Jared Poley’s book offers a thought-provoking, engagingly written, and broad approach to European history in the nineteenth century through the lens of gambling. In just over 200 pages, divided into 3 sections and 9 numbered chapters, Poley aims to show “that gambling is central to the cultural, social, and intellectual history of the nineteenth century” (7). This is a key theme of the book: it is not focused on gambling and gamblers themselves but rather asserts that “gambling is a useful tool to pry open” (7) historical changes in culture, politics, social relations, ideas, and how contemporaries made sense of uncertainty, chance, and even their own bodies and emotions (2–3, 6–8). In this, Poley’s book is continuing a larger trend in historical research since the 1990s, and especially the mid-2010s, where casino gambling in general emerged as a dynamic field within modern history.
Poley states clearly that he is particularly interested in casino gambling, as it transformed games of chance into a commercial mass activity, connected to rapid changes in technology, urban infrastructure, transportation, and media. Casinos were sophisticated, bourgeois, and transnational spaces of luck and leisure, and therefore exemplified for Poley the larger trends and developments one can glean from looking at the action within these temples of fortune and capitalism (2, 10, 83, 199). He does not deny the rich early modern gambling culture but asserts, as others have before him, that gambling in forms that contemporaries of the twenty-first century would recognize “was invented in the nineteenth century” (10).
The book does not follow a strict chronological approach. Poley rather wants to “move from the outer to the inner” (8), and from a narrative history in the first chapters to a more in-depth discussion of gambling-related issues in later ones. Section one consists of chapters 1–3. In “Gambling in the Nineteenth Century” (chapter 1), “Visiting the Resort” (chapter 2), and “Experiencing the Casino” (chapter 3), Poley gives a broad overview of the development of modern gambling and the spatial organization of games of chance as a metropolitan, transnational leisure practice. The second section turns to the role gambling played in ideas and the experience of chance, luck, and probabilities. In “Probability and the Casino” (chapter 4), Poley traces the ways the casino shaped and inspired mathematicians, both professionals and amateurs, as well as their nineteenth century contemporaries more broadly, to rethink and contextualize uncertain outcomes. In “Chance and Luck” (chapter 5), the book shifts its focus to definitions, representations, and conceptualizations of luck by both gamblers and social scientists. Section three shifts the lens of gambling to the body itself: in “Gambling and the Body” (chapter 6), the book investigates not only how casino gambling imprinted itself on the bodies of contemporaries but also how games of chance fueled new debates in the field of natural sciences. In “Gambling and the History of Emotions” (chapter 7), the book traces how the emotional impacts of gambling were described and embedded in the discourse on feelings, their control, and social impact. In “The Psychology of Gambling” (chapter 8), similar themes are explored in the field of psychology. “What Gaming Was” (chapter 9) shows how gambling was a “heuristic device” (9) that allowed for new ways to look at human behaviors.
This structure is well suited for the broad, bird’s-eye approach with which Poley chooses to present his arguments. While each chapter or section can be read independently, it is equally possible to follow the book as it turns from urban and casino spaces to bodies, emotions, and psychologies of gambling. Each chapter presents fascinating ideas and interesting material, drawn from newspaper articles; travel writings; sociological, psychological, and educational literature; as well as postcards, letters, and diary entries. These are often presented in extensive direct quotes, which, depending on one’s preference, either help the reader to grasp the developments the book traces or potentially blur the analytical focus.
Poley succeeds in showing that gambling and gamblers were not a marginal phenomenon but were rather linked to the intellectual, social, and cultural shifts and debates during this time. Gambling reflected, shaped, and provided a vocabulary for the sweeping changes in the nineteenth century.
The broad and bird’s-eye perspective, however, comes with a number of blind spots. The reader learns little about the selection criteria of the cited texts and sources, for example. Their selection and their broader contextualization in the period are often not directly addressed. While the 200-page text also offers a lucid and succinct overview of debates on and about gambling and gamblers, casinos and games of chance remain oddly static.
Games, and how they were played, changed over the course of the nineteenth century. They were adapted to new leisure practices and potential players. The same holds true for casinos: the Monte Carlo Casino was an eclectic, experimental, and modular space that embodied the dynamic developments of gambling consumer culture. Even if Poley is not interested in gambling itself but rather in what it can reveal, it seems like a missed opportunity not to integrate these processes of adaptation into the narrative. The chapters concerning casino spaces, their experiences, and their role in urban reconfiguration during the nineteenth century (chapters 1–3) reflect this especially. They are a sufficient overview and context for the following chapters but invite a much deeper engagement with histories of casino cities and buildings as historically contingent sites of interplay between various actors.
The analysis is much stronger in chapters 4–9, where the book shows that the casino provided contemporaries with words, ideas, and experiences to explore fundamental issues about themselves and their societies. The book makes a compelling case that luck, probability, and chance were recognized as distinct concepts for the first time. While the chapters refer to many innovative historical perspectives, such as the history of emotions and of the body, their own analytical work remains firmly based upon traditional methodologies. The book does not explore the tools provided by fields like the history of emotions to engage with the material, which leaves a great deal of untapped potential. The same is true of the gambling practices themselves, which are not explored beyond how they are represented by intellectuals, scholars, and scientists in their bodies of work. This is somewhat curious as the experimental, practical character of gambling could have served to strengthen the book’s argument: that how people approached games of chance tells us how they made sense of their social, cultural, and natural environment.
There is a more fundamental, unresolved tension in the book as well. At several places, it remains somewhat unclear whether gambling was an expression of the changes in the nineteenth century, served as a laboratory for contemporaries to explore them, or might have even shaped them. The way the book presents its material magnifies this issue further. It leaves the reader wondering about the exact meaning of casino gambling for the processes Poley investigates through it.
Jared Poley’s Luck, Leisure, and the Casino in Nineteenth-Century Europe offers, however, many compelling arguments, thought-provoking observations, and engagingly guides the reader through its material. For those who are interested in the role casinos played in the profound changes occurring in the nineteenth century, and how gambling itself was reinvented during this time, it is a rewarding and interesting read.
