The Transformation of the World (165 page)

Under the blanket term “petit bourgeois,” never altogether free of disdain, lies many a local artisan with his own ethos and the pride that comes from self-confident mastery of a trade.
⁶⁵
Such cultures, sometimes (as in parts of India) involving a caste-like exclusiveness, existed all around the world and often enjoyed higher esteem than the sphere of commerce: fixed and stable spheres of the social middle, supported by monopolies of know-how that no upper class could contest or replace. Traditional knowledge is more able than property or legal privilege to escape devaluation through political revolution; there is always a need for artisans and basic service providers. Only machine production presents a challenge, without necessarily rendering time-tested skills superfluous. This staying power counterbalances an ubiquitous fear of proletarianization. Thus, the petit bourgeois (in a broad sense) does not always look up obsequiously to the higher ranks of the social hierarchy. Not aspiring to be the originator or bearer of a superior culture, he does not invest much of his cultural capital in education (as distinct from vocational training); he has a pragmatic attitude to it, weighing up how useful it might be for his offspring.

Petit bourgeois are certainly capable of collective political action. If they control major channels of social communication, they may exercise greater power than many a captain of industry. Strikes by merchants in Middle Eastern bazaars or Chinese port cities have repeatedly generated significant political pressure, and when directed against foreign interests they became early expressions of nationalist politics. The key international experience for the petit bourgeois was war. Along with peasants and workers, they formed the main bulk of armies nearly everywhere. Noncommissioned ranks (corporals and sergeants) were petit bourgeois in both origin and habitus. In general, military hierarchies often accurately mirrored grading systems in civilian life. In scarcely any other domain can the nationally variegated rise of the European bourgeoisie be observed more clearly than in the struggle for officers' commissions and for acceptance by aristocratic general staffs.
⁶⁶

Respectability

The true bourgeoisie, corresponding to the “upper middle class,” consisted of people who had a wider mental horizon than the petite bourgeoisie, operating with capital (also the cultural capital of academic knowledge) and managing not to get their hands dirty. The “bourgeois,” remarked Edmond Goblot smugly in an unsurpassed essay from the 1920s, “wears kid gloves.”
⁶⁷
This was a key element of a specifically bourgeois habitus. Another was concern for one's reputation. Instead
of honor, as in the case of noblemen, the typical bourgeois was preoccupied with respectability—even if he occasionally subjected himself to the aristocratic code of the duel. Individual bourgeois sought to appear respectable above all in the eyes of other bourgeois, but also in those of the upper classes (who must not be offered a chance to treat one with condescension) and in those of people lower down the social ladder (who were expected to behave with deference and to recognize one as an opinion leader). This middle-class striving for respectability is also found outside Europe. Its economic expression is creditworthiness: the bourgeois has a reasonably secure income, and if he needs money the lender can expect to be repaid. A respectable bourgeois obeys the law and observes moral prohibitions, knowing what is expected and behaving accordingly. If female, she avoids idleness but also physical labor outside the home. The wife and daughters of a bourgeois man do not need to work in the service of others, while a high member of bourgeois society is in a position to employ domestic servants of his own.

“Respectability,” like the character model of the English gentleman, was a mobile cultural ideal capable of being learned and transmitted. Europeans and non-Europeans alike could aspire to it—white and black middle layers in nineteenth-century urban South Africa, for example, until racism put more and more obstacles in the way of such convergence.
⁶⁸
Arab, Chinese, and Indian merchants, too, cultivated an aloofness from manual labor, set a high value on domestic virtues (no less achievable in a polygamous setup), emphasized the degree of foresight required for their activity, planned according to the rules of rational business calculation, and took pains to demonstrate their high standing. Something like a bourgeois habitus is not necessarily tied to Western cultural presuppositions. The huge middle classes numbering overall hundreds of millions that emerged in countries such as Japan, India, China, and Turkey in the last third of the twentieth century cannot therefore be adequately explained as a mere import of Western social forms. They would have been unimaginable without indigenous foundations.

