The Transformation of the World (12 page)

The Closing of Distance

Photographic expeditions to archaeological sites (primarily Egypt) and the habitats of exotic peoples became more numerous.
¹³⁷
In Britain, whose overseas possessions were far larger than those of other Western countries, the public only now realized who and what had been gathered beneath the imperial roof. In comparison with the illustrated travel books that for centuries had provided the only visual impressions, photography brought a great increase in knowledge and atmospheric detail about distant lands. As far as India was concerned, nothing before had come close to the eighteen-volume gem
The Peoples of India
(1868–75), which made 460 new photographs available.
¹³⁸
Yet for many years the camera remained a tool in the hands of Europeans and Americans alone, who quickly discovered its usefulness in imperial war.
¹³⁹
Subversive gazes directed back at the metropolis would only come later. But many photographers trained in remote places, enabling them later to focus more clearly on things closer to home. John Thomson, the author of the four-volume
Illustrations of China and Its People
(1873), came back and pointed his camera next at the poor of London—those whom Henry Mayhew had described in journalistic prose a few years earlier.

The camera had less of an exotic effect than the pen or paintbrush. As early as 1842, Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey took some wonderful daguerreotypes of both medieval European and Islamic architecture and established a strong aesthetic affinity between them.
¹⁴⁰
The place of “the alien” in the European imagination of the second half of the nineteenth century is almost
inconceivable without photographic representation. The idea of a “photographic museum of the human races” was obsessively pursued, with highly diverse results. On the one hand, images of poverty—for example, Chinese opium dens or the devastated sites of the Indian revolt of 1857–58—served finally to strip the “fairy-tale” Orient of its enchantment. On the other hand, the alien became more palpable than in conventional depictions of the noble or not-so-noble savage, and colonialists could more easily illustrate scenes of their rule for the benefit of the public in the home country.

Photography was adopted more readily in parts of Latin America—Peru, for example—than in Europe and North America. The 1840s were a boom age for Peru, and the new medium fit perfectly into the boisterous atmosphere.
¹⁴¹
The first non-Western country in which photography gained a foothold was the Ottoman Empire. Studios began to spring up in its large cities in the 1850s, only a little later than in western and central Europe. At first they were run by Europeans and members of non-Muslim minorities for customers who were also mostly European. In the last two decades before 1900, however, the family portrait and the workplace picture became a basic part of the culture of the Muslim upper and middle classes. The state soon saw that photography could be advantageous, especially for military purposes. The autocratic Sultan Abdülhamid II used it to check up on officials in the provinces—for example, on whether building projects were going ahead as planned—and to project an image of his country in Europe. He is said to have presented one of his daughters with snapshots of suitable marriage candidates.
¹⁴²

By the end of the century, photography had become part of ordinary life in many societies. All its branches that are familiar to us today have their roots in the nineteenth century, including advertising, propaganda, and picture postcards. Photography was a widely practiced trade; even small towns had their own studios and laboratories. The Kodak camera of 1888, which required no training or technical knowledge, democratized the medium and lowered its artistic pretensions. Easier and cheaper devices, as well as the invention of roll film, made the production of images for private use technically accessible to the lay public. Scarcely any middle-class home was without professionally made pictures of special occasions on display, or without an album containing photos taken by family members.

Of the observation systems that the nineteenth century perfected or devised, photography was the one that brought the greatest advance in objectification. This remains true even if we bear in mind the malleability and “subjectivity,” and hence the artistic adaptability, of the medium. Of course large numbers of photos were “set up,” and many show the inhibitions and prejudices of the age; photographic images have proved to be rewarding objects of such deconstruction.
¹⁴³
Nevertheless, the technology afforded a novel kind of visual access to the world, created new concepts of truth and authenticity, and placed tools of image creation in the hands of those without artistic talent or training.

Moving Images

Film was born in the year 1895.
¹⁴⁴
On March 22 in Paris, the “cinématographe” of the manufacturer's sons Louis and Auguste Lumière and their engineer Jules Carpentier showed moving images for the first time. The Lumières could immediately offer everything for sale: camera, projection apparatus, and film. Unlike in photography, the new technology was ready for industrial production from the outset; public performances for an entrance fee were already taking place in December. The Lumière family also trained a squad of operators in the new machines and sent them out into the wider world. By 1896–97, Lumière films were being shown all over Europe, from Madrid to Kazan and from Belgrade to Uppsala, as well as in a number of cities on the American East Coast. The coronation of Tsar Nicholas II on May 26, 1896, was an especially popular subject. The triumphal progress of the cinema continued: Lumière operators appeared in 1896 in Istanbul, Damascus, Jerusalem, Cairo, Bombay, Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, and Sydney; and by 1899 it was possible to see motion pictures in Shanghai, Beijing, Tokyo, and Yokohama.
¹⁴⁵
Nearly everywhere, motion pictures also started to be made at the same time.

