The Age of Empire, 1875-1914

Modern History: The Four Ages #3

by Eric J. Hobsbawm

The splendid finale to Eric Hobsbawm's study of the nineteenth century, The Age of Empire covers the area of Western Imperialism and examines the forces that swept the world to the outbreak of World War One and shaped modern society.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Politics, World History, European History, Economics, 19th Century

404 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1987

About the author

Eric John Ernest Hobsbawm was a British historian of the rise of industrial capitalism, socialism and nationalism. His best-known works include his tetralogy about what he called the "long 19th century" (The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789–1848, The Age of Capital: 1848–1875 and The Age of Empire: 1875–1914) and the "short 20th century" (The Age of Extremes), and an edited volume that introduced the influential idea of "invented traditions". A life-long Marxist, his socio-political convictions influenced the character of his work.
Hobsbawm was born in Alexandria, Egypt, and spent his childhood mainly in Vienna and Berlin. Following the death of his parents and the rise to power of Adolf Hitler, Hobsbawm moved to London with his adoptive family. After serving in the Second World War, he obtained his PhD in history at the University of Cambridge. In 1998, he was appointed to the Order of the Companions of Honour. He was president of Birkbeck, University of London, from 2002 until his death. In 2003, he received the Balzan Prize for European History since 1900, "for his brilliant analysis of the troubled history of 20th century Europe and for his ability to combine in-depth historical research with great literary talent."

Reviews

[Callum's Column · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hobsbawm describes the decades prior to the Great War as the Age of Empire. This age cemented the global capitalist order. Britain led the way but was challenged by the newly formed German Empire. These tensions led to global war and later the fall of empire. This age also saw the political rise of the working-class agency, which was evinced by the advancement of democracy and socialist movements. However, it was the solidification of nationalism that ultimately defined the age. This phenomenon sowed the seeds for the Age of Catastrophe that erupted in 1914. It did not end until 1991, if at all.

This book is the third in Hobsbawm's trilogy of the Long Nineteenth Century—a must-read read for history buffs. The author deploys a Marxian historiographical lens. This is both illuminating and limiting. It is illuminating because it provides a dialectical materialist lens of individualism, society, and geopolitics. However, it is limiting because Marxism is inherently deterministic. It generally prioritises politico-economic motivations at the expense of other feasible explanations like culture or ideology. Moreover, it sidelines the autonomy of the state, which acts in the interests of power and self-preservation. Nonetheless, Hobsbawm's analysis remains thorough and impactful.

This period is colloquially referred to as the Belle Époque. We may be living through the twilight of a second Belle Époque. Optimism and prosperity flourished in the West for several decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Such optimism has dissipated following the Global Financial Crisis and rise of authoritarian populism. Prosperity is becoming increasingly concentrated, and the drums of war are beating. It was the rise of Germany and the relative decline of Britain that underscored the Great War. Today, the US is threatened by a rising China. Bismarckian diplomacy is required; instead, we have Trumpian diplomacy.

[Luís · Rating 4 out of 5]

We can appreciate The Age of Empire as the culmination of a set of events that intertwine in time and space covered by either this one or all of Hobsbawm's other works. Therefore, it is pertinent to carry out a detailed study to verify the continuity of the story that the author defends so much. Broadly, the author demonstrates clarity of ideas in constructing the past and impressive factitious precision, which insistently inebriates the reading of any of his works, encouraging and stimulating the study of the present chronology.

[Kevin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have read and reviewed The Age of Revolution, dealing with the dual industrial and political revolutions from 1780 up till 1848, the second volume The Age of Capital, essentially covering the rise of Capitalism from 1848 till the 1870's and, from when I started reading Eric Hobsbawm - The Age of Extremes, dealing with the short twentieth century (up till the mid 1990's). The Age of Empire (1875 till the outbreak of the First World War) is the final book in this series of modern history I have read, and, I would suggest, the more academic and most heaviest of all.

Everyone who knows history will assume World War One was the result of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, however it was more of a result of years of slowly developing European Capitalist Powers searching for new colonies for exploitation and in serious competition with each other (Britain lost the 'Workshop of the World' status from the massive growth of countries such as Germany, France and to a lesser extent Russia - but no less dramatic, in this period), that eventually led to a massive arms build up due to steel and armament mass production- and the eventual grab for territory that every European Power were competing for. The most unfortunate aspect about the whole late 19thC and early 20thC grab for land led to a world-wide conflict (but not on the same scale as World War Two) was the belligerence of the left; Social Democracy and many Socialist organisations treated the outbreak in August 1914 with great 'gung-ho' and patriotism, the 'war to end all wars' was seen along nationalist and patriotic lines. It was only Lenin and the Bolsheviks who argued against what was essentially an Imperialist conflict and were anti-war, whilst Karl Kautsky, the Orthodox Marxist theoretician of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), ended up supporting the war.

The whole period was incredibly transformative in social relations also; from the arts right up to early Womens emancipation (the Suffragettes) and education and the development of philosophy and social science (as well as the natural sciences - Darwinism et al) such as Sociology and Max Weber - its main theoretician, the whole period from 1875-1914 was massively progressive. For the Belle Époque, heralding a dawn of (what Hobsbawm argues) a Bourgeois utopia to end up using the various belligerent competing nations manufacturing output for mass slaughter on an industrial scale (20 million accordingly died), essentially showed the contradictions in Capital.

I found this book the heavier of all the other three in the series of the formation of the modern world. You really need to have some, quite serious, understanding of dates, events, persons - you cannot come into this book with having no idea what happened towards the end of the 19thC and the start of the First World War, because even though Hobsbawm is not that dry, he writes critically. None of his works are chronological curriculum history - he was a Marxist Historian and writes expecting you to know your basic history. Good, but it took a bit of wading to get through.

