The Age of Capital: 1848-1875 [Paperback]

Eric Hobsbawm (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 26, 1996

In this book, Eric Hobsbawm chronicles the events and trends that led to the triumph of private enterprise and its exponents in the years between 1848 and 1875. Along with Hobsbawm's other volumes, this book constitutes and intellectual key to the origins of the world in which we now live.

Editorial Reviews

Review

What a book! For heaven's sake, and your own, read it! GUARDIAN 'Brilliantly conceived and equally brilliantly written' ASA BRIGGS 'Brilliant and wide ranging' AJP TAYLOR, OBSERVER 'Excellent' NEW STATESMAN 'A book filled with pleasures for the connoisseur and amateur alike' --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

About the Author

Eric Hobsbawm is a Fellow of the British Academy and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Before retirement he taught at Birkbeck College, University of London, and after retirement at the New School for Social Research in New York. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 354 pages
• Publisher: Vintage; 1st Vintage Books ed edition (November 26, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679772545
• ISBN-13: 978-0679772545
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.8 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #64,033 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

31 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars um, September 6, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Age of Capital: 1848-1875 (Paperback)

name a single European event that happened between 1848 and 1875...quick! My guess is that a lot of non-Europeans would have a hard time with that one. Yet it was an astonishingly influential period, the time when both capitalism and imperialism became truly, irreversibly entrentched. Hobsbawm tells the tale masterfully. Reading the book, it's hard to believe he didn't actually live through this time himself. The book is a superb marriage of narrative with historical detail. Read it. Read all three.

26 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant Marxist Historiography!, January 20, 2004

By A Customer

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Age of Capital: 1848-1875 (Paperback)

Um, a few observations are in order. Firstly, Marx's critique of history, economics, and society must not be confused with the later activity of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, nor Ho Chi Min: just because they used Marx as their point of departure does in no way diminish Marx's project. Secondly, Hobsbawm is a Marxist historiographer--not a Marxist per se. Thirdly, the period 1848-75 witnessed some remarkably convulsive and important events: 1) the Crimean War [Britian burned on the Black Sea], 2) the Dano-Prussian War [Prussian victory at Düpple], 3) the Austro-Prussian War [Prussian victory at Sadowa], 4) German unification under Bismarck, and 5) the Franco-Prussian War which resulted in the spectacular German victory at Sedan, the collapse of the Second Empire, the Paris Commune, and the establishment of the Third Republic. Need we say more? Get the book.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Our own Timelord, March 15, 2011

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Diziet "I Like Toast" (Hull, E Yorks, UK) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Age of Capital: 1848-1875 (Paperback)

The Age of Capital was originally the second part of a trilogy, flanked by The Age of Revolution: Europe, 1789-1848 and The Age of Empire, 1875-1914. Later the series became a tetralogy with the publication of Age of Extremes : The Short Twentieth Century 1914-1991.

Although each book stands up as a volume in it's own right it is very difficult, when finishing one, to not want to continue to find out 'what happens next' even if you know perfectly well what happens. And this is because, even though the books are not narratives in the normal sense of the term, the way Hobsbawm draws out the themes and events of each period really makes you want to find out how he is going to explain subsequent developments.

This volume, like the others in the series, is made up of more-or-less discreet essays on individual aspects of the period under consideration. Each subject is a chapter and the chapters are gathered together into three sections - Part 1: Revolutionary Prelude, Part 2: Developments and Part 3: Results. The chapters in Part 2 include The Great Boom, The World Unified, Conflicts and War, Building Nations, The Forces of Democracy, Losers, Winners and Changing Society. And then in Part 3, he looks at the effects of these developments.

Partly because of this structure but also partly because of the quality of the writing, it is a really interesting and illuminating read. So much of what we are living through today has its seeds in this and the previous period; to make any sense of the world today this is required reading.

There have been some criticism of Hobsbawm for being overtly Marxist in his outlook and theoretical basis. He says himself in his introduction:

"The historian cannot be objective about the period which is his subject. In this he differs (to his intellectual advantage) from its most typical ideologists, who believed that the progress of technology, 'positive science' and society made it possible to view their present with the unanswerable impartiality of the natural scientist, whose methods they believed (mistakenly) to understand. The author of this book cannot conceal a certain distaste, perhaps a certain contempt, for the age with which it deals, though one mitigated by admiration for its titanic material achievements and by the effort to understand even what he does not like. He does not share the nostalgic longing for the certainty, the self-confidence, of the mid-nineteenth-century bourgeois world which tempts many who look back upon it from the crisis-ridden western world a century later. His sympathies lie with those to whom few listened a century ago." (P17)

In the preface to this edition, he expands on these comments:

"This has been read by some as a declaration of intent to be unfair to the Victorian bourgeoisie and the age of its triumph. Since some people are evidently unable to read what is on the page, as distinct from what they think must be there, I would like to say clearly that this is not so. In fact, as at least one reviewer has correctly recognised, bourgeois triumph is not merely the organising principle of the present volume, but 'it is the bourgeoisie who receive much the most sympathetic treatment in the book'. For good or ill, it was their age, and I have tried to present it as such, even at the cost of - at least in this brief period - seeing other classes not so much in their own right, as in relation to it." (P11)

So leave your prejudices and pre-formed opinions at the door and read a remarkably inclusive, erudite and, above all, readable history of this formative period.