SirYour name is down amongst the Black hearts in the Black Book and this is to advise you and the like of you, who are Parson Justasses, to make your willsYe have been the Blackguard Enemies of the People on all occasions, Ye have not yet doneas ye ought- SwingIn our increasingly mechanized age, the Swing revolts are a timely record of the relationship between technological advance, labour and poverty. With th...

In nearly two decades since Samuel P. Huntington proposed his influential and troubling 'clash of civilizations' thesis, nationalism has only continued to puzzle and frustrate commentators, policy analysts and political theorists. No consensus exists concerning its identity, genesis or future. Are we reverting to the petty nationalisms of the nineteenth century or evolving into a globalized, supranational world? Has the nation-state outlived its usefulness and exhausted its progressive and...

In the two decades following the fall of the Berlin Wall, global capitalism became entrenched in its modern, neoliberal form. Its triumph was so complete that the word "capitalism" itself fell out of use in the absence of credible political alternatives. But with the outbreak of financial crisis and global recession in the twenty-first century, capitalism is once again up for discussion. The status quo can no longer be taken for granted.As Eric Hobsbawm argues in his acute and elega...

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 ...

I remain in the curious position of disliking, distrusting, disapproving and fearing nationalism wherever it exists . . . but recognising its enormous force, which must be harnessed for progress if possible.In the last two decades the uses of the term 'nationalism' has increased steeply with the rising tide of nationalist parties. In this collection of historian Eric Hobsbawm's writing on nationalism, we see some of the critical historical insights he brings to bear on thi...

History, Culture and Ethnography: Jack Goody, Clifford Geertz and Philippe Descola is a collection of interviews that is being published as a book for the first time. These interviews have been conducted by one of England’s leading social anthropologists and historians, Professor Alan Macfarlane.Filmed over a period of several years, the three conversations in this volume are part of the series Creative Lives and Works. These transcriptions form a part of a larger set of i...

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...

“What the future fortunes of [Gramsci’s] writings will be, we cannot know. However, his permanence is already sufficiently sure, and justifies the historical study of his international reception. The present collection of studies is an indispensable foundation for this.” —Eric Hobsbawm, from the prefaceAntonio Gramsci is a giant of Marxian thought and one of the world’s greatest cultural critics. Antonio A. Santucci is perhaps the world’s preeminent Gramsci scholar. Monthly Review P...

In the 144 years since Karl Marx's Das Kapital was published, the doctrine that bears his name has been embraced by millions in the name of equality, and just as dramatically has fallen from grace with the retreat of communism from the western world. But as the free market reaches its extreme limits in the economic and environmental fallout, a reassessment of capitalism's most vigorous and eloquent enemy has never been more timely.Eric Hobsbawm provides a fascinating and insightful...

THE AGE OF EXTREMES is eminent historian Eric Hobsbawm's personal vision of the twentieth century. Remarkable in its scope, and breathtaking in its depth of knowledge, this immensely rewarding book reviews the uniquely destructive and creative nature of the troubled twentieth century and makes challenging predicitions for the future.

From 1955-65 the historian Eric Hobsbawm took the pseudonym 'Francis Newton' and wrote a monthly column for the New Statesman on jazz - music he had loved ever since discovering it as a boy in 1933 ('the year Adolf Hitler took power in Germany'). Hobsbawm's column led to his writing a critical history, The Jazz Scene (1959). This enhanced edition from 1993 adds later writings by Hobsbawm in which he meditates further 'on why jazz is not only a marvellous noise but a centr...

Eric Hobsbawm (1917-2012) wrote that Latin America was the only region of the world outside Europe which he felt he knew well and where he felt entirely at home. He claimed this was because it was the only part of the Third World whose two principal languages, Spanish and Portuguese, were within his reach. But he was also, of course, attracted by the potential for social revolution in Latin America. After the triumph of Fidel Castro in Cuba in January 1959, and even more after the defeat o...