[Reid tries to read · Rating 5 out of 5]

The world of the 1880s
100 years after the American and French revolutions had birthed modern politics as we know it, and the Industrial Revolution had begun building the modern economy as we know it, life had changed for human kind. How did the world of the 1880s compare to the 1780s? For starters, the world had become a genuinely connected single system. Almost all parts of it had been discovered and adequately mapped out. Railways and steamships had turned cross-continental travel from an endeavor that lasted for months into trips of only a few weeks (and soon to be only days). The electric telegraph allowed communication to spread across the entire world in a matter of hours. Now, the people of the world could travel to and communicate with each other exponentially faster and easier than ever before. Second, the world was more densely populated than ever before; the best estimates guess that the world population in the 1880s (around 1.5 billion) was about double that of the 1780s. Although the world was simultaneously more dense and more tightly connected than ever before, it was also beginning to develop deeper divisions than ever before.

In the 1700s China had seemed to be a very strange land to Europeans, but economically no one argued that it was backwards or inferior. By the 1880s this was no longer the case because the Industrial Revolution had transformed the Western countries. The per capita income of the ‘developed’ industrial world in the 1880s was approximately double that of the ‘undeveloped’ world; by 1913 it had grown to triple. The technological advancement of the industrialized countries was a major reinforcer and perpetuator of this gap. By 1880 it was increasingly evident that the technological inferiority of the underdeveloped worlds’ armaments, armies, and weaponry made these areas easier to conquer and subjugate. Napoleon had been able to defeat the Mamluks in Egypt in the late 1790s, despite their comparable equipment, due to the organizational revolution that had transformed his army thanks to the French Revolution. By the 1880s the Industrial Revolution had penetrated warfare so deeply that the industrial nations of the world now brought far superior equipment into the battlefield than their opponents. Not only were they organizationally superior, but now they had explosives, machine guns, and steam transport.

As the very epicenter of capitalism and industrialization, the European powers were the core of the world economy and bourgeois society by the 1880s. The “long 19th century” (1780s-1914) was a European century. Although Japan and the U.S. were catching up, European industrial output was still over 2x as large as America’s during this period, while most major technological innovations still came from Europe. Culturally, the elites of the less developed parts of the world looked to Europeans as their models, while white settlers/colonizers spread European culture by force wherever they went. Both of these were reinforced by the foreign elites’/white colonizers’ economic dependence on the European metropole. The ideology of liberalism called for its self-proclaimed “superior” culture to be freely spread (by force, if need be) to all corners of the world; its achievements as such were the public libraries and museums. Additionally, the political model of the constitutional nation state was also adopted throughout the world. Finally, literacy spread but was heavily dependent on class; in general, the bourgeoisie had higher literacy rates than the proletariat, who had higher literacy rates than the peasantry.

Depression
In the 1890s, in response to economic depression, all industrialized nations of the world except for Great Britain abandoned free trade and attempted to enact tariffs to protect at least some of their major industries as well as their agriculture. Many historians are puzzled as to why contemporaries of the 1890s believed they were living in a depression because, while there were definitely fluctuations in trade, the overall output of production rapidly increased throughout the decade. The issue, in fact, was not production but profitability. The agricultural sector was hit the hardest; it had overproduced and, with transportation costs dropping thanks to improved technology, its inflated prices began dropping by the 1880s. This was why that decade had experienced a mass migration from Europe to America;. European governments openly supported this practice because they saw mass migration as a safety valve for their discontented peasantry.

Protectionism was not the biggest symptom of increased competition between industrializing nations. Even more important was the concentration of capital into hitherto unprecedentedly large trusts, as well as the near-universal implementation of scientific management procedures in the workplace. The concentration of capital was the expression of a general tendency for larger firms to swallow up smaller ones, and then for these large firms to divvy up markets between each other. Scientific management showed that businesses were increasingly attempting to regulate and control even the most minute details of labor in order to maximize output (and therefore profit).

This period saw a clear transformation of the structure of businesses. Corporate organization and management turned Adam Smith’s ‘Invisible Hand’ of the market into the ‘visible hands’ executives and managers. The corporation replaced the individual, and the typical businessman was less likely to be a family member of a founder and more likely to be an educated executive overlooked by a shareholder or board of managing capitalists. Internationally, the depression turned contemporary views of economics on their head. The economy appeared to be a zero sum game where not just firms, but nations themselves, competed, and the gains of one nation seemed to inevitably come at the expense of another. This zero sum game led to an additional way to compensate for the depression: imperialism. The pressure for capital to search for new investments, raw materials, and cheaper inputs contributed to state policies of expansion and colonialism. A U.S. state department official put it succinctly in 1900 when he stated that “Territorial expansion is but the by-product of the expansion of commerce”.

A continuation of the Industrial Revolution
From the mid 1890s until World War I, the global economy rapidly shifted from a depression to a large boom. This period saw Britain decline as the workshop of the world from its commanding stranglehold that it had had in the 1860s. It also saw what we now characterize as a second industrial revolution, although contemporaries at the time believed it to be a mere extension of the first industrial revolution. Steel, electricity, and oil power became more common place; automobiles, bicycles, airplanes, cameras, and the cinema made up the environments and interactions of everyday life. On top of these developments was a parallel expansion of previously important industries such as railways which, from 1890 to 1918, had more tracks placed than in the entire period of history preceding those 28 years.

For the first time in history, media had fully transformed into what can accurately be called ‘mass media’. Mass media was important because as the vote expanded and democracy spread, the ruling classes had to find some ways to prevent the lower classes from democratically taking back wealth/benefits/power from them. Often, some form of welfare concessions were made to the lower classes, but propagandistic ideological warfare through mass media was equally as important of a tool. All of these factors played into imperialism: the growing economic competition between European industrial nations increased their hostility to each other; the technological revolution made transporting supplies and sending communications/coordinating actions across vast distances easier for armies; and the usage of mass media helped inculcate jingoism nationalism into the masses more effectively than ever before.

