The Pursuit of Power: Europe, 1815-1914

by Richard J. Evans

In late-industrializing Russia, workers in the new industrial and mining settlements were housed in barracks, as in the Bryansk metallurgical factory 235 miles south-west of Moscow, where conditions were ‘compared without any exaggeration with the quarters of domestic animals’ by an inspector in 1892;

Hamburg drew its supplies from the river Elbe upstream; so impure was the unfiltrated water in the pipes that carried it into people’s houses that small fish could sometimes be found coming out of the taps;

Lindley to persuade the Hamburg Senate to build public bathhouses at key locations across the city. As he remarked in 1851, ‘a dirty population degenerates and so commits all the more offences against the laws of the state’

As he cleared away the narrow alleys and replaced them with broad boulevards, Haussmann the ‘demolition artist’ (as he called himself) was also removing the ideal sites for the construction of barricades by revolutionary crowds and opening up the city to the forces of order.

salons were increasingly outflanked by the new institutions of the emerging bourgeois social world, and these institutions were emphatically male, bound together by a new code of ‘manliness’, subscribing to the values of stability, solidity, probity, industriousness and self-control, all qualities that their members did not consider women to possess.

The professions mostly had to make do with journals, alumni associations, scientific meetings and informal contacts instead. The creation of broad, self-regulating professional bodies seemed politically dangerous to the Russian authorities.

As late as the 1890s the physicist Leo Arons (1860–1919), who lectured at Berlin University, was refused promotion on the orders of the Prussian government in 1892 and dismissed eight years later because he had donated money to the Social Democratic Party.

Competition from large-scale industry and from socialist consumer co-operatives drove members of these associations to the right of the political spectrum and infused them with a dose of paranoid antisemitism,

PB business associations

the anti-Jewish character of the populist German National Commercial Employees’ Association, founded in 1896 on the basis of a local Hamburg group set up three years earlier: it also became virulently anti-feminist as the female secretary began to replace the male clerk, and combined its two obsessions in the charge that feminism was a Jewish plot designed to undermine the German family.

One of the sharpest delineators of the social boundary with the petty bourgeoisie was the fact that the wives and unmarried daughters of teachers, shopkeepers, pettifogging clerks, independent master artisans and small businessmen had to work, either as unpaid assistants or in paid employment outside the home, while those of the established bourgeoisie did not.

A statistical comparison between cadets at Sandhurst, for example, an officer-training establishment, and students enrolled in the Marine Society charity school, shows that the elite students enjoyed a remarkable height advantage of almost 9 inches by 1840.

Life expectancy at birth in the prosperous London suburb of Hampstead around 1900 was fifty, whereas in the deprived working-class London borough of Southwark it was thirty-six

By 1900, 96 per cent of babies born in the middle classes in England survived the first year of life, whereas 33 per cent of those born in the poorest London slum districts did not.

The Scottish engineer James Harrison (1816–93), based for most of his life in Australia, patented the first vapour-compression refrigeration machines in the 1850s, using them mainly to cool beer.

The Adulteration of Food Act, passed in 1860, had no discernible effect, largely because the trade interest stopped local authorities from appointing official food analysts.

Women were generally believed to be more dexterous and better at delicate work than men, but their employment outside the home was also concentrated in areas that extended their conventional domestic roles to the outside world, in the food and drink industries, in clothing manufacture and cleaning, and in domestic service.

In the garrison and county town of York in the north of England, in 1851, nearly 60 per cent of all employed women were servants.

The experience of poverty, oppression, social disadvantage and, in much of Europe for most of the period, lack of basic rights was common to all these workers and helped bind them together into a single social class, much as Marx had predicted.

Yet many workers who in other respects were law-abiding citizens saw nothing wrong in stealing from their employers. In the mines they considered it perfectly legitimate to take coal home for heating since the coal was the product of their own labour; indeed some 3,000 miners went on strike in Upper Silesia in the early 1870s when the mine-owners proposed checks on workers going off shift to make sure they were not taking any coal with them.

crime in the countryside often represented a clash of values and beliefs between the peasantry and the authorities.

Former serfs in many areas refused to accept the consequences of the privatization of woodland that accompanied their emancipation. Between 1815 and 1848 convictions for wood theft in Prussia reached astonishing proportions as a result.

‘Almost daily,’ noted an article in the Russian magazine The Jurist in 1905, ‘the telegraph brings news about cases of vigilante justice against thieves, robbers, hooligans and other criminal elements … One might think that Russia has been brought temporarily to the American prairie and that lynch-law has been granted citizenship by us.’

