E. J. Hobsbawm

The age of revolution, 1789-1848

It is quite dificult to find a History book who is well written and also makes you think about the subject. This is the main diference about Hobswamn. He makes you think, and I believe this is the main aim for a Historian. It is curious for me that one of the reviewers complaints about the lack of interest that the author shows for the American revolution. Maybe if we think in the world of XXth century or XXIst one we can consider this situation quite strange, but in the XVIIIth century the new born United States were not important in the world. Besides the influence of the principles of the American constitution cannot be compared with the influence of the French revolution. In the last book of the serie The Age of Catastrophe is when the rol of the United States is more important so he makes a brilliant anylisis of its influence in Contemporary History.

Peasants and politics

This paper discusses the political relations of ‘traditional’ peasants to groups and institutions outside their local community, with special reference to situations in which they encounter the political movements and problems of the twentieth century. It stresses the separation of peasants from non‐peasants, the general subalternity of the peasant world, but also the explicit confrontation of power which is the framework of their politics. The relative isolation of local communities, and their consequent ignorance, does not confine peasant politics only to parish pump or undefined millennial universality. However, it makes certain forms of nation‐wide peasant action without outside leadership and organisation difficult and some, like a general ‘peasant revolution’, probably impossible. The political problems of a ‘modern’ peasantry are briefly touched upon in conclusion.

The Invention of Tradition: The Highland Tradition of Scotland

Today, whenever Scotchmen gather together to celebrate their national identity, they assert it openly by certain distinctive national apparatus. They wear the kilt, woven in a tartan whose colour and pattern indicates their ‘clan’; and if they indulge in music, their instrument is the bagpipe. This apparatus, to which they ascribe great antiquity, is in fact largely modern. It was developed after, sometimes long after, the Union with England against which it is, in a sense, a protest. Before the Union, it did indeed exist in vestigial form; but that form was regarded by the large majority of Scotchmen as a sign of barbarism: the badge of roguish, idle, predatory, blackmailing Highlanders who were more of a nuisance than a threat to civilized, historic Scotland. And even in the Highlands, even in that vestigial form, it was relatively new: it was not the original, or the distinguishing badge of Highland society. Indeed, the whole concept of a distinct Highland culture and tradition is a retrospective invention. Before the later years of the seventeenth century, the Highlanders of Scotland did not form a distinct people. They were simply the overflow of Ireland. On that broken and inhospitable coast, in that archipelago of islands large and small, the sea unites rather than divides and from the late fifth century, when the Scots of Ulster landed in Argyll, until the mid-eighteenth century, when it was ‘opened up’ after the Jacobite revolts, the West of Scotland, cut off by mountains from the East, was always linked rather to Ireland than to the Saxon Lowlands. Racially and culturally, it was a colony of Ireland.

Marx and History

How does Marx stand one hundred years after his death? If we look at the literature written and read by intellectuals, and the polemics among Marxists, the answer is: not too firmly. In the past they disputed about the political and ideological significance of Marx’ theory. Today some of the most basic propositions of the old gentleman are queried even among people claiming to be Marxists, from the materialist conception of history to the labour theory of value. People ask with increasing frequency what precisely has survived in Marxism. So it is important to establish, at the outset, that today-unlike the situation even thirty years agonobody seriously doubts that something of Marx has survived, indeed that a great deal has survived. If this were not the case, there would not be such passionate argument about the matter. For there is no argument about thinkers who are dead. No one today asks what has survived of the thought of Herbert Spencer, who, at the time of Marx’ death, was by far the most celebrated philosopher and sociologist in the world, a man whose name was familiar to any educated person from Santiago de Chile

Nationalism in the late twentieth century

Since this book was first published in early 1990, more new nation-states have been formed, or are in the process of formation, than at any time in this century. The break-up of the USSR and Yugoslavia have so far added sixteen to the number of internationally recognized sovereign entities, and there is no immediately foreseeable limit to the further advance of national separatism. All states are today officially ‘nations’, all political agitations are apt to be against foreigners, whom practically all states harry and seek to keep out. It may therefore seem wilful blindness to conclude this book with some reflections on the decline of nationalism as a vector of historical change, compared to its role in the century from the 1830s to the end of World War II. It would indeed be absurd to deny that the collapse of the Soviet Union and the regional and international system of which, as one super-power, it was a pillar for some forty years marks a profound, and probably permanent, historical change, whose implications are, at the time of writing, entirely obscure. However, they introduce new elements into the history of nationalism only insofar as the break-up of the USSR in 1991 went far beyond the (temporary) break-up of Tsarist Russia in 1918–20, which was largely confined to its European and transcaucasian regions. For, basically, the ‘national questions’ of 1989–92 are not new.

The Age of Empire, 1875-1914.

This title is about the death of the 19th century, the world made by and for liberal middle classes in the name of universal progress and civilization. It is about hopes realized which turned into fears: an era of unparalled peace engendering an era of unparalled war; revolt and revolution inevitably emerging on the outskirts of a stable and flourishing Western society; an era of profound identity crises for bourgeois classes whose traditional moral foundations crumbled under the pressure of their own accumulations of wealth and comfort, among a new and sudden mass labour movement which rejected capitalism, new middle classes which rejected liberalism. It is about world empires built and held with almost contemptuous ease by small bodies of Europeans, which were to last barely a human lifetime, and a European domination of world history never more confident than at the moment when it was about to disappear forever.