Urban Laborers Research Articles

Unfinished Revolution: The Early American Republic in a British World by Samuel W. Haynes (review)

Unfinished Revolution: The Early American Republic in a British World. By Samuel W. Haynes. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2010. Pp. 378. Cloth, $29.95.)(Editors' Note: Every so often, a significant book slips through the cracks and fails to receive a timely review. This 2010 title is such a book.)Reviewed by C. Edward SkeenAs the title suggests, Samuel W. Haynes argues that the United States did not truly slip its colonial past until the mid-nineteenth century. Long after independence, Americans continued to have a conflicted love/ hate relationship with the former mother country. Great Britain was the standard in virtually all aspects of American life, as citizens consciously emulated and compared themselves with the British. It was, however, hard to escape the sometimes-contemptuous condescension of the British toward the Americans, who found it hard to admit to feelings of inferiority.In the post-War of 1812 years, American pride was affronted in several ways. British visitors often published critical writings of life in the United States. Frances Trollope and others wounded American feelings with their descriptions of crude behavior, which, truthfully, were not far off the mark. The American response was a mixture of hostility and counterclaims that the British envied the new republic's growing wealth and power. In fact, Haynes argues, it led Americans from a deep-seated sense of cultural inferiority to a bold, if self-conscious declaration of their own exceptionalism (43). A British reviewer wrote in the Edinburgh Review in 1820, asking who read an American book, watched an American play, or looked at American art or sculpture, and it aroused a firestorm of protest in the United States. Forced to admit some validity in the observation, American intellectuals responded by pointing out rising literary artists such as James Fenimore Cooper and Washington Irving.As for American theater, Haynes, in one of his most interesting chapters, relates the sad state of the American stage. Virtually all of the leading actors were British. While the audience was largely upper crust, urban laborers often expressed class antagonism by protesting against arrogant British actors and those who fawned over them. Taking their lead newspapers that cited some insult by a British actor, theater riots were fairly common in larger cities. Haynes connects these urban riots of the 1830s and 1840s to the perceived British influence over the antislavery movement. In fact, the worst riot in the antebellum era, the Astor Place riot in New York City in 1849, began as a dispute between American actor Edwin Forrest and his British rival William Charles Macready. Anti-British sentiment and the humbling of a British actor might have been the ostensible cause, but class conflict and anti-abolitionist hysteria was at the root of the riot, which killed twenty-two people.America's deep sense of inferiority was most obvious in the political arena. Anti-British sentiment seeped into virtually every aspect of American political life. Exploiting Anglophobia for political advantage was ever-present as both major parties hurled charges against the other of being a tool of the British. Henry Clay's American System, for example, was attacked as a British system in disguise. …

Contested Election Laws: Representation, Elections, and Party Building in Pennsylvania, 1788–1794

In preparation for the 2012 presidential election, members of the Pennsylvania GOP have been considering changing the way the state awards its electoral votes. Under the current system, the candidate who wins the greatest number of votes statewide receives all twenty of the state’s votes in the Electoral College. In recent years, heavy Democratic voting in urban areas such as Philadelphia and Pittsburgh has offset Republican victories in rural parts of the state. In order to build on their strength in the less-populated areas, Republicans are considering having Pennsylvania award electors based on a district method. While this approach is technically constitutional, political commentators have been quick to condemn the proposal as unethical and potentially dangerous. This is not, however, the first time a political party has attempted to change election laws to their advantage. The manipulation of election law dates back to the first elections under the Constitution.

Miscellaneous Food in a Feverish Haste

The eating-house was a pillar of late nineteenth-century American cities, feeding famished industrial workers and harried professionals. Urban wage laborers came to depend on cheap lunch joints for a quick midday meal, in the process altering Americans’ relationship with food. Eating-houses familiarized many Americans with the habit of purchasing cooked meals, eating rapidly with strangers, and the increasing distance between diner and farmer. The beef-centric meals served at such establishments helped strengthen the nationwide network of industrial ranching. This prose piece explores the experience of dining in an eating-house from the perspective of a hungry laborer.

