Why are things the way they are? Or rather, how did we get here? It's a question many of us have been asking ourselves in these troubled times, and one that is not easily answered. In an era of sound bites, institutional distrust, general paranoia, and misinformation overload, it is hard to piece together a coherent narrative of, well, just about anything. The mediums have become so horrifying that most people can’t even sit still long enough to try and discern the messages.

This is the moral and political void that class consciousness has traditionally tried to fill. An enduring advantage of leftist politics is our adherence to a world framework - the dialectical materialism inherent in our Marxism - that traffics in grand narratives of revolution, redemption, and redistribution. But even these narratives have grown finicky, and in a time when humanities education is under attack from all sides, the venues available to produce and consume historical knowledge, and the stories that show us the kind of change we seek is possible, grow slimmer by the year.

Enter Eric Hobsbawm, academic of the people: by some accounts, the most widely read historian in the entire world by the time of his death in 2012. Over the past year, I had the pleasure of working through his four sweeping volumes of economic history (The Age of Revolution, 1789-1848; The Age of Capital, 1848-1875; The Age of Empire, 1875-1914; and The Age of Extremes, 1914-1991), the first three of which brought Hobsbawm’s conception of “the long 19th century” into popular usage. The volumes present a straightforward and accessible history of the modern Western world that became the standard-bearer of leftist history for armchair amateurs in the 20th century. As a lifelong Marxist, Hobsbawm believed in the material program of the study of history: his books answered the why, how, and when of the revolutionary economic and social changes of the 19th and 20th centuries. Always keeping a close analytical eye on the enemy, Hobsbawm’s histories carefully chronicle the wins and losses of the various capitalist, socialist, and nationalist movements that continue to shape our daily lives.

While his work makes no secret of his political leanings, he approached proselytization with a subtlety that allowed for mainstream success. His mass appeal often obfuscated the explicit political project Hobsbawm spent his life pursuing from the ivory tower: exposing the violence of capitalist accumulation while emphasizing the agency that working people have to collectively combat the powers that encroach on the dignity of their daily lives (pragmatically and slowly, of course - he was British after all).

Over the course of my year of Hobsbawm, I found myself envious of the material circumstances that allowed a Marxist historian to productively spend his life answering the “How did we get here?” question that so many of us ponder. The death of the academy inevitably affects us armchair historians downstream, and it is difficult to imagine the pursuit of an academic career studying leftist thought, in 2026, that ends in anything other than abject poverty. But mostly, I found myself mourning for future leftists. Without easy access to popular history, the kind that Hobsbawm produced and whose void has yet to be filled, how will we narrativize and define our own moment and movement? Hobsbawm’s is truly a history for the masses, and young leftists of the 20th century, particularly in post-colonial nations, used his works as a sort of genealogical tome. But what happens when a movement forgets its origins? As the study and teaching of history is increasingly threatened every year from cuts to the liberal arts and humanities in this country, where will future leftists turn to for an explanation for our present moment? How will we know where to go, when we don’t even know how we got here?

A Leftist for Life

Eric Hobsbawm was born to Jewish parents in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1917. His childhood represented the cosmopolitan melting pot that would often be the subject of his future works, and, after Egypt, he spent his early life living in a sort of “genteel poverty” between Vienna and Berlin until the death of his father in 1929 and his mother in 1931. He was taken in by an aunt who relocated the family from Berlin to London in 1933; after the Nazis came to power in Germany, the already precarious financial situation of his family was increasingly hindered by nationalist quotas on Jewish businessmen. It was in England that Hobsbawm would begin his career as a historian, completing his PhD at Cambridge after serving in the British army during WWII.

Although he spent the rest of his life in England, it was in the chaos-filled streets of Weimar Berlin that Hobsbawm’s lifelong commitment to Communism began. As a young Jewish man, Hobsbawm was drawn to the German Communist Party’s (KPD) explicit and total opposition to the Nazis, and like many young leftists of the 1930s, this commitment to an unwavering anti-fascist ideology served as a preliminary introduction to the larger struggle for Communism around the globe. Hobsbawm would later recall the KPD as the strongest and most devoted anti-fascists of the then nascent Popular Front - a valorous label, given the almost daily scenes of violent street-fighting between fascists and the Left. He looked back on these early days of his involvement with joy, referring to them as his “mass ecstasy,”^[1] despite the growing sense of dread and fear as repression ramped up in the weeks before the Nazi electoral victory in early 1933.

