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117-459: The Swing Riots were a widespread uprising in 1830 by agricultural workers in southern and eastern England in protest of agricultural mechanisation and harsh working conditions. The riots began with the destruction of threshing machines in the Elham Valley area of East Kent in the summer of 1830 and by early December had spread through the whole of southern England and East Anglia . It

234-611: A chain of designedly unwholesome workhouses covering larger areas across the country to which the poor had to go if they wanted help. Threshing machines Separate reaper-binders and threshers have largely been replaced by machines that combine all of their functions, that is combine harvesters or combines. However, the simpler machines remain important as appropriate technology in low- capital farming contexts, both in developing countries and in developed countries on small farms that strive for especially high levels of self-sufficiency . For example, pedal-powered threshers are

351-662: A controversial viewpoint in a period of trade union militancy. Hobsbawm supported Neil Kinnock 's transformation of the British Labour Party from 1983 (the party received 28 per cent of the vote in that year's elections , 2 per cent more than the Social Democratic Party/Liberal Alliance), and, though not close to Kinnock, came to be referred to as "Neil Kinnock's Favourite Marxist". His interventions in Kinnock's remaking of

468-641: A genuinely communist society had been the result. Hobsbawm argued that, "In a period in which, as you might imagine, mass murder and mass suffering are absolutely universal, the chance of a new world being born in great suffering would still have been worth backing" but, unfortunately, "the Soviet Union was not the beginning of the World Revolution". The following year, when asked the same question on BBC Radio 4 's Desert Island Discs , if "the sacrifice of millions of lives" would have been worth

585-548: A low-cost option, and some Amish sects use horse-drawn binders and old-style threshers. As the verb thresh is cognate with the verb thrash (and synonymous in the grain-beating sense ), the names thrashing machine and thrasher are (less common) alternate forms . The Swing Riots in the UK were partly a result of the threshing machine. Following years of war, high taxes and low wages, farm labourers finally revolted in 1830. They had faced unemployment for years, due to

702-627: A major influence on the Whig government. They added to the strong social, political and agricultural unrest throughout Britain in the 1830s, encouraging a wider demand for political reform, culminating in the introduction of the Great Reform Act, 1832 . The act was the first of several reforms that over the course of a century transformed the British political system from one based on privilege and corruption to one based on universal suffrage and

819-582: A man passionate about his politics ... He brought history out of the ivory tower and into people's lives". He was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium and his ashes were interred in Highgate Cemetery , very close to Karl Marx . A memorial service for Hobsbawm was held at the New School in October 2013. Owing to his status as a widely read and prominent Communist historian, and

936-501: A minimum living wage and to end rural unemployment. A 2021 study that examined how information and diffusion shaped the riots found "that information about the riots traveled through personal and trade networks but not through transport or mass media networks. This information was not about repression, and local organizers played an important role in the diffusion of the riots". The landowning class in England felt severely threatened by

1053-403: A new class of recent historians. Enclosure has been seen by some as causing the destruction of the traditional peasant way of life, however miserable: "Enclosure dissipated the haze which surrounded rural poverty and left it nakedly visible as propertyless labour" Landless peasants could no longer maintain an economic independence and so had to become labourers. Surplus peasant labour moved into

1170-452: A personal file on Hobsbawm in 1942 and their monitoring of his activities was to affect the progress of his career for many years. In 1945, he applied to the BBC for a full-time post making educational broadcasts to help servicemen adjust to civilian life after a long period in the forces and was considered "a most suitable candidate". The appointment was swiftly vetoed by MI5 who believed Hobsbawm

1287-427: A skilled inventor, created a small thresher that does not harm the straw in the process. In 1834, John Avery and Hiram Abial Pitts devised significant improvements to a machine that automatically threshes and separates grain from the chaff, freeing farmers from a slow and laborious process. Avery and Pitts were granted United States patent #542 on December 29, 1837. John Ridley , an Australian inventor, also developed

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1404-556: A soldier or farmer. The rioters' only intent was to damage property. Similar patterns of disturbances and their rapid spread across the country were often blamed on agitators or on "agents" sent from France , where the revolution of July 1830 had broken out a month before the Swing Riots had begun in Kent. Despite all of the different tactics used by the agricultural workers during the unrest, their principal aims were simply to attain

1521-649: A son named Peter. Hobsbawm was a student at the Prinz Heinrich- Gymnasium Berlin (today Friedrich-List-School) when the Nazi Party came to power in 1933. That year the family moved to London, where Hobsbawm enrolled in St ;Marylebone Grammar School . He didn't consider himself a refugee, given that he was British by birth because of his father's nationality. Hobsbawm attended King's College, Cambridge , from 1936, where he joined

1638-480: A threshing machine in South Australia in 1843. The 1881 Household Cyclopedia said of Meikle's machine: Steam-powered machines used belts connected to a traction engine ; often both engine and thresher belonged to a contractor who toured the farms of a district. Steam remained a viable commercial option until the early post-WWII years. Modern-day combines harvesters (or simply combines ) operate on

1755-418: Is one of the great achievements of historical writing in recent decades". Mark Mazower wrote of his historical writings being "about trends, social forces, large-scale change over vast distances. Telling that kind of history in a way that is as compelling as a detective story is a real challenge of style and composition: in the tetralogy, Hobsbawm shows how to do it." Ian Kershaw said that Hobsbawm's take on