Was there an ‘industrious revolution’ before the industrial revolution? An empirical exercise for England, c. 1300-1830

It is conventionally assumed that the pre-modern working year was fixed and that consumption varied with changes in wages and prices. This is challenged by the twin theories of the ‘industrious’ revolution and the consumer revolution, positing a longer working year as people earned surplus money to buy novel goods. In this study, we turn the conventional view on its head, fixing consumption rather than labour input. Specifically, we use a basket of basic consumption goods and compute the working year of rural and urban day labourers required to achieve that. By comparing with independent estimates of the actual working year, we find two ‘industrious’ revolutions among rural workers; both, however, are attributable to economic hardship, and we detect no signs of a consumer revolution. For urban labourers, by contrast, a growing gap between their actual working year and the work required to buy the basket provides great scope for a consumer revolution.

Post-Colonial Migration: Virtual Culture, Urban Farming and New Peri-Urban Growth in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, 1975–2000

Using ethnographic and historical approaches, this article examines unplanned, peri-urban settlements on Dar es Salaam's northern and western fringe, where urban farming is central to many residents’ household economy. Contrasting with conventional models of African urban migration, these new districts were established by a vanguard of educated urban professionals, utilizing farming as an economic diversification strategy. Despite disjunctures arising through decolonization and implementation of state socialism in the 1960s and 1970s, this peri-urban vanguard not only engaged in agricultural activities reminiscent of regions on the borderlands of Tanzania, but also contributed to the reproduction of configurations of socio-economic inequality characteristic of other kinds of urban communities. With critical infrastructural improvements and a pool of urban labourers supporting their endeavours, these districts attracted additional, economically influential urban in-migrants following capitalist reforms following the implementation of the Zanzibar Declaration in 1991.

Was There an ‘Industrious Revolution’ Before the Industrial Revolution? An Empirical Exercise for England, c. 1300-1830

It is conventionally assumed that the pre-modern working year was fixed and that consumption varied with changes in wages and prices. This is challenged by the twin theories of the ‘industrious’ revolution and the consumer revolution, positing a longer working year as people earned surplus money to buy novel goods. In this study, we turn the conventional view on its head, fixing consumption rather than labour input. Specifically, we use a basket of basic consumption goods and compute the working year of rural and urban day labourers required to achieve that. By comparing with independent estimates of the actual working year, we find two ‘industrious’ revolutions among rural workers; both, however, are attributable to economic hardship, and we detect no signs of a consumer revolution. For urban labourers, by contrast, a growing gap between their actual working year and the work required to buy the basket provides great scope for a consumer revolution.

The early American table: food and society in the New World

An exploration in the history of biopolitics, The Early American Table offers a unique study of the ways in which the American diet was a democratic diet that had social and political consequences. According to the 17th- and 18th-century European understanding of the body, food affected the blood, bones, mind, and spirit in ways other social markers (e.g. clothes, manners, speech) did not because food was directly assimilated by the consumer. After a few decades of settlement, many of the English men and women who colonized North America enjoyed the unprecedented prosperity enabled by the fertile environment. Lower and middling families could set their tables with a greater variety and higher quality of food than their social counterparts in England. As a result, the differences between the diets of artisans and urban laborers, of plantation owners and small farmers, were not as great as the differences that existed between an aristocrat's and a laborer's dinner in England.

Rossiiskie evrei mezhdu krasnymi i belymi (1917-1920) by Oleg V. Budnitskii (review)

