The Transformation of the World (168 page)

A global social history of the nineteenth century can set itself many tasks other than those outlined here. For example, it can ask which positions were occupied by custodians of knowledge and “knowledge workers” in various social spaces, such as the type of intellectual developed in the West that others modified and adopted elsewhere in the world—a process that appears to have accelerated soon after 1900.
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It can take an interest in the development of gender roles and family types, whose great variety makes generalizations especially difficult. Whether there was and is a typically European model of the family and kinship relations, and what specific changes it underwent in the nineteenth century, is a controversial question that only extensive comparisons can help to elucidate.
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We can be sure that European family ideals did not spread around the world through simple diffusion and force of example. The merits of European technology or
military methods could be easily appreciated and copied, but not those of modes of biological and social reproduction. Such basic elements of sociality did not travel well. Colonial governments showed much greater caution here than in other domains, and reform initiatives on the part of public and private bodies began on a large scale only after the turn of the century.
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Even the war on polygamy and concubinage—the most visible and, for Christians, most objectionable deviations from European standards—was in most cases only halfhearted, being left to missionaries and seldom producing the success expected of it.

CHAPTER XVI

 

Knowledge

Growth, Concentration, Distribution

“Knowledge” is a particularly ephemeral substance. As a social quantity, distinct from its various philosophical concepts, it is the invention of a discipline scarcely a hundred years old: the sociology of knowledge. It took what German idealism had called
Geist
(“spirit”) and placed it at the heart of society, relating it to existential practices and social locations. “Knowledge” is somewhat narrower than the all-embracing concept of “culture.” It does not for our purposes include religion and the arts;
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it will refer here to cognitive resources for the solution of problems and the mastering of life situations in the real world. This is a preliminary decision in conformity with the nineteenth century itself, when, at least in Europe and North America, a rationalist, instrumental understanding of knowledge came to the fore: knowing served a purpose. It was supposed to enlarge the mastery of nature, increase the wealth of whole societies through its technical application, liberate worldviews from “superstition,” and be generally “useful” in as many respects as possible. Nothing was a more conspicuous measure of progress—the hallmark of the age for European elites—than the expansion and improvement of knowledge.

From the “Res Publica Litteraria” to the Modern System of the Sciences

The formation of “modern knowledge society” has been situated in a long early modern period that lasted until approximately 1820.
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The next hundred years then witnessed its constant enlargement, institutionalization, and routinization, and even the beginnings of its globalization. Such a continuity should not be exaggerated, however. Only in the nineteenth century was the old concept of “science” enriched with aspects that we now firmly associate with it. The subject classification still in use today goes back no further. Modern institutional forms for the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge were created at that time: the research university, the laboratory, the humanities seminar. The relations between science and its applications in technology and medicine grew closer; the scientific challenge to religious conceptions of the world became weightier. Many terms for disciplines such as “biology”—first used in 1800—or “physics”
only now established themselves. The “scientist” (another neologism, coined in 1834) developed into a social type who, despite much overlapping, differed from the “scholar” or “intellectual” (one more nineteenth-century creation). Science as a whole was demarcated more sharply than ever from philosophy, theology, and other traditional branches of learning.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, a new concept of science prevalent among scientists gave up the old claim to strict universality, unconditional necessity, and absolute truth and emphasized the reflexive character of knowledge—its conditional validity, intersubjectivity, and autonomy—within the social system of science.
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The old imaginative community of scholars, the
res publica litteraria
that cultural historian Peter Burke, following Coleridge, described as a “clerisy,” broke open and yielded a special scientific community with narrower membership criteria.
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The scientist saw himself as a “professional,” a specialist in a clearly defined area, having little in common with literary “intellectuals,” who addressed a wider public and were politically committed. This was a big step on the way to “two cultures,” and only a small number of natural scientists, such as Alexander von Humboldt, Rudolf Virchow, or Thomas H. Huxley, sought and found a hearing for their views on nonscientific matters. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, governments began to take a greater interest in science; science policy became a new branch of systematic statecraft. Big industry (e.g., the chemicals sector), too, increasingly regarded scientific research as one of its tasks. The links between science and war or imperial expansion became closer than ever before.

The Cultural Authority of Science

By the eve of the First World War, the modern system of science had come of age institutionally in a number of countries. Science was a force in the work of interpreting the world and a cultural presence enjoying extraordinary prestige. Anyone who did not observe its standards of argument and justification was thrown into defensive mode, so that even Christians had to make concessions to scientific thinking. It became a compulsory part of the school syllabus, as well as a profession for large numbers of (overwhelmingly male) individuals. Whereas in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—up to the time of Alexander von Humboldt, who spent his inheritance on his research interests—many heroes of the “scientific revolution” had lived
for
science on other sources of income, their successors in 1910 lived
on
it. The amateur was retreating on a wide front before the expert. No one could gain recognition as a scientific dilettante, as Goethe had still been able to do in the theory of colors, morphology, and anatomy.