Imperialism
Imperialism led to the divvying up of land belonging to non-capitalist societies between the industrial capitalist nations of the world. These backwards regions simply did not have the means to defend themselves against the more technologically advanced capitalist powers. Almost all of Africa was divided between the European industrial powers;
nearly all of the Pacific was divided between European powers, the United States, and Japan. Large swaths of Asia were informally divvy up to European powers: Russia tried to advance into the continent via direct territorial conquest, Britain expanded its sphere of influence in India, many European powers had satellite/vassal states throughout China, France set up colonies in IndoChina, and Japan conquered Korea and Manchuria. The Americas, besides parts of the Caribbean, remained nominally independent, although it was well understood that they were economically dependent on the industrial powers and that the United States, through the Monroe doctrine, was the sole hegemonic power over South America. Overall, from 1875 to 1914, around 25% of the world’s landmass was redistributed as colonies or protectorates to a handful of capitalist empires: England, France, Russia, Italy, the United States, Belgium, and Japan.

Politics and economics seemed to morph into a single sphere during this period as the state began playing more of a direct role in economic affairs. Emperors and empires were as old as class society, but the concept of imperialism and its seemingly direct link to the economic sphere began to really be formulated in the 1890s. The term ‘imperialism’ was never used by Marx; it originated in Britain in the 1870s and entered the general lexicon in the 1890s. Despite what some may argue, the contemporaries of the 1890s believed imperialism to be an entirely new development and not a holdover from the pre-capitalist era. Many people were even proudly self described as imperialists, although the term now is undoubtedly a pejorative.

One of the main causes of the division of the globe between the capitalist powers was their need for hitherto unused raw materials thanks to the second Industrial Revolution. These raw materials, such as the rubber and oil necessary for internal combustion engines, were only found in remote regions, while the new electrical and motor industries needed copper, which was only to be found in the backwards areas of the world. Besides the obvious search for raw materials, what were some other explanations for imperialism at the time? Some (most famously J. A. Hobson) tried to connect the increase in capital exports to the new imperialistic tendencies. The claim was that profitable investment outlets were not available domestically (Hobson argued this was a result of monopoly capital) and therefore had to be located abroad. However, just by looking at the biggest capital exporter at the time, Britain, this explanation appears flawed. Britain’s export of capital did not go to the underdeveloped world, but rather to what were once her white settler colonies (mainly the United States, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa). Most of this investment was put towards public railways and was less lucrative than investments at home but also safer. To link this to the investment in colonies in places like Africa and Asia seems untenable.

A more convincing argument centered around the search for markets to help deal with the crisis of overproduction that had led to the depression of the 1890s. In a sense this was an extension of the protectionism that had grown since the 1880s: colonize (whether formally or informally) large swaths of the globe to give your state’s large firms/corporations huge protected markets backed up by the force of your imperial state. The great power rivalry that followed was a natural extension of the economic rivalry that originally led to this ‘colonization for protected markets’ process. It became a status symbol as a Great Nation to control more colonies than other Great Powers, a fact German imperialists were deeply resentful of.

Finally, many observers, (who often were imperialists themselves like Cecil Rhoads) noted that imperial conquests had the effect of quelling domestic discontent. Although there is no proof that imperial or colonial conquests raised the wages or relative standard of living of the masses of the imperialist countries, it did give them a psychological wage in the form of feeling superior to “backwards cultures“. It also united them through a collective sense of nationalism. The use of imperialism to smooth over class conflict at home was important during this period, because for the first time in history mass politics became a reality as democracy and suffrage spread to the majority of males in most liberal capitalist societies. This development was imbued with contradictions.

Democracy
Liberalism believed democracy to be the rule of the poor over society. The bourgeois liberals originally were in favor of implementing constitutions and having elected assemblies as forms of governance because it was in their best interest to do so against the aristocracy; they had put property requirements and other such measures in place to prevent the majority of the population from taking advantage of these political triumphs. During the age of imperialism, property and education requirements for voting, as well as hereditary chambers of peers designed to insulate the aristocratic classes, were weakened or abolished entirely throughout the western world. This was a terrifying development for the ruling classes. In their eyes dangerous masses were too unruly, too uneducated in the fine arts of politics and economics, and too willing to turn society into the (from their perspective) disastrous Paris Commune of 1871 through social revolution. Even still, after 1870 it became clear to all that the masses would be a part of the political theater whether the rulers liked it or not; the march towards general democracy seemed inevitable.

The goal then became how to limit the power of the franchise and manipulate the voters. Bismarck famously placed strict limits on the political power of any assemblies elected by universal suffrage (like the Reichstag); others like Britain and the United States had already implemented weighted voting or electoral colleges to but brakes on democratized representative assemblies by giving some voting blocs more power than others; Belgium, Italy, and the Netherlands effectively gave more votes to those with more education. Gerrymandering (aka “electoral geometry”) carved up and manipulated constituency boundaries in order to minimize votes for some parties while maximizing them for others. The open ballot was often standard, meaning voters often cast their votes under the watchful eyes of their bosses or landlords, thus influencing who they felt comfortable in voting for. However, these brakes merely slowed down the pace with which the masses entered into politics, but by the 1900s not even the epitome of reaction, Tsarist Russia, could stop the inevitable advance of democracy.

