The Age of Empire

The Age of Empire EJ. HOBSBAWM VINTAGE BOOKS A DIVISION OF RANDOM HOUSE, INC. NEW YORK To the students ofBirkbeck College First Vintage Books Edition, April 1989 Copyright © 1987 by E.J. Hobsbawm All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published, in Great Britain, by George Weidenfeld and Nicolson Ltd., London, and in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1987. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hobsbawm, EJ. (EricJ.), 1917- The age of empire, 1875-1914 / E.J. Hobsbawm.—1st Vintage Books ed. p. cm. Bibliography: p. Includes index. ISBN 0-679-72175-4 (pbk.) i. History, Modern— 19th century. I. Title. D359.7.H63 1989 909.81 —dci9 Manufactured in the United States of America 579B86 CONTENTS Illustrations ix Preface xiii Overture i I The Centenarian Revolution '3 2 An Economy Changes Gear 34 3 The Age of Empire 56 4 The Politics of Democracy 84 5 Workers of the World 112 6 Waving Flags: Nations and Nationalism 142 7 Who's Who or the Uncertainties of the Bourgeoisie 165 8 The New Woman 192 9 The Arts Transformed 219 IO Certainties Undermined: The Sciences 243 Ii Reason and Society 262 12 Towards Revolution 276 '3 From Peace to War 302 Epilogue 328 Tables 34i Maps 353 Notes 361 Further Reading 379 Index 39i CHAPTER 7 WHO'S WHO OR THE UNCERTAINTIES OF THE BOURGEOISIE In its widest possible sense ... a man's Self is the sum-total of what he can call his, not only his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes and his house, his wife and children, his ancestors and friends, his reputation and works, his lands and horses and yacht and bank-account. William James1 With an immense zest ... they begin shopping. ... They plunge into it as one plunges into a career; as a class they talk, think and dream possessions. H.G.Wells, 19092 The College is founded by the advice and counsel of the Founder's dear wife ... to afford the best education for women of the Upper and Upper Middle Classes. From the Foundation Deed of Holloway College, 1883 I Let us now turn to those whom democratization appeared to threaten. In the century of the conquering bourgeoisie, members of the successful middle classes were sure of their civilization, generally confident and not usually in financial difficulties, but only very late in the century were they physically comfortable. Until then they had lived well enough, surrounded by a profusion of decorated solid objects, encased in large quantities of textiles, able to afford what they regarded as suitable to persons of their standing and unsuitable to those below them, and consuming food and drink in substantial, and probably in excessive, quantities. The food and drink, in some countries at least, were excel lent: cuisine bourgeoise, in France at least, was a term of gastronomic praise. Elsewhere, at least, they were copious. An ample supply of servants compensated for the discomfort and impracticability of their 165 THE AGE OF EMPIRE houses. But it could not conceal them. It was only quite late in the century that bourgeois society developed a style of life and the suitable material equipment actually designed to fit the requirements of the class which was supposed to form its backbone: men in business, the free professions or the higher ranks of public service and their families, who did not necessarily aspire to or expect the status of aristocracy or the material rewards of the very rich, but who were well above the zone where buying one thing meant forgoing others. The paradox of the most bourgeois of centuries was that its life-styles became 'bourgeois' only late, that this transformation was pioneered on its fringes rather than at its centre, and that, as a specifically bourgeois way and style of living, it triumphed only momentarily. That is perhaps why the survivors looked back to the era before 1914 so often and so nostalgically as the belle (poque. Let us begin the survey of what happened to the middle classes in our period by considering this paradox. That new lifestyle was the suburban house and garden, which has long ceased to be specifically 'bourgeois' except as an index of aspiration. Like so much else in bourgeois society it came from the classic country of capitalism, Great Britain. We may first detect it in the garden suburbs constructed by architects like Norman Shaw in the 1870s for comfortable, though not particularly wealthy, middle-class households (Bedford Park). Such colonies, generally intended for rather richer strata than their British equivalents, developed on the outskirts of central European cities - the Cottage-Viertel in Vienna, Dahlem and the Grunewald-Viertel in Berlin - and eventually moved socially down wards into the lesser or