1872-536: Is quoted as saying that, next to sex, there is nothing so physically intense as 'participation in a mass demonstration at a time of great public exaltation'. In 1994, Neal Ascherson said of Hobsbawm: "No historian now writing in English can match his overwhelming command of fact and source. But the key word is 'command'. Hobsbawm's capacity to store and retrieve detail has now reached a scale normally approached only by large archives with big staffs". In 2002, Hobsbawm

1989-442: Is shaken mechanically. The top sieve has larger openings and serves to remove large pieces of chaff from the grain. The lower sieve separates clean grain, which falls through, from incompletely threshed pieces. The incompletely threshed grain is returned to the cylinder by means of a system of conveyors, where the process repeats. Some threshing machines were equipped with a bagger, which invariably held two bags, one being filled, and

2106-462: Is the abnegation of individual freedom, as Hobsbawm admits in a chilling passage: "The Party ... had the first, or more precisely the only real claim on our lives. Its demands had absolute priority. We accepted its discipline and hierarchy. We accepted the absolute obligation to follow 'the lines' it proposed to us, even when we disagreed with it ... We did what it ordered us to do ... Whatever it had ordered, we would have obeyed ... If

2223-469: Is wasted when used to write untrustworthy history. Reviewing the same book, Francis Wheen argued in a similar vein: "When writing about how the anti-fascist campaigns of the 1930s brought new recruits to the communist cause, he cannot even bring himself to mention the Hitler-Stalin pact , referring only to 'temporary episodes such as 1939–41'. The Soviet invasion of Hungary and the crushing of

2340-969: The Communist Party of Great Britain "in the form of the university's Socialist Club." He took a double-starred first in History and was elected to the Cambridge Apostles . He received a doctorate (PhD) in History from the University of Cambridge for his dissertation on the Fabian Society . During the Second World War , he served in the Royal Engineers and the Army Educational Corps . He

2457-652: The Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) in 1936. He was a member of the Communist Party Historians Group from 1946 until its demise and subsequently president of its successor, the Socialist History Society, until his death. The Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 led thousands of its members to leave the British Communist Party – but Hobsbawm, unique among his colleagues, remained in the party but

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2574-852: The French Communist Party 's failure to support the May 68 movement in Paris. In "The Forward March of Labour Halted?" (originally a Marx Memorial Lecture, "The British Working Class One Hundred Years after Marx", that was delivered to a small audience of fellow Marxists in March 1978 before being published in Marxism Today in September 1978), he argued that the working class was inevitably losing its central role in society, and that left-wing parties could no longer appeal only to this class;

2691-470: The French Revolution in 1789 and ends with the start of World War I in 1914. He published numerous essays in various intellectual journals, dealing with subjects such as barbarity in the modern age , the troubles of labour movements , and the conflict between anarchism and communism. Among his final publications were Globalisation, Democracy and Terrorism (2007), On Empire (2008) and

2808-713: The Great Dorset Steam Fair in England, and the Western Minnesota Steam Threshers Reunion in northwest Minnesota . Irish songwriter John Duggan immortalised the threshing machine in the song "The Old Thrashing Mill". The song has been recorded by Foster and Allen and Brendan Shine . On the Alan Lomax collection Songs of Seduction (Rounder Select, 2000), there is a bawdy Irish folk song called "The Thrashing Machine" sung by tinker Annie O'Neil, as recorded in

2925-687: The New Left as "a half-remembered footnote". He signed a historians' letter of protest against the Soviet invasion of Hungary and was firmly in favour of the Prague Spring . Hobsbawm was a leading light of the Eurocommunist faction in the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) that began to gather strength after 1968, when the CPGB criticised the Soviet crushing of the Prague Spring and

3042-526: The Prague Spring are skipped over." An alternative conservative assessment of Hobsbawm came from Matthew Walther in National Review . While critical of Hobsbawm for his communist sympathies and his purported views about Israel, Walther wrote that "There is no denying his [Hobsbawm's] intelligence and erudition" and concluded that "if Hobsbawm is read 50 or 100 years from now, it will probably be despite rather than because of his politics." In 2008,

3159-621: The Tories against reform and the Whigs having proposed changes well before the Swing riots. The farm labourers who were involved in the disturbances did not have a vote, but it is probable that the largely landowning classes, who could vote, were influenced by the Swing Riots to support reform. Earl Grey , during a House of Lords debate in November 1830, suggested the best way to reduce the violence

3276-457: The Volga famine of the early '20s , if not the early '30s . Thanks to the breakdown of the west, we had the illusion that even this brutal, experimental, system was going to work better than the west. It was that or nothing. With regard to the 1930s, he wrote that It is impossible to understand the reluctance of men and women on the left to criticise, or even often to admit to themselves, what

3393-772: The excommunication of Tito . He condoned the show trials of men like László Rajk in Hungary . In 1954, just after Stalin's death, he visited Moscow as one of the honoured members of the Historians' Group of the British Communist Party . He admits to having been dismayed when, two years later, Khrushchev denounced Stalin's crimes at the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party . When Khrushchev himself ordered

3510-592: The 1960s, his politics took a more moderate turn, as Hobsbawm came to recognise that his hopes were unlikely to be realised, and no longer advocated "socialist systems of the Soviet type". Until the day of his death, however, he remained firmly entrenched on the Left, maintaining that the long-term outlooks for humanity were 'bleak'. "I think we ought to get out of that 20th-century habit of thinking of systems as mutually exclusive: you're either socialist or you're capitalist, or whatever", Hobsbawm stated in 2009 in regard to