While called to the party for its anti-fascist stance, Hobsbawm remained a lifelong Communist because he was drawn to the inherent centering of the poor and working classes explicit in Marxist ideology. Through Marx, he was conferred a degree of dignity he had lacked in his youth; early diary entries paint a picture of an insecure young man, constantly comparing his shabby clothing and unwashed hair to that of his more buttoned-up, bourgeois classmates. His engagement with Marxist thought - he was specifically drawn to the writings of Lenin - helped him reframe his insecurities into a confidence in being a part of the vanguard class: “only by turning this completely around and becoming proud of it,” he wrote, “did I conquer the shame.”^[2]

His career as an intellectual took off after he completed his PhD thesis in 1951, though his professional life began to suffer almost immediately due to his affiliation with the Communist Party of Great Britain, where he had been a founding member of the party’s “Historian’s Group.” Always an academic before an activist, Hobsbawm was most comfortable in the behind-the-scenes, knowledge production space of party politics, founding and editing various leftist and party-affiliated journals while continuing to publish works in more academic, traditionally “bourgeois” publications. His criticisms of Stalin throughout the 1940s and 50s attracted the ire of those in party leadership, yet he remained committed to the inherent ideals of communist revolution: he was one of the few British intellectuals who remained loyal to the party after the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. His steadfast dedication to the rank and file blacklisted him from most of British intellectual society, and direct interference from MI5 (who had held a file on Hobsbawm since at least early 1942) prevented him from receiving positions at the BBC and the University of Cambridge.

He eventually became a professor at the more progressive Birbeck College, University of London, in 1959, and it was during this era that he began to write the first of the “Age of” series that would catapult him to international fame. With the publication of The Age of Revolution in 1962, Hobsbawm was transformed from a niche, leftist intellectual into the world’s preeminent historian to the masses.

The Striking Humanism of the "Age of…" Series

Hobsbawm opens the preface of his first volume with what today might be considered a barrier to entry: “[this book’s] ideal reader is…the intelligent and educated citizen, who is not merely curious about the past, but wishes to understand how and why the world has come to be what is is today and whither it is going.”^[3] There is something refreshing and almost naive about his faith in a curious citizenry; a remnant of a bygone era and audience that valued learning for the sake of being a better political subject and human.

The actual historical content portion of The Age of Revolution is as equally bold as the preface and draws us further in with its first paragraph, immediately connecting the world of the reader to the world of the book:

Words are witnesses which speak louder than documents. Let us consider a few of the English words which were invented, or gained their modern meanings, substantially in the period of sixty years with which this volume deals. They are such words as ‘industry’, ‘factory,’ ‘middle class,’ ‘working class,’ ‘capitalism’ and ‘socialism’... to imagine the modern world without these words is to measure the profundity of the revolution which broke out between 1789 and 1848.^[4]

Profound, indeed! “Here you go,” Hobsbawm seems to say, “I am about to tell you how we got here, illuminate to you the very content of your own language, give you the origin story at the heart of your politics today.” This is history at its most personal and relevant.

The premise of the Age of Revolution is deceptively simple: that two revolutions - the Industrial in Britain and the Political in France - created the world as we know it. Modernity, he argues, owes its existence to this dual revolution and the subsequent ascendence of bourgeois capitalism. He makes his case extensively, detailing the conditions present in both countries that caused them to be the vanguard of their respective helix of Capitalism’s DNA (the materialistic British vs. the idealistic French) and how it was exported to the rest of Europe and the world. He recounts, with vivid detail and the occasional fascinating tangent, the revolutions and nascent nationalisms convulsing through Europe, culminating with the revolutions of 1848 and the publication of the Communist Manifesto that same year. This entire recounting of an era only encompasses the first part of the book, titled Developments. The second part, Results, confirms Hobsbawm's penchant for cause and effect reasoning, and he intricately expounds on the dual revolutions' effects on land, industry, meritocracy, the “labouring poor,” religion, secularism, the arts, and science.

