History
5: Lecture 20
Nineteenth Century Culture and its Critics
Introduction
• Distinctive character of 19th c. culture is the aspiration
to replace religious faith with the certainties of science. B y 1890s
the mid-Victorian certainties appeared illusory and problematical.
I Nineteenth century culture
• Five themes: secularization; emergence of science; importance
of historical thinking; search for systems of thought and knowledge;
new intellectual challenges
• Institutional setting: intense and extensive institutionalization
and professionalization of culture in all its forms-development of
theaters, museums, scholarly enterprises, academic disciplines, and
publishing. New public sphere, which is neither princely court nor
traditional community. These new forms and ways of organizing people
and spaces both reflect and strengthen social norms and ideals.
• 19th c culture tries to be universal, available to all; ideals
of freedom of thought and expression
II Secularization
• Secularization of high culture, previously inseparable from
religious values.Sociologist Max Weber called it ”the disenchantment
of the world”.
• Religion does not disappear from social and political life.
Decline relative, not absolute- many new churches continue to be built;
arguments between Church and State, Catholics and Protestants flourish
• Key change: religion no longer an accepted fact of cultural
life but a problem-something to be analyzed, explained, defended or
attacked. Efforts to find a substitute for the religious basis of
society and culture.
III Science
• Many see science as replacement for religion: positivism of
Auguste Comte (1798-1857); T.H.Huxley-science as foundation for moral
values.
• Major discoveries in biology and genetics; Gregor Mendel (1822-1884);
Louis Pasteur (1822-1895); Charles Darwin (1809-1882) On the Origin
of Species (1859)
• Impact on society and culture: doctrine of Social Darwinism
- “survival of the fittest” as characteristic of all activities
(Herbert Spencer 1820-1903); Samuel Smiles (1812-1904) Self Help (1859)
IV History
• Secularization and awareness of rapidity of social, economic
and political change promotes search for grand historical narratives
based on a scientific approach to data. National histories prioritized
; Marx, Leopold von Ranke and T.B .Macaulay. History as popular subject
for artists and novelists.
V Systems
• 19th.c is last great age of the intellectual system-grand
syntheses that seek to embrace all reality in a single coherent explanatory
order.
• Comte sees himself as completing vast enterprise begin by
Bacon, Descartes, and Galileo; G.W.F Hegel (1770-1831) is last European
philosopher to assemble in a single system logic, history, theology,
philosophy, morality and law; Marx believed he had discovered the
law of development of human history.
VI Challenges
• The scientific challenge: advances in physical sciences: x-rays,
radioactivity, electron, Relativity Theory (Albert Einstein, 1879-1955)
undermine Newtonian system.
• Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) and new science of psychology brings
a new relativity in to judgments of human behavior.
• Modernist challenge: Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900); Georges
Sorel (1847-1922)
Conclusion
• Challenges to mainstream culture and science by questioning
the validity of the quest for a system create a sense of “the
fragmentary and problematic character of modern life”.
History 5: Lecture
21
The New Imperialism
“When I was a little chap I had a passion for maps. I would look for hours at South America, or Africa or Australia and lose myself in the glories of exploration. At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting on a map…I would put my finger on it and say, ‘When I grew up I will go there’ (Marlow in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, 1902)
Introduction
• What’s new about the new imperialism?
• Stages in the history of European expansion: 1) 1492-1650;
2) 1650-1815; 3) 1870-1900
• New imperialism in the context of 19thc state building, nation-building
and Europe’s “creation of a world in its own image”
(Marx)
• European empires changed the face of the 19th.c world
II Theories of Imperialism
• Economic: capitalism:
i) Non-Marxist (J.A.Hobson, Imperialism, 1902); Cecil Rhodes and the
Boer War (1899-1902)
ii) Marxist (V.I Lenin, Imperialism, 1917); finance capitalism and
the “new mercantilism”: big business +government
• Political: international rivalry and nationalism:
i) The European balance of power 17-19th.c
ii) The “Eastern Question” and the colonies in the 1880s
iii) Imperialism and the ideologies of nationalism post-1871
iv) Berlin Congo Conference (1885) and the scramble for Africa
III.Ideologies and Actors within the New Imperialism
1)“Opening Africa”; the case of David Livingstone
in Southeast Africa (1840s-1860s) and H.M.Stanley, How I Found Livingstone
(1872)
• Exoticism: geographic discovery
• Missionary activity:
• Jingoism and mass media in the late 19th century
2) ” The scramble for Africa”: groups that support and
back imperialist projects: military personnel and civil service bureaucrats;
imperialist associations (Imperial Federation League in Britain, Colonial
French Union, etc)
3) Ideologies:
• Social Darwinism and the invention of anthropology as a discipline:
the idea of evolutionism, both physical (phrenology) and socio-cultural
• “The civilizing mission” and the” White
Man’s Burden” (Rudyard Kipling, 1898)
• European culture and the representation of the African as
“Other”; the other as child; the other as ‘worker”
Conclusions
• Industry and technology make possible the globalization of
European capitalism
• Political and cultural motives as important as economic ones:
“ creation of the world in its own image”
• Imperialism=globalization of European nationalist rivalry
• European empires changed the face of the world: legacy both
good and ill is all around us: impractical and divisive national frontiers,
post-colonial ethnic tensions; English as a world language, parliamentary
democracy and liberal capitalism, the concepts of an impartial judiciary
and the rule of law.