Product Description

In this history of the years 1848-1875, the author's intention is not to summarize facts, but rather to draw facts together into a historical synthesis, "make sense of" the period and trace the roots of the present world back to it.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #91778 in Books
• Published on: 2000-05-25
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 368 pages

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 was born in Alexandria in 1917 and was educated in Vienna, Berlin, London and Cambridge. A Fellow of the British Academy and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, with honorary degrees from universities in several countries, he taught until retirement at Birkbeck College, University of London, and since then at the New School for Social Research in New York. All his books have been translated into several languages.

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.