While Revolution, as with all the volumes, is a work of sweeping economic history, Hobsbawm exposes his Marxism not through grand political declarations but rather through his centering of the average working person in every chapter. He takes time to emphasize the conditions of whatever contemporary proletariat his writings encompass. After a paragraph explaining global communication methods in the decades leading up to the French Revolution, he pivots to describe the actual people, quite literally:

Europeans were, on the whole, distinctly shorter and lighter than they are today…in one canton on the Ligurian coast 72 percent of the recruits in 1792-9 were less than 5 ft. 2 in. tall. That did not mean that the men of the later eighteenth century were more fragile than we are. The scrawny, stunted, undrilled soldiers of the French Revolution were capable of a physical endurance equalled today only by the undersized guerillas in colonial mountains.^[5]

Hobsbawm plays with the reader’s modern sensibilities of physicality (imagine that, men under 5’2”), while still demanding that we respect their “hustle.” His pages are filled with these one-offs, which illuminate the lifestyles and struggles of average people dealing with the dual industrial and political revolutions of the early 19th century.

The Age of Capital picks up right where Revolution leaves off, with the (in Hobsbawm’s view) failed European revolutions of 1848. Hobsbawm details how their hopeful start, modeled off the early days of 1789, ultimately devolved into chaos and defeat within the year. The failed revolutions laid the groundwork for Hobsbawm’s “Age of Capital,” an era in which Capitalism came of age and the developed world experienced an unprecedented rate of economic growth, or what Hobsbawm calls “The Great Boom.” The global bourgeois class becomes (reluctantly, perhaps) his muse, and Hobsbawm picks apart their laissez-faire economics, their preferred forms of political organization - they view the nation-state as their ultimate salvation - and their tastes and customs. Like Revolution, Capital is divided into simple cause and effect sections that even the least-academically inclined layperson will find digestible and illuminating. The “Development” section's chapters are titled: The Great Boom, The World United, Conflicts and Wars, Nations, Democracy, and are followed immediately by the “Results” chapter titles: The Land, Men Moving, City, Industry, The Working Class, Science, Religion, Technology. The rhythm is simple, no stone is left unturned.

While elucidating on the horrors of capitalist accumulation and lamenting the decreased revolutionary activity in this period, Hobsbawm still reveals a level of awe for the achievements of the era, asking at one point: “can anyone who has ever seen the Peruvian Central Railway deny the grandeur of the concept and achievement of its romantic if rascally imagination?”^[6] Capitalism is bad - Hobsbawm is always the first to say this - but my, aren’t trains cool!? The reader cannot help but agree. He goes on to explain: “this is not simply to write history with the wisdom of hindsight… it is also to write history as contemporaries saw it.”^[7] Hobsbawm is generous enough, human enough, to admit that even if we know, as historians in the 20th century, the levels of violence, displacement, and poverty this system would eventually engender, it must have been pretty cool to see a train for the first time.

In the absence of large revolutionary movements, the meat of which constituted his first volume, Hobsbawm instead focuses on the smaller social and cultural changes, refining his rhetoric of leftist humanism even as it pertains to bourgeois subjects. As he proclaims mid-way through the book, “the most superficial phenomena are sometimes the most profound,”^[8] and he spends the following half-page describing what the typical drapes would look like in a bourgeois home. He then digresses into an analysis of bourgeois sexuality and some of the burgeoning tides of sexual liberation, focusing in particular on an early feminist named Victoria Woodhull:

This splendid woman, one of two equally attractive and emancipated sisters, caused Marx some moments of irritation because of her efforts to convert the American section of the International into an organ for the propagation of free love and spiritualism. The two sisters did very well out of their relations with Commodore Vanderbilt, who looked after their financial interests. Eventually she married well and died in the odour of respectability in England, in Bredon’s Norton, Worcestershire.^[9]

In these passages, Hobsbawm almost takes on the persona of a trusted confidante or gossipy church woman, playing with the reader’s sensibilities of what constitutes relevant, serious history. Unlike many historians of his era, especially Marxist ones, Hobsbawm treats the social and the cultural as on par with the economic, the personal as on par with the systemic. Yet he always brings these seemingly surface-level observations back to a Marxist analysis, subsequently explaining that the bourgeois “duality between solidity and beauty thus expressed a sharp division between the material and the ideal, the bodily and the spiritual; highly typical of the bourgeois world.” Bourgeois homemakers expressed their anxieties about their newfound class status and aspirational political power through the material decoration of their homes, which in turn cemented an idealistic position as the ruling class by laying claim to a moralized aesthetic of “order.” There is a lot to be discerned by examining one’s drapes, apparently.

The Age of Empire, published 12 years after Capital, opens with the depression of 1873, which signalled the end of unparalleled economic growth in the Western world. The book covers a period characterized by Western anxieties about exploiting new markets (hence, the empires) as well as Great Britain’s retraction from the preeminent global power as Germany and the United States surpassed them in industrial might.

