Product Description

A major treatment of the crucial years 1848-1875 - a penetrating analysis of the rise of capitalism throught the world. In the 1860s a new word entered the economic and political vocabulary of the world: "capitalism". The global triumph of capitalism is the major theme of history in the decades after 1848. It was the triumph of a society which believed that economic growth rests on competitve private enterprise, on success in buying everything in the cheapest market (including labour) and selling it in the dearest. An economy so based, and therefore nestling naturally on the sound foundations of a bourgeoisie composed of those whom energy, merit and intelligence had raised to their position and kept there, would - it was believed - not only create a world of suitably distributed material plenty but of ever-growing enlightenment, reason and human opportunity, an advance of the sciences and the arts, in brief a world of continuous and accelerating material and moral progress.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #38009 in Books
• Published on: 1988-01-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 413 pages

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' ECONOMIST

From the Publisher
“His two great syntheses on the origins of the society we inhabit –the Age of Revolution and The Age of Capital – have become part of the mental furniture of educated Englishmen” Guardian

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. Previous books include AGE OF EXTREMES, THE AGE OF REVOLUTION and THE AGE OF EMPIRE.

Customer Reviews

Great History Book
Although I'm not a leftist, I read many of his books, especially the four ones about the past Centuries. A really intersting book, written with unbias opinion, a really true historian.
Highly recommended.

Erudite but boring
I read this book during a week in Romania. Around me I saw what an age of communism does. Why I wonder should an intelligent author be so critical of capitalism? It is his a priori it seems that Marxism is good and would solve the inequalities of the world. Now we know better. But old Marxists it seems do not have fading commitment to error.

Hobsbawm knows everything about economics but his grasp of religion is no more than atheistic prejudice. Christianity is irrational. Revivals of religion may be promoted by cholera we are told. Hobsbawm 's messiah is Marx. Rest assured, Karl and his ideology will not rise again save in the groves of academe, far from reality.

Hobsbawm ignores Christian contributions to the history of the period. for example, Holland's Anti-Revolutionary party gets no mention, nor does the Christian motivations behind Gladstone's liberalism.

Erudite but boring prose as in his previous volume. The Guardian says this book sparkles on every page. Only perhaps if you compare it with a left of centre newspaper.