As if to offer proof that God has chosen us to accomplish a special mission, there was invented in our land a marvelous new and subtle art, the art of printing.
—Johann Sleidan (1542)
Religion in 1600 presents a grim face. . . . Prickly, defensive, gladiatorial debates were conducted endlessly between theologians who seldom if ever met and who wrote in prose intelligible only to their own kind. Lutheran, Calvinist, and Catholic armies were poised within a few decades to lacerate each other on the battlefields of central Europe.
—Euan Cameron
In the eighteenth century, Voltaire described the Holy Roman Empire as "neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire." This was not the first time the empire had failed to live up to its billing. Since the day in A.D. 800 when the pope crowned Charlemagne, emperors had sometimes differed with popes over who was in charge, and the ensuing dustups typically left neither party looking very holy. And, holiness aside, the emperor’s authority was often less than imperial, thanks to uppity feudal lords. By Voltaire’s time, what clout the emperor did possess was confined to German lands. In the early years of the following century, the empire expired altogether.
This raises a question. Why, after Europe’s recovery from the disarray of the early Middle Ages, did empire never lastingly return? After all, the prosperity of the late Middle Ages restored the logic behind large-scale government. With commerce once again a long-distance affair, commensurately broad governance could ease and protect it. Besides, with war as popular as ever, big states should in theory have swallowed little states ad nauseam. Also favoring large polities was that eternal force of history, the egos of rulers. Yet all imperial designs—the Hapsburgs’, Napoleon’s—ultimately failed. And it wasn’t just western Europe that seems to have grown resistant to lasting conquest. Southeast Europe meanwhile freed itself from the long-redoubtable Ottoman Empire. More recently, Russia’s imperial dominance of eastern Europe lasted a mere half-century.
Obviously, as the previous topic suggested, the absence of lasting empire in recent centuries has something to do with Europe’s being a crazy quilt of different languages. But that can’t be the whole story. The eastern half of the Roman Empire had been quite multilingual, but it endured imperial rule for centuries. By Voltaire’s day, something had changed, making linguistic boundaries more formidable. The political model that had prevailed across much of Eurasia in A.D. 100—large, multilingual empires—was becoming an endangered species in Europe. It would also falter in the Near East and, eventually, in much of Asia. Why?
To try to account for such a complex and momentous change with a single explanation would be foolhardy. But let’s try anyway: the printing press. At least, let’s examine the possibility that the press, more than any other factor, rendered vast multilingual empires unwieldy to the point of being unworkable.
There are other reasons to spend a topic dwelling on the press. Not for nothing have some historians used Gutenberg’s first movable-type press, circa 1450, a the official starting point of Europe’s "modern era," that half-millennium of brisk change that got us where we are today. The printing press helped overhaul religious thought and ushered in both the scientific and industrial revolutions. In so doing, it hastened the coming of other world-changing information technologies—telegraph, telephone, computer, Internet. In 1450, most Europeans would have laughed at the notion of a single, intricately woven global civilization (and perhaps at the notion of a globe). Yet already they possessed the basic machinery for creating this world.
The press did more than pave the way for the information technologies that today are revolutionizing life; it foreshadowed them. In its specific, sometimes paradoxical effects, the print revolution parallels the latest phase of the microelectronics revolution. Indeed, there is no better historical preparation for thinking about how the Internet will reshape political and social life than seeing how the printing press reshaped them. The late modern era—today—is in many ways the early modern era, only more so.
TECHNOLOGIES OF PROTEST
When history topics note the importance of the printing press, they often emphasize its role as a purveyor of pure, clear knowledge. By stressing the enlightening aspects of the press, they are buying into the view of human progress that prevailed in the eighteenth century (known, not coincidentally, as an enlightenment-era view). In this view, the source of history’s directionality is intellectual advance—scientific, technical, political, moral. Over time, people build better machines, better governments, better societies, better moral codes; they rationally discern the good and rationally achieve it. Condorcet, the iconic enlightenment-era progressivist, envisioned a time when elitism and prejudice would dissolve in a sea of virtue and wisdom. (Now that would be progress.)
Obviously, intellectual, even moral, progress does happen—and the printing press did its share to further them. But, as we’ve seen, information technologies are instruments not just of enlightenment but of power. In ancient times, writing had bestowed power; when literacy spread, power spread beyond a tiny elite. With the printing press, and its proliferation, came another episode in the decentralization of power. And, though this power sometimes rested on enlightenment, there was no necessary connection between the two.
One way to see this distinction is to look at the press’s role in the Protestant Reformation. There are two basic stories about how the printing press fostered the Reformation. The first is that it brought Bibles within reach of laypeople, allowing them to get their religious instruction from the source and thus form their own opinions about church doctrine, with no coaching from the pope. This story is especially popular among Protestants, and there is some truth to it.