i68 SEER, 86, I, 2008 military schools. The private soldiers mostly joined up in September 1914 when therewas inFinland a passing feeling of sympathy towardsRussia. They were predominantly young urban labourers with a low level of education. Their enlistmentwas often a reaction to a decline in employment opportuni ties at the start of the war. Few Finns volunteered to serve in the ranks in 1915 and practically none after that.On the other hand the better educated young men who sought to become officers joined throughout the war, albeit in diminishing numbers. Hoppu claims that rather than joining the army out of loyalty toRussia theywere seeking a career, even for the ultimate benefit of Finland. This isplausible. The wartime training courses of around fourmonths for infantryand cavalry officershad the advantage of being significantly short er than the two-year peacetime courses. The numbers at military schools would have been higher had Finns possessed a better knowledge ofRussian. The Finnish private soldiers also had problems with theRussian language. They mostly undertook their brief training (between one and threemonths) in and around Petrograd and a significantnumber served in thePreobrazhen skiiGuards Regiment. Infantry service, poor training, lack of Russian and participation in heavy fighting caused high casualties. Nearly a third of the private soldiers were killed during thewar. Of thewartime officers only 6.5 per cent were killed, although it ishard to believe that, as Hoppu claims, this relatively low casualty ratewas due to a calculated avoidance of danger. High explosive ishard to avoid. The book also examines the volunteers' participation in the Finnish Civil War, inwhich 113 soldiers served on theRed side, where some were useful instructors.Almost as many served on the White side, including over seventy officers, although the hostile reception officersmet from theJ?gers and men of the White army often precluded their effectiveuse. Some officers remained in the army after thewar and the fewwho avoided bein^ purged in thewitch hunt against 'Russian' officers in the ro,20s had successful careers. The extensive sources used by Hoppu include Finnish central, local and parish records, which provide information about casualties, as well as some Russian regimental archives. Unfortunately, few contemporary letters survive to supplement the official documents. Nevertheless, this is a successful book which not only fulfilsitsaims in relation to the background and service of the volunteers but also throws light on theworkings of theRussian army during World War One and the fate of prisoners ofwar. As Hoppu comments, the service of the volunteers inRussia was long a painful subject inFinland. They deserve their rescue from oblivion. The book has a summary inEnglish. Berkhamsted J. E. O. Screen Budnitskii, Oleg V. Rossiiskie evrei mezhdu krasnymii belymi(igiy-ig2o). Rosspen, Moscow, 2005. 548 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Indexes. Price unknown. The Soviet era was a time of profoundly mixed fortunes for the Jews of Russia. Soviet Jewish history began so disastrously that it has even been REVIEWS 169 described as a rehearsal for theHolocaust. First came the geographical splin tering of the community, as territories which included large numbers ofJews were ceded to the successor states of Eastern Europe ? Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia and, above all, Poland. In these countries, while essentially excluded from any significant political role, Jewish cultural lifeflourished, despite the widespread and often intense antisemitism tolerated by these new and osten sibly democratic regimes. Inside Soviet Russia, however, theJews faced an even more uncertain future. Widely perceived as the natural allies of the Bolsheviks, from the 1920s through the 1960sJews advanced up the political, scientific, economic and cultural hierarchies to emerge as the manifestly suc cessful Soviet Jewish intelligentsia, and yet their institutionsand theireconomy were devastated, as theCivil War rehearsed the first phase of class war against all forms of 'bourgeois' activity.The worst effects were felt inUkraine, where pogroms carried out by armed forces of different stripes resulted in between 60,000 to 200,000 Jewish deaths, and as many as one million lives ruined, along with theJewish economy of the region. It comes as no surprise to learn thatJewish commissars were prominent in theRed onslaught on Jewish local self-government, religious and educational institutions, and Zionist organiza tions. Even theJewish socialist parties allied to the new regime...

Historian unohtamat. Suomalaiset vapaaehtoiset Venäjän armeijassa I. maailmansodassa 1914-1918 by Tuomas Hoppu (review)

