Thinking from the now, it might be hard for us to imagine that just about a century about large sections of the populations, including women and the non-land owning class, were unable to vote in many countries which were even at that time known to be "modern". Hobsbawm, in this third book of his classic series spanning the long arc of history from 1789 to 1991, writes about that specific time when all that was set to change- the years from 1875 to 1914. The first trade unions were beginning to appear, the upper classes were beginning to feel the pressure and derision of the demands from down below for further and further democratisation. As he says, in 1880, there were hardly any mass party of the working class, which was not the case a couple of decades later, at the turn of the century.

As is the format of books in this series, the chapters are not divided as succeeding time periods as in usual books of history, but as a chronicle of the changes which happened in different arena - in arts, in women's rights, in science, in nationalism, in workers' rights. A thread that binds this book is the slow build up of the First World War in the background, even as the period was one of peace, compared to the preceding decades. As he writes, "the era of peace, of confident bourgeois civilization, growing wealth and western empires inevitably carried within itself the embryo of the era of war, revolution and crisis which put an end to it."

In tracing the reasons of the war, he does not lazily pin point at the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and leave it at that. Infact, that incident is almost treated as a footnote, while he concentrates on all the complex relations between the belligerents over the decade leading to the war. Parallely, Lenin and his comrades were building up a revolution that for quite a considerable period of time created a fear in the minds of the capitalists that they world was about to crumble. But, as Hobsbawm explains in 'Age of Extremes', they fought off the challenge, by turning into ssomething very different from what they were before 1917. Keynes is given much of the credit for this life-saving shape-shifting.

Some of the sections can be dense and tough to plough through compared to the 'Age of Extremes' (I am reading the series in reverse), yet the amount of things he manages to condense to build the narrative can be an excuse for this.