This is a long one I’d been slowly working through for the past year or so. It’s a sprawling book that covers the better part of a century, and ranges widely in its topics and geography. At the core of the book is Hobsbawm’s conception of the “Dual Revolution”, i.e., a joint eruption of historical forces in the form of political upheaval caused by the French Revolution, and technological advances unleashed with the Industrial Revolution. As told by Hobsbawm, amidst this swirling of change, capitalism and conceptions of the modern liberal state were crystalized. In order to gain space to delve deeper into their topics, it often feels like historical works consider periods/events like the French and Industrial Revolutions separately. This book differs in foregrounding how these changes overlap, and influence each other as they progress. It’s ambitious in what it’s tackling, but in doing so it engages with complexity that other works avoid.