The Transformation of the World (53 page)

Dress is always a good indicator of consumption preferences. In Latin America, especially in countries with a large indigenous population, society split into the peasantry who dressed as in colonial times and city dwellers for whom it was important to demarcate themselves from “uncivilized” fellow citizens. Mestizos, too, placed stress on sartorial markers, such as the polished leather shoe. Also in other spheres, the material cultures of town and country rapidly drifted apart. The identification of the Latin American upper classes with the civilization and commodities of England or France reached its peak in the Belle Époque, around the turn of the century. Equating progress with Europe, they were unreservedly prepared to interpret foreign goods as symbols of modernity. Their export
economies
were at the same time import
societies
, in either way occupying a peripheral position in the international order. Since the increasing prosperity did not rest upon domestic industrial production, the whole urban life of Latin America acquired a European stamp: not only clothing and furniture had to be imported but also the emblematic cultural institutions of contemporary Europe: the restaurant, the theater, the opera, the ball. Top chefs were enticed away from France, and in 1910, not a single indigenous dish was served at the official celebrations in Mexico to mark the anniversary of independence. In Lima golf and horseracing became an obsession. Railroad stations were built as exact copies of models in Paris or London.

The epitome of imitation was the wearing of heavy English men's clothing in tropical and subtropical zones. The British had already concluded that it was necessary in India. Around 1790 the governor-general Lord Cornwallis permitted himself to dine in his shirt sleeves, but two decades later it went without saying that members of the colonial elite should dress correctly for dinner when natives were present, even in intense heat, and in 1830 officials of the East India Company were forbidden to wear Indian clothes in public.
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Such customs soon spread to Latin America. Whatever the temperature or degree of humidity, gentlemen in Rio de Janeiro and many other cities had to appear in penguin costume: black cutaway, starched white shirt and white waistcoat, tie, white gloves, and top hat; the disappearance of color and ornament from the fashion of the
male European upper class between circa 1780 and 1820 had earlier led to a new vestural style of generalized functionality where clothes were no longer permitted to express social rank and personal identity.
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Ladies forced themselves into corsets and wrapped themselves in layer upon layer of heavy material. Until the end of the 1860s crinoline was de rigueur in good Brazilian society. Such martyrdom was the price of being civilized.

Tropical cultures in which not even the upper classes had been accustomed to wearing covering clothes of a European or Middle Eastern description had a long road to travel before they reached what was considered as “civilization.” Invariably, Christian missionaries insisted on a proper covering of the body and instilled in their charges Victorian notions of shame. In vast parts of the planet, such as the Pacific islands, this resulted in “a fairly total reclothing of the region.”
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King Chulalongkorn, the reformer of Siam, made every effort to get his subjects to wear buttoned-up garments, and by the beginning of the twentieth century the urban population was fully dressed.
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In Lagos, in the 1870s and 1880s, a small group of Western-oriented Africans in frock coats and lavish women's costumes created a social life centered on churchgoing, balls, concerts, and cricket.
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Gandhi, the great virtuoso of symbolic politics and friend of frugality, later reversed the process: the late-Victorian dandy we see in his early photos turned into the charismatic “naked fakir,” as Churchill reviled him.
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Nowhere else outside Europe, however, were the trappings of its civilization so faithfully and uncritically adopted as in Latin America; nowhere else, except perhaps in the Egypt of Khedive Ismail (r. 1863–79), was the imitative fetishism of consumption so great.
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Cultural resistance was stronger in West and East Asia. Sultan Mahmud II prescribed Western clothing for the senior Ottoman bureaucracy, and the military likewise switched to Western uniforms. This did not at all involve internalizing a European attitude to fashion but rather an outward change in public dress that scarcely reached beyond the court and the top administration. On the streets of Istanbul, men continued for a long time to wear traditional costumes, and no women were photographed before the 1870s in European dress; foreign influence showed itself, as it had for centuries, only in the use of new materials such as French or Chinese silk. European clothes became popular and culturally acceptable as late as in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.