REVIEWS 167 crimes and criminals, and many scholars will now want to know more about their etymology: maravikhery, domushniki, golubiatnikiand tsiperito name but a few. Tales ofOld Odessa is a valuable contribution to our knowledge about the middle of Russian society at the end of the tsarist period. It shows how important that segmentwhich identifiedneither with the nobility nor with the peasantry and theworkers had become, and it replays many of the defini tional and terminological imperfections that bedevil students of emergent social groups. Sylvester is rightwhen she occasionally emphasizes the fluidity of distinctions between intelligentnyi and meshchanskii. They had greater potency as adjectival descriptors rather than nounal classifications: one man's intelligent was another man's meshchanin. Not enough ismade, however, of the unity that existed between the constituent parts ofOdessa's middling sorts,which appear in Sylvester's analysis to be only ever at one another's throats. More often than not, the visceral anti-petty-bourgeois outbursts of intelligenty against meshchane were actually proof of the anxiety one group feltabout its similarity to the other. London Timothy Phillips Hoppu, Tuomas. Historian unohtamat. Suomalaiset vapaaehtoiset Ven?j?n armeijassa i. maailmansodassa igi4~igi8. Bibliotheca Hist?rica, ioo. Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, Helsinki, 2005. 361 pp. Illustrations. Tables. Figures. Notes. Bibliography. Appendixes. Indexes. 32.00 (paperback). During World War I Finns were not compelled to serve in theRussian army although Finland formed part of theRussian Empire. The policy of russifica tion in Finland had put an end to the Finnish army and military servicewas replaced by a tax. However, some Finns continued to serve as regular officers in theRussian army and navy and duringWorld War One Finns volunteered to serve in both the Russian and German armies. The clandestine movement of volunteers to Germany was prompted by opposition to russification mea sures inFinland and the desire to obtain military training in order to fight for Finland's independence. These volunteers, who were formed into the 27th Royal Prussian J?ger Battalion, returned to Finland after its declaration of independence inDecember 1917.The J?gers fought on the victorious White or government side in the Finnish Civil War of 1918.The course of history thus changed theJ?gers from traitors in law into national heroes. On the other hand the volunteers who had joined theRussian army, and fought for their lawful sovereign, became stigmatized as near traitors to Finland. Much has been written about the J?gers but until the publication of Tuomas Hoppu's thesis the volunteers inRussia have remained, in thewords of his title, 'The Forgotten ofHistory'. Hoppu's aim is to describe the background of the volunteers and their activity in theRussian army. They fell into two groups: thosewho served in the ranks and those who entered military schools to train as officers. In all some 1,100 Finns expressed interest in volunteering but only about 600 actu ally served in the Russian army, some 500 in the ranks and 130 who attended i68 SEER, 86, I, 2008 military schools. The private soldiers mostly joined up in September 1914 when therewas inFinland a passing feeling of sympathy towardsRussia. They were predominantly young urban labourers with a low level of education. Their enlistmentwas often a reaction to a decline in employment opportuni ties at the start of the war. Few Finns volunteered to serve in the ranks in 1915 and practically none after that.On the other hand the better educated young men who sought to become officers joined throughout the war, albeit in diminishing numbers. Hoppu claims that rather than joining the army out of loyalty toRussia theywere seeking a career, even for the ultimate benefit of Finland. This isplausible. The wartime training courses of around fourmonths for infantryand cavalry officershad the advantage of being significantly short er than the two-year peacetime courses. The numbers at military schools would have been higher had Finns possessed a better knowledge ofRussian. The Finnish private soldiers also had problems with theRussian language. They mostly undertook their brief training (between one and threemonths) in and around Petrograd and a significantnumber served in thePreobrazhen skiiGuards Regiment. Infantry service, poor training, lack of Russian and participation in heavy fighting caused high casualties. Nearly...

Florence and Its Church in the Age of Dante (review)

Florence and Its Church in Age of Dante. By George W. Dameron. [The Middle Ages Series.] (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2005. Pp. x, 374. $65.00.) From 1250 to 1330 Florence suffered a succession of overlapping conflicts between Guelfs and Ghibellines, Black and White factions, popular and elite forces for which Dante famously blamed and its Angevin and Florentine Guelf allies. In his earlier study of Episcopal Power and Florentine Society 1000-1320 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard, 1991) pp. 145-153, George Dameron suggested that competition among Florentine lineages within local church may have exacerbated violence. Here, instead, aiming to refute anticlericalism of Robert Davidsohn's much cited Storia dt Ftrenze, he emphasizes that the church played a constructive role institutionally, economically, culturaEy and politically in process by which Florence became dominant commune inTuscany (p. 5). The church was not monolithic. Dameron details operations of Florence's myriad ecclesiastical institutions, emphasizing importance of rural alongside urban contexts, secular and monastic as well as mendicant clergy, and underscoring clergy's involvement in local dispute resolution (p. 32) and development of confraternities and charitable institutions that helped maintain social peace (p. 52). Although papal interventions and Florentine politics provoked disputes, especially among upper clergy, these constituted social processes that channeled and reconciled ... competing interests and constituencies (p. 27). Clergy comprised roughly 3% of Florentine population (p. 82), controlled a quarter to a third of landed property (p. 114), and contributed 10-20% to communal fisc in gabelle and other taxes (p. 152). Among upper ranks Ghibellines disappeared (p. 81) and influence of older aristocratic families waned (p. 97) while members of upwardly mobile popolano families rose thanks to their political and economic connections with papacy (p. 105). Meanwhile two-thirds of lower clergy lived on incomes below those of unskilled urban laborers (p. 128). Benefices varied greatly in value, tithes were unreliable, and many priests supplemented their incomes with mortuary fees, altar offerings, and testamentary legacies (pp. 133-135). While elite institutions profited from and stimulated Florence's expanding economy, rising episcopal, communal, and papal taxes in 132Os feE most heavily on lower clergy, precipitating a crisis in diocesan finance and experiments with clerical self-government (pp. …

