History at the 'End of History': Inequality and Discourse in the Age of Reimperialism
When:
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Venue:
Birkbeck Main Building, Malet Street
Hobsbawm Memorial Lecture
18 June 2026
Birkbeck Malet Street Building
Toby Green
History at the 'End of History': Inequality and Discourse in the Age of Reimperialism
As a Marxist historian, Eric Hobsbawm believed that the revolution led by the proletariat would resolve the dialectic produced by capital, and end the historical process of inevitable revolution. However, in the last two decades of his life the collapse of the Soviet Union and communist states saw a new philosophy of the ‘end of history’, propagated by the neoliberal economist Francis Fukuyama: with the defeat of communism, the organisation of political life around liberal democracy was now established and could not be challenged in the future.
History has had the last laugh on that, but three decades later a new ‘end of history’ is on the horizon. The rise of Artificial Intelligence, the assault on reading and thought independent of computation, and on the other hand the production of endless deepfakes all challenge the future of a profession which relies on human subjects bringing a critical perspective to more-or-less reliable evidence. On a third hand, the death of scientific modes of historical analysis in the Marxist and liberal traditions has gone hand in hand with political attacks on the historical discipline itself.
This lecture places this juncture of crisis within the historical frame of the last three decades. The expansion of mass inequalities, on national and global levels, has shaped a frame in which institutionalised history is inevitably now deemed a threat to the consolidation of these economic ‘gains’ in an era of reimperialisms of all kinds.
Toby Green is professor of precolonial and lusophone African history and culture at King’s College, London. He is the author of The Heretic of Cacheu (2025), The Covid Consensus: The New Politics of Global Inequality (2021/2023) and A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution (2019). He is a Fellow of the British Academy, Global North representative of the Pan-African Epidemic and Pandemic Working Group, and a member of the Advisory Board of the International Africa Institute in Lagos.
The lecture will be followed by a reception for all attendees.
Contact name: Brodie Waddell
Speakers-
Toby Green
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Toby Green is professor of precolonial and lusophone African history and culture at King’s College, London. He is the author of The Heretic of Cacheu (2025), The Covid Consensus: The New Politics of Global Inequality (2021/2023) and A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution (2019). He is a Fellow of the British Academy, Global North representative of the Pan-African Epidemic and Pandemic Working Group, and a member of the Advisory Board of the International Africa Institute in Lagos.
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