This semester we will be reading Eric Hobsbawm’s The Age of Revolution (1962) and Mark Mazower’s Dark Continent (2000).  Despite their obvious dissimilarities in terms of chronological focus and publication date, they share an interest in interpretative synthesis.  They are both books, in other words, that not only strive to present readers with a synthetic account of “what happened,” but also to enumerate a unique argument about those events.  Our task is to understand those arguments.

Eric Hobsbawm passed away last year and Mark Mazower wrote an obituary for the Guardian.  Here is an excerpt:

Rereading those books [the Age tetralogy] it is hard not to be overwhelmed by Hobsbawm’s skill. One of the hardest things for a historian is to make an argument readable; he does it better than anyone. Not for Hobsbawm, the turn to narrative, the urge to tell stories. He had plenty of his own. But his histories are about trends, social forces, large-scale change over vast distances. Telling that kind of history in a way that is as compelling as a detective story is a real challenge of style and composition: in the tetralogy, Hobsbawm shows how to do it.

I’ll be interested to know whether you agree or disagree with Mazower’s assessment after we finish with Age of Revolution.