SOCIAL THEORY AND SOCIAL SCIENCE

Hoff, Jan. Marx global. Zur Entwicklung des internationalen Marx-Diskurses seit 1965. Akademie Verlag, Berlin 2009. 345 pp. € 49.80.

This dissertation (Freie Universität Berlin, 2008) deals with the growth and diversification of interpretations of Marx's work, as well as of critical theory based on Marxian critical political economy that has emerged since the 1960s. Dr Hoff aims to offer a comprehensive review of this recent reception and influence of Marx's work in different parts of the world, focusing on how the theoretical and institutional development of Marxism studies has evolved across national and language barriers, leading to a genuine globalization of “Marxology”.

Jacques Rancière. History, Politics, Aesthetics. Ed. by Gabriel Rockhill and Philip Watts. Duke University Press, Durham [etc.] 2009. viii, 358 pp. £16.99.

The sixteen essays in this volume, many of which are based on a conference organized at the University of Pittsburgh in March 2005, explore the influence of the work and ideas of the French philosopher Jacques Rancière on various disciplines, from philosophy and history to political theory, literature, art history, aesthetics and film studies. Contributors from all these fields, including French philosophers Alain Badiou and Étienne Balibar, analyse Rancière's work and discuss his place in current debates. In an afterword, the subject of the collection addresses some of the questions and comments raised by the contributors.

HISTORY

Arkel, Dikvan. The Drawing of the Mark of Cain. A Socio-Historical Analysis of the Growth of Anti-Jewish Stereotypes. Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam 2009, 592 pp. € 49.50.

In this book Professor Van Arkel sets out to explain anti-Semitism as a historical phenomenon. Under what conditions do anti-Semitic movements emerge? What evokes large-scale stereotyping? How does anti-Semitism differ from other types of racism? The functionality of the Jewish stereotype and “labelled interaction” are concepts the author employs in answering these questions. The book focuses on the pre-modern period but traces its themes all the way to Hitler's rise to power. See also the review essay by Dienke Hondius in this volume, pp. 333–335.

Children in Slavery through the Ages. Ed. by Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers, and Joseph C. Miller. Ohio University Press, Athens 2009. vi, 234 pp. £37.71.

This is the first of two planned volumes on children in slavery that aim to provide comparative examples of child slavery in world history, ranging from the medieval Islamic world to twentieth-century Hong Kong. The first section focuses on trade in slave children, from the North Atlantic to the areas around the Indian Ocean, the second on the treatment and uses of slave children. This section includes chapters on conscripted children in the Ottoman Empire, palace eunuchs in China and Korea, slave children in eighteenth-century France, and slavery's orphans in the nineteenth-century Chesapeake.

Une démographie au feminine. Risques et opportunités dans le parcours de vie. A Female Demography. Risks and Chances in the Life Course. Ed. par Michel Oris, Guy Brunet, et Virginie De Luca Barrusse. [Population, Family, and Society. Population, Famille et Société, Vol.11.] Peter Lang, Bern [etc.] 2009. vi, 355 pp. € 43.80.

Arguing that examining female trajectories in demographic history is both possible and necessary, the editors of this volume have brought together a selection of articles originally presented at a conference in Lyons, December 2005. Six focus on women, mobility, and migration, and seven on maternity, family size, and birth control. They cover the period from the seventeenth to the twentieth century and deal with several European countries, including France, Spain, the Netherlands, and England, as well as North America, especially Quebec.

Folbre, Nancy. Greed, Lust and Gender. A History of Economic Ideas. Oxford University Press, Oxford [etc.] 2009. xxxiii, 379 pp. $34.95.

In this book Professor Folbre offers a feminist reinterpretation of the history of economic ideas. Basing her approach on the observation that many economists have praised men for pursuing their self-interest but have criticized women for being selfish, she explores debates about greed and lust in Britain, France, and the United States since the eighteenth century. She discusses the ideas of a wide range of writers, from Mandeville, Malthus, and John Stuart Mill to Milton Friedman, and describes the economic and cultural changes that shaped the evolution of patriarchal capitalism and the broader relationship between production and reproduction.

George Padmore. Pan-African Revolutionary. Ed. by Fitzroy Baptiste and Rupert Lewis. [Caribbean Reasonings.] Ian Randle Publishers, Kingston [etc.] 2009. xvi, 209 pp. $24.95.

The ten essays in this volume are a selection from a conference held in Trinidad and Tobago, in October 2003, to mark the centenary of the birth of George Padmore (born Malcolm Ivan Meredith Nurse, 1902–1959), once a communist and a major Pan-Africanist theoretician and activist. The essays address various aspects of Padmore's political life, including his use of periodicals to build a movement, his relationship with C.L.R. James and Kwame Nkrumah, and his difficulty reconciling party communism with the Pan-Africanism of W.E.B. Dubois and Marcus Garvey.

Hilton, Matthew. Prosperity for All. Consumer Activism in an Era of Globalization. Cornell University Press, Ithaca [etc.] 2009. xi, 315 pp. Ill. $65.00; £47.00. (Paper: $26.95; £14.95.)

