J. Merriman – Encyclopedia of the Age of Industry and Empire. Europe 1789 to 1914 (5 Volume set)

Автор: J. Merriman
Название книги: Encyclopedia of the Age of Industry and Empire. Europe 1789 to 1914 (5 Volume set)
Формат: PDF
Жанр: История Европы
Страницы: 571+622+608+631+521
Качество: Изначально компьютерное, E-book

Europe 1789–1914: Encyclopedia of the Age of Industry and Empire covers what is
known as ‘‘the long nineteenth century.’’ The French Revolution that began in
1789 brought momentous changes not only in France but in much of Europe as
the Revolution was carried across French borders. By 1790, references were already
being made to the ancien re´gime. Many of the dramatic political struggles of the
nineteenth century were waged in reaction to or in support of changes brought or
accentuated by the Revolution. It represented the first successful challenge to
monarchical absolutism on behalf of popular sovereignty. Republican ideals,
nationalism, the espousal of the rights of the individual, the idea of ‘‘the nation at
arms,’’ the sanctity of economic freedomand of property, and the respective roles of
the state and of religion in society people all influenced the subsequent evolution of
European societies and spread their influence into much of the world. Similarly,
ending the long nineteenth century in 1914 also makes good sense. World War I
swept four empires away, changing the face of Europe. It took the lives of millions
of Europeans and helped unleash many of the demons of the twentieth century,
including fascism and communism, in ‘‘the Europe of Extremes.’’ Like 1789, 1914
is a date that really matters, an undeniable turning point.
The editorial board has been careful to include attention to Russia, of course
(including the expansion of the Russian Empire to include considerable chunks
of Asia), but also the Balkans and the Ottoman Empire, which, after all, included
a good part, however diminishing in size, of that region. We have also insisted on
sufficient attention to economic, social, political, intellectual, and cultural history,
presenting many articles organized along thematic lines, with cross-references
back and forth between such articles and entries on individuals whose lives
influenced in important ways the European experience.
We are proud of the remarkable illustrations that we think are worthy of
attention in their own right, and of helpful maps, particularly useful in following,
for example, the wars of the French Revolution and of the Napoleonic era, the
unification of Germany and Italy, the expansion of European domination and
influence in the age of imperialism, and much more.
Statemaking and nationalism were two of the dynamics of change that most
affected the lives of ordinary people. The French Revolution struck a lasting blow
against the absolute rule of monarchs in Europe, although Russian tsars and
German emperors still retained such authority in 1914. There were two essential,
related aspects to statemaking, whether that of autocracies or that of republics.
States added to their bureaucracies, thus increasing the reach of state power on
their subjects and citizens (taxes, military conscription, and more). And, at the
same time, nationalism emerged as a political force in European states. More and
more people, arguably most people—but not all—began to think of themselves
as members of a national state. By 1789, British and French nationalism already
existed. In the case of France, the experience of the Revolution and Napoleonic
periods certainly accentuated the appeal of nationalism in France, but also
generated nationalist reaction and resistance in Spain and in the German states.
Yet even in France, a country in which only about half of the population spoke
French as their first language in 1789, nationalism would be a long and necessarily
incomplete process.
Nationalism came later in central and eastern Europe. Following the Revolutions
of 1848, a group of Czech nationalists met in Prague and noted that if
the roof of the hall in which they were meeting should somehow collapse, that
would be the end of Czech nationalism. By 1914, this was no longer the case,
and in the Balkans, where Serb, Croatian, and other nationalisms had existed only
among a handful of intellectuals at midcentury, although pushed along by the
Revolutions of 1848 in central Europe, competing nationalisms would help bring
about the catastrophe of the Great War.
In about 1500, there were about that many independent territorial units or
states in Europe, ranging in size from tiny bishoprics in Germany not much
bigger than a sizeable cathedral garden to important monarchies like Spain,
France, and England. In 1871, there were less than forty European states. This
was the result of the consolidation of state power. The political unification of
Germany, completed in January 1871, brought into a single nation a good many
German states that had previously been independent. That of Italy during the
same period had the same effect on the Italian peninsula (although the Austrian
statesman Metternich’s wry comment early in the century that Italy was but ‘‘a
geographical expression’’ remained at least partially true). Increased schooling
and teachers given the responsibility of teaching the dominate language or way of
speaking in a state helped bring about increased allegiance to the nation (often
undercutting, for example, dominant religious identities). Nationalism and statemaking
thus went hand in hand.
