The Transformation of the World (54 page)

The nineteenth century, seen globally and in its full time span, was undoubtedly an age in which the material circumstances of life improved for a large part of the world's population. Today it seems perfectly natural to us to be skeptical about progress—the underlying ideology of the Atlantic West since the Enlightenment—but this should not be taken so far that it erases the idea altogether. Such a general statement suffers from a degree of triviality, however. A more interesting observation is that by no means do all tendencies lead in the same direction, that as a matter of fact they often contradict one another. There
are numerous examples of this. In the early nineteenth century, many people in the big cities had a higher income than they would have had in the country, even though they often lived in worse environmental conditions. In one and the same society, living standards did not differ only on the scale from less to more; they often reflected different economic logics. Many working-class households lived only just above the survival threshold and could therefore not escape from a narrow time horizon; the property-owning and educated middle classes were able to make long-term plans, basing them on various sources of income.
²⁷⁷
Or, with regard to nutrition: Europe's “long” eighteenth century, which in terms of welfare sometimes lasted into the 1840s, was a lean century, but from the 1850s on, there was a visible “relocation” of hunger, as the capability of transporting food over longer distances was combined with improvements in preservation and storage and the beginnings of a processing industry.
²⁷⁸
The example of the Indian famines demonstrates, however, that this expanded circulation could have a deadly impact on economically weak food-producing regions. The victims of progress are therefore not to be found only among those who are “left behind” or untouched by innovation. The unfettered and uninterrupted invasion of “modernity” could also have baneful consequences.

Many aspects of the standard of living have not been broached in this chapter. For example, few things reveal the character of a society better than the way in which it treats its weaker members: children, old people, the disabled, and the chronically sick.
²⁷⁹
Histories of childhood and old age therefore need to be narrated. The best of them would show whether, in and since the nineteenth century, not only various curves of economic growth but also the survival chances of infants and the physically and mentally handicapped have gone up—whether, that is, the world has become more humane.

CHAPTER VI

 

Cities

European Models and Worldwide Creativity

1 The City as Norm and Exception

A “city” is a way of socially organizing space. It is hard to distinguish it clearly from other ways. The city always stands in a tension with something else, with non-city. This may take a number of forms: “the country” with its villages of settled farmers, the deserts and steppes of nomads, the world of large estates and plantations where the landowners' power is concentrated, or another city in the same region, with which there may be peaceful rivalry or sometimes—as in the case of Athens and Sparta, or Rome and Carthage—irreconcilable hostility.
¹
A city is easy to recognize when it is taken in its specific polarity with non-city. But it is difficult to say which conditions a settlement must fulfill in order to be recognized as a city. Wall plus market plus city charter: nothing as clear-cut as in premodern Western Europe existed either in other civilizations or in the nineteenth century. Number of inhabitants is not a reliable guide: two, five, ten thousand—what is the starting figure? Not even national statistical bureaus have yet agreed on international criteria for what constitutes a city; statistical comparisons are therefore often a rather tall order. There are also other problems of definition. Many historians go so far as to question whether “urban history” can be distinguished at all from other fields of research: after all, is not almost every facet of history somehow reflected in cities? Nor is there agreement as to whether cities should be seen as social fields with a distinctive individual profile and a characteristic “spirit” or rather as interchangeable articulations of an overarching process of urbanization.
²
Urban history and the history of urbanization stand alongside each other as two different optics. The one focuses on the physiognomy of particular cities, the other on a major tendency of the modern age or even of human settlement in general.
³

Models

Each civilization that has formed cities has its own idea of a model and its own terminology for different kinds of city. A Chinese
dushi
is not the same as a Greek
polis
or an English
township
, and over a long period of time—that which
saw Byzantium turn into Constantinople, then into Istanbul, for example—quite different visions might follow on top of each other. Particular cultures have developed their own understanding of “city” and “urban life.” A city is thus a concentrated expression of a particular civilization—a place where the creativity of a society is expressed most clearly. No one in the eighteenth or even the nineteenth century could have confused Beijing with Agra, Edo (Tokyo) with Lisbon, or Isfahan with Timbuktu. It is easier to know where you are in a city than in a village. Urban architecture reveals more clearly than almost anything else what is distinctive about a civilization; cultural traits become stone. Only the growth of “megacities”—one of the most important trends in social history in the second half of the twentieth century—has stripped away this personality specific to a civilization.

On the other hand, even for earlier times, we should be wary of taking at face value the city models that geographers and sociologists have construed. To speak of
the
Chinese, Indian, or Latin American city, as if certain basic features recurred in every instance, has a point only if one understands that this radically abstracts from many particular cases. Such types are major simplifications; they can only very incompletely embrace change over time—nineteenth-century urbanization, for example—and therefore give us an excessively static and “essentialized” picture. They also leave out the fact that, whichever the civilization, cities with the same function (e.g., ports or capitals) have common features that are often greater than their differences. It is particularly questionable to consider civilizations as uniform spheres of social order that are sharply separated from one another. It is by no means the case that “the Indian city” could be found in every corner of South Asia, or that wherever the Chinese went they founded the same kind of settlement. City forms are not latent “cultural codes” that automatically find expression amid changing circumstances. No doubt there are preferences for certain kinds of urban life: Europeans seek out the center of a city, North Americans are less likely to be drawn to it. But it is more interesting to ask how the aims of a city were defined and achieved under a certain set of circumstances than simply to take its distinctive morphology for granted. In “the Chinese city,” for instance, we will be on the lookout for what is
not
Chinese.

