that tax assessment and collection was largely in the hands of local administrators drawn from the ranks of the noble landowners, the Landräte, who fixed them in the interests of their fellow estate owners. Similarly in France the pressure for import tariffs on grain grew until they were introduced in 1885. Under the 1892 Méline tariff they reached very high levels indeed, making wheat prices about 45 per cent higher than they were in free-trade Britain. Russia introduced new grain duties, above all in the Mendeleev tariff of 1891, as did Austria-Hungary with new tariffs in 1878, 1882 and 1887. The Italians reversed their policy of the 1860s and pushed through new import duties in 1878, 1888 and 1894. In all these cases, and even more so with tariffs introduced by countries such as Bulgaria and Romania, there was a strong element of industrial protection, but a significant part of the pressure to bring in tariffs came from large and medium-sized farms and estates producing for the market.
All of these measures had some effect in shoring up the large estates. But they did not shore up the traditional, post-feudal aristocracy. In many parts of Europe failing estates were increasingly purchased by wealthy middle-class entrepreneurs and investors, who by 1877 had bought up one-eighth of all the land owned by individuals in Russia. In Prussia the Junker aristocracy gained 990,000 acres of land through the whole process of emancipation, together with 260 million marks in money payments, but even this huge transfer of resources did little to counteract its indebtedness, which doubled from 162 million to 325 million marks between 1805 and 1845. In this situation many landowners had no option but to sell. By 1900 only a third of East-Elbian noble estates were still owned by noblemen, including recently ennobled ones. The middle-class purchase of landed estates from impoverished noble families was one of the most widespread social phenomena of the post-feudal period in nineteenth-century Europe. Following disentailment in Spain, for example, a sixth of the property sold in Valladolid was purchased by people from Madrid, all of them commoners. In 1855 a liberal government ordered all land belonging to the state, the Church, charities and municipalities to be sold at auction, for cash that was to be used to fund public works. As a result, around 615,000 properties covering 24 million acres, up to a third of the total land surface of Spain, came onto the market between 1836 and 1895. In some parts of Europe the great landowners managed to put brakes on this process by reintroducing entailment: thus in Hungary, for example, where in 1844 non-nobles had for the first time been legally permitted to purchase landed estates, sixty-four estates were newly entailed between 1853 and 1867, creating nearly three and a half million acres of ‘indivisible and inalienable’ land. But this only slowed down the overall process of transfer, rather than stopping it altogether.
Some aristocratic landowners were unable to adapt to the new commercialism even with the aid of massive sums paid in compensation for their loss of income from feudal sources such as the tithe. In Spain the Duke of Osuna, the country’s top taxpayer in 1850, had already begun to sell off property in 1841 to reduce his debts, but he was forced to take on further loans until he was unable to meet the interest on them except by selling off more land. By 1877 forty-seven sales, ‘some of them worth millions’, it was said, had reduced the duke’s properties still further, until in 1894, following a lengthy series of lawsuits brought by his creditors, his entire remaining property was sequestrated and sold off. According to one investigation, most of the land fell into the hands of ‘substantial farmers, many of whom had been tenants of the House [of Osuna], who added ownership to exploitation and came to reinforce the figure of the capitalist farmer’. Nevertheless, despite such spectacular failures, most large aristocratic landowners in Spain and elsewhere managed to weather the transition to a capitalist agrarian economy, enjoying their new liquidity to invest in a broad portfolio including services and industrial enterprises, or selling off estates in a carefully managed way to reduce their indebtedness. But smaller noble landowners did not always fare so well. ‘Sandalled nobility’ as they were called in Hungary, or ‘buckwheat nobility’ in Poland, were similar to the Krautjunker or ‘cabbage-patch Junkers’ in Prussia – men who lacked the land necessary to live off after the ending of serfdom and often had to migrate to the towns. In Hungary bankruptcies multiplied and many small estates were sold to large landowners, often acting through Jewish-owned banks. The number of medium-sized gentry estates fell from 30,000 in 1867 to only 10,000 by 1900; in 1890 alone there were foreclosures on nearly 15,000 farms whose owners had mortgaged them up to the hilt.
For those whose income allowed them to do it, by far the best way to survive was to invest in industry. In Russia the redemption payments that aristocratic landowners received for the ending of serfdom provided ready funds with which to do so. By the 1870s, as Friedrich Engels remarked in one of his writings on Germany, the aristocracy had ‘left the old and respectable days behind and now swell the lists of directors of all sorts of sound and unsound joint-stock companies’. From the point of view of industrialists, including a titled aristocrat on the board of a company could lend it a touch of class, while the financial rewards were eagerly sought after by those noblemen who did not regard such activities as beneath them. By 1905 the boards of Hungarian financial and industrial companies counted among their number eighty-eight counts and sixty-six barons; in 1902 noblemen made up 30 per cent of the directors of railway companies, and 23 per cent of large steel and banking companies. In Austria in 1874 the boards of railway companies founded since 1866 included thirteen princes, sixty-four counts, twenty-nine barons and forty-two other noblemen. This reflected among other things the huge shift in the sources of wealth that had taken place over the preceding decades. In France the 1848 inheritance records showed that only 5 per cent of the fortunes left at death were in stocks and shares, while 58 per cent were in land or houses; but by 1900 the former figure had climbed to 31 per cent and the latter declined to 45 per cent.
Investing in industry was even easier for a landowner if there were mineral deposits on his estate. Engelbert, Duke of Arenberg and Croy (1875–1949), not untypical in this respect, allowed mines to be sunk on his land in Westphalia in return for rent that brought him an annual income of more than half a million marks by the 1900s. Other aristocratic landowners settled for a percentage of the mining income, a deal that propelled another Westphalian magnate, Alfred, Prince zu Salm-Salm (1846–1923), to one of the top positions in a Yearbook of German Millionaires compiled by Rudolf Martin (1867–1939) as a way of demonstrating the prosperity of the German Reich. Most entrepreneurial of all were the great Silesian landowners, six of whom figured on Martin’s list of the eleven richest Prussians in 1913. One of them, Prince Christian Kraft zu Hohenlohe-Öhringen, Duke of Ujest (1848–1926), employed more than 5,000 coalminers and was the world’s largest producer of zinc. Four-fifths of his wealth was invested in industry by 1910. Another, Prince Guido Henckel von Donnersmarck (1830–1916), diversified his industrial empire into chrome, viscose, paper and cellulose, and invested in industrial enterprises in Austria, France, Hungary, Italy and Russia. Nevertheless, however energetic they were, rich aristocrats like these found it increasingly difficult to keep pace with the rapid development and expansion of industry. By 1909 the Duke of Ujest’s businesses were embroiled in a bitter lawsuit with those of Henckel von Donnersmarck and were teetering on the verge of bankruptcy: Kaiser Wilhelm II was forced to intervene, and the duke had to sell off a large chunk of his land. ‘Mere dilettantism,’ commented the Austrian ambassador on the scandal, ‘was no longer sufficient to manage large estates in a capitalist world.’ Increasingly such men turned their business interests into limited companies and employed professional managers to run them.
In many cases landed aristocrats who tried to gain from industrial enterprises founded on their lands were outflanked by the entrepreneurs they called in to run them. In the Donbass region, the Welsh ironmaster John Hughes (1814–89), having received a commission from the Russian government, arrived in 1870 with a hundred skilled ironworkers and miners from south Wales. Renting the land from the Lieven family, originally Baltic German nobility but now occupying high positions at Court and in the army, Hughes set up a vast complex with eight blast furnaces, iron-ore mines, collieries and brickworks. As the settlement grew, he built an Anglican church dedicated to St George and (of course) St David, schools, a hospital, tearooms, bath-houses, and many other amenities. In 1882, unable to cope with the assertiveness of the miners in the rapidly growing industrial settlement, and mired in lawsuits over their properties, the Lievens sold up to Hughes and invested in stocks and bonds and Baltic forests instead. Within a decade of Hughes’s death, the town, now under the management of four of his sons, was producing three-quarters of all Russia’s iron ore. All this was achieved by a man who was unable to write and could only read if the text was in capital letters, while the aristocratic owners of the land were not even capable of understanding what they had done. Hughes’s memory was commemorated in the name of the settlement, Yuzovka (Hughesovka), and it was only changed after the Bolshevik Revolution when most of the Welsh miners went back home; in 1924 it became Stalino, then, later, after Stalin’s name fell into disrepute, Donetsk.
The example of Yuzovka, like the experiences of the Silesian magnates, pointed to the fact that even where the landed aristocracy tried to keep up with the times, they were often overtaken by thrusting entrepreneurs of far humbler origin. What emerged in fact from the social changes of the nineteenth century, as bourgeois businessmen invested in landed property and aristocratic estate-owners invested in industry, was a new kind of elite, based above all on wealth, mixing together large landowners, bankers and businessmen, industrialists and investors, some with titles, some without, but all living more or less the same style of life, wearing the same kind of clothes, and indulging in the same kind of amusements. Increasingly hunting parties and country-house weekends were joined by businessmen, non-aristocratic politicians and other commoners who entered ‘Society’, as the term was in England, on the basis of their wealth. The very wealthy lived a peripatetic lifestyle, moving from one residence to another as the seasons required. In England, for example, they would occupy a house in London in the late spring and early summer. They would move up to the Scottish moors for the opening of the grouse-shooting season on the ‘glorious twelfth’ of August, and then to Norfolk for the pheasant shooting, or the Midlands for fox hunting and county balls. They returned to London for Christmas, after which they would overwinter in Monte Carlo or Biarritz, indulging in gambling, card-playing, socializing and intrigue.
It was common for the very rich to own a house in every location where they spent more than a few weeks each year, though only their main country residence would be really large. Wealthy central Europeans tended to spend a good deal of their time in spas such as Karlsbad or Baden-Baden, where the casino was almost as important as the thermal baths. Such locations were meeting places for a wide variety of European high nobility and, increasingly, wealthy bourgeois. Baden-Baden was visited at one time or another by Queen Victoria, Kaiser Wilhelm I and the Emperor Napoleon III, as well as foreign potentates such as the Persian Shah Nasir al-Din (1831–96). It also featured as a setting for some of the episodes in the novel Anna Karenina by Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy (1828–1910) as well as The Gambler by Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky (1821–81), who went there to play the tables at the casino, though he could not really afford it. Johannes Brahms (1833–97) had a house there, and Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev (1818–83) set his 1867 novel Smoke in the town. In such venues the high aristocratic and, increasingly, the wealthy elites of many countries had the opportunity to meet, socialize, gamble, and conduct affairs across national and linguistic divides. Their cosmopolitanism was aided by the universality of French as the basic means of communication. The great cities of Europe, above all Paris, provided more venues of this kind; some noblemen lived almost all the time there, like the post-feudal boyars of Romania, who generally preferred to stay in France or Switzerland rather than in their own impoverished country, where 2,000 of them nonetheless owned 38 per cent of the land at the turn of the century. Later on, the film The Grand Illusion (1937) by the French director Jean Renoir (1894–1979) was to recapture this cosmopolitan world of the European elite in the encounter between Major von Rauffenstein, governor of a German prisoner-of-war camp during the First World War, and Captain de Boeldieu, one of his French prisoners: both aristocrats, they remembered dining at Maxim’s restaurant in Paris, and even recalled flirting with the same woman before the war.
Not content with sharing in the lifestyle of the landed elite in this way, the upper middle classes even moved in on that most aristocratic of pursuits in the nineteenth century, duelling. In the aristocratic world of the eighteenth century, the pursuit of glory was accompanied by the defence of honour. An insult could only be requited through a challenge. Potential duellists were supposed to be, as the Germans put it, satisfaktionsfähig, that is, of suitably honourable standing to give or receive a challenge, but as the century wore on, the definition of who was honourable crept steadily down the social scale. Out of the 232 Prussian duellists known to have fought between 1800 and 1869, 44 per cent were noblemen; among the 303 duellists known to have fought between 1870 and 1914, the figure sank to a mere 19 per cent. Doctors fought over diagnoses, lawyers over court cases, politicians over parliamentary exchanges, army and naval officers, whether titled or not (and 20 per cent of the Prussian officer corps and the great majority of the naval officer corps were not titled even in the 1850s), over tactics employed on manoeuvre. By asserting their honourable status, middle-class men were laying claim to what had previously been the exclusive preserve of the titled aristocracy: all across Europe, writers like Marcel Proust (1871–1922), Alexander Pushkin and Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov (1814–41), politicians like Pyotr Stolypin, Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929) and Ferdinand Lassalle, even the painter Édouard Manet (1832–83), fought duels. The merging of aristocratic and bourgeois mores signified by middle-class duelling took place at many levels across the century. In Britain, duelling was replaced from mid-century by sporting contests, but the process was the same. Long before 1914 it was clear that a new upper class of the wealthy and the influential had been formed.
Some historians have argued that the aristocracy changed over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries from a social order to a class, but this is not quite correct. Certainly under the legal regime of agrarian feudalism the aristocracy possessed rights and privileges denied to the untitled, reflecting the ancien régime conception of a society where every order not only knew its place but was also kept there by law. But before the decline of feudalism, in most parts of Europe the aristocracy was also a class, that is, it too could be defined economically, as the group in society whose wealth derived from the land. Of course, at its lower borders there was little to choose in this respect between the impoverished Krautjunker and the prosperous peasant, and here the web of rights, privileges and duties spun by feudalism was at its most potent and its most restrictive. Nevertheless, the aristocracy’s decline in the nineteenth century broadly mirrored the decline of land as a source of wealth and the rise of banking, trade and industry until they outstripped it. The titled aristocracy, increasingly uncoupled from landed wealth, became ever more exclusively a status group, retaining its social prestige but losing its economic identity and merging into the upper ranks of the bourgeoisie. Contemporaries recognized this fact: in France, for example, it was common by the late nineteenth century to argue that the country was run by ‘200 families’ of the wealthy elite, most of them non-noble, who arranged everything to suit themselves (though if there was such an oligarchy, it was certainly much larger than this).
In Der Stechlin, the last novel of Theodor Fontane (1819–98), the central figure, the conservative noble landowner Dubslav von Stechlin, lives a tranquil life, interrupted only by an election in which he is beaten by a socialist. Stechlin recognizes that he and his kind are no longer capable of keeping up with the modern world. They had, as one of the characters, Pastor Lorenzen, says, to go ‘not necessarily with the new: better with the old, as far as we can, and with the new, only as far as we must’. But perhaps the most powerful fictional evocation of the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of a new bourgeoisie comes from a much later novel, Il Gattopardo (referring to the serval, a large wildcat that was hunted to extinction in Italy in the nineteenth century, but known in English as The Leopard). Its author, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (1896–1957), was a minor Sicilian prince whose incompatible marriage to a Baltic German noblewoman, Alexandra Alice Wolff von Stomersee (1894–1982), strangely mirrored that of Hermynia and Viktor von Zur Mühlen. The novel, based on family stories and documents from the time of Lampedusa’s great-grandfather, centres on Prince Fabrizio, an impoverished Sicilian aristocrat who lives off his peasants and does not really work, preferring to occupy himself with pursuing his private hobby of astronomy. The prince is jolted out of his routine when he is confronted with the upheaval of the Risorgimento, in which the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies falls and is incorporated into the new united Italy, ruled from Piedmont by bourgeois politicians, bankers and industrialists. As those who have backed the unification become rich and influential, the prince realizes that he and his estates will only survive in this new world if he follows the advice of his nephew Tancredi, who has joined with Garibaldi to signify the nobility’s acceptance of unification: ‘If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.’ Although he does not love her, the ambitious Tancredi marries Angelica, the daughter of the rough and unscrupulous businessman and politician Don Calogero, who has rigged the plebiscite in Sicily to produce a majority for unification. As the novel proceeds, the prince and the businessman grow more like one another, the prince becoming more proactive in his business dealings, Don Calogero beginning ‘that process of continual refining which in the course of three generations transforms innocent peasants into defenceless gentry’.
Throughout the nineteenth century, the economy of Europe and indeed the entire world was dominated by Britain. By 1850 over 40 per cent of the world’s output of traded manufactured goods was produced in the United Kingdom. Britain was ‘the workshop of the world’, a status celebrated in the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations held in 1851 in a vast, specially constructed glass pavilion – the Crystal Palace – erected in London’s Hyde Park. Despite the invitation to exhibitors from across the globe to display their wares in the pavilion, there was no doubt that the primary intention was to advertise Britain’s role as the world’s industrial leader. The continuing influence of the landed aristocracy was present symbolically in the choice of the Duke of Devonshire’s head gardener, Joseph Paxton (1803–65), to design the Crystal Palace, a larger version of an enormous glass conservatory he had built at Chatsworth in Derbyshire. Six million people visited the Great Exhibition, from all social classes, making the average attendance per day more than 40,000. Queen Victoria was given season ticket number one and visited the Crystal Palace more than forty times. ‘The tremendous cheering,’ she wrote on the opening day, ‘the joy expressed in every face, the vastness of the building, with all its decoration and exhibits, the sound of the organ . . . all this was indeed moving.’
Those who attended were overwhelmed by the novelty and diversity of the exhibits. The novelist Charlotte Brontë (1816–55) noted after her visit:
It is a wonderful place – vast, strange, new and impossible to describe. Its grandeur does not consist in one thing, but in the unique assemblage of all things. Whatever human industry has created you find there, from the great compartments filled with railway engines and boilers, with mill machinery in full work, with splendid carriages of all kinds, with harness of every description, to the glass-covered and velvet-spread stands loaded with the most gorgeous work of the goldsmith and silversmith, and the carefully guarded caskets full of real diamonds and pearls worth hundreds of thousands of pounds.
Prizes were offered for the most ingenious mechanical inventions and the most innovative industrial products, and were almost all won by the British; other countries took the prizes for foodstuffs, handicrafts and raw materials. The Exhibition was notable for its social harmony, with workers, admitted on specially discounted tickets, marvelling at the products alongside the middle classes. Queen Victoria’s husband Prince Albert (1819–61), a moving spirit of the Exhibition, remarked before the opening that it would demonstrate ‘peace, love, and ready assistance, not only between individuals but between the nations of the earth’. Only the German industrialist and arms manufacturer Alfred Krupp struck a discordant note, exhibiting a shiny steel cannon: ‘The English will have their eyes opened,’ he exulted.
Britain’s domination of the oceans in the decades following the defeat of Napoleon ensured that British shipping carried the vast bulk of world trade during the period. At mid-century a quarter of all international trade passed through British ports. More than half of Britain’s foreign trade was carried in British ships, generating important invisible earnings that were enormously boosted by the virtual world monopoly in shipping insurance exercised by Lloyd’s of London. In 1890, Britain still had a greater tonnage of shipping than the rest of the world put together. Even in 1910, 40 per cent of the tonnage of the ships engaged in world trade was British. For most of the nineteenth century these ships were sailing vessels, with the famous tea-clippers such as the Cutty Sark dominating the trade in China tea. American sailing ships were more advanced than their British counterparts in the early decades of the century, carried more cotton and required fewer sailors to man them. But the transition to ironclad and steam-powered vessels transferred the advantage back to the British shipping industry, above all when steamships became powerful enough to cross the oceans, as they did in the early 1830s. A crucial breakthrough came with the invention of the screw propeller by the Bohemian engineer Josef Ressel (1793–1857), who patented the device in 1827 and used it to power the ship Civetta across Trieste’s harbour at 6 knots in 1829 (unfortunately the ship exploded halfway over, and the Austrian police banned any further experiments). The first steam-powered ship to cross the Atlantic Ocean, the SS Savannah, which made the journey in 1819, still carried sail, while the first purpose-built transatlantic vessel, the SS Great Western, built by the British engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806–59) and the largest ship in the world at the time, still used a paddle-wheel for propulsion. But by 1845, Brunel had built a screw-propelled ship for the Atlantic crossing, the SS Great Britain. It took further technical innovations such as compound and triple-expansion engines, which hugely increased fuel efficiency by using steam several times over, to make regular long-haul journeys possible. Coaling stations allowed steamships to carry more cargo, and the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 saved nearly 4,000 miles on the China run.
