Eric Hobsbawm’s latest book is unlikely to have the general appeal of The Age of Revolution. There are few generalizations; elaborate synthesis is not its purpose. Common themes remain implicit rather than stated. Each essay remains a discrete entity, the connections must be made by the reader. Again, unlike The Age of Revolution, Labouring Men is primarily a book designed to meet the needs of the specialist historian; tentative conclusions are buttressed by an overwhelming weight of scholarship testified in page upon page of meticulous footnotes. Even the most commonsense and apparently obvious statement is stoutly defended by a mass of irreproachable source material and continental analogy. Perhaps this is an occupational hazard of any historian who wishes to present even the most catholic Marxist interpretation of 19th century working-class history. In a country increasingly dominated by a positivist and quantitative philosophy of history, both Hobsbawm in the 19th and Hill in the 17th century have often felt obliged to argue a Marxist case in their opponents’ terms. In some ways this is unavoidable, but the constant danger of such an approach is that important points will be obscured and castrated by a jungle of qualifications and historical modesty. In his essay on the standard of living between 1790 and 1850 for instance Hobsbawm finds it necessary to employ 17 pages of footnotes to support the assertion that ‘no certainty in this field is as yet possible, but that the hypothesis of a marked or substantial rise in the standard of living of most Britons between early 1790’s and the early 1840’s is, as things stand, an extremely improbable one.’ Such a conclusion would seem plausible, even without the ambiguous evidence of weight of meat sold at Smithfield, and Edward Thompson has provided a more convincing refutation of the Hartwell-Von Hayek school, relying on qualitative material.

Hobsbawm is far more interesting in his ‘expository’ essays. His contributions on the ‘Tramping Artisan’, ‘Custom, Wages and Work Load’, and ‘the British Gas-workers’ are model historical monographs; lucid, important and touching upon uncharted historical material, they raise the important questions of the connection between Imperialism and the beginnings of a ‘scientific’ attitude to the exploitation of labour, of the first real post-industrial debate on the comparative merits of a high and low wage economy, and of the elimination of pre-industrial and customary modes of payment. Very important in this connection is Hobsbawm’s elaboration of the thesis that industrialization is a game whose rules are only gradually learnt by both capitalists and proletariat. Methods of agitation applicable to pre-industrial societies become ineffective when the industrial sector becomes predominant and this is one important factor which helps to explain the failure of the Chartists. Effective industrial action on the part of those whose labour has no scarcity value must be learnt; so must class solidarity. The effective unionization of casual and unskilled labourers can only be achieved by curtailing initially inexhaustible supplies of blackleg labour. In an interesting essay on the General Labour Unions in Britain between 1889 and 1914, Hobsbawm clarifies the difficulties besetting the ‘new unionists’ in their attempts to organize the hitherto amorphous groups of casual and migrant workers. The essay incidentally casts interesting light on the failure of attempts to introduce exchangeability of union cards and shows once again how regional differentiation accounts for so many of the peculiar strengths and weaknesses of the British labour movement.