The Frock Coated Communist

Download or read book The Frock-Coated Communist written by Tristram Hunt and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2009-04-30 with total page 567 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Friedrich Engels is one of the most attractive and contradictory figures of the nineteenth century. Born to a prosperous mercantile family in west Germany, he spent his career working in the Manchester cotton industry, riding to the Cheshire hounds, and enjoying the comfortable, middle-class life of a Victorian gentleman. Yet Engels was also the co-founder of international communism - the philosophy which in the 20th century came to control one third of the human race. He was the co-author of The Communist Manifesto, a ruthless party tactician, and the man who sacrificed his best years so Karl Marx could write Das Kapital. Tristram Hunt relishes the diversity and exuberance of Engels's era: how one of the great bon viveurs of Victorian Britain reconciled his raucous personal life with this uncompromising political philosophy. Set against the backdrop of revolutionary Europe and industrializing England - of Manchester mills, Paris barricades, and East End strikes - it is a story of devoted friendship, class compromise, ideological struggle, and family betrayal.

Download or read book The Frock-coated Communist written by Tristram Hunt and published by Allen Lane, a. This book was released on 2009 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Born to a prosperous mercantile family in west Germany, Friedrich Engels enjoyed the middle-class life of a Victorian gentleman. Yet he was also the co-founder of international communism. This book looks at how one of the great bon viveurs of Victorian Britain reconciled his raucous personal life with this uncompromising political philosophy.

Download or read book Marx's General written by Tristram Hunt and published by Metropolitan Books. This book was released on 2010-08-03 with total page 469 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Written with brio, warmth, and historical understanding, this is the best biography of one of the most attractive inhabitants of Victorian England, Marx's friend, partner, and political heir."—Eric Hobsbawm Friedrich Engels is one of the most intriguing and contradictory figures of the nineteenth century. Born to a prosperous mercantile family, he spent his life enjoying the comfortable existence of a Victorian gentleman; yet he was at the same time the co-author of The Communist Manifesto, a ruthless political tactician, and the man who sacrificed his best years so that Karl Marx could have the freedom to write. Although his contributions are frequently overlooked, Engels's grasp of global capital provided an indispensable foundation for communist doctrine, and his account of the Industrial Revolution, The Condition of the Working Class in England, remains one of the most haunting and brutal indictments of capitalism's human cost. Drawing on a wealth of letters and archives, acclaimed historian Tristram Hunt plumbs Engels's intellectual legacy and shows us how one of the great bon viveurs of Victorian Britain reconciled his exuberant personal life with his radical political philosophy. This epic story of devoted friendship, class compromise, ideological struggle, and family betrayal at last brings Engels out from the shadow of his famous friend and collaborator.

Download or read book Ten Cities that Made an Empire written by Tristram Hunt and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the return of Hong Kong to China in 1997 and the end days of Empire, Britain's colonial past has been the subject of passionate debate. Tristram Hunt goes beyond the now familiar arguments about Empire being good or bad and adopts a fresh approach to Britain's empire and its legacy. Through an exceptional array of first-hand accounts and personal reflections, he portrays the great colonial and imperial cities of Boston, Bridgetown, Dublin, Cape Town, Calcutta, Hong Kong, Bombay, Melbourne, New Delhi, and twentieth-century Liverpool- their architecture, culture, and society balls; the famines, uprisings and repressions which coursed through them; the primitive accumulation and ghostly bureaucracy which ran them; the British supremacists and multicultural trailblazers who inhabited them. From the pioneers of early America to the builders of modern India, from west to east and back again, Hunt follows the processes of exchange and adaptation that collectively moulded the colonial experience and which in their turn transformed the culture, economy and identity of the British Isles. This vivid and richly detailed imperial story, located in ten of the most important cities which the Empire constructed, demolished, reconstructed and transformed, allows us a new understanding of the British Empire's influence upon the world and the world's influence upon it. 'In this ingenious, gripping and unorthodox book Tristram Hunt tells the story of the British Empire in a way we have never had it before. Hunt has a talent for the vivid and the specific which is almost novelistic. We learn about the growth, effects and motivations of Empire not through statistics or the story of British legislators, but by being guided on the ground, taken by the hand through the streets of Liverpool and Melbourne, waterfronts from Hong Kong to Cape Town, and learning the stories of some of the most extraordinary - and often outrageous - people in our history.' Andrew Marr 'This eminently readable book tells the story of the expanding British empire through a history of its key cities across the world, providing fresh insights and fascinating details. It ranges from the Americas to India and back to Britain- an exhilarating ride - and an important contribution to its subject.' C. A. Bayly

Download or read book Engels before Marx written by Terrell Carver and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-04-15 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the life and works of Friedrich Engels during the decade before he entered a political partnership with Karl Marx. It takes a thematic approach in three substantial chapters: Imagination, Observation, and Vocation. Throughout, the reader sees the world from Engels’s perspective, not knowing how his story will turn out. This approach reveals the multifaceted and ambitious character of young Friedrich’s achievements from age sixteen till just turning twenty-five. At the time that he accepted Marx’s invitation to co-author a short political satire, Engels was far better known and much more accomplished. He had published many more articles on far more subjects, in both German and English, than Marx had managed. Moreover, he had written a critique of political economy from a perspective unique in the German context, and published his own pioneering and substantial study of working class conditions in an industrializing economy. Offering an innovative approach to a largely neglected period of Engels’s life before meeting Marx, Carver upends standard narratives in existing biographical studies of Engels to reveal him as an important figure not just in relation to his more famous collaborator, but a key voice in the liberal-democratic, constitutional and nation-building revolutionism of the 1830s and 1840s.

Download or read book The English Civil War At First Hand written by Tristram Hunt and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2011-01-27 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a history of the English Civil War using first-hand contemporaneous accounts to bring the period and its characters to life. As well as the most famous documents, diaries and court cases of the period, the author has uncovered less known sources which offer a fresh perspective on the subject.

Download or read book The Red Flag written by David Priestland and published by Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. This book was released on 2016-05-03 with total page 567 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The best and the most accessible one-volume history of communism now available . . . A far-reaching, vividly written account.” —Foreign Affairs In The Red Flag, Oxford professor David Priestland tells the epic story of a movement that has taken root in dozens of countries across two hundred years, from its birth after the French Revolution to its ideological maturity in nineteenth-century Germany to its rise to dominance (and subsequent fall) in the twentieth century. Beginning with the first modern Communists in the age of Robespierre, Priestland examines the motives of thinkers and leaders including Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Castro, Che Guevara, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Gorbachev, and many others. Priestland also shows how Communism, in all its varieties, appealed to different societies for different reasons, in some as a response to inequalities and in others more out of a desire to catch up with the West. But paradoxically, while destroying one web of inequality, Communist leaders were simultaneously weaving another. It was this dynamic, together with widespread economic failure and an escalating loss of faith in the system, that ultimately destroyed Soviet Communism itself. At a time when global capitalism is in crisis and powerful new political forces have arisen to confront Western democracy, The Red Flag is essential reading if we are to apply the lessons of the past to navigating the future. “Detailed and scholarly but written in lively prose, this is a rich, satisfying account of the most successful utopian political movement in history.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review