Aristotle is a famous philosopher. He had an even better known pupil - Alexander. But Alexander did not get much time to study, for when he was 16 in 340 BC, his father Philip was assassinated, and he had to take over the kingship of Macedon. Seven years later he invaded the Achaemenid Empire, defeated Darius III, and took over the entire region stretching from today's Turkey to the Indus; the central part of it, which is in Iraq today, came to be called Macedonia. He then rushed east and defeated Porus, the king of Punjab. Impressed by his courage, he made Porus governor of his Indian empire and rushed back west.
Before going home, he made a detour across Syria to Egypt and founded a port, which is called Alexandria till today. When I went there in 1960, it was an elegant version of south Bombay, with beautiful colonial buildings and a promenade along the sea.
That is where Percy Hobsbawm, son of a London cabinet-maker, ran into Nelly Grün, daughter of a Viennese jeweller, in 1913 and fell in love with her. Percy wanted his children to be British, but soon after they met, Britain went to war with Germany and Austria, which made it unsafe to sail back to Britain. So they took a boat to Naples and thence a train to Zurich, where they got their marriage registered in the British embassy. They went back to Alexandria; after the war ended, they went to Vienna, where Nelly had her extended family, and lived in one room of Nelly's father's huge house.
Those were the days of hyperinflation in Germany and Austria; savings in money soon became valueless. Percy earned a precarious living as a travelling salesman. Then one day in 1929, he collapsed at his doorstep as he returned, and died; two years later, Nelly died of lung disease, leaving her two children orphans.
One of them was Eric, then aged 14. He went to live in Berlin with his uncle Sydney. But then came the Great Depression and massive unemployment. The desperate Germans voted Nazis to power. Nazis forced employers to employ Germans; Sydney, being British, lost his job. He had to go back to England; Eric had to change over from his mother's to his father's language, and go to a local school. He had less homework to do than in Germany and had more time to himself. Some of his teachers were Oxbridge graduates; they encouraged him to read; being lonely, he did so voraciously. Amongst his readings were Marx, Engels and Lenin; they turned him into a communist at the age of 17. But he also became knowledgeable - a scholar. As a result, he did well in the scholarship examination and got into King's College, Cambridge.
Cambridge is a great place for intellectual discussions; but they are pretty laid-back. As in everything else, Cambridge would let you have any political beliefs you wanted. You could debate them as much as you liked, as long as you did so coolly and dispassionately. That was not to Eric's taste; he would have been more at home in London School of Economics. After he graduated, he went to teach in Birkbeck College, London, which was founded in 1823 as London Mechanics' Institute, and aimed to give evening lectures to workers.
The World War began in September 1939, and British young men were recruited in millions to serve in the armed forces. But Stalin signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler, which made communists suspect in Britain. And Austria, the country of Eric's mother, was an ally of Germany. So he was first sent to the Sappers and put to work building up civilian defences - digging ditches, laying mines, attaching explosives to bridges to be demolished in case there was a German invasion, and so on. Then he was made Sergeant Major in the Army Education Corps, and wrote pamphlets to give soldiers knowledge they saw no need of. Bored by the work, he got married. He started training soldiers in jazz and blues, about which he was crazy. In the late 1950s, when he supervised me in economic history in Cambridge, jazz records played in the background. In 1954, the Soviet Union recognized him as a VIP communist and invited him to Moscow, where he saw Stalin, embalmed in a glass case.
In his forties by now, Eric began to relax and settle down. There was no future in the communist party: it would never come to power, and would never have more than a handful of members. So Eric gave up the King's fellowship and settled down to teaching in Birkbeck. He divorced Muriel and, a bit later, married Marlene - for life. He bought a house in Clapham. He started taking the family to Wales for holidays.
And he began to write books. Some of them are of interest to revolutionaries - for instance, Bandits, Primitive Rebels, or Revolutionaries. But about a dozen are serious economic history. He began with the economic history of Britain, Industry and Empire, in 1968, but then broadened his reach to the Western world, which he covered in a comprehensive series of four volumes each beginning with The Age, successively, of Revolution, Empire, Capital and Extremes - a sustained analysis of two centuries of Western history beginning with the industrial revolution, and combining politics, economics and sociology. They are essentially about capitalism, which Hobsbawm saw moving from one crisis to another. There was no final lesson, no pontification, no preaching of the superiority of communism; it was a study of the capitalist world. It was not conventional scholarship; for instance, Hobsbawm used photographs and cartoons and made history come to life.
He wound up half a century of historiography by writing a history of himself called Interesting Times, covering the first 85 years of his life. He died in 2012, five years short of a century. In its conclusion, he wrote, "The test of a historian's life is whether he or she can ask and answer questions, especially 'what if' questions, about the passionate significance, to themselves and the world, as though they were journalists reporting things long past - and yet, not as a stranger but as one deeply involved."
Although he had left King's for Birkbeck College by the 1950s, he continued to supervise students in King's in economic history; he would take a train from London and a bus from Cambridge station to King's, briskly critique our essays, set assignments for the next week, and go back to London. I was one of the students. He did not leave much of an impression on me; but looking back, he did convey history as a source of broader lessons since I went on to write a thesis based on the economic history of Germany. Growing up, I became fascinated with moving across worlds and ages, which he did so well. I did not make as good a potpourri of my life as well as he did; but the fun of doing so stayed with me. His call for scholarship with emotional engagement will be passionately contested by many historians - which would, I guess, prove his point.