The hegemony of British shipping was ensured by the largest naval force in the world, which from 1889 onwards was required by an Act of Parliament to have at least as many battleships as the next two largest navies in the world combined. British trade was underpinned by the vastly greater degree of mechanization that gave British industry a huge advantage over its competitors, allowing it to produce more goods, faster, in greater quantities, and to a higher standard. The British economy dominated a global division of labour in which Britain produced industrial and manufactured goods, while the rest of the world supplied raw materials. Some 93 per cent of British exports at mid-century consisted of manufactured goods, and around the same proportion of imports comprised primary unprocessed produce. This situation continued well into the second half of the nineteenth century. The period was dominated increasingly by heavy industry and engineering. Textiles, which still made up more than 60 per cent of British exports in 1850, fell to 34 per cent in 1913, whereas metals and engineering increased from 18 to 27 per cent.
Just how much the economy depended on the British command of seaborne trade can be seen in the case of the Welsh slate-quarrying industry, which came to dominate the world in the nineteenth century. There were major seams of this stone, used above all for roofing the millions of houses built in the urban expansion of the era, in other parts of Europe, notably Westphalia and Spanish Galicia, but these regions lacked the ability to ship out blocks and finished slate products in quantity. The great quarries opened in north Wales transferred their products down to the coast on narrow-gauge gravity railways such as the Ffestiniog, the Talyllyn and the Corris, and from there they were shipped away by small bulk carriers, many of which were built onsite in special harbour facilities such as Port Dinorwic. The Penrhyn Quarry at Bethesda, on the slopes of Mount Snowdon, was carved out of the hills on a gargantuan scale, with twenty galleries together producing over 100,000 tons a year, leaving behind enormous grey slag heaps of discarded and broken rock tumbling down the hillside. In the five-year period 1875–80, 1,125,000 tons of slate were taken by ship from Porthmadog to other parts of Britain, the Continent or overseas, and another 692,000 tons from Port Dinorwic. Slate exports remained at an extraordinarily high level throughout the period, above all to Germany: in 1894, 39,500 out of 48,700 tons of slate went from Porthmadog directly to German ports. The 14,000 or so men employed in the Welsh slate-quarrying industry owed their livelihood in the first place to the British ability to monopolize the means of transportation of this heavy yet fragile bulk material across Europe and the world.
British industrial know-how and capital investment did not spread evenly across the European Continent in the age of high industrialization. Although many major industrial regions crossed state boundaries, as with the north-western European coalfield, industrial production had a growing effect on the economic and ultimately the military power of individual nations. Nowhere was this more obvious than in the case of the German Empire. In western Germany, north of the river Ruhr, the coal seams were deep, and the first successful sinkings of pits were achieved only in the 1840s. Coal output in the Ruhr, a mere 2 million tons in 1850, rose to 12 million in 1870, 60 million in 1890, and 114 million in 1913 (nearly three times the entire coal output of France). By 1913 the Ruhr was producing 8 million tons of pig iron a year. Companies grew at a frenetic pace, uniting coal and iron-ore mining with smelting and engineering in a ‘vertical combination’ that reduced costs and increased efficiency. Beginning with railways they moved out into other areas, above all armaments. Typical of this process was the Alfred Krupp firm in the Ruhr, which had begun its dizzying ascent to industrial prominence by making crankshafts and axles during the first railway boom in the 1840s. Continuing technical innovations after the middle of the century enabled Krupp to produce cast steel rings for use on railway wheels, then rails, as well as steel plates and propellers and shafts for steamships. In 1862, Krupp installed the first Bessemer furnace, named after the English inventor of a process involving the removal of impurities from pig iron by oxidation, Henry Bessemer (1813–98). Krupp followed it in 1869 with an improved version named after another English inventor, Sidney Gilchrist Thomas (1850–85). The profits allowed Krupp to buy up other firms and acquire iron-ore mines. The firm went on to make more and bigger steel products, until it was employing 12,000 workers on an 86-acre site in Essen by 1874, three times the size it had been a decade earlier. Major heavy-industrial enterprises like Krupp and Thyssen ensured that Germany had become the leading industrial nation on the Continent well before the end of the century. It began to rival Britain. In 1910 the steam tonnage of the German merchant marine was well over 2 million tons, 11 per cent of the world total. Britain’s monopoly on merchant shipping was clearly on the wane. The pace of German industrial growth and innovation was frantic. At the opening of the new port facilities in Hamburg in 1888, Otto von Bismarck surveyed the 16,150-square-foot sprawl of the Blohm and Voss shipbuilding yards, with their three huge construction berths, the recently completed purpose-built ‘warehouse city’, the bustling tugs and barges, the vast steamships towering over the waterfront, and the forests of steam cranes loading and unloading goods on the quayside, and remarked to his entourage: ‘Gentlemen, that is a world I no longer understand.’
Compared to Germany’s rapid industrial growth, French industrialization was an oft-interrupted process through most of the nineteenth century. British superiority in heavy industry, manufacturing and engineering in the first half of the century meant that the French had to concentrate on consumer goods, notably textiles. The weight of a peasant-dominated agricultural sector retarded French industrial investment, though German and British banks put considerable resources into the French economy. Population growth in France was far slower than in Britain or Germany, leaving little room for growth-led demand and placing a greater weight on exports. In addition, French agriculture was notably inefficient, with wheat yields in 1911–12 averaging half those of Belgium or the Netherlands. A major agricultural crisis hit France in the 1870s, as a microscopic parasite called pébrine devastated the silkworm industry and a tiny aphid, phylloxera, found its way across the Atlantic in fruit shipments and began eating up grapevines across the country. By 1880 nearly half of the vineyards in St Emilion had been lost. As the English humorous magazine Punch commented, ‘The phylloxera, a true gourmet, finds out the best vineyards and attaches itself to the best wines.’ Of course, the disease badly affected vines elsewhere, notably in Germany, but French wine was a major export commodity, whereas German wine mostly stayed at home, to be exported principally in the sickly sweet variety known in England as ‘hock’. Overall, the epidemic cost around 37 per cent of the average annual French gross domestic product in the years 1885–1894, an indication of how important winegrowing was to the economy. The industry gradually recovered, thanks to the importation of disease-resistant vines from America, but the rate of replacement was slow. Germany’s output of pig iron, the same as that of France in 1870, had doubled to twice the French output twenty years later, reflecting France’s 10 per cent compared with Germany’s 50 per cent population increase during these years as well as the chance location of large coal and iron-ore fields within the German borders. In France, 53 per cent of the labour force were engaged in agriculture and forestry in 1870, and 37 per cent in 1913. The railway boom continued through much of this period, and France’s coal output rose from 17 million tons in 1875 to 41 million by 1913. But these quantities were small in comparison to those produced in Britain and Germany, and French imports of coal always amounted to between a third and a half of total consumption.
If French industry fell behind in relative terms, then on the southern periphery of Europe economies altogether failed to develop a strong industrial sector. In Spain the poverty of agriculture, the lack of easily exploitable mineral resources, the loss of the Americas, and the high tariff barriers erected in 1891 to levy a duty of more than 100 per cent on foreign grain, meant that the economy continued to be dominated by agriculture. Political instability discouraged investment, and the weak home market inhibited capital accumulation. Most Spanish natural produce was exported, including 81 per cent of Basque iron ores over the period 1881–1913. Portugal was in a similar situation, with one estimate putting per capita gross national product in 1913 near the bottom of the European pecking order, only a little higher than that of the Balkan states. Similarly, Austria-Hungary accounted by 1913 for only 6 per cent of Europe’s total industrial output, and within the empire agriculture continued to make up around half of the entire national product on the eve of the war, with foodstuffs, textiles and consumer goods dominant. Heavy industry was concentrated in a few areas such as Bohemia and Moravia, Silesia and Styria, pulled along by the railway boom. But even though the Gilchrist-Thomas process enabled low-grade ore to be smelted and used in steel manufacture, costs per ton were a quarter higher than in Lorraine, coke and even ore had to be imported, and in some parts of the empire charcoal continued to be used in preference to coke as late as the 1890s. The textile industries continued to grow in Austria, with an increase in the number of cotton spindles from 1.3 million in 1851 to 2 million in 1885 and nearly 5 million in 1913, but Hungary was left far behind in the race, and overall continuing rural poverty held demand back across the Austro-Hungarian Empire as a whole. Only in a few centres did imaginative entrepreneurship and the import of modern methods lead to a real success story, as in the shoe industry of Bohemia, where Tomáš Bat’a (1876–1932) brought assembly-line technology back from the United States to his home town of Zlín in 1894 and applied it to the family firm, creating one of Europe’s most successful mass-production shoemaking businesses in the process. On the northern slopes of the Carpathians, deep-drilling techniques imported by a Canadian oil company led to a vast increase in production from 2,300 tons in 1884 to more than 2 million in 1909, putting Galicia into fourth place among the world’s oil-producing regions.
Patchy and regionally localized industrialization also characterized the Russian economy before 1914. Yuzovka, in the Donbass region of Ukraine, was one, still relatively small industrial area; in the 1890s the iron-ore fields of Krivoy Rog came into large-scale operation, with large metallurgical plants being founded at Ekaterinoslav, on the Dnieper, and industry clustered around the great cities of Moscow and St Petersburg. Industrial production in Russia doubled between 1860 and 1880, again to 1891, and again from 1892 to 1900. Yet this was still a slow pace of growth. Sergei Witte, Finance Minister from 1892 to 1903, previously in charge of Russia’s railways, saw that state intervention was needed to speed up the process of economic growth. Witte was determined to bring Russia into the modern world. His policies ranged widely, and included for example a drive to improve literacy rates among the peasantry, in an effort to equip them for success in a market economy. Witte’s policies represented perhaps the most dynamic and determined example in Europe before 1914 of state intervention as a deliberate tool of economic and industrial growth. Protective tariffs introduced in 1891 encouraged the domestic market, and in 1897 Witte introduced the gold-based rouble in order to provide a stable financial environment for foreign banks to invest in machines and factories for Russian industry. Witte was also successful in encouraging foreign banks to subscribe to government loans, so that by 1914 nearly half the state debt was held abroad. Coal output in the southern provinces of the tsarist empire more than trebled between 1890 and 1900, while pig-iron production in the area grew from 210,000 tons in 1890 to 1,483,000 a decade later. Right up to 1914, however, heavy industry still lagged behind cotton textiles, beet sugar refining and other consumer goods industries. Around 15 per cent of the empire’s spindles were concentrated around Łódź, ‘the Polish Manchester’.
As a latecomer, Russian industry imported advanced structural models from western and central Europe rather than building on pre-existing proto-industry. Thus firms tended to be large in scale from the outset. The average number of workers per factory in the metallurgical industries of Ukraine in 1890, for example, was 1,500, and in 1900 that number had risen to 4,600. Companies formed syndicates such as Prodameta, especially in mining and metallurgy, to control prices and divide up the market. Vertical integration proceeded apace; by 1913, twelve of the leading southern metallurgical firms owned or rented iron-ore mines, controlling 80 per cent of supplies in Ukraine, and held enough of an interest in coalmines to produce more than 2 million tons a year surplus to their own requirements. Yet the poverty of rural Russia, where the overwhelming majority of the tsar’s subjects still lived on the eve of the First World War, held them back. ‘To dream of consolidating our metallurgical industry on the basis of horseshoes, axles, wheels, ploughs and roofs for the peasantry,’ a government spokesman observed gloomily, ‘ . . . is not something in which practical men can indulge.’ The fact was that heavy industry was dependent on foreign and especially French investment. Ten of the fifteen companies that dug out three-quarters of Russia’s coal in 1899 were foreign-owned, and almost every shipyard from Riga to Odessa was in foreign hands.
After 1905 heavy industry in Russia relied not on the wider market but overwhelmingly on government commissions, above all for armaments, but here too there was major foreign involvement. Thus the French arms firms of Schneider-Creusot and St Chamond transferred their expertise to the Putilov Armoury in St Petersburg, the largest industrial enterprise in the capital and another metallurgical plant that had grown up in the railway era of the 1890s. Similarly, the British arms firms of John Brown, Vickers and Armstrong-Whitworth together modernized the Tsaritsyn Arsenal in 1910–14 to make it ‘a private factory such as no other nation possesses, excepting England . . . the most recent, the most modern, and most effective which could be provided in any country in the world’. Yet Russian exports in 1914 were still dominated by agricultural produce – half of their value was accounted for by grain – and manufactured goods made up a mere 8 per cent. In 1913, despite its huge size and massive population, the Russian Empire produced only one-tenth of the coal mined in Britain, half the British output of steel, and one-third of the oil brought to the surface in the USA. Witte’s attempt to force industrialization ran into the sands of an agricultural depression at the turn of the century. In 1903, under fire variously from agrarian pressure groups, disgruntled conservatives, and intriguers who looked down on him because he was not only a commoner but also had a Jewish wife, Witte was forced to resign his position as Minister of Finance.
By the time the railway boom eventually came to an end, the engineering industry on the Continent had largely taken over the production of locomotives, track and rolling stock. The rapid mechanization of the textile industry displaced British exports as British firms failed to switch from the jenny or mule to the new, faster and cheaper technique of ring-spinning. Ironically, British machinery firms such as Platts in Oldham near Manchester exported the new automatic looms to Japan and other countries but failed to find buyers in the home market. British dependence on what by the late nineteenth century had become traditional industries also inhibited the development of new ones, but also slowed modernization more generally. Continental industries had the advantage of coming late to the game and being able to adopt the latest methods, while British industries began to lag behind. Cotton mills constructed in Lancashire after 1896 to take advantage of new markets for cheap cloth in Africa were still being built on the old lines. Industrial production in Britain, which had grown at an average of 3 per cent per annum since the 1820s, slowed down to under 2 per cent after 1880. Productivity began to fall until output per head in British coalmining was only half of that found in the American coal industry by 1914. Heavy investment in the 1860s and 1870s in plant such as the Bessemer converter made manufacturers reluctant to invest again. American innovations such as the typewriter and the sewing machine invaded British markets. Danish, Dutch, French and Swedish patented dairy equipment followed. Hungarian roller mills started to supplant British ones in the milling industry.
The growing difficulty of their situation from the end of the 1870s onwards led British industrialists to control competition and fix prices through trade associations, trusts and cartels. In 1879, for example, the tea shippers agreed to limit the tonnage competing for trade with China so that their ships would all sail with full cargoes. British consumer goods production was now vulnerable to American intervention, particularly in the tobacco, salt and sewing-thread industries, which prompted British manufacturers and retailers to combine in order to fight the competition. The Imperial Tobacco Company united thirteen leading companies that together accounted for over half of all the tobacco sales in Britain at the turn of the century. In 1906, eleven regional soap businesses merged into a ‘soap trust’ run by Lever Brothers, reducing costs by pooling research and technical expertise and accounting for some 60 per cent of soap production and sales in Britain by 1910. It was in these decades that many famous brands in the food and drink and other light industries, such as Cadbury and Fry in chocolates, or Lever Brothers’ ‘Lux’ and ‘Vim’ in washing and cleaning products, became established. At the same time, coal output increased from 110 million tons in 1870 to 290 million in 1913. Ironically, Britain became an exporter of a major raw material – coal – at the same time as its dominance of the European economy in manufactured goods began to decline.
In two industries in particular the British fell behind their competitors in the second half of the nineteenth century. Germany took the lead in the chemical industry, where German research dominated to such an extent that British chemists almost invariably went there to get their training. Soda production was revolutionized by the Solway purification process, invented in Belgium in 1861 and used as the basis for mass production by the German-born industrialist Ludwig Mond (1839–1909). The first aniline dye (christened ‘mauvine’ from its colour) was discovered accidentally by the British chemist William Perkin (1838–1907) while working on quinine, a treatment for malaria, with the German chemist August Hofmann (1818–92). Perkin patented the substance, but aniline dyes only became suitable for mass production when the French chemist Antoine Béchamp (1816–1908) developed a way of reducing them and manufacturing them in quantities suitable for commercial use. The Baden Anilin and Soda Factory (BASF), founded in 1865, developed a similar process, using coal tar, ironically mostly imported from Britain, where industrialists did not know what to do with it. BASF developed further dyes, notably indigo, produced from 1897 onwards. Business boomed, and by 1900 the BASF factory, in the company town of Ludwigshafen, across the Rhine from Mannheim, was devoting 80 per cent of its production to dyestuffs.
The pharmaceutical company Bayer, in Wuppertal, founded in 1863 by two men involved in the dyestuffs business, built on the discoveries of the French chemist Charles Gerhardt (1816–56), becoming a joint-stock company in 1881. He was a student of the great German chemist Justus von Liebig, whose discovery of the value of nitrogen as a plant nutrient effectively founded the chemical fertilizer industry. Liebig had studied and worked in Paris, and in 1865 founded a company to produce and market meat extract according to a process he had discovered with a Belgian colleague: in 1899 the product was labelled ‘Oxo’. Liebig also developed a technique for producing concentrated extracts of yeast, marketed in England as Marmite or, in Australia, where it became a national icon, Vegemite. Non-German chemical companies were mostly multinational, such as Nobel Explosives, founded in Ayrshire in 1870 by the Swedish inventor of dynamite Alfred Nobel (1833–96), Brunner Mond, founded in 1873, and United Alkali, formed in 1890 from the merger of forty-eight small firms.
Like the chemical industry, the electrical industry, the other field in which Germany took the lead in the late nineteenth century, also developed through international collaboration. Here too the British failed to innovate. It was the British scientist Michael Faraday (1791–1867) who first built a machine to produce a direct current from rotary motion, but it was the American inventor Thomas Edison (1847–1931) who adapted it for commercial use on a large scale. In 1882, Edison opened the world’s first steam-powered electricity generating station, on Holborn Viaduct in London. (The previous year a water-powered generator had provided the world’s first public electricity supply, in Godalming, Surrey.) Soon electricity was being used to power trams and underground railways in Europe’s great cities, and domestic appliances such as hotplates and blankets, already exhibited at the Vienna World Exhibition in 1883. The German engineer Werner von Siemens (1816–92), who made his fortune with telegraph systems based on needles pointing to letters rather than on Morse Code, operated on an international basis, with his brother Sir William Siemens (1823–83) in Britain and another brother Carl von Siemens (1829–1906) in St Petersburg. Other companies too established subsidiaries in Britain: the electrification of the pioneering District and Metropolitan lines on the London Underground, for example, was undertaken at the turn of the century by the American financier Charles Yerkes (1837–1905), and the trains worked on an alternating current system provided by the Ganz Works in Budapest. It was a sign of the British electrical industry’s failure to exploit inventiveness that Sir Joseph Swan’s incandescent light bulb was outclassed and outsold by the products of his rival Thomas Edison, forcing a merger of the two companies in Britain in 1883 under the trade name Ediswan.