Transition from Below: Forging Trade Unionism and Workplace Change in South Africa (review)

Reviewed by: Transition from Below: forging trade unionism and workplace change in South Africa Ari Sitas (bio) Karl von Holdt (2003) Transition from Below: forging trade unionism and workplace change in South Africa. Scottsville: University of Natal Press. I thumbed through Von Holdt's Transition from Below with feelings of envy and sadness —envy because in 1979 I had toyed with the idea of doing my PhD work on Witbank, Highveld Steel, KwaGuqa and the hostels; sadness because the area brought back memories of a number of people, crucial to my intellectual and creative development, who have passed away.1 A further cause for envy was that Von Holdt's study could span the period from the initial steps of trade union organisation in the area, the early 1980s, the resistance and insurrection that followed and the transition to democracy. That he does so with commitment, care and analytical rigour makes this book a great contribution to the field of industrial sociology in the country. By focusing on what he terms the 'micro-institutional level' of analysis, he attempts to demonstrate that South Africa's transition is not only a combination of a 'political transition to democracy and an economic transition towards a liberalised economy' but it also entails a 'third dimension': 'a process of internal decolonisation and reconstruction of society' or a 'contested transformation of post-colonial reconstruction' (2003:3). A core concept that explicates his approach and which constitutes the object of this 'contested transformation' is the 'apartheid workplace regime' (2003:5-8). Such a regime of domination at work constitutes, in turn, 'a national pattern of workplace practices' (2003:11). Alongside the above conceptualisation of the workplace, there lies an understanding of the trade union as a central institution but also as a social movement: 'union structure includes the formal institutional girders ... but [End Page 124] also values and meanings, discourses and repertoires of action' (2003:9). The dramatic transformations occur in the KwaGuqa township and the hostels servicing Highveld Steel, the largest private steel producer in the country. They are driven by the dynamics of trade union organisation, initiated by the National Union of Metalworkers (NUMSA), and are taken to an unprecedented crescendo of politicisation through the campaigns of the United Democratic Front (UDF). The second chapter is particularly crucial as the concept of the 'apartheid workplace regime' is given flesh and blood in the context of the steelworks: its racial division of labour, its racial segregation of facilities, the racial structure of power in the workplace, the role of the black 'baas-boys', but, also, the 'differentiation of black migrant and urban workers', and traces how each one is beginning to be challenged by the emerging unionisation in the factory and the area. The third chapter explores the arrival of the trade union and the consolidation of its struggles, the winning of trade union recognition and the role of migrant and urban labourers in an emerging challenge that 'ushered in a period of unstable and fiercely contested transition' (2003: 71). The first consequence of these processes was not only a challenge to 'baasskap' and conditions of work, but also a process of untold hardship between the union shop stewards and a militant strike committee which used violence to establish control and discipline in the workers' struggles. This led to deep divisions and a loss of NUMSA's legitimacy among a sizeable section of the workforce by the late 1980s (2003:83). The fourth chapter illuminates the relationship between social movement unionism, popular alliances and 'ungovernability' in the community. The rolling out of stayaways and resistance brought tensions between unions and community organisations, and between hostel-based migrant workers and residents. The complexity of the tensions was enormous because many of the shop stewards were also 'increasingly active in the community' (2003:107). The fifth chapter explores how the interlacing of manifold struggles spilled over into the factory, and between 1986 and 1987 a 'chaotic' challenge and counter-challenge was under way with the 'lockout strike' of 1987, which ended with the 'union (securing) a relatively orderly surrender', but in the workplace 'it was smashed completely, there were no longer meetings, there was nothing… the militant...

Strange and Exorbitant Demands’:Rural Labour in Nineteenth-Century Bologna

Although rural populations continue to suffer a lack of attention from many historians, an examination of the province of Bologna during the early nineteenth century reveals that this is a mistake. As a substantial literature now shows for the case of France, peasants were not simply ignorant in their political actions during nineteenth-century revolutions. This article suggests that rural populations could also be more sophisticated in terms of labour developments than urban-focused historians generally allow. Rice cultivation began dramatically to alter the Bolognese plains during the Revolutionary era, and the rural labouring population responded in two phases. The first, during the Restoration, was a battle against ricefields altogether: in 1816 and 1817 several communities attacked and destroyed ricefieldsin what might be considered an agricultural equivalent of machine-breaking. By the second phase, during the 1840s and 1850s, ricefield workers were engaging in full-blown strikes, several years before the province’s urban labourers made that transition. The evidence of the province of Bologna thus suggests that the urban path to working-class formation must be viewed within the context of rural labour as well.