But the more generally important story is the one hidden in the word "Protestant." The printing press lubricated protest. It did so by lowering the cost of reaching and mobilizing a large audience. Before the invention of printing, publishing en masse had been hard unless you could afford the upkeep on, say, a few dozen monasteries full of scribes. (For a student in Lombardy during the fifteenth century, just before the coming of movable type, the price of a law book was more than a year’s living costs.) Now, with printing cheap, an eloquent agitator with a catchy idea could occupy center stage.
Martin Luther, a theologian of modest prominence, affixed his critique of Catholic doctrine to the door of Wittenberg’s All Saints Church on October 31, 1517, and within weeks three separate editions were rolling off the presses in three cities. A sixteenth-century writer observed: "It almost appeared as if the angels themselves had been their messengers and brought them before the eyes of all the people." Luther expressed shock at the sudden currency of his thought and agreed that the new technology had the earmarks of divinity; printing was "God’s highest and extremest act of grace, whereby the business of the Gospel is driven forward."
Of course, the pope had a different view on whether the Gospel, rightly perceived, was being driven forward. And here we see the problem with stressing the "enlightening" aspects of the press. Given the subjective nature of theological judgment, it will forever be debatable whether the press, in promulgating Luther’s theses, was furthering human knowledge. What is not debatable is that the press was sending signals that aroused and helped organize a particular community of interest.
The same distinction holds today. When lobbyists use a more recent technological advance—computerized mass mailing—to target a narrow interest group, the mailings may or may not contain truth; often, in fact, they exaggerate the threat that this or that policy poses to the audience. Nonetheless, they succeed in mobilizing the audience, getting it to cough up donations, or to fax senators, or whatever. These mass mailings— fact or argument, true or false—are signals that give energy and cohesion and thus power to a community of interest that might otherwise be amorphous and powerless.
An information technology constitutes, among other things, a nervous system for social organisms—organizations of clergy, say, or organizations of heretics. The better the nervous system, the more agile the organism. For centuries before Luther, as one scholar has observed, the church hierarchy had "easily won every war against heresy in western Europe because it always had better internal lines of communication than its challengers." The press changed that, chipping away at the pope’s spiritual authority.
By the same logic, the press chipped away at secular authority. In fact, the two forms of rebellion sometimes fused. In 1524, German peasants revolted, demanding an end to serfdom. Some rebel leaders had been inspired by Luther’s teachings, including Lutheran pamphlets that held up the earnest, hardworking peasant as symbol for the simple purity of ideal Christian life. The peasants also emulated Luther’s use of the press, publishing a list of twelve grievances.
As it happened, their hero let them down, siding with the ruling class. To argue against serfdom, Luther wrote, was "dead against the Gospel." After all, "Did not Abraham and other patriarchs and prophets have slaves?"
Still, try a Luther might to confine his radicalism to theology, the cleavages within Christendom that the Reformation revealed would time and again turn out to coincide with political fault lines. The "wars of religion" that racked Europe in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were also war of politics. In the Netherlands, Calvinists fought to loosen the yoke of their distant and oppressive Catholic ruler Philip II, the Hapsburg king of Spain. In various German states, Protestants struggled for states’ rights against the Holy Roman Emperor. By the mid-seventeenth century, the Netherlands was free from Hapsburg control, and the Holy Roman Empire was effectively dead. A primary cause was the centrifugal force of the printing press. The press mobilized religious dissent and political dissent, and often the two worked in synergy.
Still, to call the press a wholly fragmenting, decentralizing force would be to oversimplify. Instruments of efficient communication are tools for mobilizing groups that have something in common—a political aspiration, a religious belief, a language, whatever. If the commonality implies opposition to a central authority, as it did for Luther’s followers, the result can be fragmentation, or at least a diffusion of power. But if the group’s common bond stretches across existing boundaries, bridging prior chasms, the effect can be to glue fragments together, to aggregate power.
A good example is that mixed blessing of the modern age, the shared national sentiment that—especially in its more intense, self-conscious forms—is known as nationalism. This sinewy sentiment, if used deftly by a politician, can erode the power of local rulers, expanding authority. The result—a centrally governed and culturally coherent region bound by a sense of shared heritage, shared interest, and shared destiny—is the nation-state. We take nation-states for granted today, but they didn’t always exist. To understand the printing press’s role in their evolution, we need to first understand the forces that were encouraging this evolution well before the press arrived on the European scene.