By this time the German chemical and electrical industries had grown to become European and indeed world leaders, leaving their British counterparts far behind. Part of the reason was their employment of trained scientists – 230 in BASF, for example, or 165 in Hoechst, another major chemical firm – reflecting the greater concentration of state-funded German universities on the sciences. In 1913, German chemical companies were producing 28 per cent of the world’s exports in the field, with Britain producing only 16 per cent. In synthetic dyestuffs the British only managed 2 per cent of the world’s exports, with Germany making up a massive 90 per cent. Similarly, Siemens, and its great rival, AEG (Allgemeine Elektrizitäts-Gesellschaft, or General Electricity Company, which applied Edison’s patents to the European market), accounted for 75 per cent of German electro-technical production. The scale of these organizations by this time was gargantuan: Siemens, for example, employed 75,000 workers in Germany in 1913, and 24,000 outside the country. The ambition of their leading figures was boundless. As the writer, politician and businessman Walther Rathenau (1867–1922) noted at the funeral of his father Emil Rathenau (1838–1915), founder of AEG, when he ‘saw this little light bulb alight for the first time, he had a vision of the whole world covered with a network of copper wire. He saw electric current flowing from one country to another, distributing not only light but also power.’ Backing up these developments was a steady growth in trusts and cartels, in which bank representatives joined the boards of industrial companies and acted as intermediaries in mergers and acquisitions. In Germany they brokered the union of the Phönix Ironworks with the Westende coalmining concern in the 1890s, an example of ‘vertical integration’, while after the turn of the century the Darmstädter Bank was instrumental in the creation of the Luxemburg-Lorraine Pig Iron Syndicate. So closely were German banking and industrial enterprises interwoven by this time that some historians have even spoken of ‘organized capitalism’ in which open-market competition became increasingly controlled by large conglomerates, often with close links to the government. Certainly, by 1907 cartelization covered 90 per cent of the German market in paper, 74 per cent in mining, and 50 per cent in crude steel. By 1900 there were 275 cartels in operation in Germany, in all branches of industry, some 200 of them created between the years 1879 and 1890.
It was not only the German economy that was outpacing the British in the ‘second industrial revolution’, or at least in parts of it. In Italy the development of an advanced electrical industry in the 1890s delivered a sharp stimulus to modern areas of production, notably motor manufacture. Industrial take-off in the Italian north-west, around Genoa, Milan and Turin, already economically relatively prosperous, had to wait for railways – built with imported materials and equipped at first with foreign machinery – to facilitate the bulk import of coal, still however costing up to eight times what it cost in England at the factory gate. It was not until the 1860s that Italy witnessed a real railway boom, with the new national government seeing the railways as a means of unifying the country; three-quarters of all expenditure on public works between 1861 and 1913 went on the construction of railway lines. The length of railway line in Italy grew from just short of 1,120 miles in 1859 to 11,800 miles by 1913, mostly concentrated in the north. The real breakthrough, however, lay in the technological innovation that enabled the vast potential sources of hydroelectrical power in the Alps to be exploited. The development of electric generators from the 1880s onwards soon led to the creation of large-scale hydroelectrical power plants, pioneered by the Schoelkopf Power Station at Niagara Falls in the USA in 1881. From the mid-1890s onwards there was a massive construction boom in Italy, with hydroelectricity replacing 20 per cent of imported fuels by 1911 and operating at a much lower cost. In 1914 the hydroelectrical capacity of Italy reached a million kilowatts, and though some of this was used for purposes such as providing electric lighting for Milan (one of the first cities in the world to be fully lit by this method), 90 per cent of it was employed in industry, which expanded at dizzying speed in the decade and a half before the outbreak of the First World War.
Following a banking crash in 1893–4, new Italian banks emerged, often funded with foreign capital, and they invested heavily in hydroelectric schemes, especially after the nationalization of the railways in 1905. They extended credit to the most modern industries. Other advanced industrial enterprises were emerging in Italy by this time, such as the Olivetti typewriter company, founded in 1908, but technological innovation also produced rapid growth in more traditional sectors, such as food production, where the Buitoni factory employed thermo-mechanical drying for pasta products. Cotton spinning machines and power looms, combined with high import tariffs introduced in 1887, turned Italy into a major exporter of cotton goods, especially to Turkey and the Balkans. Mechanization stimulated the iron and steel industry – steel production grew from 200,000 tons in 1895 to 933,000 tons in 1913. Altogether the industrial growth rate in Italy has been estimated at around 5 per cent per annum between 1897 and 1913, but electricity was growing by 15 per cent a year, chemicals by 13 per cent, and iron and steel by 11 per cent.
Italy was not the only European country to experience rapid industrial growth based on hydroelectric power. By 1915, Sweden was producing 550,000 kilowatts of energy a year, modernizing its iron and steel production, and building a new industrial economy centred on high-precision engineering products. Capital accumulated through the export of timber to Britain for railway sleepers was invested in the new power source and the new industries, which included technologically advanced sawmills and paper mills. Norway depended more on foreign capital, though it had a very large whaling and fishing fleet, but hydroelectric power resources grew here almost exponentially, doubling from 200,000 kilowatts in 1908 to 400,000 in 1912. In this way Italy, Sweden and Norway all leapfrogged the coal-based stages of industrialization and entered the industrial age on the basis of the most modern power technology. Other countries, such as Austria, despite its Alpine potential, found it difficult to follow suit, not least because of the inhibiting effect of the German economy: thus, for example, while German chemical companies could obtain sulphuric acid as a cheap by-product of the metallurgical industries, Austria, lacking modern industries of this kind, had to import it in the old-fashioned form of Spanish pyrites, at a much higher cost. The predominance of highly specialized artisanal production such as watchmaking made the adoption of hydroelectric power schemes in Switzerland and the French Alps seem unnecessary. German demand for untreated wood for use in its technologically advanced and large-scale paper industry meant that Austria-Hungary remained a source of raw material in this area rather than developing a pulping industry of its own, so that exports of wood from the empire between 1904 and 1914 were eleven times greater than exports of wood pulp and cellulose. Similarly, the headlong industrialization of Germany led to rapid urbanization that created rising demand in areas such as electricity supply, tramways, street lighting, chemically dyed clothing, canned or processed food and the like, which was absent from areas such as Spain, southern Italy, Hungary or the Balkans, where industrialization and urbanization were slower and towns few and far between, and even from France, where economic growth and entrepreneurship were too sluggish to take advantage of the potential of hydroelectric power in the French Alps.
The outbreak of war in 1914 interrupted these developments, but already it was clear that Britain was being overtaken by other European countries, especially in the ‘second industrial revolution’. Even in heavy industry, Germany, with its newer and more rational organizational structures and improved plant, was outpacing Britain, producing for example 77 tons of steel per man-year in 1913 as against 48 tons. In this later stage of industrialization, too, the state began to play a greater role, not only with orders for armaments but also with infrastructural measures including improved education and legal reform and in some places direct investment in major railway-building and similar projects. A fierce debate broke out among economists in Britain about the reasons for this. One major reason, it was agreed, lay in the primacy of advanced scientific research in countries like Germany. While the technological innovations that brought about the first industrial revolution had been achieved largely by the ingenuity of mechanics, the second clearly required the knowledge of scientists. British universities began to adopt the focus on centrally directed research that characterized German higher education, with Cambridge creating strong faculties separate from the colleges, whereas Oxford refused to take this step, preferring instead to continue focusing on the education of young men for public service. Others considered dedicated research institutions the answer, and Imperial College London was founded in 1907 on the lines of the Charlottenburg Institute, incorporating the Royal School of Mines and the Royal College of Science. But British industrialists seemed to many to be too keen on ploughing their fortunes into becoming country landowners, rather than reinvesting them in productive technical innovation. The widespread belief in Britain that Germany was forging ahead economically before 1914 fuelled anxieties about the rise of an economic rival that translated all too easily into political and military terms.
The scale of social and economic change that swept across Europe from the middle of the nineteenth century to the outbreak of the First World War was staggering. Statistics tell a dramatic story. In 1850 some 52 per cent of the economically active population of France was employed in agriculture; by 1900 this figure had fallen to 42 per cent. In Italy the fall was from 75 per cent (in 1862) to 60 per cent in 1900. In Germany rapid industrialization pushed down the figure more dramatically, from around 60 per cent to 35 per cent. The head start enjoyed by the British in the process of industrialization and urbanization was demonstrated by the fact that already in 1850 only 22 per cent of the economically active population were engaged in agriculture, and by 1900 this had sunk to a mere 9 per cent. A new social world was emerging, one in which society was dominated by people who no longer inhabited the countryside but lived in the cities and towns of the industrial age.
The nineteenth century was the age of Europe’s urbanization. Most obvious were the entirely new settlements that mushroomed where industry took root. In the Ruhr, the population of the new industrial town of Duisburg doubled from around 7,000 in 1831 to over 13,000 in 1850, then shot up to 93,000 by 1900. Living conditions were poor. In late-industrializing Russia, workers in the new industrial and mining settlements were housed in barracks, as in the Bryansk metallurgical factory 235 miles south-west of Moscow, where conditions were ‘compared without any exaggeration with the quarters of domestic animals’ by an inspector in 1892; they were filthy, poorly ventilated and unhygienic. Staying in Salford, a new industrial suburb of Manchester, in the mid-1840s while working in the management of a sewing-thread mill owned by his father’s textile company, the twenty-two-year-old Friedrich Engels found ‘dirt and filth’ everywhere, especially around the river Irk, where ‘several tanneries are situated on the bank of the river and they fill the neighbourhood with the stench of animal putrefaction’. The houses abutting onto the river were ‘blackened by soot, all of them are crumbling with age and all have broken window-panes and window-frames’. There was no pumped or piped water, and ‘so few privies that they are either filled up every day or are too far away for those who need to use them’. The middle classes insulated themselves from the spectacle of poverty and exploitation behind their shopfronts and villa walls. After speaking on the street to a middle-class businessman about the ‘frightful condition of the working people’s quarters’, Engels reported: ‘The man listened quietly to the end, and said at the corner where we parted: “And yet there is a great deal of money made here; good morning, sir.”’ It was not only the new industrial settlements that experienced rapid growth. The population of Glasgow, estimated in 1800 at 77,000, nearly doubled in twenty years to 142,000 and increased almost tenfold by the end of the century, to 762,000. Berlin’s population grew from 172,000 in 1800 to 419,000 at mid-century, 1,122,000 by 1880, and more than two million thirty years later, on the eve of the First World War. The population of Copenhagen increased from just over 100,000 in 1800 to more than half a million in 1910. After Buda and Pest, facing each other across the Danube, were formally united in 1873, the population of the Hungarian capital grew from 270,000 to 880,000 by the First World War. Lisbon’s population, more or less static for most of the nineteenth century, suddenly shot up from 242,000 in 1880 to 435,000 thirty years later.
The effects of such rapid growth were soon apparent as the social geography of such cities began to change. Like many other European capitals, London swallowed up surrounding villages and turned them into suburban settlements for the better-off portion of the population who wanted to escape the dirt and noise of the city centre, seeking out higher ground in areas such as Hampstead. As working-class housing was cleared to make way for railway termini and commercial buildings, the poor were forced to migrate to newly built terraced houses in the East End. The process of social-geographical differentiation can be observed with particular clarity in the case of Hamburg, whose population, under 200,000 in 1820, rocketed to 623,000 by 1890 and over a million by the eve of the First World War. In the eighteenth century and before, merchants and manufacturers had lived in Hamburg’s old city, near the harbour, often above their offices and next door to their warehouses. But as the city grew, they moved out of the city centre to plush and spacious villas dotted around the Alster Lake inland of the old town, or downstream on the banks of the river Elbe, leaving the half-timbered buildings on the waterfront to be divided into tenements as the working classes moved in. Soon these became known as the ‘Alley Quarters’, insanitary and overcrowded, dilapidated and unhygienic. Similar processes took place in many European cities in the nineteenth century. Deteriorating conditions in the older inner-city areas provided the backdrop to the writings of socially concerned novelists. In his novel Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens described the ‘rookeries’ as they were known, of one particular slum district in London, Jacob’s Island, in dramatic terms, with its ‘dirt-besmeared walls and decaying foundations, every repulsive lineament of poverty, every loathsome indication of filth, rot, and garbage’. Newly built working-class housing was often almost as bad. In Colonel Chabert, an 1832 novella by Honoré de Balzac, the eponymous hero, an impoverished Napoleonic veteran, forced to live in a hastily built speculative development every bit as squalid as a medieval slum. ‘Though recently built,’ Balzac commented, ‘this house seemed ready to fall into ruins.’
Most notorious of all were the slums of Naples, a city of half a million people in the 1880s, where the poorest section had to suffer a density of 208,000 inhabitants per square mile, ten times that of London. Housing blocks were so tall that the American writer Mark Twain, on visiting the city, described it as ‘a hundred feet high, like three normal American cities piled on top of one another, blocking out the sunlight from the streets’. With an average of only 86 square feet per person in the lower city (compared to 344 in London), these tenements were regularly compared to anthills or rabbit warrens, blackened with smoke and dirt, plagued by swarms of flies that fed on the rotting organic waste thrown into the streets, ‘the most ghastly human habitations on the face of the earth’, as the Swedish-born doctor Axel Munthe (1857–1949) described them during a visit in 1884. Not only Naples, but most other European cities lacked fresh water supplies well into the second half of the century and in many cases beyond. Hamburg drew its supplies from the river Elbe upstream; so impure was the unfiltrated water in the pipes that carried it into people’s houses that small fish could sometimes be found coming out of the taps; indeed, in 1885 a zoologist published a scientific study entitled The Fauna of the Hamburg Water-Supply, identifying several dozen types of small worms, molluscs and other creatures in a cross section taken from a water-supply pipe. In 1863 a survey of 8,242 buildings in St Petersburg, housing 90 per cent of the population, revealed that only 1,795 had running water, and its quality was only marginally better than that of the Neva river from which it was taken (visitors were advised not to drink it, since, as a travel guide noted bluntly, ‘with most travellers it produces diarrhoea’). In 1911 the biologist August Thienemann (1882–1960) described the Ruhr river as a ‘brown black brew, reeking of prussic acid, containing no trace of oxygen, and absolutely dead’. Only 50 per cent of the river’s total volume was from natural sources; the rest was provided by millions of litres of sewage from the 1,500,000 people who lived in its catchment area, along with the human and industrial effluent from 150 mines and 100 factories.
Cleaning the streets of Europe’s growing towns and cities posed problems every bit as severe as providing pure water to drink. Horses were present in every European city right up to 1914, pulling carts and wagons, buses and trams. Some 12,000 horses were stabled in the inner city and suburbs of Hamburg as late as 1892. It was estimated that 20,000 tons of horse droppings had to be cleared away from London’s streets every year in the 1850s; thirty years later, 100,000 tons of dung were being removed from the streets of Berlin each year. In the 1840s pigs were roaming freely around the streets of Gateshead in north-east England. Smaller towns retained the sounds and smells of the farmyard for much longer. Major cities solved the problem of supplying fresh meat to their inhabitants before the age of refrigeration by driving live animals into the centre to be slaughtered. By the middle of the nineteenth century, it was reported, in the course of a single year 220,000 head of cattle and 1,500,000 sheep would pass through the streets to Smithfield, the meat market located in the centre of London. ‘Of all the horrid abominations with which London has been cursed,’ wrote one observer, ‘there is not one that can come up to that disgusting place, West Smithfield Market, for cruelty, filth, effluvia, pestilence, impiety, horrid language, danger, disgusting and shuddering sights, and every obnoxious item that can be imagined.’ Dead animals and the like were simply dumped. In Paris complaints multiplied in the 1830s about the vast waste disposal site on the edge of the city, at Montfaucon, a cesspool to which, it was reported, ‘some 230 to 244 square metres of human excreta are carted . . . daily and most of the corpses of 12,000 horses and 25,000 to 30,000 smaller animals are left to rot on the ground’.
But civic pride and bourgeois squeamishness gradually combined to overcome these problems. The middle classes may have moved out of city centres but they still travelled there to work, and increasingly they demanded a healthy and salubrious environment. In 1842 a much-publicized report on the sanitary condition of the working classes in English towns by Edwin Chadwick (1800–90) led to the creation of a Public Health Association and a General Board of Health six years later. Chadwick believed strongly in the Victorian maxim ‘cleanliness is next to Godliness’. ‘How much of rebellion,’ he remarked, ‘of moral depravity, and of crime, has its roots in physical disorder and depravity.’ In 1868 a magnificent new livestock market was opened in Smithfield, with the animals transported to it through a specially constructed underground railway line. By the 1870s there was general acceptance in Britain that local authorities had to provide pure water and dispose effectively of liquid and other wastes, clean the streets and provide a healthy environment, following a Royal Commission on the Prevention of the Pollution of Rivers, which led to the Rivers Pollution Prevention Act of 1876. A crucial aid in achieving the situation was the flush toilet, first mass-produced by the plumber George Jennings (1810–82), whose curiously named ‘Monkey Closets’, the first public conveniences, were visited by 827,280 people at the Great Exhibition of 1851. Each of them spent a penny on the visit, for services including shoe-shining and the use of a towel and comb – the origin of a much-used euphemism common up to the late twentieth century. Another plumber, Thomas Crapper (1836–1910), often credited with the invention of the flush toilet, was in fact responsible only for the development of the ballcock. Water closets became standard in Britain by the late nineteenth century, required by law in all new dwellings in Manchester from 1881 onwards, and in many other towns and cities as well.
‘A good sewer,’ declared the art critic John Ruskin (1819–1900), was a ‘far nobler and a far holier thing . . . than the most admired Madonna ever painted.’ London’s new system of sewers, constructed by the civil engineer Joseph Bazalgette (1819–91) between 1858 (immediately after the ‘Great Stink’, caused by noxious effluvia from the Thames, had closed down Parliament for several days) and 1865, was a great source of civic pride: the opening of the southern outfall down the Thames was attended by 500 guests, who dined on salmon as the effluvia of the great city rushed through the tunnel beneath them and fell into the river below. ‘Sewage farms’, introduced in Berlin from 1885 onwards by the city planner James Hobrecht (1825–1902), now purified the noxious liquids before they reached the rivers and oceans of Europe. Pure water supplies became available to an increasing proportion of the population of Europe’s great cities in the late nineteenth century: within just over a decade after the last outbreak of typhoid in Budapest in 1888, all of the city’s dwellings were connected to the municipal water supply. By 1893, Budapest could also boast some thirty-two public conveniences, mostly concealed artfully between the trees of public squares. Chadwick’s vision was realized in almost all of Britain’s towns and cities from the late 1850s onwards. In other parts of Europe the process took much longer; as late as 1885, for example, only a third of Italian municipalities possessed underground water mains and just half of them had sewage systems.
