The Age of Empire, 1875-1914

• The Age of Empire, 1875-1914
  E.J.Hobsbawm - Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987 – 404pp - £16.95

The apparently limitless capacity of the productive system established by Professor Hobsbawm has now taken him into a third volume of what has turned out to be a general survey of the nineteenth century in world history. He tells us that it was not his original intention to write anything so 'crazily ambitious'. It is only this present volume which was consciously conceived as the final part of a trilogy. Its four-fold purpose has been to understand and explain the nineteenth century and its place in history, to expound a world in process of revolutionary transformation, to trace the roots of our present back into the soil of the past and to see the past as a coherent whole rather than a medley of different topics. Professor Hobsbawm is not a person to set himself modest objectives.