Of Poverty and Wealth

Eric Hobsbawm, Barry Supple and Gareth Stedman Jones

Alan Macfarlane

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781032201382
• eBook ISBN: 9781000538366
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economía
• Subtopic: Teoría económica

Of Poverty and Wealth: Eric Hobsbawm, Barry Supple and Gareth Stedman Jones is a collection of interviews that is being published as a book for the first time. These interviews have been conducted by one of England's leading social anthropologists and historians, Professor Alan Macfarlane.

Filmed over a period of several years, the three conversations in this volume are part of the series Creative Lives and Works. These transcriptions form a part of a larger set of interviews that cut across various disciplines, from the social sciences and the sciences to the performing and visual arts. The current volume is on three pre-eminent economic historians.

There are many factors that lead to the rise and fall of power, in which wealth, trade and commerce, play a vital role. In this collection, Eric Hobsbawm takes us through the fundamental and broader concepts of economic history, while Barry Supple and Gareth Stedman Jones bring in the more focussed and often less discussed aspects of this branch of history. Through these engaging conversations one gets a better understanding of poverty and wealth in the context of history.

The book will be of enormous value not just to those interested in the subject of Economics History and Comparative Studies but also to the uninitiated because of the lucidity which conversations bring to even otherwise opaque discussions.

Please note: This title is co-published with Social Science Press, New Delhi. Taylor & Francis does not sell or distribute the Hardback in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

Appendix 1 Biographical information (in alphabetical order)

ARISTOTLE (384-322 BC)

Aristotle was a Greek philosopher and polymath during the Classical period in Ancient Greece. Taught by Plato, he was the founder of the Lyceum, the Peripatetic school of philosophy, and the Aristotelian tradition. His writings cover many subjects including physics, biology, zoology, metaphysics, logic, ethics, aesthetics, poetry, theatre, music, rhetoric, psychology, linguistics, economics, politics, meteorology, geology and government. Aristotle provided a complex synthesis of the various philosophies existing prior to him. It was above all from his teachings that the West inherited its intellectual lexicon, as well as problems and methods of inquiry. As a result, his philosophy has exerted a unique influence on almost every form of knowledge in the West and it continues to be a subject of contemporary philosophical discussion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristotle

MICHAEL LEONARD GRAHAM BALFOUR, CBE (1908-95)

Balfour was an English historian and civil servant. He was born in Oxford, the son of Sir Graham Balfour. He was educated at Rugby School and Balliol College, Oxford, where he graduated with a first in history. He first visited Germany in 1930, where he became a friend of Helmuth James von Moltke. During the Second World War Balfour worked at the Ministry of Information and the Political Intelligence Department of the Foreign Office (the cover name for the Political Warfare Executive). In 1944 he joined the Psychological Warfare Division of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force and after the war he became Director of Public Relations and Information Services, Control Commission, in the British Zone of Allied-occupied Germany.

He was Chief Information Officer at the Board of Trade from 1947 to 1964. He was then Professor of European History at the University of East Anglia from 1966 to 1974. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Balfour_(historian)

SIR CHRISTOPHER ALAN BAYLY, FBA, FRSL (1945-2015)

Bayly was a British historian specialising in British Imperial, Indian and global history. Bayly was the Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History at the University of Cambridge from 1992 to 2013. He was also a trustee of the British Museum. In 2007, he succeeded Sir John Baker as President of St Catharine’s College, Cambridge. Bayly also became the Director of Cambridge’s Centre of South Asian Studies. He was co-editor of The New Cambridge History of India and sat on the editorial board of various academic journals. He also served on the inaugural Social Sciences jury for the Infosys Prize in 2009.

In 1990, Bayly was elected a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA). In 2004 he was awarded the Wolfson History Oeuvre Prize for his many contributions to the discipline. In the 2007 Queen’s Birthday Honours, it was announced that he had been appointed a Knight Bachelor ‘for services to History’. Upon being informed of the knighthood, he stated: ‘I regard this not only as a great personal honour but, as an historian of India, as recognition of the growing importance of the history of the non-western world’. In 2016, Bayly became the first person to be posthumously awarded the Toynbee Prize for global history. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Bayly

FERNAND BRAUDEL (1902-85)

