People came to realise that there was something basic – even mysterious – about statistics. The very notion of a normal distribution, of the average man, meant that men and women behaved, to an extent, according to the logic of numbers. For example, although any individual murder was unpredictable, crime statistics revealed a regularity, even a stability – from year to year – in how many murders were committed and, more or less, where. Durkheim had observed the same thing with suicide. What did this say about the complexities of modern life, that such patterns should lie hidden? ‘Statistics therefore appeared to be the means by which the study of social facts is made as objective and as precise as the study of physical facts, and the means by which social science, like physical science, uncovers general laws.’ Such ideas provided hope for those who believed that ‘the competitive system . . . must be reconstructed for the general welfare’, that there should be state intervention to cushion at least some of the damage inflicted by raw industrialism.53 This was one of the core beliefs of the Fabian Society, founded in London in 1883–1884, and of the London School of Economics and Political Science, where sociology was taught from 1903.54
But, as we saw in Chapter 17, the development of measurement, the increase in accuracy, and the rise of quantitative thought, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, was one of the factors that led to the modern West, and a further leap forward in this regard took place in Victorian times. A final influence here came in the form of Edwin Chadwick, who insisted that one particular question, ‘cause of death’, be included in government surveys.55 Chadwick was the researcher, the ‘commissioner for fact’, on two royal commissions (on the Poor Law, and on the sanitary conditions of labour) and, thanks to him, the Victorian mania for counting was consolidated (the statistics collected for the Poor Law Commission filled fifteen volumes). Chadwick’s most shocking figure was that, out of 77,000 paupers studied, no fewer than 14,000 had been made poor by catching fever.56 This correlation thus identified a problem that no one had imagined existed before and which, to an extent, is still with us. Chadwick identified, and published, such damning figures as the increasing death rate in industrial towns, which had doubled in ten years, and showed that, in poor areas, there was a ‘usually inaccessible privy’ for an average of 120 – yes, 120 – people.57
These figures outraged many among the Victorian middle classes, playing a part in the development of modern politics (the establishment of the Labour Party, for example). At the same time, still other Victorians thought that the urge to count and measure was a form of control. The historian G. M. Young wrote ‘It has been suggested to me that the Railway timetable did much to discipline the people at large.’58 But in a mass society, statistics were a necessity and, far from being a controlling factor, proved for many people to be a form of freedom. To the Victorians, statistics were exciting, both philosophically, for what they revealed about determinacy and indeterminacy in collective life, and practically, for the help they gave government in the new – and often grim – metropolises. Nowadays, for most people, statistics have become dry and have completely lost the exciting ring that they once had. Even so, modern society, not least the idea of the welfare state, is unthinkable without them.
33
The Uses and Abuses of Nationalism and Imperialism
In 1648, more than 150 years after the discovery of the Indies, and of America, the Treaty of Westphalia was finally concluded. This brought to an end the Thirty Years War, when Protestant and Catholic nations had fought themselves to a standstill over how to interpret God’s intentions. They agreed that, from now on, each state would be left free to pursue its own inclination. So much blood had been shed, for ideas that could never be settled one way or the other, that a ‘toleration of exhaustion’ seemed the only way forward.1 However, it was impossible to avoid the fact that there were several uncomfortable consequences which followed from this new state of affairs. For one, the papacy was sidelined; Spain and Portugal lost power, and the centre of gravity of Europe moved north, to France, England and the newly independent United Netherlands.2 But by now it had become clear that the globe was bigger, more varied and more recalcitrant than the first explorers had anticipated and this brought about a change in sensitivity in the northern nations, whose very existence had been confirmed by the outcome of the Thirty Years War. Instead of the outright conquest of other peoples, which had brought Spain such vilification for its treatment of the American ‘Indians’, the northern nations were more interested in trade and commerce. (Only around a quarter of the Spanish and Portuguese migrants to pre-independence Latin America were women, whereas British settlers in North America were encouraged to bring their wives and children. As a result, far fewer British migrants took sexual partners from the indigenous population.) This change in feeling, between the early ‘Catholic’ attitude and the later ‘Protestant’ one, had a great deal to do with the fact that new mercantile classes were replacing the traditional military and landowning aristocracies as the main political force. There was thus an intellectual and moral basis in this development: commerce was believed to be a civilising and humanising force, for both parties. ‘Commerce was not simply the exchange of goods, it involved contact and tolerance.’3
Crucial here were the Protestant countries, Britain and Holland. Each had a strong tradition of trading and, as countries which had achieved religious tolerance at some cost, they had no wish to inflict the same sin on the populations they found in distant lands. If they could, they would rescue these ‘primitives’ from paganism, as a subsidiary aim of trading, but they would not use force.4
If anything, Britain was now more important in this regard than Holland. Britain had her American colonies and, after the Seven Years War with France, she had emerged as the most powerful of the maritime nations. But the seven-year campaign had driven her into massive debt and it was her attempt to make good her financial losses, through taxation of the American colonies, combined with the government’s flat refusal to allow these colonies any direct representation in Parliament, that finally brought on the War of Independence (though the levels of taxation in the American colonies were quite low compared with those in Britain).5 This was not a foregone conclusion but, at the same time, for many people, in Britain and elsewhere, it was only too clear that colonisation could never work in the long run. Experience was to show that either the colonies became dependent, and then a drain, on the metropolitan countries or, once they showed signs of becoming economically self-sufficient, they wanted to go their own way. One of Adam Smith’s most pertinent predictions was that free Americans would prove better trading partners than as colonised subjects. Niall Ferguson says that there is good reason to believe that by 1770 New Englanders were ‘about the wealthiest people in the world’.