Europe 1783-1914

William Simpson, Martin Jones

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317437222
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Weltgeschichte

The third edition of Europe 1783-1914 provides a comprehensive overview of Europe from the outbreak of the French Revolution to the origins of the First World War. William Simpson and Martin Jones combine accounts of the most important countries, notably France, Germany and Russia, with the wider political, economic, social and cultural developments affecting Europe as a whole. These include:

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• A survey of Europe c.1780: the social and economic background, forms of government, and the Enlightenment
• The impact of the French Revolution and Napoleon on Europe
• The spread of nationalism: the 1848 Revolutions and the unification of Italy and Germany
• Changes in the world of ideas: religious belief, romanticism, and cultural achievements in art, literature and music
• The age of imperialism: the expansion of Europe, Marxism and left-wing movements, international relations, 1870-1914
• The reciprocal relationship between Europe and the United States
• Europe in 1914: shifts in the intellectual climate through the works of Darwin and Freud, scientific discoveries and the impact of new technologies, and changes in society and the position of women.

Each chapter features a list of key dates, concise background information and suggestions for further reading, as well as a concluding 'Topics for Debate' section which contains relevant contemporary sources and outlines the contrasting views of recent historians on the key issues. The suggestions for further reading have been updated in every chapter by the addition of relevant and significant new books, published up to and including 2014. Extensively illustrated throughout with maps, contemporary cartoons and portraits, Europe 1783–1914 is a clear, detailed and highly accessible analysis of this turbulent and formative period of European history.

Chapter One
The Condition of Europe c. 1789

Contents

Europe’s extent and the concept of Europe

The social and economic background

Industry and trade

The states of Europe

The Enlightenment

EUROPE’S EXTENT AND THE CONCEPT OF EUROPE

Europe is both a place and an idea. Most of us, challenged to do so, could produce a reasonably precise description of its boundaries: to the west the Atlantic coastline, stretching from Cape Finis-terre (Finis terrae - the end of the land) to Ireland and the Outer Hebrides, but also including island groups such as the Faroes and the Azores; to the north the coasts of Norway, Finland and Russia; to the south the Mediterranean, and to the east, less assuredly perhaps, the Ural mountains.

A much more difficult question to answer is when and why the concept of Europe came into common use. The Ancient Greeks were the first to use Europe as a geographical term, denoting first the Greek mainland, and by 500 bc the northerly landmass that lay beyond it in contrast to Asia to the east and Libya to the south. The first recorded use of European in Latin (Europeenses) has been traced to ad 732, when it was used with reference to Charles Martel’s victory over the followers Muhammad at the battle of Tours. The word European occurs for the first time in English in the seventeenth century, the Oxford English Dictionary citing a play, written in 1632, The City Madam, by Philip Massinger: ‘You are learned Europeans and we worse than ignorant Americans.’

Thus the origins of the term Europe are shrouded in mystery and it has a long and complex ancestry. More important from our point of view is to establish why those who occupied what we now think of as Europe came to feel that they belonged to a distinct continent and what it was that they had in common. One obvious answer to the first question is that Europeans came to be distinguished from the inhabitants of other continents by recognition of differences between them. In the case of Charles Martel’s contemporaries, it is the religious difference between Christian and Muslim, and Europe’s southern boundary became that dividing line. In the case of Philip Massinger’s, it is the technological superiority which Europeans enjoyed over the Native Americans whom they colonised - and in many cases slaughtered.

But there was much more to being a European than Christianity or technical knowledge. Those who lived in Europe shared certain fundamental historical experiences. At one time or another most of western Europe at least had been part of the Roman empire, and as a consequence of that experience Europeans were also heirs to the world of Greek and Latin culture. Latin became the language of educated discourse in Europe until at least the end of the seventeenth century. Two of the greatest minds of that century, Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) and Isaac Newton (1642–1727), wrote their main works in Latin. Until the end of the eighteenth century the study of the classical world of Greece and Rome was the staple diet of university education from Cracow to Aberdeen and from Bologna to Salamanca.

With the fall of the western Roman empire in the fifth century ad came the so-called Dark Ages, and the breakdown of the existing political structures in many areas. A common response to the threat of anarchy was the emergence of local leaders who would guarantee protection, land and office to their followers in return for services, whether in the form of military service or forced labour, often commuted into payments in cash or in kind. Historians have coined the term ‘feudalism’ to describe societies organised in this way, the ‘feodum’ or ‘fief’ representing the office or property conveyed by the lord to his vassal. Feudalism never extended to the whole of Europe (Norway remained an exception) and it rarely existed in its purest form. But it was sufficiently widespread to generate a powerful landowning class based on the principle of inheritance and even where this class lost its exclusiveness, as in England, its distinctive privileges remained. One of the most successful plays in the late eighteenth century, The Marriage of Figaro, by Beaumarchais, concerned the thwarting of Count Almaviva in his attempt to exercise his droit de seigneur by sleeping with the bride of his valet Figaro on their wedding night. Though the play was written in 1778 public performance was censored in France until 1784. Mozart’s equally successful opera, based on the play, had to be toned down before Emperor Joseph II would permit its performance in Vienna in 1786.

