Modern industrial societies are the creation of forced of change embedded in their pre-industrial and pre-capitalist past, forces which have shaped their economic structures, their politics of domination and resistance, their social ideas and relationships. In this book a distinguished group of historians focuses on this dialectal relationship between capitalism and its pre-capitalist heritage, revealing the ways in which older forms - whether they be social and economic structures and institutions, movements or ideologies, rituals or vocabulary - help to shape new, and are themselves reshaped in the process. The book thus develops a central theme in the writing of Eric Hobsbawm, to whom these essays are presented as a tribute on his retirement from Birkbeck College. An additional essay provides a major reappraisal of Hobsbawm's work. A number of different themes in modern European history are discussed in the context of the interrelationship of capitalism and the pre capitalist past.
