Age of... S.
3 total works
Eddie Bosham (aka Charlie Boylan) is in prison on a murder charge. But he's not worried. He's innocent, and, anyway, he has hidden proof of a ghastly scandal that could bring down the monarchy. Taking up his memoirs from where we left him, marooned on the Galapagos Islands, we find Eddie offering a young Charles Darwin an explanation of why the finches on the islands vary. In Texas, staunchly loyal to whichever side will win, he spies for General Santa Anna at the Alamo and, with the help of Emily Morgan, the ravishingly beautiful Yellow Rose of Texas, for Sam Houston at San Jacinto. Eddie works the Mississippi riverboats as a cardsharp. Caught cheating, he is forced to jump ship and inadvertently stumbles across the secret that will launch the Californian Gold Rush. Finally, having traversed the girth of a nation, his disgraceful saga ends, back east, at a highly inflammatory revivalist meeting.
In "The Age of Revolution", Eric Hobsbawm traced the transformation of European life between 1789 and 1848 by the "Dual Revolution" - the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. In the years that followed the values developed which, taken together, made up the age of capital. In this history of the years 1848-1875, he continues his analysis of the rise of industrial capitalism and the consolidation of bougeois culture. The extension of capitalist economy to the four corners of the globe, the mounting concentration of wealth, the migration of men, the domination of Europe and European culture made the third quarter of the 19th century a watershed. This is a history not only of Europe, but of the world. Hobsbawm's intention is not to summarize facts, but to draw facts together into an historical synthesis, to "make sense of" the period, and to trace the roots of the present world back to it.
This title is about the death of the 19th century, the world made by and for liberal middle classes in the name of universal progress and civilization. It is about hopes realized which turned into fears: an era of unparalled peace engendering an era of unparalled war; revolt and revolution inevitably emerging on the outskirts of a stable and flourishing Western society; an era of profound identity crises for bourgeois classes whose traditional moral foundations crumbled under the pressure of their own accumulations of wealth and comfort, among a new and sudden mass labour movement which rejected capitalism, new middle classes which rejected liberalism. It is about world empires built and held with almost contemptuous ease by small bodies of Europeans, which were to last barely a human lifetime, and a European domination of world history never more confident than at the moment when it was about to disappear forever.