A third shared experience was the spread, and imposition, of Christianity throughout Europe. This was a long process, eventually achieved with the conversion of Hungary in the fourteenth century and the conquest of the Moors in Spain in the fifteenth. The term Christendom came into use in the eleventh century to denote the territory subject to the Catholic Church; the extent to which Christianity was conceived of as a European religion, at any rate by Protestants, is well illustrated by this 1625 comment:

Europe is taught the way to scale heaven, not by mathematical principles, but by divine verity. Jesus Christ is their way, their truth, their life; who hath long been given a bill of divorce to ungrateful Asia, where He was born, and Africa, the place of his flight and refuge, and is become almost wholly and only European. For little do we find of this name in Asia, less in Africa, and nothing at all in America, but later European gleanings.

(cited by J.M. Roberts, The Triumph of the West, London, BBC, 1985, p. 200)

Before equating Christendom with Europe, however, two important qualifications have to be made. Europe, until the twentieth century, did not include much of the Balkan peninsula, which remained part of the Ottoman empire. Eastern Christianity began to diverge from western as early as the ninth century. In 1054 each branch of the Church issued anathemas against the other, and divisions hardened with the Fourth Crusade, when Constantinople was sacked by Latin Crusaders. When Constantinople fell to the Turks in 1453 the eastern Church came under Turkish rule; while Christianity was still permitted, Christians in the Balkan peninsula continued to be subject to sporadic bouts of persecution and their welfare continued to be a matter of concern to neighbouring Christian states. Western Christendom was itself irretrievably split with the coming of Protestantism in the sixteenth century and the religious wars which ensued.

A fourth and arguably the most significant shared experience was the exploration and settlement of other continents by Europeans. In 1492 Columbus crossed the Atlantic ocean. In 1499 Vasco da Gama reached India by sailing round the Cape of Good Hope. In 1519 Magellan set out on the first circumnavigation of the globe, completed by one of his captains, Sebastian del Cano, in 1522. From these initial ventures sprang the empires of Portugal, Spain, Holland, Britain and France which by 1750 extended to North and South America, India, Africa and the Far East. Though the empires of Portugal and Spain had already passed their zenith by this date European domination of the world was already assured.

There has been much active debate on how this was achieved. One recent explanation hinges on the internal wars in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: ‘While the stable empires of 17 th century Asia had nurtured pockets of ‘industrial revolution’, the ferocious wars fought by the comparatively small, competitive powers of 17th century Europe had brought about a revolution in military technology and in the public financing of warfare, which eventually enabled European powers to impose their will by force on the rest of the world’ (Colin Kidd, London Review of Books, vol.26, 2 September 2004, p. 14; see C.A. Bayly, Birth of the Modern World 1780—1914: Global Connections and Comparisons, Oxford, Blackwell, 2004). Whatever the explanation, Europe’s emergence as the engine of world commerce, the birthplace of large-scale industry and the fount of political authority over large parts of the world are essential features of its history in the nineteenth century.

Thus by the end of the eighteenth century the concept of Europe denoted a distinct geographical area whose inhabitants inherited from the past a fund of common experiences, and which enabled them to feel a common identity when they faced Muslims and races of other colours. But when they faced each other they were only too conscious of what divided them. Local and national sentiment was to be for many years to come a much more powerful force than any sense of belonging to Europe. The history of Europe thus has to be written not only in terms of developments which affected the continent as a whole, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the industrial revolution, imperialism, for instance, but also in terms of individual states and nations - by no means identical - and the conflicts to which the divisions between them gave rise. Another characteristic feature of European history was the urge by one state or another to dominate the continent. France dominates the first part of this book, Germany the second.

THE SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC BACKGROUND

Population

Accurate population statistics date from the nineteenth century. Sweden was the first country to have a national census, in 1749, followed by Britain and France in 1801 and other countries thereafter. Thus all population figures for the eighteenth century are at best based on careful guesswork, and are subject to considerable margins of error. In the case of France, for instance, estimates for the population in 1789 range between 25 million and 28 million. There is little dispute however over the main trends, which show that Europe’s population was rising constantly from about 1750 onwards, if not at a uniform rate (Table 1.1).

For the first time in its history, Europe’s population was on a rising trend that was not seriously interrupted by events such as the Black Death. The Irish potato famine from 1845 to 1848 and the Russian famine of 1921 were exceptional events. Any growth in population has to be explained by a change in the relationship between birth and death rates. If these match each other the population will remain stable. An increase in population will occur whenever there is a rise in the birth rate or a fall in the death rate, or where both occur simultaneously. All these conditions seem to have been present in eighteenth century Europe. In England the age of marriage fell, resulting in a rise in the birth rate. In France it appears that in some parts of the country at least, there was a fall in the death rate as famine became less common. While demographers continue to debate the precise explanation for the population rise, it was sufficiently evident to contemporary observers to cause alarm. In 1798 an English clergyman, Thomas Malthus, wrote his celebrated Essay on Population in which he argued that population unless unchecked has a tendency to double itself every twenty-five years (a geometrical progression, 1, 2, 4, 8, 16 …). But the means of subsistence could not be increased more than arithmetically (1, 2, 3, 4 …). Malthus posed in stark form the problem encountered by any country with a rising population. Unless resources could be increased to match the extra mouths to be fed the natural checks of famine, disease and war would inevitably operate to bring population and resources back into balance. This was the demographic background confronting Europe at the end of the eighteenth century, and it had inescapable consequences not only for living standards, but also for the supply of labour. Much would hinge on whether Europeans could apply their inventiveness to ensure that the rise in employment kept pace with the rise in population.

