The Age of Capital: 1848–1875 is a book by Eric Hobsbawm, originally published in 1975. It is the second in his trilogy of books about a time period he phrased, “the long 19th century”. This book is preceded by The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789–1848 and followed by The Age of Empire: 1875–1914. A fourth book, outside of this “long 19th century” trilogy, is The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914–1991.
Table of Contents
Summary of The Age of Capital
Hobsbawm analyzed the 19th and 20th century processes of modernization through the framework of what he calls the dual revolution thesis. This thesis recognizes the dual importance of the French Revolution — in the socio-political realm — and the Industrial Revolution — in the socio-economic realm — as midwives of modern European history. Equally important, through the connections of colonialism and imperialism, these dual revolutions influenced world history.
In his second installment in the trilogy, Hobsbawm picks up where he left off in The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789–1848, by delving first into the Revolutions of 1848, the so-called “Springtime of Peoples”, in Part I. In Part I: Revolutionary Prelude, Hobsbawm traces the remarkable success of the 1848 revolutions before their final defeat, whether by suppression or consolidation, the latter being the case in France: The overthrow of the July Monarchy in February 1848 led to the founding of the Second Republic. But then, through presidential election, Louis Napoleon won a substantial majority and, through a coup, turned himself from president of the Second Republic into Emperor Napoleon III of the Second French Empire.
In Part II: Developments, and Part III: Results, Hobsbawm traces the rise of modern “capitalism.” Indeed, the word itself, he states, made its first appearance in the economic and political vocabulary of the world in the 1860s. Here is a synopsis of the chapters of The Age of Capital:
Part I: Chapter 1. “The Springtime of Peoples”
In the book’s first chapter, “The Springtime of Peoples”, Hobsbawm outlines and analyzes the extraordinary event(s) that was the 1848 Revolutions. From Sicily to the North Sea, from France in the west to Moldova in the east, revolutionary upheaval gripped most of the states of Europe. The notable exceptions include:
- Great Britain: A nation that had undergone her own near-revolutionary upheaval in the Chartist movement of the 1830s-1840s, and one that had made concessions to popular opinion, such as enlarging the franchise with the Great Reform of 1832.
- Portugal: Like its Iberian neighbor Spain, Hobsbawm states that Portugal didn’t follow the general “rhythm” of the rest of continental Europe. Again, like Spain, Portugal experienced civil military conflict between liberals and conservatives, in what’s called the Liberal Wars, which were fought over the royal succession and lasted from 1828 to 1834. The Liberals, supported by Great Britain, France, as well as Belgian volunteers (an independent Belgium was created by revolution in 1830 in the then United Kingdom of the Netherlands), won the Liberal Wars in Portugal.
- Russia: As the most conservative, right-wing, and absolutist of the Great Powers, Russia was the “gendarme of Europe,” poised to intervene militarily in countries where revolution against the status quo occurred. In the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, Russia had formed the Holy Alliance along with Austria and Prussia. In 1848, Russia’s social and political conditions were not conducive to the kinds of revolutions that spread throughout most of continental Europe. What’s more, Russia had experienced its own episodes of revolutionary upheaval before 1848 and crushed them: The 1825 Decembrist Revolt and the November Uprising in Poland (1830-1831).
- Spain: Similar to Portugal, Spain didn’t experience a general revolution in 1848 like so much of the rest of Europe. Instead, it had to grapple with the Carlist Wars, which, like the Liberal Wars in Portugal, pit liberals against conservatives. The First Carlist War was long and vicious, lasting from 1833 to 1840, with fighting across the Basque Country, Aragon, Catalonia, and Valencia. The Second Carlist War, from 1846 to 1849, was a minor Catalan uprising. The origin of the Carlist Wars was a succession dispute between the more liberal supporters of Queen Isabella II and the conservative, absolutist supporters of the Infante Carolos of Spain, brother of the deceased Ferdinand VII.
- Other countries: Sweden saw only a series of riots, the March Unrest; not much happened in the modern Netherlands, which had already lost the southern, formally called Austrian Netherlands, in 1830 in the Belgian Revolution; Switzerland’s main constitutional contest had been waged in the Sonderbund War and had settled on a new constitution in the years 1845-1848.
Hobsbawm notes that thinkers as different as de Tocqueville and Marx felt that a revolution was brewing well before it eventually broke out. At no time in European history up to that point had it experienced such a general, widespread, and contemporaneous revolutionary upheaval. Even the great French Revolution of 1789 saw only a couple of neighboring countries undergo endemic revolutions and, in most cases, the French had to export their revolution to other countries. The Revolutions of 1848 were all homegrown and yet interrelated.
Common themes and patterns among the diverse Revolutions of 1848 include the ideas of nationalism, popular sovereignty, liberalism, constitutionalism, autonomy or even independence. Never had the prospects of revolutionaries seemed so assured in the early months of 1848. Never had revolutionaries been so spectacularly crushed than in the later months of 1848 and 1849.
The Revolutions of 1848 and the fear of their reoccurrence made European governments over the next 25 odd years very cautious. Repression could be resorted to, but increasingly outside Russia, European governments were resorting to this as a last resort. Concessions, the governments realized, could be made the middle-class liberals without the social order being undermined. Socialist demands, however, could not be conceded.
The Revolutions of 1848 affected the central core of Europe, from France in the west to the Danubian Principalities, like Romania and Moldova, in the east. The revolutions thus affected both “developed” countries — like France, the German states, and the Austrian portion of the Austrian Empire — and the “underdeveloped” countries — like Southern Italy, the Balkans, the Hungarian portion of the Austrian Empire.
