In his 1870 book The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims, Andrew Steinmetz recounts the origins of gambling. Drawing on Greek allegory, Steinmetz claims that Gaming was the child of a union between the Goddess of Fortune – Tyche or Fortuna – and the God of War, Ares or Mars. Gaming was, at least in Steinmetz’s retelling, a “misfeatured” child, a “wayward thing [who] could only be pleased by cards, dice, or counters.”Footnote ¹ Gaming, Steinmetz tells his readers, “was courted by all the gay and extravagant of both sexes, for she was of neither sex, and yet combining the attractions of each.”Footnote ² Gaming was also wooed by rough and violent men and has an “unnatural union” with one of them, later giving birth to two children: Dueling and Suicide. “These became their mother’s darlings, nursed by her with constant care and tenderness, and her perpetual companions.”Footnote ³ Gaming’s mother surveyed her child’s development, and “endowed her with splendid residences … magnificently designed and elegantly furnished.”Footnote ⁴ All were allowed to enter, but exit required an escort. Some were led by her “half-witted son Duelling,” while others were escorted by “her malignant monster Suicide, and his mate, the demon Despair.”Footnote ⁵ Yet Gaming’s calamitous reign was an extensive one. Steinmetz explains that “Gaming is a universal thing – the characteristic of the human biped all the world over.”Footnote ⁶

Steinmetz’s recounting of the origins of gambling, like his assertions that gambling is a universal human trait or that it occasioned the creation of fantastic new spaces to enjoy this form of leisure, provides a hint of the central topic considered in this book: the history of European casino gambling in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Steinmetz wrote at a pivotal turning point in that history, just after the establishment of legal gambling at Monte Carlo and just before the casinos in the German Rhineland were shuttered in the wake of German unification. Casino gambling of the type developed in the nineteenth century, which leveraged new technologies and novel forms of leisure, was unlike the sort we are now accustomed to seeing. These resorts were created at a moment of possibility, a time when the politics of mass leisure were first felt and when the casino offered a new way to socialize. Gambling – which was indisputably older and more universal than what we can consider in this book – found itself in a new situation in the nineteenth century. New ways to discuss luck and chance; new ideas about the body, emotion, and sensation; and new ways to understand health and morality coalesced in this period to create a charged environment – the resort casino – in which people experienced themselves and those around them in transformed ways. Gambling provided the nineteenth century with a new vocabulary that could be used to discuss the most intense and sharply felt events. Its mechanical wonders provided scientists and mathematicians with a built-in experimental space that was used to probe the meaning of likelihood, luck, and chance. And gambling’s emotional intensity drove the creation of new ways to understand impulse, behavior, and feeling. Furthermore, gambling – especially when experienced in the context of the resort casino – presented nineteenth-century patrons with an opportunity to engage in new ways of historical thinking, to consider the meaning of causation and correlation, and even to contemplate the ability of humans to intervene in history or to exert influence on their world. In short, gambling ushered in new ways to understand what a human was and how it acted. Describing the historical evolution of these ideas is the goal of the book.

Readers familiar with Jackson Lears’s Something for Nothing: Luck in America will see parallels with that great work. While Lears’s subject – the history of luck – is focused on a related topic, many of the themes entertained there appear in transformed ways in this text. Lears explains that central elements of American cultural history may be explained as an oscillation between two poles. One consists of the self-made man whose “success comes through careful cultivation of (implicitly Protestant) virtues in cooperation with a Providential plan,” while the other is characterized by the “speculative confidence man” whose eye is always on the “Main Chance.”Footnote ⁷ This duality means that gambling and luck are especially freighted cultural systems in the United States, in part because of the notion that good fortune is deserved by the fortunate. Lears also emphasizes what could be called the secularization of chance, in which the category moves from an emphasis on Providential theories of design and fate to secular notions of “management” and chaos. The overall arc of his narrative may be summed up in his suggestion that a “culture of chance” dominating the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was insistently supplanted by a “culture of control” in the twentieth. There were gaps in this shift, to be sure, but the overall suggestion is that an ephemeral existence dominated by fate or by Providence was replaced with a logic of management and controlled design that sought to relentlessly preclude chance from reattaining any kind of dominant cultural position. Managerial attempts to understand, balance, and mitigate chance, especially applied within the context of the Cold War and as part of a geopolitical nuclear strategy, were a hallmark of mid-century Americanism.