Cities are nodal points of relations and networks. They organize the area surrounding them. Either the market, an overarching state apparatus, or the initiative of local authorities creates trade networks, administrative hierarchies, and federative associations between cities. No city is an island; influences from “the outside world” penetrate through the city gates. In a strong tradition of Western, as well as Middle Eastern/Islamic, thought, cities are the
fons et origo
of all civilization. The premodern traveler headed straight for them; they were his salvation from the perils of the wild. As a stranger or outsider, he was in less danger there than in a village. Knowledge, wealth, and power were concentrated in cities. They offered opportunities in life for the ambitious, the curious, and the desperate. In contrast to rural communities, cities were always “melting pots.” Empires were
ruled, or global systems steered, from them: international finance from London, the Catholic Church from Rome, the fashion world from Milan or Paris. After the fall of a civilization, its cities are often what remains in the memory of a mythopoetic posterity: Babylon, Athens, the Jerusalem of Herod's Temple, the Baghdad of the caliphs, the Venice of the doges. The city is of premodern origin, but it is also the birthplace of modernity. Cities stand out from their surroundings by taking the lead, by wielding power, by being
relatively
progressive. This has been true at all times. What was new in the nineteenth century?

A World of Stone

The range of forms of urban life should not be underestimated. It stretches from the first skyscraper cities—Chicago nosed ahead in 1885, with its unprecedented seventeen-story building
⁴
—to the most evanescent settlements. In the nineteenth century there were still mobile cities that resembled the itinerant seats of power in medieval Europe. Only the founding of Addis Ababa in 1886 by Emperor Menelik II ended a centuries-long period of mobile capitals in Ethiopia, during which a huge herd of livestock and up to 6,000 slaves followed the ruler and aristocracy around, carrying their household goods and cult objects. The construction of the new capital was supposed to symbolize as clearly as possible the country's entry into modernity. After Menelik unexpectedly wiped out an Italian expeditionary force at Adwa in 1896, the Great Powers ratified the status of Addis Ababa and set about building embassies there in the European style.
⁵
Until the end of the nineteenth century, the kings of Morocco, too, spent more time in the saddle than in any of their urban residences; Sultan Mulay Hassan, actually an industrious master builder, is said to have journeyed in 1893 with a retinue and staff numbering 40,000.
⁶
Should such practices be regarded as inherently archaic? In any event, in China as much as in the Tsarist Empire or Great Britain, monarchs still had summer and winter palaces. From 1860 on, one of the largest countries in the world was governed for several months of the year from a health resort: Simla (now Shimla) in the Himalayan foothills. The whole apparatus of the British viceroy would travel there each summer by caravan and set up shop in a dramatic landscape—although it is true that from 1888, the representative of the Queen-Empress Victoria had his own permanent Viceregal Lodge, a castle built in the English late-Renaissance style.
⁷

Nevertheless, the nineteenth century was in general an age when rulers settled down and cities turned into stone. Even in Europe stone constructions were by no means universal in 1800; a peripheral country like Iceland switched to them only after 1915.
⁸
The transition was especially apparent in the colonies, where the authorities sought to literally solidify the fluidity of local politics in the interests of a more manageable order. At the same time, this underlined their claim to have established themselves overseas for all eternity; they achieved their civilizing mission through the triumph of stone over clay and wood. But there was an ironic result. A lightweight house can easily disappear, be consumed by fire, or
simply be replaced if political and economic conditions change. Stone buildings remain standing, so that today they are the most conspicuous testimony to the death of colonialism: despised ruins, villas converted into slum dwellings, power centers of postcolonial politics, or relics spruced up for tourists in parts of the world where they may be the oldest surviving monuments.

Sometimes forest depletion made the change to stone especially advisable. Wooden buildings were increasingly thought of as primitive and old-fashioned or as too reminiscent of pre-bourgeois grandeur; the timber facing of Victorian mock-Tudor houses was only an ornamental addition to the neoclassical solidity of their stone construction. Wooden or clay cities held out where ecology or economics excluded other options: then they could be a rational adaptation to circumstances. As in the West, the American zoologist and art collector Edward S. Morse noted in 1885, very few people in Japan could afford fire-resistant houses; it made sense to build only simple, collapsible buildings with ordinary inflammable material, in order to limit the expense and to make it easy for planks and floorboards to be quickly rescued in the event of a fire.
⁹
The fatalism of this way of thinking disappeared when houses in Japanese cities began to be built in stone and cement. The beauty of aging wood and tightly thatched roofs was sacrificed to the fireproof banality of concrete.
¹⁰

The city is a nearly universal phenomenon. It has been said that the state was a European invention, but that is not true of the city. Urban cultures arose independently on all continents, with the exception of North America and Australasia. Usually with close links to agriculture, they developed in the Middle East, on the banks of the Nile, in the eastern Mediterranean, in China and India, and considerably later in Japan, Central America, and sub-Saharan Africa. The city as a physical form and a mode of social life is not a transplant from Europe. Although the “modern” city of European origin spread around the world, it encountered indigenous urban cultures that usually did not give way before it. Tenochtitlán was destroyed in the 1520s, so that colonial Mexico City could be built in its place. But old Beijing, with its gigantic walls (in three concentric rectangles) and sixteen city gates, survived European and Japanese invaders, until city planners and Mao Zedong's Red Guards tore down the “relics of feudalism” in the 1950s and 1960s. These were the two extremes—disappearance and persistence—in the face of the aggressive forces of the West. Everything else lay in between. Elements of architecture and urban organization were combined, overlaid, mingled, and juxtaposed in narrow spaces, often in sharp contradiction with one another. The general tendency to urban modernity broke through everywhere at different points in time, but seldom entirely on Western terms.