This study aims to provide a first comprehensive history of the consumer activism that has arisen since the decades following World War II. Professor Hilton, who previously published on consumer movements in Britain and Malaysia (see IRSH, 51 (2006), p. 348, 52 (2007), pp. 373–406, and 53 (2008), p. 341), describes how consumer activism evolved out of product-testing activities into a successful global movement, which saw a reversal of fortunes with the advent of neo-liberalism from the 1980s onward. In the process, the definition of consumerism changed, now focusing more on choice for the happy few than on access for the many.

Intellectuels, artistes et militants. Le voyage comme expérience de l’étranger. Sous la dir. de Anne Dulphy, Yves Léonard, et Marie-Anne Matard-Bonucci. [Comparatisme et Société, no. 10.] Peter Lang, Bruxelles [etc.] 2009. 295 pp. € 31.90; £28.70; $49.95.

The sixteen contributions to this volume, presented originally at a conference in Paris in 2004, use travel reports to study, in Malraux's words, the “transformation de l'expérience en conscience” of the travellers, as well as questions such as whether their travel was meant to discover or rather to confirm preconceived notions. Three categories are specifically considered: intellectuals and militants; exiles and refugees; and writers and artists – all of whom somehow gave expression to what they had experienced. The emphasis is on France, Italy, Spain, and Portugal, from the early twentieth century through the 1950s.

Magnusson, Lars. Nation, State and the Industrial Revolution. The visible hand. [Routledge Explorations in Economic History, Vol. 45.] Routledge, London [etc.] 2009. xi, 183 pp. £80.00.

This book examines to what extent and in which ways the state promoted and shaped the actual form of the different Industrial Revolutions that took place in Europe during the nineteenth century. Challenging the standard view emphasizing the transition from a dirigiste state in early modern Europe to the political economy of laissez faire that emerged during the first half of the nineteenth century, Professor Magnusson argues that the visible hand of the state and its institutions did figure in the Industrial Revolution and as such intervened in the market mechanism.

Ó Gráda, Cormac. Famine. A Short History. Princeton University Press, Princeton [etc.] 2009. xiii, 327 pp. Ill. £16.95.

In this book Professor Ó Gráda explores the causes and consequences of famine over the past five millennia. He deals with various aspects of famine such as the roles of population pressure, public policy, and human agency in causing famine; how food markets can mitigate or exacerbate famine; famine's long-term demographic consequences; and the successes and failures of globalized disaster relief. He aims to demonstrate the importance of famine in the economic and political histories of places such as the Ukraine under Stalin, 1940s Bengal, and Maoist China.

The Origins of Criminology. A Reader. Ed. by Nicole Rafter. Routledge, Abingdon [etc.] 2009. xxvi, 348 pp. £26.99.

This is a collection of sixty-one mainly nineteenth-century texts from pioneers in the practice of criminology, including Johann Kaspar Lavater, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Cesare Lombroso, Alphonse Bertillon, Charles Darwin, Elizabeth Fry, Friedrich Engels, W.E.B. Dubois, Pauline Tarnowsky, Havelock Ellis, and Émile Durkheim, as well as the dying speech of a black slave hanged for a rape in 1768. The texts are arranged in sections on phrenology, moral and mental insanity, evolution, degeneration and heredity, the underclass and the underworld, criminal anthropology, habitual criminals and their identification, eugenic criminology, statistics, and sociology, each with an introduction by Professor Rafter.

Solidarity with Solidarity. Western European Trade Unions and the Polish Crisis, 1980–1982. Ed. by Idesbald Goddeeris. Lexington Books, Lanham [etc.] 2010. xiv, 307 pp. $80.00.

This volume is from a conference held in Brussels and Louvain in December 2006. The ten contributions analyse reactions to the Polish trade union-movement, Solidarność, in Sweden, Spain, Italy, Great Britain, West Germany, France, Denmark, Belgium, and Austria and within the ICFTU and WCL international trade-union confederations. While contributors argue that trade unions sided openly with Solidarność, when such a position might strengthen their own programme or position, they also aim to demonstrate that assistance from numerous other unions was massive, albeit discreet. See also the review essay by Christie Miedema in this volume, pp. 349–351.

Supervision and Authority in Industry. Western European Experiences, 1830–1939. Ed. by Patricia Van den Eeckhout. [International Studies in Social History, Vol. 15.] Berghahn Books, New York [etc.] 2009. viii, 234 pp. $90.00; £45.00.

This volume, based on a conference held at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in December 2005, explores the role of the foreman in American and western European industry before World War I. In the introductory chapter the editor discusses the different forms of supervision in the United States, Britain, France, and Germany. The eight case studies examine wage forms and hierarchy in the artisanal sector, and the textiles, mining, printing, engineering, heavy manufacturing, and car industries in western Europe. In the postscript the editor compares supervision practices in western Europe with those in Russia, Japan, China, and India.

Women and the Material Culture of Needlework and Textiles, 1750–1950. Ed. by Maureen Daly Goggin and Beth Fowkes Tobin. Ashgate, Farnham [etc.] 2009. xvi, 296 pp. Ill. £70.00.