3627-593: The 1970s, seeking rapprochement with the Catholic Church and the Christian Democrats , providing passive support to the latter in government in order to bring the Communists into the political mainstream by accepting Italy's position as a member of NATO , thus being able to build broader alliances and convince wider sections of society of its legitimacy as a potential governing force. From

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3744-406: The 1990s. Today, as in the 19th century, threshing begins with a cylinder and concave. The cylinder has sharp serrated bars, and rotates at high speed (about 500 RPM) so that the bars beat against the entire plant as it is mechanically fed from the reaping equipment at the front of the combine to the gap between the concave and the rotating beater/cylinder. The concave is curved to match the curve of

3861-413: The 20th century". Hobsbawm's friend, historian Donald Sassoon, wrote that: "Hobsbawm was not a Jewish historian; he was an historian who happened to be Jewish". His first marriage was to Muriel Seaman in 1943. They divorced in 1951. His second marriage was to Marlene Schwarz (in 1962), with whom he had two children, Julia Hobsbawm and Andy Hobsbawm . He had an out-of-wedlock son, Joshua Bennathan, who

3978-525: The British Industrial Revolution ). He saw their effect as a driving force behind the predominant trend towards liberal capitalism today. Another recurring theme in his work was social banditry , which Hobsbawm placed in a social and historical context, thus countering the traditional view of it being a spontaneous and unpredictable form of primitive rebellion. He coined the term " long nineteenth century ", which begins with

4095-537: The British Marxist historians will endure as these books will." In 2003, The New York Times described him as "one of the great British historians of his age, an unapologetic Communist and a polymath whose erudite, elegantly written histories are still widely read in schools here and abroad". James Joll wrote in The New York Review of Books that "Eric Hobsbawm's nineteenth century trilogy

4212-671: The CPGB, Hobsbawm developed close ties to the largest Communist Party in the western world, the Italian Communist Party (PCI), of which he declared himself a "spiritual member". He developed contacts with Italian left-wing academics and intellectuals in the early 1950s, which led to him encountering the work of Antonio Gramsci , whose writings were a key influence on Hobsbawm's work on the history of subaltern groups , emphasising their agency as well as structural factors. Hobsbawm spoke favourably about PCI general secretary Enrico Berlinguer 's strategy of Historic Compromise in

4329-787: The Communist Party. Hobsbawm occasionally wrote about other forms of popular music, such as in his 1963 article "Beatles and before", in which he predicts that the Beatles "are probably just about to begin their slow descent" and that "[i]n 29 years' time nothing of them will survive". Hobsbawm joined the Sozialistischer Schülerbund (Association of Socialist Pupils), an offshoot of the Young Communist League of Germany , in Berlin in 1931, and

4446-594: The Companions of Honour . He was president of Birkbeck, University of London , from 2002 until his death. In 2003, he received the Balzan Prize for European History since 1900, "for his brilliant analysis of the troubled history of 20th century Europe and for his ability to combine in-depth historical research with great literary talent." Eric Hobsbawm was born in 1917 in Alexandria , Egypt . His father

4563-479: The Hammonds exaggerated the costs of change, but enclosure really meant more food for the growing population; more land under cultivation and, on the balance, more employment in the countryside. The modern historians of the riots, Eric Hobsbawm and George Rudé , cited only three of a total of 1,475 incidents as being directly caused by enclosure. Since the late 20th century, those contentions have been challenged by

4680-687: The Labour Party helped prepare the ground for the Third Way , New Labour , and Tony Blair , whom Hobsbawm later derisively referred to as "Thatcher in trousers". Until the cessation of publication in 1991, he contributed to the magazine Marxism Today . A third of the 30 reprints of Marxism Today 's feature articles that appeared in The Guardian during the 1980s were articles or interviews by or with Hobsbawm, making him their most popular contributor. In addition to his association with

4797-566: The New School for Social Research in the Political Science Department. A polyglot, he spoke English , German , French , Spanish , and Italian fluently, and read Dutch , Portuguese , and Catalan . Hobsbawm wrote extensively on many subjects as one of Britain's most prominent historians. As a Marxist historiographer he has focused on analysis of the " dual revolution " (the political French Revolution and

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4914-644: The Party after seeing the friendly reception of Nazi foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop in Moscow during the years of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact (1939–1941), Hobsbawm stood firm even after the Soviet interventions of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the Prague Spring . In his review of Hobsbawm's 2002 memoirs, Interesting Times , Niall Ferguson wrote: The essence of Communism

5031-572: The Party ordered you to abandon your lover or spouse, you did so." Consider some of the "lines" our historian dutifully toed. He accepted the order to side with the Nazis against the Weimar -supporting Social Democrats in the great Berlin transport strike of 1932 . He accepted the order to side with the Nazis against Britain and France following the Ribbentrop–Molotov Pact of 1939. He accepted

5148-527: The Soviet Union after World War II—"the Second World War," he says with characteristic slipperiness, "led communist parties to power" in Eastern and Central Europe—he explains that a "possible critique of the new [postwar] socialist regimes does not concern us here." Why did communist regimes share the characteristics of state terror, oppression and murder? "To answer this question is not part of