The educated property-owning bourgeoisie was everywhere a minority in the nineteenth century, rarely exceeding the 5 percent of the population (or 15 percent including the urban petite bourgeoisie) that has been estimated for Germany.
⁶⁹
In the United States, however, there is an influential tradition still alive today that sees the country as made up of nothing other than “middle classes.” The American people, wrote the historian Louis Hartz in 1955, are “a kind of national embodiment of the concept of the bourgeoisie.”
⁷⁰
Social historians have deconstructed this myth of classlessness, a twin of the “melting pot” legend, and exhaustively described the
differentia specifica
of bourgeois situations and worldviews in the United States. For the American grande bourgeoisie did not demarcate itself any less sharply than its European counterparts from lower strata of society.
⁷¹

If the bourgeoisie in 1900 was still thinly spread even in most of the “West”—the main exceptions being Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, northern France, Catalonia, western Germany, and the northeastern states of
the United States—how much more was this true of the global scene. In the “bourgeois age,” the educated property-owning bourgeoisie comprised a tiny minority of the world population, distributed very unevenly around the planet. However, its distribution did not follow the simple schema of “the West and the rest.” Europe
as a whole
was not at all living in a bourgeois age, and sprouts of bourgeois or quasi-bourgeois development were by no means completely lacking outside Europe and North America.

The Universality of Middle Ranks in Society

At this point a global social history starts to become interesting. To be sure, the bourgeoisie and bourgeois values were products of Western European urban culture and early modern long-distance trade, which were then reshaped in the nineteenth century under the conditions of industrial capitalism and revolutionary theories of equality. Moreover, the idea and to some extent the actual practice of “bourgeois societies” were among the most striking aspects of the (Western) European special path in modern history. Nowhere except in Europe and the neo-European settler societies does the belief seem to have existed that the middle orders could stamp their lifestyle ideals on society as a whole. Nevertheless, it is worth asking whether and how in the nineteenth century, outside the North Atlantic, social milieux arose that could be described as similar or even equivalent in their roles to the Western middle classes.

The following remarks do not amount to a panorama of bourgeois existence outside Europe;
⁷²
they aim to throw light on a number of analogies and relations and to illustrate them with examples taken mainly from Asia. That was the continent, in the early modern period, that gave rise to merchant cultures by no means inferior to those of Europe in complexity and efficiency.
⁷³
It was there too, that by 1920 at the latest, embryonic bourgeoisies emerged in many regions in a tense interplay between capitalism and higher education: societal strata who—and this was new—thought in categories of
national
politics. Similar processes began to occur in many parts of Africa too, but the social discontinuities were typically sharper in sub-Saharan Africa than in Asia. There were two reasons for this. First, European control over new modern sectors of the economy (mining, plantations) was even more comprehensive, with Africans serving only as wage laborers or small agricultural suppliers. Second, the appearance of Christian missionaries in Africa led to a much deeper social-cultural rift than almost anywhere in Asia. The mission and its educational facilities alone led to the formation of a Western-oriented elite, whereas in East or South Asia indigenous cultures of knowledge were converted in a series of complex processes.
⁷⁴

Broadly speaking, the relative weight of middle ranks in society increased in many parts of the world especially after the mid-nineteenth century. This had to do with the greater social differentiation fueled by population growth and with the general expansion of regional and supraregional trade and business activity—processes that left no continent untouched, even involving sub-Saharan Africa
long before the colonial conquests began there.
⁷⁵
Merchants and bankers—experts in exchange and circulation—were the main impetus and beneficiaries in many cultural contexts. A third factor was the establishment of state administrations and associated job opportunities at middle levels of the hierarchy—hence for nonnoble functionaries with at least some formal schooling if not a full liberal education. In the nineteenth century, social groups were bourgeois if they occupied a “third” position on the margins, or in the vertical middle, of social hierarchies.