The Industrial Revolution began, to be sure, in England, which benefited
from the location of natural resources, such as coal, near waterways, flexible
boundaries between nobles and elite commoners (who shared the quest for land
and social exclusiveness, but also a willingness to invest in commerce and industry),
an agricultural revolution that rapidly increased productivity, permitting a
surplus that could be invested in manufacture, and a precocious banking system.
But large-scale industrial production, whether concentrated increasingly in factories,
or scattered in the countryside, where entire families, and particularly
women, worked in ‘‘cottage industry,’’ spread rapidly during the course of the
century. Despite increased mechanized production and large factories, the Industrial
Revolution was at first an intensification of forms of manufacturing that
already existed. Here, too, continuities, then, were arguably as important as changes. The ‘‘Satanic mills’’ of Manchester and the mines of northern France—
immortalized in E´ mile Zola’s naturalistic Germinal—where men, but also
women and child laborers were chewed up by dauntingly hard work and long
hours, symbolized some aspects of the Industrial Revolution, but so did the
single woman sewing in a Parisian garret, part of the ‘‘putting out of work’’
system in the garment industry. Large-scale industrialization spread west to east.
Northern Italy, northern France, Barcelona and Zurich and their hinterlands, the
German Rhineland, as well as northern England, became centers of manufacturing.
Historians have long underestimated the rapid economic development of
Imperial Russia, located in Moscow and St. Petersburg, as well as in the Ural
Mountains. Industrial work gradually transformed the way people lived, although
important continuities remained, for example in the work done by women. The
‘‘Second Industrial Revolution’’ that began in the 1860s was characterized by the
use of steel, recently invented, the advent of electricity almost two decades later,
and such inventions as the fountain pen and typewriter, serving an expanding
army of clerks and sales people. By 1900, automobiles began to appear here and
there, inching their way along dusty roads, and the first airplanes took off on
short flights, while military planners dreamed of wartime uses for them.
The importance of the middle classes increased in what has been called ‘‘the
Bourgeois Century.’’ Over the long run, the French Revolution had eliminated
much of noble domination, although aristocrats remained extremely powerful in
Russia, Germany, Spain, and, within the Habsburg Empire, Hungary and Croatia.
Economic change and increased industrialization accentuated the influence ofmanufacturers
and bankers. There were more lawyers, doctors, and notaries than ever
before, and lower middle-class professions such as teachers, policemen, and clerks
developed rapidly in western Europe. Bourgeois culture, largely urban and increasingly
urbane, took hold, increasingly privileged education and achievement. Elegant
concert-halls, coffee-houses, and cafe´s attracted middle-class clients.However, to be
sure, the middle class remained extremely small in Russia and the Balkans.
Europeans were divided socially in ways historians have understood in terms of
social classes, the very terminology of which emerged during the nineteenth
century. The plural of the word class is important, in that it suggests the complexity
of social groupings of people who earned a living in similar and different ways.
There was no one working class in nineteenth-century Europe, but many working
classes, each different from each other to a degree, but each even further removed
from people whose living came out of the fact that they owned property or land.
Similarly, there was no one middle class, although these middle classes—
some whose wealth was based in land, others from banking and commerce, and
others still from manufacture—intermarried and formed the domestic and dynastic
alliances celebrated in the great novels of the nineteenth century, from Jane
Austen to Gustave Flaubert to Theodor Fontane. Indeed this literature discloses
one of the key features of nineteenth-century Europe. Far from being a period of
untrammeled individualism, the nineteenth century was the heyday of the family.
A stroll through Paris’s Pe`re Lachaise cemetery will show how this was so:
sculptures of the dearly beloved were paeans of praise to the surviving family
members.
Even within these families, women were almost always trapped in a subordinate
position. The right of married women to hold property in their own right was not at all the rule in the nineteenth century, though major steps toward
equality of property rights were made. Women were less well educated, paid
lower wages, and excluded from political life throughout the century. Feminism
was not born in the nineteenth century; it existed before the French Revolution,
but it became a social movement growing in strength.
The growth of the middle class accompanied the rapid urbanization of much
of Europe. Not only did major cities, indeed elegant capital cities such as
London, Paris, Berlin, and Vienna, grow dramatically in size, but industrial cities
such as Manchester, England, and Saint-E´ tienne, France, which were barely dots
on eighteenth-century maps, increased even more rapidly in size. Middle-sized
market and administrative centers, and small towns, as well, grew markedly.