5265-523: The air chaffer, were developed to deal with this. Combines generally chop and disperse straw as they move through the field, though the chopping is disabled when the straw is to be baled, and chaff collectors are sometimes used to prevent the dispersal of weed seed throughout a field. The corn sheller was almost identical in design, with slight modifications to deal with the larger kernel size and presence of cobs. Modern-day combines can be adjusted to work with any grain crop and many unusual seed crops. Both

5382-415: The appalling waste of lives in Soviet communism. But he refuses to acknowledge that he regrets anything. He's not that kind of person." Hobsbawm himself, in his autobiography, wrote that he desires "historical understanding ... not agreement, approval or sympathy". The 1930s aside, Hobsbawm was criticised for never relinquishing his Communist Party membership. Whereas people like Arthur Koestler left

5499-595: The approaching winter of 1830 with dread. Starting in the south-eastern county of Kent , the Swing Rioters smashed the threshing machines and threatened farmers who owned them. The first threshing machine to be destroyed was during Saturday night, 28 August 1830 at Lower Hardres . By the third week of October, more than 100 threshing machines had been destroyed in East Kent. The riots spread rapidly and systematically - following pre-existing road networks - through

5616-451: The area. The letters would call for a rise in wages, a cut in the tithe payments and the destruction of threshing machines, or people would take matters into their own hands. If the warnings were not heeded local farm workers would gather, often in groups of 200 to 400, and would threaten the local oligarchs with dire consequences if their demands were not met. Threshing machines would be broken, workhouses and tithe barns would be attacked and

5733-508: The character of his work. Hobsbawm was born in Alexandria , Egypt, and spent his childhood mainly in Vienna and Berlin . Following the death of his parents and the rise to power of Adolf Hitler , Hobsbawm moved to London with his adoptive family. After serving in the Second World War , he obtained his PhD in history at the University of Cambridge . In 1998, he was appointed to the Order of

5850-521: The collection of essays How to Change the World: Marx and Marxism 1840–2011 (2011). Outside his academic historical writing, Hobsbawm wrote a regular column about jazz for the New Statesman (under the pseudonym Francis Newton, taken from the name of Billie Holiday 's communist trumpet player, Frankie Newton ). He had become interested in jazz during the 1930s when it was frowned upon by

5967-596: The combine was invented and became popular, a new compact-size thresher called a harvester , with wheels, still remains in use and at present it is available from a Japanese agricultural manufacturer. The compact-size machine is very convenient to handle in small terrace fields in mountain areas where a large machine, such as a combine, is not usable. People there use this harvester with a modern compact binder . A number of older threshing machines have survived into preservation. They are often to be seen in operation at live steam festivals and traction engine rallies such as

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6084-475: The costs, and lower and lower levels of relief were offered. Three "one-gallon" bread loaves a week were considered necessary for a man in Berkshire in 1795. However provision had fallen to just two similarly-sized loaves being provided in 1817 Wiltshire . The way in which poor law funds were disbursed led to a further reduction in agricultural wages since farmers would pay their workers as little as possible in

6201-415: The cylinder, and the grain, now separated from the plant stalks falls immediately through grated openings in the concave as it is beaten. The motion of the rotating cylinder thrusts the remaining straw and chaff toward the rear of the machine. Whilst the majority of the grain falls through the concave, the straw is carried by a set of "walkers" to the rear of the machine, allowing any grain and chaff still in

6318-408: The dead of night, when it was easier to avoid detection. Although many of the actions of the rioters, such as arson, were conducted in secret at night, meetings with farmers and overseers about the grievances were conducted in daylight. Despite the prevalence of the slogan "Bread or Blood", only one person is recorded as having been killed during the riots, which was one of the rioters by the action of

6435-601: The demise of the USSR was "traumatic not only for communists but for socialists everywhere". Regarding Queen Elizabeth II , Hobsbawm stated that constitutional monarchy in general has "proved a reliable framework for liberal-democratic regimes" and "is likely to remain useful". On the nuclear attacks on Japan in World War II, he adhered to the view that "there was even less sign of a crack in Japan's determination to fight to

6552-468: The disturbances were concentrated in the south (Berkshire 165 incidents, Hampshire 208, Kent 154, Sussex 145, Wiltshire 208); East Anglia had fewer incidents (Cambridge 17, Norfolk 88, Suffolk 40); and the Southwest, the Midlands and the North were only marginally affected. The tactics varied from county to county, but typically, threatening letters, often signed by Captain Swing , would be sent to magistrates, parsons, wealthy farmers or Poor Law guardians in

6669-418: The early 20th century. In his film score for Of Mice and Men (1939) and consequently in his collection Music for the Movies (1942), American composer Aaron Copland titled a section of the score "Threshing Machines," to suit a scene in the Lewis Milestone film where Curley is threatening Slim over giving May a puppy, when many of the itinerant worker men are standing around or working on threshers. In

6786-405: The emergence of a new historical system. "There are plenty of people who still think so. I think very few attempts have been made to build a system on the total assumption of social ownership and social management. At its peak the Soviet system tried it. And in the past 20 or 30 years, the capitalist system has also tried it. In both cases, the results demonstrate that it won't work. So it seems to me

6903-431: The end [compared with that of Nazi Germany], which is why nuclear arms were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to ensure a rapid Japanese surrender". He believed there was an ancillary political, non-military reason for the bombings: "perhaps the thought that it would prevent America's ally the USSR from establishing a claim to a major part in Japan's defeat was not absent from the minds of the US government either." Hobsbawm

