Hobsbawm‘s opening chapter is a dazzling survey of the world (specifically, the European world) on the eve of the “dual revolution”. He sketches out the forces and relations of production and shows how intellectual and political structures
Hobsbawm‘s opening chapter is a dazzling survey of the world (specifically, the European world) on the eve of the “dual revolution”. He sketches out the forces and relations of production and shows how intellectual and political structures and developments derived from this economic base. This is a dynamic picture of a world in flux and on the brink of revolutionary change – poised between old forces and new, dynamic elements and static, governed by a political order rendered obsolete by economic change. In short, this is a magnificent application of the method of Karl Marx to elucidate, to understand, and to explain.
“The first thing to observe about the world in the 1780s is that it was at once much smaller and much larger than ours.”
Smaller in the geographical sense that only patches of the inhabited globe were known, even to the most erudite; “The ‘known worlds’ of less scientifically advanced and expansionist communities than those of Western Europe were clearly even smaller, diminishing to the tiny segments of the earth within which the illiterate Sicilian peasant or the cultivator in the Burmese hills lived out his [sic] life, and beyond which all was and always would forever be unknown.” Smaller also demographically – the world’s population had tripled between the 1780s and 1962 (when Hobsbawm wrote), and it has more than d