Eric Hobsbawm

Eric Hobsbawm was a British Marxist historian who wrote extensively on the rise of industrial capitalism, socialism and nationalism. He was born in Alexandria, Egypt, to Jewish parents who moved to Vienna and then Berlin during his childhood. He became a communist in his teens and joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1936. He studied history at King’s College, Cambridge, where he was influenced by the historian E. H. Carr. He served in the Second World War as a radio engineer and later obtained his PhD in history at Cambridge. He taught at Birkbeck College, London, for most of his academic career and became one of the most influential and widely read historians of the 20th century. His best-known works include his tetralogy of books on the “long 19th century” (The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789–1848, The Age of Capital: 1848–1875, The Age of Empire: 1875–1914 and The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991) and an edited volume that introduced the concept of “invented traditions”. He also wrote on topics such as banditry, jazz, labour movements, nationalism, social history and the history of the left. He was a lifelong Marxist and a member of the Communist Party until its dissolution in 1991. He was also involved in various political and intellectual movements, such as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the Socialist Register, the New Left Review and the Historians’ Group of the Communist Party. He received numerous awards and honours for his work, including the Balzan Prize, the Wolfson History Prize, the Companion of Honour and the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. He died in London in 2012 at the age of 95.