7020-407: The expense of hard-working agricultural labourers; his solution was parliamentary reform. During his trial in July 1831 at the Guildhall , he subpoenaed six members of the cabinet, including the prime minister. Cobbett defended himself by going on the attack. He tried to ask the government ministers awkward questions supporting his case, but they were disallowed by the Lord Chief Justice. However, he

7137-476: The fact that his ideology had influenced his work, Hobsbawm has been credited with spreading Marxist thought around the globe. His writings reached particular prominence in India and Brazil in the 1960s and 1970s at a time of lively debate about these countries' political and social future. Emile Chabal, in an essay for Aeon , wrote: "In the period from the early 1960s to the late '80s, Marxists in non-communist countries were increasingly able to participate in

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7254-404: The family lived in German-speaking countries , he grew up speaking English as his first language. In 1929, when Hobsbawm was 12, his father died, and he started contributing to his family's support by working as an au pair and English tutor. Upon the death of their mother in 1931, he and his sister Nancy were adopted by their maternal aunt, Gretl, and paternal uncle, Sidney, who married and had

7371-407: The future communist society, he replied: "That's what we felt when we fought the Second World War". He repeated what he had already said to Ignatieff, when he asked the rhetorical question , "Do people now say we shouldn't have had World War II , because more people died in World War II than died in Stalin's terror?". Tony Judt was of the opinion that Hobsbawm "clings to a pernicious illusion of

7488-414: The historian Tony Judt summed up Hobsbawm's career thus: "Eric J. Hobsbawm was a brilliant historian in the great English tradition of narrative history. On everything he touched he wrote much better, had usually read much more, and had a broader and subtler understanding than his more fashionable emulators. If he had not been a lifelong Communist he would be remembered simply as one of the great historians of

7605-420: The impact of his Marxist outlook and sympathies on his scholarship, Ben Pimlott saw it as "a tool not a straitjacket; he's not dialectical or following a party line", although Judt argued that it has "prevented his achieving the analytical distance he does on the 19th century: he isn't as interesting on the Russian revolution because he can't free himself completely from the optimistic vision of earlier years. For

7722-438: The knowledge that the parish fund would top up wages to a basic subsistence level (see Speenhamland system ). To that mixture was added the burden of the church tithe . This was the church's right to a tenth of the parish harvest. The tithe-owner could voluntarily reduce the financial burden on the parish either by allowing the parish to keep more of their share of the harvest. Or the tithe-owner could, again voluntarily, commute

7839-413: The late Enlightenment: that if one can promise a benevolent outcome it would be worth the human cost. But one of the great lessons of the 20th century is that it's not true. For such a clear-headed writer, he appears blind to the sheer scale of the price paid. I find it tragic, rather than disgraceful." Neil Ascherson believes that, "Eric is not a man for apologising or feeling guilty. He does feel bad about

7956-421: The memory and tradition of the USSR with an indulgence and tenderness." Reviewing the book, David Caute wrote: "One keeps asking of Hobsbawm: didn't you know what Deutscher and Orwell knew? Didn't you know about the induced famine, the horrors of collectivisation , the false confessions, the terror within the Party, the massive forced labour of the gulag? As Orwell himself documented, a great deal of evidence

8073-402: The norm. Later, contracts were offered for as little as a week. Between 1750 and 1850, farm labourers faced the loss of their land, the transformation of their contracts and the sharp deterioration of their economic situations. By the time of the 1830 riots, they had retained very little of their former status except the right to parish relief, under the Old Poor Law system. Additionally, there

8190-417: The older and modern machines require a good deal of effort to operate. The concave clearance, cylinder speed, fan velocity, sieve sizes, and feeding rate must be adjusted for crop conditions. From the early 20th century, petrol or diesel-powered threshing machines, designed especially to thresh rice , the most important crop in Asia, have been developed along different lines to the modern combine. Even after

8307-467: The only solution to the unrest, one of them being the radical politician and writer William Cobbett . The authorities had received many requests to prosecute him for the speeches that he had made in defence of the rural labourer, but it was for his articles in the Political Register that he was eventually charged with seditious libel . He wrote an article, The Rural War , about the Swing Riots. He blamed those in society who lived off unearned income at

8424-444: The other being replaced with an empty. A worker called a sewer removed and replaced the bags, and sewed full bags shut with a needle and thread. Other threshing machines would discharge grain from a conveyor, for bagging by hand. Combines are equipped with a grain tank, which accumulates grain for deposit in a truck or wagon. A large amount of chaff and straw would accumulate around a threshing machine, and several innovations, such as

8541-539: The parishes. the Act of Settlement in 1662 had confined relief strictly to those who were natives of the parish. The poor law system charged a Parish Rate to landowners and tenants, which was used to provide relief payments to settled residents of the parish who were ill or out of work. The payments were minimal, and at times, degrading conditions were required for their receipt. As more and more people became dependent on parish relief, ratepayers rebelled ever more loudly against

8658-564: The poor of the countryside to graze their animals and grow their own produce. The land was now divided up among the large local landowners, leaving the landless farmworkers solely dependent upon working for their richer neighbours for a cash wage. That may have offered a tolerable living during the boom years of the Napoleonic Era , when labour had been in short supply and corn prices high, the return of peace in 1815 resulted in plummeting grain prices and an oversupply of labour. According to