Suburbs, in Europe more often than not the domain of the poor and transient,
people and activities unwanted in the center, stretched out beyond city walls in
places as varied as Cologne, Milan, and Barcelona. Moreover, the percentage of
the European population living in cities and towns increased rapidly. Mass
immigration from the countryside, not natural population increase (as cities
remained notoriously unhealthy, with more people dying than being born in
cities), accounted for Europe’s urbanization. Yet, to be sure, urbanization characterized
western Europe more than eastern Europe, Russia, and the Balkans.
Immigration from the countryside had another result, as well: cities like Budapest,
Prague, and Talinn, among others, became increasingly peopled by ethnic
Hungarians, Czechs, and Estonians, respectively—in each the proportion of
Germans fell.
In Berlin, Paris, Milan, and Vienna, among other places, cafe´s began to line
wide boulevards, such as those that Baron Georges Haussmann ploughed
through Parisian neighborhoods in the 1850s and 1860s. These boulevards
and their cafe´s, theaters, department stores, and kiosks became identified with
the ‘‘Belle E´ poque’’—the good old years—that period of remarkable cultural
innovation and good times that would be particularly remembered with nostalgia
after the Great War. In western, central, and southern European the middle
classes pushed for political rights commensurate with their greater economic,
social, and cultural status. Liberalism was a philosophy and politics that suited the
middle classes. In Britain, the Reform acts recognized middle-class achievement,
as did the establishment of universal manhood suffrage. By the 1880s, much of
Europe entered the age of mass politics. Political parties, particularly socialist
parties, competed for votes, using newspapers and brightly colored newspapers to
make their appeals. Reform socialists demanded that states enact laws that would
protect and improve the conditions of working people. Revolutionary socialists
worked for a proletarian workers’ revolution that they believed would inevitably
sweep them into power. Anarchists, principally in Spain, Italy, France, and
Russia, also wanted a revolution, but one that would sweep away the state, as
well as capitalism. The last decades of the period were a great turning point in the
evolution of modern politics and political contention.
Cultural life was still dominated by the very rich, but during the nineteenth
century the institutions of popular culture grew into the world mass entertainment
we know today. Photography, the cinema, the Olympic Games, football,
rugby, the mass circulation press, all existed by the end of the century. Different
social groups had their own entertainments, but for the mass of the working
population, there was a world of leisure made possible both by increasing living standards and by the shortening of the work-week to enable people to take half of
Saturday (as well as Sunday) off for their own pleasure.
The long nineteenth century has also been dubbed ‘‘the Rebellious Century.’’
The French Revolution started it all off, to be sure. In Napoleon’s large
wake following his final defeat in 1815, the Great Powers formed the Concert of
Europe, supporting the restoration in monarchy in France, in the hope of stifling
liberal movements wherever they developed. Yet an insurrection began in Greece
in 1821 that led to Greek independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1832, and
this with British and French support. A liberal revolution in Spain failed in the
early 1820s, with the help of French intervention. The Revolution of 1830 sent
the Bourbon monarchy packing and an insurrection against Dutch rule in Belgium
led to Belgian independence. In 1848, revolutions occurred in France, the
German States, Austria, and in some of the Italian states, the ‘‘springtime of the
peoples.’’ Russian troops brutally crushed uprisings in Poland in 1831 and 1861.
Subsequent major insurrections included the Paris Commune of 1871, and the
Russian Revolution of 1905. These revolutions helped accentuate consciousness
of national identity, as well as serving, at least in France, to expand the electoral
franchise so that more people of means could vote in elections. They also
brought unmitigated reaction. The Revolutions of 1848 brought successful
conservative reaction virtually everywhere. In 1871, conservative forces slaughtered
during ‘‘Bloody Week’’ in May about twenty-five thousand ‘‘Communards’’
who had participated in or at least supported the insurrection in Paris,
or simply had been unable to leave the capital. The Russian Revolution of 1905
brought only short-lived concessions from the tsarist autocracy. Demonstrations
and popular protest (for example, against the high price of grain, upon which
most ordinary people depended) characterized much of the century.
