42nd book of 2020: A History of the Belle Epoche: Strap in for an abstract ride.
This book was eating vegetables in between the main course (age of revolution and age of capital) and dessert (age of extremes). There were fewer world-changing military conquests, much of the change happening at this time was in the ideological realm, something that Hobsbawm addresses critically rather than at the level of concrete events. This makes it harder for somebody like me to follow, as I only have the vaguest notions of the actual events of import during this time.
For the narrative: As classical liberalism, observation based science, and free markets remained ascendant (and at this point had been for more than a generation), we start to see what looks like other facets of the 20th century: rights of women, development of the social sciences, and the creation of labor movements to support a body politic beyond the bourgeois.
I’m glad I read it, but not sure how much I enjoyed the experience.