Bread, or Bullets! Urban Labor and Spanish Colonialism in Cuba, 1850-1898

Emerging from an exhaustive if not exhausting meditation on the causes, contingencies and conjunctures of 1898, Cuban historiography is now turning to relatively unexamined issues in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Joan Casanovas’s Bread, or Bullets! Urban Labor and Spanish Colonialism in Cuba, 1850–1898, opens an important new area of research as it delves into the formation of an urban working class, comprised mostly of tobacco workers, and its intimate relationship to the linked processes of slave emancipation and the acquisition of independence from Spain. Casanovas challenges the teleology of narratives that see in the mid-nineteenth century rise of the labor movement the origins of a militancy that culminated in 1959. Aiming to reinsert workers’ agency and aspirations into an account dominated by a notion of workers as passive recipients of ideologies, the book focuses on local economic and political conditions as principal factors shaping labor consciousness.With an impressive accumulation of Spanish, North American, and Cuban sources, Casanovas renders a complex Cuban world of shifting colonial policy, rapidly changing demographics and a growing export economy. In addition, his field of vision rightly includes attention to Spain’s own transformations with regard to its imperial status and the nature of its domestic regime. In his account, currents of reformism, separatism, abolitionism, and pro-Spanish sentiment jostled for the loyalty of urban laborers, themselves divided between recent Spanish immigrants and Cubans of both Spanish and African origin. By the same token, once labor groups formed, they impinged on the colonial state persistently but only sometimes successfully. Casanovas integrates the consequences of an emerging collective urban labor consciousness into the momentous events of nineteenth-century Cuban history. His expansive argument includes claims that workers supported and in some ways impelled slave emancipation, dispersed to locations that would later prove strategic, such as Key West, during the war of 1868–78 and provided one of the bases upon which José Martí built a revolutionary coalition. The book makes a compelling case for the significance of the relatively neglected development of Cuba’s colonial urban labor movement.Yet it is perhaps a consequence of its well-executed ambition and scope that some issues do not receive the attention they are due. Although Casanovas includes descriptions of several aspects of workers’ lives, their “making” as a working class remains only tenuously explored. The practice of reading in cigar factories, the creation of mutual aid societies, the interracial character of many unions and the fluctuating degrees of repression all appear as evidence that some kind of change was indeed occurring. Yet in the absence of workers’ voices the texture of these changes is elusive. Hence his assertions about the appeal of anarchism over reformism only raise the question, why did workers respond to some ideologies and not others? Although the faltering commitment to reformism is persuasively argued, the turn to anarchism is given cursory treatment. The anarchist ranks grew, he argues, because its ideas were disseminated widely. This is not implausible, but it does beg the question, how did workers come to understand, adopt, and spread anarchist beliefs and practices? Casanovas has synthesized prodigious research and made key claims. If this book prompts historians to inquire more closely into the ways the Cuban urban laboring class was, as E.P. Thompson put it, “present at its own making,” that will only add to its achievement.

Bread, or Bullets! Urban Labor and Spanish Colonialism in Cuba, 1850-1898

A documented history of organized labour in 19th-century Cuba. It focuses on how urban labourers joined together in collective action during the transition from slave to free labour and in the last decades of Spanish colonial rule.

Bread, or bullets!: urban labor and Spanish colonialism in Cuba, 1850-1898

A documented history of organized labour in 19th-century Cuba. It focuses on how urban labourers joined together in collective action during the transition from slave to free labour and in the last decades of Spanish colonial rule.

Money and prices : some evidence from India

The objective of this paper is to examine the long-run relationship between supply of money and prices. The prices considered are wholesale price and consumer price indices for industrial workers, urban non-manual workers and agricultural labourers. Using the null hypothesis of cointegration, it is shown that the supply of money and consumer price indices for urban non-manual workers and agricultural labourers are cointegrated in the long-run. Both the prices - namely, urban non-manual workers and agricultural labourers - form a stable relationship with money supply in the long-run.

