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all over Europe, not only by the German kaiser and the Russian czar, but also by the German nobility, who preferred to marry English girls, the German upper classes, who liked to stroll through town in English coats and trousers, and by the French
haut monde
who organised
le Derby
at Chantilly,
le Steeplechase
at Auteuil and who met at
le Jockey Club
.
    Only in the distance was there the faint rumble of new powers to come: Germany, the United States, Japan. The British coal and iron industries were the factory of the world, the City of London its financial core. The major European bankers had all moved to London after the currency market in Paris collapsed in 1870, and that was where the big money continued to circulate.
    The City was a world unto itself, with its own codes and its own honour system. To a certain extent, the entrepreneurial and the personal mingled there in much the same way as within the royal houses of Europe. The City, wrote Jean Monnet, the son of a French cognac manufacturer and a trainee there in the year 1904, ‘is more than a neighbour-hood of offices and banks: it is also a gathering, socially most exclusive, but professionally open to the world at large.’ Lines ran from the City to Shanghai, Tokyo and New Delhi, to New York and Chicago and back again, and at the same time everyone knew each other personally; from their games of golf, or the hours they spent together, regardless of rank or position, in London's commuter trains. Monnet: ‘It is a closely woven community in which business rivalry is mitigated by personal relationships. Everyone sees to his own affairs, but at the same time to the affairs of the City. An Englishman will therefore not say: “I am sending my son to such-and-such a company or bank.” Instead, he says: “I am sending him to the City.”’
    Outside the City as well, the empire lent British society a certain standing. It imposed a lifestyle in which a number of traits were highly valued: militarism, a pronounced awareness of rank and class, a sort of frontier mentality, a typically British, undercooled machismo. A great deal of travelling was done, all over the world, and at the same time as British cosmopolitism upheld a strong sense of its own superiority. A great deal was learned aboutplants, animals and human cultures, but at the centre of the world stood Britannia. And at the summit of creation stood the Cumings, striving diligently for immortality, at the top of the heap for all time.
    In 1862, the city chronicler Henry Mayhew wrote: ‘Because London is the largest of all cities, it is also home to the largest number of human wrecks. Wrecks, too, because their misery seems all the more miserable by reason of its juxtaposition with the wealthiest, most comfortable life in the world.’
    From 2.6 million in 1850, London's population grew to 5.5 million by 1891, and 7.1 million by 1911. A hundred years after the start of the Industrial Revolution, Great Britain was still a rural society in 1870. Two thirds of all Britons lived in the countryside or in small towns. By 1914, it was only a quarter.
    Between 1850–6, Karl Marx lived with his five children, his wife and a servant girl in two rooms at 28 Dean Street. Marx was and remained a burgher, unlike most of his contemporaries on Dean Street. When thinking of those times, there is always one photograph that comes to mind: the dilapidated shoes of three street urchins, the holes in their soles showing the bottoms of their bare feet, covered by a thick layer of dirt and calluses; six times an engrossing jumble of leather, iron and human skin.
    In 1885, the socialists claimed, one out of every four Londoners was living in dire poverty. The shipping magnate Charles Booth wanted to find out for himself, so he organised the world's first large scale sociological study, based on figures from the Poor Act, police reports and a massive door-to-door survey. Between 1891–1903 he published seventeen volumes of
Life and