From 1896, filmed documentaries were being made of royal appearances, military maneuvers, and everyday life on every continent. Spanish bullfights, Niagara Falls, Japanese dancers, and all manner of street scenes were among the earliest themes. Film started out as a medium of reportage, swept up by globalization. The first known demonstrator of the new French technology in a Shanghai teahouse was James Ricalton from Maplewood, New Jersey, who offered his Chinese audience moving pictures of the Russian tsar's visit to Paris and an Egyptian belly dancer's performance at the world's fair in Chicago.
¹⁴⁶
A great success in many countries was the film that Auguste Lumière shot of workers at his own factory.
¹⁴⁷
The new medium soon revealed its dual nature as staged production and as documentary. Since cameramen were not present at the main international event of summer 1900—the Boxer Rebellion in northern China—a number of horrific scenes were reenacted in English meadows and French parks and presented as authentic testimony; a special favorite was the reconstruction of an attack by Chinese rebels on a Christian mission post. More traditional documentary footage came out of liberated/defeated Beijing only in 1901.
¹⁴⁸
But it is difficult to tell here what is genuine and what is illusory. Georges Méliès, who is considered the inventor of the art film, shot his
Coronation of King Edward VII
(1902) in a studio, after a careful study of the previous year's event and with the help of a British master of ceremonies. His film about the Dreyfus affair (1899) had been a kind of animated conversion of photographic material from newspapers and magazines.
¹⁴⁹

Media studies have recently tended to emphasize perspectival and subjective factors, casting doubt on claims to truth or objectivity. In light of present-day experiences of the technical and material malleability of the media, such
mistrust does indeed seem justified. The arts have long distanced themselves from a model of “realism,” and even documentary currents in literature and cinema, which first arose in the nineteenth century and have never disappeared, have lost much of their original naïveté. It is therefore no longer easy to grasp the emotive connotations of objectivism or the high regard for “positive” knowledge that were characteristic of the nineteenth century. Its quest for reality, not without roots in the early-modern empiricism of Francis Bacon, makes the world seem alien to us—although there was no lack of voices at the time, from the Romantics to Friedrich Nietzsche, who warned against the illusions of positivism and realism.

On the other hand, the nineteenth century belongs to the prehistory of the present day. It gave rise to institutions and cognitive forms of social self-observation that did not change fundamentally down to the spread of television in affluent societies, and even to the late-twentieth-century digital revolution.
Mass
communications media stretching far beyond small elite circles, public investment in the preservation of knowledge and objects of general interest, the monitoring of social processes through statistics and social research, the technical reproduction of texts and artifacts by means of fast printing presses, photography, and phonographic recording—the latter having been technically feasible from about 1888 and used already a year later to document Bismarck's voice
¹⁵⁰
—all this was still a long way off and unimaginable in 1800 but was treated as a matter of course by 1910.

The nineteenth century developed an ambivalent relationship to the past that is not alien to us even today. Optimistic openness to the future, awareness of innovation, and faith in technological and moral progress had seldom been so great, and the old had rarely appeared so obsolete, yet the century was also the zenith of a historicism that was not only imitative and reconstructive but also conservationist. The age of museums and archives, of archaeology, and of textual criticism built gateways to the distant past through its work of collection, preservation, and classification—gateways that we still make use of today. Written knowledge about the earlier history of humanity piled up in the leap from 1800 to 1900 as it had never done in any previous century.

Strictly speaking, this only applies to the West. It was in Europe, and in its fast-growing offshoot across the Atlantic, that technological and cultural innovations started their journey around the globe, supported in some cases (the telegraph) by imperial power and imperial capital, and in other cases (the press, the opera, other Western-style musical entertainment) by complex, nonimperial processes involving both the export of taste and indigenous adaptations. No one forced the Egyptians to found newspapers, or the Japanese to listen to Gounod and Verdi. There was cultural mobility from east to west, as we can tell from the riveting effect that Japanese or African art had in Europe.
¹⁵¹
But the new thinking, technologies, institutions, and “dispositives” that were supposed to achieve universality over time, and that by 1930 at the latest appeared as hallmarks of global “modernity,” all came into being in the West in the nineteenth century and began their various global careers from there. In the main, the contents of memory and observation were and remained locally and “culturally” specific. But the frames and forms of their media everywhere came under Western influence, albeit in widely varying degrees and with distinctive mixes of adaptation and resistance to a partly feared, partly welcomed Europeanization.

CHAPTER II

 

Time

When Was the Nineteenth Century?

1 Chronology and the Coherence of the Age

Calendar Centuries

When was the nineteenth century? We speak of a century as if it were a self-explanatory term, implying that everyone connects it with a precise, perhaps the same, meaning. What is it if not the time span that is contained between the years 1801 and 1900, for example? Yet that time span does not correspond to a tangible experience: the senses do not perceive when a new century begins, as they do the daily cycle or the seasons of the year. The century is a creature of the calendar, a calculated quantity, which was introduced for the first time in the 1500s. For historians it is, as John M. Roberts put it, “only a convenience.”
¹
The less they believe in the “objective” coherence of an age, and the more they see dividing lines between epochs as pure convention, the fewer objections there can be to a simple chronology that operates with chunks of a hundred years. In the case of the nineteenth century, however, the lusterless boundary dates underscore the formal character of this procedure: neither the beginning year nor the end year of the calendar century coincided with a major turning point. Years with two or three zeros are often not the watershed that remains fixed in the memory of a nation. It is not 2000 but 2001 that is engraved in the mind.

All this can be an advantage for the writer of history. A tight border means that there is less of a distraction from the picture itself, and the whole problem of periodization can be solved in one decisionist swoop. Blind justice marks out a spatially and culturally neutral frame of reference, capable of encompassing all kinds of change around the world, which frees the historian from difficult debates about the major landmarks. Only this kind of photographic “frame” takes in various histories without treating one as a yardstick for the others. Books have been written about what took place in a certain year—1688 or 1800, for example—in the world's diverse theaters,
²
producing a panoramic effect whose
formal
simultaneity brings out the
substantive
nonsimultaneity of many phenomena.
Synchrony spread over a whole century can have the same result. But, of course, change becomes visible in the span of a hundred years. Snapshots at the beginning and the end of a calendar century reveal processes at different stages of maturity in different parts of the world. Other temporalities emerge alongside the familiar narrative of Western progress.