Throughout the century, ordinary people acquired more rights, although the
story varied considerably from place to place. Tsar Alexander II freed the serfs in
Russia in 1861, leaving most of them free to remain miserably poor. Reform acts
in 1832, 1867, and 1884 enfranchised at first more and then all men in Britain.
Universal manhood suffrage came to France, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy,
and many other smaller countries. Women, however, remained at a considerable
disadvantage virtually everywhere. Yet women’s literacy increased with that of
men, and greater educational opportunity and new occupations opened up to
them, notably teaching.
The long nineteenth century was also a time when Europe broke the link
between numbers and the living standards of the population. While early commentators
like Thomas Malthus spoke of limits to self-sustained economic
growth, at the very same time those limits were breached. Europe’s teeming
population grew more rapidly than ever before. By the 1870s, the upward thrust
of population growth was evident throughout the continent. But thereafter, a
remarkable change took place, generalizing a trend evident as early as the eighteenth
century in France. That trend was toward family limitation, first through a
later age at marriage and then through a range of contraceptive practices, made
safe and relatively reliable only in the 1960s. For those women who faced
unwanted pregnancies, abortion was an option that was adopted throughout
Europe at a high level; how high, no one knows. Yet overall aggregate population
totals still rose, reflecting the high number of young people already at childbearing
ages. There were far more Europeans in 1914 than ever before The nineteenth century also brought a dramatic increase in European emigration
and thus immigration. A considerable percentage of the Irish population
left their island during the deadly potato famine during the late 1840s for
England, but above all for the United States. Hard times (as well as the Revolutions
of 1848) sent refugees from Germany in great numbers to the United
States, as well as smaller numbers (but proportionally even more relative to their
populations) of Norwegians, Swedes, and other peoples. The last decades of the
century brought a great exodus of Italians, particularly from the north, to the
United States, as well. But hundreds of thousands of Europeans who left home
for good moved to other countries on the Continent, above all, Jews fleeing
hardship and indeed pogroms in the Russian Empire for the relative safety of
Germany, France, and Great Britain. The nineteenth century was indeed a period
of considerable geographic mobility, infusing western states in Europe and the
United States with diverse immigrants bringing with them many languages and
cultural background.
Changes and continuities also characterized the role of organized religion in
Europe during the long nineteenth century. The French Revolution greatly
eroded the public role of the Catholic Church in France, and challenged the
church in countries over which the Revolution had swept. Yet the Catholic
Church and other ‘‘established’’ churches—Protestant and Orthodox—maintained
their influence in countries such as Spain, Italy, Russia, and in the Balkans.
However, the erosion of religious practice (often referred to as ‘‘dechristianization’’)
occurred in some places, notably some regions of France, and probably in
Great Britain, as well. Yet the cult of miracles and the tradition of pilgrimages
remained strong in Catholic countries. But the growing strength of states and the
impact of growing national identities contributed to secularization of states in
western Europe, particularly.
Intellectual currents influenced by scientific speculation and discoveries—
notably Darwinism and Darwin’s theory of evolution—also challenged organized
religion. Traditional religious themes largely disappeared from painting, particularly
as naturalist and realist currents, and then impressionism, postimpressionism,
and cubism, followed Romanticism in the evolution of modern painting.
Such currents joined subjectivist and symbolist themes in literature and poetry
during the Belle E´ poque, centered in Vienna and Paris.
The nineteenth century was for the most part of the period devoid of
major wars within Europe, which is ironic, given how the period had begun, with
the wars of the French revolutionary and Napoleonic e´poques, and how it ended,
with the cataclysm of 1914. A rough balance of power contributed to this. There
were, to be sure, some wars, including the Crimean War of 1853–1856, pitting
Britain, France, and the Ottoman Empire against Russia, the wars that indirectly
led to German unification, including those of Prussia against Denmark (1864),
Austria (1866) and France (1870–1871). But, over all, the nineteenth century was
a period of relative peace.
During the long nineteenth century, the European powers took possession
of most of the globe. The nineteenth century was the century of unbridled
imperial expansion by the Great Powers. Although Britain, France, Spain, and
the Netherlands were colonial powers well before 1789, the long nineteenth
century was a period of globalization, on a scale which contradicts the claims of today’s leaders that they live in an unprecedented time. Russia extended its
empire to the east, an expansion that brought great tensions with Britain, which
held India and Afghanistan, and in the first years of the twentieth century with
Japan, the rising Asian power. Movements of capital, goods, and people across
and out of Europe were on a scale perhaps equal to today’s movements. The
economic hegemon was Britain, not the United States, and its vast network of
power was held together less by military might than by economic leverage.
