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The Age of Capital: 1848-1875

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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.

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.

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.

Excelente libro que resalta y muestra de manera clara los origenes del complejo siglo XX. El nacimiento de la burguesia, sus costumbres desarrolladas sobre nuevas premisas que destacaban el éxito por encima de la tradición y de las costumbres anteriores, los grandes avances en ciencia, destacando especialmente la teoria de la evolución de las especies de Darwin, el anti-clericalismo, las nuevas diferencias creadas por la riqueza y pobreza, permiten comprender de manera clara las razones que generaron tantas acciones incomprensibles en nuestro siglo
Me encantaron, particularmente, los capítulos 13 y 15 sobre el mundo burgués y las artes respectivamente, sin dejar de mencionar sus explicaciones sobre la creación del nacionalismo y el origen de la clase trabajadora.

Lo recomiendo ampliamente para el que quiera conocer de nuestra istoria contemporánea. Su autor, además, escribe de manera muy amena e inteligente.

After the collapse of the Revolutions of 1848, Europe as a whole was pretty quiet until 1914. Economically, however, the period is divided by a serere economic downturn areound 1875. This book covers the first part of this period, when European and American Capitalism grew strong.

Since Hobsbawm is a Marxist, he's not much of a fan of this period, but his coverage of it is quite evenhanded and honest. Again, as in the first book, he's challenging to read, but worth the effort.

In THE AGE OF CAPITAL, British Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm focuses his attention on the slow then sudden expansion of capitalism in Europe and in the United States. What one notices in this and in his other books on Western history is that his animus toward capitalism and his approbation of socialism is never far fom the surface. The closer he writes of the late 20th century, the more vicious his bile is toward a freewheeling style capitalism; and conversely the further he is removed in time from that era, the less his writing becomes a screed. THE AGE OF CAPITAL examines how capitalism became entrenched in the fabric of Western society. As Hobsbawm writes of expanding populations, of the growth of a solid middle class mercantilism, of an explosion of technology and literacy, one can read between the lines to sense that he bemoans the obvious fact that capitalism, and not an incipient socialism under Marx and Engels, became the invigorating factor that created a market economy that would in a few more decades lead to the internecine wars of the next century. As Hobsbawm relates how the mid 19th century saw an acceleration of human growth and capital, it is as if he were setting up an economic straw man that begged for the emergence of a Marx to puncture that capitalist piggy balloon. For those readers who speak glowingly of Hobsbawm's soaring critical vision that is not at all impacted by his acknowledged Marxist bias, I suggest that it is quite impossible for any Marxist to claim credibility to write fairly and impartially of matters historical, since it is that same soaring vision that somehow managed to overlook and excuse the tens of millions of miserable human beings who died under the red star of socialism merely to prove futiley that Marx was right all along.