The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789–1848
When Fredric Jameson writes:
it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism
You stand facing forward. What political possibilities can we picture for today and for a future?
But here I started to consider the other end. How easy is it to imagine how this modern economy and era came to start?
I suppose I must know that Neanderthal didn’t exchange contracts on shellfish futures. That medieval serfs and lords had obligations not grounded in legal contracts or real estate brokered rents. That those worlds were a long way from the modern economy and legal system of today. But can I picture and describe the transition points? Do I know how this modern world came about, and what it might say for any great sociological change?
That’s the picture Hobsbawm helpfully provides here. In the introduction he describes:
Our problem is thus to explain not the existence of these elements of a new economy and society, but their triumph
Why was it this world that came about? Was that inevitable or contingent? Gradual or sudden? Organised or diffuse? Of local peculiarity or global consequence?
I think the answers we get are fairly clear, a centuries long process of “sapping and mining in previous centuries” culminates in something “decisive”. A sudden conquest of a new kind of society with “profound changes” for nearly everywhere its reach extended. Most of all the book describes how this happened at enormous speed between 1789 and 1848, with decades doing the work of centuries of transformation.
I started the book expecting something valuable, but a dry slog to push myself through. Not true, the opening pages begin a breathtaking style that continues throughout. The opening paragraphs are a litany of the words invented in this period that survive into modern daily speech. They are words I can’t really imagine not having, whole professions, philosophies, lenses onto the world. To imagine a time when Journalism is new is curious. To have “nationality”, “scientist”, “railway”, “industry”, “factory”, “ideology” also crop up in a 50 year period suggests a dizzying lifetime to have lived through.
Hobsbawn places this moment as so total a change, few of us would recognise European societies before the 1780s. We take a tour, not through palaces and halls of power, but the (unenviable) lives of majorities. Their lives, their bodies, their worlds made small by their circumstances.
The setup drives home that a departure of almost absurd scale occurred here. Requiring a coherent description as to why it came about and took such forceful root. The description we get is a dual piston engine of change. An economic revolution in Britain’s Industrial centres, and a Political one from the French revolution.
Perhaps the most plausible parts of the book for me is how unintentional this all seemed. The busy work of many hands, often achieving their own goals adds up to something emergent few of them could have predicted.
To take the industrial revolution, why in Britain? The British were not smarter, more enlightened or educated. Instead the contingency of other histories drove the tinderbox. Consequences of the civil war in restructuring power. The monopolisation of land. Subsistence chipped away by enclosure and peasantry already farming for the market, already beginning some manufacture to put out goods to try and supplement some livelihood. None of these things were designed to upend the world, but they unknowingly laid a groundwork. Meanwhile a growing class of business folk grew rich faster than investments grew to sustain their wealth.
Investors burned in foreign investments turned to a mania for railways to try and find a reliable 3.5% return, and doubtless bragging rights of proximity to such startling innovations. The parallels with today’s Silicon Valley surpluses and AI barons jump off a page.
Then the french revolution brings a political detonation, sweeping away kings and god given rights to rule. Centering nation, “the people” amid a Jacobin revolt that both brought terror to Paris, yet defended France from its invaders. Stabilising the financially ruined nation and setting it up as the engine of European history, as its ideas extended across the world before it.
By the mid point I’m returned to this heady sense of what it must have been like to have lived through this world. I always thought my grandmother who grew up with outdoor toilets and lived to see an IPhone saw a world transformed. However the change here comes across half a modern lifetime, and seems totally shattering of what came before, in a way I’m not sure 60s progress and consumer electronics equal.
With this dual revolution firmly set and justified, the second half of the book moves methodically through major consequences. Land, Industry, careers for talent, labouring poor, religion, the secular, arts and science. If the dual revolution is two rumbling volcanoes, then these are the survivors and inheritors of the new world. Shaped by the caldera they sit within, by 1848 now building the world that emerged from it.
After "The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789–1848" I read: V13: Chronicle of a Trial
Before "The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789–1848" I read: Classic Chinese Stories by Lu Xun