Empire begins to differ significantly from the previous volumes with Hobsbawm’s invocation of familial anecdotes; the timeline of the book overlaps with Hobsbawm’s parents’ generation and his early years. The introduction tells the story of Hobsbawm’s parents meeting in British-occupied Egypt - a happenstance that Hobsbawm insists could only be the product of this particular age, with these particular flows of labor and capital. His mother, an Austrian Jewish woman, had an uncle with a chain of stores throughout the Levant, and his father, a British Jewish man, had followed the empire abroad to seek his fortune. True to form and blazing his now well-trod stylistic path, Hobsbawm uses his own family story to illuminate the larger economic, political, and social trends of the era as only he can do:

There is a more serious reason for starting the present volume with an autobiographical anecdote. For all of us there is a twilight zone between history and memory; between the past as a generalized record which is open to relatively dispassionate inspection and the past as a remembered part of, or background to, one’s own life…for individual human beings this zone stretches from the point where living family traditions or memories begin to the end of infancy, when public and private destinies are recognized as inseparable and as mutually defining (‘I met him shortly before the end of the war’; Kennedy must have died in 1963, because it was when I was still in Boston’). The length of this zone may vary, and so will the obscurity and fuzziness that characterizes it. But there is always such a no-man’s land of time. It is by far the hardest part of history for historians, or for anyone else, to grasp… [and] this is not only true of individuals, but of societies. The world we live in is still very largely a world made by men and women who grew up in the period with which this volume deals.^[10]

There are a couple of things Hobsbawm does here that are uniquely incredible for a historian. When Empire was released in 1987, many people alive still remembered, or at least had direct familial memories of, the book’s era. Hobsbawm acknowledges the difficulty of recording recent history and, in doing so, highlights the very human imperfections of memory and historiography. He rebukes history as an exact, materialist science and reconstitutes it as a study of families, genealogies, remembrances, and stories. This introduction is also wildly successful as an overall framing device, hooking the reader in by promising a journey of mutual exploration: “my memories,” he seems to say, “may not exactly be yours, but perhaps by rummaging through this together, we can parse through what exactly happened in our world before 1914.” Call me captivated!

Of course, like Revolution and Capital, Hobsbawm also continues to excel in his more broad-scale analysis of the world during this era. While abandoning the more formal cause-and-effect structure of the earlier volumes, he still manages to corral various dynamics into grand, organized narratives of economic, political, and social change. He illustrates beautifully, and tragically, Europe’s continued rise during the belle-epoque (and its genocidal and imperial underbelly) and its subsequent unravelling, through petty alliances and a military-industrial arms race, into the senseless violence of the First World War. The “long 19th century” reaches its horrifying conclusion.

The Age of Extremes, the final book in the series, covers the start of World War I to the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 - what Hobsbawm deemed ‘the short twentieth century.” By far the longest book of the series, it is also Hobsbawm’s most cynical and pessimistic. While never one to proselytize on liberal notions of “progress,” Hobsbawm at least tended to regard the past and potential futures with a degree of inspiration and hope. Not so in Extremes: “[the twentieth century] was without a doubt the most murderous century of which we have record, both by the scale, frequency, and length of the warfare which filled it…but also by the unparalleled scale of the human catastrophes it produced, from the greatest famines in history to systematic genocide,”^[11] he laments in the introduction. His outlook on the future appears to be equally dim, and he concludes a chapter on “third world revolutions” quite ominously: “the world of the third millennium will therefore almost certainly continue to be one of violent politics and violent political changes. The only thing uncertain about them is where they will lead.”^[12] There is something incredibly disconcerting about the able narrator, who has guided us with such grace and confidence for three volumes thus far, seemingly throwing his hands up in the air to say, “I don’t know either.”

Given the book’s contemporary context (it was published in 1994, three years after the fall of the Soviet Union), Hobsbawm’s apparent despair makes sense. In a way, he lost two of the structuring foundations of his life: communism and history, as this era was famously “the end of” both. He actively mourns both throughout the work, stating in his introduction that:

The world that went to pieces at the end of the 1980s was the world shaped by the impact of the Russian Revolution of 1917. We have all been marked by it, for instance, inasmuch as we got used to thinking of the modern industrial economy in terms of binary opposites, “capitalism” and “socialism”...it should now be becoming clear that this was an arbitrary and to some extent artificial construction, which can only be understood as part of a particular historical context.^[13]

The “we” he uses here is significant - Hobsbawm, like the reader, is unsure of what lies ahead. He spent his entire life fighting for an economic structure that no longer exists, and this sense of unknowingness and insecurity in his role as narrator extends throughout the work.

