United Kingdom
Eric Hobsbawm
said
As the global expansion of Indian and Chinese restaurants suggests, xenophobia is directed against foreign people, not foreign cultural imports.
— Mapping the Nation (Mappings Series) (13 November 2012), p. 263.
Eric Hobsbawm
British academic historian and Marxist historiographer (1917–2012)
- Fame59.7
- Momentum0.0
- United Kingdom rank#237
Source-basedFalling
- Fame59.7
- Momentum0.0
- United Kingdom rank#237
- Writers rank#173
- Wikipedia22.3K
Lived 1917–2012, aged 95United Kingdom
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Summary
Updated 2026-06-09
He mapped the whole modern world — capitalism's rise, empires cracking, revolutions burning and cooling — in four books that treated centuries like acts in a single drama. A Marxist who never wavered, writing history as if politics and economics were the scaffolding under everything else.
Biography
About
Born in Alexandria in 1917, Hobsbawm spent his childhood in Vienna and Berlin until his parents died and Hitler's rise sent him to London with his adoptive family. He served in the Second World War, then earned his PhD at Cambridge and began the work that would define him: the tetralogy tracing the "long 19th century" through revolution, capital, and empire, then the "short 20th" in The Age of Extremes. He also edited the volume that gave us "invented traditions," the idea that many national rituals are newer than they pretend. His Marxism was lifelong and unapologetic, shaping every line. In…
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Sourced, dated quotes from Eric Hobsbawm
Eric Hobsbawm
said
Look at London. Of course it matters to all of us that London's economy flourishes.
— The Guardian (2009).
Eric Hobsbawm
said
Liberalism was failing. If I'd been German and not a Jew, I could see I might have become a Nazi, a German nationalist.
— As quoted by Eric Hobsbawm, in “A Question of Faith,” Maya Jaggi, The Guardian (Sept. 14, 2002)
Eric Hobsbawm
said
Xenophobia looks like becoming the mass ideology of the 20th-century fin-de-siecle.
— Divided Europeans: Understanding Ethnicities in Conflict (1999), p. 41.
Eric Hobsbawm
said
[H]istorians are to nationalism what poppy-growers in Pakistan are to the heroin-addicts: we supply the essential raw material for the market.
— "Ethnicity and Nationalism in Europe Today" (February 1992). Anthropology Today.
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Fame
Falling59.7
Composite of search demand, mentions, audience & graph footprint.
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Historical24.8
Source confidence65.0
Completeness75.0
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- WikipediaHigh confidencewikipedia · en.wikipedia.org
- WikidataHigh confidencewikidata · wikidata.org
- Pantheon 2.0High confidencedatabase · pantheon.world
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