984 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE often gave out money” (p. 109). Indeed, Dessalles’ legitimate con cern and affection for some of his slaves contrast sharply with his usually depressing comments about his spouse and legitimate chil dren. He came to enjoy the etiquette ofrace relations on the planta tion, giving slaves gifts on New Year’s Day, gathering them around him for evening prayers, soliciting gossip about their personal and sexual habits, and even seeking treatment from slave folk healers. While as a young man Dessalles termed Martinique an “accursed country” (p. 66) and aspired to make a killing in sugar and then live comfortably in France, an older Dessalles could not wait to return to Martinique from his French trips without his wife. In Paris in 1846, Dessalles registered how much he missed the warmth, sights, sounds, and smells of Martinique. There “I could at least talk to my little negro children, and I could ask my negroes about their work on the plantation. I was never bored” (p. 196). Dessalles returned to Martinique a year before slave emancipation in 1848. He, like other planters, entered a period of tense, shifting negotiations with his former slaves about the meaning of “free” la bor. At one point, Cyrille Bissette, a free mulatto whom Dessalles had unsuccessfully tried to have executed for allegedly plotting to raise a slave revolt in 1823, now returned triumphant to Martinique from exile. Dessalles dreaded a prearranged meeting with him; the very idea of greeting Bissette with an embrace was making Dessalles sick. But Bissette, no radical egalitarian, proved to be a man of order and thus a pleasant surprise tojittery planters. Bissette and Dessalles did embrace. At a banquet they ate, drank, and eventually sang songs together. On second thought, Dessalles’ diary records, Bissette “was really full of wit and charm” (p. 259). Here is a parable for our own time. Robert L. Paquette Dr. Paquette is Publius Virgilius Rogers Professor ofAmerican History at Hamil ton College in Clinton, New York. His most recent work, which he coedited with Stanley Engerman, is The Lesser Antilles in the Age ofEuropean Expansion (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996). Iron and Steel: Class, Race, and Community in Birmingham, Alabama, 1875-1920. By Henry M. McKiven Jr. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. Pp. xiii+223; notes, bibliography, in dex. $37.50 (cloth); $14.95 (paper). In recentyears an increasing number ofhistorians have attempted to trace the roots of Birmingham’s massive resistance to racial inte gration. In a valuable contribution to this ongoing scrutiny, Henry McKiven argues that skilled white workers were more strongly moti vated by racial bias in opposing integration than some scholars had TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 985 previously supposed. He is especially critical ofPaul Worthman, who, in an influential essay published in 1969, stressed the importance of nonracial cleavages between skilled and unskilled workers that were adroitly exploited by Birmingham’s political and business lead ers. The evidence presented by McKiven, by contrast, indicates that skilled whites, who ‘‘believed that their social and economic interests were linked to the maintenance of a rigid caste system” (p. 4), tried to retain a superior status in Birmingham by keeping black workers down and resisting any efforts by owners and managers to improve their lot. McKiven traces connections between labor relations and racial prejudice back to Birmingham’s beginnings. During the 1870s, con fronted by a scarcity of skilled workers, the city’s leaders persuaded white puddlers, molders, and other craftsmen to come to Alabama from northern states and foreign countries, not merely by offering them higher pay than they could obtain elsewhere but also by prom ising to confine black workers to less desirable, unskilledjobs. Con trary to Worthman and other scholars who believe that “the long term interest of working-class whites and blacks lay in unified resistance to those who exploited them,” McKiven argues that “the ideas about race and class expressed by early boosters reflected the attitudes of the white workingmen they were trying to attract to Birmingham” (p. 167). Later, however, when mechanization and a transition from iron production to steelmaking reduced the need for traditional craft skills...