Mass political participation via the vote also meant mass mobilization of voters, which meant mass political parties, mass media, and mass media propaganda. World leaders who, up to this point, had never spoken politically before anyone other than fellow elites had to tone police themselves; it was not politically feasible to tell the majority of voters that you think they should have no political rights after all. Whether through the megaphone or through their political parties’ respective newspapers, leaders from here on out have been forced to camouflage their beliefs/objectives through rhetoric. Overall though, and often thanks to the confidence engendered by the economic boom of the late 1890s, governments and statesmen were generally confident in their abilities to manage democracy. As labor and socialist movements emerged as international phenomena around 1890, they became the primary concerns of the ruling classes of Europe and the Western world. Catholics and religious movements had been generally easier to integrate and manage thanks to their inherent conservatism. Labor and socialist movements took a little more finesse. For a while, most rulers attempted to stamp them out with an iron fist before realizing that it would be more effective to win them over with the carrot rather than the stick.

The 1890s therefore saw an offensive against unions in the United States, Germany, Britain, and other industrialized nations. By 1900 it had become clear that a moderate/reformist wing had emerged in all the labor and socialist movements, even in the Marxist movement (exemplified by Eduard Bernstein). While socialists were still generally barred from government in the early 1900s, the bourgeoisie and ruling classes found relative success with bringing in less radical members of the labor movement into seats of power. Systematically in Britain and France, members of labor parties were brought into parliament and had pacts/coalitions formed with more conservative parties/statesmen. The less radical members of the labor movement were therefore co-opted, defanged, and integrated into the capitalist system. This strategy (which was a coherent strategy by the ruling class by the way. They were not doing this just to gain votes, because the votes to gain were relatively puny, but rather to engage in class warfare and co-opt resistance from below) succeeded in permanently splitting the radicals and reformists in the labor movement into irreconcilable wings, allowing the ruling classes to isolate the radicals further. Part of this also meant giving material concessions to the working class/labor movement in the form of welfare and increased regulations. Both of those material concessions implied and led to the strengthening powers of the state apparatus and its ability to intervene into the economy.

[Lamia Al-Qahtani · Rating 5 out of 5]

الجزء الثالث والذي يتحدث عن ما قبل الحرب العالمية الأولى وشكل العالم وقتها والأسباب التي أدت للحرب بعد فترة مستقرة ونهضة علمية وتقدم اقتصادي عاشها العالم الأوروبي في نهاية القرن التاسع عشر وبداية القرن العشرين، أحببت هذا الجزء أكثر من الجزئين السابقة.

[Sense of History]

I remember having read this a long time ago, after Hobsbawm's two volumes on earlier 19th Century history. Those were an absolute stunning read. This one felt a bit less sweeping. Hobsbawm of course corrected on his eurocentric look, - how could he not in this age of imperialism -, but the marxist inspiration in this volume is a bit too obvious. Still a great read, but - just as the others - probably outdated by now.

[George · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is the first book of this series I laid hand on, and to be honest I was expecting it differently. It didn't really present all the major historical events in a timeline, but took for granted the reader’s familiarity with them and proceeded with deep diving in the context. It is though an excellent round description of this era.
What were the key players and the power dynamics, their economic status, the rise and fall of empires and how the new world will be redistributed? These will be few of your takeaways from this book.
Personally, I particularly enjoyed the last chapter, explaining the reasons of WW1.

[Jack · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hobsbawm's most hopeful statement is that the entire edifice of 19th century imperialism was built and crumbled in a single lifetime. Otherwise, this is fairly bracing reading for those of us living through a time of spiralling inequality, economic contradictions, naked great power imperialism and behind it all, a rising, popular, reactionary nationalism that demands a spectacular display of blood (everyone).

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow! I've just finished Hobsbawm's survey of the major historical, political, economic, and cultural developments of the nineteenth century, of which this is the third volume. It was well worth it. This is history that engages you and has something interesting to say.

I think this was the best of the three volumes (the first covers the French and industrial revolutions, the second the massive expansion of capitalism beginning with the failed revolutions of 1848 up to the world depression of the 1870s) probably because the pace of world events in all the realms Hobsbawm covers sped up in this period and because we can see more of the roots of our present and recent past in these events. In the epilogue, Hobsbawm gives his opinion on how the legacy of the nineteenth century can be seen in the twentieth.

Hobsbawm's history is so damn readable because he really pulls all the seemingly disparate realms of society together in a way that is compelling and unforced. But he can only pull this off because he has such broad interests. He presumably knows more about economic history than he does about European classical music, but he writes about both in a way that doesn't short change either, and highlights their interconnectedness.

It's really exciting to be presented with a three dimensional map of a time so far removed from ours, and because Hobsbawm draws so many individual features onto it, you can't help but notice that he's using your pre-existing knowledge to illustrate his underlying arguments. I think this book will really be stimulating for anyone who has a curiosity about history, whether or not you've done a lot of reading in the area before or not.

[Memduh Er · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sonunda üç ciltlik destan bitti.

Özellikle I. Dünya Savaşının nedenlerinin irdelendiği bölüm ve Sonsöz kısmı resitaldi. (Ama çeviri yüzünden kimseye tavsiye etmiyorum bu kitapları okumayı, en azından Türkçesini...) Daha şimdiden, diğer Hobsbawm kitaplarıyla buluşmak için sabırsızlanıyorum.

Kitaba 5 yıldız, çeviriye 1 yıldız. Bu tip çeviri felaketlerinin sorumlusu olarak da çevirmenden çok, hızlı çeviri isteyen ve adam gibi editör istihdam etmeyen yayınevlerini gördüğümü not düşmek istiyorum.

[AC · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this dense, and not wholly satisfying. Hobsbawm presupposes that the reader knows a fair bit, but not too much. Hence the book swings between interpretative digests that are often interesting, but sometimes too superficial — too much synthesis, not sufficient analysis.