All this holds true only for parts of Europe and for the United States. A global historical approach would not radically alter the picture, however. Modern industry, based on the use of fossil energy, came into being in Europe, and so did the science that has now swept everything before it. Yet a global perspective can place these developments in a comparative context and draw attention to the
worldwide impact of the Western explosion of knowledge. A first requirement for this is to expand our concept of knowledge beyond science. Insofar as science itself is understood as a communicative enterprise and its results passed on through channels of communication to a wider public, it relies on a system of symbols that makes scientific contents intellectually transmittable in the first place. Mathematics—an important element also in economics from about 1875—and some natural languages with transcontinental reach guaranteed the mobility of scientific meaning. But, of course, languages are also the most important vehicle for many kinds of knowledge other than organized science. It is therefore impossible to speak of the history of knowledge in the nineteenth century without taking a closer look at language and languages. Their spread and use is a good indicator of the ever-changing geography of political and cultural dominance.

1 World Languages

In the nineteenth century, some language areas became larger than they had been in the early modern period. By 1910 the “world languages” (a term now justified for the first time) had been distributed around the globe in a pattern that is still largely with us today. Here two aspects must be distinguished from each other—although often in practice no clear dividing line can be drawn between them. It makes a difference whether a majority of the population adopts a foreign language as its chief means of everyday communication, a kind of second-order mother tongue, or whether the language remains “foreign” while being used for functional purposes such as trade, scholarship, religious worship, administration, or contact across cultures. The expansion of a language is made easier by political and military empire building, without being an inevitable outcome of it. For example, in the early modern period in Asia, Persian and Portuguese became more widely spoken without being carried into new territories by the colonial rule of Portugal or Iran. On the other hand, relatively short-lived formations such as the Mongol Empire of the Middle Ages or the Japanese Empire in the first half of the twentieth century left behind hardly any lasting linguistic traces. In Indonesia too, despite three hundred years of colonial rule, Dutch did not maintain itself alongside indigenous languages, since unlike the British in India, the Netherlanders never took pains to develop a culturally Europeanized layer of the population.

Portuguese survived around the Indian Ocean into the 1830s as a lingua franca of multicultural merchant milieux. The flowering of Persian between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries in western, southern, and west-central Asia was followed by the collapse of its literary ecumene in the eighteenth.
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But until the 1830s it continued to play its old role as an administrative and commercial language beyond the borders of Iran. Both Portuguese and Persian were then replaced by English, which in 1837 became the only recognized language
of administration in India and, at the latest with the opening of China in 1842, the dominant non-Chinese language in the Eastern seas. By the end of the century, the Portuguese-speaking world had been whittled down to Portugal, Brazil, Goa, and a few possessions in southern Africa. Spanish was a legacy of colonial settlement in South and Central America, its geographical extent remaining more or less unchanged in the nineteenth century. Chinese spread slightly as a result of coolie emigration from China, but it never moved outside the overseas Chinese communities to become a language of education reaching into the environment around them. The fact that most of the overseas Chinese originated in Fujian or Guangdong province and used dialects barely intelligible to Mandarin speakers contributed to this isolation of the Chinese language.

Winners of Linguistic Globalization

The German language spread to only a very limited extent in the wake of colonization and had no real lasting effect in Africa. But its position strengthened in east-central Europe with the founding of the German Reich in 1871 and the literary and scientific esteem it enjoyed from the eighteenth century on. It continued to be the administrative language of the Habsburg Empire and, until the end of the Tsarist period, it remained with French and Latin a major language of communication among scholars in Russia; the papers of the Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences, for example, were largely composed in German. Wherever the Reich pursued a policy of Germanization in its border areas, compulsory use of the German language became more common.

Russian expanded to an even greater degree, as a direct result of Tsarist empire building and the cultural Russification associated with it after midcentury. Russian was imposed as the only official language in the Tsarist Empire, meeting resistance from Poles and subject populations in the Caucasus. Apart from being a symbol of Tsardom, it was also the main cultural cement of the empire. In contrast to the great ethnic diversity of the Habsburg armies, the Tsarist military consisted overwhelmingly of Russian-speaking soldiers.
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This was also the time when Russian developed as the language of a world-class literature. Nevertheless, it may be doubted whether the Tsarist Empire really did become an integrated linguistic community. Especially in the Baltic provinces in the Northwest and the Muslim lands in the South, the Russian language did not penetrate beyond circles of immigrants from Russia and a stratum of administrative officials.

At a time when the use of French was gradually declining among scholars and educated people in Europe, the number of French speakers in the colonial empire was on the rise. Moreover, the French Canadians in Quebec (since 1763 no longer part of the French empire) were maintaining themselves as a separate linguistic group. It was the only territory ever ruled by France where the language remained in everyday use beyond elite circles in the late nineteenth century (even today it is the mother tongue for roughly 80 percent of the population). Things were different in the African and Asian colonies. Almost half
a century after the end of colonial rule, the number of Algerians who speak or understand French is estimated at up to a quarter of the population.
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In countries that used to belong to France's West African empire, French is still the official language (alongside English in Cameroon), although it is probably used by just 8 percent of people in daily life.
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Haiti sticks to French two hundred years after its revolutionary separation from France. If a traveler in 1913 could get by with French better than with any other language except English, this was due to France's military-colonial expansion after 1870 and the high cultural prestige it enjoyed among Middle Eastern elites in particular. From 1834, French was part of the training program for Ottoman elite officers, and in Egypt it held its ground among the upper classes even after the British occupied the country in 1882.
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At the end of the nineteenth century, a kind of
francophonie
reached far down into the Pacific, where political control had weakened other culturally autonomous forces and broken up their coherence.