Table 1.1 Total population of Europe by country, 1750–1850 (in millions)

Country	1750	1800	1850
Britain (including Ireland)	10.6	16.1	27.4
Austria and Bohemia	5.7	7.9	12.9
Russia	35.0	49.0	79.0
Belgium	2.2	2.9	4.4
Germany	17.0	24.5	34.4
Scandinavia	3.6	5.0	7.9
Switzerland	1.3	1.7	2.4
Spain	8.9	10.5	15.0
France	21.7	27.0	35.8
Italy	15.3	17.8	24.0

Agriculture

‘Agriculture was the principal source of employment and wealth, the most significant sector of the economy, the basis of the taxation, government, ecclesiastic and seigneurial, that funded most other activities’ (J. Black, Eighteenth Century Europe, London, Macmillan, 1990, p. 19). In some parts of France, it has been calculated, 74 per cent of the population were engaged in agriculture. In rural parts of Poland or Russia the ratio would have been even higher. In England it was rather lower.

Patterns of landownership and production varied so widely then, as they do today, that they defy meaningful generalisation. Certain tendencies can be identified, however. In much of western Europe, Britain and the Low Countries in particular, a landlord-tenant relationship was the characteristic feature of ownership. Landless agricultural labourers, who in England formed an increasing element in the agricultural population, were still free in the sense that they were not tied to a single owner. In much of eastern Europe and in Russia particularly, serfdom not only persisted but also was becoming more extensive.

Historians are now inclined to doubt whether anything as dramatic as a revolution occurred in agriculture, even in England in the eighteenth century. There were certainly improvements in stock breeding, new crop rotations were introduced to improve fertility and there was a switch to high yield crops such as maize and potatoes in areas such as western Ireland, Bavaria and Alsace. The landowning class founded agricultural societies and had access to a wide range of books and pamphlets on agriculture: 1,214 such works were published in France alone in the eighteenth century. But the implementation of the practices and improvements recommended was very haphazard, and where peasant proprietorship persisted almost non-existent. The general picture is one of gradual increase in food production as more land was brought into cultivation and new techniques were applied which still failed to meet the needs of a rising population. Agricultural prices tended to rise throughout the century while wages lagged behind. In France a rise of 65 per cent in food prices between 1760 and 1789 was offset by a rise of only 22 per cent in wages (O. H. Hufton, Europe: Privilege and Protest, London, Fontana, 1980, p. 34). In many parts of Europe, it has been calculated, as much as 90 per cent of the population did not have enough to live on.

INDUSTRY AND TRADE

As with the agricultural revolution, historians have cast an increasingly sceptical eye at the pace and scale of industrial development in the eighteenth century. Throughout Europe industry was mainly small scale and rural in 1800, as it had been in 1700. Even in Britain, while there was spectacular growth in the iron, cotton and coal-mining industries from the 1780s onwards, agriculture retained its pre-eminence as the main source of employment well into the nineteenth century. In Europe as a whole there were some isolated pockets of industrial development. The Russian iron industry grew rapidly and its arsenal at Tula produced 14,000 muskets a year between 1737 and 1778, even if they could fire only five or six times without breaking. In Flanders, half the rural population were engaged in weaving linen and spinning flax. The coal-mines near Liège used steam engines for pumping purposes as early as 1725. The use of coke rather than charcoal for smelting iron was introduced in Prussia in 1776. In Bohemia Count Joseph Kinsky set up mirror factories in 1761. The first mechanised textile factory at Düsseldorf was opened in 1783. But these were much less typical than the handlooms to be found in weavers’ cottages all over Europe. The factory system had still to come.

The extent to which industrial production remained mainly rural is reflected in the low level of urbanisation. In no European country did town-dwellers exceed 20 per cent of the population except the Austrian Netherlands, where in Flanders and Brabant they reached 24 per cent, and in Sicily where towns like Palermo attracted huge numbers of displaced peasants.

Industry and commerce were mutually dependent. Without markets and the financial institutions needed to sustain them, industry could not prosper. Equally, without an adequate system of communications, buyers and sellers could not be brought together. The eighteenth century saw limited improvements in all these areas. It has been calculated that a carriage pulled by four horses could transport 4,000 lb. of goods 20 miles in a day over adequate roads. A cart pulled by a single horse could manage 1,120 lb., a pack horse with panniers 280 lb. Until the coming of railways these limitations remained in force, except in those areas where rivers or canals could be used. Roads improved sporadically, most signific...