Eric Hobsbawm

Eric Hobsbawm (1917- ), one of the leading historians of his generation. He was born on June 9, 1917, in Alexandria (Egypt) of a British father and an Austrian mother. Hobsbawm was educated in Vienna and Berlin (where he became a communist just before the Nazi rise to power) before moving to England where he completed his secondary education, eventually graduating from King’s College, Cambridge. Most of his professional life has been spent at Birkbeck College, University of London. After retiring in 1982, he taught at the New School for Social Research in New York. Hobsbawm has held visiting chairs in various universities in the United States and elsewhere and has lectured throughout Europe and throughout the Americas. In 1976 he became a Fellow of the British Academy and, in 1998, a Companion of Honour.

A prolific writer, he specialized on the 19th century though he ranged widely, helped by his cosmopolitan outlook, his encyclopedic knowledge, and his gift for languages. He appeared equally at home discussing the artistic avant-garde, the seizure of land by peasants in Latin America, jazz (he wrote a history of the genre, The Jazz Scene; 1959), the thoughts of the Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci, and the debate on the conditions of the British working class during the Industrial Revolution. Hobsbawm also frequently intervened in British political debates, notably in the 1980s.

Hobsbawm’s first major book, Primitive Rebels (1959), examined the connection between “pre-modern” forms of banditry and millenarian social rebellions—a theme he returned to ten years later in his equally influential Bandits. In between he authored The Age of Revolution 1789-1848 (1962), and, in 1968, Industry and Empire, in which he revealed his gift for lucid writing and succinct exposition of history over the longer period. His history of Europe’s “long” 19th century (1789-1914), which he had begun with the Age of Revolution, was continued with The Age of Capital (1975) and The Age of Empire (1987). This trilogy made him internationally famous even outside the historical profession. In 1994 he published a fourth volume, The Age of Extremes 1914-1991, which was translated into 37 languages.

After Marxism—Hobsbawm was a lifelong communist though aware of its failures—the major influence on his work has been the French school grouped round the journal Annales (see Annales School). The richness of Hobsbawm’s use of the comparative method in history was further evidenced in his work on nationalism and on the historiography of the French Revolution. The introduction he wrote to the collective volume The Invention of Tradition (1983) sparked an entire genre of historical research demystifying the traditions and ceremonials states have used to create a national identity. He produced neither a distinctive method nor his own school of history but showed generations of historians the value of using comparisons to uncover the patterns and processes that have transformed the world. Hobsbawm’s autobiography, Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life, was published in 2002.