The Age of Empire, 1875-1914

The third part of Hobsbawm’s big review of the “long 19th century” in world history covers the period when Big Capital and western imperialism went full-on global, when the “old empires” (China, Persia, Ottoman, Austria-Hungary, Russia) were visibly crumbling, when Britain stopped ruling the waves, when the USA and Japan emerged fully as new international powers, when workers’ movements challenged the liberal orthodoxy, when millions of people (especially Europeans) migrated to other parts of the world, when feminism began to be taken seriously, and when new technologies like the motor car, aircraft, electric light, the cinema, radio and telephones began to impinge on people’s lives around the world. Science broke with the show more mechanistic universe of Newton and Galileo to give us Freud and Einstein and Heisenberg, artists and writers invented modernism. And the European powers somehow managed to start a World War. There was a lot going on.

As usual, Hobsbawm moves fast with his high-level analysis and avoids getting bogged down in detail — you’ll probably find this hard to follow unless you already have at least a broad outline of the history of the period in mind before you start, but if you can keep up, it’s a very rewarding process, and it will give you a lot to think about, even if you don’t share his Marxist viewpoint. He manages to touch on a surprising number of topics in a relatively small space, and draws them all into his big picture — it’s not often that you read someone who can jump between Keynes and Schoenberg and quantum physics and the Mexican revolution and tell you something interesting and new about all of them. He doesn’t get unduly bogged down in the most widely-rehashed question of the period — why did World War I start? — but he does point out the factors that were different in the international situation by 1914 and made war a more likely outcome of incidental conflicts. show less

Hobsbawm writes impeccably, but I find his perfectly formed sentences turgid in aggregate. Of course, one does not read Hobsbawm for his prose but for his brilliant ideas. His understanding and sympathy for all strata of European society (and this is at heart a European history) are refreshing. Like Braudel, this is an analysis of the effects of economics on civilization rather than a chronicle of political events. It's impressive that the chapter on the origins of the First World War barely mentions the Kaiser, that colorful but irrelevant figure.

This is a curate's egg of a series of books. Eric Hobsbawm is great on his history, pretty good on politics but, not so good on culture where he often lets his prejudices cloud the issues.

Still very worth reading.

Third in Hobsbawm's series about the history of the modern world, the period covered here is from the latter part of the 19th century up to the outbreak of the Great War.
As indicated by the title, this was the era in which the dominance of Britain broke down and a number of peers engaged in imperialist competition, building their own empires. The upshot was the end to both free trade and the dominance of liberalism, replaced by protectionism in economics and increasingly facing both nationalism and socialism in the political sphere as political democracy gained ground. All of this was obviously central to the outbreak of the war - a major turning point in world history.
The first half of the period saw a deep depression for world show more capitalism, paradoxically leading to an accelerated increase in living standards. This was succeeded by what has been regarded as the "Belle Epoque" - mainly by elites - where their profits returned.
Much of this was new to me and I learned a lot - but this time I felt that things began to drag a little as Hobsbawm switched from the economic to social sphere - dealing with changes for women, in philosophy, in science and so forth. Additionally as we move towards the Russian Revolution, the authors biases are obvious - in what he does not say as much as what he does. This stuff is of more interest from the point of view of historiography than of history. And when I get to the last volume which covers the bulk of the 20th century, I suspect that will be my general feeling on that as well. show less

Erica Hobsbawm discusses the evolution of European economics, politics, arts, sciences, and cultural life from the height of the industrial revolution to the First World War. Hobsbawm combines vast erudition with a graceful prose style to re-create the epoch that laid the basis for the twentieth century.

3rd & last volume of the 'long 19th century' trilogy. Hobsbawm deserves credit for stressing that the 19th century - indeed the entire era of grandiose European expansion - didn't end at the very turn of the 20th century but later, with the First World War, & after several decades of an imperialistic, zero-sum 'scramble' for the remaining unconquered corners of the globe. A discreditable race, alongside which Hobsbawm seems to jettison whatever little sympathy he might still have had for the people & periods described earlier in his trilogy, who at least seemed more earnest & truly innovative. He maintains, however, a marked preference for more popular or working-class movements.

An authoritative history of the end of the long nineteenth century by one of the great historians. Eric Hobsbawm redefined the nineteenth century as lasting from the French Revolution to the start of the Great War, and in The Age of Empire he sets out the final 40 years of that long century as European powers built their empires, scrambled for Africa, indulged in the Great Game and moved inexorably towards the Killing Fields of France, Belgium, the Dardenelles et al.