British imperialists did not try to control the globe by an iron fist; a velvet glove
did just as well, and in many ways, much better.
The 1880s brought the ‘‘new imperialism,’’ as the Great Powers, first Britain
and France, and then Germany and Italy, began to compete aggressively for
colonies, continuing their expansion in Southeast Asia. Africa, in particular,
became the target for imperialism. The powers had by 1900 divided up virtually
the entire continent. The New Imperialism reflected, above all, international
competition (complete with the New Darwinian sense of the struggle and the
chilling phrase ‘‘the survival of the fittest’’), as well as the quest for sources of raw
materials and new markets for manufactured goods. The goal of bringing western
religions to Africa, Asia, and other places played only a very minor role in the
New Imperialism, which basically was about great-power international politics.
In 1500, the European powers held only about 7 percent of the land surface of
the globe; by 1800, they held 35 percent. By 1914, the powers had divided up
84 percent of the lands of the globe. Expanded empires provided more opportunities
for international tension and strife, helping pave the way for World War I
which began in 1914.
The rivalries of the Great Powers, accentuated by economic competition and,
above all, imperial struggles and accompanying ‘‘entangling alliances’’ that divided
the European powers into essentially two armed camps, help explain the
coming of the Great War in 1914. Because of these alliances, Europe was something
of a deck of cards that would collapse with the great crisis of the summer of
that momentous year.
Many of the articles in Europe 1789–1914: Encyclopedia of the Age of Empire
and Industry reflect the impact of almost two decades of work by social historians,
beginning in the mid-1960s. Studies by historians such as E. P. Thompson,
Eric Hobsbawm, George Rude´, and Charles Tilly had tremendous influence on
the subsequent period, focusing the attention of historians on the dynamics of
change on ordinary people during the long nineteenth century, particularly
statemaking, large-scale industrialization, and urbanization. Within this context,
ordinary people made their own history during the French Revolution, the
Revolutions of 1848, the Paris Commune, and the emergence of mass politics
in the last decades of the nineteenth century.
We see Europe 1789–1914: Encyclopedia of the Age of Empire and Industry
and Europe since 1914: Encyclopedia of the Age of War and Reconstruction as two
parts of one set of encyclopedias, covering the experience of Europe from the
French Revolution to the first years of the twenty-first century. World War I was
without question a real turning point of such importance. It left a ravaged
continent with millions of dead and revenge-minded states determined to reverse
what they believed were awful decisions dictated by the Treaty of Versailles and
the subsequent related treaties following the end of the war. The war helped lead
almost inevitably, it might be argued, to what has been called ‘‘the Europe of Extremes,’’ as parties of the extreme right—not the least of whom were the
Fascists in Italy and the Nazis in Germany—battled Communists inspired by the
Russian Revolution of 1917. Yet salient continuities, too, between the two
periods must be recognized. To take but one important example, the anti-
Semitism that characterized all movements of the extreme right in the 1920s
and 1930s did not just emerge out of a war- and economically ravaged Europe,
but had significant antecedents in the prewar period. Thus, we view these two
encyclopedias as two parts of the same trajectory.
Inevitably, there were some major figures whose lives and influence may
clearly be seen in both the pre–World War I period and the post-1914 period.
Sigmund Freud, Vladimir Lenin, and Tsar Nicholas II of Russia have entries in
both, because their importance is clear both before and after the beginning of the
Great War. Leon Trotsky’s impact was overwhelmingly in the second period, and
his entry is to be found in the second set. In general, in the interest of space, we
have chosen to place a number of cultural figures, as well as important personages
who have made significant contributions in other domains to the European
experiences, in one set or another. Thus the operatic composer Giacomo Puccini
is found in Europe 1789–1914, because his greatest works were written before
1914. Winston Churchill’s greatest contributions to Great Britain without question
were in the post–World War I period, and thus the article on him is found in
Europe since 1914.
Above all, our aim has been to bring the best of recent scholarship to a wide
population of people interested in finding out more about how Europe became
what it is today in the early twenty-first century. This task has been a collective
one, involving historians on four continents. This introduction is a guideline, and
many scholars whose work we present here have their own views almost certainly at
variance with those of the editors. That is right and proper and shows well how
lively and creative is the field of European history today.