Obviously, I’m an outlier here. I much preferred the first volume. I then began the fourth, but decided not to bother with it.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was great...now I need to read the two books that come before, "Age of Revolution" and "Age of Capital." I'm doing this all out of order! I think that might be interesting though, to work backwards through the long 19th century rather than forwards.
I think the best way to think about this book is to treat it as if you are taking a class with Hobsbawm. You knew he was a Marxist, but hey, so what - agreeing that Marx was on to something with his interpretation of history will not turn you into Trostky overnight. You'll probably agree with some of the argument here and think that other parts are less convincing, and that is what you should expect from any historian. The man's previous courses have covered the late 18th century revolutions that gave birth to European bourgeois liberalism, and that class's mid 19th century conquering of the world. This course provides an interpretation of the golden age, and the fall. How, as Hobsbawm puts it, "the era of peace, of confident bourgeois civilization, growing wealth and western empires inevitably carried within itself the embryo of the era of war, revolution and crisis which put an end to it." We build to August, 1914, when it all descended into bloody carnage.
Each chapter is a little different, as Hobsbawm takes us through facets of the age one by one. The growth of the European empires, the changes in politics back home, the growing influence of women, the birth of cinema and other cultural changes. In the end, I definitely felt like I had a much better understanding of where everything was in 1914, and why this war that no one seemed to want ended up happening anyway.
Hobsbawm is a little dismissive of religion, treating it basically as always anti-modern and incapable of adaptation, but what did we expect on religion from a Marxist? For a more interesting take on that issue, see C.A. Bayly's "Birth of the Modern World." The thing with Hobsbawm is, even if you think he might be wrong occasionally, he is so easy and fun to read. He makes everything make sense. He's like that professor who gets those lectures just right, so you have lots of little "ah ha" moments and really retain the material. I'm currently buying all his books at used bookstores and keeping them on my shelf.

[Sotiris Karaiskos · Rating 5 out of 5]

Σε αυτό εδώ το βιβλίο ο σπουδαίος ιστορικός μας περιγράφει μία εποχή μεγάλων ανατροπών που ουσιαστικά οδήγησε στη σύγχρονη εποχή. Όλες αυτές τις ανατροπές ο μας τις παρουσιάζει με το γνωστό του διεισδυτικό τρόπο που εστιάζει στα πιο ουσιαστικά πράγματα. Φυσικά η εποχή στην οποία αναφέρεται παρά την απουσία πολέμων στην Ευρώπη ήταν ιδιαίτερα βίαιη με αυτήν τη βία να οδηγεί τελικά στον πρώτο Παγκόσμιο Πόλεμο, για τις αιτίες του οποίου ο συγγραφέας μας παρουσιάζει μία εξαιρετική ανάλυση. Κάτι παραπάνω από εξαιρετικό.

[Stefan Mitev · Rating 3 out of 5]

И преди съм писал, че Ерик Хобсбаум е най-влиятелният историк, за когото никога не сте чували. Неговата трилогия за "разширения"19 век - от 1789 г. (Френската революция) до 1914 г. (началото на Първата световна война) има легендарен статус в англоезичните страни. Книгата "Ерата на империята, 1875-1914" обхваща период, характеризиращ се с бурни обществени промени. От една страна именно тогава има най-голям брой хора, наричащи себе си императори, но от друга се вижда ясна тенденция към възход на либералната буржоазия. Рязко нараства броят на завършилите висше образование. Жените започват организирани действия за еманципация и равни права. Детската смъртност намалява, паралелно с раждаемостта в развитите общества. Социалните промени разрушават стария ред и подготвят почвата за бъдещи (кървави) революции.

За съжаление, Ерик Хобсбаум не е най-лесният за четене историк. Той предполага високо ниво на информираност у читателите си. Фокусира се върху предпоставките и причините за събитията, а не върху тяхната фактологичност. Обхватът на засегнатите теми е впечатляващ - логично най-голям интерес имах в главата, посветена на науката. През 1887 г. Майкълсън и Морли провеждат елегантен експеримент, с който отхвърлят наличието на предполагаемата субстанция "етер". Тя е удобна измислица, създадена да запълни липсата на актуално научно познание. Разбиването на догми и революционните открития са характерни за периода преди Първата световна война. Нютоновата физика получава първите си удари от теорията на относителността на Айнщайн. Открити са радио вълните (Херц, 1883), рентгеновите лъчи (1895) и радиоактивността (Бекерел, 1896). Но псевдонауката, под формата на евгеника, също добива голяма популярност и както и днес обслужва чисто политически интереси.

"Ерата на империята" е книга за запалени фенове на историята, които не се страхуват от многобройни бележки под линия и чести справки в интернет за непознати събития и личности.

[Jonathan Tlalim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wise

[Steffi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very, very long overdue summer reading project: Marxist historian Hobsbawm’s classic and beyond interesting trilogy on the ‘long 19th century’ (The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789–1848, The Age of Capital: 1848–1875 and The Age of Empire: 1875–1914). Started reading in reverse order i.e. with the Age of Empire (published in 1987) because of the most fascinating subject of the systemic link between the dynamics of capitalism and imperialism, the rise of socialism and nationalism and related conflict and war. The book, which is great prose by the way, is written for non-historians, with neat chapters covering the various dynamics of the transformation which was set in place by the first ‘great depression’ which began in 1873 and ensuing new imperialism, such as mass politics and democracy, nationalism, working class politics and socialism, the new woman, the uncertainties of the bourgeoisie, the arts transformed etc.

[Pablo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fin de la trilogía de Hobsbawn sobre la historia del siglo XIX.
Como comentario de la trilogía en general, es importante destacar que Hobsbawm es de la escuela historiográfica marxista, esto no quiere decir que en sus libros todo lo capitalista sea malo y lo socialista bueno; sino que su forma de afrontar la historia se centra en procesos sociales.
Ninguno de los libros relata la historia de forma cronológica, sino que temática. Tampoco hay mención de muchos personajes históricos, ni relatos sobre batallas; pero si abundan bastantes datos estadísticos, sobre todo económicos y demográficos. Tampoco existe abuso en las referencias o citas bibliográficas.
A pesar de ser una obra bastante larga, resulta ser una pincelada de la historia del siglo XIX, el autor tiene claro eso, y al final de cada libro deja una extensa bibliografía recomendada por si se quiere profundizar en alguno de los temas de libro.

