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The Age of Empire

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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 CHAPTER5 WORKERS OF THE WORLD 1 got to know a shoemaker called Schroder.... Later he went to America He gave me some newspapers to read and I read a bit because I was bored, and then I got more and more interested.... They described the misery of the workers and how they depended on the capitalists and landlords in a way that was so lively and true to nature that it really amazed me. It was as though my eyes had been closed before. Damn it, what they wrote in those papers was the truth. All my life up to that day was proof of it. A German labourer, c. 1911' They [the European workers] feel that great social changes must come soon; that the curtain has been rung down on the human comedy of government by, of and for the classes; that the day of democracy is at hand and that the struggles of the toilers for their own shall take precedence over those wars between nations which mean battles without cause between working men. Samuel Gompers, 19092 A proletarian life, a proletarian death, and cremation in the spirit of cultural progress. Motto of the Austrian Workers' Funeral Association, 'The Flame'3 I Given the inevitable extension of the electorate, the majority of electors were bound to be poor, insecure, discontented, or all of those things. They could not but be dominated by their economic and social situation and the problems arising from it; in other words, by the situation of their class. And the class whose numbers were most visibly growing as the wave of industrialization engulfed the west, whose presence became ever more inescapable, and whose class consciousness seemed most directly to threaten the social, economic and political system of modern societies, was the proletariat. These were the people the young Winston 112 WORKERS OF THE WORLD Churchill (then a Liberal cabinet minister) had in mind when he warned Parliament that, if the system of Conservative-Liberal two- party politics broke down, it would be replaced by class politics. The number of people who earned their living by manual labour for a wage was indeed increasing in all countries flooded or even lapped by the tidal wave of western capitalism, from the ranches of Patagonia and the nitrate mines of Chile to the frozen gold-mines of north-eastern Siberia, scene of a spectacular strike and massacre on the eve of the Great War. They were to be found wherever modern cities required building work or the municipal services and public utilities which had become indispensable in the nineteenth century - gas, water, sewage - and wherever the network of ports and railways and telegraphs stretched which bound the economic globe together. Mines were to be found in remote spots throughout the five continents. By 1914 even oilfields were exploited on a significant scale in North and Central America, in eastern Europe, South-east Asia and the Middle East. More significantly, even in predominantly agrarian countries urban markets were supplied with manufactured food, drink, stimulants and elementary textiles by cheap labour working in a sort of industrial establishment, and in some - India is a case in point - fairly significant textile and even iron and steel industries were developing. Yet the number of wage-workers multiplied most spectacularly, and formed recognized classes of such labour, chiefly in the countries of old-estab­ lished industrialization, and in the growing number of countries which, as we have seen, entered their period of industrial revolution between the 1870s and 1914, that is to say mainly in Europe, North America, Japan and some of the areas of white mass settlement overseas. They grew mainly by transfer from the two great reservoirs of pre- industrial labour, the handicrafts and the agricultural countryside, which still held the majority of human beings. By the end of the century urbanization had probably advanced more rapidly and massively than ever before, and important currents of migration - for instance from Britain and east European Jewry- came from towns, though sometimes small ones. These could and did transfer from one kind of non- agricultural work to another. As for the men and women who fled from the land (to use the then current term, Landfluckt), relatively few of them had the chance to go into agriculture, even if they wanted to. On the one hand, the modernizing and modernized farming of the west required relatively fewer permanent hands than before, though considerable use was made of seasonal migrant labour, often from far away, for whom farmers did not have to take responsibility when the working season ended: the Sachsenganger from Poland in Germany, the 113 THE AGE OF EMPIRE Italian 'swallows' in Argentina,* the train-jumping hobo transients and even, already, the Mexicans, in the USA. In any case agricultural progress means fewer people farming. In 1910 New Zealand, which had no industry worth mentioning and lived entirely by means of extremely efficient agriculture, specializing in livestock and dairy prod­ ucts, had 54 per cent of her population living in towns, and 40 per cent (or twice the proportion of Europe without Russia) employed in tertiary occupations.5 Meanwhile the unmodernized agriculture of the backward regions could no longer provide enough land for the would-be peasants whose numbers multiplied in the villages. What most of them wanted, when they emigrated, was certainly not to end up their lives as labourers. They wanted to 'make America' (or wherever they went), hoping to earn enough after a few years to buy themselves a holding, a house and the respect of the neighbours as a man of means, in some Sicilian, Polish or Greek village. A minority returned, but most stayed, to fill the constructional gangs, the mines, the steel mills, and the other activities of the urban and industrial world which needed hard labour and little else. Their daughters and brides went into domestic service. At the same time machine and factory production cut the ground from under the considerable masses who had, until the late nineteenth century, made most familiar urban consumer goods - clothing, footwear, furniture and the like - by handicraft methods, ranging from those of the proud master artisan to those of the sweated workshop or attic seamstress. If their numbers did not appear to fall dramatically, their share of the labour force did, in spite of the spectacular increase in the output of their products. Thus in Germany the number of people engaged in shoe-making sank only slightly between 1882 and 1907 from c. 400,000 to c. 370,000 - but the consumption of leather doubled between 1890 and 1910. Plainly most of this additional output was produced in the c. 1500 larger plants (whose numbers had tripled since 1882, and who now employed almost six times as many workers as then), rather than in the small workshops employing no workers/or less than ten workers, whose numbers had fallen by 20 per cent and which now employed only 63 per cent of people engaged in shoe-making as against 93 per cent in 1882.6 In rapidly industrializing countries, the pre-industrial manufacturing sector thus also provided a small, but by no means negligible, reserve for the recruitment of the new workers. On the other hand, the number of proletarians in the industrializing economies also grew at so impressive a rate because of the apparently * It is said that they refused to take harvesting jobs in Germany, since travel from Italy to South America was cheaper and easier, while wages were higher.4 114 WORKERS OF THE WORLD limitless appetite for labour in this period of economic expansion, and not least for the sort of pre-industrial labour that was now prepared to pour into their expanding sectors. Insofar as industry still grew by a sort of marriage between manual dexterity and steam technology, or - as in building - had not yet seriously changed its methods, the demand was for old craft skills, or skills adapted from old crafts like smiths and locksmiths to new machine-making industries. This was significant, since trained craft journeymen, an established pre-industrial body of wage-workers, often formed the most active, educated and self-con­ fident element in the developing proletariat of early economies: the leader of the German Social Democratic Party was a wood-turner (August Bebel), of the Spanish Socialist Party a printer (Iglesias).
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