#hobsbawm

[redstarnotebooks]

Industry and Empire, Chapter 2 - The Origin of the Industrial Revolution

I like the way Hobsbawm sets up his problems here, that the British industrial revolution wasn't obviously going to happen (like there isn't a reason to assume private interest will lead to perpetual technological development), and that as the first such revolution it couldn't be explained using external factors (like capital import or technology transfer). It's pleasingly Maoist, insofar as the contradictions leading to the revolution are principally internal, rather than external. And why Britain, when other European maritime powers were also increasingly enmeshed in a semi-global economy of advanced and dependent economies?

He rejects on various grounds explanations based on geography, climate, population, contingency and pure politics. The basics explanation is the existence of accumulated capital, a national market, and three factors.

"Exports, backed by the systematic and aggressive help of the government, provided the spark, and -- with cotton textiles -- the 'leading sector' of industry. They also provided major improvements in sea transport. The home market provided the broad base for a generalized industrial economy and (through the process of urbanization) the incentive for major improvements in inland transport, a powerful base for the coal industry, and for certain important technological innovations. Government provided systematic support for merchant and manufacturer, and some by no means negligible incentives for technological innovation and the development of capital goods industries."

What I really like here is the way Hobsbawm highlights that the first factor was itself dependent on the division of the world, even at the time, between the rise of a mass market for overseas goods, and the creation of economic systems to produce these goods (plantations and colonies). Furthermore, at various points he highlights that Britain's military played a big role in securing these markets and systems.

"Our industrial economy grew out of our commerce, and especially our commerce with the underdeveloped world. And throughout the nineteenth century it was to to retain this peculiar pattern: commerce and shipping maintained our balance of payments, and the exchange of overseas primary products for British manufactures was to be the foundation of our international economy."

And this keeps going on! Later he talks about how this pattern gets ossified, and it fucks over Britain as newer industrial powers arise.

I think this book really benefits from having read/listened to some of the work by Utsa Patnaik on British colonial extraction in India, since it deals heavily with this issue of balance of payments.

This is a long-read version of her argument.

This is a good interview, with her specific argument coming in answer to the question: "Lenin argues that one of the constituents of imperialism is capital export. But some of your work and others such as Amiya Kumar Bagchi discuss how capital export was actually fundamentally different when it was exported to settler colonies versus capital exported to other locations."

[davidhudson]

Eric Hobsbawm, June 9, 1917 – October 1, 2012.

[ladyhawke]

– Eric Hobsbawm

[Text ID: “Who, having seen the Brazilian national football team in its heyday, can deny its claim to the status of art?”]

[gregor-samsung]

“ Cambiano le generazioni e i figli assomigliano ai loro tempi piú che ai loro padri, come scrisse Marc Bloch. La prospettiva delle nuove generazioni si è fatta diversa da quella dei loro padri, il mondo umano è cambiato, gli spazi e i tempi nuovi sono diversi dagli antichi, quelle che sembravano conquiste ferme e indiscutibili devono di nuovo sottoporsi alla prova della nuova configurazione del mondo. E chi profetizzava la fine della storia è stato presto disingannato. Quello che invece si è fatto sempre piú evidente è un processo che potremmo definire di distruzione del passato. La definizione non ci appartiene. È stato Eric Hobsbawm nel suo celebre Secolo breve a individuare questo fenomeno con parole degne di attenta lettura: «La distruzione del passato, o meglio la distruzione dei meccanismi sociali che connettono l’esperienza dei contemporanei a quella delle generazioni precedenti, è uno dei fenomeni piú tipici e insieme piú strani degli ultimi anni del Novecento. La maggior parte dei giovani alla fine del secolo è cresciuta in una sorta di presente permanente, nel quale manca ogni rapporto organico con il passato storico del tempo in cui essi vivono.»