While Lears proposes a historical trajectory that moves from chance to control, sociologist Gerda Reith argues for a different view of historical change in which an assumption of certainty crafted during the enlightenment gives way to an “age of chance” dominating the twentieth century. Play and gambling are central pillars of this argument. Tracing the history of play, Reith argues that the eighteenth-century theory of play saw it as unproductive and irrational, but not directly sinful. By the nineteenth century, however, gambling represented to moralists a loss of both money and time and, according to Reith, was criminalized at this historical juncture because it represented a failure to adopt the basic demands of work discipline.Footnote ⁸ In the twentieth century, gambling was still a problem, but that problem was understood in a “medical rather than an ethical sense.”Footnote ⁹ Gambling and play were directly related to larger attempts to understand fate and causation. Reith, suggesting that the universe was apprehended by faith in the early modern period, reason in the eighteenth century, and chance in the twentieth, explains that in the “twenty-first century, chance is understood as a constituent part of the world, codified in the rules of probability theory and, in the branches of quantum mechanics and chaos theory, an irreducible feature of modern science.”Footnote ¹⁰ In this way, chance – and not, as Lears would argue, control – is the dominating principle of our time.

Lears and Reith provide us with two different ideas about the history of human perceptions of the world. While they both suggest a kind of secularization of indeterminacy that characterized modernity, Lears and Reith reach different conclusions about where we are today. Lears ends his book with a gesture toward the advancing ubiquity of control; even chaos theory represents an attempt to separate signals from noise, to use Nate Silver’s memorable formulation.Footnote ¹¹ Reith argues that the Enlightenment represented a collapse of indeterminacy. In the “Age of Reason, everything had a cause, whether material or transcendental, and so chance had no place in the world. It was an irrational aberration which could be banished by the application of reason and the advance of knowledge. Chance thus had no real being, and existed only in an epistemological sense as a deficit, a lack of knowledge.”Footnote ¹² One of Reith’s conclusions is that with the rise of indeterminacy, uncertainty, and then chaos theory we can see the primacy of chance as the dominant intellectual fact of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We have order, but no certainty. Things instead are governed by orders of probability. Despite their differing conclusions, both Lears and Reith indicate that the nineteenth century was a pivot point in our understanding of these issues. And there was no realm more central to the discussion of determinacy than gambling, thus requiring a deeper focus on this period and the intellectual forces at work between 1840 and 1925.

My understanding of the period and of the issues at hand is framed by the work of four historians of gambling. David Schwartz’s Roll the Bones: The History of Gambling provides a wonderfully complex look at the trajectory of gambling in a global context and over millennia.Footnote ¹³ Tracing the history of gambling from the ancient world to its current incarnations in Las Vegas and Macau, Schwartz illustrates both the ubiquity and the variability in our approach to gambling. Schwartz’s central argument in that text, that “gambling unites humanity,” is borne out through his compelling retelling of what he calls the evolution of gambling.Footnote ¹⁴ Schwartz defines gambling as a human practice that transcends temporal periodization, cultural affiliation, and social stratification. His project is an expansive one, bridging 5,000 years of human history and all the continents. This book has a narrower focus: the creation of industrial forms of casino gambling and their proliferation within the ecology of the European spa resort in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Schwartz provides a panoramic view of gambling; my aim is more modest: a dive into the social, cultural, and intellectual frameworks generated by European casino gambling in a critical time of change and transformation.

