The Culture of the Europeans (Text Only Edition)

Donald Sassoon

• Publisher: HarperPress
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780007400409
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

I

1800–1830

THE PRE-CONDITIONS

1

Sources of Cultural Expansion

Population

WHO WERE THE EUROPEANS WHO, in 1800, were willing and able to buy books, borrow them from lending libraries, subscribe to newspapers and magazines, attend concerts, go to the theatre and play music at home having purchased musical instruments and scores?

What was the potential of these rapidly developing cultural markets? Assessing their growth potential is pure guesswork. It is reasonable, however, to assume that cultural markets will grow more in rich countries than in poor ones, and in large ones than small ones. It is, after all, a ‘universally held truth’ that the rich spend more than the poor. Countries that are both large and wealthy consume more than those with a tiny and destitute population.

Today, the European Union – neither a country nor a linguistic entity – is the largest cultural market in the world. With over 450 million inhabitants, the EU cannot match China or India in population, or the USA and Japan in wealth, but it is richer than the former and bigger than the latter. Almost all Europeans can afford to buy a book, a radio, a record, a newspaper, and practically all of them have a television – by contrast ‘Only’ eighty-two million households in India had their own television in 2003.¹

The Europe of 1800 was quite a different matter. It was poor and relatively underpopulated. There are no reliable data, but a total population of 195 million people is a plausible estimate.

Russia had fewer than forty million people. Next came France with 29.3 million. German-speakers, excluding those in Austria, were 24.5 million. The Austrian Empire comprised 23.3 million inhabitants – a little more than the population of modern Romania. Next came the Italian states with 18.3 million, then Spain with 10.6 million. The recently established United Kingdom of Great Britain had only 8.6 million.²

By 1850 the number of Europeans had increased by almost 50 per cent, to 288 million. By 1900 there were 422 million Europeans. This unprecedented growth had affected all the Continent’s countries, especially the richest, Great Britain, whose population more than trebled in the course of the nineteenth century. Even Ireland, in spite of the high mortality rate following the disastrous famine of 1845, saw an increase of population between 1800 and 1850: from five million to 6.6 million. Its population did drop by 1900 to 4.5 million, but this was due to emigration rather than starvation (though, of course, the emigration was caused largely by hunger and poverty).

Though health and longevity continued to improve, Europe did not grow as fast in 1850–1900. There were fewer epidemics than before and virtually no wars, but birth control led to smaller families and Europeans emigrated in massive numbers. This emigration had considerable consequence for the developments of cultural markets in Europe, North America and the rest of the world.

Today we think of migrant workers as coming from the so-called ‘Third World’. In the nineteenth century, most migrants were Europeans. In the eighteenth century the most massive ‘emigration’ had been an enforced one: the slave trade. Taken in its entirety (between 1500 and the middle of the nineteenth century) this was the largest forcible migration in world history, involving the transportation of between eleven and twelve million Africans as slaves to the Americas – from Canada to Brazil. Although the slave trade was abolished in the first decade of the nineteenth century, considerable internal movement continued within Africa throughout the century, largely because of African wars. In China the opening of the Treaty Ports in 1842 led to millions of Chinese moving to South-East Asia, Australia and California.³ The number of Chinese, Indian and Japanese emigrants was considerable, most of it directed towards the rest of Asia, the Caribbean and, to a lesser extent, to the USA and Latin America. However, their numbers did not match that of European migrants.

Between 1851 and 1915 forty-one million Europeans went to the Americas and Australia. At first (1846–65) most (70 per cent) came from the United Kingdom, followed by Germany with 20 per cent. But in the 1891–1915 period Italians topped the emigration league (26 per cent), just preceding the UK (25 per cent). The Europeans who emigrated in the course of the nineteenth century settled in areas dominated by the English language: the USA (70 per cent), Canada (6 per cent) and Australia (6 per cent). Ten per cent went to Argentina and 6 per cent to Brazil.⁴ Between 1860 and 1913 an annual average of 125,000 British took passage to an extra-European country. In 1887 alone (a peak year), 202,000 went to the USA. They were not escaping persecution or starvation. They were attracted by the prospect of improving their lives.⁵ The spread of colonies offered further space to European settlers. In comparison to the economic migrants of the late twentieth century these settlers had considerable advantages. The possession of advanced weaponry and the backing of strong states meant they could thrust their way in instead of begging to be accepted.

This emigration impacted on cultural markets by establishing or reinforcing a great degree of linguistic homogeneity. The children of the Poles, the Germans, the Italians, the Jews, the Swedes who went to Latin America and the USA became Spanish-, Portuguese- or English-speakers. According to the first census, in 1790, the number of English-speakers in the USA (excluding the Native Americans and the African slaves) amounted to little over four million. By the end of the nineteenth century this had grown to fifty million.

Emigration to the United States and the British colonies and dominions represented – in the long run – a net linguistic loss for all European languages other than English. The relatively high literacy rate of immigrants contributed further to the expansion of cultural markets in the USA. The ‘wretched refuse’ of Europe’s ‘teeming shore’, to quote Emma Lazarus’s famous sonnet engraved on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, were not as ignorant as those who had stayed behind. Three-quarters of those entering the USA in 1900–10 were literate. Among Turks the literacy rate was 56 per cent (the same as in Egypt in 1995), among Italians it was almost 70 per cent for southerners and 85 per cent for northerners, and it was well over 90 per cent among Bohemians (96.8 per cent), Irish (96 per cent), Armenians (92.1 per cent) and Jews (93.3 per cent).⁶

Immigration led to new forms of cultural preservations. The culture of the ‘old country’, much of it oral, continued to evolve and was more carefully preserved by the emigrants in their new adoptive country.⁷ They selected specific features of their home culture, often the popular elements such as the food and the music, and turned them into a badge of identity. In their new country the immigrants often tenderly preserved and cherished the memory of a lost world which in their native land was rapidly disappearing under the weight of modernity. Thus Italian songs composed at the end of the nineteenth century, such as the renowned ‘O Sole Mio’ (1898), were still being played in jukeboxes in New York’s Little Italy in the late 1960s while they were no longer heard in Milan’s bars and cafés – unlike Elvis Presley and his Italian imitators.

