Eric Hobsbawm's The Age of Empire occupies a special place in what has grown, without the author's originally intending it, into the final volume of a trilogy in which Hobsbawm 'makes sense', on the grand scale, of the 19th century - of the world which flourished before, and led to, the catastrophe of 1914. The first two volumes of this trilogy, such is the exciting sweep of their canvas and the dazzling force of their integrative argument, have been claimed, with only slight exaggeration, to 'have become part of the mental furniture of educated Englishmen'. Hobsbawm towers above all others as social historian and polymath, able to pluck an example from Peru as readily as from Perivale, as much at home with music as with marriage, and with the sharpest eye in the business for the tricks of the capitalists.

LRB 7 July 1988 | PDF Download