Other scholars of gambling have produced similarly focused studies to useful effect. Thomas M. Kavanagh’s Enlightenment and the Shadows of Chance: The Novel and the Culture of Gambling in Eighteenth-Century France connects gambling, the origins of probability theory, and the birth of the novel in the French Enlightenment.Footnote ¹⁵ Kavanagh’s argument – that a juxtaposition of enlightenment thinking and a mania for gambling presents a paradox that continues to inform how we orient ourselves in the world – is supported through his rich analyses of literary texts, joining them in valuable ways to social practice and cultural position. The resulting study, which connects “the emergence of the novel to the problematics of chance, gambling, and probability theory,” makes a strong case for a cultural history of gambling that is connected to the social, economic, and political dynamics of a particular time.Footnote ¹⁶ In Kavanagh’s view, Enlightenment France and the court society of Versailles produced a dramatic reconfiguration of how people understood probability and chance. Kavanagh notes the existence of a perplexing paradox: eighteenth-century France was obsessed with gambling, and it was also obsessed with “coherent systems of reason, law, or nature.”Footnote ¹⁷ Examining the interplay between these two ways of understanding the operation of the world allows Kavanagh to frame gambling as something more significant than a mere pastime or type of leisure. Gambling – and its representation in cultural forms like the novel – provided new ways to probe questions about chaos, order, and meaning. Kavanagh pursues this line of inquiry in another valuable text, Cards, Dice, and Wheels: A Different History of French Culture.Footnote ¹⁸ While confining his analysis to francophone texts, Kavanagh embarks on a longer historical view of gambling in France, positioning it as a way to understand larger shifts and transformations in French life. His source material ranges from medieval texts to contemporary ones, allowing Kavanagh to produce a transformed vision of the contours of French history.

Schwartz’s panoramic view of the history of gambling is one strategy to understanding its importance. Kavanagh’s focus on French gambling is another. Other historians have pursued the issues in different ways. Mark Braude focuses narrowly on Monte Carlo, producing a wonderful account that combines business history with social, political, and cultural analysis.Footnote ¹⁹ By focusing on Monaco and its relationship to resort gambling, from its inception in the mid-nineteenth century to today, Braude is able to do more than just provide the history of a “gambling town.”Footnote ²⁰ Instead, he writes the history of gambling at Monte Carlo as just one part of a larger story about place-making in the Mediterranean. Everett John Carter’s equally illuminating dissertation, “The Green Table: Gambling Casinos, Capitalist Culture, and Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Germany,” uncovers the development of Rhenish casino gambling and positions it as a sign of the “legitimation of a credit economy” and a significant element within a “culture of corporate and finance capitalism.”Footnote ²¹ I have benefited from reading each of these works. Carter illuminates critical aspects of German casino gambling in the nineteenth century; Braude’s work carries that story into the Mediterranean zone and into the twentieth century.

One of the crucial insights coming from the work of these scholars is that gambling is not something peripheral to historical change; it is central to it. As Kavanagh explains, “Rather than a curious underworld set apart from the larger society, gambling brings with it a hidden and ignored, yet rich and provocative history of the tensions and conflicts that prevailed with the broader culture.”Footnote ²² In short, gambling is not something on the margins of cultural or historical significance; it is instead uniquely positioned to open a window onto fundamental questions such as how we understand time and causality, how we experience our bodies and the visceral pleasure of play, and how we navigate the constraints and possibilities of intervening in the world. Gambling lets us wrestle with big questions, and I argue that this intellectual, social, and cultural process was inflected in the nineteenth century with questions that arguably remain leading ones in our world as well: What is democracy? What is the basis of society? What is luck? How do we change the world?

I argue that gambling is central to the cultural, social, and intellectual history of the nineteenth century. Studying casino gambling provides a way to see how nineteenth-century Europeans understood their changing world, even as it also reflected those changes itself. In this way, gambling was used in an explanatory capacity, one that let contemporaries probe the inner workings of the machine and the creation of knowledge. Gambling has only attracted serious scholarly attraction since the 1990s, but it is increasingly clear that if we want to understand the intricate dance of society, culture, politics, and ideas, then gambling is a useful tool to pry open these different stories, allowing us to see better large historical transformations.

