Hobsbawm, Eric J. (1917– )

Hobsbawm, Eric J. (1917– ), British historian. Eric Hobsbawm has long been considered one of the leading European experts on the history of working classes.

Despite his reputation as a historian of revolution and the lower classes, one of Hobsbawm's most popular works is a study of jazz. The Jazz Scene, which was originally published in 1959 under a pseudonym (the author felt that a work on popular culture would hurt his professional reputation), is the work of "an abject jazz fan who sees his subject, good and bad, in the full economic, social, and political perspective of a historian," declares Roderick Nordell in the Christian Science Monitor.

Working-class issues and revolution are major themes throughout Hobsbawm's work. In Politics for a Rational Left: Political Writing, 1977–1988, the historian argues against the Conservatism of British politics during the 1980s. One of Hobsbawm's early works, Captain Swing (co-written with fellow historian George Rude), looks at nineteenth-century English working-class issues. It tells of a series of uprisings by agricultural laborers in rural England during the 1830s. The bands gathered together under the leadership of a mythical captain "Swing," whose name was signed to threatening letters addressed to local landowners. When the uprisings were suppressed, the convicted rebels were deported to Australia and Tasmania.

Hobsbawm looks at the question of revolution and its relationship to the development of the nation-state in Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality. The existence of a nation is something that developed only in the recent past, the historian concludes, and nationalism developed to its greatest extent (in one direction) in Nazi Germany during the 1930s and early 1940s.

So influential have Hobsbawm's writings been in the field of historical study, Tony Judt points out in the New York Review of Books, that "among historians in the English-speaking world there is a discernible 'Hobsbawm generation.' It consists of men and women who took up the study of the past at some point in the 'long nineteen-sixties,' between . . . 1959 and 1975, and whose interest in the recent past was irrevocably shaped by Eric Hobsbawm's writings, however much they now dissent from many of his conclusions." "But Hobsbawm's most enduring imprint on our historical consciousness," Judt continues, "has come through his great trilogy on the 'long nineteenth century,' from 1789 to 1914, the first volume of which,The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848, appeared in 1962." The interpretation put forth by Hobsbawm in this volume was that a single social class from northern Europe—the bourgeoisie—rose to power in a time of great social upheaval.

The Age of Revolution was followed by The Age of Capital, 1848–1875, a study that begins with another series of revolutions—the series of uprisings that shook Europe in 1878—and ends with an economic catastrophe: an economic depression that stretched across the world in 1875. Hobsbawm relates many events in world history during this time to the influence of capitalism: the collapse of black slavery in the United States, the urbanization of Western Europe, the massive emigration of agricultural and light industrial workers to the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand, and, David Brion Davis concludes, "the realization that no corner of the globe could escape the irresistible impact of Western capitalism and Western culture."

The Age of Empire, 1875–1914 continues Hobsbawm's examination of the expansion of capitalism into the twentieth century. Hobsbawm continues his examination of the twentieth century with The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914–1991, which won the Lionel Gelber Prize in 1995.

EWB