The neo‐authoritarian dilemma and the labor force: Control and bankruptcy vs freedom and instability

Neo‐authoritarian leaders confront one of their greatest dilemmas when attempting to decide what to do about China's non‐agricultural labor force. Should leaders continue to maintain short‐term order and stability by providing comparatively comfortable employment and benefits to a state‐sponsored workforce, even as two‐thirds of all state enterprises are experiencing financial difficulties and central government deficits are rising? Or should they permit the development of a free market for labor, even though the full implications of a free market — hundreds of millions of surplus rural laborers flooding the cities, tens of millions of surplus urban laborers laid off — are so destabilizing that they are difficult to contemplate? This article discusses the extent to which a neo‐authoritarian program to reform the labor market has succeeded in practice, and it assesses the destabilizing effects of the program. Specifically, it outlines the goals of neo‐authoritarians as they struggle to reform the labor market; the daunting problems that they confront in this struggle; and their limited successes to date. Despite some successful reforms, the article concludes that ‘the neo‐authoritarian dilemma’ with respect to the labor force — stability vs economic modernization — has not been solved.

Regimenting Revelry: Rhenish Carnival in the Early Nineteenth Century

Oneconsequence of the lively debates in the 1970s and 1980s centering on the concept of a peculiar German path (Sonderweg) to the twentieth century has been a reexamination of the nineteenth-centuryBürgertum, the closest Central European counterpart to the French bourgeoisie and the English and American middle and upper middle classes. The study of the educated and propertied urban dwellers who became the core constituents and leading spokesmen of theBürgertumhas flourished, as historians have attempted to identify the consequences for German national development of bourgeois successes and failures.1Neither an estate (as determined by legal privileges) nor an economic class (as defined by common market position), the nineteenth-centuryBürgertumshared at least modest economic security along with overlapping clusters of values, attitudes, and goals and a sense—highly mutable and often ill-defined, to be sure—of who they were. Using moral and behavioral as much as social and economic criteria, a mélange of career and property-owning-groups set itself apart from the aristocracy, the peasantry, urban laborers, and—more belatedly and less clearly—from artisans, tradesmen, and other elements of theMittelstandand claimed in the process an enhanced social and political role as advocates of a transformed society based upon individual achievement.2

Contesting Power: Resistance and Everyday Social Relations in South Asia. By Douglas Haynes and Gyan Prakash. Berkeley: University of Calfornia Press, 1992. x, 310 pp. $40.00.

Historians, sociologists and political scientists have long been interested in riots, rebellions and revolutions. More recently, however, they have focused attention upon quieter, less dramatic confrontations between oppressors and the oppressed. They have pointed out that resistance can occur in everday forms. The specific shapes of everyday resistance are both determined by, and an aspect of, various socio-economic and cultural practices. The present volume explores and analyzes instances of everyday resistance in South Asian history and society. The eight essays cover groups from peasants to urban labourers, and from women to merchants. Several of the essays use unconventional sources and methods to supplement archival research while depicting the processes of the sorts of non-confrontational behaviour which contest existing structures of power. Seen as a whole, the volume suggests that the notion of resistance can be rethought and extended to take in and understand large areas of social activity.

Work and Labor in Early America

Ten leading scholars of early American social history here examine the nature of work and labor in America from 1614 to 1820. The authors scrutinize work diaries, private and public records, and travelers' accounts. Subjects include farmers, farmwives, urban laborers, plantation slave workers, midwives, and sailors; locales range from Maine to the Caribbean and the high seas. These essays recover the regimen that consumed the waking hours of most adults in the New World, defined their economic lives, and shaped their larger existence. Focusing on individuals as well as groups, the authors emphasize the choices that, over time, might lead to prosperity or to the poorhouse. Few people enjoyed sinecures, and every day brought new risks. Stephen Innes introduces the collection by elucidating the prophetic vision of Captain John Smith: that the New World offered abundant reward for one's owne industrie. Several motifs stand out in the essays. Family labor has begun to assume greater prominence, both as a collective work unit and as a collective economic unit whose members worked independently. Of growing interest to contemporary scholars is the role of family size and sex ratio in determining economic decision, and vice ersa. Work patterns appear to have been driven by the goal of creating surplus production for markets; perhaps because of a desire for higher consumption, work patterns began to intensify throughout the eighteenth century and led to longer work days with fewer slack periods. Overall, labor relations showed no consistent evolution but remained fluid and flexible in the face of changing market demands in highly diverse environments. The authors address as well the larger questions of American development and indicate the directions that research in this expanding field might follow.