The Age of Capital

Like the cuts of beef, the slices of written history have become so conventional that it is difficult to think of them as parts of a living animal. The American Civil War, which cost approximately 600,000 lives, is seldom placed on the same dish with the Chinese Taiping Rebellion (1850–1866), which may have cost 20 million lives. The nationalistic mid19th century has been particularly subject to meticulous carving by specialists on the German and Italian unifications, on the French Second Empire, on Victorian Britain and on the American Civil War. Professional historians have regarded efforts to box this portion of the world's experience in a single package much as French chefs would regard a Big Mac.

But as E.J. Hobsbawm brilliantly argues, the quarter‐century beginning with the European revolutions of 1848 and ending with the economic depression of the mid‐1870's must be understood from a global perspective. This brief period truly marked “the creation of a single world under capitalist hegemony.” it witnessed the rapid extension of the industrial and agricultural revolutions that had already transformed Great Britain; the migration of tens of millions of farmers and villagers to the mushrooming industrial cities of Europe and across the seas to Australia, Argentina and tne United States; the swift and almost total collapse of Negro slavery throughout the Western Hemisphere; and, above all, the realization that no corner of the globe could escape the irresistible impact of Western capitalism and Western culture.

Moreover, the incredibly rapid construction of telegraph lines, submarine cables and transnational railroads created for the first time a world in which events in Egypt or China impinged immeckately on the politics of the West. As early as 1853 Karl Marx, who as Hobsbawm observes was less “Euro‐centric” than most subsequent historians, could write that “perhaps the next uprising of the peoples of Europe [Marx was beginning to digest the significance of 1848] may depend more on what is now taking place in the Celestial Empire [China] than on any other existing political cause.”

Hobsbawm, a professor at the University of London and one of the West's most distinguished Marxist historians, has taken on an ambitious task. “The Age of Capital,” a volume in the History of Civilization series and a sequel to the author's “The Age of Revolution, Europe 1789–1848,” is intended for the “non‐expert.” Hobsbawm affirms that the book can be read independently and that, “at a pinch,” readers should be able to “manage without any previous knowledge of the fall of the Bastille or the Napoleonic wars….” This is an admirable goal, but it is doubtful whether Hobsbawn or anyone else could achieve it while also overcoming the methodological problems of comparative and interdisciplinary history. In fact, “The Age of Capital” will not be easy reading even for determined students of history. Hobsbawm's perhaps in defiance of the repu cation of shallower British historians, is often dense, graceless and pocked wirth obscurities. Hobsbawm's effort to provide the general reader with encyclopedic “coverage” tends to submerge his original insights in a flow of distracting and confusing detail.

Unfortunately, for the specialist there are other obstacles to an appreciation of Hobsbawm's central argument. Though modestly acknowledging his dependence on the “secondary” literature of other scholars, Hobsbawm has mastered an astonishing range of specialized knowledge extending from economics to the fine arts, from the history a science to the political intrigues of Mexico and Japan. Inevitably, however, historians will tend to judge “The Age of Capital” by the more flagrant errors in the areas they know best. Specialists in American history, for example, may find themselves excited and enlightened by Hobsbawm's discussion of the Meiji Restoration in Japan, but then begin to wonder when he misdates the Mexican War and Federal Reserve System, and when he tells us that the Civil War “raged” for five years.

Elementary errors seem to be the inevitable price of multinational and comparative history. The central question is whether the flawed close‐ups seriously distort a wide‐angled landscape. On this question, since few reviewers cart begin to match Hobsbawm's range of knowledge, it is

1848–1875. By E.J. Hohshawm. Illustrated. 354 pp. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. $17.50. best to be cautious and tentative. Hobsbawm's central thesis deserves the respect of serious debate—and it must be confessed that, apart from highly specialized questions, historians are unaccustomed to serious debate. But whatever the outcome of debates over Hobsbawm's thesis, it should not be allowed to obscure the dazzling insights, contrasts, juxtapositions, parallels and interconnections that enrich the book and make up for most of its shortcomings.

For Hobsbawm, the entire “Age of Capital” hinged on the failure of the revolutions of 1848—the so‐called “springtime of peoples,” when buoyant hopes for social democracy died with thousands of workers on the barricades of Europe's cities; when the rebellious middle class led by a vanguard of students and intellectuals, suddenly lost their nerve. Apart from the fact that students and intellectuals have seldom been conspicuous as shock troops, the European middle class discovered that revolution was dangerous business‐‐that it would not merely sweep away the old aristocratic barriers to “progress” but would unleash unanticipated threats to property and social order.

