Strange Modernity

In Distant Strangers: How Britain Became Modern, James Vernon wants to ask big questions about modern British history and about the advent of the modern world more generally. For this reason alone it is worth paying attention to. If he does not put in place a new grand narrative about Britain, he at least wants to provoke us into thinking about what is distinctive about the shape and flow of its history. In doing so he also wants us to recognize that the history of nineteenth-century Britain is significant for our understanding of the societies in which we now live, even if Britain is today a place of declining importance.

Vernon’s central claim is that Britain was the first modern society—a familiar enough notion—but, more than this, that the coming of modernity to it “captures something which is a condition or process which all societies experience, albeit in their own particular ways” (xii). He wants, further, to restore the force of modernity as a useful analytic category that will give us purchase on processes that are in some ways universal, or are supposed to be.

These are bold claims, and I, for one, certainly welcome the boldness, the vigor, and the empirical detail with which he pursues his argument. However, I also think Vernon’s arguments are flawed and, in some ways, deeply so.

There is no question that modernity is an important but difficult notion to work with, for we are always modern in relation to the past but are always also on the way to somewhere else. This has been one of the central problems of Western social, political, and historical thought since the Enlightenment. While there was not and cannot be universal agreement about its characteristics or dynamics, there has been a broad consensus that the modern was to be distinguished in some way from the traditional: that we are now modern (be it the modern of commercial society in the eighteenth century or the high point of modernism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries); that there was something restless and new about being modern; and often, if not always, that to be modern was a desirable condition. Though there has been no universal agreement about the central features of modernity, we might, for instance, describe it in terms largely derived from a Marxist tradition, yet in ways which would be familiar to those of a Weberian inclination, or to those who look to historians such as Fernand Braudel. We can, for instance, include the following aspects:

First, the development of capitalism, or socioeconomic formations which rested on the development of global exchange; the extensive growth of production and consumption of commodities for local, national, and international markets; the ownership of private property; and the expanded accumulation and reproduction of capital and new forms of labor use, not only of wage-labor but also of coerced and unfree labor, including slavery.

Second, emerging nation-states were also created and sustained by new kinds of imperial formation. With them came new forms of state and political power. And while the engines of these new imperial formations were initially located primarily in western Europe, their development extended to include, among other places, the North American states.

Third, the decline of social formations resting on relatively fixed social hierarchies and the development of new forms of social hierarchical relations of class, gender, race, and ethnicity and the development of associated forms of identity including those of national belonging and cultural difference.

Fourth, the relative decline of religious cultures, the advent of secular outlooks and associated cultures and ideologies of materialism, individualism, and rationalism.¹

Central to this variety of critical positions, which Vernon surveys in his first chapter, has been the explanation not only of how the modern world came about and how it can be described, but also of what forces drove these processes. So too the question of time has been of paramount importance: when did modernity emerge? For some, it was with the growth of commercial society, identified by Adam Smith and others in the eighteenth century. For others, like Karl Marx, the...