His lamentations on the masses’ lack of historical thought, and the subsequent diminishing role of the historian in the late 20th century, are even more explicit:

The destruction of the past, or rather of the social mechanisms that link one’s contemporary experience to that of earlier generations, is one of the most characteristic and eerie phenomena of the late twentieth century. Most young men and women at the century’s end grow up in a sort of permanent present lacking any organic relation to the public past of the times they live in…no one who has been asked by an intelligent American student whether the phrase “Second World War” meant that there had been a “First World War” is unaware that knowledge of even the basic facts of the century cannot be taken for granted.^[14]

His qualms with the state of affairs of the late 20th century foreshadow our current crisis of historical knowledge. But while his pessimism is prominent throughout the work, the bulk of Extremes still takes on Hobsbawm’s signature rhythm of highlighting large, sweeping social and economic changes and then, almost melodically, scaling it down to the level of the working individual. Hobsbawm seems equally comfortable explaining the economics of aristocratic land-redistribution in post-revolution Russia as he does discussing the societal implications of rising hemlines on women’s dresses in the 1920s.

Using Hobsbawm’s History as Leftist Guide

Early on in my Hobsbawm journey, I read a quote from one of his early journal entries: “after reading twelve pages of Lenin, [its] astonishing how that cheers me up and clears my mind. I was in a total good mood afterwards.” One could say the same about reading Hobsbawm- nothing lifts the spirits like digestible history. And while they are digesting, the reader suddenly realizes their “good mood” has as much to do with Hobsbawm's subtle invocation of the leftist mandate of economic equality, encouraging the reader to envision themself in the moral arc of history (like Lenin) as it has to do with his buoyant prose (unlike Lenin).

It is easy to understand why Hobsbawm’s Communism flew under the radar and why he was accepted as a popular historian for so long: he never explicitly exposes his political leanings in his historical works. Extremes perhaps comes the closest, but only in the form of Hobsbawm’s lamenting of the failures of state socialism and the horrors of global capitalism.

While he was not always explicitly political in his writings, his leftist history and its dissemination were often in service of party organizing. Hobsbawm brought a social scientific empiricism and an almost tender narrativization to the study of groups not often given serious academic attention by his contemporaries: peasant societies, illiterate mill workers, colonized teachers, or farm workers were all portrayed as actors in the grand narrative on par with dukes, generals, and industrialists.

Whether intentional or not, Hobsbawm’s affinity for the subaltern inspired more than one post-colonial movement, and translated well to incipient Marxist movements in the post-colonial world, specifically in India and Brazil. As he skyrocketed to an international intellectual star in the 1960s and 70s, his books were disseminated to a wider audience than many traditional Marxist texts. He is credited with helping to popularize Marxism in India after a tour of the country’s academic and political institutions in 1968, and his texts were required reading for young, leftist Indian leaders who sought to model their new movement in the Leninist fashion prominent earlier in the century while addressing the specific needs and issues of a largely rural, post colonial society such as theirs. Hobsbawm’s writings showed that there were advantages to some strategies and merits to others across the broad spectrum of leftist thought and political organizing: Lenin’s commitment to an industrial proletariat might not be as useful as, say, the strategies showcased by peasant uprisings in Central Europe in the mid 19th century. The University of Delhi added a course to its roster in the mid-1970s, “The Rise of the Modern West,” which included Hobsbawm’s “Age of” series. The course still exists today, and Hobsbawm, despite India’s rightward turn in the 21st Century, is still on the syllabus.

Similarly, Hobsbawm gained prominence among young Brazilian Marxists after an academic sojourn there in 1962. His focus on the human component of larger social movements provided a framework for the more underdeveloped Latin American Marxist movements, which sought to incorporate the history of indigenous peoples, slaves, and other non-traditional “working class” actors into a broader labor analysis. Here, Hobsbawm’s writings inspired an almost anthropological model of class analysis that fit the country’s contemporary vernacular, and by the late 1970’s, Hobsbawm was “obligatory reading” for any young Brazilian leftist.^[15] This momentum helped fuel the growth and organizational capacity of Brazil’s pre-eminent leftist party, the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT), which currently holds a ruling majority in the country.

