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E. J. Hobsbawm |
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Eric J. Hobsbawm was born on 9 June 1917. He was educated at Vienna, Berlin, London and Cambridge, where he was a Fellow of King's College from 1949 to 1955. He was Professor of Economic and Social History at Birkbeck College, University of London from 1970 to 1982, having also taught at Stanford and M.I.T. He has been Emeritus Professor of Economic and Social History at the University of London since 1982 and teaches at the New School for social Research in New York.
He was made an F.B.A. in 1976. His main publications include; Primitive Rebels (1959), The Age of Revolution (1962), Labouring Men (1964), Captain Swing (1969; with George Rudé), Bandits (1969), Revolutionaries (1973), The Age of Capital 1848-1875 (1975), The Italian Road to Socialism (1977), The Invention of Tradition (1983; with Terence Ranger), Worlds of Labour (1984), Nations and Nationalism Since 1780 (1990), Age of Extremes (1994) and On History (1997). Professor Hobsbawm, who lives in London, is married, with two children.
Committed to observing the world around him, and to understanding these 'interesting times', Eric Hobsbawm - one of the most celebrated historians of our time - unravels his thoughts on the 20th century, the 21st century, and his love of Jazz.
Your latest book, Interesting Times, looks at the history of the 20th century and how it has shaped the world in which we live today. How did you approach writing such a vast subject?
By trying not to see it globally. By trying to see it in long focus. Basically, by trying to look at it as if I were someone as remote from its passions as we are today from the Thirty Years' War of the 17th century; but knowing full well that I wasn't. That is to say, like an ideal, clear-headed Irishman (Catholic or Protestant) writing about Ulster today.
Of the multitude of world changes that have happened in your lifetime, which stands out most in your memory?
There is an important difference between the changes which stand out in memory i.e. which stood out at the time - such as the explosion of the first nuclear bomb and the fall of Socialism in the USSR and its region, and the changes which stand out in retrospect. The most important of these was the extraordinary acceleration of the speed of historical change between 1945 and 1975. This has transformed the world more profoundly than any previous period of thirty years in world history.
And which moment in time, would you say, so far sums up the 21st century?
It is a bit early to come to a conclusion about it. But if you ask me when the 21st century began, I would say, economically with the collapse of the great dot.com stock exchange bubble and the proclamation of the US global imperial project after 11 September 2001.
I understand that you are a great lover of Jazz. Have you ever been lucky enough to meet any of your heroes or heroines?
Yes. I was a friend of John Hammond Jr., who did more for jazz and racial equality in the 1930s than anyone else, not least by discovering Billie Holiday. As he told me on his deathbed, it was the thing he was proudest of in his life. I had a wonderful evening with Studs Terkel in the house of the great gospel singer Mahalia Jackson. And I stood next to Benny Goodman, a few days before his death, when both of us got honorary degrees at the same US university.