Among Chadwick’s disciples was a young engineer, William Lindley (1808–1900), who as an adolescent had spent time in the 1820s learning German in Hamburg. Because of his linguistic competence, Lindley was sent by Isambard Kingdom Brunel to survey and construct the first railway lines in northern Germany during the 1830s. After a large part of the city of Hamburg was destroyed by fire in 1842, Lindley was commissioned to help plan its reconstruction. An essential part of the scheme consisted in creating a new sewage and water-supply system. He persuaded Hamburg’s ruling Senate to build a new set of reservoirs that would draw water from the Elbe above the city, together with steam-powered pumps to push the water through a network of pipes into people’s houses and flats; by 1890 there were over 250 miles of pipes, and nearly every house in the city had at least one tap either inside or in the courtyard. The scheme was linked to the creation of a centralized sewage disposal system, built in the 1840s and opened in 1853; in 1875 a Sewage Law required all the city’s inhabitants to have their dwellings connected to it. The introduction of a central water supply also enabled Lindley to persuade the Hamburg Senate to build public bathhouses at key locations across the city. As he remarked in 1851, ‘a dirty population degenerates and so commits all the more offences against the laws of the state’ – an almost exact reproduction of the political principle of urban improvement he had learned from his teacher Edwin Chadwick.
Lindley’s reputation spread to other European cities, which soon began to clamour for his services. In 1863 he began work on a new water-supply system for Frankfurt am Main, and then moved on to Düsseldorf, St Petersburg, Budapest and Moscow. Together with his son William Heerlein Lindley (1853–1917) he designed and built a new water-supply system for Warsaw in the 1870s and 1880s. This last-named project, with its huge water tower, reservoirs, filter beds, pumping stations, many miles of pipes, and numerous earthworks and tunnels, was built with the assistance of another of William Lindley’s sons, the young Robert Searles Lindley (1854–1925). William Lindley junior went on to construct water-supply and sewage-disposal systems in Prague, where a museum was subsequently devoted to his projects, and Baku in Azerbaijan, while his plans for Łódź, initially shelved because of their expense, were eventually realized in the 1920s. Everywhere, the Lindleys’ schemes resulted in a dramatic decline in death rates from waterborne diseases. Between 1868 and 1883 the death rate from typhoid in Frankfurt am Main fell from 80 to 10 per 100,000 inhabitants, while a local historian of Warsaw calculated just before the outbreak of the First World War that the new water-supply system in the city had saved on average 10,000 lives a year since its construction. Only in Hamburg, where the penny-pinching Hanseatic merchants and house-owners had refused, despite Lindley’s advice, to spend money on ensuring that the water supply was passed through sand filtration to kill off harmful bacteria, did these death rates remain undiminished (as we have seen, the pipes were full of all kinds of living creatures). Dam construction to create reservoirs of drinking water for the great cities of Europe began towards the end of the century. Invariably dams were built of stone: the age of concrete came later. In the Elan valley, in north Wales, identified as a suitable site with impenetrable rock below, high average annual rainfall, and an elevation above that of the city – Birmingham – that it was chosen to supply, land was compulsorily purchased, three manor houses, eighteen farms, a school and a church were demolished, and one hundred people were displaced (only landowners received any compensation). Workers moved in to begin construction of the dam in 1893, and the project was completed nine years later. A similar dam was built at Lake Vyrnwy in the 1870s to provide water for Liverpool. All over Europe, schemes such as these were in progress, with the first in Germany being completed near Remscheid in 1891.
More than the provision of hygienic water supplies was needed to bring about urban improvement. The most famous of all nineteenth-century projects of urban renewal was begun by the Prefect of Paris under Napoleon III, Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann (1809–91), soon after his appointment in 1853. His aim was to rid the city of what one critic called ‘the tiny, narrow, putrid and tangled streets’ that never let in the sun. As he cleared away the narrow alleys and replaced them with broad boulevards, Haussmann the ‘demolition artist’ (as he called himself) was also removing the ideal sites for the construction of barricades by revolutionary crowds and opening up the city to the forces of order. His grand schemes reduced the Île de la Cité’s population from 15,000 to 5,000, destroying almost all the private dwellings there at one stroke. ‘It was the gutting of old Paris,’ Haussmann wrote with satisfaction in his Mémoires (1890), ‘of the neighbourhood of riots, and of barricades, from one end to the other.’ With a large part of the working class forced to seek accommodation further out, the way was open for the construction of grand public buildings such as the Opéra (1875), the creation of the major railway termini, the homogenization of the central boulevards by lining them with neo-Classical buildings of the same height and the same façade design, and the provision of new squares and public gardens. Haussmann completely transformed France’s capital city during the seventeen years of his Prefecture, wielding dictatorial powers unavailable to any of his predecessors. The work of transformation was crowned by an iconic structure he had not envisaged, the Eiffel Tower, built by Gustave Eiffel (1832–1923) for the Paris Exposition of 1889, and improvement continued, albeit at a slower pace, after Haussmann’s death
The rebuilding of Paris turned the waste-disposal facility of Montfaucon into a public park complete with trees and grassy knolls. Remodelling the streetscape of the French capital offered an opportunity to create a new underground system of water supply and waste disposal. ‘The underground galleries,’ wrote Haussmann, ‘organs of the large city, would function like those of the human body, without revealing themselves to the light of day.’ So capacious was the main sewer constructed underneath the city that journeys along it in what was described as ‘a veritable gondola with carpeted floor and cushioned seats, lit up by large lamps’ were offered to adventurous tourists. ‘No foreigner of distinction’, noted the Larousse dictionary proudly in 1870, ‘wants to leave the city without making this singular trip’, and female tourists were as welcome as male: ‘The presence of lovely women,’ commented an American tourist, ‘can add a charm to the sewer.’ The Paris sewers even appealed to the literary-minded, who could thrill to the thought that they were reliving the experiences of the hero of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, Jean Valjean.
Parallel to these developments, increasing efforts were made to improve housing conditions in Europe’s towns and cities. In 1862 the London-based American banker George Peabody (1795–1869) launched the Peabody Trust, which opened its first housing block for the poor, in Spitalfields, two years later, containing twenty-two flats, nine shops, water closets on each landing, baths and laundry facilities on the top floor. By 1882 the Trust had constructed 3,500 dwellings in London, housing 14,600 people. Social housing in Copenhagen also evolved from private initiative, in this case physicians alarmed at the slum conditions they considered responsible for a major cholera epidemic in 1853. Some 250 houses were built initially, and let at low rents. Yet in many cities housing construction could not keep pace with population growth. In St Petersburg the number of apartments rose from 88,000 in 1869 to 155,000 in 1900, but the average number of people per apartment also rose over this period, from 7.0 to 7.4, and a third of the city’s inhabitants at the turn of the century still lived in apartments that were not equipped with basic services such as running water. In the new industrial town of Duisburg, in the Ruhr, the average number of persons per room rose from 1.3 in 1875 to 1.5 ten years later. In the northern French textile town of Lille one building inspected in 1863 was inhabited by 271 people, with an average of 18.3 square feet of living space each.
While housing often proved resistant to reform, however fast speculative builders might throw up tenement blocks for incoming migrants, municipal services did improve dramatically in a number of respects in the second half of the century. City governments cleared the way in many towns for urban expansion by knocking down medieval city walls, as in Hamburg in 1837, where they were replaced by green parkland, or Vienna in 1857, where the famous Ringstrasse with its grandiloquent public buildings took their place. Urban roads were renovated and supplied with new surfaces. Up to mid-century, London’s streets were paved not with the legendary gold, but in many cases with wood, which was only replaced by granite along Cheapside in 1846 and Fleet Street in 1851. Pavements took a long time to arrive, and in most towns pedestrians took their lives in their hands if they dared to walk in heavy traffic. In larger cities the streets were increasingly clogged with a chaotic jam of horse-drawn carriages, wagons, handcarts, and hansom cabs and their equivalent on the Continent, the fiacre or the Droschke. There was little attempt at traffic regulation: an effort to introduce a manually controlled gas-powered traffic light outside the British Houses of Parliament in 1868 was abandoned soon afterwards when it exploded, killing the policeman who operated it. After that, no more traffic lights were erected anywhere in Europe until the 1920s. There was no legal requirement to drive on one side of the road or the other in England until 1835, and in Belgium as late as 1899. Different parts of Italy drove on the left or right according to custom, nor was there a uniform rule in Spain. Traffic in the Austro-Hungarian Empire drove on the left, as also in Portugal and Sweden, whereas those parts of Europe affected by Napoleon I’s mania for standardization, including Denmark, the Netherlands, and western Germany, drove on the right, along with Russia, where the rule had been imposed by Catherine the Great. Photographs of busy European cities taken in the early twentieth century suggest that in many cases these rules were in any event simply ignored.
But at least, gradually, the streets began to be lit properly at night. Gas lights were already in use in the late eighteenth century, and they illuminated Westminster Bridge and Pall Mall as early as 1815; after the end of the Napoleonic Wars they became more common, spreading quickly to British provincial towns and cities. It was not until the 1840s that gas lighting became generally accepted in Paris, and even in 1860 London alone consumed twice as much gas as the whole of Germany. The first public gas lamp was lit in St Petersburg in 1819, and by mid-century there were 800 of them lighting up the streets and squares of the Russian capital. It was a Russian military engineer, Pavel Nikolayevich Yablochkov (1847–94), who in 1875 first developed an arc light powered by electricity, the ‘Yablochkov candle’. The first town on the Continent of Europe to have public electric lighting was Temesvár, in Hungary, where 731 street lights were installed in 1884. By this time Swan or Edison incandescent bulbs had replaced arc lights, and cities, beginning with London, had started to build central electricity-generating stations. Electricity also increasingly powered municipal tram systems, which were built in many European cities in the second half of the century, following the invention of the grooved and sunken rail by the French engineer Alphonse Loubet (1799–1866). Tramcars were initially pulled by horses everywhere, from St Petersburg, where a network of 71 miles was carrying 85 million passengers a year by the end of the century, to Sarajevo, where the first horse-tram ran in 1883, to be replaced by electric trams twelve years later. The cost of keeping, feeding and grooming horses, and the fact that they could only work for relatively short periods each day, thereby requiring frequent replacements, made electrification attractive – once Werner von Siemens had developed a means of transmitting power to the trams, at first through an electrified rail, which he invented in 1879. Within two years the first electric trams were running in Berlin, and after the American invention of the trolley pole in 1885 was adopted in Europe, pedestrians no longer ran the risk of receiving electric shocks by treading on the rails when they crossed the street.
By this time major cities were attempting to solve the problem of street congestion by building underground railways on the model of the first to be opened, the Metropolitan Railway in London, on which ordinary steam trains ran just below the road surface from 1863 onwards. Electric tram technology enabled these railways to be converted to cleaner power, and the three new lines opened in the 1890s used it from the start. The discovery that it was possible to bore through the soft London clay allowed for much deeper and narrower tunnels – ‘the tube’ in local parlance. The first carriages were not provided with windows because it was not considered that passengers would need to know where they were when they travelled underground: they were popularly known as ‘padded cells’. The world’s second-oldest underground railway was a funicular system built in Istanbul by a British company and opened in 1875, and the third, in Glasgow, a cable railway inaugurated in 1896. The Budapest Underground, using overhead wires, also opened in 1896. Paris followed suit with the Métro, whose first line began operating in 1900. In many European cities overground and elevated suburban railways complemented the underground system. In Berlin the S-Bahn (Stadtbahn, or city railway) brought together some existing and some specially constructed lines to carry people to and from work on steam-hauled trains from 1882 onwards.
Urban improvements such as these were attempts to solve the basic problem of moving thousands or even millions of people around efficiently and cheaply as Europe’s cities expanded. But there were less tangible reasons for urban improvement as well. As monarchs and rulers attempted to bolster their legitimacy in the decades after 1815, they launched ambitious building programmes. They included the grand neo-Classical edifices and spaces designed for Munich by Leo von Klenze (1784–1864) on the orders of King Ludwig I of Bavaria; and the constructions of Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1781–1841) in Berlin, such as the Neue Wache (1816), the Prussian National Monument for the Liberation Wars (1826) and the Altes Museum (1830), which transformed the city from a sleepy provincial town into a grand state capital. The Saxon capital of Dresden received similar treatment from Gottfried Semper (1803–79), as did Karlsruhe, the capital of the Grand Duchy of Baden, from Friedrich Weinbrenner (1766–1826) and his pupils. Broad avenues flanked by grand public buildings projected princely majesty onto the public stage in a way designed to cement loyalty by evoking awe. In London these decades saw the laying down on the orders of the Prince Regent, subsequently King George IV, of Regent Street and Regent’s Park, under the guidance of the most celebrated of Georgian architects, John Nash (1752–1835). The ‘Haussmannization’ of Paris under Napoleon III belonged in the same context.
In the 1870s and 1880s it was the turn of Budapest. A long boulevard, Andrássy Avenue, was constructed between 1872 and 1876, lined with large and imposing new buildings: the Academy of Fine Arts (1871), the Academy of Music (1875) and the Opera House (1884). The new boulevard ended at Heroes’ Square, designed by the Galician-born German architect Albert Schickedanz (1846–1915), who placed a new Museum of Fine Arts and Palace of Art on opposite sides of the square. In 1906 a Millennium Memorial Monument, celebrating the conquest of the Carpathian Basin by the Magyars, was placed in the middle. A public park along one side of the boulevard completed the grandiose representation of national culture. Where a new state was created, the erection of public buildings and the establishment of the standard accoutrements of a capital city became matters of urgency. Following the foundation of the autonomous Principality, later (1908) the independent Kingdom, of Bulgaria in 1878, the insignificant town of Sofia, with fewer than 12,000 inhabitants, was chosen as the capital. The new monarch imposed by the Concert of Europe, Alexander von Battenberg (1857–93), nephew of the Russian Tsar, appointed two Viennese architects, Friedrich Grünanger (1856–1929) and Viktor Rumpelmayer (1830–85), to design and oversee the construction of two royal palaces (one in Sofia, the other on the Black Sea coast). Foreign-trained Bulgarian architects put up a building to house the National Assembly, the main railway station (opened in 1888), and a range of government Ministry headquarters. Vitosha Boulevard, later to become the capital’s main shopping street, was opened in 1883. Gradually Sofia lost its sleepy provincial character and began to take on the mantle of a national capital city.
By contrast, many small towns across Europe survived virtually unchanged through most of the century, often isolated from new industrial developments by poor communications and a primary orientation towards the markets provided by their rural hinterland. Baedeker’s 1883 guidebook for tourists in south-eastern Europe warned that the town of Debrecen presented ‘the usual Hungarian characteristics. Pavements are unknown, and in rainy weather the mud in the narrower streets is atrocious.’ In 1858 Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in Scandinavia warned adventurous travellers who made it to the Icelandic capital of Reykjavík that they would find only ‘a collection of wooden sheds’ there. There were no inns anywhere, no roads, and no creature comforts. Would-be tourists were advised to take a tent with them. The poverty of Iceland was extreme, but where there was little or no economic development, urbanization and urban improvement were slow to take root. On entering the Bulgarian town of Plovdiv in 1868, the Bulgarian patriot Lyuben Stoychev Karavelov (1834–79) saw in it only oriental squalor, the product of continuing Ottoman rule: ‘Our horses plunged into the mud up to their knees and lurched from side to side together with us; we held our noses to keep from suffocating from the extraordinary stench. In the streets: dead dogs, chickens, even horses swam in the muddy morasses.’ Only after the creation of an autonomous Bulgaria in 1885 did urban improvement begin. And even in Europe’s grandest metropolises, there were still areas of urban deprivation at and after the turn of the century. In Birmingham there were more than 40,000 houses without any running water in 1900, and nearly 60,000 without a separate sanitary facility. Even as late as 1895 only 42 per cent of Prussian urban communities with over 2,000 inhabitants were serviced by mains water; the other 58 per cent were dependent on wells, springs, river water or rainwater. By the time the century came to an end, urban improvement had come far, but it also still had a long way to go.
The headlong growth of industry brought with it a rapid transformation of urban society, creating what was in many ways essentially a new social class: the bourgeoisie. The name itself – bourgeois, Bürger, borghese – meant city-dweller. In the pre-industrial urban social order, the dominant elite of guildsmen would include a handful of educated, literate doctors, lawyers, notaries, apothecaries, clerks and scribes. Many long-established towns were dominated by an hereditary patrician elite that increasingly had to make room for bankers, industrialists and professionals without necessarily being displaced by them. In the Swiss city of Basel the patrician elite, which had formed a closed corporation earlier in the century, still provided more than half the members of the ruling institutions in the 1890s even after a reform carried out in 1875 had introduced a democratic element into the city’s political system. Nevertheless, the old patrician elite was in effect merging into a new urban middle class as its legal privileges were gradually eroded. In the Adriatic seaport of Trieste, whose population grew from 45,000 in 1815 to 230,000 a century later, the self-co-opting patriciate lost power as a new constitution was passed in 1838 that made provision for the election of ‘people . . . on the basis of intelligence, knowledge, personal services and gifts’ as well as for those passing the minimum qualifications of wealth and property. In 1850 a further municipal reform defined citizenship (as distinct from mere domicile) in even broader terms of educational and propertied factors, including possession of a degree, exercise of a profession such as architect, surgeon, apothecary and so on; ship’s captains and master artisans were included in the list, as were lawyers and tradesmen.
Economic and social change drove up the numbers and increased the significance of the bourgeoisie across many European countries in the course of the century. In Norway the proportion of bureaucrats, teachers, bankers, financiers, lawyers, doctors and other professionals in the population rose from 6 per cent to 22 per cent between 1815 and 1914. Around the end of the century one calculation numbered around 15,000 merchants and industrialists in Sweden, 4,700 engineers, 7,000 higher civil servants, 7,600 teachers at all levels including the universities, and 3,300 doctors and apothecaries. They formed a distinctive social class that provided the driving force of social and political liberalism along with the wealthiest among the independent farmers in a country that was still predominantly agricultural. In even less developed societies the bourgeoisie, though growing rapidly, remained a relatively weak social and political force, often with a minority composition. In Hungary around 1900, 45 per cent of doctors and 35 per cent of medical students were Jewish, while in Poland, the German-speaking element of the bourgeoisie was particularly strong, and was concentrated in predominantly German-speaking towns such as Danzig, Elbing or Thorn. By contrast, in a city like Vienna, with its bloated bureaucracy administering the affairs of the entire Habsburg monarchy, the bourgeoisie was both numerous and strong.
