𝐸𝓁𝒾𝓉𝑒 and 𝐏𝐨𝐩𝐮𝐥𝐚𝐫 Culture

Features of Elite Culture

• Rococo: an art movement for the elite, an art of gentility and elites, shows the elite living large, includes light and airy pastel colors

• arts shifted from religion/power to glimpse of their private life

• used the national language

• ate developed menus from professional cooks; if food prices ever went up they simply paid more

• their houses had many glass windows, mirrors, specialized rooms (separate bedrooms, dining room), and lots of furniture

• they were educated

• they experienced the Renaissance

• had china plates, silver bowls, and pitchers

• main method of "transmission" of culture: books

Features of Popular Culture

• kept festivals and traditions
• Smigas Dingus: a festival the Monday after Easter where they threw water at people
• Carnival: "farewell to meat," came before Lent (Christians did not eat meat for 40 days), time of big eating, heavy drinking, merry making, and foolery; comical processions went thru streets, mock sermons delivered; in England, men and women swapped clothes, street dramas showed servant ordering master, student beating teacher, husband with baby and wife with gun; time for defying custom + ridiculing authority
• Charivari: placed someone on a horse backwards, parade them through town, and beat them; form of punishment/public humiliation
• witches, magicians, and enchantments stayed with them, while Elites moved away with scientific doubt by 1700
• spoke in the local dialect (had an accent, used words other people did not use)
• had barely any food; when the price went up they couldn't pay so ate acorns
• lived in crowded, unhealthy buildings in towns; in countryside lived in dark, shabby cabins
• a luxury to them was a stove
• had no furniture, at most a bench and a mat for bed
• had no glass
• lived in one room
• coffee shops and taverns were gathering places for them
• drunkenness was a visible problem for them in cities: workers who couldn't drink in domestic privacy were increasingly seen in the streets, alcoholism, GIN LANE

𝘎𝘪𝘯 𝘓𝘢𝘯𝘦

• drawn William Hogarth
• showed popularity and dangers of alcohol in the lives of Britain's working class
• illustration of drunkenness in London's streets
• displayed the wealthy attracted to coffeehouses, but they also catered to the lower classes

Features Elite and Popular Culture had in Common

• religion
• subject to the same diseases (but the Elites had less exposure because they did not eat as much tainted food, drink polluted water, were near the filth, puddles, and in the streets. Additionally, they had educated doctors if they got sick, Popular had to rely on popular healers with concoctions made with herbs and potions.)

What is the importance of smallpox in the context of Elite and Popular Cultures?

At the end of the 18th century, a smallpox vaccine is created in the Ottoman Empire. However, people in Britain and France refuse to use it because it was made by Muslims and a woman (who wanted to save her son and did) brought it there and wrote a paper about its effectiveness → racist, sexist

Evidence that defends this statement: "In most places at most times the elites of European history have nurtured a sense of distance between themselves and their 'inferiors.' In the eighteenth century, this general, unfocused, largely implicit sense of distance, became a pervasive, explicit sense of polarity between the nature of the non-elite -- the people -- and that of the elite."

• purged Carnivals or just watched for amusement → manners more enforced
• doctors VS healers
• national language VS isolated dialects
• diverse food choices VS acorn eaters
• turned to science VS still believed in magic
• educated, had a Renaissance VS did not have a Renaissance

Evidence that refutes this statement: "In most places at most times the elites of European history have nurtured a sense of distance between themselves and their 'inferiors.' In the eighteenth century, this general, unfocused, largely implicit sense of distance, became a pervasive, explicit sense of polarity between the nature of the non-elite -- the people -- and that of the elite."

• had the same religion
• could catch the same diseases

Main Features of the Global Economy in the 18th century

• lots of agriculture (produced by slaves) was traded
• capitalism and private property/possessions increased (Europeans wanted cotton, porcelain, Indian and Ottoman rugs, furniture for themselves; China only wanted gold)
• private trading companies, like East India Companies, developed
• trading was focused internally with tariffs on foreign goods
• plantations (economic unit of land and capital owned by people in France or England which had a force of impressed labor by African American slaves) developed
• enclosure: wealthy bought land and divided it with walls and rented out each divvied plot to people, capitalistic, created more dedicated capitalistic farmers
• Price revolution occurred: costs of things go up
• Colombian Exchange transferred of plants, animals, culture, and diseases between Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas
• Agricultural revolution occurred
• mercantilist policies enforced: export over import, state control over finances, tariffs on imports

How "elites" and commoners were impacted by the new Global Economy

• sugar becomes 50% of Europeans' choleric intake
• some people became unexpectedly rich
• rich got richer and the poor got poorer
• pleasant, comfortable life for the elites because they had a new market for furniture, art, gardeners
• people married to have kids and then work them

How and why did Europe's social classes change over time?

• the upper middle class (bourgeois, the merchants, traders, new money) merged with the aristocracy (land-owning old money)
• marriage was purely economical: bourgeois got land + titles, landowners got ships to trade with (commerce)
• only way the poor could influence the government was by rioting