The Making of the Middle Class: Toward a Transnational History(Radical Perspectives)

In this important and timely collection of essays, historians reflect on the middle class: what it is, why its struggles figure so prominently in discussions of the current economic crisis, and how it has shaped, and been shaped by, modernity. The contributors focus on specific middle-class formations around the world-in Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas-since the mid-nineteenth century. They scrutinize these formations in relation to the practices of modernity, to professionalization, to revolutionary politics, and to the making of a public sphere. Taken together, their essays demonstrate that the historical formation of the middle class has been constituted transnationally through changing, unequal relationships and shifting racial and gender hierarchies, colonial practices, and religious divisions. That history raises questions about taking the robustness of the middle class as the measure of a society's stability and democratic promise. Those questions are among the many stimulated by The Making of the Middle Class, which invites critical conversation about capitalism, imperialism, postcolonialism, modernity, and our neoliberal present. Contributors. Susanne Eineigel, Michael A.Ervin, IÑigo GarcÍa-Bryce, Enrique Garguin, Simon Gunn, Carol E. Harrison, Franca Iacovetta, Sanjay Joshi, Prashant Kidambi, A. Ricardo LÓpez, Gisela Mettele, Marina Moskowitz, Robyn Muncy, Brian Owensby, David S. Parker, Mrinalini Sinha, Mary Kay Vaughan, Daniel J. Walkowitz, Keith David Watenpaugh, Barbara Weinstein, Michael O. West

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments ix Introduction: We Shall Be All: Toward a Transnational History of the Middle Class / A. Ricardo López with Barbara Weinstein 1 Part I: The Making of the Middle Class and Practices of Modernity 27 Thinking about Modernity from the Margins: The Making of a Middle Class in Colonial India / Sanjay Joshi 29 The African Middle Class in Zimbabwe: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives / Michael O. West 45 Between Modernity and Backwardness: The Case of the English Middle Class / Simon Gunn 58 "Aren't We All?": Aspiration, Acquisition, and the American Middle Class / Marina Moskowitz 75 The Gatekeepers: Middle-Class Campaigns of Citizenship in Early Cold War Canada / Franca Iacovetta 87 Commentary on Part I / Barbara Weinstein 107 Part II: Labor Professionalization, Class Formation, and State Rule 119 The Conundrum of the Middle-Class Worker in the Twentieth-Century United States: The Professional Managerial Workers' (Folk) Dance around Class / Daniel J. Walkowitz 121 Becoming Middle Class: The Local History of a Global Story—Colonial Bombay, 1890–1940 / Prashant Kidambi 141 Conscripts of Democracy: The Formation of a Professional Middle Class in Bogotá During the 1950s and Early 1960s / A. Ricardo López 161 The Formation of the Revolutionary Middle Class during the Mexican Revolution / Michael A. Ervin 196 Commentary on Part II / Mary Kay Vaughan 223 Part III: Middle-Class Politics in Revolution 233 A Middle Class Revolution: The APRA Party and Middle-Class Identity in Peru, 1931–1956 / Iñigo García-Bryce 235 Revolutionary Promises Encounter Urban Realities for Mexico City's Middle Class, 1915–1928 / Susanne Eineigel 253 Being Middle Class and Being Arab: Sectarian Dilemmas and Middle-Class Modernity in the Arab Middle East, 1908–1936 / Keith David Watenpaugh 267 Commentary on Part III / Brian Owensby 288 Part IV: Middle-Class Politics and the Making of the Public Sphere 297 The City as a Field of Female Civic Action: Women and Middle-Class Formation in Nineteenth-Century Germany / Gisela Mettele 299 Putting Faith in the Middle Class: the Bourgeoisie, Catholicism, and Postrevolutionary France / Carol E. Harrison 315 Siúticos, Huachafos, Cursis, Arribistas, and Gente de Medio Pelo: Social Climbers and the Representation of Class in Chile and Peru, 1860–1930 / David S. Parker 335 "Los Argentinos Descendemos de los Barcos": The Racial Articulation of Middle-Class Identity in Argentina, 1920–1960 / Enrique Garguin 355 Commentary on Part IV / Robyn Muncy 377 Afterword / Mrinalini Sinha 385 Bibliography 395 Contributors 431 Index 435

About the Author :
A. Ricardo LÓpez is Assistant Professor of History at Western Washington University. Barbara Weinstein is the Silver Professor of History at New York University. She is the author of For Social Peace in Brazil: Industrialists and the Remaking of the Working Class in SÃo Paulo, 1920–1964.

Review :
"Both materially grounded and sensitive to notions of subjectivity and discourse, this timely and provocative volume challenges us to historicize the multiple, transnational formations and meanings of the middle class. Modernity itself is thus recast as a set of multiple, entangled, locally rooted processes that did not begin in 'the West' and travel elsewhere, but were mutually constituted and reconstituted in a global and colonial context." Florencia E. Mallon, Chair, Department of History, University of Wisconsin-Madison "The Making of the Middle Class is a first-rate collection of essays by top scholars writing on a topic of enormous interest: the middle class as an evolving conception and historical reality. The contributors focus on locales around the world. While the issues that they raise take locally specific forms, their essays converge around shared central questions, giving this stimulating collection a rare intellectual unity and focus." Michael Frisch, University at Buffalo, SUNY "Scholars interested in the formation and historical role of the middle class will also value the historiographic discussions scattered through the book and the extensive bibliography." Dennis Gilbert, Reviews in History "The Making of the Middle Class: Toward a Transnational History brings together new work on a subject - the history of the middle class - that has previously seen only fragmented historical discussion.Yet, the volume does more than simply bring the middle classes back into the fold of global history. Rather, by taking a transnational lens, it has spurred an ambitious project to connect the history of the middle classes to broader discussions on global cultural identities, the history of globalization, practices of modernity, imperialism, and neoliberalism. The authors make it clear that their volume represents not the culmination, but the very beginnings, of a historiographical project. [...] The volume offers a strong theoretical baseline for the emergent global histories of the middle class, and it is a collection that any scholar interested in questions of the middle class as sociological or political phenomenon will be wise to read and consider. It successfully broadens spatial conceptions of middle class histories, thoroughly integrating middle class history into global history." -Lisa Ubelaker Andrade, on H-Soz-u-Kult, Dec 2012