Buy new:
£9.42£9.42
Arrives:
Tuesday, April 9
Dispatches from: Amazon Sold by: Amazon
Buy used £0.62
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet or computer – no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
TheAge of Capital, 1848-1875 Paperback – 1 Jan. 1988
Purchase options and add-ons
The first and best, major treatment of the crucial years 1848-1875, a penetrating analysis of the rise of capitalism throught the world.
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. It was the triumph of a society which believed that economic growth rests on competitive private enterprise, on success in buying everything in the cheapest market (including labour) and selling it in the dearest. An economy so based, and therefore nestling naturally on the sound foundations of a bourgoisie composed of those whom energy, merit and intelligence had raised to their position and kept there, would - it was believed - not only create a world of suitably distributed material plenty but of ever-growing enlightenment, reason and human opportunity, an advance of the sciences and the arts, in brief a world of continuous and accelerating material and moral progress.
- Print length416 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherAbacus
- Publication date1 Jan. 1988
- Dimensions20 x 2.6 x 13.1 cm
- ISBN-100349104808
- ISBN-13978-0349104805
Frequently bought together

Popular titles by this author



How To Change The World: Tales of Marx and MarxismEric HobsbawmPaperback£12.44 deliveryOnly 6 left in stock (more on the way).

Product description
Review
ASA BRIGGS ― 'Brilliant and wide ranging’
AJP TAYLOR, OBSERVER ― 'Excellent’
NEW STATESMAN ― 'A book filled with pleasures for the connoisseur and amateur alike’
Book Description
About the Author
Product details
- Publisher : Abacus; 32nd edition (1 Jan. 1988)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 416 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0349104808
- ISBN-13 : 978-0349104805
- Dimensions : 20 x 2.6 x 13.1 cm
- Best Sellers Rank: 65,479 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- 1,767 in World History (Books)
- 5,803 in Business, Finance & Law
- Customer reviews:
About the author

