Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The British historian Eric Hobsbawm begins his seminal The Age of Revolution 1789–1848 with a reflection on words. “Words,” he says, “are witnesses which often speak louder than documents.” In sixty years from 1789 to 1848, words like “industry,” “industrialist,” “factory,” “middle class,” “working class,” “capitalism,” and “socialism” were either “invented or gained their modern meanings.” The list also includes “aristocracy,” “railway,” “liberal,” and “conservative,” as well as “nationality,” “scientist,” “engineer,” “proletariat,” and “(economic) crisis.” Regardless of our political or ideological commitments, our conceptual space has been shaped, Hobsbawm seems to say, by philosophical, economic, and technological revolutions and we cannot understand ourselves if we fail to grasp this fundamental fact. “To imagine the modern world without these words … is to measure the profundity of the revolution which broke out between 1789 and 1848 and forms the greatest transformation in human history” (Hobsbawm 1962).Strikingly absent from Hobsbawm's list is any concept that would refer us to racial slavery, colonialism, and the political struggles against them. We have “aristocracy” but not “slaveholder,” “nationality” but not “colonial subject,” “factory” and “socialism” but not “plantation” and “abolitionism.” Are slavery and colonialism not part of modernity? Or did they play no role ... log in or subscribe to read full text