See economic history of Europe for my earlier notes

China and Europe

In the greater scheme of things, the growth of the European economy in the early middle ages derives, to a
considerable extent, from the Atlantic economy. However, this Atlantic economy generated the silver and
gold that allowed for the purchase of Asian products.

The Middle Classes and Economic Transformation

Sociology and the Rise of the Middle Classes

For Watt, the external, non-formal forces at work in the rise of the novel are weakly explained by the
perennial “rise of the middle class.” A (permanently) emerging middle denotes a change in the nature of the
socially extended power relations that derive from changed economic circumstances. In particular, the
emergence of a pious, educated class beneath the aristocracy and hostile to the principles embodied in birth
right actively seek a representation of their own values and experience. In place of tragedy and romance was
to be found a picture of meritocratic self-advancement as a reward for pious self-discipline.

If this class based approach is perhaps a concession to Marxist informed class analysis – with Watt aligning
himself somewhere towards the position of a Raymond Williams on the left of an academic environment
otherwise dominated by F.R. Leavis and New Criticism – the economic factors discussed are essentially
those of the market place. As such, Watt’s description of the rise of the novel remains indebted to the type of
sociological analysis undertaken by Q.D. Leavis albeit an analysis that was substantially enlarged, no doubt,
by personal encounters with figures such as Parsons and Adorno in the United States. Class here is not so
much the embodiment of the conflicting interests of capital and labour as it is a matter of the sort of socio-
economic categories used by marketeers in analysing market segments.

Once the assumptions have been made that a) the novel form per se rejects aristocratic romance – and hence
is realistic in relation to a Quixotic ideal – and b) that the motive for this is the middle class reading public’s
desire to see their values and attitudes reflected back to them, then it is difficult to include non-realistic prose
in the equation.

(see article on MacKay and Watt in LRB)

It is possible to see Watt’s The Rise of the Novel as being a response to emerging structuralism – Watt was
fluent in French and represents an early awareness of and reaction to structuralism– or perhaps more
accurately as a response to the post-War linguistic turn taken by philosophy. In this respect, the novel is
understood as dealing with precisely those elements in discourse that structuralism did not take into account:

a) it is concerned with a referent or more generally with the production of language in a given social
context. Watt does not take the ordinary language philosophy that developed in the wake of the second
Wittgenstein and Austin’s distinction between constatives and performatives into account.

b) it emphasises the role of (human) agents. However, the main economic mechanism is that of
supply and demand (with the novel being the result of a demand-led movement on the part of an emerging
reading public who desired to see representations of themselves in the world).

Even today, this week sociological account survives in contemporary accounts of the “rise of the novel” or,
what amounts to the same thing for Watt, the rise of novelistic realism.

The idea of the "rise of the novel" in the 18th century is especially associated with Ian Watt's important study
The Rise of the Novel (1957). However, what happened in the 18th century is not so much the rise of the
novel, but rather the rise of realism in fiction, which is what Ian Watt sees as distinguishing the novel from
earlier prose narratives.

By around 1700, fiction was no longer a predominantly aristocratic entertainment, and printed books had
soon gained the power to reach readers of almost all classes, though the reading habits differed and to follow
fashions remained a privilege.

In the 18th century, the appearance of newspapers and magazines attracted a large number of readers from
the middle class. These new readers had little interest in the romances and the tragedies which had interested
the upper class.

Thus need for new type of literature rose that would express the new ideas of the 18 th century and this new
type of literature was none but novel. In the 18thcentury, women of upper classes and the middle classes
could partake in a few activities of men. However, with the rise of the public sphere and with the spread of
education, a certain taste for reading novels developed among women.

The group of the first four novelists of the Augustan Age or Neo-classical age: Richardson, Smollett,
Fielding and Sterne, in whose hands Novel blossomed, are called the four pillars of the English novel.

A first sketch of the structural or paradigmatic relations that are at work enables a more sophisticated account
of the social, political and economic context, on the one hand, critical examination of the notions of
paradigm and episteme (Foucault), on the other hand.

The Rise of London and the Geographical Distribution of Forces

Spectacular Growth of London

Economic expansion over the course of the seventeenth century – as this involved the growth of London as a
commercial and economic centre – was spectacular. For Shakespeare – when he deals with the economics of
global trade in The Merchant of Venice – the action is situated not in the relative backwater of London but
rather in a distant Venice. However, Shakespeare is writing at the end of the Mediterranean Renaissance
rather than its beginning.

By the end of the seventeenth century, London, now at the centre of a trading and colonial empire that could
rival that of the Dutch, the Portuguese and the Spanish, was a subject of direct interest in itself, casting the
Italian City States into the deep shadow that they were to remain in for the rest of the modern period in
English speaking fiction.

During the Renaissance, the European economy grew dramatically,

particularly in the area of trade.
Developments such as
population growth, improvements in banking,
expanding trade routes, and new manufacturing systems
led to an overall increase in commercial activity.

Feudalism*, which had been widespread in the Middle Ages, gradually disappeared,
and early forms of capitalism* emerged.
The changes affected many aspects of European society,
forcing people to adapt to different kinds of work
and new ways of doing business with others.

Between 1550 and 1650 northern Europe replaced Italy

as the centre of the continent's economic activity.
The growth of the cities of Amsterdam and London
during this period reflects that change.
In 1500 Amsterdam, under Spanish rule, had some 11,000 residents.
After expelling the Spanish 78 years later,
the city's economy and population both grew rapidly.
 Amsterdam had 50,000 residents in 1600
and a population of 150,000 by 1650
It became one of the most important commercial centres in northern Europe.

