The Transformation of the World (50 page)

In Japan, with its very different social structure, the outcome was similar. The aristocratic samurai, though sharply differentiated from “commoners,” were seldom rich in a European sense: most lived on hereditary stipends awarded by their feudal prince (
daimyō
), who alone was entitled to raise taxes in his domain, and on low salaries for administrative duties. The objective impoverishment of many samurai, and even more their subjective experience of it, fostered
discontent with the Edo ancien régime that found political expression in the 1860s in the Meiji Restoration.
²⁰⁷
Yet, in a way unknown in the rather austere Chinese empire, the Edo period was, until the end, one of conspicuous consumption. In a Japanese variant of the “royal mechanism,” which Norbert Elias analyzed for the court of the Sun King, the real rulers of early modern Japan, the House of Tokugawa, tamed the territorial princes by compelling them to spend regular periods at the shogun's court in Edo (Tokyo). Edo was a great stage on which the princes and their entourages competed with one another to display the most glamorous buildings, festivals, gifts, and concubines. Many a thrifty prince, though aware of the impact on his finances back home, was driven to the brink of ruin by this contest of competitive splendor. Most of their treasuries had little left in them once the samurai stipends and the costs of running a court had been paid out.
²⁰⁸
Few large aristocratic fortunes therefore survived into the Meiji period. The feudal princes disempowered after 1868 lost their lands in return for a degree of compensation, while samurai status was abolished within just a few years. After 1870 Japan was a much more “bourgeois” country than Prussia, England, or Russia. Fortunes acquired through industrialization (some on the basis of merchant wealth from the Tokugawa period) did not constitute an upper class of “the rich,” and private ostentation was also discreetly limited. It was considered improper to show off one's wealth in the shape of ostentatious private buildings, for example.

In South and Southeast Asia, wealth was traditionally in the hands of princes. The European colonial invasion narrowed the scope for enrichment, both in their case and in the case of court aristocracies. At the same time, it opened up new opportunities in commerce. Some Bengali merchant families, for example, amassed large fortunes after 1815, as did a number of cotton manufacturers in western India after 1870. In many places in Asia and North Africa, corporate assets had an importance similar to that of church property in Europe before the Reformation and the French Revolution. Clans and lineages, temples of various kinds, Buddhist monasteries, Muslim holy shrines, and pious foundations (
waqf
) owned and leased out land that was safe from state exactions, or controlled and multiplied large sums of money.
²⁰⁹
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, private accumulation often occurred in the hands of religious or ethnic minorities that possessed extensive business networks: Jews, Parsis, Armenians, Greeks in the Ottoman Empire, and Chinese in Southeast Asia.

We know as yet too little about the financial circumstances of such merchant dynasties—or of Indian maharajahs, Malayan sultans, Philippine landowners, or Tibetan monasteries—to draw a substantive comparison with Europe or the United States. One thing is clear: these elites lived a life that was between comfortable and luxurious. But nowhere in Asia was Western-style aristocratic or upper-bourgeois wealth taken as a model, and apart from Indian courts and Japanese princely homes in Edo before the mid-nineteenth century, displays of luxury consumption were of less significance. This was not simply because Asian
societies were poorer; material success in general had less of a function in guiding their cultures.

Types of Poverty

At the bottom end of the social ladder, the differences among the poor appear at first sight not to have been very great. On closer examination, however, all possible distinctions open up. In 1900, the pioneer social researcher Charles Booth identified five categories in London alone among the less “well-to-do.” The decisive qualification for prosperity was the regular employment of one or more domestic servants, even in rented accommodation. From there it was a long way, through gradations of “shabby gentility,” to outright poverty. If the rise of rich and superrich capitalists gave the nineteenth century a special place in the history of wealth, how does it appear in the history of poverty?

Poverty and wealth are relative, culturally specific categories. In sub-Saharan Africa, for example, the ownership of land was a far less important criterion than control over dependent persons. Many rulers in precolonial Africa had scarcely more storable wealth than their subjects. They stood out by the number of their wives, slaves, and animals, and by the size of their granaries. Wealth meant access to manpower that allowed the leap into conspicuous consumption and lavish hospitality. In Africa the poor were people whose situation in life made them especially vulnerable, and who had little or no access to other people's labor. The poorest of all were the unmarried and childless, especially if some physical disability made them unable to work, and doubtless also slaves (even if they were often well fed). Some African societies had institutions that provided a poverty net, but others (Christian Ethiopia among them) lacked anything that could be described as such. A precolonial “caring Africa,” with a comprehensive community life, is a romantic myth.
²¹⁰
The higher value given to control over people rather than ownership of land was not a peculiarity of Africa, since wealth is generally seen in terms of access to scarce resources. Thus, the status of Russian magnates before the emancipation of the peasantry in 1861 was measured more by their serfs or “souls” than by the size of their estate, and around the same time in Brazil the importance of a landowner depended on the number of his slaves. In early nineteenth-century Batavia, no European who wanted to count as somebody could afford to arouse the suspicion that he was skimping on the number of his black slaves.
²¹¹

In societies of herdsmen—not only in Africa but also in West Asia, from Anatolia to Afghanistan or Mongolia—wealth was measured by herd size. The mobile way of life excluded the amassing of treasure as well as investment in buildings made to last. European conceptions of poverty and wealth apply to no one less than they do to nomads. This continually gave rise to the cliché that they were especially deprived, as many travelers reported from trips they made among African herdsmen, Mongols, or Bedouins. What is true is that a nomadic existence was (and is) especially prone to risk. It came increasingly into conflict
with the interests of farmers and was exposed to the hazards of drought and food shortage. Herdsmen were the first to suffer in lean times: those who lost their herd no longer had any means of subsistence and were unable to pick up again after the end of a drought.
²¹²

