Eric Hobsbawm – författare

Born almost a hundred years ago in Vienna - the cultural heart of a bourgeois Mitteleurope - Eric Hobsbawm, who was to become one of the most brilliant and original historians of our age, was uniquely placed to observe an era of titanic social and artistic change. As the century progressed, the forces of Communism and Dadaism, Ibiza and cyberspace, would do battle with the bourgeois high culture fin-de-siècle Vienna represented - the opera, the Burgtheater, the museums of art and science, City Hall. In Fractured Times Hobsbawm unpicks a century of cultural fragmentation and dissolution with characteristic verve and vigour.Hobsbawm examines the conditions that created the great cultural flowering of the belle époque and held the seeds of its disintegration, from paternalistic capitalism to globalisation and the arrival of a mass consumer society. Passionate but never sentimental, Hobsbawm ranges freely across his subject: he records the passing of the golden age of the ''free intellectual'' and examines the lives of great, forgotten men; he analyses the relation between art and totalitarianism and dissects cultural phenomena as diverse as surrealism, women''s emancipation and the American cowboy myth. Written with consummate imagination and skill, Fractured Times is the last book from one of our greatest modern-day thinkers.

A magisterial account of the rise of capitalismEric Hobsbawm''s magnificent treatment of the crucial years 1848-1875 is a penetrating analysis of the rise of capitalism and the consolidation of bourgeois culture. 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. The extension of capitalist economy to four corners of the globe, the mounting concentration of wealth, the migration of men, the domination of Europe and European culture made the third quarter of the nineteenth century a watershed. This is a history not only of Europe but of the world. Eric Hobsbawm''s intention is not to summarise facts, but to draw facts together into a historical synthesis, to ''make sense of'' the period, and to trace the roots of the present world back to it. He integrates economics with political and intellectual developments in this objective yet original account of revolution and the failure of revolution, of the cycles of boom and slump that characterise capitalist economies, of the victims and victors of the bourgeois ethos.

THE AGE OF EMPIRE is a book about the strange death of the nineteenth century, the world made by and for liberal middle classes in the name of universal progress and civilisation. It is about hopes realised which turned into fears: an era of unparalleled peace engendering an era of unparalleled war; revolt and revolution emerging on the outskirts of society; a time of profound identity crisis for bourgeois classes, among new and sudden mass labour movements which rejected capitalism and 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, which was never more confident than at the moment it was about to disappear for ever. It is about Queen Victoria, Madame Curie and the Kodak Girl, and the novel social world of cloth caps, golf clubs and brassieres, about Nietzsche, Carnegie, William Morris and Dreyfus, about politically ineffective terrorists, one of whom, to his and everyone''s surprise, started a world war.With the AGE OF EMPIRE, Eric Hobsbawm, Britain''s leading historian of the left, brings to a dazzling climax his brilliant interpretative history of ''the long nineteenth century''.

The first in Eric Hobsbawm''s dazzling trilogy on the history of the nineteenth century.Between 1789 and 1848 the world was transformed both by the French Revolution and also by the Industrial Revolution that originated in Britain. This ''Dual Revolution'' created the modern world as we know it.Eric Hobsbawm traces with brilliant analytical clarity the transformation brought about in every sphere of European life by the Dual Revolution - in the conduct of war and diplomacy; in new industrial areas and on the land; among peasantry, bourgeoisie and aristocracy; in methods of government and of revolution; in science, philosophy and religion; in literature and the arts. But above all he sees this as the period when industrial capitalism established the domination over the rest of the world it was to hold for a century.Eric Hobsbawm''s enthralling and original account is an impassioned but objective history of the most significant sixty years in the history of Europe.

A trailblazing study of the social bandit or rebelBANDITS is a study of the social bandit or bandit-rebel - robbers and outlaws who are not regarded by public opinion as simple criminals, but rather as champions of social justice, as avengers or as primitive resistance fighters. Whether Balkan haiduks, Indian dacoits or Brazilian congaceiros, their spectacular exploits have been celebrated and preserved in story and myth. Some are only know to their fellow countrymen; others such as Rob Roy, Robin Hood and Jesse James are famous throughout the world. First published in 1969, BANDITS inspired a new field of historical study: bandit history.

Social agitation is as essential a part of public life today as it has ever been. In Eric Hobsbawm''s masterful study, Primitive Rebels, he shines a light on the origins of contemporary rebellion: Robin Hood, secret societies, revolutionary peasants, Mafiosi, Spanish Civil War anarchy, pre-industrial mobs and riots - all of which have fed in to our notions of dissent in the modern world.Coining now familiar terms such as ''social banditry'', Primitive Rebels shows how Hobsbawm was decades ahead of his time, and his insightful analysis of the history of social movements is critical to our understanding of movements such as UK Uncut, Black Lives Matter and the growing international resistance to Donald Trump''s presidency.Reissued with a new introduction by Owen Jones, Primitive Rebels is the perfect guide to the revolutions that shaped western civilisation, and the bandits, reformers and anarchists who have fought to change the world.