lower-middle-class suburbs or the unplanned labyrinth of'pavilions' on the fringes of great cities, and eventually, via speculative builders and socially idealistic town-planners into the semi detached streets and colonies intended to recapture the village and small-town spirit (Siedlungen or 'settlements' was to be the significant German term for them) of some municipal housing for the more comfortable workers later in the twentieth century. The ideal middle- class house was no longer seen as part of a city street, a 'town house' or its substitute, an apartment in a large building fronting a city street and pretending to be a palace, but an urbanized or rather suburbanized country house ('villa' or even 'cottage') in a miniature park or garden, surrounded by greenery. It was to prove an enormously powerful ideal of living, though not applicable as yet within most non-Anglo-Saxon cities. The 'villa' differed from its original model, the country house of nobility and gentry, in one major respect, apart from its more modest (and reducible) scale and cost. It was designed for the convenience of 166 WHO'S WHO OR THE UNCERTAINTIES OF THE BOURGEOISIE private living rather than social status-striving and role-playing. Indeed, the fact that such colonies were largely single-class communi ties, topographically isolated from the rest of society, made it easier to concentrate on the comforts of life. This isolation developed even when it was not intended: the 'garden cities' and 'garden suburbs' designed by socially idealistic (Anglo-Saxon) planners went the same way as the suburbs specifically built to remove the middle classes from their inferiors. And this exodus in itself indicated a certain abdication of the bourgeoisie from its role as a ruling class. 'Boston', the local rich told their sons around 1900, 'holds nothing for you except heavy taxes and political misrule. When you marry, pick out a suburb to build a house in, join the Country Club, and make your life center about your club, your home, and your children.'3 But this was the very opposite of the function of the traditional country house or chateau, or even of its bourgeois rival or imitator, the great capitalist's mansion - the Krupps' Villa Hugel, or the Bankfield House and Belle Vue of the Akroyds and Crossleys, who dominated the smoky lives of the woollen town of Halifax. Such establishments were the engine-casings of power. They were designed to demonstrate the resources and prestige of a member of a ruling elite to other members and to the inferior classes, and to organize the business of influence and ruling. If cabinets were made in the country house of the Duke of Omnium, John Crossley of Crossleys Carpets at least invited forty-nine of his colleagues on the Halifax Borough Council for three days to his house in the Lake District on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday, and entertained the Prince of Wales on the occasion of the inauguration of Halifax town hall. In such houses private life was inseparable from public life with recognized and, as it were, diplomatic and political public functions. The requirements of these took precedence over home comforts. One does not imagine that the Akroyds would have built themselves a grand stairway painted with scenes from classical myth ology, a painted banqueting hall, a dining room, library and suite of nine reception rooms, or for that matter a servants' wing designed for twenty-five domestics, primarily for their family use.4 The country gentleman could no more avoid exercising his power and influence in his county than the local business magnate could avoid doing so in Bury or Zwickau. Indeed, so long as he lived in the city, by definition an image of the urban social hierarchy, even the average member of the bourgeoisie could hardly avoid indicating - nay, underlining - his place in it by the choice of his address, or at least of the size of his apartment and the storey it occupied in the building, the degree of servitude he could command, the formalities of his costume and social intercourse. The Edwardian stockbroker's family which a dissident son 167 THE AGE OF EMPIRE recalled later in life was inferior to the Forsytes, because their house did not quite overlook Kensington Gardens, but it was not so far away as to lose status. The London Season was beyond it, but the mother was formally 'At Home' on regular afternoons, and organized evening receptions with a 'Hungarian band' hired from Whiteleys Universal Store, as well as giving or attending almost daily dinner parties at the required time, during the months of May and June.5 Private life and the public presentation of status and social claims could not be distinct.

Load more