The Age of Empire

Erica Hobsbawm discusses the evolution of European economics, politics, arts, sciences, and cultural life from the height of the industrial revolution to the First World War.  Hobsbawm combines vast erudition with a graceful prose style to re-create the epoch that laid the basis for the twentieth century.
"Its sheer power and eloquence will make this book a classic." —Neal, Ascherson, Sunday Observer (London)

"It is Mr. Hobsbawm's achievement both to have captured the exuberance of an age, and to have shown how and why that world was coming to an end. . . . He not only captures the age of empire he also illuminates the course of the twentieth century." —Kennedy, The Economist (London)

"A virtuoso performance. . . . Few, if any, present practitioners of the historian's craft can equal. the astonishing range and dazzling erudition of Mr. Hobsbawm's scholarship." —David M. Kennedy, The New York Times Book Review

"A splendid answer to those critics who complain that academic historians no longer write readable prose. . . . The great strength of this book is the way in which what seems in so many ways a wholly vanished epoch is related to our situation today." —James Joll, The New York Review of Books