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Foreign fabrics should not be thought of as a conscious loan from another culture. Where European imports had largely destroyed indigenous textile production, there was often no other option. In the 1880s it was reported from Morocco—not yet a colony—that nearly everyone was wearing cotton goods from abroad.
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Japan, unlike Latin America, did not share a colonial past with Europe. Before 1853 there were few contacts with foreigners, and they did not radiate out to Japanese society as a whole. Later—especially after the Meiji Renovation of 1868 brought systemic change to the polity—the country opened up to the West and launched a modernization drive that took directly from Europe, and
secondarily from the United States, new organizational forms for the state, the justice system, and the economy. But this far-reaching structural Europeanization was not matched by a de-Japanization of private life; people did not give up their traditional clothing, for example. It is true that following a decree of the State Council in 1872, top figures in the Meiji state, including the emperor himself, dressed in frock coat, top hat, or uniform, and that from the 1880s on lower officials fell in with the change. But traditional clothing kept its place in the home, as an early and expensive flurry of sartorial Westernization gave way to a moderate “improvement” of the
kimono
. Attachment to the familiar was even more self-assertive in other spheres of material culture. On the other hand, a fondness for leather shoes seems to have developed quite early, especially if they squeaked and “sang” as one walked. Those who wished to marry tradition with progress wore traditional dress plus leather shoes—a combination still popular today with Buddhist monks in various parts of Asia.
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The hat became a universal symbol of bourgeois manners, civil servants wearing it for show in much the same way as a lawyer in Africa or India or a well-off worker on Sundays in the Polish industrial city of Lodz.
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In the 1920s Kemal Atatürk ruthlessly forced hats onto the heads of Turks, banning the fez that had been introduced in 1836, in an earlier age of attempted modernization, as a symbol of the state's eagerness for reform. Before the hat became compulsory—having been prohibited to non-Muslim minorities in the Ottoman Empire—the Young Turk revolutionaries opted for the decidedly anti-Ottoman “Caucasian” cap.
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In China the resistance to foreign consumption models was even greater than in Japan, and Western clothing gained acceptance for the first time only through the military reforms of the Qing dynasty in the early 1900s. Photographs and moving pictures from the time of the nationalist protests in 1919, known as the “May Fourth Movement,” show professors and students in Beijing, who were politically radical and often familiar with European culture, marching in the floor-length costumes of traditional scholars. Trousers and jackets, which finally won over these same circles in the 1920s, had traditionally been worn by peasants and ordinary soldiers only.
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Groups of Chinese merchants who since the mid-nineteenth century had had close ties with Western business partners in Hong Kong, Shanghai, or other ports remained largely faithful to older models in their private life and were poor customers for European luxury items. Only in the 1920s did the appeal of these items increase in the cities, though even then with a bad conscience that regarded the display of “imperialist” appurtenances as national betrayal. The great opening of urban consumers to European and North American patterns of taste, fashion, and behavior occurred in mainland China only in the mid-1980s, a whole century after Latin America's, but now fueled by domestic industrialization and extensive brand piracy.

There are also examples of a reverse effect: of European acculturation to Asian customs. In China and especially in India, this was condemned with increasing severity as “going native”—as crossing a racial status barrier. Adaptation in the
opposite direction was also frowned upon. Much as the “trousered Negro” was later an object of ridicule in Africa, many British in the nineteenth century refused to accept Indians in shoes and suits, seeing such sartorial behavior as an insolent aping of Europeans. The Indian middle classes were expected to dress in Indian style, and the symbol designers of British India concocted especially “exotic” costumes for the princes they liked to regard as feudal museum pieces. It caused a huge scandal when one maharajah, the reform-minded Sayaji Rao Gaekwad III of Baroda, arrived to greet the King-Emperor George V at the Imperial Durbar in Delhi—a sumptuous assemblage of Indian dignitaries—in December 1911, wearing a plain white European suit instead of the Oriental costumes and jewelry sported by the other princes, and with a walking stick instead of the prescribed sword.
