37th book of 2020.
As I read through the Age of Capital, the history felt surprisingly relevant. The first economic boom of the 1850s, fueled by San Francisco gold induced monetary inflation, created an era where white men occupied the hazy frontier between optimism and fraud. (Sounds familiar) Age of Capital is the story of modernity spreading from its European epicenter to the world, creating winners and losers in a way unprecedented in history. In Europe, and especially for the wealthy few, this was a time of amazing returns on investment, epic trips to foreign lands, and a sense of unmatched progress and confidence in liberalism.
Yet for the rest of the world, becoming connected wasn’t all positive. Locals, individually or collectively often didn’t benefit, as their connection to a modern world often meant subjugation at the hands of a people or group that had the luck to be exposed to the modernity sooner. The only country to enter the modern world on its own terms was Japan, thanks to sufficient isolation, control, and desire to build a parallel representation of modernity.
Age of capital zooms out far enough to show the curvature of history. Hobsbawm provides a orbit-level view of how nation-states were created, to the foundations of liberal ideology, and the creation of capitalism, or even the origins of hipsterism: “bourgeois youth performing a brief, sterile, apolitical, highly stylized rebellion against the materialism of their parents”. Hobsbawm’s detached and somewhat critical perspective of the age he covers made the reading more engaging, and at this point I’ll definitely finish the tetralogy.