The Age of i789-1848

ERIC HOBSBAWM

VINTAGE BOOKS A Division of Random House, Inc. New York FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, AUGUST 1996

Copyright © 1962 by E. J. Hobsbawm

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in Great Britain in hardcover by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, in 1962.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hobsbawm, E.J. (EricJ.), 1917- The , 1789-1898 / .—1st Vintage Books ed. p. cm. Originally published: London : Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1962. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-679-77253-7 1. Europe—History—1789-1900. 2. . I. Title. D299.H6 1996 940.2'7—dc20 96-7765 CIP

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Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 CONTENTS

PREFACE IX INTRODUCTION I

PART I. DEVELOPMENTS I THE WORLD IN THE I780S 7 2 THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 27 3 THE 53 4 WAR 77 5 PEACE 99 6 log 7 I32

PART //. RESULTS 8 LAND 149 9 TOWARDS AN INDUSTRIAL WORLD L68 IO THE CAREER OPEN TO TALENT 182 II THE LABOURING POOR 200 12 IDEOLOGY: RELIGION 217 13 IDEOLOGY: SECULAR 234 14 THE ARTS 253 15 SCIENCE 277 16 CONCLUSION: TOWARDS 1848 297 MAPS 309 NOTES 321 BIBLIOGRAPHY 332 INDEX 339 CHAPTER 2

THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

Such works, however their operations, causes, and consequences, have infinite merit, and do great credit to the talents of this very ingenious and useful man, who will have the merit, wherever he goes, of setting men to think. . . . Get rid of that dronish, sleepy, and stupid indifference, that lay/ negligence, which enchains men in the exact paths of their forefathers, without enquiry, without thought, and without ambition, and you are sure of doing good. What trains of thought, what a spirit of exertion, what a mass and power of effort have sprung in every path of life, from the works of such men as Brindley, Watt, Priestley, Harrison, Arkwright.... In what path of life can a man be found that will not animate his pursuit from seeing the steam-engine of Watt? Arthur Young, Tours in England and Wales1 From this foul drain the greatest stream of human industry flows out to fertilize the whole world. From this filthy sewer pure gold flows. Here humanity attains its most com­ plete development and its most brutish, here civilization works its miracles and civilized man is turned almost into a savage. A. de Toqueville on Manchester in 1835*

I

LET US begin with the Industrial Revolution, that is to say with Britain. This is at first sight a capricious starting-point, for the reper­ cussions of this revolution did not make themselves felt in an obvious and unmistakable way—at any rate Outside England—until quite late in our period; certainly not before 1830, probably not before 1840 or thereabouts. It is only in the 1830s that literature and the arts began to be overtly haunted by that rise of the capitalist society, that world in which all social bonds crumbled except the implacable gold and paper ones of the cash nexus (the phrase comes from Carlyle). Balzac's Comidie Humaine, the most extraordinary literary monument of its rise, belongs to that decade. It is not until about 1840 that the great stream of official and unofficial literature on the social effects of the Industrial Revolution begins to flow: the major Bluebooks and statistical enquiries in England, Villerme^s Tableau de Vetat physique et moral des ouvriers, Engels's Condition of the Working Class in England, Ducpetiaux's work in Belgium, and scores of troubled or appalled observers from Germany to and the USA. It was not until the 1840s that the proletariat, that child of the Industrial Revolution, and Communism, which was now

27 THE AGE OF REVOLUTION attached to its social movements—the spectre of the Communist Manifesto—walked across the continent. The very name of the Indus­ trial Revolution reflects its relatively tardy impact on Europe. The thing existed in Britain before the word. Not until the 1820s did English and French socialists—themselves an unprecedented group—invent it, probably by analogy with the political revolution of .3 Nevertheless it is as well to consider it first, for two reasons. First, because in fact it "broke out'—to use a question-begging phrase—before the Bastille was stormed; and second because without it we cannot understand the impersonal groundswell of history on which the more obvious men and events of our period were borne; the uneven com­ plexity of its rhythm. What does the phrase 'the Industrial Revolution broke out' mean? It means that some time in the 1780s, and for the first time in , the shackles were taken off the productive power of human societies, which henceforth became capable of the constant, rapid and up to the present limitless multiplication of men, goods and services. This is now technically known to the economists as the 'take-off into self-sustained growth'. No previous society had been able to break through the ceiling which a pre-industrial social structure, defective science and technology, and consequently periodic breakdown, famine and death, imposed on production. The 'take-off' was not, of course, one of those phenomena which, like earthquakes and large meteors, take the non-technical world by surprise. Its pre-history in Europe can be traced back, depending on the taste of the historian and his par­ ticular range of interest, to about AD 1000, if not before, and earlier attempts to leap into the air, clumsy as the experiments of young ducklings, have been flattered with the name of 'industrial revolution' —in the thirteenth century, in the sixteenth, in the last decades of the seventeenth. From the middle of the eighteenth century the process of gathering speed for the take-off is so clearly observable that older historians have tended to date the Industrial Revolution back to 1760. But careful enquiry has tended to lead most experts to pick on the 1780s rather than the 1760s as the decisive decade, for it was then that, so far as we can tell, all the relevant statistical indices took that sudden, sharp, almost vertical turn upwards which marks the 'take-off'. The economy became, as it were, airborne. To call this process the Industrial Revolution is both logical and in line with a well-established tradition, though there was at one time a fashion among conservative historians—perhaps due to a certain shy­ ness in the presence of incendiary concepts—to deny its existence, and substitute instead platitudinous terms like 'accelerated evolution'. 28 THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION If the sudden, qualitative and fundamental transformation, which happened in or about the 1780s, was not a revolution then the word has no commonsense meaning. The Industrial Revolution was not indeed an episode with a beginning and an end. To ask when it was 'complete' is senseless, for its essence was that henceforth revolutionary change became the norm. It is still going on; at most we can ask when the economic transformations had gone far enough to establish a substan­ tially industrialized economy, capable of producing, broadly speaking, anything it wanted within the range of the available techniques, a 'mature industrial economy' to use the technical term. In Britain, and therefore in the world, this period of initial industrialization probably coincides almost exactly with the period with which this book d