The social formation of the urban middle class in most European countries occurred first of all through the development of associations – the reading circles, coffee houses, social clubs and cultural organizations of the early nineteenth century. The membership of social clubs in German towns, usually with names like ‘Casino’ or ‘Harmony’, varied according to the nature of the society in which they emerged – 40 per cent of the members in the university town of Göttingen were professors and teachers, while 70 per cent in the Bavarian capital of Munich were noblemen, army officers and bureaucrats. In the financial centre of Frankfurt bankers, merchants and industrialists predominated. But everywhere these societies made a conscious effort to include a broad spectrum of members from the world of the educated and the well-off. The 1820s and 1830s saw a wave of new foundations across Germany, including in Augsburg alone the Tivoli (1825), the Concordia (1827), the Resource (1829), the Enlivenment (1829) and the Jollity (1830). Subscriptions were kept high enough to deter applicants from lower down the social scale, while internally the constitutions of these societies worked on a democratic and representative basis. As these organizations proliferated, they divided the emerging middle class into religious, political or professional groups, above all after 1850. But multiple memberships also helped class cohesion: thus in the 1870s, 38 per cent of the members of the music society in Mannheim also belonged to the leading social club in the town, the Harmony, which also included 44 per cent of the art association and 56 per cent of the natural history society among its members. Almost half the members of all these clubs were counted in the highest class of taxpayers in the town. Participating in urban cultural life was a key to professional as well as social success for the middle class. For medical men, lawyers and other professionals, a suitable social manner in dealing with other members of the bourgeoisie was an essential part of the job, and belonging to a club or society could be a means of gaining patients or clients as well as relaxing after work.
These societies differed from the traditional salon in a number of ways. Salons were frequented above all by the nobility, and although members and visitors left their social status at the door, there is little doubt that they had a strongly aristocratic character. Women played a central role in convening and presiding over salons, whereas they were barred from participation in bourgeois social clubs. The sexual intrigues common in salons were scarcely in evidence in the rigorously moral world of the social club. Every club drew up its own elaborate rules and standing orders, but the salon remained an informal meeting place dedicated above all to conversation. Literature and philosophy were the topics of discussion there, whereas the clubs covered a vastly broader area, when taken as a whole; and while the salons avoided oppositional politics, the clubs were not at all reluctant to engage in them. Salons continued to exist through the nineteenth century: in Brussels, presided over by the Marchioness Arconati-Visconti (1800–71); in Milan, founded in 1834 by Clara Maffei (1814–86); in Uppsala, where Malla Silfverstolpe (1782–1861) organized informal discussions of art and literature; and in many other European cities. But salons were increasingly outflanked by the new institutions of the emerging bourgeois social world, and these institutions were emphatically male, bound together by a new code of ‘manliness’, subscribing to the values of stability, solidity, probity, industriousness and self-control, all qualities that their members did not consider women to possess.
Largely absent from both kinds of institutions were the bankers and industrialists who formed the stratum known as the ‘economic’ or ‘entrepreneurial’ bourgeoisie. Their income was directly subject to market forces, contrasting with that of the ‘educated’ or ‘professional’ bourgeoisie of lawyers, teachers, doctors, engineers and the like. But both sectors of the bourgeoisie were increasingly bound together not only by social but also familial ties. By 1900 only 34 per cent of the wives of senior civil servants in the Prussian Rhineland were themselves the daughters of officials, while 48 per cent of these women’s fathers were in business or industry. The bureaucracy was merging into a wider middle class, with 37 per cent of the fathers of senior civil servants in the Prussian Rhineland being civil servants themselves, 30 per cent in business or industry, 17 per cent landowners, and 6 per cent military men. In the late nineteenth century between a half and a quarter of the business elite in France, Britain and Germany had received a higher education. The snobbery with which the wealthy and the educated treated families that made their money through ‘trade’ was gradually being overcome.
Urbanization, industrial growth, the expansion of the state, the rise in population, all demanded the services of doctors, lawyers, engineers, teachers and many others. This led to a steady expansion in the professions. The total of people in the ‘public service and professional sector’ in England and Wales, counted at just over 200,000 in 1851, numbered some 560,000 forty years later. As knowledge became more complex, training and validation became more important. On the Continent, these were supplied through studying at universities and obtaining degrees in the relevant subject. In Italy in 1877, 40 per cent of university students were studying law. Between 1830 and 1860 nearly a third of all students at German universities were enrolled in Law Faculties. No wonder that legislative assemblies in this period were peopled above all by lawyers. Repeated revisions of the written legal codes that defined every respect of the application and administration of the law on the Continent provided a great deal of fodder for legal practices. The number of lawyers in England and Wales grew from the already considerable total of 15,800 in 1851 to 22,000 in 1891, and there was a comparable increase in other European countries too.
Everywhere, of course, the legal profession encompassed a wide range of qualifications and abilities, from the poorly paid and badly educated notaries of small-town provincial France to the wealthy City solicitors and high-earning barristers of London. Not surprisingly, lawyers were constantly campaigning against unqualified hucksters, known in Germany as Winkeladvokaten, or street-corner advocates, and in Italy as faccendieri, fixers. In the 1880s the Naples hall of justice was said to be like a flea market, with would-be lawyers advertising their services at every corner. Small wonder, then, that the 18,000 or so lawyers practising in Italy in the 1880s were keen to regulate their profession, though efforts to pass such legislation were generally frustrated, or the laws emasculated, by vested interests. The model here was England, where the Law Society, founded in 1825, regulated entry to the profession of solicitor, set examinations, and enforced standards. While solicitors prepared cases, barristers, who appeared to plead cases before the court, gained their qualifications from the Inns of Court, where they also lived and based their practice in ‘chambers’. It was not until 1894 that a broader-based body, the Bar Council, was brought into existence to deal with breaches of professional standards, previously handled by the judiciary.
A similar process of professionalization took place in the civil service and higher state administration of most European states, which underwent a massive expansion in the nineteenth century. By 1914 there were some 166,000 senior civil service posts in Italy, with 314 heads of division compared to a mere 103 in 1882. In the early decades of the century civil servants and state administrators were often lazy, corrupt and lacking in qualifications, like the mayor satirized in Gogol’s play The Government Inspector (1836), who mistakes a casual visitor for an auditor sent from St Petersburg. The idea of political neutrality was also slow to take root. In the early part of the century, the higher civil service in France, including the prefects in the regions, was a political body. The Restoration appointed noblemen, especially if they were former exiles; the July Monarchy replaced them with Bonapartists and new men; the Second Empire immediately brought about a fall in the number of titled bureaucrats. Similarly, political instability in Spain had its effects on the bureaucracy; a character in the 1898 novel Mendizabal by Benito Pérez Galdós (1843–1920) tells the hero that during twenty-five years as a bureaucrat he has ‘seen fourteen administrations and been dismissed seven times’. His job, like others in the Spanish civil service, basically depended on patronage. It was constantly at risk; in an earlier generation the dramatist Antonio Gil y Zárate (1793–1861) noted cynically that ‘a government job is nothing more than a way of having an income without doing anything . . . talent is irrelevant and . . . the whole business is reduced to whether the person who has the job is a friend or not’. In Britain the Northcote-Trevelyan Report of 1854, strongly influenced by the model of the Chinese mandarinate, recommended that civil-service appointments be made on the basis of merit, as tested by open examinations, and that promotion should be on the basis of merit as well. The civil service had to be neutral, serving the government of the day without being dependent on it. In France higher civil servants were given a more targeted training at the Free School of Political Sciences, known familiarly as Sciences-Po, an elite college founded in 1872.
In contrast to the modern civil service, the medical profession was a long-established and relatively stable institution. The number of qualified medical practitioners in England and Wales barely grew in the second half of the century, increasing from 19,200 in 1851 to 20,800 forty years later. The status of English doctors at mid-century was not particularly high. They had to enter the houses of the rich and powerful by the tradesmen’s entrance; in The Vicar of Bullhampton (1870), a novel by Anthony Trollope (1815–82), one of the characters ‘would not absolutely say that a physician was not a gentleman, or even a surgeon; but she would never allow to physic the same absolute privileges which, in her eyes, belonged to law and the church. There might also possibly be a doubt about the Civil Service and Civil Engineering . . .’ In Britain, as with other professions, medicine was largely self-regulating, under the General Medical Council established in 1858. The number of doctors also increased slowly in France, from just over 11,000 in 1866 to a little more than 13,000 in 1906, before leaping to 20,000 on the eve of the First World War. Their education still left a great deal to be desired. Medical students in Paris protested frequently in the 1900s about the lack of practical training, overcrowding in laboratories, and the dominance of a small elite of wealthy doctors; in 1911, dissatisfied with the standard of the education they were offered, they locked the Dean of the Medical Faculty at the Sorbonne in his laboratory, causing the Faculty to be closed for a month. The German Doctors’ Society was set up in 1822, aiming not least to eliminate the competition of unqualified and alternative medical practitioners, whom it damned as Kurpfuscher, or quacks, and to cement the status of doctors by providing regulatory norms. The growth of mutual benefit societies, health insurance and medical charities made doctors less dependent on well-heeled patients for their income. The number of medical students in the German Empire increased from just over 1,600 in the mid-1840s to more than 5,000 in 1882, while at the turn of the century there were nearly 18,000 qualified doctors in Prussia and more than 22,000 in Italy.
The rate of expansion was far greater in another, much more modern profession, engineering, whose practitioners grew in number as Europe’s towns and cities expanded, roads, railways and canals were built, and factories and offices multiplied. There were 900 engineers in England and Wales in 1850 and 15,000 forty years later. Graduation from engineering courses in Italian universities was a compulsory requirement for practice, and the profession was organized in military-style corps answerable to special government offices. The state remained the major employer after unification, when a campaign of road and railway construction provided new opportunities for engineers. In France the dominance of the army in the engineering profession declined sharply over time, but the state continued to be the major employer, and the influence of the Saint-Simonians and the prestige of the École Polytechnique, founded in 1794, ensured a relatively high status for engineers, making the profession a vehicle of upward social mobility as it expanded towards the end of the century. Technical institutes were set up in Germany, with more than 11,000 students enrolled by 1914; at the turn of the century they made up a fifth of all students in higher education. In every European country, engineers, like other professions, cemented their identity and status by founding professional associations like the Association of German Engineers (1856), the Society of Civil Engineers set up in France in 1848, and the Austrian Engineers’ Association established at the same time and extended in 1864 to include architects. The first Italian congress of engineers met in Milan in 1872, and the 1875 conference, held in Florence, called for a national register of engineers, though this was unsuccessful, as was a proposal to found a national association. Internal rivalries and dissensions, particularly over the role of government in the profession, prevented further progress until 1908, when twenty-four different associations came together to form a national federation.
Special obstacles barred the way to the formation of an independent bourgeoisie in Russia. Merchants were prevented from owning serfs or purchasing land until the 1860s. They were subject to heavy taxation and treated as a closed caste. In the 1897 census there were merely 500,000 merchants, the same number as Orthodox priests and monks, and only a third as many as nobles and officials. Their social isolation was deepened by the fact that most of them were Old Believer sectarians, like the Skoptsy whose proposal to recruit Savva Purlevsky had so frightened the runaway serf. Many came themselves from servile backgrounds. If merchants eventually managed to escape from the institutional restrictions imposed by the tsarist regime, technical experts and professionals found it rather more difficult. For most of the nineteenth century they were confined to militarized corps under the aegis of the tsarist authorities. Three-quarters of physicians, for example, were public employees, and most of them were trained in military medical academies. Some 94 per cent of mining engineers and more than three-quarters of transport engineers were graduates and members of military corps. Only in the reform era of the 1860s were these corps replaced by universities and technological institutes. What substituted for a middle class in Russia for most of the century was the ‘intelligentsia’ or literati, a small group of educated men and women, university professors or teachers, doctors and lawyers, many of them noble.
In the 1890s with the rise of the zemstva local and regional authorities, and the beginnings of the industrialization pushed forward by Sergei Witte, the numbers of technicians and professionals began to increase significantly and start the process of forming a middle class on western European lines. It was not until this final decade of the century that the professions started to organize themselves, albeit only with limited success: the tsarist authorities permitted the physicians to hold congresses from 1885 onwards, persuaded that they were necessary for the exchange of information and the formulation of policy about epidemics, but they banned the lawyers from holding conferences after the first one took place in 1872, and did not allow engineers to organize any at all. The professions mostly had to make do with journals, alumni associations, scientific meetings and informal contacts instead. The creation of broad, self-regulating professional bodies seemed politically dangerous to the Russian authorities. Establishing ethical codes of conduct, a central element in western European professionalization, remained difficult if not impossible in a situation where the lion’s share of jobs and contracts remained in the hands of government officials who were a byword for corruption.
In every European country, the expansion of technical and other kinds of expertise also required an expansion in the numbers of people who taught them. Here too, as in the law, or medicine, there was a wide spectrum of status and income. There was a large gulf between, on the one hand, university professors and senior teachers in selective academic schools such as the French lycée or the German Gymnasium, many if not most of whom possessed doctorates from prestigious universities, and, on the other, the lowly primary-school teacher in a provincial town or village who often had to take a second job to make ends meet and did not really belong to the established bourgeoisie. As government employees, teachers in academic and higher education were vulnerable to political pressure: university professors like François Guizot and Victor Cousin were dismissed in the 1820s for their liberal views, and the case of the seven Göttingen professors sacked for the same reason in 1837 achieved widespread notoriety. As late as the 1890s the physicist Leo Arons (1860–1919), who lectured at Berlin University, was refused promotion on the orders of the Prussian government in 1892 and dismissed eight years later because he had donated money to the Social Democratic Party. Political controls were even more severe in Russia.
The bourgeoisie, with its manifold gradations of income and status, developed unevenly across Europe, but by the end of the century there could be little doubt that its numbers and influence were increasing as European economies grew. To be bourgeois was to employ a live-in servant, avoiding any hint of engaging in manual labour; in the middle-class London suburb of Hampstead, for example, in 1911, there were 737 servants for every 1,000 inhabitants. To be middle-class was also to boast a degree of education above the mere command of literacy, preferably with a high school, university or professional qualification; to engage in associational, public and charitable life; and to command sufficient income to possess, or more frequently on the Continent, rent, a well-furnished house or apartment in a salubrious suburb. Status was won not by title or descent but by hard work, probity, lifestyle, and the outward manifestation of ‘respectability’. Within the family, the wife or mother did not engage in paid work outside the home; at most, in the upper reaches of the middle classes, women undertook charitable work of one kind or another. Yet this did not mean they were mere passive advertisements of a higher social status; in the bourgeois household, the mother had to manage the servants and control the family’s expenditure as well as ensuring the home was supplied with food, clothing, and all the accoutrements of domestic existence. The family, indeed, was at the centre of bourgeois life.
Over the decades, political systems everywhere, even in reluctant tsarist Russia, had adjusted to the new world of the middle classes. Yet there was also a sense in some quarters that their heyday was over by 1900. In the first year of the new century the German writer Thomas Mann (1875–1955) published his great novel of upper-middle-class life, Buddenbrooks, in which a mercantile family gradually falls apart over the decades as its members abandon their core values and sink into self-indulgence and decadence in a process symbolized in the progressively worsening tooth decay suffered by the men of each generation. This trajectory was paralleled almost uncannily in the real-life history of the Morozov family, whose founder, Savva Vasilyevich Morozov (1770–1862), freed himself from serfdom to create one of the largest industrial enterprises in Russia. His grandson, Savva Timofeyevich (1862–1905), departed from family tradition to study chemistry at Cambridge, sponsor the Moscow Arts Theatre on his return, and become a friend of the radical socialist writer Maxim Gorky (1868–1936). He committed suicide in Cannes when his mother ousted him from the family business after he had tried to introduce a profit-sharing scheme for the workers; some alleged it was murder. The lengthy series of realist novels, Les Rougon-Macquart (1871–93), published by the popular writer Émile Zola (1840–1902), charted the influence of hereditary weakness on a bourgeois family. Moral hypocrisy forms the core of Professor Unrat (1905) by Thomas Mann’s elder brother Heinrich (1871–1950), which satirizes the double standards of the outwardly respectable German professoriate. The middle classes, in all their variety, were still socially and in many ways also politically dominant at the beginning of the century, but increasingly they had to share their power with competitors lower down the social scale.
For Karl Marx and his followers, the petty bourgeoisie or lower middle class was a transitional social stratum doomed to extinction, torn apart by the owners of the means of production on the one hand and those they exploited, the workers who had nothing to sell but their labour, on the other. Writing at mid-century, Marx categorized the petty bourgeoisie as a disparate collection of subsistence farmers, traditional artisans and small independent retailers. The gigantic social upheavals of the second half of the century did indeed create serious competition for these social groups. But they also generated new additions to the lower middle class, both transforming it and ensuring its future. Thus the massive expansion of educational systems provided jobs for huge numbers of schoolteachers, who were forced to live on the margins of respectability. In Britain, even after the introduction of the ‘certified teacher’ system in 1846, their salary averaged £100 a year. This was little more than the average earnings of most clerks, of whom there were said to be around 129,000 in England and Wales in 1871 but 461,000 in 1901. Before the age of the typewriter, theirs was a male profession, augmented by scribes, copyists and similar employees in banking, the law, insurance, and the lower ranks of the civil service. ‘Clerks as clerks,’ wrote one of them in response to a British inquiry about employment in 1870, ‘are at a discount. There are swarms of them glad to engage at £180 a year and less. Clerks as clerks never will be in a better position.’
This was the quintessentially lower-middle-class occupation. Charles Dickens’s novels graphically conveyed the often miserable conditions in which they worked. In The Pickwick Papers (1836) he described ‘the clerks’ office of Messrs. Dodson & Fogg’ as ‘a dark, mouldy, earthy-smelling room, with a high wainscotted partition to screen the clerks from the vulgar gaze, a couple of old wooden chairs, a very loud-ticking clock, an almanac, an umbrella-stand, a row of hat-pegs, and a few shelves, on which were deposited several ticketed bundles of dirty papers, some old deal boxes with paper labels, and sundry decayed stone ink bottles of various shapes and sizes’. Bob Cratchit, the decent but ineffectual clerk to the grasping moneylender Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol (1843), is continually at the mercy of his employer’s unrelenting miserliness. In David Copperfield (1850) Uriah Heep, the ambitious and manipulative villain of the story, is a clerk whose ambition is to better himself. Some indeed did: Charles Pooter, the hero or possibly anti-hero of The Diary of a Nobody (1892), whose trivial social ambitions and dull suburban lifestyle are gently satirized by the authors George Grossmith (1847–1912) and his brother Weedon Grossmith (1854–1919), gains promotion to the lofty position of senior clerk at one point in the novel, with a £100 salary increase, though he remains irritated by his social connections among the local shopkeepers, whom he now considers well below him on the social scale.
Shopkeepers were one of the success stories of the century, at least in economic terms. As towns expanded, the traditional weekly market, with produce brought in from the countryside, became inadequate to meet the needs of a growing population, even when transport links improved. Thus fixed and specialized retail outlets grew rapidly in number. A study of six towns in the north of England, for example, showed that there was one shop for every 136 inhabitants in 1801 and one for every 57 half a century later. After this, the numbers stabilized as new forms of retailing established themselves. Most important of these was the chain store, with branches all over the country. The stationer W. H. Smith was founded in 1792 and expanded to a nationwide business through opening newsstands on railway stations, the first being in 1848. Further competition came from co-operatives and from mail-order retailing, invented by the Welsh entrepreneur Pryce Pryce-Jones (1834–1920) in 1861 and dependent, of course on the establishment of an effective national postal service. Commentators on local government in Victorian England soon came to speak of a ‘shopocracy’ in which retailers played an influential role on local councils (from 1832 to 1867 they made up a third of the local electorate).