Da quando sono state scritte queste parole il fenomeno si è fatto sempre piú evidente, tanto da suscitare diversi allarmi dando vita a diagnosi di vario genere. Oggi si va dicendo che una nuova malattia sociale incomberebbe su di noi: quella della memoria. Inevitabile pensare per analogia alla patologia individuale dell'Alzheimer. Ma mentre questa suscita angoscia al solo evocarla, l’offuscarsi della coscienza e della conoscenza storica nella società sembra passare quasi inavvertito. Eppure è un fenomeno diffuso in molti ambienti e in diverse fasce sociali, minaccia specialmente le nuove generazioni e il mondo della scuola e devasta quello della politica. La cosa non riguarda solo l’Italia: affligge anche altri Paesi di un’Europa formalmente unita eppure resa da questa malattia sempre piú fragile e spesso irriconoscibile. È l’Europa in primo luogo colei che appare oggi nel mondo come smarrita e dimentica della sua grande eredità culturale. Da molti anni la delusione per la costruzione europea nasce soprattutto davanti alla perdita di memoria di una grande realtà risorta dalle macerie e dalle ceneri di milioni di vittime col proposito di restaurare il ricordo e il rispetto dei suoi valori ideali ma che sembra tornare sempre piú indietro: tanto indietro da scambiare per valori europei quelli finanziari di borse e banche, col risultato di emarginare e minacciare di esclusione la Grecia e lasciare spesso l’Italia sola davanti al dovere di accoglienza e aiuto per il popolo dei migranti. C’è voluto il ritorno del flagello biblico del Covid-19 o altrimenti detto coronavirus perché voci isolate richiamassero alla consapevolezza dell'esistenza di valori superiori a quelli della finanza e della produzione di ricchezza: per esempio, quello della tutela della semplice e nuda vita umana, la si ritenga dono divino o frutto del caso. Oggi la minaccia di una pandemia globale costringe credenti e no, cultori del Vangelo o dei valori illuministici, a incontrarsi e riconoscersi d’accordo sulla vera scala dei valori. “

Adriano Prosperi, Un tempo senza storia. La distruzione del passato, Giulio Einaudi editore (collana Vele); prima edizione: 19 gennaio 2021. [Libro elettronico] 

[moltage]

i need. i need history book recs. specifically european history if you guys have any 👁️👁️

@on-a-lucky-tide pspsps i trust your judgement 👉👈

[cuatrotrece]

Joshua Brown's illustrations of E.P. Thompson, C.L.R. James, Natalie Zemon Davis and Eric Hobsbawm in Visions of History (1984) by MAHRO - The Radical Historians Organization.

[empirearchives]

In all seriousness, the whole “you think Napoleon looks cool because he paid people to make him look cool” has always been a very silly argument. All leaders paid people to make them look cool. Literally all of them. This argument also doesn’t take into account that Napoleon has been the target of wayyyy more negative propaganda than any of the other rulers. The historian Eric Hobsbawm said that the rise of the “Napoleonic legend” really has nothing to do with any propaganda effort on the part of Napoleon. According to Hobsbawm, Napoleon’s popularity “can be adequately explained neither by Napoleonic victories nor by Napoleonic propaganda, nor even by Napoleon’s own undoubted genius.” Saying it was entirely due to propaganda is just a way to dismiss any serious attempt to understand public support for Napoleon in the late 18th and early 19th century.

Hobsbawm quote from: The Age of Revolution, 1789-1848

[gabinete63]

[articlesofnote]

SCoR - Section II, Ch. 1, Part B "Origins of Institutionalization"

summary of “The Social Construction of Reality” by Berger and Luckmann, gotta repost because Tumblr fucked up the article slugs and I couldn’t link to individual posts correctly

I. Repeated actions become habitual/patterned, thus reproducible with less effort; NB this isn't a specifically social phenomenon.

II. Habitualization provides psychological relief of choice limitation, and also frees energy for times when innovation/deliberation is required to respond to a situation.

III. Habitualization also means we don't need to define each response on the fly; prediction becomes possible, even precise.

IV. Habitualization precedes institutionalization, and can take place in isolation, but in practice it takes place in the context of an institution or institutions.

V. institutions are formed when there is a reciprocal/multilateral typification of particular types of actions by particular types of actors ("the president shall address the congress")

VI. Inherent in the institution are: historicity and control. Historicity, because institutional patterns aren't formed instantly ("institutions always have a history, of which they are products"); control, because institutional patterns are typified, therefore limited, even regardless of actual enforcement behaviors or patterns as such that are part of the institutional structure.

VII. Institutionalization is incipient in every social interaction continuing in time.

VIII. That is, even two individuals thrown together without a shared social context WILL start to typify each other's behaviors - the initiation of roles, patterns of action, historicity, etc.

IX. The participants in this process benefit from it in that they end up with more ability to predict the other's actions - less astonishment/fear, more familiarity.

X. Any repetition tends to some degree of habitualization; any observation tends to some degree of typification; but in an ongoing bilateral social situation, certain actions are more likely to be habituated/typified. Which ones?

XI. Generally, that which is relevant to both parties (hereafter, A and B). This obviously varies based on material conditions, however, usually communications come first, followed by labor/sexual/territorial relationships, etc. all of which will be inflected by the prior socialization of A and B.

XII. Then, if A and B have a child ("C"), C will experience the parental patterns as objective historical givens, NOT contingent constructs.

XIII. In other words, prior to C, A and B construct a world that is entirely transparent and accessible to them, fluid and mutable. After C, and to C, this world is objective and opaque - and this also affects A and B since they now need to keep things more consistent for C's sake.

