The Global Bourgeoisie

The Rise of the Middle Classes in the Age of Empire

Christof Dejung, David Motadel, Jürgen Osterhammel

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780691177342, 9780691195834
• eBook ISBN: 9780691189918
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Economic History
• Index: History

The first global history of the middle class

While the nineteenth century has been described as the golden age of the European bourgeoisie, the emergence of the middle class and bourgeois culture was by no means exclusive to Europe. The Global Bourgeoisie explores the rise of the middle classes around the world during the age of empire. Bringing together eminent scholars, this landmark essay collection compares middle-class formation in various regions, highlighting differences and similarities, and assesses the extent to which bourgeois growth was tied to the increasing exchange of ideas and goods. The contributors indicate that the middle class was from its very beginning, even in Europe, the result of international connections and entanglements.

Essays are grouped into six thematic sections: the political history of middle-class formation, the impact of imperial rule on the colonial middle class, the role of capitalism, the influence of religion, the obstacles to the middle class beyond the Western and colonial world, and, lastly, reflections on the creation of bourgeois cultures and global social history. Placing the establishment of middle-class society into historical context, this book shows how the triumph or destabilization of bourgeois values can shape the liberal world order.

The Global Bourgeoisie irrevocably changes the understanding of how an important social class came to be.

1

Worlds of the Bourgeoisie

Christof Dejung, David Motadel & Jürgen Osterhammel

IN 1896, the Togolese businessman John Calvert Nayo Bruce traveled to Berlin for the Great Industrial Exposition. He was the manager of a company of nearly thirty men and women from Togo who were to stage an ethnographic exhibit, offering the German audience a supposedly authentic insight into the daily life of their home village. Bruce had specifically designed this Togodorf for the exposition. The son of a local chief, Bruce had been educated at a missionary school and worked many years as an interpreter for the German protectorate administration of Togoland. After the success of the show in Berlin, he toured with different companies through Europe and organized human zoos not only in Germany but also in France, Russia, Switzerland, and Italy, until his death, in 1916. He was, however, not merely an impresario interested in economic profit alone; he also expressed great interest in Western education. In an interview with the Kölnische Zeitung during the Berlin Exposition, he spoke about his daughter, who was attending a German school in order to “learn everything white girls learn and to become as civilized as them.” Even though he praised German rule in Togoland, which is not surprising given that the Togodorf had been established with the explicit goal of propagating German colonialism, he criticized the atrocities committed against Africans by white hunters and travelers. And he took a swipe at the educational policy of the Germans in West Africa: “You see, our people would like to learn more, but the Germans don’t want that. They think reading and writing is enough for the Negroes but it is not enough.” Emphasizing the significance of higher education in Togoland, he added: “Many really want to study: law or medicine. We want to have black lawyers and medical doctors.”¹

By European standards Bruce would, no doubt, be ranked among the middle classes. His emphasis on learning, his striving for economic success as a businessman, and his urge to provide his people with education certainly qualified him as a bourgeois and, thus, a member of the social group that ranked between the established aristocratic elite on the one hand and the peasants and plebeian majority on the other, a group that had emerged as a result of increasing social and economic change after the end of the eighteenth century.

The long nineteenth century has often been described as the golden age of the bourgeoisie in Europe, but the emergence of middle classes and of bourgeois cultural milieus was by no means exclusive to European societies. One of the most striking features of the nineteenth century was the rise of similar social groups around the world. Merchants in Shanghai, lawyers in Delhi, bankers in New York, doctors in Cairo, professors in Vienna, and schoolteachers on the Gold Coast had much in common. A group between the old entrenched aristocratic classes and the peasants and workers, their social milieus were marked by its own lifestyles, tastes, and values. The members of this bourgeois middle class emphasized education and individual achievement. They were the product of the dramatic transformation of social structures, the progressive division of labor, and the increasing differentiation of societies. And they were often connected across countries and continents, standing at the very center of globalization. In fact, members of the middle classes acted as its most effective proponents, and an understanding of their history is vital for coming to grips with the transformation of the world in the modern age.

To be sure, this development was uneven. In the early nineteenth century, bourgeois social formations were most visible in Western Europe and its (current and former) settler colonies, but by the early twentieth century, bourgeois middle classes had emerged in various regions across the world. The global bourgeoisie was far from being a homogeneous social group. Its members competed with each other, both within one society and between countries. Non-European middle classes in the colonies, for example, were always demarcated (and to some extent excluded) from the white middle classes by the asymmetries of colonial rule and the mechanisms of “racial” exclusion. The global history of the rise of the bourgeois middle classes is a story not only of global convergence and growing uniformity but also of divergences and mounting unevenness. Yet despite all differences and the frequent political and economic disparities among them, these middle classes were similar enough to allow us to study them across geographical boundaries.²

The history of the middle class and bourgeois culture has captured the interest of social historians for decades. Scholars working on European and American history, however, have long considered the middle class largely as a Western phenomenon.³ Similar social groups in other parts of the world have been considered as merely a pseudo-bourgeoisie, if they have been considered at all. Historians have often referred to them using specific terms; one prominent example is the longtime interest of Africanists in the history of the African “elites”—among them Nayo Bruce—without explicitly comparing these “elites” to the middle classes of the Western world.⁴ Such a restricted approach seems no longer expedient. The last decade has seen the publication of a great number of well-researched studies on the emergence of social groups in non-Western societies that can be described as bourgeois middle classes.⁵ Still, most of these studies focus on particular countries and do not look at their rise as a global phenomenon by comparing middle classes across world or by tracing their global entanglements.

