Age of Empire Ch 1-4

The Age of Empire by Eric Hobsbawn


Chapter one details the splitting of the world into in two, first world and second world. The first world is characterized by: industrialized countries, commercialized farming, rapidly urbanizing, males "increasingly conformed to a minimum criterion of bourgeois society; that of legally free and equal individuals", legal serfdom nonexistent, legal slavery very near abolition (still in Brazil and Cuba died out by 1880's), and legal freedom and equality (different from real inequality). The second world is characterized by: agricultural countries, vastly un-businesslike farming, no mass education and low literacy in population.
Economics and business are the focal points of chapter two. When the price of agricultural products decreased, the two "non- governmental responses from the population were mass emigration and co-operation". Those were owned no land and were poor choose to emigrate and those who owned land choose to cooperate. The capitalistic world economy found it's building blocks in the national economies of the US, Germany and Britain. Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations illustrates that restrictions are futile for they interfere with freedom. Another idea is the wealth of a nations citizen's determines the strength of a nation.
Chapter three deals with the age of empire. Also the age of emperors, by 1918 five had disappeared and by 1987 only one remained, Japan. It is now the era of the colonial. All the world outside of Europe and Americas were under the formal or informal control of mainly "Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, USA, Belgium and Japan". Only Ethiopia fought off the colonization of Italy. How did Ethiopia fend off the Italian invaders? Why is exoticism a byproduct of European expansion?
Chapter four elaborates on the rise of democracy. The people are clamoring to be heard whether their "emperors" like it or not. Politicians had to appeal to the mass since yellow press became popular. I found it very interesting when Hobsbawn states, "when the men who governed really wanted to say what they meant, they had henceforth to do so in the obscurity of the corridors of power". To what extent did this lead the rise of duplicity and honesty?



Kayla O