Urbanisation, Population Mobility and the Evolution of Cultural Prejudice: Some Speculations on the Geography of Ignorance and the Growth of National Identity

Abstract

The paper addresses issues raised by Langton and Hoppe (1983; 1988) regarding the crude and ultimately barren dichotomy between town and country which underpins much analysis of economic process in Early Modern Europe. It is argued that a fresh perspective is offered by a reading of cultural history which allows a different interpretation of changing aspects of the relationship between core areas and their peripheries. A case is made for regarding emergent prime cities as centres not just of power but of bourgeois cultural value and that this became more significant at the moment when the bourgeois fraction of the population achieved a critical mass for the generation of prejudice against an older, more classless, popular culture. At this point there was a crucial separation of popular from polite culture in the minds of a new urban elite and a redefinition of value along lines which emphasised differences between urban and rural, enlightenment and ignorance, order and disorder, centre and periphery. France represents the apogee of cultural bureaucracy and a centralised sense of value. Here the new bourgeois culture was instrumented through a spatial hierarchy of settlements and the communication system. It has been reinforced in public consciousness by notions like the North-South (St. Malo-Geneva) divide. This bourgeois prejudice, which still influences scholarship, ignores the significance of migration as a powerful positive force in nation-making. Attention is drawn to the function of migration in creating backward and forward cultural linkages. These work to break down some of the worst manifestations of this spurious process of bourgeois acculturation with its perceptual hierarchies and dichotomies.

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