London experienced similarly explosive growth.

A city of 100,000 in 1500,
London doubled in size by 1600 and doubled again by 1650.
By that date it had 400,000 inhabitants and was the largest city in western Europe.

An interesting feature of the development of the novel in the eighteenth century is that – at least in the
academically consecrated canon – the narrative of the novel’s emergence and development foregrounds
writing that remains with a largely English setting. However, what replaces the novel of adventure,
exploration and the encounter with the exotic is the country house novel from Richardson to Austin.

London, Communications Networks and the Civil War

The British Civil War has conventionally been seen in terms of a class division and, perhaps, more
interestingly a regional division. This, however, supposes a different understanding of class, one that is less a
matter of different market segments and their consumption patterns and less the social excrescence brought
about by changing relations between capital and labour.

From the perspective of class division, a bourgeoisie (in alliance with sections of lower gentry and
commercially minded aristocrats) make use of Parliament in order to restrict aristocratic and monarchical
privilege. In the process, they lay the grounds for the early demise of Stuart absolutism, displacing the centre
of power from the court to Parliament. However, this is not an immediate effect: the real constitutional
changes are delayed two further generations. As a result, it is the period from the Glorious Revolution to the
Hanoverian succession that represent the real sea change, ushering in a very early form of parliamentary
democracy.

For this class division – these changed relations between capital and labour to come about supposes that
there is a class that wishes to adapt government policy (including in the conduct of war) and legislation –
including by simply deregulating markets – in their own interests. This, in turn, supposes changes in the
economic organisation of society – as this can be analysed in terms of regional developments (with, for
example, the industrial revolution taking place in relation to the location of coal fields) – that represent a
radical departure from the relations that had prevailed under feudal arrangements.

Communications networks – which for the industrial revolution included the development of the railways,
for instance – are important factors in developments of this sort.
A regional map of the social divisions found during the Civil War period easily detects a divide between the
North West of the country, on the one hand, and the South East of the country, on the other hand.

London, the Country and the Reformation

If the late seventeenth century and early eighteenth century novel is thus constituted in relation to a context
that is supplied by the process of forging a British trading empire, the first observation that can be made
about Bunyan’s fiction is that all of this universe – one that is also a fundamental motor in generating the
modern world – is simply absent. The world that is glimpsed in Bunyan’s fiction is not all that different from
that in which Chaucer’s protagonists moved.

This would suggest that Bunyan’s intellectual and experiential horizons remained profoundly enrooted in a
traditional society and that, surprisingly, they also depended on still active elements of traditional, Catholic
social belief and practice.

In a manner comparable to the reception of Christianity in pagan societies – where a syncretic form of
religious belief combining pagan and Christian elements is found – the hypothesis here is that ordinary social
existence in England integrated Protestantism into traditional forms of religious practice and belief in a
relatively uncritical manner. It is odd, for example, that a figure as well-versed as he was in the theological
controversies of the day should combine Calvinist theology with pilgrimage (which, after all, entails a
religion of works).

This suggests that the penetration and engagement of the broad mass of the British population with the
precepts of Protestantism was less the effect of the sixteenth century and more the ideological turmoil of the
British Civil War, a war in which religion, as is so often the case, represented a powerful catalyst in the
polarising of opinion across territorial and class divides. The central Protestant emphasis on the Bible, a
fideistic theology of grace that is separated from merit and a marked, individually self-determining and anti-
authoritarian strain are all present in Bunyan but they are found in a parochial environment that still descends
directly from the Middle Ages.

a) Social relations, for instance, are figured in quasi-feudal terms although Christian’s lack of
deference towards nominally socially superior individuals encountered on the way is a peculiar characteristic
of the driven, angst-ridden, largely solitary Protestant, Everyman hero.

b) the world in which Bunyan’s Christian moves remains profoundly “enchanted” (by contrast with
the disenchantment that takes place with the Enlightenment).
At the same time, in this transitional text, there are elements in The PP that not only anticipate but lay the
ground for Defoe’s fiction. The Protestantism of the central protagonist is a factor but so too are a) the fact
that the narrative concerning a single, central protagonist has been successfully extended by means of
successive episodes within a single questing narrative to book length and b), the development of the plot
around a conversion narrative (a moment of crisis in which the individual recounts a before and after in his
or her life with the before being that of the miserable sinner and the after of the potentially justified
evangelist). The relevance of the conversion narrative to Defoe is particularly evident.

For Bunyan, it is still quite possible to travel without moving – The PP, after all, is a dream vision – but
whether imaginary or represented realistically, the object of travel is significant. The goal of Christian’s
pilgrimage is not Canterbury, Rome or Jerusalem but rather, not insignificantly, London. Metaphor operates
on the paradigmatic axis in the use of language and the generation of discourse. Allegory involves a
systematic metaphorical shift from the concrete or literal to the ideologically constituted. A road stands for
the “journey of life” so that an allegory is the events that take place as the individual – in this case the
Christian – journeys at once along the road and through life.

In this respect, Christian’s travelling towards the Celestial City is a voyage towards an after-life but, on the
concrete rather than theological level, that Bunyan chooses the destination London as a substitute for Heaven
is significant and already represents a considerable disenchantment of the old Catholic world.