Even today, and closer to home, Hobsbawm is still read widely amongst a certain milieu of DSA Brooklynnites and Rust-Belt academics. The movements and people he illustrates so vividly still have the potential to serve as guide, inspiration, and resource. But as we get farther away from the era Hobsbawm describes, I worry his insights track less and less onto our current moment. Perhaps this worry is unfounded - many Marxists claim eternal relevance, always caught in the never-ending cycle of “same shit, different day.” Still, as the institutions that produced the knowledge we covet continue to crumble, I can’t help but worry we are entering a new dark age. Call me crazy, but I won’t be trusting the archives of Twitch streamers, Tik Tok influencers, or X posters to properly critique our era.

Whither History, now?

So, after my invigorating year of Hobsbawm, why do I mourn? While his works were influential for many 20th-century Marxist movements, I find his pessimistic musings on the state of historical knowledge in the Age of Extremes much more descriptive of our contemporary moment.

Historical knowledge is declining everywhere in the West: in all regions, at all levels, across all political spectrums, amongst all age groups, races, genders - you name it. While history was never an all-American strong suit, there was at least a robust and renowned academy that consistently produced rigorous, peer-reviewed scholarship on a variety of historic subject areas. Trump’s cuts to higher education greatly accelerated the already precipitous decline in American letters that Hobsbawm foresaw towards the end of his life. This global decimation of resources is not accidental: the academy was one of the few places in Western society where Marxist critique was allowed to exist and, very rarely, flourish. The academy, with all its faults and hierarchies, allowed a rank-and-file Communist to become one of the greatest popular Western historians of the 20th Century. Would it be possible to incubate a Hobsbawm today? Are there historians with his mass appeal that can not only entertain, but inspire? There are some (I haven’t forgotten you, Robin D.G. Kelly!), but they are a dying breed.

However, as I mourn the loss of Hobsbawm and the culture that produced him, I realize that I have also started asking questions that, maybe, produce a glimmer of hope. Who bears the responsibility for teaching us history? Is it our educational systems, our own communities, the Party? I think about all the things I’ve learned outside the classroom: from my grandfather’s anecdotes about his local union, the translated novel from a friend that first exposed me to social realism, to the DSA Night School classes where reading Marx finally felt like instruction instead of jargon. I must confess now - I never read Hobsbawm in school. I first encountered him a few years ago, when my partner gifted me a copy of The Age of Revolution and suggested we work through it together (clearly, I was hooked).

I admire Hobsbawm for his ability to bring the subaltern into the halls of academia, to translate specific political vernaculars into the language of the masses. But now that I’m re-reading this all, it starts to sound a little too trickle-down for me. I don’t want to embrace the crisis of historical thought, or in any way condone the political extremes being enacted onto the American academy - but perhaps we can view it as some sort of opportunity, or at least as inspiration to consider other models of knowledge dissemination. Maybe the answer to the question of “who” will teach us, is just that - us. It sounds a bit utopian, but I find my mind wandering these days. It is possible to do this on our own (Hobsbawm could give us an example of some historic, grassroots education collective, I’m sure), but it is definitely harder. I wouldn’t mind another Hobsbawm either.

1. Eric John Hobsbawm. 2005. Interesting Times : A Twentieth-Century Life. New York ; London: The New Press.

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2. Evans, Richard J. 2019. “Eric Hobsbawm’s Dangerous Reputation.” The Guardian. January 17, 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jan/17/eric-hobsbawm-mi5-communism-stalin-historian-private-papers.

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3. Hobsbawm, Eric. 1962. The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789-1848. London: Abacus, ix.

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4. The Age of Revolution, 1.

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5. The Age of Revolution, 8.

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6. Hobsbawm, Eric. 1996. The Age of Capital, 1848-1875. New York: Vintage Books, 57.

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7. The Age of Capital, 255.

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8. Ibid., 230.

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9. Ibid., 233.

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10. Hobsbawm, Eric. 1987. The Age of Empire: 1875-1914. London: Abacus, 3.

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11. Hobsbawm, Eric. 1995. The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991. London: Abacus, 13.

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12. The Age of Extremes, 460.

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13. Ibid., 4.

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14. Ibid., 3.

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15. https://aeon.co/essays/how-eric-hobsbawm-helped-shape-the-global-marxist-imagination

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