The Age of Empire, 1875-1914

📖 The Scoop

"In what may be his most important work, Eric Hobsbawm turns to the crucial years that formed the modern world. This 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 civilization. It is about hopes realized that turned into fears: an era of unparalleled peace engendering an era of unparalleled war; revolt and revolution inevitably emerging on the outskirts of a stable and flourishing Western society; new and sudden mass labor movements that rejected capitalism, new middle classes that 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. It is about Queen Victoria, Madame Curie, and the Kodak Girl; about 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 else's surprise, started a world war. It is about where the 1980s came from. The Age of Empire charts the road from triumph to tragedy, through Europe's economics, its politics, arts, sciences, and cultural life, and not least, the emergence of its women. It traces the conflicts at the heart of the bourgeois world which plunged Europe into war, the tensions which unraveled it at its margins, bringing revolution with them, the certainties and uncertainties of an era which built the Titanic in hope, but not without premonition. This is the third and last volume of an interpretive history of the "long nineteenth century," but it is destined to be read as a self-contained book. It concludes with a look forward at the 1980s." --

Genre: History / Modern / 19th Century (fancy, right?)