The Distant Magnet After Twenty-Five Years: An Essay in Self-Criticism

Abstract

When, in September 1971, I published The Distant Magnet, I planned a personal synthesis, supplemented by small pieces of my own research. I was not taking up a position in any controversy, nor was I engaging in polemic with any other scholar. Yet I did intend some change of emphasis, and in particular I wanted to stress Europe more than anyone had done since Marcus Hansen. I sought realism in the description of travel conditions, rather than dwelling on the wholly exceptional horrors of 1847. I demonstrated how foreign was America's working class. I stressed the American conditions common to all immigrants, rather than the differences between ethnic groups. I showed how British capitalism, supplemented by that of France, Belgium, and, later, Germany, opened up overseas areas and at the same time undermined, further and further eastwards, Europe's peasant economies. I had in mind the impact of factory competition and railway construction in eroding the secondary occupations on which so many peasants depended. In other words, I asserted that the modernization of a small corner of Europe was responsible, to use old-fashioned language, for both “push” and “pull.” To restrict length, and to acknowledge my own shortcomings, I omitted the Colonial period, and also all Hispanic and Oriental migrations – and, of course, before World War II these latter were not very big.