** 31st Book of 2020: Birth of Modernity **
I’ll be honest, ask me about European history before 1900, and you’d be treated to a blank stare and a mystified shrug. So a book that covers an otherwise blank spot on historical maps is alluring.
Age of Revolution, while it claims to be a global history, is really a history of France and England from 1789 to 1848. In France, the political upheaval revolution brought a new class structure, the bourgeois state, and via Napoleon spread these revolutions across Europe. In England, the industrial revolution brought global capitalism, a rationalist faith in progress, and economic and scientific progress unprecedented in history. Hobsbawm keeps the descriptions high level, and in doing so offers a persuasive thesis on the origins of western modernity that has since conquered the world and become the default of modernity we still enjoy/suffer from today. Striking for me was the breakdown of feudalism via land and political reform in Europe during this time. The trends were slow and broad enough to only be readily apparent in a book of this scope.
Rather than try and give an overview of events happening in the rest of the world, Hobsbawm dismisses them as unimportant, and focuses on the dual revolutions in England and France. Even so, Hobsbawm still assumes you know how the rest of the historical pieces fit together. The book ends in 1848 with few hints about what happens after.
The book was a bit dense, and I found myself zoning out during some of the chapters at the end, but I’ll read the next book and appreciate even the attempt at taking on this subject.