Eric Hobsbawm

"One of the few genuinely great historians of our century" according to the New Republic, Eric Hobsbawm has produced a canon of landmark books--including The Age of Capital, The Age of Revolution, Bandits, and The Age of Extremes--that has both set the standard for radical scholarship and influenced historical thinking across the political spectrum. Now back in print after thirty years, Revolutionaries is vintage Hobsbawm, written masterfully amid one of the century's most intense periods of political and social upheaval, putting those events in historical context. Few observers were as astute as Hobsbawm at probing, criticizing, and clarifying radical movements, whether in Beijing or Berkeley. Ranging from historical investigations into communism to contemporary appraisals of revolutionary movements and meditations on Marxism, Hobsbawm's commentaries are essential guides to ideas and people that changed the face of the twentieth century. Hobsbawm's essays retain a freshness that speaks both to his brilliance as a writer and scholar, as well as to the perennial importance of his subjects. At a time when the very concept of revolution has been largely discredited, these essays remind us of the enduring importance of radical investigations into--and solutions to--society's persistent inequalities and injustices.

* A fascinating study of the spectacular explots if robbers and outlaws from Robin Hood to Jesse James.

Eric Hobsbawm's AGE OF EXTREMES was a remarkable phenomenon, a book of serious and challenging historical analysis that became a worldwide bestseller. Now, THE NEW CENTURY continues Hobsbawm's analysis of our twentieth century, asking crucial questions about our inheritance from the century of conflict and its meanings for the years to come. Looking back over the last decade to learn something of the new era, Hobsbawm finds the distinction between internal and international conflicts and between state of war and state of peace disappearing. He goes on to analyse the crisis of the multi-ethnic state and shows the distortions of history involved in the creation of its myths. He expresses his anxiety over the system of international relations between states that have so far ruled by colonialism and nuclear terror. Hobsbawm then assesses the impact that a popular global culture has had on every aspect of life, from happiness and social hierarchy to nutrition and the environment. Published this year in dozens of countries throughout the world, THE NEW CENTURY is a concise summary of the thinking of one of the pre-eminent historians.

* Classic essays on the history of radical protest.

Premier historian Eric Hobsbawm's brilliant study of the Industrial Revolution, which sold more than a quarter of a million copies in its original edition, is now back in print, updated for a new generation. In Industry and Empire, Hobsbawm explores the origin and dramatic course of the Industrial Revolution over two hundred and fifty years and its influence on social and political institutions. He describes and accounts for Britain's rise as the first industrial power, its decline from domination, its special relation with the rest of the world, and the effects of this trajectory on the lives of its ordinary citizens. This new edition includes a fascinating summary of events of the last twenty years, and an illuminating new conclusion.

Few historians have done more to change the way we see the history of modern times than Eric Hobsbawm. From his early books on the Industrial Revolution and European empires, to his magisterial 1995 study of the "short twentieth century," Age of Extremes, Hobsbawm has become known as one of the finest practitioners of his craft. On History brings together his brilliant and challenging reflections on the uses, and abuses, of history. Ranging from considerations of "history from below" and the "progress" of history to recent debate on the relevance of studying history and the responsibility of the historian, On History reflects Hobsbawm's lifelong concern with the relations between past, present, and future.

*A great historian tells the inside story of how history is recorded.

This magisterial volume follows the death of ancient traditions, the triumph of new classes, and the emergence of new technologies, sciences, and ideologies, with vast intellectual daring and aphoristic elegance. Part of Eric Hobsbawm's epic four-volume history of the modern world, along with The Age of Capitalism, The Age of Empire, and The Age of Extremes.

In this book, Eric Hobsbawm chronicles the events and trends that led to the triumph of private enterprise and its exponents in the years between 1848 and 1875. Along with Hobsbawm's other volumes, this book constitutes and intellectual key to the origins of the world in which we now live. Although it pulses with great events--failed revolutions, catastrophic wars, and a global depression--The Age of Capital is most outstanding for its analyis of the trends that created the new order. With the sweep and sophistication that have made him one of our greatest historians, Hobsbawm indentifies this epoch's winners and losers, its institutions, ideologies, science, and religion.

Dividing the century into the Age of Catastrophe, 1914-1950, the Golden Age, 1950-1973, and the Landslide, 1973-1991, Hobsbawm marshals a vast array of data into a volume of unparalleled inclusiveness, vibrancy, and insight, a work that ranks with his classics The Age of Empire and The Age of Revolution. In the short century between 1914 and 1991, the world has been convulsed by two global wars that swept away millions of lives and entire systems of government. Communism became a messianic faith and then collapsed ignominiously. Peasants became city dwellers, housewives became workers--and, increasingly leaders. Populations became literate even as new technologies threatened to make print obsolete. And the driving forces of history swung from Europe to its former colonies. Includes 32 pages of photos.

A reassessment of the 20th century exploring topics such as the breakdown of the Old World, the lack of international accord, the failure of the Arts in recent years and the influence of the Third World.

The bicentenary of the French Revolution has been dominated by those who do not like the French Revolution or its heritage. This book deals with a surprisingly neglected subject: the history, not of the revolution itself, but of its reception and interpretation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.A critical assumption of the book is that while it is necessary and inevitable that historians write out of the history of their own times, those who write only out of their own times cannot understand the past and what came out of it. The recent historiographical reaction against the centrality of the Revolution reflects the politics of those contemporary historians for whom progress and revolutionary democracy are dangerous concepts. Their reinterpretations, Hobsbawm argues, are misguided. The Revolution transformed the world permanently and, as recent events in Eastern Europe emphasize, introduced ideas that continue to transform it. 'The French Revolution', writes Hobsbawm, ' gave peoples the sense that history could be changed by their action ... [and] demonstrated the power of the common people in a manner which no subsequent government has ever allowed itself to forget.'Echoes of the Marseillaise is a stimulating mix of historiography and political analysis, a much-needed epilogue of clarity and reason to a muddled bicentenary.

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.

In this book, Eric Hobsbawm, one of Britain's most distinguished historians, tackles the current impasse of the left. In a series of cogent and elegant contributions he elaborates a strategy for the defeat of Thatcherism and the opening of a new era of progressive and democratic politics.Hobsbawm situates the left's recent difficulties within a longer historical perspective: the epochal crisis of the 'classic labour movement' created by new patterns of urbanization and post-industrial economics. He argues that in Britain this crisis has been exacerbated by a factionalism which obstructs the creation of rational alliances, and by an insularity which blinds the left to valuable lessons from elsewhere in Europe. Unity of the left, around a broad and imaginative programme including major reform of the electoral system, is the only effective response to a Conservative government which has made a radical break with the post-war consensus.Politics for a Rational Left sets Hobsbawm's influential political analyses in the context of more discursive contributions ranging over themes such as working-class organization in the modern city, the appeal of nationalism in contemporary society, the lessons of the pre-war Popular Front, and his own formative political experience. Hobsbawm emerges from these pages as a hard-headed and lucid political commentator whose dismissal of wishful thinking and party chauvinism never deflects from an underlying commitment to the relevance of socialism for the 1990s.Published in association with Marxism Today

The first volume of Hobsbawm's classic and universally acclaimed trilogy on the 19th century, beautifully repackaged as an Abacus History Great

Hobsbawm's brilliant history, beautifully repackaged as an Abacus History Great