• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

5. Th e Northern Heyday: 1830–1880 Tipping the Scales In Europe, the mid-nineteenth century witnessed a decisive change in the relative strength of North and South, confi rming a long-term trend that had been visible for a hundred years, and that had accelerated since the fall of Bonaparte. Great Britain was clearly the main driving force behind this development, but by no means the only one. Such key statistical indicators as population growth and GDP show an unquestionable strengthening in several of the northern nations. A comparison between, for instance, Britain, Germany and the Nordic countries, on the one hand, and France, Spain and Italy, on the other, shows that in 1830, the population of the former group was signifi cantly lower than that of the latter, i.e. 58 vs. 67 million.1 By 1880, the balance had shifted decisively in favour of the North, with 90 vs. 82 million. With regard to GDP, the trend is even more explicit. Available estimates from 1820 show that the above group of northern countries together had a GDP of approximately 67 billion dollars, as compared to 69 billion for the southern countries. In 1870, the GDP of the South had risen to 132 billion (a 91 percent increase), but that of the North to 187 billion (179 percent increase).2 During the 1830–1880 period, the Russian population similarly grew from 56 to 98 million, representing by far the biggest nation in the West, whereas the United States was rapidly climbing from only 13 to 50 million, and Canada from 1 to 4 million (“Population Statistics”, 2006). Correspondingly, the US GDP rose from 12 billion dollars in 1820 to a spectacular 98 billion dollars in 1870, practically catching up with Britain’s 100 billion at the same time. Th e fi gures reveal a period in which the countries of the North experienced a boom-like growth compared to those of the South. Britain, in particular, exhibited all the characteristics that, at the beginning of the previous chapter, were seen as related to the French Revolution: rationality, 1 Th is and the following population fi gures for European countries are taken from Mitchell 1992. 2 Th is and other fi gures on GDP are taken from Angus Maddison’s Contours of the World Economy, 1–2003 AD (OUP, 2007), as listed in Wikipedia, s.v. “List of regions by past GDP (PPP)”. Th e dollar value is in 1990 equivalents. © PETER FJÅGESUND, 2014 | DOI 10.1163/9789401210829_007 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0Peter license. Fjågesund - 9789401210829 Downloaded from Brill.com10/06/2021 12:07:02PM via free access 332 Th e Dream of the North science, technology, progress, urbanity, industry, and even perfectibility. Queen Victoria’s reign, which began in 1837, witnessed a transformation that exceeded the most naive expectations, in combination with a political stability in the sharpest possible contrast to the generation leading up to Waterloo. Germany and the United States, too, were very much on the rise and destined for a similar development. Th e revolutionary ideals of freedom, furthermore, of democracy and national independence had not been forgotten. Th us there was not only a constant pressure on traditional and often undemocratic governments and institutions, and a demand for a further democratisation, specifi cally transfer of power from the aristocracy to the middle classes; there was also an increasing focus on an ideal with strong eighteenth-century roots, of regarding the nation state as the fundamental political unit. Nationalism and democratisation were really two sides of the same coin. Nationalism by its very nature drew attention to the cultural uniqueness of the geographical region that either was or intended to become a nation. Th is cultural uniqueness was not primarily associated with the traditional and elitist culture of learning, which was precisely supra-national, with a common anchorage in Mediterranean Antiquity, and closely linked to the nearly two-thousand-year-old tradition of Latin as a pan-European lingua franca. Th e structure of the equally old religious institution of the Catholic Church similarly ignored national boundaries. A nation’s cultural uniqueness was rather to be found, as Herder and others had argued, in the Volk, among the common people, who until recently had not even been granted the privilege of possessing anything worthy of attention. Th is elevation of the culture of common people had in itself more of a democratising eff ect than the series of electoral and economic reforms that took place simultaneously. It may not have provided the masses with improved material conditions, but it did provide them with a sense of cultural dignity that was truly historic. It is hardly an exaggeration to claim that this represents a factor that has been underestimated by historians with a fundamentally materialistic approach to social change. Th e nineteenth century has been called the century of the middle class, and what this middle-class culture set out to do, and especially so in the Protestant North, was to graft on to the old, elitist culture, an alternative culture, namely that of the people and that of the specifi c nation. Admittedly, this attempt had been long in the making, but so far it had been conducted mostly by enthusiasts who found themselves more on the fringes than within the cultural Establishment. Th is now changed; the indigenous culture – or cultures – of the North was now increasingly institutionalised and brought within the sphere of governments and other public institutions, and was thus brought into the service of the nation. It was, in short, instrumentalised in an attempt to build a national identity and exhibit a national mettle that might enable successful competition Peter Fjågesund - 9789401210829 Downloaded from Brill.com10/06/2021 12:07:02PM via free access Th e Northern Heyday: 1830–1880 333 with the neighbours. Th e process resulted in a group of strangely hybrid national cultures, all of which showed progressive as well as reactionary features, and all of which had a strong concept of a common northern denominator, but which still developed their own distinct characteristics. With the benefi t of hindsight, it was an unfortunate time in which to develop ideals that further underlined the need for strong, competitive nation states. Populations were rapidly rising; there was a steadily growing need for raw materials to feed an expanding industrial system; and the areas of unclaimed territories around the world were quickly dwindling. Th e strongest indication of the latter was the intense race among the European nations for colonies. Th e scene, in other words, was already set for tensions and hostilities that would reach a terrible climax in the following century. In such a context, the wars of the mid-1800s involving the northern nations were like volcanic tremors before the eruption. One example, which reveals a strong element of nationalism, is the dispute between Denmark, on the one hand, and the German states of Prussia and the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein, on the other. Here, well before the unifi cation of Germany, Pan-German arguments had been employed for some time on the German side. Jacob Grimm, for instance, had argued that Jutland was historically German, giving an unpleasant foretaste of a Lebensraum philosophy. Th e dispute resulted in two wars, the First and the Second Schleswig War (1848–51 and 1864), which ended with the inclusion of Schleswig and Holstein into Prussia, and eventually into the German Empire. Th us, the northern countries had diff erent reasons for consolidating their positions through various nationalist programmes. Denmark had to come to terms with a wholly new reality and a considerable reduction in both land and population. Britain, at the peak of its power, was struggling, as had become apparent in the Crimean War (1853–56), to hold the empire together and retain its infl uence as the world’s only superpower. Norway, Sweden and Finland were in diff erent ways either coming to terms with the reshuffl e after the Napoleonic Wars or nursing dreams of further steps towards full independence. And on the other side of the Atlantic, the United States went through a bloody civil war, which eventually saved the union. Most radically, however, Germany was fi nally transformed, with the unifi cation of 1871, from being a centuries-old conglomerate of scattered and largely uncoordinated principalities to become a massive power, with more than 40 million people (as opposed to 26 million in Britain) and a land mass of 540,000 km2, twice that of Britain. In this context, ideas about and a focus specifi cally concerned with the North became deeply ingrained in the struggle for retaining a sense of common identity as well as for underlining a national uniqueness. And there was hardly a northern dimension that was more self-evident than the polar regions. It is not surprising, therefore, to fi nd that such countries as Peter Fjågesund - 9789401210829 Downloaded from Brill.com10/06/2021 12:07:02PM via free access 334 Th e Dream of the North Germany and the United States, which had hitherto played second fi ddle in the exploration of the icy wastes, now entered the race with full force; the image of the ancient heroes, who conquered new land with dragon-like ships that stunned their victims, melted together with the modern heroes, whose conquest was spearheaded by superior science, technology and – as before – courage. For the time being, the values and the ideals of the past fi tted nicely with those of the present.

Load more

  81

Copy Link