8775-451: The post-1914 period as "banal in the extreme. They are also highly evasive. A vast silence surrounds the realities of communism, a refusal to engage which led the late Tony Judt to conclude that Hobsbawm had 'provincialised himself'. It is a damning judgement". In a 1994 interview on BBC television with Canadian academic Michael Ignatieff , Hobsbawm said that the deaths of millions of Soviet citizens under Stalin would have been worth it if

8892-548: The present chapter." Regarding the execrable pact between Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia , which shocked many former communist sympathizers into lives of anticommunism, Mr. Hobsbawm dismisses the "zig-zags and turns of Comintern and Soviet policy," specifically the "about-turn of 1939–41," which "need not detain us here." In one sense, Mr. Hobsbawm's admirers are right about his erudition: He possesses an encyclopedic knowledge of Marxist thought, specifically Italian communism and pre-Soviet socialist movements. But that knowledge

9009-422: The problem isn't whether this market system disappears, but exactly what the nature of the mixture between market economy and public economy is and, above all, in my view, what the social objectives of that economy are. One of the worst things about the politics of the past 30 years is that the rich have forgotten to be afraid of the poor – of most of the people in the world." Hobsbawm stressed that since communism

9126-493: The result of the progressive impoverishment and dispossession of the English agricultural workforce over the previous fifty years leading up to 1830. In Parliament, Lord Carnarvon had said that the English labourers were reduced to a plight more abject than that of any race in Europe, with their employers no longer able to feed and employ them. A 2020 study found that the presence of threshing machines caused greater rioting and that

9243-440: The rioters were hanged and a further 450 were transported to Australia . Early threshing machines were hand-fed and horse-powered. Some were housed in a specially constructed building, a gin gang , which would be attached to a threshing barn. They were small by today's standards and were about the size of an upright piano . Later machines were steam-powered , driven by a portable engine or traction engine . Isaiah Jennings,

9360-462: The rioters would then disperse or move on to the next village. The buildings containing the engines that powered the threshing machines were also a target of the rioters and many gin gangs , also known as horse engine houses or wheelhouses, were destroyed, particularly in south−eastern England. There are also recorded instances of carriages being held up and their occupants robbed. Other actions included incendiary attacks on farms, barns and hayricks in

9477-492: The riots and responded with harsh punitive measures. Nearly 2,000 protesters were brought to trial in 1830–1831; 252 were sentenced to death (though only 19 were actually hanged), 644 were imprisoned and 481 were transported to penal colonies in Australia. Not all rioters were farm workers since the list of those punished included rural artisans, shoemakers, carpenters, wheelwrights, blacksmiths and cobblers. One of those hanged

9594-525: The riots were concentrated in the southern and south-eastern counties, which were little affected by enclosure. Some historians have posited that the reason was that in the West Midlands, for example, the rapid expansion of the Potteries and the coal and iron industries provided an alternative range of employment to agricultural workers. Critically, J. D. Chambers and G. E. Mingay suggested that

9711-468: The same principles and use the same components as the original threshing machines built in the 19th century. Combines also perform the reaping operation at the same time. The name combine is derived from the fact that the two steps are combined in a single machine. Also, most modern combines are self-powered (usually by a diesel engine) and self-propelled, although tractor-powered, pull-type combines models were offered by John Deere and Case International into

9828-431: The same reason, he's not that good on fascism ". In a 2011 poll by History Today magazine, he was named the third most important historian of the previous 60 years. After reading Age of Extremes , Kremlinologist Robert Conquest concluded that Hobsbawm suffers from a "massive reality denial" regarding the USSR, and John Gray , though praising his work on the nineteenth century, has described Hobsbawm's writings on

9945-457: The same reasons. Hobsbawm spoke of his good fortune at having got a post at Birkbeck in 1948 before the Cold War really started to take off. Conservative commentator David Pryce-Jones has questioned the existence of such career obstacles. Hobsbawm helped found the academic journal Past & Present in 1952. He was a visiting professor at Stanford University in the 1960s. In 1970s, he

10062-682: The secret ballot. In domestic elections before the Great Reform Act of 1832, only about three per cent of the English population could vote. Most constituencies had been founded in the Middle Ages and so the newly-industrial northern England had virtually no representation. Those who could vote were mainly the large landowners and wealthy commoners. The Great Reform Act was followed by the Poor Law Amendment Act 1834 , ending "outdoor relief" in cash or kind and setting up

10179-470: The severity of the riots was lowest in areas with abundant employment alternatives and the highest in areas with few alternative employment opportunities. The name "Swing Riots" was derived from Captain Swing , the name attributed to the fictitious, mythical figurehead of the movement. The name was often used to sign threatening letters sent to farmers, magistrates , parsons and others. These were first mentioned by The Times on 21 October 1830. 'Swing'

10296-452: The social historians John and Barbara Hammond , enclosure was fatal to three classes: the small farmer, the cottager and the squatter. Before enclosure , the cottager was a labourer with land; after enclosure, he was a labourer without land. In contrast to the Hammonds' 1911 analysis of the events, the historian G. E. Mingay noted that when the Swing Riots broke out in 1830, the heavily-enclosed Midlands remained almost entirely quiet, but

10413-555: The song "Thrasher" from the album Rust Never Sleeps , Neil Young compares the modern threshing machine's technique of separating wheat from wheat stalks to the natural forces of time that separate close friends from one another. Threshing machines appear in Twenty One Pilots ' music video for the song " House of Gold ". Eric Hobsbawm Eric John Ernest Hobsbawm CH FRSL FBA ( / ˈ h ɒ b z . b ɔː m / ; 9 June 1917 – 1 October 2012)

