Book description
THE AGE OF EMPIRE 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 civilisation. It is about hopes realised which
turned into fears: an era of unparalleled peace engendering an era of
unparalleled war; revolt and revolution emerging on the outskirts of
society; a time of profound identity crisis for bourgeois classes, among
new and sudden mass labour movements which rejected capitalism and new
middle classes which 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, which was never more confident than at the
moment it was about to disappear for ever. It is about Queen Victoria,
Madame Curie and the Kodak Girl, and 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's surprise, started a world war. With the AGE
OF EMPIRE, Eric Hobsbawm, Britain's leading historian of the left,
brings to a dazzling climax his brilliant interpretative history of 'the
long nineteenth century'.