In southern Africa, already before the First World War, poverty began to take on a form familiar from the densely populated societies of Europe and Asia: landlessness more than physical disability became the main cause of material deprivation, typically resulting from the state-supported takeover of land by settlers. Cities played a rather different role here, though. Whereas in Europe, at least during the first half of the nineteenth century, poverty was more visible and perhaps also greater in the town than in the country, African poverty was (and still is today) “made” above all in rural areas. It is likely that slumdwellers in Johannesburg felt better off in comparison with their relatives in the country. Extremes of structural poverty were found less among physically capable male migrant workers in the cities than among family members who remained behind in areas that, until the 1920s, were often still difficult to reach with famine relief. Nevertheless, there was an advantage in maintaining links with relatives in the country: the poorest sections of the population in Africa's growing cities were those for whom it was no longer an option to return to their village in times of crisis. There is little evidence, in large parts of the world such as Africa and China, that the lives of “the poor” improved to any noticeable degree in the course of the nineteenth century.

Poverty became most firmly entrenched in cities that displayed the full spectrum of income groups—from beggars to ultrarich manufacturers, bankers, or landowners. In any case, social research was still in its early days, and profiles of income and living standards were developed only for urban areas. In the English cities a turning point was reached around 1860 when the diet of the lower classes gradually improved and the proportion of people in the worst housing situation (statistically, more than two adults per bedroom) began to fall, partly as a result of the development of new working-class suburbs. But even in one of the richest countries in the world, destitution among the urban lower classes by no means disappeared. The number of males fit for work living in British workhouses is a good indicator of the scale of
extreme
urban poverty—and between 1860 and the First World War there was no significant drop in this total. The same is true of the figure for those classified as “vagrants.”
²¹³

It is impossible to quantify global poverty for the nineteenth century. We rarely have any insight into proportions between Europe and other civilizations. Measuring income is scarcely ever possible in the case of the very poor, even in the cities. A minimum of data exists only where wages were paid, and actually recorded, at the bottom of the income ladder. Then we learn, for example, that between 1500 and 1850 the
real
wages of unskilled construction workers in Istanbul, the Muslim metropolis on European soil, followed the general trend in big cities to the north of the Mediterranean. They fell behind it only after 1850.
According to another estimate, shortly before 1800 the real wages (measured in wheat equivalent per day) of workers in Istanbul and Cairo exceeded those paid in Leipzig or Vienna and were significantly higher than in southern India or the Yangtze delta.
²¹⁴
It is important not to assume a
general
superiority of “Europe” over “Asia.” One has to differentiate according to region, type of work, social position, and gender. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, living standards of unskilled male workers in London or Amsterdam were already significantly higher than in the big Chinese cities, and that gap widened enormously during the nineteenth century. The contrast is less stark when we compare the more developed parts of China to those regions of southern and eastern Europe that remained untouched by industrialization.
²¹⁵

Begging and Charity

The gradual emergence of a welfare state in Germany and certain other European countries toward the end of the nineteenth century should not obscure the fact that in many parts of the world this was also an age of continuing, and freshly motivated, philanthropic efforts on behalf of the poor. There are many cases in Europe where poor relief funded by local authorities went hand in hand with private charity; the mix of the two varied, as did the motives behind them. In the Tsarist Empire, for instance, there was nothing that might be described as a public
system
of poor relief (such as existed in England under the Poor Laws, until their abolition in 1834); the altruism of large landowners and state officials, hardly on a large scale, stemmed partly from a wish to emulate Western European models of social commitment.
²¹⁶
Contrasting examples outside Europe come mainly from philanthropic orientations in the Muslim world. In Egypt an ancient tradition of munificence persisted, not in ostentatious displays (which Islam prohibited) but out of the public view. It was a moral obligation that was often taken over by charitable institutions. This distinctively Muslim practice caused many European observers to tell stories about rich beggars. But in Egypt too, the nineteenth century saw the state increasingly assume the task of helping the poor.

One should not exaggerate the differences between Western Europe and North America, on the one hand, and the Muslim world on the other. In neither was there a linear development of a welfare state; family or community forms of aid coexisted alongside new state institutions. The greater failure of the Egyptian state, compared to “the West,” to stem begging in the cities had to do with the public tolerance shown toward beggars (as in Tsarist Russia). Of course, Egypt differed in many respects from northern Europe: (1) its lower level of economic development meant that fewer resources were available to the state for poor relief; (2) its poorhouses were used as temporary accommodations, never as English-style workhouses; (3) poor relief acquired a colonial dimension when missionaries appeared on the scene, and when the British, after the occupation of 1882, started up some rather meager initiatives; and (4) the poor never
disappeared from the public arena but vigorously asserted their claims—unlike the urban lower classes in England, for example, which from the 1860s on regarded poor relief and especially begging as shameful and demeaning.
²¹⁷

An absence of begging is very rare in history, and it was probably never attained before the twentieth century. We should bear in mind that in the nineteenth century begging was still seen as a normal part of social existence. It has always been a fairly precise indicator of poverty or even destitution, but also something else: a special kind of parasitic economy, often with a complex (in China even guild-like) organization and usually tolerated within limits by the authorities. The Victorian term “underworld” is here seldom apposite. In nineteenth-century Europe too, the social type of the penniless outcast, halfway between Franz Schubert's “hurdy-gurdy man” from his
Winterreise
(1828) and Charlie Chaplin's déclassé tramp (created in 1914), had not yet been rationalized away or pinned down in the categories of public welfare services. The struggle for existence at the lower depths was still visible.