The revolutionaries of 1848 suffered from several axes of division. A big one was nationalism, except in France; the nationalist question was caught up in the multiple social and political issues in European countries which either had a large minority of subject nationalities — like the Hungarians in the Austrian Empire — or were still divided up into multiple sovereign states — like the Italian and German states. The vision of the future social and political structure also divided revolutionaries, much to the advantage of the conservative status quo regimes. It was in the Revolutions of 1848 that the middle-class liberals of the style of the 1789 French Revolution definitively split with the more radical left, the latter now being socialism or communism. In almost every revolutionary upheaval in 1848, this division enabled the conservative forces of reaction to divide and conquer and/or draw the moderate liberals onto their side. This dynamic helped doom the Revolutions of 1848.
The other tool of destroying the revolutions was foreign intervention and/or foreign war. In the case of the 1848 Revolutions in the Austrian Empire, the rebelling Hungarian portion of the empire had managed to continually defeat attempts by the imperial authorities to suppress the revolution. It was only when the Austrian emperor asked the Russian tsar — the epitome of a reactionary, Nicholas I — to intervene militarily did Austria quell the Hungarian Revolution in 1849. In the Italian states, the Kingdom of Sardinia attempted to throw out the Austrian presence in northern Italy and serve as the spearhead of Italian unification. However, in the First War of Italian Independence (March 23, 1848-August 22, 1849), King Charles Albert of Sardinia was soundly defeated by Austrian forces, provoking his abdication and the failure of Italian unification at this stage.
So, what did the Revolutions of 1848 accomplish? In the exceptional case of France, a republic did ensue after the overthrow of the July Monarchy of the Orleanist Louis-Phillipe. However, the Second Republic very quickly shifted towards moderation and bloodily suppressed urban worker riots in the summer of 1848. Moreover, after Louis Napoleon was elected president in 1848, he then carried out a coup d’état in December 1851, eliminating the Second Republic and establishing the Second Empire.
One of the main things the Revolutions of 1848 accomplished was the eradication in serfdom in Europe west of Russia and Romania. This was no mean achievement. Another, more indirect accomplishment was that, over the following two decades, many of the demands of the liberals were conceded by the reigning regimes. Franchises were enlarged, improved civil and political rights were gradually achieved. Indeed, the years 1848 to 1875 can be described as generally “liberal,” even in the more conservative, eastern European states like Prussia and Austria.
In the years following the Revolutions of 1848, regimes would more-or-less effectively combine a “party of order” politics with “forces of progress.” As a result of these upheavals, Hobsbawm concludes that the “bourgeoisie ceased to be a revolutionary force.” Another effect of the 1848 Revolutions was that the ruling regimes, in order to maintain the desired social order, had to learn the politics of the people and partake in the formulation of public opinion; something liberals had done since the days of the Enlightenment in the 18th century but which conservatives usually had not.
Part II: Chapter 2. The Great Boom
The Great Boom of chapter 2 covers the dramatic economic transformation and expansion of the years from 1848 to the early 1870s, an economic boom that he argues helped provide European governments, nearly brought to the brink by revolution in 1848-1849, “breathing-space” to recover and stabilize their regimes and domestic societies.
Chapter 3. The World United
As the economy expanded and began to penetrate parts of the world that had never truly been integrated into the global economic system, Hobsbawm argues that the period covered by The Age of Capital: 1848–1875 witnessed the first steps towards what we would call globalization. As a result of this expansion and penetration, there emerged so-called “Losers” and “Winners” from the process.
Chapter 4. Conflicts and War
Hobsbawm’s “Age of Capital” was by no means stagnant or tranquil: It witnessed major if short international conflicts such as the Crimean War, the Italian and German wars of unification, the much longer American Civil War, and the devastating Taiping Rebellion in China.
Chapter 5. Building Nations
Chapter 6. The Forces of Democracy
Domestically, the period 1848 to 1875, Hobsbawm argues, was one that witnessed the seeming triumph of “reason, science, progress and liberalism,” and especially bourgeois ideas and preeminence. He therefore sees this period as somewhat of an exceptional interlude, between the tumults of the Age of Revolution (1789-1848) and the economic disruption and socio-political radicalization of the Age of Empire (1875-1914). But social conflict and social revolution subsided during the period after 1848 to the early 1870s, with the most notable development being mainly the establishment and growth of the one socialist, mass labor movement of the era — Ferdinand Lassalle’s General German Workers Association after 1863.
Chapter 7. Losers
Chapter 8. Winners
Chapter 9. Changing Society
Part III: Chapter 10. The Land
Chapter 11. Men Moving
Chapter 12. City, Industry, the Working Class
Chapter 13. The Bourgeois World
Chapter 14. Science, Religion, Ideology
Chapter 15. The Arts
Chapter 16. Conclusion
The book concludes with the ending of the Great Boom in the early 1870s, with what in America has been called the Panic of 1873 and, in countries like Great Britain, the Long Depression, running anywhere from 1873 to 1879 or even 1873 to 1896, depending on the metrics used. Hobsbawm sees the 1870s not as a sharp break in history, but a watershed: An evolution away from the unrestrained competitive private enterprise, free from government intervention, towards a landscape of economic cartelization, industrial corporations, increased government intervention in domestic economies and protectionism against international economic competitors, as opposed to the free trade ideals of the mid-19th century. Social revolution, which had died down after the Revolutions of 1848, would rear its head in the form of the Paris Commune of 1871; but serious social unrest, social revolution, and political radicalization (such as the emergence of a new right-wing form of nationalism) would only come to the fore in the next era, the Age of Empire (1875-1914), as the seeds sewn during the Age of Capital would finally be reaped amid the revolutions in the Persian Empire, Mexico, China, the Russian Empire and the Great War.