PESKY NOBLES
The roots of the European nation-state can be seen at least as far back as the twelfth century, in the ongoing economic recovery from the "dark ages." Though towns had gained a measure of freedom from rural dominance, liberating commerce locally, the landscape was still strewn with obstacles to long-distance exchange. The main problem was the motliness of feudal government. Laws and regulations differed from place to place, jurisdictions overlapped, and disputes, even battles, cropped up between neighboring lords, or between town and country.
In this atmosphere, a monarch could win gratitude by performing the public service of harmonizing law and settling disputes. Indeed, by bringing trust and predictability to the system, he could unlock enough economic non-zero-sumness to pay his salary in the form of taxes. Describing the general drift toward centralization in the late medieval and early modern period, E. L. Jones has written, "In return for a lion’s share of the small productive surplus, the ruler supplied justice." As early as the end of the twelfth century, this implicit social contract between monarchs and locals had laid the rudiments of England’s modern justice system and had brought new concord and homogeneity to France, paving the way for the peaceful, stable prosperity of the thirteenth century.
In essence, what was happening was the oldest story in the topic: as commerce expands, governance follows, clearing the way for smoother and stronger commerce. The fourteenth century would bring various disruptions—notably the plague—but in the fifteenth century this trend toward national political organization would resume.
Indeed, the change is sometimes attributed largely to a single technological development. With the big cast-iron cannons of the fifteenth century, "great men could no longer brave the challenges of their rulers from behind the walls of their castles," as one single-volume world history puts it.
Any story repeated by as many historians as the cannon story must hold some truth, but as usually told it obscures as much as it reveals. In particular, it downplays the question of why kings could afford so many cannons, and so many troops to accompany them. The answer is that kings taxed the townspeople. And why were the townspeople willing to pay taxes that would be used to blow away nobles? Because the nobles were among the aforementioned obstacles to commerce; they engaged in marauding and petty warfare that complicated the life of people who wanted to stick with the business of business. As the historians R. R. Palmer and Joel Colton put it: "The middle class was willing to pay taxes in return for peace." By waging war against the reactionary nobility, the monarchs were waging peace—one of their obligations under their implied contract with taxpaying urban merchants.
This is the real story behind the centralization of national rule in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries: commerce demanded nationwide harmony, and subsidized the extinction of impediments to it. The particular instruments of extinction—the cannons— are largely beside the point. If they hadn’t existed, the merchants’ money would have gone to buy some other form of military might that would have spelled equally certain doom for the pesky nobles.A large part of the answer is that the king had commerce—non-zero-sumness—on his side, and the nobles didn’t. In the great non-zero-sum games of history, if you’re part of the problem, you’ll likely be a victim of the solution.
NATIONAL SINEWS
The press reinforced the drive toward national rule in two ways. First, it unified the cultural base of large swaths of land, standardizing custom and mythology and, above all, language. In the late Middle Ages, the scholar Adam Watson has written, "one dialect shaded almost imperceptibly into the next, the Romance languages from the Low Countries to Portugal and Sicily and the Germanic from Holland to Vienna." The press changed that, tamping down dialectical differences, creating large blocks of mutual intelligibility—"unified fields of exchange and communication," as the political scientist Benedict Anderson has called them.
Second, the press began to foster a kind of day-to-day national consciousness. By the early 1500s, single-topic "news pamphlets" were harmonizing English sentiment, reporting on battles, disasters, celebrations. In the ensuing centuries, as journals and true newspapers evolved, the printing press would give more and more fiber to national feeling. Whole states would become, in Anderson’s terminology, "imagined communities."
The symbiotic development of printing and nationhood differed from place to place. For the French and the English, it was in the context of an already distinct and growing national organization that the press made its mark. Among central European peoples—the Italians, the Germans—national rule wouldn’t arrive until the nineteenth century, so the press, and strong national sentiment, didn’t just consolidate the nation-state, but paved the way for it.
Even here, within central Europe, different nations followed somewhat different paths. The German states, their leaders reluctant to surrender local sovereignty, were united by Bismarck via war and intimidation. Italian unification, while not wholly peaceful, was closer to a voluntary conglomeration. But whatever the route, the printing press figured crucially—via newspapers (which had proliferated wildly during the eighteenth century); polemical journals (such as Joseph Mazzini’s Young Italy); popular books (Grimm’s Fairy Tales created a national German folklore); and weighty tomes (especially German ones romanticizing the idea of a unique national character, a Volksgeist—an idea that found receptive audiences elsewhere in Europe).
In no nation did the printing press cause national governance. Amid economic recovery and expansion, the logical scope of governance was growing with or without the press. But the press strengthened the logic and gave nationhood a particular cast—a coherence, a basis in shared language, culture, and feeling. And this nearly tangible unity, in turn, made nations naturally formidable units, resistant to conquest. In a sense, the printing press was less important in carrying centralized governance up to the national level than in stopping it there—keeping it from rising higher, to the level of empire.
