This magisterial volume follows the death of ancient traditions, the triumph of new classes, and the emergence of new technologies, sciences, and ideologies, with vast intellectual daring and aphoristic elegance. Part of Eric Hobsbawm's epic four-volume history of the modern world, along with The Age of Capitalism, The Age of Empire, and The Age of Extremes .

In the wake of the French Revolution & the Industrial Revolution, Europe underwent another revolution—this time a revolution of values. The author examines the rise of industrial capitalism and the consolidation of bourgeois culture, exploring the effects of mounting concentration of wealth, population migrations, and the domination of European culture. Integrating economics with political and intellectual developments, this account studies the cycles of boom & slump that characterize capitalist economies, of the victims & victors of the bourgeois ethos.

In this third volume of his four-volume history of the modern world, as it has been produced by the development and expansion of the West, Eric Hobsbawm combines vast erudition with a graceful prose style to re-create the epoch that laid the basis for the twentieth century. “Though written by a professional historian,” Hobsbawm writes of his own work, “[it] is addressed not to other academics, but to all who wish to understand the world and who believe history is important for this purpose.” —from the back cover

Dividing the century into the Age of Catastrophe, 1914-1950, the Golden Age, 1950-1973, and the Landslide, 1973-1991, Hobsbawm marshals a vast array of data into a volume of unparalleled inclusiveness, vibrancy, and insight, a work that ranks with his classics The Age of Empire and The Age of Revolution. Includes 32 pages of photos.