Readers will be introduced in the course of this book to a varied cast of characters and modes of analysis. The source material for this book gives voice to diverse perspectives related to gambling. While much of the material comes from the European context, I have also included North American sources when they spoke in interesting ways to the issues at hand. Some of the sources are ephemeral publications that no doubt had a small readership; others were mass publications that enjoyed popular acclaim and stimulated review and discussion. Novels, memoirs, biographies, pamphlets, newspapers, travel reports, and scientific and mathematical materials are treated as equally indicative of the culture of the time even if they require different modes of analysis and interpretation. In the course of this book, readers will consider how contemporary biographies of key people were used to shape understandings of the narrative history of casino gambling. We will also consider emerging genres of travel writing – travel guides as well as didactic texts that not only served to locate gambling in specific contexts but also gave readers an education in gambling that would allow them to participate knowledgeably in the practice. Other contemporary sources – from newspapers and diaries to letters and postcards – provide evidence of the growing culture of leisure associated with resort casinos. Pro-gambling texts produced a range of laudatory descriptions of the practice, while moralizing ones warned of the dangers of casino gambling. Fictional accounts – by authors as well known as E. T. A. Hoffmann and Fyodor Dostoyevsky and less-familiar ones like Margaret de Vere Stacpoole – set in resort casinos allow analysis of the cultural meanings associated with gambling in the nineteenth century. The work of social scientists like Georg Simmel and Thorstein Veblen is placed alongside mathematical and philosophical texts (from figures as varied as the industrialist Hiram Maxim, the eugenicist Karl Pearson, and the mathematician John Venn) in order to pull back the curtain on the ways gambling and the casino were integrated into late nineteenth-century analyses of social and human development. Through an analysis of a range of psychological, pedagogical, and medical texts we explore how gambling produced new ways of understanding human behavior and agency.

The analysis of gambling in this book is focused on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Other scholars, notably Thomas Kavanagh, have provided detailed analyses of eighteenth-century developments, a period in which gambling reached new heights of popularity and critical concern. This book focuses on the nineteenth century, in part because this was a period of time when new developments in communication, transportation, politics, and intellectual life permitted the development of a mass form of gambling. This is not to say, of course, that gambling was not richly and widely enjoyed in earlier periods. Rather, I argue that the nineteenth century was a critical period when gambling was institutionalized in novel contexts and when gamblers participated in the wholesale transformation of European society and culture.

The book consists of three sections. The first – Chapters 1–3 – traces the evolution of gambling in the nineteenth century and then investigates the spatial qualities of casino gaming. Moving from the outer to the inner, chapters in this section consider the development of resorts and resort towns and the architectural qualities of casinos and gambling rooms. We consider in this section how new leisure practices that developed after the Napoleonic Wars, combined with revolutions in transportation and communication, rejuvenated gambling in the resort towns of the Rhineland and the Mediterranean. The next sections initiate an analysis of what casino gambling was thought to mean to people at the time. The second section (Chapters 4 and 5) probes the ways that gambling and fate intersected in the nineteenth-century casino, looking at the ways that gambling inflected ideas about probability, chance, and luck. I argue in this section that refinements in the field of probability, coupled with the use of the casino as an experimental space for mathematicians and then amplified through popular culture, provided a way for people in the nineteenth century to ruminate on the meanings of history, chance, and luck in especially pointed ways. The third section focuses on the body, again following a trajectory that moves from the outside in. We consider in Chapters 6–8 how gambling affected the body, how it excited emotions, and how the “psychology” of the gambler was evaluated. The chapters in this section use the work of social scientists, psychologists, novelists, and even educators to evaluate the ways that gambling was both cause and symptom of the changed ways that people experienced their bodies, understood emotion and behavior, and assessed compulsion and pleasure. The final chapter considers the larger question of what gambling was, contemplating the ways that gambling was deployed as a heuristic device that opened up opportunities to understand in fresh ways theories about aggression, play, and human development.

The book unfolds in a particular way: moving from narrative history to a discussion of the mechanics of gambling in the nineteenth century. Along the way, it also dives into the questions that contemporaries posed of the practice, but which were anchored in a basic problem: what is gambling doing to us? Each section may be read independently, and while there is a logic to the development of the argument across the chapters, it is not necessary to read them in order.