XIV. This is the birth of the social world we are familiar with, i.e. an objective fact received from without - the child takes it all for granted, the signifier IS the signified, etc.

XV. This extends to the world of institutions that we live within - objective, external, incomprehensible except via experience.

XVI. Nevertheless, this is still a human-constructed reality - "Society is a human product. Society is an objective reality. Man is a social product." - in an ongoing dialectical interaction.

XVII. Institutional reality also requires legitimation - ways in which it can be explained and justified to those who do not have a direct memory of its creation. These legitimations are learned as part of socialization into a given institutional order.

XVIII. As institutions depart form the original social processes that formed them, there is a corresponding increase in the need for more explicit mechanisms of social control - folks must be "taught to behave" then "kept in line."

XIX. In practice, mutual interactions between people or groups lead to multiple tracks of institutionalization which don't necessarily share a functional or logical integration.

XX. Nevertheless, institutions (which persist) do tend to some level of functional/logical coherence, implying some level of common relevance/shared meaning among participants. Note that role performances can (and must?) be functionally segregated, but MEANINGS tend to a consistency of some sort as people try to understand their experiences as occurring within some kind of framework. There may be a physiological cause for this drive*, but it isn't necessary to assume one to appreciate this habit as a real empirical phenomenon.

XXI. "It follows that great care is required in any statement… about the 'logic' of institutions." The 'logic' is not 'within' the institution, but rather is imposed by our reflections about that institution.

XXII. Language provides the fundamental well of logic which can be drown on to explain the institutional world, and all legitimations are expressed in language. This also connects with the social "knowledge" that the world one inhabits is a consistent and logical whole, since from that fact comes efforts to explain experience in terms of the pre-existing internalized social knowledge.

XXIII. So, institutions are integrated, but this is "not a functional imperative of the social processes that produce them;" rather, it is a byproduct of individual need to see their actions as part of a subjectively meaningful whole.

XXIV. Given this, it follows that analyzing social phenomena/institutional order would primarily depend on analyzing the understanding of the social knowledge of the people composing these institutions, of which complex theoretical legitimations are a part but by no means the whole. In fact, "the primary knowledge about the institutional order is knowledge on the pre-theoretical level," the sum total of "what everybody knows" about that order.

XXV. Since this knowledge is socially objectivated AS knowledge, deviations from it ("depravity", "insanity", "ignorance") occupy an inferior cognitive status; because this social knowledge is coextensive with "what is knowable," deviations are seen as deviations from reality itself. "Knowledge in this sense is at the heart of the fundamental dialectic of society… [it is] a 'realization' in the double sense… of apprehending the objectivated social reality, AND in the sense of … producing this reality."

XXVI. For example, in the course of division of labor, an area-specific body of knowledge is developed, crystallized in language, and transmitted to particular actors; the knowledge thus transmitted becomes an objectivation that serves to structure and channel further actions of its type.

XXVII. Then, this body of knowledge is available to the next generation as an objective truth which has the power to shape an individual into an instance of that actor, which definition only has meaning inside the social world that hosts this knowledge. With variation, this same process applies in ANY area of institutionalized conduct.

----

Notes:

re. V - The word "institutionalization" was used in the book where is used "formed"; "institutionalization" is overloaded to also mean "molding a human as an institutional actor" IMO (ref Brooksy from Shawshank Redemption)

re. XII - Unlearning the "objectivity" of parental dictates is probably a universal developmental phase? Or not - but maybe recognizing it is?

re. XVII - I can imagine an institution so totalizing that no legitimation is required - "force of nature" - conflict/discrepancies generate questions that must be answered, but if no discrepancies, no questions? Also implies that such institutions may already exist but we wouldn't know - because we don't question them or they are so universally taken for granted (i.e. the concept of death itself, see The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant)

re. XX -

* I added the caveat about persistence - might be gratuitous, but seems relevant given my interest in institutional life cycles i.e. they CAN die or degrade or change, so how? Dis-integration of belief seems related, but is it symptom or cause? Or both?

** I think Energy Minimization IS this physiological (or even pre-physiological/physical) cause(? need? drive?)

re. XXI - Found this paragraph extremely surprising statement at first, but then less so - interpreted as another instance of "The institution is in our minds" - but might be wrong about this!

re. XXIII - So what happens if folks no longer feel the need or have the ability to do this integration of experience into a "meaningful whole?"