Drawing on recent research and combining the expertise of historians of the Western and non-Western worlds, this book provides the first truly global survey of the history of the bourgeoisie. It examines both the similarities and differences between these groups in their various environments across the globe. Moreover, it demonstrates that the making of the middle classes across the world can be explained only by considering the increasing worldwide circulation of people, ideas, and goods. It was from its start closely connected to global interactions and interconnections in the age of empire. In fact, the middle classes, whether in European metropoles or in colonial peripheries, were deeply affected by global entanglements. Many social structures that emerged in the long nineteenth century can be traced back to activities of such cosmopolitan bourgeoisies and in turn can be considered a reason for the emergence of these groups.⁶ Still, these structures were shaped by, and often the result of, highly uneven power relations, such as imperialism and the emergence of a global economy that was increasingly dominated by Western Europe during the long nineteenth century. The rise of middle classes in Asian and African colonies was undoubtedly fueled by European imperialism, yet their emergence was shaped not only by Western influences but also by local conditions. In some cases, colonial middle classes emerged despite the existence of global Western hegemony.

Global Social History

Since the beginnings of mankind, societies have been marked by inequality and hierarchy. In almost every human community, some groups have possessed more resources and enjoyed more privileges than others. To be sure, social stratification could vary significantly between different countries. In some societies it was more static and less permeable; in others it was more fluid and permitted more social mobility. But despite all the differences, the modern period saw transformations of class hierarchies across the globe that were remarkably similar.

Social historians tend to study societies within national boundaries, assuming the existence of distinct national societies. This framework may be justified in many cases, given that nation-states did indeed frequently emerge from distinct social communities. Moreover, following the foundation of nation-states, societies were shaped by each state’s legal and political institutions and its efforts at nation building, which involved the invention of traditions and various attempts to introduce a feeling of national consciousness and solidarity among citizens.⁷ But the nation-state is not always the best instrument to analyze societies historically. Often, it is rather pointless to make general statements about, say, Chinese, German, or American society. Even if the boundaries of national societies can be identified with some accuracy, taking into account border zones and areas of overlap and plural identities, the internal cohesion of society considered more or less congruent with a territory of national jurisdiction should not be overstated. Around 1800, it was hardly possible to speak of a “German” society, given the heterogeneity of all its individual regions. Similarly, the Qing Empire comprised more than half a dozen different regional societies. The United States had (and still has) various different societies across its regions, say between New England and the Southern slave states.

Consequently, scholars have moved beyond the nation as the main unit of analysis and have begun to examine historical processes both above and below the national level. On the one hand, they have focused on local historical processes, with local history becoming one of the most widely practiced forms of social history. On the other hand, they have examined transnational or even global historical processes, an endeavor that brings difficulties of its own, given all the local, national, regional, and continental particularities. While urban, local, national, and at times even regional and continental histories can examine single societies, global social history is confronted with the challenge that there is no observable world society; it thus lacks a clearly defined referent and space for the examination of the interplay of social processes. In practice, however, most global historians focus on a clearly defined locality—a city, a region, a nation-state—and examine its relation to other parts of the world and the consequences such entanglements had for its historical development. In fact, most historical accounts on the rise of the middle classes across the world focus on particular cities and towns such as Aleppo, Delhi, Lucknow, or Shanghai or countries such as Egypt, Japan, or Iran and explore how the middle classes emerged there in the context of transnational and imperial connections.

A global social history also has to take into account the vast variety of social hierarchies across the world. But despite these enormous variations of social differentiation in diverse areas, the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw remarkably analogous developments in the transformation of societies around the world. Moreover, these developments were increasingly connected. Global labor history, for instance, has examined the interconnection of labor regimes in different parts of the world, demonstrating that forced and voluntary migration, such as the transatlantic slave trade, the Asian coolie trade, and after the turn of the nineteenth century, the emigration of millions of Europeans to the Americas and to Australia, often influenced each other and led to the emergence of new worker communities.⁸ The global emergence of middle classes is a similar example of such transformative connectivity in the long nineteenth century. It was linked to global integration and has to be interpreted in the context of worldwide processes such as imperialism, the establishment of ever denser systems of transport and communication, and the breakthrough of global capitalism. In fact, many of the mercantile, scientific and political networks that came into being during the long nineteenth century were established by members of the middle classes such as businessmen, scholars, and intellectuals. It was the middle classes that staffed imperial bureaucracies and the offices of multinational companies, and it was they that ensured the effective operation of such global institutions.

Focusing on the middle classes, this book aims to set out a new trajectory for global historical research by helping define the field of global social history. It aims to reemphasize the importance of class and social stratification in global history and thus close a gap in current scholarship that has often been lamented....

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on the Contributors
• 1. Worlds of the Bourgeoisie: Christof Dejung, David Motadel, Jürgen Osterhammel
• Part I. State and Class
• Part II. Colonialism and Class
• Part III. Capitalism and Class
• Part IV. Religion and the Betterment of the World
• Part V. Failures and Fringes
• Part VI. Global Social History
• Index