The Transformation of the World (161 page)

Despite the framing and shaping of social life by political authorities in bounded territories, it is not easy, and often quite pointless, to make statements about Chinese, German, or Mexican society
in general
. One may well doubt, for instance, whether it is possible to speak of just one “society” in Germany across a multitude of sovereign territories around 1800,
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and in the case of China no fewer than ten different “regional societies” have been identified within the overarching framework of the Qing empire.
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The British colonies that formed themselves into the United States of America were in essence thirteen different countries, with characteristic forms of society and regional identities. Little changed in this respect during the subsequent decades; many differences actually increased. Around 1850, extraordinary diversity persisted between the Northeast (New England), the Southern slave states, the Pacific coast (California), and the frontier in the interior. A similar kind of heterogeneity is discernible in the vertical dimension: Egyptian society had been so strictly stratified over centuries that it cannot be described as an even minimally coherent totality. A Turkish-speaking Ottoman Egyptian elite ruled over an Arabic-speaking majority to which it was bound by little more than the tax nexus.
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To an extent scarcely imaginable today, older or even archaic social forms survived in ecological, technological, or institutional niches around the world, long after they had ceased to be progressive or dominant.
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Even more questionable are sociological generalizations at the higher, supranational level of “civilizations.” Historians trained in subtle distinctions and the study of change over long periods are reluctant to operate with static macro-constructs such as “European,” “Indian,” or “Islamic” society. Numerous
attempts to define the cultural or social peculiarities of Europe suffer from the juxtaposition of such phantoms and from the untested claim that salient European virtues are absent in other parts of the world. In the worst cases, the clichés about Europe itself are no less crude than those about Indian or Chinese society.
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Grand Narratives

There are still no synthetic accounts of all-European or North American social history in the nineteenth century—not for want of research, but because of the difficulties of organizing and conceptually working through the vast amount that is known about it. All the harder must it be to outline such syntheses for other parts of the world, where many empirical questions are still unresolved and sociological or social-historical concepts of Western origin cannot be simply applied without further ado. To embark on a social history of the
world
for a whole century would be the height of presumption. It would have no identifiable object, since no uniform “world society” can be uncovered for 1770 or 1850, or indeed for 1900 or 1920.

Historians in the nineteenth century itself were less cautious. Building on Enlightenment ideas of progress, some of the leading minds of the age elaborated theories of social development and in many cases held them to be universally valid. Eighteenth-century Scottish moral philosophers, economists, and philosophers of history—such as Adam Ferguson and Adam Smith—postulated a material progression of the human species through stages of hunting and gathering, pastoralism, and agriculture to modern life in the “commercial society” of emergent capitalism. The German Historical School adopted such conceptions, while in France Auguste Comte constructed a stages model that placed the emphasis on the intellectual development of mankind. Karl Marx and his disciples thought they could discern a necessary succession from primitive society to slavery and feudalism to bourgeois or capitalist society, though Marx himself, in his later years, hinted that there might have been a deviation from this normal path: the so-called Asiatic mode of production.

Other authors thought less in terms of sequential stages of development than of great transitions. In the 1870s, the English philosopher Herbert Spencer suggested a progression from “military” to “industrial” society—an idea rooted in a complex theory of social growth through phases of differentiation and reintegration. The legal historian Sir Henry Maine, who was familiar with India, observed how in many societies contractual relations made status relations obsolete. Ferdinand Tönnies, one of the founders of sociology in Germany, perceived a trend away from “community” to “society;” Max Weber analyzed the “rationalization” of many areas of life, from the economy to the state to music; and Émile Durkheim thought that societies based on “mechanical” solidarity were being superseded by others based on “organic solidarity.” Although at least Maine, Durkheim, and Weber were interested in societies outside Europe, it is hardly surprising that all these theories were “Eurocentric” in the spirit of the age. But
this was mostly true in an inclusive rather than an exclusive sense: those lagging behind in non-European civilizations, regardless of skin color or religion, could in principle be fitted into general models of social progress. Only toward the end of the century—and then only seldom among the truly important authors—did modernization theory take on racist hues, in the sense that scriptless “primitives” and sometimes even “Orientals” were denied any capacity to rise to higher cultural achievements.
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From Status to Class?