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Acculturation in reverse had been on the agenda in eighteenth-century India, when the adoption of an Indian lifestyle had been a frequent and acceptable occurrence.
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In the nineteenth century such things were still possible in the Dutch East Indies. Whites there had become so orientalized in the previous century that the British—who occupied Java during the Napoleonic wars and held it until 1816—sought to stem their fall from civilization, requiring the men to give up brazen cohabitation with female natives, and the women to forgo idleness, Oriental dress, and the chewing of betel nuts. It cannot be said that they were very successful. If anything, the lifestyle of both Europeans and Chinese in Batavia became even more Asiatic or perhaps hybrid: they ate
rijstafel
, wore sarongs (at least at home), and indulged in endless midday breaks.
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It cannot be stressed enough that adaptation to European culture was very often a voluntary process; colonial authorities and missionaries occasionally helped things along, but that was by no means the rule. A whole series of cases shows that European architecture was embraced in Asia and Africa even in contexts where there was no colonial or quasi-colonial dependence. In the eighteenth century, the Qing emperor had Jesuit architects build him a rococo-style summer palace on the outskirts of Beijing. The Vietnamese ruler Nguyen Anh (after 1806 Emperor Gia Long), who reunified Vietnam following many years of turmoil, built citadels inspired by the famous military engineer and architect Vauban—not only in his new capital, Hanoi, but in all large provincial cities. The building plans stemmed from French officers who, without an official contract from Paris, worked for the emperor in return for a salary. Gia Long preferred European architecture to Vietnam's traditional Chinese styles because he recognized its superiority for his purposes. French influence, or even a reflection of French prestige, played no role in the decision. Gia Long was not an imitator of the West but an early “free shopper” of what was on offer abroad. Good relations with Catholic missionaries did not prevent him from swearing his mandarins and officers first and foremost to the cult of Confucius.
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One final example: On Madagascar, which became a (French) colony only in 1896, amateur European master builders had been developing an imaginative
architecture since the 1820s. A start was made with some modest buildings to house missionaries, but Jean Laborde, an adventurer shipwrecked on the island in 1831, had greater ambitions. In 1839 he built a new palace for the queen, skillfully combining local stylistic elements with neo-Gothic ones and stabilizing everything with European construction techniques. On other public buildings he put up Hindu quotations that he had learned in India. Later architects introduced granite facades, balconies, and Romanesque round arches. The resulting official style lent an unmistakable aspect to the capital, Antananarivo, where court ladies wore the latest fashions from Paris and London. In spite of all that, the Merina Monarchy did not belong among the zealous self-Westernizers of the age; the country was closed after being opened to the outside world several times, and deep suspicions remained about European intentions.
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Living standards, understood as a set of material circumstances or a measure of physical well-being, may be in part essentially the same for large differentiated societies but may also vary to a huge degree socially and regionally, and according to gender and skin color, within such societies. The epidemiological situation, for instance, may be very similar for all members of a society even if there are large income differences among them; the rich were no safer than the poor in the face of smallpox and cholera. On the one hand, then, the living standards of countries may be roughly quantified and ranked in a league table: “life” today is undoubtedly better in Switzerland than in Haiti. On the other hand, different societies and
types
of society operate by different yardsticks: wealth among rice farmers is not the same as wealth among Bedouins or among storekeepers. Societies, as well as social groups within them, differ in their perceptions of “illness” and in the language they use to speak about it. Some diseases are characteristic of particular epochs. Around the end of the nineteenth century, people in Central Europe complained of “neurasthenia”—a condition and a term that has all but disappeared in present-day medicine.
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Yet the nineteenth century did not yet know the term “stress,” which was borrowed in the 1930s from the realm of physics, from material science. This does not mean, of course, that people in the nineteenth century had “stress-free lives” by today's standards. But, whether it is a question of poverty and wealth, sickness and health, or hunger and adequate nourishment, the categories that describe such conditions are relative or—to use a trendy expression—“culturally constructed.” They do, however, refer to tangible realities of bodily and material existence.