[Christopher · Rating 2 out of 5]

You would think that even with my pretty large leftward turn in the past 7 or so years I would have become more accommodating to this book which I once loathed in undergrad, but the fact is that my opinion remains the same for even the silly immature me of then was pretty spot on when it came to my criticisms of it (and Hobsbawn in general). His complete lack of understanding of any culture outside of western Europe by his fixation of a doctrinaire and limiting framework of analysis smacks of some of the worst old tropes of 'classic' works of history but combined with the worst elements of enlightenment/euphoria to be had.

[Emily Petroff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nothing to distract yourself from stressful current events like reminding yourself that other times in history were equally fraught and eventful. I've really enjoyed all the books in this series, and this one was no exception. The years 1875-1914 were exceptionally peaceful by world standards, with a focus on the growing global economy and consolidation of empire by the Western powers, all building towards the inevitable and catastrophic collapse in the First World War. This book explores this from many angles -- the rise of socialism, women's rights, immigration, breakthroughs in science and reason. It all comes together to make a wonderful portrait of this interesting time.

[Marc Lamot · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not as enticing as his previous volumes, but still a great read. See my review in my History-account on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

[Samuel Brander · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tre höjdpunkter/saker jag tyckte var särskilt intressanta, lite på måfå:

1. Hela kapitlet om demokratisering och masspolitik.

2. Kapitlet om nationalism och dess mutationer under perioden (själva begreppet härrör från 1880-talet). Hobsbawm skildrar hur renodlad nationalistisk ideologi, och antisemitism, kom att förknippas alltmer med den politiska högern, och dess klassbasis, de lägre mellanskikten, som aktivt ville skilja sig från arbetarklassen. Samtidigt började nationalism vid ungefär samma tidpunkt på idéplanet förutsätta ett territorium, vilket inte direkt alltid varit fallet i dess tidigare former. ”Age of Empire” var också tidpunkten då mindre nationalismer började utvecklas på allvar. Liberala tänkare i mitten av 1800-talet hade föreställt sig att den ”nationella tanken” bara eller i huvudsak kunde tillämpas på medelstora och stora folk. Hobsbawm skiljer också på ett intressant sätt mellan en underström av nationell känsla i masspolitik, som förenade politiska motståndare av olika ideologier (detta var/är på ett sätt ”naturligt” i den mån nationen-staten är grunden för mycket politiskt liv), från högerns ensisidiga nationalistiska ideologi. I själva verket var de mest politiskt framgångsrika nationella rörelserna ca. 1875-1914 de som förenade patriotism eller en nationell betoning med antingen en social eller en religiös dimension. Således kunde t.o.m. socialistiska och marxistiska partier plötsligt framstå som ”det nationella partiet”, bland annat i Finland och delar av det Habsburgska riket!

3. Kapitlet ”Reason and Society”, där Hobsbawm bland annat diskuterar sociologins uppkomst som en separat vetenskap (i vilken mån det nu var en etablerad vetenskap och hur sociologi ska definieras har varit en omstridd fråga omgiven av oklarheter från början). Han påpekar bland annat det tvivelaktiga i konventionen att klumpa ihop Marx med Max Weber och Durkheim som sociologins ”founding fathers”. Weber, Durkheim och Pareto var politiskt sätt alla liberala borgerliga tänkare, som ställde ”marxistiska frågor” i syfte att hitta medel och svar på hur det rådande systemet bäst kunde bevaras, i en tid av omfattande sociala omvälvningar och upplevda hot mot den bestående ordningen.

En lustig sak med boken är också att den innehåller överraskande många hänvisningar till Finland. Detta torde bero på att Hobsbawm skrev en del av den i Helsingfors, eftersom han arbetade här ett år mot slutet av 80-talet om jag minns rätt.

Och till sist tyckte jag om formuleringen i en bildtext: ”bicycle: vehicle of liberation”. Hobsbawm skriver också kort om hur cyklismens uppkomst kunde vara befriande speciellt för kvinnor, cykeln representerade en ny fri rörlighet, både bokstavligen och mentalt.

[Sean Cavanaugh · Rating 4 out of 5]

It turns out the long nineteenth century was the friends we made along the way

[Omar Kassem · Rating 4 out of 5]

في "عصر الثورة"، يبدأ هوبزباوم من لحظة الانفجار العظيم: الثورة الفرنسية والثورة الصناعية. هناك، تتغيّر قواعد اللعبة كلها. الأرستقراطية تفقد موقعها المركزي لصالح الطبقة البرجوازية، والدولة الحديثة تتشكّل، كما تتشكّل الرأسمالية كقوة غير قابلة للإيقاف. في هذا الجزء، كانت الصورة لا تزال "مفتوحة"، ثورية، تغمرها الطاقة والانبعاث.

ثم في "عصر رأس المال"، ننتقل إلى مرحلة التنظيم. الثورات تهدأ، والأسواق تتّسع، وتُبنى شبكات التجارة الدولية، وتبدأ أوروبا – وخاصة بريطانيا – ترسي أسس هيمنتها العالمية. هو عصر الثقة بالرأسمالية، بالعلم، بالتقدم. لكن، وتلك عبقرية هوبزباوم، ما يبدو وكأنه عصر استقرار، يخفي بداخله تناقضات تنمو في صمت: صعود الطبقة العاملة، تصاعد الغبن الطبقي، وضغط التحديث السريع.