If institutional strength is in the minds of its members, then institutional weakness would result from folks not feeling a need to integrate their experiences into the institutional patterns

"all is vanity" - "integration is pointless" (cynicism?) as a concept is a degenerate simplicity, saving much effort - folks don't have to think hard about things or meaningfully engage with the world they inhabit, because all effort is proactively deemed a waste of time

and in a complex technical society such as ours, which is relatively productive and protective of its members, a given individual member doesn't NEED to engage with many of its structures in order to survive (vs. eg the medieval peasant of my imagining)

leads to a dislocation/disconnection/differentiation between 'social integrators' eg. folks who commit to institutional logics and embody them, pulling together and strengthening them, vs. 'social neutrinos' - folks existing without integrating or participating much ("consumers", maybe!)

hypothesis: industrial productivity gains not put into "shorter workdays" (i.e. fewer hours assigned to materially-productive labor) but rather in giving less of a shit about the world we find ourselves in; anomie/ennui

drivers(?)

existentialism/scientific revolutions driving human "place in universe" farther and farther out of center (Thomas Kuhn, Eric Hobsbawm)

nb existential philosophy seems to develop roughly parallel to industrial revolution, initially dislocated (kierkegaard?) provide language for those who follow

american "rugged individualism"

contra "network", individual DOES matter, but lives in a matrix (hah) of institutions that he believes he cannot influence - which makes it so

institutional immune systems - change-from-within resistance (Le Chatelier's Principle again?)

institutions also try to change their environment to be more hospitable (Legibility)

re. XXV - See also XVI for the cycle being described in more words here

[cutulisci]

[redstarnotebooks]

Industry and Empire, Chapter 1 - Britain in 1750

Introducing us to Britain in 1750, Hobsbawm gives contemporary tourists' contrasting descriptions of London as the biggest city in Christendom, versus the green and orderly countryside. Our tourist can't visit any comparable cities in England but Bristol, Liverpool and Glasgow are rapidly growing due to a burgeoning trade in slaves and colonial commodities.

Britain has 6000 mercantile ships with tonnage of half a million, nearly 6 times bigger than its nearest rival, France. This private merchant's fleet forms 1/10 of all fixed capital investment, with 100,000 seamen forming the largest group of non-agricultural workers. There is some machinery, basic lifts and steam engines, but was the country was better known for artisan manufacturing.

The overall impression is of a powerful, rich country, based on commerce and its navy, with a comparatively prosperous common people.

"Economic and technical progress, private enterprise, and what we would now call liberalism: all these were evident. Yet nobody expected the imminent transformation of the country by an industrial revolution -- not even travellers who visited Britain in the 1780s, when we know it had already started."

Importantly, Britain also had a national "monetary and market economy", with London providing a giant internal market for agricultural products and coal, little regional variation in prices, and a lack of famine outside of the Scottish Highlands and Ireland

There was little peasantry in the sense of small cultivators, villages had a cash economy with consumption of colonial goods like tea and tobacco, and land ownership was largely concentrated: "a few thousand landowners, leasing their land to some tens of thousands of tenant farmers, who in turn operated it with the labour of some hundreds of thousands of farm labourers..."

Manufacturing was largely rural, with villages starting to specialize in certain artisanal crafts. This meant that the big landowners had a direct interest in the mines and manufactures on their lands, and thus industry had a major influence on domestic politics in comparison to commerce, unlike the situation in other European countries

The British ruling class, due to the influence of the English Civil War, was much more interested in austere money-making compared to the more archaic and feudal aristocracy of the Continent, allowing them to adapt better when things did change.

A lot of what Hobsbawm is pointing to here -- the condition of town and country, the relative balance of industry and commerce, the concentration of land, and the essentially bourgeois nature of the aristocracy are all this that are about to rapidly change, or are relevant for understanding the politics of what is to come.

One thing I really like is Hobsbawm explaining the preconditions for the Industrial Revolution in fundamentally economic terms of land and production, and their attendance social relations, without too much appeal to national character or a kind of pure contingency. Those show up -- they aren't irrelevant -- but they play a mediating role rather than a basic one.

This is a short chapter, so I really need to improve my summarizing.

[davidhudson]

Eric Hobsbawm, June 9, 1917 – October 1, 2012.

[vampyreambrosia]

went outside again today and im so sad at the amount of money i just spent... but at least i got one thing for free: borrowed a book from the library <3

[hierarchyproblem]

Only unrealistic dreamers can suggest that Louis XVI might have accepted defeat and immediately turned himself into a constitutional monarch, even if he had been a less negligible and stupid man than he was, married to a less chicken-brained and irresponsible woman, and prepared to listen to less disastrous advisers.

Why don't you tell us what you really think!

[userpreferencegirl]

hobsbawm !!! sorry for ever doubting you i was not familiar with your game

[pericardio-relicario]

Most of what I have written in this bopk, except obvious personal judgments of the author, readers will have to take on trust. There is no point in overloading a book such as this with a vast apparatus of references or other signs of erudition.

— Eric Hobsbawm, from AGE OF EXTREMES: The Short Twentieth Century 1914-1991, on The Age of Catastrophe,