August 3, 2006
The Round Number Problem Posted by Fredric Smoler at 04:45 PM EST John Steele Gordon writes “Why there should be this human fascination with flukes and big round numbers, I have no idea. It’s a question for psychologists, not historians. But there’s no more point in decrying it than in decrying any other part of human nature.” I agree that a fascination with flukes as flukes is harmless; I have been trying to suggest that a tendency to interpret flukes so that they are not flukes but signs and portents, or revelations of causal mechanisms, is not so harmless. Maybe more on that in another post, but for now, what about big round numbers?
Historians can perhaps do one thing about the fascination with big round numbers: They can try not to sign on to it, and write too easily of centuries as if those numbering units had some historical essence. Take the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, to see how this can make trouble. Does the nineteenth century make sense as an explanatory category? Is it a useful shorthand, as it was when I was a student, for the industrial revolution, or for the rise of nation states? Is the eighteenth century the age of Enlightenment, or the twentieth of mass industrialized warfare, or of totalitarianism?
The onset of the industrial revolution can plausibly be dated to the last quarter of the eighteenth century. The completion of its first phase—the mechanization of certain portions of the textile industry—has been plausibly dated to 1830. So the industrial revolution, on this account, spans roughly one quarter of one century and one quarter of another, which means that it doesn’t happily correspond to either century. And even this scheme means restricting analysis to significant parts of Britain, the Low Countries, and a smallish bit of France.
Does the spread of industrialization to large parts of the rest of Europe over the nineteenth century mean that we can on that account rest easy about the old association of the industrial revolution with that century? I don’t think so. The industrialization of China and India is a current and world-transforming event, if you think about industrialization as including the movement of a very large portion of the labor force out of the agricultural sector and into manufacturing, and an impressive rise in per capita GDP.
How about the Enlightenment? Is that one safely eighteenth century, indeed the essence of the eighteenth century? By one modern account, Enlightenment disappears as anything like a unitary category the harder you think about it; by another, it is still going on and expanding into the Islamic world and the Indian subcontinent, and if it means, among other things, secularization, it has either not hit a lot of the world at all, or is going into reverse, or is hitting now, inspiring furious reactions, but will sooner or later triumph, etc. Is the eighteenth century an age of (political) revolution? If you mean in Europe and North America, in small parts only. You can make a good or better case for either the nineteenth or twentieth centuries.
Industrialized mass warfare arguably starts in 1861, and in the West ends in 1945—once again, it spans two centuries and includes better than half of neither. What some modern historians call “the long eighteenth century” can run from Dryden to Byron, call it 1660 to 1830, and there is a very common version of the nineteenth Century, if you judge these things from the way survey courses are constructed, that lasts from 1815 until 1914.
Is speaking about centuries as if they correspond to decisive shifts more or less harmless? I’m not sure. How about a smaller round number, the decade? Were the 1960s the decade of the civil rights movement? You can make a better case for 1954 to 1965, which splits two decades nicely. What about the sixties as sex, drugs, and revolutionary student politics? You can make a decent case that such a sixties lasted from 1968 through 1973, whereas I’d guess that changing sexual mores or mass drug use considered separately would produce different spans of time, with changes in sexual mores beginning earlier, and drugs hitting big later. Feminism? That sixties arguably started in 1969. Were the fifties a dull, depressing, reactionary era? Everyone “knew” this for much of my adult life, until books began appearing eloquently arguing that this was an almost insane slander.
My hunch is that large conceptual generalizations like “Enlightenment,” ”industrial revolution,” and “military revolution” can be endlessly complicated by closer scrutiny, and when too coarsely and easily employed, admittedly do harm, but they remain indispensable. Assuming that these conceptual generalizations can be usefully associated with the units of time produced by the big round number fetish is something we would ideally do without—whether or not we can.
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