Book review: A half-baked chronicle of a celebrated 20th Century historian

This is a biography of Eric Hobsbawm, arguably the most famous historian of the second half of the 20th century, written by another well-known historian. In this sense — a biography by a professional historian of another serious historian — this is a special, if not a unique, kind of book. It deserves to be evaluated by the very high standards of historical scholarship that the two historians set for themselves.

It is, thus, a valid expectation that this biography would be more than a chronicle of Hobsbawm’s long and rich life — he lived well into his 90s and was involved in history writing, politics, music, literature and other cultural and scholarly activities. There was hardly any sphere of intellectual activity that did not draw Hobsbawm’s outstanding mind. The doyen of Marxist historians, Christopher Hill, a senior peer of Hobsbawm, once dedicated a book thus: “For Eric Hobsbawm, who knows about everything, including the seventeenth century.” As a fellow and younger historian, Evans, the expectation is, would trace and analyse Hobsbawm’s intellectual trajectory and interrogate it. The biographer should not only be able to place Hobsbawm and his ideas in their time and context but also evaluate what Hobsbawm himself thought of his own ideas and work, especially because the subject of the biography published his memoirs (Interesting Times: A Twentieth Century Life, Allen Lane) a few years before his death.

Evans is right in describing Hobsbawm’s life as a life in history. In spite of his varied interests, it is as a historian that he is best known. Hobsbawm’s work as a historian can be seen as falling into two distinct parts. The first is that of Hobsbawm, the professional historian who on the basis of archival research and his wide reading produced original essays like “The Tramping Artisan”, “The Standard of Living”, “The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century” and so on, and books like Bandits, Primitive Rebels and (with George Rude), Captain Swing and Industry and Empire. The other is his achievement as a popular historian as manifest in the four volumes, The Age of Revolution, The Age of Capital, The Age of Empire and The Age of Extremes. These four books made Hobsbawm world famous and his other works, especially his outstanding long essays of historical reconstruction, fell into relative oblivion. These volumes may have also rendered irreparable harm to Hobsbawm’s reputation as a serious historian since they were grand and sweeping narratives that lacked solid research and analytical rigour that had informed his earlier books and essays.

Eric Hobsbawm: A life in history | Author: Urvashi Bahuguna

Moreover, as an Indian reader I should emphasise that The Age of Capital contained egregious errors. He referred to “Satyadjit (sic) Ray’s beautiful film Pather Panchali based on a 19th century novel”; and he made Bankimchandra Chatterjee the author of India’s national anthem. The name of the film director is Satyajit, Pather Panchali was written in the 20th century and Rabindranath Tagore is the author of the national anthem of India. I had pointed out these errors to Hobsbawm when the book first came out and later when I reviewed Interesting Times — a review that he had read with thinly-veiled contempt — but he made no attempt to correct them. It is entirely possible that readers from other parts of the world have noted similar instances of Hobsbawm’s shoddy research for these four volumes. Evans does not note them but what is worse is that he does not address, as a biographer, the shortcomings of these surveys. He completely accepts Hobsbawm’s own justification for writing them and fails to note that the quality of the volumes declined as the series progressed from Revolution to Extremes.

Hobsbawm was a lifelong communist, well read in the writings of Marx and Engels and other Marxist theoreticians like Antonio Gramsci; his work as a historian was clearly informed by this reading and commitment. The commitment led him to join the Communist Party of Great Britain and he remained a member of the party till the time it folded. This membership of the CPGB went hand-in-hand with his almost unqualified support of Josef Stalin and the erstwhile Soviet Union. This is of some consequence. In the aftermath of the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, Hill, Rodney Hilton, 

E P Thompson, Victor Kiernan — all friends and comrades of Hobsbawm and with him members of the Historians’ Group of the Communist Party — resigned from the CPGB; Hobsbawm did not. He remained steadfastly loyal to the party and the Soviet Union. Evans does not interrogate this blind loyalty.

The word “blind” is used advisedly. Evans records without comment that the young Hobsbawm had noted that if he had been asked to spy for the Soviet Union (as five other students of Cambridge — a little senior to Hobsbawm — had been asked) he would have agreed. But he was never asked. Very late in his life in an interview, Michael Ignatieff asked him if the killing of 20 million people in Russia under Stalin would be justified if communism had succeeded. Hobsbawm answered in the affirmative. As an uncritical biographer, Evans ties himself up in knots trying to justify this. He writes, “His apparent defence of the mass murders carried out in Stalin’s name was based on a hypothetical statement, not on what had actually happened (italics mine).” Why “apparent”, when the defence is fairly straightforward and shocking to any unbiased reader: a historian of enormous erudition condoning the killing of 20 million people for a given Cause. Why in “Stalin’s name”, when it is clear now from the available evidence that most of the killings were carried out on Stalin’s direct orders? Would Evans, as a historian of Nazi Germany, agree if a historian wrote that the Jews were killed in “Hitler’s name”? The statement of Hobsbawm is, in fact, based on “what had actually happened”, that is, the killing of 20 million Russians. 

What is equally important is that Hobsbawm believed all this not only in the 1930s when communism was pitted against fascism but throughout his life, even in old age when the horrors perpetrated by Stalin were known to students of history. Further, the justification that Hobsbawm provided that the massacres were not known to him through the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s and the 1960s is disingenuous, to say the least. Why were they unknown to a historian who read so widely? The writings of Trotsky and other observers were available from the 1930s; in the 1950s and 1960s, the works of Isaac Deutscher were well known. Either Hobsbawm did not read them or took no notice of them because he was blind. His blindness is further manifest in his description of his memoirs, Stalin’s History of the CPSU: A Short Course, as “pedagogically brilliant”. That book, as any reader will recognise, is a piece of nonsense.

There was another piece of history about which Hobsbawm refused to offer a strong critique. This was the British Empire. Not surprisingly, Evans does not address this issue. As a Marxist historian not only was Hobsbawm reticent about the British Empire but he also wrote about it in somewhat justificatory terms in his memoirs. He wrote in the very last page of Interesting Times that the British Empire was saved from megalomania by Britain’s modest size. This from an erudite historian about an empire whose proconsuls believed that the sun would never set on it; an empire about whose Indian possessions a British prime minister wrote, “when we go if are ever to go”. No megalomania, Professor Hobsbawm, the great Marxist? And what does one say about his biographer who lets this pass without a comment?

Evans has done as much harm to his reputation as a historian as Hobsbawm did when he wrote his four volumes of popular history and unashamedly justified Stalin and the Soviet Union. When faced with the choice between Clio and Party, Hobsbawm invariably chose the latter. Evans has produced a chronicle of Hobsbawm’s life with very little critical analysis. He is as blind to Hobsbawm as the latter was to Stalin. This is a pity and this book is a sad commentary on the historian’s craft.

The reviewer is chancellor and professor of history, Ashoka University