But the most striking innovation in the field was the department store, where a variety of specialized retailing outlets were gathered together under the same roof, thus reducing overheads. The new department stores extended over several floors and offered a variety of goods including luxuries of many kinds. The earliest, such as Bainbridge’s in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, founded in 1838, had twenty-three departments by 1849; the Bon Marché in Paris, also founded in 1838, sold goods at fixed rates, another innovation in an era when customers were used to haggling over prices with shopkeepers or market stall-owners. The department store was immortalized in Zola’s novel Au Bonheur des Dames (1883), which described its many innovations, including mail-order sales, aggressive marketing and heavy discounting, and chronicled its devastating effects on small shopkeepers who were unable to lower their prices to meet the competition. These were successful enterprises: the Bon Marché in Brussels increased the number of its departments between 1879 and 1889 from eighteen to thirty-two, adding children’s clothing, hats, perfumes, flannel and much else besides. In Germany the department-store chains were founded by Jewish cloth merchants. Among them were Rudolph Karstadt (1856–1944), who began trading in Wismar in 1881; Oskar Tietz (1858–1923), who launched his first store in Gera in 1882 and soon possessed a chain of stores across northern Germany, including one on the Alexanderplatz in Berlin; and his brother Leonhard Tietz (1849–1914), who began trading in Stralsund in 1879. By eliminating the middleman and purchasing direct from the producer, they were able to control prices more effectively than conventional retailers.
This model was quickly followed elsewhere, as in Budapest, where the Simon Holzer Fashion House, opened in 1895, occupied four floors of a large building twelve years later, selling ready-to-wear clothing, another innovation. By the turn of the century purpose-built department stores such as Harrods, constructed on the Brompton Road in West London in the late 1890s following the destruction of an earlier building by fire, had become ‘cathedrals of consumerism’, where shopping became a leisure activity, middle-class women could wander around without the need to be chaperoned, and specially trained staff, also overwhelmingly female, could acquire secure employment, though at the price of spending up to thirteen hours on their feet every day. By the early twentieth century the Párisi department store in Budapest, on the prestigious Andrássy Avenue, close to the Opera House, was selling goods on six floors of a magnificent building whose vast galleries, adorned with specially commissioned paintings and decorations, offered a huge range of goods at all prices, advertised in plate-glass windows along the frontage. The Samaritaine in Paris, constructed in 1910, had steam heating ducts, a pneumatic tube system for messages, motorized conveyor belts to deliver packages, and electrically powered awnings on the exterior to protect the windows from the sun.
Yet all these new forms of retailing did not really account for more than 15 per cent of turnover in the sector. The small shop, the butcher, baker, grocer, greengrocer, dairy and so on, continued to grow in numbers to meet the ever-increasing demand. In Madrid the Almacenes Madrid-Paris department store employed 416 people, but at the start of the twentieth century the 8,851 merchants engaged in ‘general commerce’ in the city employed nearly 25,000 workers, or just under three each. The number of shops in Germany grew by 42 per cent between 1905 and 1907 alone, at a time when the country’s population increased by only 8 per cent. A witness to an inquiry of 1892 in Britain described a plethora of ‘small shops in back streets, or perhaps in a parlour window, or small cellar, [that] sell almost everything, a little hosiery, chips, and bath bricks, and all that kind of thing, and sweets; a little bit of everything that they think they can dispose of’. Many such businesses led a precarious existence; in Bremen at the turn of the century a third of all retail businesses lasted less than six years. Nearly half of all grocery stores in Ghent had been in business for less than five years according to an inquiry undertaken in 1905.
It was a similar story with small workshops manned by single master artisans: in Edinburgh a third of them closed down in a typical five-year period, from 1890 to 1895. To defend their interests and provide a social life, small shopkeepers, clerks and other groups within the petty bourgeoisie increasingly established clubs and societies of one kind and another. The Master Joiners’ Circle founded in Lyon in 1867 was set up ‘with a view to establishing regular and friendly relations between the master joiners; to tighten among themselves ties of fraternity; and to associate for the progress of their trade’; the Master Patissiers of Brussels set up a society in 1887 ‘to get together from time to time, to see each other, and to talk over the past’, as well as to formulate demands for their trade; the Fulham Tradesmen’s Association held convivial dinners but also tried to advance their group economic interests. In Germany the Central Association of German Traders and Businessmen (1899), the German Central Association for Trade and Business (1907) and similar organizations acted to defend the economic interests of their members. Well before the turn of the century these were describing themselves as representatives of the Mittelstand, the ‘middle order’, which they contrasted with the workers on the one hand and the bourgeoisie and aristocracy on the other. Competition from large-scale industry and from socialist consumer co-operatives drove members of these associations to the right of the political spectrum and infused them with a dose of paranoid antisemitism, though this has sometimes been exaggerated by historians.
There was no doubt, however, about the anti-Jewish character of the populist German National Commercial Employees’ Association, founded in 1896 on the basis of a local Hamburg group set up three years earlier: it also became virulently anti-feminist as the female secretary began to replace the male clerk, and combined its two obsessions in the charge that feminism was a Jewish plot designed to undermine the German family. None of this had much effect, as women – mostly the educated daughters of the middle class – continued to move into new, modern and technologically driven areas of employment such as post offices, telephone exchanges, department stores and all kinds of businesses where the female-operated typewriter, first commercially produced in 1870 by the Danish inventor Rasmus Malling-Hansen (1835–90), quickly replaced the scribe and the copyist. One of the sharpest delineators of the social boundary with the petty bourgeoisie was the fact that the wives and unmarried daughters of teachers, shopkeepers, pettifogging clerks, independent master artisans and small businessmen had to work, either as unpaid assistants or in paid employment outside the home, while those of the established bourgeoisie did not. In Germany in 1907, indeed, 54 per cent of those recorded in an occupational census as working in commerce were members of the owner’s family. If the husband should die, it was common enough for his widow to carry on the business. Such activity was considered socially embarrassing for those petty-bourgeois families who aspired to move up the social scale: in one of the numerous novels by the Greek-born Italian writer Matilde Serao (1856–1927) a female character ‘did not look down on the life of a shopkeeper. But she would have liked to have been the lady of the house and not of the shop, a housewife and not a seller of sweets, a mother to her family and not a vendor in a shop.’ Yet the dividing line of social aspiration and class consciousness between petty bourgeoisie and proletariat remained clearer and sharper than it did between petty bourgeoisie and the social world above.
By the early twentieth century, the proletariat of wage-earning manual labourers and their families had grown to become the largest single social class in many industrialized nations. In France by 1914 there were perhaps 4 million industrial workers in a population of around 42 million. In a fully industrialized economy like Britain, with a population of roughly 45 million in 1868, industrial workers far outnumbered all other social classes put together, over 16 million compared with under 5 million economically active members of the upper and middle classes. In Germany manual labourers and their families made up nearly two-thirds of the population, though this figure included agricultural workers as well. Income inequalities were striking. According to one estimate, of the 10 million people with an independent income in Britain in 1867, some 50,000 (the ‘upper class’) earned over £1,000 a year, 150,000 (the ‘middle class’) between £300 and £1,000 a year, 1,854,000 (the ‘lower middle class’) up to £300 a year, and 7,785,000 below £100 a year, of whom nearly 2,250,000 were agricultural labourers and the rest urban skilled and unskilled workers. The well-to-do literally looked down on their social inferiors. A statistical comparison between cadets at Sandhurst, for example, an officer-training establishment, and students enrolled in the Marine Society charity school, shows that the elite students enjoyed a remarkable height advantage of almost 9 inches by 1840. The poor Marine Society boys, many of them from London, were the shortest group ever recorded in Europe and North America. They were even 2–3 inches shorter than the average height of American slaves at the time. Among male Scottish prisoners, Glasgow natives were nearly an inch shorter than other prisoners. Longitudinal studies show that average height in Britain did not start to increase until the late nineteenth century.
These differences reflected gross disparities in health and nutrition. Life expectancy at birth in the prosperous London suburb of Hampstead around 1900 was fifty, whereas in the deprived working-class London borough of Southwark it was thirty-six – the disparity reflecting above all a huge difference in the rates of infant mortality between the two districts. By 1900, 96 per cent of babies born in the middle classes in England survived the first year of life, whereas 33 per cent of those born in the poorest London slum districts did not. Average mortality per 1,000 inhabitants in the Parisian arrondissements with the wealthiest population was 16 points below the average for the city as a whole in 1817, 27 by mid-century, and 23 by 1891; by contrast, mortality in the poorest districts was 23 to 24 points above the city average throughout the first half of the century, falling back to 6 points by 1891. Death rates were highest in the industrial towns where the working classes were crowded together in cramped and poorly ventilated living quarters: in the early 1890s, for example, 4.5 per thousand population in the industrial areas of the Ruhr and the Lower Rhine died of tuberculosis every year compared to under 2 per thousand in the rural districts of eastern Prussia. In the city of Hamburg around the same time death rates per thousand in the two wealthiest precincts stood at 1.3 from tuberculosis compared to 3.3 in the waterfront slums, while the figures for overall infant mortality were 11.4 and 25.1 respectively. Diseases such as cholera struck the poor much harder than the well off; in Hamburg in 1892 mortality rates among taxpayers earning 800–1,000 marks a year – a manual labourer’s income – were 62 per thousand, among those earning 2,000–3,500 marks a year 37 per thousand, and among those earning 50,000 marks or more a year a mere 5 per thousand.
As cities grew, and people crowded into them looking for work, getting fresh food in from the countryside and keeping it from going rotten became ever more difficult. Icehouses, storing blocks of ice imported from glaciers and snowfields in the mountains or the far north, were used only by the very wealthy. The Scottish engineer James Harrison (1816–93), based for most of his life in Australia, patented the first vapour-compression refrigeration machines in the 1850s, using them mainly to cool beer. It was not until 1911, however, that the first domestic refrigerators became available, manufactured by the General Electric Company in the USA. They sold for $1,000 each, twice the price of a motor car. Not surprisingly, the great mass of ordinary people had to do without them. And as if the problem of food deterioration in the summer months was not enough of a burden for the health of the poor, general standards of food hygiene were in any case minimal. In Hamburg, milk, unsterilized until the end of the century, was distributed through the streets in open red-painted pails carried on small carts pulled by dogs, which were said to quench their thirst on hot days ‘by lapping the dripping milk-pails’. In cities where breast-feeding was uncommon because young mothers had to return to work almost immediately after giving birth, sour or tubercular milk was a major contributor to infant mortality. The working classes often had to live off food bought as leftovers even for their good meals; on broken eggs, stale bread, bruised fruit, offal, and unsold and unfresh meat and fish. Bread, potatoes, polenta or other starchy foods provided the bulk of their diet. An average working-class family in the mining and iron and steel town of Bochum in the Ruhr in 1875 spent an average of 60 pfennigs a day on bread, 39 pfennigs on butter, fat, grease and lard, 24 pfennigs on potatoes, 15 pfennigs on coffee mixed with chicory, and 15 pfennigs on vegetables. Of these items, bread was by far the cheapest, so that its place in the diet was even more prominent than these expenditure statistics would suggest.
As the consumer became ever more separated from the producer, with supplies increasingly passing through the hands of wholesalers and other middlemen before they reached the shops, the possibilities of adulterating food were seized on with alacrity by traders looking to maintain or increase their profits at a time of growing competition. An official report commissioned by Bismarck in 1878 found that barite, gypsum and chalk were added to flour to increase its weight, while in southern Germany ‘egg noodles’ were coloured yellow with picric acid and even urine. In 1889, 60 per cent of samples of butter investigated in Hamburg were found to be adulterated with margarine (a French substitute patented in 1869 and based on vegetable oil and beef fat). Some 24 per cent of tests on a range of foodstuffs and drinks carried out in Berlin in 1890 found evidence of adulteration. The substitution of worthless additives diluted the nutritional value of food and could even in some cases be positively dangerous. In 1855 the English doctor Arthur Hill Hassell (1817–94) found alum in flour and bread, gunpowder in tea, water added to milk, and oxide of lead used as a colouring agent in coffee. The Adulteration of Food Act, passed in 1860, had no discernible effect, largely because the trade interest stopped local authorities from appointing official food analysts. Only after a new Act was passed in 1872 did the number of investigations increase, and only following more sophisticated techniques of chemical analysis in the 1880s did comparable legislation in countries such as Germany begin to have an effect. In France the first investigative laboratory was set up in 1878, serving the interests of retailers who wanted to check the quality of foodstuffs they purchased from wholesalers; it was only in 1905, however, that a general law was introduced to criminalize adulteration and the fraudulent advertising of food and drink. The law established among other things the appellation controlée designation of the origin of wines that has persisted to the present day. Only in the last two decades of the nineteenth century did nutritional standards begin to rise.
Better diet accompanied urban improvement and the ‘hygienic revolution’ in many European towns and cities. Yet employment was unstable, reflecting both the economic instability of capitalist enterprise and the attitudes of first-generation industrial workers, many of whom still retained their links with the land. In the mines of Carmaux in southern France, for instance, the company often laid off its workers without pay when demand was low. This occurred on as many as fifty-six days in 1886. On the other hand, absenteeism sometimes had an effect too, especially at harvest time, when workers often went back to their families in the countryside to help gather in the crops. Miners at Carmaux were even awarded a prize if they achieved as much as 23 per cent attendance in a month. All over Europe workers customarily took Mondays off, to add to the weekend – ‘Saint Monday’ as it was known in England, or ‘Blue Monday’ in Germany. In the coalfields of Asturias in north-western Spain as many as three-quarters of the miners were accustomed to stay away from work not only during the numerous religious holidays but on the day after too. In many trades, in any case, employment was casual and ad hoc; in ports, workers were hired in gangs separately for each ship coming into or leaving the harbour, and therefore in lean periods, notably winter time, they were left without an income. In the Voortman cotton mill in Ghent, hourly pay replaced daily wages, enabling the owner to increase the working day when demand rose, without facing protests from the workers. By 1858, however, Voortman’s employees were working a 75-hour week, an average of nearly 13 hours a day. During times of heightened demand the company increased the length of each cloth to be made by pieceworkers (who were paid per piece of finished cloth produced), whereas during an economic downturn it cut wages, at all times keeping wage calculations a secret from the workers.
In many trades, piece rates, with workers paid according to how much they produced, were common. In coalmines wages were calculated by the amount of coal produced by each particular team of miners. Because the coal was hard in some seams, soft in others, and also varied in quality from one part of a seam to another, the rate of pay for each truck of coal had to be constantly renegotiated to ensure that effort was fairly rewarded. The coal was cut by hand and taken along the galleries by pit ponies pulling trucks on a narrow-gauge railway before being hauled to the surface by a steam-powered winch; it could take as long as an hour for miners to reach the coalface in the deeper pits, and ‘winding-time’ was a constant source of dispute, especially when mine owners refused to pay for it. Hours everywhere were long and the facilities poor. In Budapest in the 1880s, most factory employees worked a twelve-hour day; yet only 109 out of 5,000 factories surveyed in 1910 had toilet facilities, and a mere 75 had canteens. Accidents were common. Spectacular mine disasters like that of the Courrières mine in northern France in 1906, when a massive dust explosion killed over a thousand workers, including many children, hit the headlines, but the daily toll of injury, death and disease on workers of all kinds exacted an even greater price over the long term. Chronic illnesses like the lung diseases silicosis and pneumoconiosis were barely recognized by the medical profession. The annual report of Britain’s Chief Inspector of Factories and Workshops for 1899 listed 22,771 industrial accidents reported to the certifying surgeons, 871 of them fatal; 150 involved the loss of a limb, 2,521 part of a hand; there were 2,706 scalds or burns, and 1,202 fractures. In Russia in 1890 alone 245 people were killed in accidents in metallurgical factories, and there were 3,508 serious injuries; by 1904 these figures had climbed to 556 and 66,680 respectively, affecting 11 per cent of the labour force.
In the textile mills where so many women worked, it was easy for clothing to be caught in a machine. Cases of operatives losing fingers were far from uncommon until safety devices were introduced and improved, the dust-filled atmosphere was damaging to the workers’ lungs, and the deafening noise of the power looms frequently led to hearing loss. Few factories had facilities catering for mothers with small children – only seven out of the 5,000 factories in Budapest surveyed in 1910 provided a crèche, for example. New industries posed new hazards, as in the manufacture of self-igniting white-phosphorus matches, invented in 1830 by the Frenchman Charles Sauria (1812–95). Already by mid-century some 250 million matches were being struck every day in the United Kingdom, the majority of them strike-anywhere ‘Lucifers’; the safety match, which was far less dangerous in every respect, never became popular in Britain. In the London-based Bryant and May company the fumes from the white phosphorus used to make the combustible match-heads began to have a terrible effect on the workers – almost all of them women and teenage children – whose job it was to prepare the phosphorus solution and dip frames of matchsticks into it. Their gums began to ulcerate, their teeth fell out, and their jawbones began to rot, exuding a vile-smelling pus, sometimes through the nose. This was ‘phossy jaw’. The use of white phosphorus was eventually banned by an international convention signed at Berne in 1906 and ratified by the British Parliament two years later.
Women such as the match-girls at Bryant and May were predominantly young and single, as they were in the textile industries and domestic service. In Spain, 4,046 of the 4,542 employees of the Seville tobacco factory were women. Tobacco workers were famous for the combativeness that led to five days of rioting at a Madrid factory in 1830 in protest against a wage cut. Their reputation caught the attention of the French composer Georges Bizet (1838–75), who adapted an 1845 novella by Prosper Mérimée (1803–70) to create in 1875 the most famous of all fictional Spanish women workers, the gypsy girl Carmen. Women were generally believed to be more dexterous and better at delicate work than men, but their employment outside the home was also concentrated in areas that extended their conventional domestic roles to the outside world, in the food and drink industries, in clothing manufacture and cleaning, and in domestic service. During the first phase of industrialization, dominated by the textile industry, the new spinning and weaving machines were operated predominantly by women. In the textile town of Roubaix in northern France during the mid-nineteenth century, 55 per cent of employed women worked in the textile mills. Here, 33 per cent of all women over the age of ten were in employment, and 18 per cent of married women worked, half of them in the mills. But this was exceptional. Married working-class women with children usually had to work at home. New possibilities were opened up by the modern sewing machine, invented in 1829 by the French tailor Barthélemy Thimonnier (1793–1857). It was developed commercially by the American inventor Isaac Singer (1811–75), a man whose volcanic energy found one outlet among many in fathering at least twenty-four children by a number of different women. Singer’s machine was patented in 1851 and was soon being mass-produced, spurring the development of a new putting-out system, through which a clothier would order garments from a middleman who would employ up to twenty women in a workshop using Singer sewing machines.