Braudel was a French historian and author of several major works that traversed borders and centuries and introduced a new conception of historical time. As leader of the post-World War II Annales school, Braudel became one of the most important historians of the 20th century. While serving as a lieutenant in the French army in 1940, Braudel was captured by the Germans. During his next five years in prisoner-of-war camps in Mainz and Lübeck, with his phenomenal memory his main resource, Braudel produced drafts of the massive work that established his international reputation, La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II (1949; The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II). First submitted as a doctoral thesis to the Sorbonne in 1947 and subsequently published as a two-volume book, this geohistorical study centred not only on the conflict between Spain and the Ottoman Empire in the 16th century but also on the region’s history, geography, religion, agriculture, technology, and intellectual climate. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Fernand-Braudel

SYDNEY BRENNER, CH, FRS, FMEDSCI, MAE (1927-2019)

Brenner was a South African biologist. In 2002, he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with H. Robert Horvitz and Sir John E. Sulston. Brenner made significant contributions to work on the genetic code, and other areas of molecular biology while working in the Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England. He established the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans as a model organism for the investigation of developmental biology, and founded the Molecular Sciences Institute in Berkeley, California, United States. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sydney_Brenner

ASA BRIGGS, BARON BRIGGS (1921-2016)

Briggs was an English historian. He was a leading specialist on the Victorian era, and the foremost historian of broadcasting in Britain. Briggs achieved international recognition during his long and prolific career for examining various aspects of modern British history. He was made a life peer in 1976.

After the war, he was elected a Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford (1945–55), and was subsequently appointed University Reader in Recent Social and Economic History (1950–55). Whilst a young Fellow, Briggs proofread Winston Churchill’s A History of the English-Speaking Peoples. He was later Faculty Fellow of Nuffield College (1953–55) and a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey, United States (1953–54).

From 1955 until 1961 he was Professor of Modern History in Leeds University and between 1961 and 1976, he was Professor of History in Sussex University, whilst also serving as Dean of the School of Social Studies (1961–65), Pro Vice-Chancellor (1961–67) and Vice-Chancellor (1967–76). On 4 June 2008 the University of Sussex Arts A1 and A2 lecture theatres, designed by Basil Spence, were renamed in his honour. In 1976 he returned to Oxford to become Provost of Worcester College, retiring from the post in 1991. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asa_Briggs

ROBIN BRIGGS, FRSL, FRHISTS, FBA (B. 1942)

Briggs is an English historian who has spent his entire academic career at All Souls College, Oxford. He was appointed a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, that year, after passing its examination; he was then appointed a Junior Research Fellow there in 1971 and then Senior Research Fellow seven years later. Briggs remained in that post until retiring and being appointed an Emeritus Fellow at All Souls in 2009. From 1976 to 2009, he also lectured for the University of Oxford, and was Junior Proctor in the 1972–73 year. His research interests include the history of witchcraft in Europe and other aspects of early modern European history (especially politics, society and religion, and the history of early modern France and the French Catholic Church). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Briggs

OSCAR BROWNING, OBE (1837–1923)

Browning was a British educationalist, historian and bon viveur, a well-known Cambridge personality during the late Victorian and Edwardian eras. An innovator in the early development of professional training for teachers, he served as principal of the Cambridge University Day Training College (CUDTC) from 1891 to 1909. He was also a prolific author of popular histories and other books. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar_Browning

JAMES CAMPBELL, FBA, FSA (1935–2016)

Campbell was a British historian, specialising in the medieval period and the Anglo-Saxons. He was a Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford from 1957 until his retirement in 2002, and Professor of Medieval History at the University of Oxford from 1996 to 2002. Campbell’s particular historical interest was in the Medieval period and Anglo-Saxon studies. He was also interested in agriculture in Britain and Ireland from the 13th to 19th centuries. Two collections of his essays were published as Essays in Anglo-Saxon History in 1986 and The Anglo-Saxon State in 2000. He was the editor of The Anglo-Saxons (1982), a collection of essays on Anglo-Saxon England, for which he wrote the section on the period from AD 350 to 660. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Campbell_(historian)

SIR DAVID CANNADINE, FBA, FRSL, FSA, FRHISTS, FRSA (B. 1950)