Immigrants who found themselves part of one group among many in a multicultural society absorbed ‘alien’ cultural baggage far more rapidly than they would have otherwise, however ghettoised their conditions. Thus emigration created a population particularly receptive to cultural innovations. Cultural entrepreneurs, if they wanted to reach more than a single group, had to produce for a culturally diverse society – hence the remarkable successes of the American cultural industry in the twentieth century.

The urban concentration of immigrants further contributed to the growth of the cultural industry because emigration was a form of international urbanisation by which many left ‘their’ countryside for foreign cities. To put it brutally: migrants abandoned cultural rural backwaters and went to thrusting and thriving cities, the seats of modernity, where the considerable presence of the urban middle classes ensured the constant development of cultural markets. Cultural production tended to be located in the larger centres. Cities and not the countryside, urban life and not rural life, had been the hub of culture in Europe since the Middle Ages. In the great Italian cities, Milan, Genoa, Venice and Florence, but also in London, Paris, Cologne, Bruges, Toulouse and Seville, the pulsating life of commerce and culture stood in sharp contrast to the lethargy of the countryside as early as the twelfth century.⁸ There is more than a grain of truth in Karl Marx’s abusive remark about ‘the idiocy of rural life’.

The thriving theatrical life of nineteenth-century Britain, and its considerable press and publishing industry, were results of its urban dimension. By 1851 Great Britain had become the first major country in which the urban population outstripped the rural. In Germany – land of many cities – this occurred only in 1891. France had to wait until 1931. And in England, people were disproportionately concentrated in just one city, that had become the home of the most developed cultural market of its time. This city, London, was in 1800 the largest in the world, with one million inhabitants. It was home to 10 per cent of the British population, while Paris was half the size and the home of only one in forty of the French.⁹ Other cities trailed far behind. Vienna, the capital of a large multinational empire, had only 250,000 inhabitants, Berlin only 172,000. In Italy, whose urban civilisation was the oldest in Europe, cities were smaller, and only Naples, with 350,000 inhabitants, could compete with the larger European countries. Rome, Milan and Venice had fewer than 200,000 inhabitants.

In an age without rapid transport and a pre-industrial communication system, networking was even more important than it is now. Authors went where other producers (publishers, printers, etc.) operated. In France a writer’s fame was usually made in Paris (hence the profusion of novels about young provincials going to the capital to make a name for themselves). This was true in London too, though novelists of great fame could live where they wanted: Walter Scott in Scotland, Maria Edgeworth in Ireland, and Jane Austen (unknown in her lifetime) in Hampshire. Thomas de Quincey spent twelve years in Edinburgh, the other great literary centre of early-nineteenth-century Britain, where some of the leading literary magazines of the time were published (Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and the Edinburgh Review).

It is an inescapable fact that wealth provides the leisure time required for cultural pursuits, however many peasant communities were able to enjoy some enforced leisure in the long winter months – certainly more than the overworked industrial proletariat of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. What did people do in late-medieval Europe in their ‘spare’ time? Some played cards, talked, gossiped. The church provided, on Sunday, a form of entertainment: some singing, some preaching. In pre-industrial societies, much of what we would call leisure was adequately provided for in the form of non-literary pursuits such as religious festivals and irregular breaks from work.¹⁰ Most of this occurred outside the market. Culture may have been limited, but it was ‘free’.

The nineteenth-century revolution in communication and transport contributed decisively to the growing unification of cultural markets. As books, newspapers, periodicals, musical scores as well as musicians, actors, storytellers and singers could move around more rapidly, local markets turned into national and international ones. There were better and faster ships, a wider network of canals and better roads.

Transatlantic shipping routes linking Great Britain (Liverpool) and the USA developed rapidly. From 1869 the Suez Canal made European commerce with Asia more rapid and safe. In 1830 a letter from London to Bombay had to go by ship round the Cape of Good Hope, and took five to eight months to reach its destination. The reply, allowing for monsoon, would mean that a simple exchange could take two years. Following the opening of the canal the message would proceed by steam train, steam boat and camel via Alexandria to Suez, and reached its destination after thirty-five days.¹¹ One result was that between 1840 and 1880 the cost of sending books dropped by 75 per cent.¹²

These developments had a powerful effect on cultural integration within each nation and throughout the Continent. Everything became increasingly homogeneous and standardised. The metre, established by the French in the 1790s, became widely adopted as a unit of measurement – except in ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I: 1800–1830: The Pre-Conditions
• Part II: 1830–1880: The Triumph of Bourgeois Culture
• Part III: 1880–1920: The Revolution
• Part IV: 1920–1960: The Interventionist State
• Part V: After 1960: The Era of the Mass Media
• Conclusion: The World Wide Web
• Bibliography of Works Cited
• Index
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• Notes
• By the Same Author
• Copyright
• About the Publisher