The Age of Empire: 1875-1914

I heard about this book from my friend Clio, who gave it a pretty positive review last October, despite not finishing the book. It's a time period that I find interesting - a world in transition from an older, nearly unrecognizable world, to a modern one with airplanes, telephones, women who work and vote and all of the other accoutrements of modern life - as well as a period about which I've read quite a bit already. All of which is to say that I was really looking forward to reading this book, and that I'm terribly disappointed in it. And I've chalked up my first "did not finish" of 2013.

So what's the problem? There were a few actually. For starters, The Age of Empire is incredibly, incredibly dry. It reads like a textbook, and not an engaging one. It's incredibly dense, so that I often found myself rereading a given paragraph or page 2-3 times to get my head around the information being presented. (I gave up after 200 pages, though I'd probably read more than the 340 in the entire book!) The Age of Empire also has tables of numbers, sometimes within the text, and regularly refers readers around the book (i.e., see pages 114-115, earlier) and to other books written by Eric Hobsbawm (i.e., see The Age of Capital, chapter 14, 11). I found these things distracting.

I also did not care for the organization of the book. Neither chronological, nor organized by empire (British, Ottoman, Habsburg, etc.), The Age of Empire is organized by theme and, therefore, seems to jump around quite a bit. The development of socialism as a political philosophy, for example, or the increasing liberation of women and growing suffrage movement are covered, then referenced, then re-referenced, to an extent that I felt I was reading in circles.

Lastly, I was disappointed with the extent to which The Age of Empire truly seemed to examine and confront imperialism. Honestly, that was probably my greatest disappointment, because I expected to read a book about empires, within the context of the wider socio-political-economic issues. Instead, this was a book about the social/political/economic issues at a time that just happened to coincide with the apex of imperialism/colonialism. Two books, one British (The Perfect Summer, England 1911: Just Before the Storm) and one American (The Imperial Cruise: A Secret History of Empire and War) handle the subject matter and time period much more deftly - and are eminently more readable.