Abstract

Six years ago, Gerhard Haupt wrote that 'the petite bourgeoisie is currently enjoying a boom'. The historiographical crash has still not come. Since I978 a series of round tables has been held on this subject, organized by Haupt himself (Bremen), Philippe Vigier (Paris-Nanterre), Geoffrey Crossick (Essex) and Ginette Kurgan-van Hentenryk (Free University of Brussels).2 Several publications have already emerged out of these gatherings: two special issues of Le Mouvement Social (no. io8, July-September 1979; no. I 14, January-March I981), several individual articles, and most recently a volume on Shopkeepers and Master Artisans in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Methuen, i984) edited by Crossick and Haupt. The present report deals with the latest of these round tables on economic crisis and the petite bourgeoisie in nineteenthand twentieth-century Europe. The round table began with a group of three papers on the impact of economic crisis in the late 1840s. The first was Clive Behagg's subtle account of the effect of crisis on small producers in the Birmingham area, especially in the metal trades. The context was provided by recent British work on the labour process and structures of authority in the workshop. Behagg argued that the depression of I847-9 accelerated the move to 'readier methods of working' (a contemporary euphemism for rationalization) in the small workshop. Under the impact of crisis,

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