10530-596: The southern counties of Surrey , Sussex, Middlesex and Hampshire before they spread north into the Home Counties , the Midlands and East Anglia . Originally, the disturbances were thought to be mainly a southern and East Anglian phenomenon, but subsequent research has revealed just how widespread Swing riots really were, with almost every county south of the Scottish border involved. In all, sixty percent of

10647-410: The straw to fall below. Below the straw walkers, a fan blows a stream of air across the grain, removing dust and small bits of crushed plant material out of the back of the combine. The residues fall to the ground and occasionally are collected for other purposes, such as fodder. The grain, either coming through the concave or the walkers, meets a set of sieves mounted on an assembly called a shoe, which

10764-505: The tanks into Budapest , Hungary, Hobsbawm finally spoke up, publishing a letter of protest. But he did not leave the Party. Hobsbawm let his membership lapse not long before the party's dissolution in 1991. In his memoirs, Hobsbawm wrote: "The dream of the October Revolution is still there somewhere inside me ... I have abandoned, nay, rejected it, but it has not been obliterated. To this day, I notice myself treating

10881-455: The tithe payments to a rental charge. The rioters had demanded that tithes should be reduced, but this demand was refused by many of the tithe-owners. The final straw was the introduction of horse-powered threshing machines, which could do the work of many men. They spread swiftly among the farming community and threatened the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of farmworkers. Following the terrible harvests of 1828 and 1829, farm labourers faced

10998-633: The tithe system, requiring payments to support the established Anglican Church; the Poor Law guardians, who were thought to abuse their power over the poor; and the rich tenant farmers , who had been progressively lowering workers' wages and introduced agricultural machinery . If captured, the protesters faced charges of arson , robbery, riot, machine-breaking and assault. Those convicted faced imprisonment, transportation and possibly execution . The Swing Riots had many immediate causes. The historian J. F. C. Harrison believed that they were overwhelmingly

11115-597: The total population of the USSR in 1937 was said to have been 164 millions, or 16.7 millions less than the demographic forecasts of the Second Five-Year Plan (1933–38). Elsewhere he insisted: I have never tried to diminish the appalling things that happened in Russia, though the sheer extent of the massacres we didn't realise ... In the early days we knew a new world was being born amid blood and tears and horror: revolution, civil war, famine—we knew of

11232-511: The towns to become industrial workers. In the 1780s, workers would be employed at annual hiring fairs, or ‘mops’ , to serve for the whole year. During that period, the worker would receive payment in kind and in cash from his employer, would often work at his side, and would commonly share meals at the employer's table. As time passed, the gulf between farmer and employee widened. Workers were hired on stricter cash-only contracts, which ran for increasingly shorter periods. First, monthly terms became

11349-482: The twentieth century, his 1994 book, The Age of Extremes , consisted of "masterly analysis". Meanwhile, Tony Judt , while praising Hobsbawm's vast knowledge and graceful prose, cautioned that Hobsbawm's bias in favour of the USSR , communist states and communism in general, and his tendency to disparage any nationalist movement as passing and irrational, weakened his grasp of parts of the 20th century. With regard to

11466-437: The widespread introduction of the threshing machine and the policy of enclosing fields. No longer were thousands of men needed to tend the crops; a few would suffice. With fewer jobs, lower wages and no prospects, the threshing machine was the final straw; it would place them on the brink of starvation. The Swing Rioters smashed threshing machines and threatened farmers who had them. The riots were dealt with very harshly. Nine of

11583-495: Was Leopold Percy Hobsbaum (né Obstbaum), a Jewish merchant from the East End of London of Polish Jewish descent. His mother was Nelly Hobsbaum (née Grün), who was from a middle-class Austrian Jewish family. Although both of his parents were Jewish, neither was observant. His early childhood was spent in Vienna , Austria, and Berlin , Germany. A clerical error at birth altered his surname from Hobsbaum to Hobsbawm. Although

11700-512: Was a British historian of the rise of industrial capitalism , socialism and nationalism . His best-known works include his tetralogy about what he called the " long 19th century " ( The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789–1848 , The Age of Capital: 1848–1875 and The Age of Empire: 1875–1914 ) and the " short 20th century " ( The Age of Extremes ), and an edited volume that introduced the influential idea of " invented traditions ". A life-long Marxist , his socio-political convictions influenced

11817-474: Was a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge, from 1949 to 1955. Hobsbawm said there was a weaker version of McCarthyism that took hold in Britain and affected Marxist academics: "you didn't get promotion for 10 years, but nobody threw you out". According to Noel Annan in his Our Age , Hobsbawm was denied a lectureship at Cambridge by political enemies, and blocked for a time from a professorship at Birkbeck for

11934-519: Was able to discredit the prosecution's case, and at great embarrassment to the government, he was acquitted. A major concern was that the Swing Riots could spark a larger revolt. That was reinforced by the 29 July 1830 revolution in France , which overthrew Charles X , and the independence of Belgium from the Netherlands later in 1830. The support for parliamentary reform was on party lines, with

12051-429: Was an influx of Irish farm labourers in 1829, who had come to seek agricultural work which contributed to reduced employment opportunities for other farming communities. Irish labourers would find themselves being threatened from the beginning of the riots the following year. Historically, the monasteries had taken responsibility for the impotent poor , but after their dissolution in 1536 to 1539, responsibility passed to

