barry stedman

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.

Alan Macfarlane was born in Shillong, India, in 1941 and educated at the Dragon School, Sedbergh School, Oxford and London Universities where he received two Master’s degrees and two doctorates. He is the author of over forty books, including The Origins of English Individualism (1978) and Letters to Lily: On How the World Works (2005). He has worked in England, Nepal, Japan and China as both an historian and anthropologist. He was elected to the British Academy in 1986 and is now Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the University of Cambridge and a Life Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge. Professor Macfarlane received the Huxley Memorial Medal, the highest honour of the Royal Anthropological Institute in 2012.