An image of society constructed in this way was not self-evident. Societies could be visualized from within as egalitarian-fraternal, as dichotomous (top/bottom, insiders/outsiders), or as finely graded into ranks and status groups. The idea of an intermediate level between the elite and the peasant or plebeian masses—that is, a middle position filled with significance—became characteristic of the nineteenth century only after the eighteenth century had seen the strengthening of a capitalist bourgeoisie in many European and Asian countries. Not only tolerated and secretly respected, the merchant or banker now also gained “theoretical” acceptance in the dominant value structure of society. This revaluation did not necessarily involve the immediate “rise of the bourgeoisie.” Sometimes, the shift in favor of large merchants and notables could be seen only in the finer shades of social interaction. But the trend was global in reach: activities, lifestyles, and mentalities that had more to do with commerce and noncanonical knowledge than with agriculture, country life, and cultural orthodoxies, and whose horizons surpassed the “view from the church tower,” acquired growing importance in comparison with earlier epochs.

The subjects of such activities, lifestyles, and mentalities defined their social identity more in terms of achievement and competition than of adaptation to existing status hierarchies. They strove to accumulate and protect movable wealth, even if they invested some of their money in real estate for reasons of security and prestige. Quasi-bourgeois groups were nowhere “in power” in Asia, but despite their small size they were often influential and had a considerable impact on the modernization of their society. In many cases, this happened in the absence of a thought-out program of bourgeois activism and without a self-conscious expression of bourgeois norms and values. Advanced techniques of production and commercial organization were brought into use, investment flowed into sectors such as export agriculture or mechanized mining, and methods for the mobilization of capital were implemented that were beyond traditional indigenous capacities. In their objective effect, these bourgeois were economic pioneers with the calculating mentality of entrepreneurs. But they seldom came forward as self-confident representatives of economic or even political liberalism. This obscured their visibility in the eyes of European contemporaries, and of historians looking first of all for liberal rhetoric and only then for the people behind it.

The quasi-bourgeois of Asia would anyway not have been able to indulge in antistatist liberalism, since they themselves stood in an ambiguous relationship
to the state. As with the economic bourgeoisie elsewhere, their twin objectives were to clear all possible obstacles to self-organization and to exercise control over the operation of the market. One such kind of market economy had existed in eighteenth-century China, and the next period when the Chinese bourgeoisie won space for initiative was not accidentally between 1911 and 1927, when the state was as weak as it had ever been or would be in the future.
⁷⁶
In many other Asian countries, however, the commercial middle classes entered into a symbiotic relationship with the state, financing it as taxpayers or bankers and relying on its support in return. The state, whether indigenous or colonial, often had to protect them in an unfavorable environment and to guarantee a minimum of legal security. There was a wide range of scenarios—from monopolistic advantages for commercial minorities in some European colonies in Southeast Asia (opium monopoly for Chinese dealers, for instance
⁷⁷
) to a laissez-faire colonial state, as in British Hong Kong, that provided the freedom to operate abroad. In most cases, the relationship with the state was closer than in Western Europe. True, the Asian bourgeoisies that developed toward the end of the nineteenth century were not primarily classes in the service of the state and were seldom directly created by it; they had their own histories of mercantile success behind them. Yet, from the Ottoman Empire to Japan, they were at first state-protected niche groups. In the nineteenth century, the institutional requirements for autonomous systems of private market regulation were lacking in the major part of the world.

Fully developed bourgeois societies, especially ones with a “bourgeois” political system, were therefore few and far between. More characteristic, not only in the colonies but also in independent countries of Asia and the southern or eastern periphery of Europe, was what the Hungarian-born historian Ivan T. Berend (with eastern Europe in mind) has called a “dual society.”
⁷⁸
In this asymmetrical formation, the economic importance of the bourgeoisie was growing but older elites retained their political preponderance and, to some extent, their cultural authority—even if the industrious, education-oriented, and self-disciplined middle of society often regarded them as decadent and ineffectual.