Stealth Mesohistory for Austere Times

It’s hard these days for us moderns to make bold claims about modernity. Macrohistory looks imprecise and retains its triumpha-list bent. When its practitioners talk broadly about modernity, in particular, they can be unappealing allies, telling stories of its inception in Europe and its subsequent diffusion to other parts of the world. Even when these narratives aim simply to describe, they skew toward the normative: modernity is on balance better than what it supersedes, they imply, and the West’s first incarnations of it are generally applicable to the Rest. Scholars working in postcolonial and global frames have discredited these stories, but at the cost of pluralizing modernity into the hands of microhistorians. Although their narrow-gauge approach has virtues, it tends to give specificity and locality a near monopoly on historical rigor. The attendant loss of big narratives has deprived historians of what may have been their most effective tool for making their work intelligible to those outside the guild, and at a time when politicians and university administrators are expressing deepening doubts about the value of history as a field of study. The would-be macrohistorian might well feel caught between a profession critical of grand narratives and a public unmoved by little ones.

Distant Strangers, James Vernon’s ambitious new book, attempts to move us beyond an impasse it describes in these terms. It wants to do nothing less than make the macro possible again for history. At the book’s heart are two bold claims about modernity. First, the prime mover of modernity was not the Industrial Revolution, the rise of free markets, imperialism, secularization, urbanization, or technologization, but rather the condition of living among strangers. And second, thanks to the rapidly increasing size, density, and mobility of its population, nineteenth-century Britain was likely the first society on the planet to experience this condition. Having opened with these claims, Distant Strangers shows us in its body chapters how the emerging society of strangers prompted abstraction and bureaucratization in four areas of nineteenth-century British life: sociality, state governance, civil society, and the economy. It’s interested, too, in how the swift current of abstraction produced eddies of particularity—dialectical counter-currents that bore elements of modern life back to the charismatic, the personal, and the local.

Anyone who teaches Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd” (1840) and the writing on flânerie it induced, or who reads Thomas Malthus and Henry Mayhew and Friedrich Engels, or who sets store by Charles Dickens’s city novels, will concede that living among strangers is a key emergent condition of nineteenth-century urban modernity in Britain. But the defining condition of modernity across the board? It’s difficult to imagine how you would go about proving such a claim. Vernon brings it within the range of plausibility by skillfully marshaling evidence, from demographic charts and statistics to qualitative accounts of the urban sensorium and of newcomers to London learning to live among strangers. However, fully re-rooting modernity in the society of strangers would require further argumentation. You would need to show that the phenomena more conventionally invoked to ground theories of a singular modernity—Enlightenment, free market capitalism, industrialization, democratization, and so forth—were either inessential to modernity or causally downstream from the emergence of a society of strangers. At points Vernon says he has “purposively sidestepped the question of causation, focusing instead on how, not why, Britain became modern” (131). But elsewhere causality is very much in play, as when he “suggest[s] that the society of strangers restructured the practice of economic life”: in other words, that the society of strangers wasn’t an effect of industrialism but its cause. This is a provocative inversion of received wisdom (“Simply put, Adam Smith was wrong”), but to become more than...