Eric John Ernest Hobsbawm CH FRSL FBA (/ˈhɒbz.bɔːm/; 9 June 1917 – 1 October 2012) was a British Marxist historian of the rise of industrial capitalism, socialism, and nationalism. His best-known works include his trilogy about what he called the "long 19th century" (The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789–1848, The Age of Capital: 1848–1875 and The Age of Empire: 1875–1914), The Age of Extremes on the short 20th century, and an edited volume that introduced the influential idea of "invented traditions".
Hobsbawm was born in Egypt but spent his childhood mostly in Vienna and Berlin. Following the death of his parents and the rise to power of Adolf Hitler, Hobsbawm moved to London with his adoptive family, then obtained his PhD in history at the University of Cambridge before serving in the Second World War. In 1998 he was appointed to the Order of the Companions of Honour. He was President of Birkbeck, University of London from 2002 until his death. In 2003 he received the Balzan Prize for European History since 1900 "for his brilliant analysis of the troubled history of twentieth-century Europe and for his ability to combine in-depth historical research with great literary talent."
Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by Rob Ward (Flickr: HayFestivalA-011.jpg) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings, help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyses reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on Amazon-
Top reviews
Top reviews from United Kingdom
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
The book is the second in a tetralogy covering the period 1789-1991. It follows the Age of Revolution (1789-1848) and precedes the Age of Empire (1875-1914).
I find it appropriate to say a few words on the periods which preceded and followed the period covered in the book in order to place the book in a better context.
The Age of Revolution (1789-1848) deals with the twin revolutions, the French of 1789 which was essentially political and the British industrial revolution which slightly preceded it. The focus of the book is on those two countries and to a certain extent on Europe but not in the remaining world for it had no relevance on it.
The Age of Empire (1875-1914) is an era of new sources of power (electricity and oil, turbines and the internal combustion engine) of new science-based industries, such as the expanding chemical industry.
The era of liberal triumph had been that of a de facto British industrial monopoly internationally.
The post-liberal era was one of international competition between rival national industrial economies - the British, the German, the North American. The world entered the period of Imperialism. An era which marked a new integration of the 'underdeveloped' countries as dependencies, into a world economy dominated by the 'developed' countries.
The Age of Capital (1848-1875) is the era of liberal triumph. Following the defeat of the pan-European revolution of 1848 there ensued an extraordinary and unprecedented economic transformation and expansion in the years between 1848 and the early 1870s with key elements industrialization, capitalism, and international trade and investment. During this period we witness urbanization, increase in world population, mass emigration with the bourgeoisie becoming the dominant class and the creation of the proletariat.
The creation of a single expanded world rendered possible by the evolution of mass communication and transportation was probably the most significant development of this period. The most remote parts of the world were now beginning to be linked together by means of communication which had no precedent for regularity, for the capacity to transport vast quantities of goods and numbers of people and above all, for speed: the railway, the steamship, the telegraph.
Modern technology put any government which did not possess it at the mercy of any government which did.
For half a century after the defeat of Napoleon I there had been only one power which was essentially industrial and capitalist and only one which had a genuinely global policy, i.e. a global navy: Britain.
But between 1848 and 1871, or more precisely during the 1860s, three things happened. First, the expansion of industrialization produced other industrial- capitalist powers besides Britain: the United States, Prussia (Germany) and, to a much greater extent than before, France, later to be joined by Japan. Second, the progress of industrialization increasingly made wealth and industrial capacity the decisive factor in international power; hence devaluing the relative standing of Russia and France, and greatly increasing that of Prussia (Germany). Third, the emergence as independent powers of two extra-European States, the United States (United under the North in the Civil War) and Japan (systematically embarking on modernization with the Meiji Revolution of 1868), created for the first time the possibility of global power conflict.
The capitalist powers at this stage were not particularly interested in occupying and administering countries such as China and Egypt, so long as their citizens were given total freedom to do what they wanted, including extra-territorial privileges.
Science was progressing rapidly and was justifiably confident while Art took the place of traditional religion among the educated and emancipated. This was most evident among German-speaking people, who had come to regard culture as their special monopoly in the days when British had cornered economic, the French political success. Here operas and theaters became temples and cathedrals in which men and women worshiped.
I shall conclude the review with a passage adapted from the book which encapsulates the spirit of the era and the attitude of its dominant peoples and countries: In the Darwinian 'struggle for existence', social and biological thought of the bourgeois world, only the 'fittest' would survive, their fitness certified not only by their survival but by their domination. The greater part of the world's population therefore became the victims of those whose superiority, economic, technological and therefore military, was unquestioned and seemed unchangeable: the economics of north-western and central-Europe and the countries settled by its emigrants abroad, notably the United States.
Book and author had a major impact on me, I intuit that they would have a similar impact on the prospective reader.
Although each book stands up as a volume in it's own right it is very difficult, when finishing one, to not want to continue to find out 'what happens next' even if you know perfectly well what happens. And this is because, even though the books are not narratives in the normal sense of the term, the way Hobsbawm draws out the themes and events of each period really makes you want to find out how he is going to explain subsequent developments.
This volume, like the others in the series, is made up of more-or-less discreet essays on individual aspects of the period under consideration. Each subject is a chapter and the chapters are gathered together into three sections - Part 1: Revolutionary Prelude, Part 2: Developments and Part 3: Results. The chapters in Part 2 include The Great Boom, The World Unified, Conflicts and War, Building Nations, The Forces of Democracy, Losers, Winners and Changing Society. And then in Part 3, he looks at the effects of these developments.
Partly because of this structure but also partly because of the quality of the writing, it is a really interesting and illuminating read. So much of what we are living through today has its seeds in this and the previous period; to make any sense of the world today this is required reading.
There have been some criticism of Hobsbawm for being overtly Marxist in his outlook and theoretical basis. He says himself in his introduction:
"The historian cannot be objective about the period which is his subject. In this he differs (to his intellectual advantage) from its most typical ideologists, who believed that the progress of technology, 'positive science' and society made it possible to view their present with the unanswerable impartiality of the natural scientist, whose methods they believed (mistakenly) to understand. The author of this book cannot conceal a certain distaste, perhaps a certain contempt, for the age with which it deals, though one mitigated by admiration for its titanic material achievements and by the effort to understand even what he does not like. He does not share the nostalgic longing for the certainty, the self-confidence, of the mid-nineteenth-century bourgeois world which tempts many who look back upon it from the crisis-ridden western world a century later. His sympathies lie with those to whom few listened a century ago." (P17)
In the preface to this edition, he expands on these comments:
"This has been read by some as a declaration of intent to be unfair to the Victorian bourgeoisie and the age of its triumph. Since some people are evidently unable to read what is on the page, as distinct from what they think must be there, I would like to say clearly that this is not so. In fact, as at least one reviewer has correctly recognised, bourgeois triumph is not merely the organising principle of the present volume, but 'it is the bourgeoisie who receive much the most sympathetic treatment in the book'. For good or ill, it was their age, and I have tried to present it as such, even at the cost of - at least in this brief period - seeing other classes not so much in their own right, as in relation to it." (P11)
So leave your prejudices and pre-formed opinions at the door and read a remarkably inclusive, erudite and, above all, readable history of this formative period.
Marx was above all dedicated to the notion of the importance of materialism; and the book reflects this. So, we hear very literal about those titans of political and diplomatic history - Cavour, Mazzini, Garibaldi in Italy and Bismarck in Germany - nor about Louis Napoleon. Gladstone and Disraeli, nor about Stephen Douglas and Abraham Lincoln in the USA. The history is told in terms of steam engines, commodities, mass emigration, and the cultural history of the triumphant bourgeoisie, who remade the whole world in their image.
Hobsbawm might have been expected to concentrate on Great Britain, or Europe, or the USA, which were after all the winners; but in fact the book is refreshing because it is an early example of what has come to be known as World History. We tour the globe, noting the material progress, but also the conflicts this brought about, and the 'downside.'
A truly original work, and not in the least dogmatic, despite the admiration for Marx.
Top reviews from other countries
Reviewed in India on 30 January 2022