We’ve already noted one early example of this dynamic, when the Calvinists of the Netherlands—the "United Provinces"—successfully resisted Hapsburg dominance in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. This would hardly be the last example, either for the Hapsburgs or for other aspiring imperialists. In the early 1800s, in the wake of the French Revolution, Napoleon tried to use the now-firm French nationalism as a base for empire-building. It worked for a while, but ultimately he foundered on, among other things, nationalist resistance in places such as Spain and the German states.
In addition to the technological obstacle to European imperialism posed by the press, there were (as sometimes happens in history!) historical factor . During the Hapsburgs’ bid for greatness, the nearby Ottomans, fearing a rival empire, aided recalcitrant states. For that matter, even if we confine our gaze to the realm of technology, the press was not the only thing that bolstered nation-states. The burgeoning roads of the late Middle Ages were conduits, however informal, for news and other data. They would become better ones as national postal services evolved during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Still, even taking account of these and the many other factors that helped invigorate the nation-state, the printing press stands alone. More than any other single thing, it accounts for the basic, oft-noted irony of the modern age in western Europe: political power migrated both upward and downward. Previously, European governance and cultural identity had tended to be local, a vestige of feudalism—and when lines of allegiance or authority did go further in scope, as with the pope or the Holy Roman Emperor, they were often at the other end of the spectrum, spanning the continent. But with the modern age, tiny polities became less and less economical, and vast monoliths became less and less tenable. The nation-state, with a cultural and political integrity crystallized by the press, emerged at the expense of both.
THE LOGIC OF PARADOX
This simultaneous upward and downward migration of power is sometimes called a "paradox," but on close inspection, it isn’t truly contradictory. Whether dividing or uniting, the printing press was often elevating coherence.
The empires it helped break up were in some sense arbitrary empires—ungainly expanses encompassing sharply different cultures and languages. Meanwhile, when the press helped fuse small polities, the borders it erased were in many cases artificial and dysfunctional—impediments to economic efficiency. These impediments were especially costly when affinities of culture and language would otherwise have allowed smooth concourse by keeping the two barrier to non-zero-sumness—the trust barrier and the communication barrier—quite low. Witness the economic potential unleashed in Germany after Bismarck united it.
These two effects of nation-state formation—breaking up the arbitrarily united and merging the dysfunctionally divided—sometimes happened in one fell swoop. The Italian states of Lombardy and Venetia, incongruously part of the Austrian empire for much of the 1800s, broke off and fused with their closer relatives as part of Italy’s emergence in the second half of the century.
The process of nation-state formation has taken awhile to play itself out. Only toward the end of the twentieth century does the idea of the vast multinational empire seem finally to be giving up the ghost around the world. But note how, even back in the nineteenth century, empires increasingly confined their exploitation to areas far from the influence of the press. Western European nations managed colonial empires consisting of pre-industrial and mostly illiterate peoples on various continents. The Russian and Ottoman empires, too, subjugated the illiterate. And as the Ottoman Empire began its long nineteenth-century disintegration, those lands that managed to carve out autonomy or outright independence were often places with the most exposure to the print revolution, such as Greece and Serbia. (A single Serb, Vuk Karad?ic, developed a Serb alphabet, published a Serbian grammar book, translated the New Testament, and compiled Popular Songs and Epics of the Serbs, paving the way for a Serbian nationalism that, for better or worse, would prove durable.)
The nation-state, having coalesced with the press’s help, was still subject to some of its centrifugal force; with pamphleteering cheaper and cheaper, malcontents could always be a headache. So, just as the pope had his Index of Prohibited Books, secular rulers, from the early modern era onward, tried to control the press. In the late sixteenth century, Britain’s Star Chamber confined printing rights to two universities and twenty-one London print shops, hoping to rein in the "great enormities and abuses" caused by "diverse, contentious and disorderly persons professing the art or mystery of printing or selling of books." In France, before the Bastille was stormed in 1789, more than eight hundred authors, printers, and book seller had been imprisoned there.
Of course, none of this worked. Both Britain and France became enduringly pluralistic. This story is a common one in western Europe and across a still-growing portion of the world. Political freedom, notwithstanding its setbacks, seems to be the basic direction in which the world has been headed for centuries now. And, at the risk of oversimplifying, the main reason is ever cheaper and more powerful information technology, as represented by the printing press. By carrying the cost of mass publication to lower and lower levels, the press allowed less and less privileged groups to mobilize against repression.