12168-439: Was apparently a reference to the swinging stick of the flail used in hand threshing. Early 19th-century England was almost unique among major nations in having no class of landed smallholding peasantry . The inclosure acts of rural England contributed to the plight of rural farmworkers. Between 1770 and 1830, about 6 million acres (24,000 km) of common land were enclosed. The common land had been used for centuries by

12285-790: Was appointed professor and in 1976 he became a Fellow of the British Academy . He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1971 and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2006. Hobsbawm formally retired from Birkbeck in 1982, becoming Emeritus Professor of History, and was appointed as president of Birkbeck in 2002. He remained as visiting professor at The New School for Social Research in Manhattan between 1984 and 1997. He was, until his death, professor emeritus in

12402-855: Was born in 1958 and died in November 2014. Hobsbawm died from complications of pneumonia and leukaemia at the Royal Free Hospital in London on 1 October 2012, aged 95. His daughter, Julia, said "He'd been quietly fighting leukaemia for a number of years without fuss or fanfare. Right up until the end he was keeping up what he did best, he was keeping up with current affairs, there was a stack of newspapers by his bed". Following Hobsbawm's death reactions included praise for his "sheer academic productivity and prowess" and "tough reasoning" in The Guardian . Reacting to news of Hobsbawm's death, Ed Miliband called him "an extraordinary historian,

12519-532: Was defeated by a vote in the House of Commons . Two days later, Earl Grey was asked to form a Whig government. Grey assigned a cabinet committee to produce a plan for parliamentary reform. Lord Melbourne became Home Secretary in the new government. He blamed local magistrates for being too lenient, and the government appointed a Special Commission of three judges to try rioters in the counties of Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Dorset, Wiltshire and Hampshire. The riots were

12636-477: Was described by right-leaning magazine The Spectator as "arguably our greatest living historian—not only Britain's, but the world's", while Niall Ferguson wrote: "That Hobsbawm is one of the great historians of his generation is undeniable ... His quartet of books beginning with The Age of Revolution and ending with The Age of Extremes constitute the best starting point I know for anyone who wishes to begin studying modern history. Nothing else produced by

12753-436: Was happening in the USSR in those years, or the isolation of the USSR's critics on the left, without this sense that in the fight against fascism, communism and liberalism were, in a profound sense, fighting for the same cause. Not to mention the more obvious fact ... that, in the conditions of the 1930s, what Stalin did was a Russian problem, however shocking, whereas what Hitler did was a threat everywhere. He claimed that

12870-475: Was mistrusted by its leadership and ceased political work by the end of the 1950s. Hobsbawm maintained some ties to former colleagues such as E. P. Thompson and John Saville , who had left the CPGB at this time and became leading lights of the New Left in Britain, occasionally contributing to New Left publications but also providing intelligence reports on the dissidents to CPGB headquarters. He later described

12987-544: Was not created, the sacrifices were in fact not justified—a point he emphasised in Age of Extremes : Still, whatever assumptions are made, the number of direct and indirect victims must be measured in eight rather than seven digits. In these circumstances it does not much matter whether we opt for a "conservative" estimate nearer to ten than to twenty million or a larger figure: none can be anything but shameful and beyond palliation, let alone justification. I add, without comment, that

13104-401: Was prevented from serving overseas after he attracted the attention of the security services by using the wall newspaper he edited during his army training to argue for the opening up of a Second Front , which was a demand made by the Communist Party of Great Britain at the time. He applied to return to Cambridge as a research student, and was released from the military in 1946. MI5 opened

13221-548: Was reliably knowable even before 1939, but Hobsbawm pleads that much of it was not reliably knowable until Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin in 1956." Reviewing Hobsbawm's 2011 How to Change the World in The Wall Street Journal , Michael C. Moynihan argued: When the bloody history of 20th century communism intrudes upon Mr. Hobsbawm's disquisitions, it's quickly dismissed. Of the countries occupied by

13338-493: Was reported to have been charged only because he had knocked the hat off the head of a member of the Baring banking family . Many of the protesters who were transported had their sentences remitted in 1835. Eventually, the farmers agreed to raise wages, and the parsons and some landlords reduced the tithes and rents. However, many farmers reneged on the agreements, and the unrest increased. Many people advocated political reform as

13455-432: Was to be the largest movement of social unrest in 19th-century England. As well as attacking the popularly-hated threshing machines, which displaced workers, the protesters rioted over low wages and required tithes by destroying workhouses and tithe barns associated with their oppression. They also burned ricks and maimed cows. The rioters directed their anger at the three targets identified as causing their misery:

13572-664: Was to introduce reform of the House of Commons. The Tory Prime Minister, the Duke of Wellington , replied that the existing constitution was so perfect that he could not imagine any possible alternative that would be an improvement. When that was reported, a mob attacked Wellington's home in London. The unrest had been confined to Kent, but during the following two weeks of November, it escalated massively by crossing East and West Sussex into Hampshire, with Swing letters appearing in other nearby counties. On 15 November 1830, Wellington's government

13689-480: Was unlikely "to lose any opportunity he may get to disseminate propaganda and obtain recruits for the Communist party". In 1947, he became a lecturer in history at Birkbeck College, University of London which, unusually at the time, lacked any inclination towards anti-communism among staff or students. He became reader in 1959, professor between 1970 and 1982 and an emeritus professor of history in 1982. He

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