Hobsbawm acknowledges that the revolutions of 1848 had little chance of success, and he is vague on the alternatives that success might have of fered. He seems to imply that 1848 presented the last opportunity for the egalitarianism of the original French Revolution to democratize the Industrial Revolution and thus to save the future Third World from imperialism and exploitation. As a sober historian, he refrains from speculating explicitly about such might‐have‐beens. Yet the possibility that socialism might have preceded and humanized European industrialization—including the awesome new powers of communication, transportation and weaponry —seems to be the hidden keystone in his architectural design.

Whatever the possibilities, there can be no doubt that the crushing defeat of revolution, reinforced by the great economic boom of the 1850's gave unprecedented flexibility to the rulers of Europe. Wars could be used as instruments of statecraft, for limited objectives, without fear of igniting a general conflagration or a revolutionary upheaval from the masses. Hobsbawm points out that the Crimean War was botched and nearly got out of hand, and his model requires him to lump the American Civil War with other marginal exceptions, such as the devastating Paraguayan War (186470) and Taiping Rebellion. Still, he succeeds in reconstructing a recent era of European history—an era which have set dangerous precedents for certain statesmen of our own time—an era when a “general war” was unthinkable and when the dazzling exploits of a Bismarck can evoke even Hobsbawm's admiration.

This immunity from revolution, or “breathing‐space,” enabled conservatives to make political concessions such as the extension of manhood suffrage and the adoption of parliamentary constitutions. Sometimes the conservatives beat the liberals at their own game. For example, when Benjamin Disraeli introduced the British Reform Act of 1867, he spoke of “catching the Whigs bathing and walking off with their clothes.” As Hobsbawm shrewdly suggests, the example of the United States increasingly pointed to the rewards as well as the safety of economic and political liberalism. The American example of a bourgeois society may thus have helped to ease the triumph of bourgeois values in Europe.

But here one encounters a critical problem that Hobsbawm fails to illuminate. A “bourgeois society” meant one thing in Europe, and something very different in the United States. Marx himself, as Hobsbawm readily admits, seriously misjudged the United States. Hobsbawm's own discussions of American society are not only thin and distorted, but reflect a common British tendency to envision 19th‐century America as an overgrown, monstrous and somewhat exotic former colony—an Australia or Canada gone mad. Although Hobsbawm makes occasional and inaccurate use of some of the best recent historical literature, he clings to a stereotyped and curiously English obsession with America's “Wild West” and “Robber Barons.” This lapse is not fatal for a period when the United States was still primarily preoccupied with domestic concerns and had only begun to join Europe in putting “the world at its feet.” But Hobsbawm's cavalier treatment of American history not only weakens his thesis on the worldwide triumph of capitalism, it also deprives him of the opportunity to draw critically important distinctions and parallels.

“The Age of Capital” will surprise American readers who have been taught to think of “Marxist history” as a simplistic formula for reducing complex events to a narrow “economic determinism.” Like Marx himself, Hobsbawm recognizes that the wars of the mid‐19th century cannot be explained by economic motives. Though writing about a—period in which “political revolution retreated, industrial revolution advanced,” Hobsbawm takes pains to minimize economic determinants. He frankly expresses his admiration for the energy, creativity and sheer bravado of men like Thomas Brassey, the great railroad entrepreneur who at times employed 80,000 men on five continents. Hobsbawm is at his best, moreover, when he dissects the bourgeois culture of “respectability.” No one has written more brilliantly on the development of middleclass tourism, the function of sexual puritanism, the decorative symbolism of the Victorian household, or the tensions between the capitalist ethic and the “hierarchy of personal de pendence” embodied in the mid19th‐century bourgeois family.

For Hobsbawm, in short, Marxist theory is a tool for the sensitive analysis and understanding of Western middleclass culture. The reader of “The Age of Capital” catches only occasional glimpses of the rival, embattled and victimized “other cultures.” What makes the book “Marxist,” then, as that term is adapted to the modern world, is its vision of a world in which the failure of social revolution in the West opened the way to a “global power structure” of have and have‐not nations—an exploitive structure which may duplicate that of Europe in the 1840's and which may some day lead, if one is an optimist, to the consummation of the once aborted “springtime of peoples.” ■