Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life

by the time I could actually call myself ‘Professor’ in Britain, I was in my middle fifties, a time of life when most professionals have got as far as they, and the world, expects them to get in their career. At that stage for most of us the promise is in the past, and so is such achievement as it has produced. Professionally speaking, people in this position are left to face half a lifetime of endless tomorrows no better than today, apart from the gowns and ribbons – professional and maybe public honours – which (at least in the humanities) usually signify that the honorand’s future will add nothing to his or her past, except the slow decline of age. World war and Cold War saved me from all this. By an unexpected twist of fortune, they prolonged the period of youth and promise into middle age. At the same time remarriage and children gave a new start to my private life.

In fact, only the war had genuinely delayed my career – but probably no more than that of most men in my age group. (In Britain it had actually advanced the prospects of women graduates.) The Cold War of the 1950s blocked jobs and publishers’ contracts, but ‘on the street’, as the fin-de-siecle phrase has it, that is to say among the working historians, my reputation was serious from the start, certainly in the unofficial world of the younger historians. I was clearly a rising star in the rather narrower community of the Marxist ones.

Pride and intellectual vanity made me worry whether my reputation was carried only by the sympathies of the left, or rested only on the relative scarcity of Marxists to fill the niche which, since the Second World War, even conventional history reserved for this version of a recognized ‘opposition’. It is not that I minded then or mind now being identified as ‘Hobsbawm the Marxist historian’, the label which I still carry round my neck to this day, like the decanters circulating after dinner in combination rooms to prevent dons from confusing their port with their sherry. Young historians need to have their attention drawn to the materialist interpretation of history as much, perhaps even more, today, when even left-wing academic fashions dismiss it as in the days when it was being damned as totalitarian propaganda. After all, I have been trying to persuade people for over half a century that there is more to Marxist history than they have hitherto thought, and if the association of one historian’s name with it helps to do so, so much the better. What troubled my vanity was rather the fear of a mere ghetto reputation, such as that from which figures prominent inside another characteristic twentieth-century cultural ghetto, the Roman Catholic community in Britain, have so often found it difficult, even impossible, to escape. G. K. Chesterton, the dimensions of whose talent have been concealed from non-Catholics by the very closeness of his association with the Church, is a good example. (No British writer would dream of thinking about him like Italo Calvino who once said it was one of his ambitions to become ‘the Chesterton of the Communists’.) Getting good reviews from friendly critics was not the problem. The test of success was to get them from the neutral and hostile ones.

From about 1960 on it became increasingly evident that I was getting beyond a ghetto reputation. My first book, Primitive Rebels (1959), was well received in the USA, both among the historians and the social scientists. Within a few years it had been translated into German, French and Italian. My second book, The Age of Revolution 1789– 1848 (1962), aimed at a broader public, was a success. At least it impressed an established literary agent, the bulky, white-haired and moustached bon vivant David Higham, enough to ask me whether I wanted to join his stable and to offer me periodic lunches at his window table in the Etoile restaurant in Charlotte Street. As I write this both the Etoile (with much the same menu) and the table are still there, under the supervision of another protector of agents and authors, Elena, whose reputation as the queen mother of literary restaurants had been acquired earlier in Soho, and I am still under the wing of old Higham’s successor in the firm still named after him, my friend Bruce Hunter. History may move at the speed of a missile, but some continuities remain. Since The Age of Revolution was part of an international co-production series organized by George Weidenfeld, it would have been translated very quickly anyway, whatever its merits. Nevertheless the seven translations and foreign editions that appeared in the 1960s were helpful, and the book was well received everywhere. I later discovered that a notoriously poor Spanish translation in 1964 was welcomed by the rapidly growing anti-Franco movement in the Spanish universities, since, unlike most Marxist publications, it was legally available.

I published a good deal in the 1960s: a collection of earlier pieces on the history of labour (Labouring Men, 1964), a text on British economic history since the eighteenth century (Industry and Empire , 1968), a small study of the myth and reality of the world’s Robin Hoods, written in Wales as the Russians put an end to the Prague Spring ( Bandits, 1969), and in the same year, jointly with my friend George Rude, a rather larger research monograph on the English farm-labourers’ rising of 1830 (Captain Swing, 1969). By 1971 when I finally got the official professorial title in the University of London, I was already entering the zone of academies (at least in the USA) and honorary degrees (at least in Sweden).

So by the 1970s I was an academically, if not politically, respectable and recognized figure. That decade reinforced this situation. My membership of the Communist Party of Great Britain was by then seen as little more than the personal peculiarity of a well-known historian, one of that new species the jet-plane academic. Only America refused to forget about Hobsbawm the subversive, for, until the abrogation of the Smith Act in the late 1980s, I remained ineligible for a visa to enter the USA and required a ‘waiver’ of this ineligibility every time I went there, which was more or less every year. I was a founder and active member of the editorial board of one of the most prestigious English-language historical journals, a member of the councils and committees of learned historical societies. Seminars and graduate courses in London, doctoral students, national and international, kept the new professor busy. The invitations to lectures and appointments elsewhere continued and multiplied. In my last year at Birkbeck I was simultaneously attached to establishments in London, Paris (at the College de France and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales) and the USA (as ‘Professor-at-large’ of Cornell University). It was all the more enjoyable, even if slightly absurd, since this take-off in my professional fortunes was something I had neither looked for nor expected. One way or another, we had a splendid, if occasionally surrealist, time in the 1970s, not least (with a young family) in Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru and (without family) in Japan. It is not every academic wife who finds herself travelling thirty miles with small children and recorders on a chicken-filled bus in the Peruvian central Sierra to a joint music lesson with the children of a British anthropologist, while her husband, very very slowly – for the buildings are above 4,000 metres – inspects the records of a recently nationalized hacienda shortly to go to the country’s newly established Agrarian Archive.

Perhaps this explains why, though producing learned articles, I wrote fewer academic books in this decade – effectively only The Age of Capital (1974), which made me aware that, without having meant to, I was engaged in writing a wildly ambitious general history of the nineteenth century. Actually much of the most intensive work I did during that decade, planning and writing for an equally ambitious History of Marxism, which was published by Einaudi in Turin in 1978–82, never reached the public entirely in languages other than Italian, since the public interest in these matters dropped precipitately at the end of the 1970s. However, in the 1980s my production speeded up again, largely thanks to the wonderful conditions available in New York and Los Angeles. I published a new collection of papers on labour history (Worlds of Labour, in the USA Workers) in 1984, the third volume on the nineteenth century in 1987 (The Age of Empire 1875– 1914), and two books based on invited lectures, Nations and Nationalism Since the 1780s (what other subject was there to lecture on in Belfast in 1985?) and Echoes of the Marseillaise: Two Centuries Look Back on the French Revolution, both in 1990. I also co-edited and contributed to a volume based on a Past & Present conference I had organized a few years earlier, and which proved to be unusually influential: The Invention of Tradition (1983). My image as I went into my eighth decade was that of an eccentric elderly grandee of the historical profession, who happened to insist that he was a Marxist, but who continued in full production.

Indeed, the history of the twentieth century I wrote in the happy conditions of the New School (where I had