Cannadine is a British author and historian who specialises in modern history, Britain and the history of business and philanthropy. He is currently the Dodge Professor of History at Princeton University, a Visiting Professor of History at Oxford University, and the editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. He has been the President of the British Academy since 2017, the UK’s national academy for the humanities and social sciences. He also serves as the Chairman of the Trustees of the National Portrait Gallery in London and Vice-Chair of the Editorial Board of Past & Present. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Cannadine

SIR JOHN HAROLD CLAPHAM, CBE, FBA (1873–1946)

Clapham was a British economic historian. He was educated at The Leys School in Cambridge and King’s College, Cambridge. From 1889 to 1902 he was a lecturer in History and Economics at Leeds University and was Professor of Economics there from 1902 to 1908. He was the first Professor of Economic History at Cambridge University from 1928 to 1938, and Vice-Provost of King’s College, Cambridge from 1933 until 1943 when he received a knighthood. Between 1926 and 1938 he published, in three volumes, An Economic History of Modern Britain. He is also recognised for his study of the Industrial Revolution in England, and for describing cooperatives in the initiation of the revolution. He is also remembered for his 1944 The Bank of England, A History. Welsh economic historian Sir John Habakkuk was one of his students. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Clapham_(economic_historian)

LOUIS CHEVALIER (1911–2001)

Chevalier was a French historian with interests in geography, demography and sociology. Much of his work was devoted to the history of French culture and Paris. Chevalier’s most important works are Classes Laborieuses et Classes Dangereuses à Paris au XIX Siècle, published in 1958, a survey of the Parisian working class that challenged many assumptions of political historians about their work regimes and political activities and L’Assassinat de Paris published in 1977.

Chevalier was awarded France’s highest honour, the Legion d’honneur, in 1958; his initial decoration as a knight was upgraded to officier in 1967, and ultimately commandeur in 1977. In 1987, he was awarded the Grand Prix of the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Chevalier_(historian)

RICHARD CHARLES COBB, CBE (1917–96)

Cobb was a British historian and essayist, and professor at the University of Oxford. He was the author of numerous influential works about the history of France, particularly the French Revolution. Cobb meticulously researched the Revolutionary era from a ground-level view sometimes described as ‘history from below’.

Cobb is best known for his multi-volume work The People’s Armies (1961), a massive study of the composition and mentality of the Revolution’s civilian armed forces. He was a prolific writer of essays from which he fashioned numerous book-length collections about France and its people. Cobb also found much inspiration from his own life, and he composed a multitude of autobiographical writings and personal reflections. Much of his writing went unpublished in his lifetime, and several anthologies were assembled from it by other scholars after his death. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Cobb

DONALD CUTHBERT COLEMAN (1920–95)

Coleman was a British economic historian. After attending The Haberdashers’ Aske’s Boys’ School, an independent school in Elstree in Hertfordshire, Coleman served in the Royal Artillery in Africa, Italy and Greece during World War II, reaching the rank of major. He gained his first degree and PhD at the London School of Economics and was appointed to a post there of Lecturer in Industrial History in 1951. He stayed at LSE as Reader and (1969–71) Professor of Economic History, and then moved to the University of Cambridge as Professor of Economic History and Fellow of Pembroke College in 1971, taking early retirement in 1981 to concentrate on his scholarly work. He was editor of the Economic History Review (1967–72). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D._C._Coleman

MARTIN JAMES DAUNTON, FRHISTS, FBA (B. 1949)

Daunton is a British academic and historian. He was Master of Trinity Hall, Cambridge, between 2004 and 2014. Daunton is the son of Ronald James Daunton and Dorothy née Bellett. He was educated at Barry Grammar School before going to the University of Nottingham where he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1970. He studied further at the University of Kent PhD 1974 and received the degree of LittD from the University of Cambridge in 2005. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Daunton

GEOFFREY HOWARD ELEY (B. 1949)

Eley is a British-born historian of Germany. He studied history at Balliol College, Oxford, and received his PhD from the University of Sussex in 1974. He has taught at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in the Department of History since 1979 and the Department of German Studies since 1997. He now serves as the Karl Pohrt Distinguished University Professor of Contemporary History at Michigan.

Eley’s early work focused on the radical nationalism in Imperial Germany and fascism, but has since grown to include theoretical and methodological reflections on historiography and the his...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents Page
• Preface Page
• Transcriber's Note Page
• Introduction Page
• Appendix 1: Biographical information
• Appendix 2: Historical information