ويأتي "عصر الإمبراطورية" ليكشف نتيجة هذا التراكم.
هنا، نكون قد وصلنا إلى ذروة السيطرة الأوروبية على العالم، ولكن هذه الذروة ليست مطمئنة، بل مضطربة ومفخّخة. فنحن أمام عصر تموّه فيه الانهيارات خلف الازدهار. الإمبراطوريات تمسك بالعالم في قبضة يدها، لكنها عاجزة عن احتواء القوى الجديدة التي خلقتها بنفسها: الطبقة العاملة المنظمة، الاشتراكية، الحركات النسوية، القوميات الجديدة، والتطورات العلمية التي بدأت تُهشّم تصوّر الإنسان عن نفسه.

نلاحظ أسلوب هوبزباوم التحليلي المركّب، حيث لا يفصل الاقتصاد عن الثقافة، ولا السياسة عن الفن. هو يربط تطوّر المفاهيم العلمية – كالنسبية والبيولوجيا – بانهيار التصوّر الليبرالي للإنسان، ويضع الحركات الفنية كرمزية على أزمة الروح الأوروبية (مثلاً، ظهور التعبيرية والرمزية بوصفها احتجاجًا على العقلنة الجافة للرأسمالية).

ويرى في تفكّك الأسرة التقليدية، ونمو المدن الكبرى، واختناق الحركات الاشتراكية داخل أنظمة "تمثيلية" عاجزة، مؤشرات على أن البنية الاجتماعية التي تأسست في القرن التاسع عشر لم تعد قادرة على احتواء القوى التي أطلقتها.

[Sarah · Rating 1 out of 5]

he Age of Empire is incredibly, incredibly dry. It reads like a textbook, and not an engaging one. It's incredibly dense, so that I often found myself rereading a given paragraph or page 2-3 times to get my head around the information being presented. (I gave up after 200 pages, though I'd probably read more than the 340 in the entire book!) The Age of Empire also has tables of numbers, sometimes within the text, and regularly refers readers around the book (i.e., see pages 114-115, earlier) and to other books written by Eric Hobsbawm (i.e., see The Age of Capital, chapter 14, 11). I found these things distracting.

I also did not care for the organization of the book. Neither chronological, nor organized by empire (British, Ottoman, Habsburg, etc.), The Age of Empire is organized by theme and, therefore, seems to jump around quite a bit. The development of socialism as a political philosophy, for example, or the increasing liberation of women and growing suffrage movement are covered, then referenced, then re-referenced, to an extent that I felt I was reading in circles.

Lastly, I was disappointed with the extent to which The Age of Empire truly seemed to examine and confront imperialism. Honestly, that was probably my greatest disappointment, because I expected to read a book about empires, within the context of the wider socio-political-economic issues. Instead, this was a book about the social/political/economic issues at a time that just happened to coincide with the apex of imperialism/colonialism.

[Josh Friedlander · Rating 4 out of 5]

The final volume of Hobsbawm's trilogy on what he called the "long nineteenth century" (1789-1914). Like its predecessors, this book gives a chapter each to an aspect of its period (women, the arts, religion, science, nationalism...), trying to give a sense of the intellectual and political currents of the time. It is thus hard to summarise: as usual, I write mostly odd bits that seemed notable or interesting to me. For example the changed perception of H.G. Wells, who seems to have been seen in his day as one of its great intellectuals - Stefan Zweig refers in The World of Yesterday to "the two keenest minds of their time, Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells"(!), and his writing inspired Leo Szilard to come up with the atom bomb - but is now mostly remembered as a science fiction pioneer. Thus Hobsbawm:

The ‘serious’ prose literature of the time has found and kept its place, though not always its contemporary popularity. If the reputation of Thomas Hardy, Thomas Mann or Marcel Proust has (rightly) risen, the fortunes of Arnold Bennett and H. G. Wells, Romain Rolland and Roger Martin du Gard, Theodore Dreiser and Selma Lagerlöf, have been more chequered.

(Dreiser is today probably the best known of the lot; Alfred Kazin liked Sister Carrie.)

Ideology is a major theme in the book, along with class, and in this volume I sensed Hobsbawm's famously unreconstructed Communism most - his willingness to associate capitalism with racism and imperialism, say, and his skimming over the details of socialist governments (of which there were few in this period, to be fair: when Alexandre Millerand joined the French government in 1899 he was kicked out of the national and international movements). Hobsbawm's choice of facts and style of presentation is susceptible to his criticism of sociology:

As an academic discipline, it still suffers from endless and inconclusive debates about social class and status, due to the fondness of its practitioners for reclassifying the population in a manner most suitable to their ideological convictions

When I have mass support, as they say, its a grassroots movement - when the other guy does it's populist demagoguery.

After the depression of the 1870s, when Marxist theory had predicted that capitalism was at its end and the battle over bimetallism raged, the world entered a period of prolonged economic expansion, possibly because of the Klondike and South African gold rushes, and European empires expanded all over the world. This was the Belle Époque (at least for the bourgeoisie). Artists began experimenting radically (the term avant-garde in its modern sense first appeared) and scientists discovered that the world was too strange even to picture in our heads by analogy. Nationalism surged, with second-tier nations never before considered as separate people (Finns, Slovaks) developing national identities and independence movements. Jews, too: Zionism began in this period in the wake of the Dreyfus affair. In larger nations, nationalism shifted from a liberal movement (opposed to local aristocrats) to a reactionary one (largely working-class and xenophobic). Monarchs had previously been international, since they all intermarried. The crowns of Britain, Greece and Belgium were all Germans, but they quickly rebranded as patriotic national figures.