Interesting that America seen as undesirable/lawless.

in Sicily the blood feud took on a new and dangerous form in the 1860s as the landowners’ private armies, disbanded by the new Italian state, were replaced by rival clans – the Mafia – who first worked to enforce the landowners’ sanctions against their tenants, then drifted into protection rackets and other forms of criminality, and finally began to fight each other over the spoils.

as Britain underwent a vast expansion of its towns and cities, the statistical record showed a steady decline in the rate of recorded acts of theft and violence

trial by jury in open court, a gift to the newly emerging mass popular press towards the end of the century. Sensational murder trials began to make headlines,

some 94,000 Russian citizens left for the USA through the ports of Bremen and Hamburg in 1891 alone, and another 70,000 the following year. Between 75 and 85 per cent of these migrants were Jewish,

Altogether some 60 million people are thought to have left Europe between 1815 and 1914: 34 million for the USA, 4 million for Canada, and maybe a million for Australia and New Zealand.

In Britain he encountered absolute and total ignorance; people knew nothing about the country at all except that it produced a sweet wine called Tokay.

Raffles was a senior East India Company official and founder of Singapore. He believed that though ‘richer than any other country in the extent and variety of [her] possessions’, Britain did not have any forum for displaying the animals that inhabited the large areas of the globe under British rule. In addition Raffles intended London’s Zoological Garden to demonstrate the organizational and scientific principles that he believed underpinned British control over the empire.

‘The only method by which any British wild animal can be preserved from extinction in this age of what is termed progress,’ opined the Liberal politician Sir Alfred Pease (1857–1939) in the first monograph devoted entirely to badgers, ‘is to hunt it.’

???

As fox hunting grew in popularity with the rural landowning classes in England, foxes became scarce, so that by the middle of the century more than a thousand fox cubs were being imported every year

!

Fox hunting – ‘the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable’, as Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) memorably described it

An entry in the carefully recorded ‘game book’ at Sandringham recorded that 725 partridges were shot on 7 November 1907.

Shortly before his assassination in 1914, Franz Ferdinand recorded with satisfaction the killing of his three-thousandth stag.

to create, as it were, a superior, denser, more colourful, more natural version of nature itself. Yet the idea of preserving nature in the wild had not yet taken root.

The eggs of the great auk were said to fetch a price equivalent to a whole year’s wages for a skilled worker.

ski clubs were coming into existence, with their members teaching local residents to use skis and claiming that the acquisition of this skill ‘transformed local life’ and ‘afforded an enormous extension of liberty to the mountain dwellers’.

on average the wooden huts in which peasants lived had to be completely rebuilt every fifteen years since there was no effective way of preserving the timber from weathering and disintegration.

in Minsk alone it was estimated in the middle of the century that more than 600,000 trees had to be felled to build or restore the 8,000 houses and other buildings that fell into disrepair in an average year.

In 1836 the Russian ethnographer Vadim Vasilevich Passek (1808–42) complained that ‘according to the observations of old-timers, the climate of Kharkov province … has become more severe, and it is now exposed to more droughts and frosts. It is likely that this change has come about because of the destruction of forests.’

Europe’s forests declined by 25 per cent between 1700 and 1850 and by another 5 per cent between 1850 and 1920.

By 1858 nearly 3,000 miles of track had been built in Spain, but the foreign companies who ran the system paid no attention to Spanish economic needs, so that the lines simply radiated out from Madrid or Barcelona instead of following traditional trade routes. Thus there was for a long time no cheap and reliable means of getting coal from the mines of Asturias in the north to the foundries of Vizcaya 200 miles to the east, which were obliged to rely on imports of Welsh coal instead.

Branch lines brought a new, cheap means of travel to millions, but just as this process of democratization was getting under way, it was put into reverse by the arrival of the self-propelled motor vehicle.

In France there were 3,000 automobiles in 1900; by the eve of the First World War this number had shot up to over 100,000; double this number of cars were being driven around the roads of Britain by this time.

The motor car enabled them once more to revert from the public nature of railway travel to the privacy of an individual mode of transportation, exhibiting their prosperity and modernity to an astonished world.

Kaiser Wilhelm II had a horn specially made for his car, blaring out the leitmotif of the thunder-god Donner from Richard Wagner’s 1854 music drama Das Rheingold.

Already in 1911 some 11 per cent of Dutch taxpayers owned a bicycle, and most of them were in the lowest tax bracket, signalling the penetration of the bicycle into the working class.

male undergraduates at Cambridge hanged a woman in effigy as a sign of their opposition to the admission of women to the university in 1897,

What the fuck Cambridge

The scale of the British Empire and the dominance of British industry ensured that in 1890 nearly two-thirds of the telegraph lines in the world were owned by British companies, which controlled 97,000 miles of cables.

A law of 1911 managed to fix French time without reference to Greenwich at all, defining it as ‘the mean Paris time slowed nine minutes and twenty-one seconds’.