Most legislation on female employment was directed towards factory work, where women’s hours were regulated in Russia in 1885, and in Germany at around the same period, with the aim, as one (male) Reichstag deputy declared in 1890, of ensuring ‘that the ennobling spirit of family life and the blessings of hearth and home, which seem at present to be seriously under threat, remain assured to the worker and his own’. It was far more difficult to regulate domestic service, which had become one of the largest areas of employment for working-class women by the late nineteenth century, when there were 2.5 million servants in Germany alone. In Spain there were 322,000 female domestic servants in 1887, out of a female labour force of around 1.5 million. From 1851 to 1871 the total of live-in female servants in England and Wales grew twice as fast as the general population, from 750,000 to 1,200,000. Most worked in single-servant households employing a ‘maid of all work’. In the garrison and county town of York in the north of England, in 1851, nearly 60 per cent of all employed women were servants. In Hamburg in 1900, 90 per cent of domestic servants were female, the majority coming from the surrounding areas. Some 75 per cent of them worked as the only employee of a middle-class family. The records of a local Hamburg tribunal dealing with disputes between servants and their employers – about 2,000 cases a year by the 1880s – demonstrate frequent complaints on the servants’ part about bullying, name-calling, long hours, poor living conditions, minimal or unpaid wages, and above all restrictions on their freedom. And if an employer did not like a new servant’s first name, he or she would arbitrarily change it to something different, and the servant simply had to acquiesce.
Industrial conditions of employment began to spread to the countryside too, above all where farmers produced in large quantities to sell on the national or international market. The harshness of agricultural work in the late nineteenth century can be illustrated by the experience of the Pomeranian labourer Franz Rehbein (1867–1909), a self-taught man whose autobiography was published in 1911. Son of a washerwoman and a tailor who died of tuberculosis when Franz was still a child, he had to earn his keep as a farm labourer. After finding work in a sugar refinery he subsequently became a farm servant on an estate before running away to Hamburg and then being called up for military service. On his discharge he went back to agricultural work. Steam-powered threshing machines were by now widely used in Schleswig-Holstein, but only the richest estate-owners could afford their own, so most of them were hired out, with their operators, by independent contractors who moved the machines from farm to farm as required. The quantity of labour needed was considerable – up to thirty men for each machine, carrying out tasks such as stoking and carrying water to the engine, baling the straw, collecting the ears of corn, and so on. A few machine-owners also used a mechanical binder or baler, which reduced the number of men needed, but mostly the work was done by hand. Conditions of work were almost unbearable. The machine made a deafening noise, and the dust it threw up stopped the workers’ noses, made their eyes swollen, and got in their throats and lungs, so that they coughed up ‘black lumps of black mucus’, as Rehbein reported. If it rained, the dust clung to their skins in a thick layer. The labourers were paid an hourly rate that could be as low as 15 pfennigs. Work often began at three in the morning, and carried on until nine or ten in the evening, sometimes even longer. Breaks were allowed only for meals, or to allow the machine to be oiled. ‘The man had to go out with the machine,’ Rehbein wrote, ‘he becomes its slave, becomes himself part of the machine.’ The threshing machines were also dangerous: in 1895 Rehbein’s arm became caught in one of them and had to be amputated.
The free market in labour and the increasing numbers of landless rural labourers living, like Rehbein, on piece rates in miserable poverty resulted in a growing migration of young men from the countryside to the towns in search of steadier and, by the late nineteenth century, better-paid work – what the Prussians called Landflucht, the flight from the land. This meant that male labour had to be replaced by female, as the women stayed behind until their husband or betrothed had made enough money to support them by buying a smallholding. The temptation of leaving the land to work in the factories was obvious from the 1913 statistics of average per capita annual income in urban and rural areas of northern Germany: 480 marks in the ‘flat land’ region of West Prussia, and 576 in Pomerania, contrasted with 1,254 marks in Berlin and 1,313 in Hamburg. Even taking into account the greater numbers of middle-class incomes in the towns, and allowing for the possibility that rural workers could subsist from a smallholding or cottage garden, this demonstrated that the towns and cities of an advanced industrial economy had finally acquired a higher standard of living for the masses than was possible in the countryside.
There were many social gradations within the urban and rural working class. There was a marked disparity in wages between male and female workers – in the Spanish textile industry, for example, female wages were about half those of men in the 1850s, rising to two-thirds by 1914. But social gradations also affected men and families at different levels. In London skilled artisans looked down on the unskilled; and among the latter, shipworkers looked down on shore workers, and the permanently employed despised the casually hired. English workers felt superior to the Irish, just as in the Ruhr German workers looked down on Italians and Poles. These differences often reflected differences in earnings. In France in the late nineteenth century, glassblowers earned around 10 francs a day, whereas weavers only earned 1 franc 65 centimes. Yet such differences paled beside the gulf that existed between all these manual, waged workers on the one hand, and the far smaller number of the better off and the wealthy in the middle and upper classes on the other. The experience of poverty, oppression, social disadvantage and, in much of Europe for most of the period, lack of basic rights was common to all these workers and helped bind them together into a single social class, much as Marx had predicted. This happened over time with the development of a permanent, hereditary proletariat. When a railway-engine factory was founded in the south German town of Esslingen in 1846, it was initially unable to recruit a permanent workforce. Although there were over a thousand operatives in the factory by 1856, most left after a few months, or migrated elsewhere, or, above all, went home in summer to help with the harvest. The pattern of migration reflected the agricultural cycle rather than the pattern of demand in the industry. During the summer, when the regular workers were away, their jobs were filled by local textile workers. It was not until the agricultural crisis of the late 1870s that this pattern changed and workers began to remain at their posts through the summer, gradually severing their contacts with the farming communities from which they came.
In the slate-quarrying districts of north Wales it was common for quarrymen to live away from the workplace on a hill farm or smallholding, where their wives and families looked after a few cows and sheep, a pig and some chickens during the day or, if the farm was far away and the men forced to live in quarry barracks, during the entire week. One quarry manager complained of his workers in 1892 that ‘in the summer, for instance in hay harvest, a good many go away’. Two-thirds of the coalminers of Asturias in north-western Spain were said by the State Mining Directorate in 1911 to be ‘farmers who have their homes and their lands, alternating their work in their fields with that in the mines’. In St Petersburg young workers retained their links with their home villages to the extent that a survey of 570 skilled wage earners carried out in 1908 revealed that 42 per cent of married and 67 per cent of single respondents sent part of their money back to relatives in the countryside. Even here, however, as the 1910 census showed, nearly 20 per cent of men in the ‘peasant’ category in St Petersburg had been born there, and 25 per cent of the women; in 1902, 16 per cent of the male and 21 per cent of mill operatives in the city were second-generation workers. A permanent, hereditary proletariat was in the process of formation here too. This development was already beginning to have major political consequences before the century came to an end.
The urbanization of Europe aroused widespread alarm among conservative contemporaries. The conservative German social theorist Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl felt that big cities broke down traditional structures of family and status, so that people became ‘intoxicated, confused and discontented’. Rising crime rates were the inevitable consequence. Indeed, social commentators noted with alarm the creation of an ‘irredeemably criminal class’, as the London Times put it in 1863. In 1852, Karl Marx described the criminal underclass, the Lumpenproletariat or ‘ragged working class’, in drastic terms:
Alongside decayed roués with dubious means of subsistence and of dubious origin, alongside ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie, were vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, pimps, brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ-grinders, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars – in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither, which the French call la bohème.
Marx’s picture was echoed by that of the army officers who suppressed the Paris Commune in 1871, blaming the uprising on ‘the dangerous classes’, ‘black with powder, haggard, ragged . . . their sordid females with them’. Scarcely less notorious than the Parisian underworld or the lazzaroni of the Neapolitan slums were the impoverished criminal classes of London, the subject of a four-volume survey by the journalist Henry Mayhew (1812–87) in his London Labour and the London Poor (1851–61). With his collaborators, Mayhew interviewed a wide variety of offenders, from ‘sneaks or common thieves’ to ‘housebreakers and burglars’, and recorded the experiences of the urban underclass including the ‘mudlarks’ who made a living by stealing coal from barges on the Thames and selling it to the poor. In Charles Dickens’s novel Our Mutual Friend (1864–5) the main female character, Lizzie Hexam, helps her father in his business of riffling through the pockets of dead bodies of people who have fallen into the river, or thrown themselves in, as they float downstream with the tide.
Many commentators titillated the horrified fascination of their bourgeois readers with the existence of this supposedly separate social class that had its own customs, habits and language. In Dickens’s Oliver Twist, indeed, there is a whole criminal underworld in London peopled by characters such as the prostitute Nancy, the violent burglar Bill Sykes, and the sinister ‘fence’ Fagin, who employs a gang of juvenile pickpockets for which Oliver is at one point forced to work. In France, a similar literary exploration of the urban criminal milieu was conducted by Eugène François Vidocq (1775–1857), a convicted thief, forger and jailbird who had become a police spy in prison. In the late Napoleonic period he founded the Sûreté, the French detective force, and went on to publish a series of (mostly ghostwritten) books on the underworld, including one on its argot. The German policeman Friedrich Christian Benedikt Avé-Lallemant (1809–92) wrote four volumes on the criminal classes, the final one being a dictionary of their language, known as Rotwelsch. But the concept of an entirely separate substratum of society was largely a literary conceit. Many of the casual poor drifted in and out of crime as their circumstances dictated, earning their living as best they could, constructing for themselves an economy of makeshifts in which legal activities intermingled with illegal ones. The social investigator Charles Booth (1840–1916) acknowledged this reality in his famous street maps of London in the late nineteenth century, colour-coded to indicate degrees of wealth and poverty: blue was reserved for streets occupied by ‘vicious, semi-criminal’ elements, the lowest of the low.
Yet many workers who in other respects were law-abiding citizens saw nothing wrong in stealing from their employers. In the mines they considered it perfectly legitimate to take coal home for heating since the coal was the product of their own labour; indeed some 3,000 miners went on strike in Upper Silesia in the early 1870s when the mine-owners proposed checks on workers going off shift to make sure they were not taking any coal with them. Similarly, in the docks, goods from incoming cargoes to sell or use later on were routinely appropriated by wharfmen and stevedores. ‘If people work all night alone and without supervision,’ wrote the Hamburg Stock Exchange Journal in 1891, ‘is it then any wonder that the one or the other of them gains a few pounds in weight during the night and that this extra weight consists in fact of coffee?’ Parts of London’s small-scale industry existed almost entirely on stolen or pilfered goods, with furniture workshops using stolen wood and clothing shops stolen fabrics. This did not make their suppliers into full-time thieves. Still, professional criminals certainly did exist. Arthur Harding (1886–1981), who grew up in a slum known as ‘the Jago’ in the East End of London, recalled in old age how he had begun his criminal career as a pickpocket, before graduating to more ambitious enterprises. In 1908 he was described as the ‘king’ or ‘captain’ of the Brick Lane van-draggers – ‘a most slippery and dangerous criminal . . . the leader of a numerous band of thieves’. ‘I got my first gun about 1904,’ he recalled. Harding and his gang were soon operating a racket extorting protection money from illegal gambling dens: ‘When we made a raid on a club, we made everyone stand up, and waved our guns about to show that we were serious.’ Many other port cities harboured a similar criminal class. In January 1906, across the North Sea in Hamburg, as a massive political demonstration occupied the attention of the entire city police force, the people of the Alley Quarters near the harbour emerged from their houses and threw stones at the street lights, putting them out before smashing the windows of the jewellery shops in the city centre and pulling down the security bars: ‘As soon as the window was destroyed,’ one eyewitness reported, ‘and the iron bars broken off, greedy fingers grabbed at the watches and gold in the display . . .’ The visibility of occurrences such as these did much to convince contemporaries that urbanization led inevitably to an increase in crime and disorder.
‘Criminal statistics,’ noted a Russian journal in 1893, ‘attest that crime is greater in cities than in villages.’ Life was insecure, city-dwellers were cut adrift from their families and were without the moralizing influence of the Church. There were far more temptations in towns and cities than in the impoverished countryside. Rural crime was thought to be mostly violent and interpersonal in nature; with the growth of towns came a shifting of the balance towards property crimes. Thus in Russia from 1874 to 1913, for instance, 85 per cent of murders occurred in rural areas, 89 per cent of manslaughters, and 85 per cent of assaults. By contrast, only just over half of all cases of theft and dealing in stolen goods occurred in the countryside, though this was still where the overwhelming majority of Russians lived. But these figures were deceptive. Not only did they in many cases fail to incorporate cases dealt with by local courts in rural areas, but most importantly they also ignored the fact that crime in the countryside often represented a clash of values and beliefs between the peasantry and the authorities.
Popular belief made a distinction between property created by human industriousness and property created without a human contribution. The latter included wood, essential for making furniture, huts and houses, and implements of many kinds, as well as fuel for heating and cooking. Former serfs in many areas refused to accept the consequences of the privatization of woodland that accompanied their emancipation. Between 1815 and 1848 convictions for wood theft in Prussia reached astonishing proportions as a result. Throughout the 1830s and 1840s the number of convictions for wood theft in Prussia (not including the Rhine Province) continued to grow, from 120,000 in 1836 to 253,000 ten years later. There were 351,000 convictions in 1856 and 373,000 in 1865. Indeed, wood theft was by a very long way the most common recorded criminal offence in Prussia during this period, with 1,000 successful prosecutions per 100,000 inhabitants of the kingdom in 1836, in contrast to a mere 236 per 100,000 for all other kinds of theft put together, and a mere 23 per 100,000 for grievous bodily harm and assault. Whole communities were involved, leading to armed clashes between the foresters of the landlords, who now sought to use their forests as a source of profit, and the local peasants, who continued to regard them as a common resource. The clash of cultures that lay behind the disputes between peasants and foresters was never fully resolved.
In many ways rural society for most of the century, and in some areas up to the First World War and even beyond, was self-sufficient in the administration of justice. Those who transgressed against the rules of the village were liable to be punished through the communal village practice known in France as charivari, in England as ‘rough music’ or ‘skimmington’, in Germany as Haberfeldtreiben, and in Italy as scampanate. The charivari in France could take various forms, but most commonly the young men of the village would gather, hold a mock trial, and decapitate or burn an effigy of the offender. In some areas they would smear the offender’s face with honey and feathers, put a nightcap on his head, place a distaff in his hand, and drive him through the village as he sat on a donkey facing backwards. More usually, however, especially in England, as described in the novel The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) by Thomas Hardy (1840–1928), they would assemble outside the offender’s house in the early hours of the morning, burn the offender in effigy, shout insults and sing specially composed songs, blow horns, ring cowbells, clash pots and pans and make what the Germans called Katzenmusik (‘caterwauling’), often repeating the process for several nights on end. In Bavaria, if a farmer had seduced his maid, the village youth would take a cart from his stable, dismantle it, and carry the parts onto the roof of his dwelling, reassemble it there, and fill it with dung in the practice known as Mistwagenstellen. But theft, defamation, even infanticide courted such punishments as well, and they could also be applied to brewers who watered down their beer, usurers who demanded excessive interest, or farmers who transgressed repeatedly across the boundaries of someone else’s property.
Such practices were common not only in England, France and Germany but also in Italy, Austria, Hungary, Holland and Scandinavia. In Russia the charivari was directed mainly against thieves; indeed, it was known as vozhdenie (‘leading the thief’). It involved parading the offender through the village, sometimes wearing a horse’s collar, to the accompaniment of a noisy banging of pots and pans, buckets, washtubs and iron oven doors. Most reviled of all were horse thieves; in 1887 villagers in Umansk even broke into the district jail where five horse thieves had been imprisoned, took them out and tortured them as a crowd of onlookers cried ‘Beat them, beat them to death!’ ‘Almost daily,’ noted an article in the Russian magazine The Jurist in 1905, ‘the telegraph brings news about cases of vigilante justice against thieves, robbers, hooligans and other criminal elements . . . One might think that Russia has been brought temporarily to the American prairie and that lynch-law has been granted citizenship by us.’ Tsarist officialdom and educated opinion saw these practices as evidence of the barbarism and backwardness of the peasantry. ‘Nothing is sacred,’ complained one writer in 1912: ‘There is anarchism, atheism, a complete decay of morals.’
In southern Europe vendettas and blood feuds were still common at the end of the century. Here a transgression of social custom, such as the refusal of a marriage, a brawl, the theft of property, disputes over land boundaries or flocks, or merely an insult offered, even in jest, to a leading villager, might be requited by the killing of the culprit by the rival clan or family, inaugurating a blood feud that could continue for decades until it was ended by the payment of blood-money. In the villages of the Mani peninsula in Greece families built high towers for their own protection, emerging to track down members of the rival family against whom they had declared a blood feud. Truces were concluded at harvest time, but as the feud continued whole families could be wiped out. On the small island of Corsica, between 1821 and 1852, no fewer than 4,300 murders were recorded by the French authorities as products of the vendetta. But despite the horrifying statistics, the blood feud was as much a way of regulating and ritualizing violence as a spur to spreading it. In Montenegro the offended family would formally appoint someone to exact revenge, an oath had to be sworn, and if the offender had committed a crime, the victim’s family could seek ritual approval from his family to deal with him. Custom dictated who was to kill and be killed (normally the closest male relative of the most recent perpetrator). In Albania there was even a set of rules, the Kanun Leke, preserved in oral tradition until it was finally published in excerpts in 1913, that provided the regulations for murder in defence of clan honour. ‘Spilled blood,’ the code declared, ‘must be met with spilled blood.’
The disorder created by such events increasingly brought down the wrath of the state. In England the practice of ‘skimmington’ was outlawed by the Highways Act of 1882, though in a few places it continued into the twentieth century. In Germany the last examples of Haberfeldtreiben took place in 1894; all the participants were arrested by the police. In the Balkans the state was less able to impose itself. Blood feuds increasingly spilled over into intercommunal violence, as Montenegrin families fought Albanian ones, while feuding declined among Serbs as the major families realized it was only helping their Ottoman overlords. In Corsica and southern Italy the state made some limited headway in controlling the violence, and the death rate from vendettas fell. However, in Sicily the blood feud took on a new and dangerous form in the 1860s as the landowners’ private armies, disbanded by the new Italian state, were replaced by rival clans – the Mafia – who first worked to enforce the landowners’ sanctions against their tenants, then drifted into protection rackets and other forms of criminality, and finally began to fight each other over the spoils. As long as the state was too weak to penetrate mountainous or remote areas like Albania, Catania, Corsica and the Mani, the blood feud and the vendetta continued to flourish.
Social conservatives who viewed the countryside as a haven of peace and tranquillity, morality and orderliness, were thus wide of the mark. Indeed, as Britain underwent a vast expansion of its towns and cities, the statistical record showed a steady decline in the rate of recorded acts of theft and violence until, as the Criminal Register noted in 1901, it was clear that there had been ‘a great change in manners: the substitution of words without blows for blows with or without words; an approximation in the manners of different classes; a decline in the spirit of lawlessness.’ The Bavarian Georg von Mayr (1841–1925) was the first to compile ‘moral statistics’, correlating food thefts with food prices, and soon states were issuing official criminal statistics in every part of Europe. Annual convictions for crimes against the person in Germany actually fell, from 369 in 1882–5 to 346 in 1914. Berlin, by far the largest city in Germany, experienced overall crime rates only just above the national average. In Wales, a country experiencing rapid industrial growth in the coalfields of the south and the slate-quarrying regions of the north, the rate of criminal indictments fell from one person per 845 in 1851 to one in 2,994 by 1899. Religion, self-discipline, temperance, improvements in living standards, and not least, education, all had an influence. The decline in crime, reported the British Home Secretary Sir William Harcourt (1827–1904) to Prime Minister Gladstone, was ‘a bright and encouraging light on our social horizon’. The more urban and industrialized an area became, the more its overall crime rates tended to fall.