Hobsbawm is a superb writer of English prose, and was maybe the best-known historian of his day. If he tends to cast an overly ideological light on things, he is honest in accepting when the facts do not fit his theory. I'll close with a quote from the end:

It was a century which transformed the world – not more than our own century has done, but more strikingly, inasmuch as such revolutionary and continuous transformation was then new. Looking back, we can see this century of the bourgeoisie and of revolution suddenly heaving into view, like Nelson’s battle-fleet getting ready for action, like it even in what we do not see: the kidnapped crews who manned them, short, poor, whipped and drunk, living on worm-eaten rusks. Looking back we can recognize that those who made it, and increasingly those growing masses who participated in it in the ‘developed’ west, knew that it was destined for extraordinary achievements, and thought that it was destined to solve all the major problems of humanity, to remove all the obstacles in the path of their solution. In no century before or since have practical men and women had such high, such utopian, expectations for life on this earth: universal peace, universal culture by means of a single world language, science which would not merely probe but actually answer the most fundamental questions of the universe, the emancipation of women from all their past history, the emancipation of all humanity through the emancipation of the workers, sexual liberation, a society of plenty, a world in which each contributed according to their abilities and received what they needed. These were not only dreams of revolutionaries. Utopia through progress was in fundamental ways built into the century.

[Lord_Humungus · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not even Hobsbawm knew where most of his paragraphs were headed.

[Steve Cooper · Rating 5 out of 5]

As we have come to expect from Hobsbawm’s ‘Age of’ books, this one presents an analysis of political, economic, social and cultural trends for the period (1875 - 1914) that is unparalleled in both depth and breadth. Of course, hovering over the entire book is the shadow of the first world war, and Hobsbawm says himself that the central preoccupation running through this book

“must be to understand and to show how the era of peace, of confident bourgeois civilization, growing wealth and western empires inevitably carried within itself the embryo of the era of war, revolution and crisis which put an end to it.”

To that end, he has lots to say about the run-up to war culminating in this:

“To the end of his days Gavrilo Prinčip, the assassin of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, could not believe that his tiny match put the world in flames. The final crisis in 1914 was so totally unexpected, so traumatic and, in retrospect, so haunting, because it was essentially an incident in Austrian politics which, Vienna felt, required ‘teaching Serbia a lesson’. The international atmosphere seemed calm. No foreign office expected trouble in June 1914, and public persons had been assassinated at frequent intervals for decades. In principle, nobody even minded a great power leaning heavily on a small and troublesome neighbor. Since then some five thousand books have been written to explain the apparently inexplicable: how, within a little more than five weeks of Sarajevo, Europe found itself at war. The immediate answer now seems both clear and trivial: Germany decided to give Austria full backing, that is to say not to defuse the situation. The rest followed inexorably. For by 1914 any confrontation between the blocs, in which one side or the other was expected to back down, brought them to the verge of war. Beyond a certain point the inflexible mobilization of military force, without which such a confrontation would not have been ‘credible’, could not be reversed. ‘Deterrence’ could no longer deter but only destroy. By 1914 any incident, however random - even the action of an inefficient student terrorist in a forgotten corner of the continent - could lead to such a confrontation, if any single power locked into the system of bloc and counter-bloc chose to take it seriously. Thus war came, and, in comparable circumstances, could come again.”

[Praveen SR · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thinking from the now, it might be hard for us to imagine that just about a century about large sections of the populations, including women and the non-land owning class, were unable to vote in many countries which were even at that time known to be "modern". Hobsbawm, in this third book of his classic series spanning the long arc of history from 1789 to 1991, writes about that specific time when all that was set to change- the years from 1875 to 1914. The first trade unions were beginning to appear, the upper classes were beginning to feel the pressure and derision of the demands from down below for further and further democratisation. As he says, in 1880, there were hardly any mass party of the working class, which was not the case a couple of decades later, at the turn of the century.

As is the format of books in this series, the chapters are not divided as succeeding time periods as in usual books of history, but as a chronicle of the changes which happened in different arena - in arts, in women's rights, in science, in nationalism, in workers' rights. A thread that binds this book is the slow build up of the First World War in the background, even as the period was one of peace, compared to the preceding decades. As he writes, "the era of peace, of confident bourgeois civilization, growing wealth and western empires inevitably carried within itself the embryo of the era of war, revolution and crisis which put an end to it."

In tracing the reasons of the war, he does not lazily pin point at the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and leave it at that. Infact, that incident is almost treated as a footnote, while he concentrates on all the complex relations between the belligerents over the decade leading to the war. Parallely, Lenin and his comrades were building up a revolution that for quite a considerable period of time created a fear in the minds of the capitalists that they world was about to crumble. But, as Hobsbawm explains in 'Age of Extremes', they fought off the challenge, by turning into ssomething very different from what they were before 1917. Keynes is given much of the credit for this life-saving shape-shifting.

Some of the sections can be dense and tough to plough through compared to the 'Age of Extremes' (I am reading the series in reverse), yet the amount of things he manages to condense to build the narrative can be an excuse for this.

[Oliver · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hobsbawm really was the fucking man. Another volume down of immaculately formulated materialist history.

He supplies you with just enough examples to elucidate his claims and hold your attention, without ever losing sight of each chapter’s topic and the thematic threads running throughout the “long 19th century”.

It’s a narrative for sure, but a convincing and compelling one at that. I cannot wait to finish up this journey with The Age Of Extremes, concluding the first step in my attempt to ever so slightly alleviate my ignorance of modern history.

[Gabe Steller · Rating 4 out of 5]

Shit something I liked about these books is I felt like Howbsbawm is so good at breaking down a lot of complex stuff clearly and concisely and afterwords I feel like I've got a this great handle on the period and I feel all satisfied and smart and stuff. But shit I read this like 5 months ago and I remember so little. at least I underlined some stuff.
Anyway whatever, Fuckin totally rocked while I was reading it tho