To this day, the schemas and terminology of (late-) nineteenth-century sociology have not disappeared from discussion, but they have remained too general for use in descriptions of actual change. Historians prefer to cultivate their own grand narratives—of industrialization, urbanization, or democratization. One such model is of a transition from a “society of estates” or “corporate-feudal society” to “class society” or “bourgeois society.” The opposition between the two was already carried to a high pitch of intensity in Enlightenment polemics against the feudal-monarchical order, and in the nineteenth century it became a key theme in the account that European societies gave of themselves. Toward the end of the early modern period, it was argued, the basic organizational principle of society changed: an immobile stratification into clearly defined status groups, each with its particular rights, duties, and symbolic markers, gave way to a structure in which property ownership and market position determined the life chances of individuals and their place in the occupational and class hierarchy. Upward and downward mobility, with formal legal equality as its prerequisite, was much more likely to occur under such circumstances than in the rigid status system.
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This model, originating in Western Europe, was by no means equally applicable to other parts of the continent—or unconditionally even to Britain, the “modern” pioneer. England in 1750 was rather a “commercial society,” in Adam Smith's sense, than a status society of the Continental type. In the Scottish highlands, however, which had no transitional stage of estates, the old Gaelic clan structures—not incomparable to those in Africa—passed directly in the last quarter of the century into the social relations characteristic of agrarian capitalism.
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Eighteenth-century Russia also lacked estates in a French or German sense: that is, no corporate groups with a separately defined juridical status and territorial basis, rooted in local legal traditions and opportunities for political participation. The division of society (and, more narrowly, of the elite servicing the state) into ranking classes, and the allocation of collective privileges, proceeded outward from the state. Thus, no group rights were safe from retraction by the monarch.
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Russia was a relatively open society, in which it was possible to climb the ladder by serving the state, and nonpeasant city dwellers could not be precisely or stably demarcated from other segments of the population. Persistent
attempts by the Tsarist authorities to impose a system of legally defined ranks came into constant conflict with the plasticity of actual status ascriptions. This has led some scholars to speak of a general “lack of structure,” or an absence of universally recognized concepts of social order, in the late Tsarist Empire.
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Since the initial situation varied from region to region, the “from status to class” model only imperfectly describes social change in a more comprehensive sense.
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Not everywhere in Europe around 1800 was “estate” or “status group” the main principle of social classification; and elsewhere in the world, status societies were rarely to be found. The term may best be applied to Tokugawa Japan, with its deep social and symbolic cleavage between nobles (samurai) and commoners—although status groups there did not exercise representative political functions such as we know them from France or the Holy Roman Empire.
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Status group criteria of social hierarchy were less pronounced in Asia than in the center of Europe. Siam was an extreme example of an Asian country where a deep gulf separated the nobility (
nai
) from ordinary people (
phrai
), although both groups were jointly subject to the limitless power of the king.
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Elsewhere, as in China, state rhetoric had propagated since ancient times a fourfold division of society into scholars, peasants, artisans, and merchants. But these vague distinctions did not crystallize into clear-cut legal categories or systems of privilege, and in the historical reality of the eighteenth century they were overlaid with more sophisticated hierarchies. Any part of the world living mainly under tribal conditions, whether in Africa, Central Asia, or Australasia, exhibited an organizational principle quite different from that of status society. Hindu societies had yet another form of differentiation, with hierarchies based on endogamy and purity taboos. The concept of caste may now be under a cloud, suspected of having been a phantasm of the colonial state and Western ethnology, but it is clear that important forms of society in premodern India differed in their classificatory rules from European status society. Those rules were, however, given additional force for traditionalist ends. When the British extended their rule to Ceylon after 1796, they perceived social relations there through an Indian lens and introduced a kind of caste system that had not previously existed on the island.
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The old European status society was transferred to overseas colonies only in a disaggregated form. In British North America, the fine distinctions that marked society in the British Isles were preponderant from the beginning. Hereditary aristocracies with the privileges of an estate never gained a foothold there, and the prevailing image of society was one of Protestant egalitarianism with only small internal gradations. In all the settler societies of the Americas, ethnic inclusion and exclusion played a role it could never have had in Europe. In North America, the principle of equality was from the beginning valid only for whites, while in Hispanic America—as one of its most acute observers, Alexander von Humboldt, already showed near the end of the colonial era—skin color operated on top of everything else as a criterion of stratification.
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Estate elements, migrating across the Atlantic in the sixteenth century and contributing to the
formation of a conquistador nobility, soon had this new principle of hierarchy superimposed onto them. As late as the second half of the nineteenth century, Mexicans still defined their place in society primarily in terms of color or “blood mix,” and only secondarily by occupation or class.
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For vast areas, the
global
social history of the nineteenth century is identical with the history of migration and closely bound up with the history of diaspora formation and the new frontiers resulting from it.
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After 1780, neo-European settler societies either were newly founded against indigenous resistance that might be weak (as in Australia) or strong (as in New Zealand), or theyreceived large new waves of immigration that built them up from thinly populated peripheries into sizable countries in their own right (United States, Canada, Argentina). In not one of these cases, however, were European social structures exported en bloc. Noble strata capable of reproducing themselves as such never sank roots in the British settler colonies, while the
very poor
underclass at the other end of the spectrum was not disproportionately represented except for those driven from home in conditions of extreme misery, as during and after the Great Famine in Ireland. Australia was a special case, because settlement began there (in New South Wales) with convict transportations.
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But an underclass removed from the context of its original classification is not automatically an underclass in the open situation of a settlement frontier. Other groups crossing the Atlantic consisted of millions of people from the middle layers of European society, as well as declassed nobles and less privileged members of noble families. Worldviews and patterns of social differentiation had to be invented and negotiated anew in the colonies.
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Opportunities to climb the social ladder were greater than in Europe. The process whereby European migrants built new societies transcending the status orders of the Old World is one of the most striking developments in the global social history of the nineteenth century.

In the nineteenth century, societies around the world practiced a multiplicity of hierarchical rules alongside one another, differing in their property relations and the dominant ideals of social ascent. A clear classification covering most possibilities is scarcely feasible. In addition to market-regulated societies of property owners (“bourgeois” society), which in a western or central European or North American perspective were the characteristic type in the nineteenth century, there were residual status societies (e.g., Japan until about 1870), tribal societies, theocratic societies in which clerics were the dominant stratum (e.g. Tibet), societies with a meritocratic elite selection (China, precolonial Vietnam), slave societies (Southern US states until 1863–65, Brazil until 1889, remnants in Korea),
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“plural societies” where various ethnic groups coexisted in the framework of colonial rule, and mobile “frontier societies.” The transitions were fluid, and hybrids more or less the rule. Comparison becomes easier if we focus not on the whole profile of hierarchy but on individual positions within it. Let us take two examples, initially from a European vantage point: the nobility and the bourgeoisie.
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