Nevertheless, criminals and crimes became the focus of growing public interest as legal reforms such as the Criminal Law Code of 1851 in Prussia, the French-influenced Criminal Law Code of 1863 in Italy, and many similar enactments, established trial by jury in open court, a gift to the newly emerging mass popular press towards the end of the century. Sensational murder trials began to make headlines, whether of the American homeopath Dr Hawley Crippen (1862–1910), found guilty of the murder of his wife and arrested on board a transatlantic liner with his young mistress, or of the former miller and repeat offender August Sternickel (1866–1913), executed in Frankfurt an der Oder in 1913 for strangling a farmer in the course of a robbery after a trial that made press headlines day after day. Readers were mesmerized by stories of fictional detectives, whether Dickens’s Inspector Bucket in Bleak House (1852–3) or Dostoyevsky’s Inspector Porfiry in Crime and Punishment (1866). England above all saw the rise of the fictional professional detective who worked independently from the police, notably Sherlock Holmes, the creation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930); elsewhere, as in Germany, the primacy of the confession over circumstantial evidence in gaining a conviction made it more difficult to write a story based on the reading of clues, and the danger to authors of criticizing the police made it harder to write a story based on a civilian detective whose work constantly showed the police to be incompetent. To suit their largely middle-class readership these writers focused on middle-class crimes and criminals, or brought in exotic villains from foreign parts; the mundane criminality of the urban residuum was seldom thought worthy of their attention, as it had been of social novelists like Dickens or Vidocq. Parts of Europe’s great cities remained dangerous for the respectable to visit, but contrary to the alarmist warnings of critics of urbanization, crime rates were steadily falling.
All through the nineteenth century, Europeans in their millions sought to escape from poverty and oppression by leaving the Continent for a new life overseas. Their motives were often mixed. The lure of American freedom, and the chance of acquiring land cheaply and farming it not just for subsistence but for profit, were irresistible to many whose future in Europe seemed bleak and without hope. Political persecution provided another motive, especially for the radicals and revolutionaries of 1848. Some 30,000 ‘forty-eighters’ settled in what became known as the ‘over-the-Rhine’ neighbourhood of Cincinnati, Ohio, where they led violent protests at the visit of a papal emissary in 1853. Within Europe itself, London was the first port of call for revolutionaries of all stripes, from Karl Marx to Lajos Kossuth. They had been preceded by a wave of political émigrés from Poland following the uprising of 1831, though many of these settled in Paris. Polish nationalists played a part in the conflicts of 1848 in many European countries, fought in the American Civil War, and, more than most émigrés from other countries, refused to sever their links with their homeland. During the 1863 uprising a Polish Central Committee was formed in the United States to aid the insurgents. A characteristic figure was Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz (1758–1841), a revolutionary nationalist in the early 1790s who emigrated to the USA following the defeat of the 1795 Polish uprising. Niemcewicz returned to Poland after the Napoleonic invasion, and in 1817 wrote the first major Polish antisemitic tract, The Year 3333, or an Incredible Dream, in which he painted a horrifying portrait of a distant future in which his country was ruled by Jews. Published posthumously in 1858, its espousal of an elaborate conspiracy theory in which ‘Judeo-Polonia’ was already beginning to replace the social structures of the old Polish Commonwealth had a powerful influence on the emerging Polish nationalist right wing. During the relatively liberal 1820s, Niemcewicz served in a number of official capacities in the administration of Congress Poland, only to be forced into exile again after participating in the insurrection of 1831. Driven to despair by the setbacks he had experienced, he wrote shortly before his death that ‘Everyone has a homeland; but the Pole only has a grave.’ On his own grave in a suburb of Paris was inscribed the epitaph: ‘And there, where tears are banished, he still shed Poland’s tear’.
Political exiles continued to find their way to London or the USA, or in some cases Latin America, throughout the century, though never in such numbers again as in 1831 and 1848. But the major reason for leaving was economic. The most spectacular exodus was from Ireland. Between 1848 and 1855 the island’s population fell from 8.5 to 6 million, and while much of the decline at the beginning of the period can be ascribed to the famine, the continuing fall, to under 4.5 million by the census of 1921, was almost entirely due to emigration. More than 700,000 had arrived on the British mainland by 1861, over 200,000 went to Canada, and 289,000 left for Australia (many of them to join in the gold rushes of the 1860s). But the bulk of the migrants found their way to the United States – more than three million in all between 1848 and 1921. By 1900 there were more Irish-born men and women living in the USA than in Ireland itself. They were not entirely destitute – between 1846 and 1851 the Irish withdrew over £1,200,000 from banks in gold, much of it to pay for the transatlantic passage – but many were funded by landlords eager to clear their estates, some had government subsidies, and a number were supported by family members already living in America. The average emigrant was a man in his mid-twenties. ‘There are very few boys left on our side of the country,’ wrote a woman in County Wicklow, south of Dublin, ‘ . . . there will be few men soon, for they are pouring out in shoals to America.’ Desperate families grouped together to raise funds. ‘All we want is to get out of Ireland,’ wrote one group: ‘We must be better anywhere than here.’
If Ireland was the most spectacular case of a desperate people driven out of Europe by economic catastrophe, then Germany showed that the morcellization of landholdings, especially in the south-west, where partible inheritance prevailed, and the rapidly deepening crisis of the artisan trades as British industrial competition undercut them, could be almost as powerful. Some 21,500 people emigrated from the German Confederation in the 1820s, 140,000 in the 1830s and nearly 420,000 in the 1840s. The ‘hungry forties’ played a role here too, and between 1846 and 1857 well over a million people left Germany in the wake of the great agrarian crisis. The USA became more attractive after 1862 with the passage through Congress of the Homeland Act, which allowed settlers to fence off land for farming in the Midwest at little or no cost. News soon reached Europe. Another million people left Germany between 1864 and 1873, before the economic downturn of the 1870s made America less attractive. As the world economy recovered, around 1880, a fresh wave emigrated, with 1,800,000 Germans leaving the country by 1890, this time mostly from the impoverished north-east. As German industry expanded headlong in the 1890s, however, the possibilities of finding work inside the country soaked up most of the remaining emigration potential, so that between 1895 and 1913 a total of little more than half a million left the country. Still, between 1820 and 1914 well over five million Germans went to live in the USA; between 1820 and 1860 they constituted 31 per cent of all immigrants there, the second largest contingent after the Irish, and from 1861 to 1890, with nearly 29 per cent, the largest contingent of all.
A rather similar picture emerged in Scandinavia, where little land could be used for cultivation. More than half of the surface area of Sweden was covered in forest, while mountains and other unusable land covered three-quarters of the land area of Norway. In 1890 the US national census reported 800,000 people who identified themselves as Swedish-American. Some 150,000 Swedes left Europe in the 1860s, nearly 140,000 in the 1870s, 347,000 in the 1880s and over 180,000 in the 1890s. Initially driven to emigrate by famine, later on they were enticed over to America by relatives promising a better life and in many cases sending them funds to purchase their passage. This was a lucrative business for the shipping lines that took them to New York, usually via Hamburg or Bremen and Liverpool or Southampton, and the companies were soon advertising for custom in the major Swedish towns. Letters home describing the idyllic conditions on the Great Plains, where everyone was equal and there was no aristocracy as there was in Sweden, prompted whole communities to leave. Americans welcomed the Swedes as hard-working, law-abiding, orderly, sober and Protestant. As one Congregational minister wrote in 1885, Swedish immigrants ‘do not seek the shelter of the American flag merely to introduce and foster among us . . . socialism, nihilism, communism . . . they are more like Americans than are any other foreign peoples’. Similar positive attitudes, combined with crop failures and a dearth of cultivable land, also encouraged some 800,000 Norwegians to emigrate to America and Canada between 1825 and 1900. Peaking at 188,000 in the 1880s, Norwegian emigration was higher as a proportion of the domestic population in the nineteenth century than that of Britain and Ireland – 971 per 100,000 in the 1880s, for example, compared to 608 per 100,000 at the height of the Irish emigration in the 1860s. Harsh climatic conditions and a major volcanic eruption in 1875 also drove 15,000 Icelanders to leave for North America between 1870 and 1900, out of a total population of 75,000, or around 20 per cent, an extraordinarily high proportion. Some 3 per cent of the entire population of the island emigrated in 1887 alone.
In Denmark, by contrast, where the land is flat and the summers are longer, and arable and pasture made up a majority of the land at the turn of the century – 75 per cent, as opposed to a mere 12 per cent in Sweden and 3 per cent in Norway – relatively few people decided to seek a better life overseas. Here the economy developed on the basis of the mechanization of food processing and a switch from grain to meat and dairy products. Danish butter and Danish bacon became major exports in this period. The Danish example was noted elsewhere: the Anglo-Irish agrarian reformer Horace Plunkett (1854–1932) exclaimed in 1908: ‘I have always felt that Ireland as a second Denmark was no bad ideal for our reformers to set before them.’ But rural Denmark enjoyed advantages that rural Ireland did not possess: an independent middling farmer community, a high level of education, a network of small rural banks, and lack of deep political or religious divisions. In Denmark farmers pooled their resources in co-operative dairies (from 1882), abattoirs (1887), egg-packing stations (1891), and bacon-producing plants (1887) – a development that did not take place in Ireland. By 1900 there were more bacon-producing co-operatives in Denmark than there were private enterprises. As a result of all this, emigration was very limited.
The pace of emigration from Austria-Hungary was steady, rising from 183,000 in the 1860s to 286,000 in the 1870s, 294,000 in the 1880s and 496,000 in the 1890s. As with other countries, there were also a substantial number of returnees, ranging from a sixth to a half of emigrants; thus in 1904, for example, while 101,000 people left Hungary, some 47,000 came back. From 1900 to 1914 over a million people were recorded as leaving the Habsburg Empire, the overwhelming majority of them bound for the USA, their numbers increased by an agreement signed by the Hungarian government with the Cunard Shipping Company in 1903. A contemporary commentator ascribed this high rate of emigration to ‘the deplorable condition of the working classes, the long hours, low wages, and the lack of proper workmen’s dwellings’, as well as ‘the methods of management of the large estates and the dearth of small holdings’, though agricultural workers tended first of all to head for Germany, Russia or Romania rather than deciding to move overseas at the outset.
Emigration from Spain was also overwhelmingly economic in character. It was severely restricted until eased by a new law in 1853, but it was not until the 1880s that it became large in scale: 360,000 Spaniards left for the New World between 1882 and 1896. Figures for the decade 1904–15 show another 1.7 million crossing the Atlantic, 500,000 of them bound for Argentina. They came from Galicia, Asturias, Santander and the Canary Islands, all poor agricultural regions unable to feed their growing populations. On a smaller scale, Spanish migrants, most of them temporary, also left for north Africa, especially after the French colonization of Algeria in 1830, and for France, where there were 80,000 Spaniards living in 1900 and 105,000 by 1911. In 1907 recruiting agents even arrived in Málaga offering ‘emigration with free passage to the State of Hawaii’ for agricultural workers under the age of forty-five, and by 1914 some 7,735 mostly landless labourers had left, though the majority later moved on to California.
Russian emigration, which began on a large scale with Jews fleeing the pogroms that were initiated after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, showed a mixture of political and economic motives. Tens of thousands left every year from this point on, with a total of nearly 800,000 from 1881 to 1890, 1.6 million between 1891 and 1900, and again 1.6 million between 1901 and 1910. No fewer than 868,000 people left in the years 1911 to 1914 alone. Crowded into the Pale of Settlement on the western side of the tsarist empire, the Jewish population sank into desperate poverty; a third were said to be living on welfare by the turn of the century. Following their expulsion from Moscow and a major famine in Russia in 1891–2, some 94,000 Russian citizens left for the USA through the ports of Bremen and Hamburg in 1891 alone, and another 70,000 the following year. Between 75 and 85 per cent of these migrants were Jewish, and they were followed after the turn of the century by many Old Believer sectarians fleeing the persecution visited upon them by an increasingly aggressive Orthodox government. One Old Believer sect, the Dukhobortsy, left en masse in 1900, when 7,500 of them made the journey to western Canada, where they aroused controversy by living in communes, rejecting education and practising nudism.
The final wave of European emigration overseas came from southern Italy, which remained mired in agrarian backwardness even after the turn of the century. Commercial agriculture was confined to the north, where there was sufficient capital to support mechanization and the use of chemical fertilizers. State grants for land reclamation, road-building, water supplies and the like became available after the turn of the century, but of the 869,800 acres improved in these various ways by 1915, only 5,680 were in the south. Northern farmers could benefit from the growth of the canning industries and sugar-beet refining. These changes barely affected southern Italy. Income per head in the south was only about half that of the north-west. Trapped in an unremitting cycle of poverty and backwardness, people in southern Italy began emigrating overseas in increasing numbers. At least 150,000 people left the country every year between 1898 and 1914, more than two-thirds of them from the south and a quarter from Sicily, and in some years the figure was much higher. No fewer than 873,000 emigrated in 1913 alone; the percentage of the entire population of Italy leaving the country increased from 0.6 in the 1880s, many of them northern Italians leaving for skilled jobs in other parts of Europe, to 1.8 between 1900 and 1913. With fast steamships guaranteeing a quick passage, around 40 per cent of these emigrants came back between 1897 and 1906, and by 1913 this figure had risen to 66 per cent. Most of them were young, unskilled rural labourers, but a portion of these returned to Argentina or the United States more than once, and overall it has been estimated that around one and a half million Italians emigrated permanently in the first decade of the twentieth century. When Prime Minister Giuseppe Zanardelli (1826–1903) visited Moliterno in the southern region of Basilicata, the first Italian head of government ever to do so, he was shocked to be greeted by the local mayor ‘on behalf of the eight thousand people in this commune, three thousand of whom are in America and the other five thousand preparing to follow them’.
Almost no part of Europe was exempt from this massive exodus. Nearly a sixth of the entire population of Greece emigrated between 1890 and 1914, either to America or to Egypt. European states with overseas empires, from Britain and France to Portugal and the Netherlands, also witnessed extensive waves of emigration. The major exception was France, where the low birth rate and the security of land tenure kept people in the home country. Altogether some 60 million people are thought to have left Europe between 1815 and 1914: 34 million for the USA, 4 million for Canada, and maybe a million for Australia and New Zealand. Between 1857 and 1940, 7 million Europeans left for Argentina, and between 1821 and 1945, 5 million for Brazil. Altogether over a quarter of the natural increase in population in western Europe between 1841 and 1915 was absorbed by emigration, with a net population loss of 35 million people.
As a result, the world balance of population was beginning to change. At mid-century the population of the USA was not much larger than that of Britain, the same as that of France, and a little less than the area covered by the future German Empire. By the eve of the First World War the USA was well ahead, with a total population of more than 92 million. Yet Europe’s share of world population actually increased over most of this period, from 22 per cent in 1850 to around 25 per cent in 1900 (for comparison, its share by the early twenty-first century was around 10 per cent). Overall the population of Europe increased from 188 million in 1800 to 458 million in 1914, and this increase formed the major driving force behind the massive emigration waves of the century. Within this global figure, there were marked contrasts between different areas and different countries. Russia’s population expanded by 300 per cent, partly because of the conquest and incorporation under the tsar’s rule of large areas of Central Asia, the Caucasus and Siberia. The population of Great Britain grew by a remarkable 400 per cent, that of Italy and Spain by nearly 100 per cent. France’s population, by contrast, grew slowly, by only 50 per cent.
This vast human replenishing of the earth was the social dimension of a process of globalization that reached its peak in the years immediately preceding the outbreak of the First World War, as capital, goods, people and ideas began to flow with increasing rapidity and intensity from continent to continent. More rapid communications boosted trade and reduced the price gaps of commodities between Europe and the USA as well as Europe and Asia by a half or three-quarters in the period 1870–1914. Investment overseas, dominated by Europe during this period, accounted for 32 per cent of the net national wealth of Britain in 1913. Foreign investment reached nearly 20 per cent of domestic savings in France by 1900. Much of this was in other European countries (60 per cent in the French case, 53 per cent in the German) but capital also flowed overseas, with 21 per cent of British foreign investment going to America in the period 1870–1913 and 16 per cent of German foreign investment (the same figure as for German investment in Latin America, only slightly below the British figure). Technology transfer took place on every level and in virtually every industry, with America increasingly the innovator in new industries such as motor manufacture. This was the first age of globalization, one in which Europe remained the dominant force. This fact was reflected in the particular intensity with which European countries developed ties with their formal and informal colonies in Africa, Asia, Australasia and Latin America.
The results could be seen at the most prosaic levels of everyday life by 1914. If the great department stores that sprang up in Europe’s cities in the last quarter of the nineteenth century prided themselves on offering for sale goods from all over the world, then small retailers also sold imported commodities, most notably of course tea and coffee, but also tropical fruit, spices, tobacco, rice, cane sugar, and much more besides. In Germany the term ‘colonial wares’ came to denote such exotic imports, and some retail outlets devoted themselves exclusively to their sale. Overseas trade lent a cosmopolitan character to a substantial portion of the bourgeoisie. Most of the larger trading houses in Liverpool trained apprentices sent to them from merchant firms in other countries, including Latin America as well as Germany and France. In the 1870s there were said to be in Hamburg ‘dozens of older gentlemen who knew “every town on the Mississippi” from personal experience and had been “twenty times in London”’, but who had never visited Berlin at all. By the end of the century, too, professionals of most kinds were participating in international congresses and associations, exchanging ideas and practices across national boundaries. Political exiles, the printing press, the telegraph and finally the radio aided the transmission of ideas between continents. Socialists, feminists and others came to regard themselves as part of global movements of political emancipation that had their international congresses and conferences too. All these developments were summed up and symbolized in the great World Fairs inspired by the example of London’s Great Exhibition of 1851. Just two years later New York held an Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations, complete with its own Crystal Palace, and in 1876 it was Philadelphia’s turn to host a World’s Fair, followed by Chicago in 1893, with many others held in a variety of European and other American states. If Britain had advertised itself as the workshop of the world in 1851, by 1914 it was clear that it was no longer alone.
Well before the outbreak of the First World War, Europe had undergone a social revolution of major dimensions, but of a very different kind from that imagined by Marx or Bakunin. Alongside the political transformations that had convulsed the Continent between 1848 and 1871, the relations between classes had also been transformed, though over a longer period. The traditional landowning aristocracy had been undermined by the forces of economic change, by political reforms such as the abolition of serfdom, by the advent of elected legislatures, however limited their powers, by the ending of corporate privileges such as those that had sustained the Baltic nobility earlier in the century, and by the increasing wealth and ambition of the business, banking and professional classes. A new, hybrid social elite had emerged, based on bourgeois values of thrift, hard work, sobriety and responsibility. These values had come to dominate society and politics in large parts of Europe, finding their expression in urban renewal, sanitation and hygiene, agricultural improvement, penal reform, and the attempt, not always successful, to impose order on the criminal or semi-criminal underworld. They percolated down in various forms to the petty bourgeoisie and the respectable working class, however much their politics may have differed from those of doctors, lawyers, teachers, or businessmen. This was a very different social world from that which emerged from the upheavals of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. It was also one, as we shall now see, that had a major, and not always positive, impact on the natural environment that surrounded it.
Map 9. Austria and Hungary, 1848–68