This essay collection followed from a conference held in 2015 to mark the death of Eric Hobsbawm, but it is neither commemorative nor hagiographic. To the contrary, it aims to suggest how doing history can move beyond the Hobsbawm era, and to this end the essays display a creative tension with the corpus of Hobsbawm's work.

It is notable, however, that the book offers no systematic consideration of Hobsbawm's Marxism. References to Marx and Marxism, of course, are dotted through the book, but they remain largely incidental. Geoff Eley's contribution comes closest to addressing this elephant in the room. Eley usefully theorizes Hobsbawm as a Eurocentric, positivist cosmopolitan. Hobsbawm was never really willing to adopt the new elements that defined radical thought in the later twentieth century, such as gender and identity politics. His thinking continued to be dominated by the great problems of the nineteenth century—social class, nationalism (which is surveyed here by John Breuilly), capitalism, and empire. For Eley, the conundrum Hobsbawm presents is his reluctance to accommodate alternative configurations of the social process beyond those rooted in a social-structural conception of social and political change. This is a fair critique, and it is probably a more fruitful observation than plumbing the motivations of Hobsbawm's theoretical postures. Eley notes that Hobsbawm's economic determinism became more elusive as time went on, which, of course, reflected Hobsbawm's first loyalty to history, rather than ideology, as the source of political understanding.

Although Eley is singular in confronting this aspect of Hobsbawm's historical method head on, other contributors make the same point in different ways. Several contributors urge the need to conjoin the conceptual absences in Hobsbawm with themes that he did privilege. Thus, Catherine Hall usefully suggests the value to be gained from attaching gender and race to more traditional notions of structural forces in history. Jan Rüger makes a similarly significant point in arguing that British history was shaped by the dynamic interconnections between the Isles, Europe, and empire rather than by the competition between them for dominant influence.

In an important essay, Renaud Morieux discusses the theme of comparison that runs through all of Hobsbawm's work. But Moreiux pushes beyond comparison's conventional uses, highlighting its virtues as an interpretive tool. By way of case study, Morieux reconstructs the comparisons eighteenth-century state actors made in their negotiations over prisoners of war. He uses this analysis to understand how their cultural languages and assumptions governed the ways they related to each other and to the material world around them. This is an important way of better understanding the contours of past behavior while remaining distant enough to avoid the trap of anachronism.

The contributors of another group of essays seek to extend some of the themes that particularly interested Hobsbawm. They elaborate and enlarge on the processes of global economic and commercial exchange or deploy Hobsbawm's pioneering explorations of popular movements. Maxine Berg and Pat Hudson expertly address the importance of cultural and material forces in economic exchange. Chris Wickham provides a sophisticated comparison between early modern Italy and China as global economic actors. Sonya Rose and Sean Brady detail how labor history—which Hobsbawm did so much to establish as a field of study—is now being revitalized and rewritten through the lens of global and gender studies. Andy Wood writes about the invention of subaltern political tradition and memories using the case of the East Anglican Fens. Finally, an interesting contribution by Jon Lawrence captures in fine detail how the social-democratic discourse dominated British politics in the post–Second World War years until it fell apart during the 1970s. These chapters provide empirically rich and finely argued examples of how the material, social, and cultural elements of historical change fit together—an issue that lay at the heart of Hobsbawm's historical practice.

Yet another group of essays are focused on topics that found little resonance in Hobsbawm's own work. This is an eclectic bunch. Some, such as Paul Warde's contribution on environmental history and Yasmin Khan's piece on the colonial origins of twentieth-century state violence, point to areas of growing significance. Bill Schwarz meditates on the ambiguities of decolonization and Alison Light on the virtues of family history. Light's essay is of particular note. Building upon her earlier book Common People, she argues that family history is a way of revealing the subjectivities of the working class—such as the patterns of migration that were part of working-class life. This was not the kind of history that Hobsbawm was drawn to, but Light provides a good example of how the widely popular family history may be joined to its academic counterpart.

The range of this collection reminds us just how wide Hobsbawm's interests and influence were. It also underscores how deeply fragmented history writing has become in comparison to the integrated vision that underlay Hobsbawm's own approach to history. Only Frank Trentmann's essay on the history of consumption suggests how that legacy from Hobsbawm may be realized in the future. Trentmann's piece—which rests on his recent book, Empire of Things (2016)—is a tour de force. It demonstrates a Hobsbawm-like ability to combine globally drawn sources and empirical examples within sweeping conceptual themes—most centrally how the interplay between culture and material forces shapes the social practices and habits of consumption. Trentmann moves easily between local and global levels, and he reminds us of the holistic aspirations of the history that Hobsbawm—as did other great historians of his generation—practiced. But Trentmann's conceptual premises differ significantly from Hobsbawm's. For Trentmann, material and cultural forces are not separated; consumption has determined capitalist structures as well as reflecting those structures. The argument proceeds from the premise of social practice and habit, not from the premise of social and economic structure. As such, it is model of the kind of sweeping, insightful history for the twenty-first century that Hobsbawm's was for the twentieth.