The aim of this illustrated volume is to contribute to the ongoing scholarly redefinition of women's relationship to creative pursuits. Focusing on dress reform, sample making, home sewing, quilting, lace-making, and knitting for soldiers, each of the thirteen contributions examines how needlework both performs gender and, in turn, constructs gender. Geographically, the volume concentrates on the nineteenth and twentieth-century United States, but essays on Canada and early modern Venice are included as well.

COMPARATIVE HISTORY

Fourcade, Marion. Economists and Societies. Discipline and Profession in the United States, Britain, and France, 1890s to 1990s. [Princeton Studies in Cultural Sociology.] Princeton University Press, Princeton [etc.] 2009. xxi, 388 pp. £19.95.

This comparative study explores the political and economic forces that shaped the professional identities, practical activities, and disciplinary projects of economists in the United States, Britain, and France in the twentieth century. Professor Fourcade argues that scientific and practical claims about the economy in the three societies arose from national elites with different intellectual orientations, institutional entanglements, and social goals. This led to distinctive differences in the role and position of economics in the three countries: scientific and mercantile professionalism in the United States, public-minded elitism in Britain, and statist division in France.

CONTEMPORARY ISSUES

Geschiere, Peter. The Perils of Belonging. Autochthony, Citizenship, and Exclusion in Africa and Europe. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago [etc.] 2009. xi, 283 pp. $60.00; £41.00. (Paper: $22.00; £15.00.)

Taking the concept of autochthony as his central point of departure, Professor Geschiere investigates in this comparative study the ambiguities of this notion in two different contemporary national contexts: Cameroon and the Netherlands. After tracing the concept's origins and how it was invoked to exclude presumed outsiders back to classical Athens, he aims to show how, through its relation to processes of globalization, the concept has such strong emotional appeal in present-day national contexts in the global north and south alike. These claims of belonging easily lead, he argues, to violence towards “the other”, as they always remain contested and ambiguous and create an obsession with otherness.

Graeber, David. Direct Action. An Ethnography. AK Press, Oakland [etc.] 2009. xx, 568 pp. $25.95.

This ethnographic study of the global justice movement focuses on the protests against the Summit of the Americas in Quebec City in 2001. In the first four chapters the author, an anthropologist who participated in the protests, narrates his own account of the events. In chapters 5 and 6 he explains direct action, anarchism, direct democracy, and “activist culture”. In the chapters that follow he analyses the meetings, the experiments with new democratic forms and the politics of representation. He concludes with a chapter about violence and the imagination.

AFRICA

Movers and Shakers. Social Movements in Africa. Ed. by Stephen Ellis [and] Ineke van Kessel. [African Dynamics, Vol. 8.] Brill, Leiden [etc.] 2009. vii, 257 pp. € 44.00; $60.00.

This volume, the outcome of a conference held in Leiden in October 2008, comprises eight case studies of late twentieth-century and contemporary social movements in Africa: the global campaign against blood diamonds; the Islamic Courts Union in Somalia; the women's peace movement in Liberia; Catholic social movements in Malawi; a slave emancipation movement in Mauritania; the Islamic social movement in south-west Nigeria; the legacy of liberation movements in South Africa; and Nigerian student initiation societies known as “campus cults”. A theoretical framework is provided by two chapters, respectively addressing social movement theory and African social movements in comparative perspective.

Algeria

MacMaster, Neil. Burning the Veil. The Algerian war and the ‘emancipation’ of Muslim women, 1954–62. Manchester University Press, Manchester [etc.] 2009. xvi, 416 pp. Ill. $95.00.

During the Algerian decolonization war the French set out to “emancipate” Muslim women from male oppression, although in suppressing the insurgency, they also used violence against women. This study explores the roots of this contradiction in the theory of “revolutionary warfare” and the attempt to defeat the National Liberation Front (FLN) by penetrating the Muslim family, seen as a bastion of resistance. Through the fatal association between women's liberation and the assault on the Muslim nation, the author argues, the French “emancipation” elicited a backlash that caused the social and political position of Muslim women to deteriorate.

Guinea

Straker, James D. Youth, Nationalism, and the Guinean Revolution. [African Systems of Thought.] Indiana University Press, Bloomington [etc.] 2009. x, 264 pp. $65.00.

In 1958 Guinea declared independence from France. The nation's first president was Ahmed Sékou Touré, who remained in power until his death in 1984. First hailed as an anti-colonial hero, he later antagonized students and intellectuals by his attempts to rid the country of Eurocentric knowledge. Using official political tracts, newspapers, education journals, novels, poems, plays, photographs, and personal histories, Professor Straker, who specializes in post-colonial literature and cultures, aims to offer a balanced view of the imbalanced impact of the new state's attempts to reshape popular attitudes, social practice and youth awareness.

Nigeria

Falola, Toyin. Colonialism and Violence in Nigeria. Indiana University Press, Bloomington [etc.] 2009. xxii, 231 pp. $65.00. (Paper: $24.95.)

In this book Professor Falola examines how the imposition of colonial rule and the British governance of Nigeria created a legacy of violence from the second half of the nineteenth century to the early 1950s. In seven chapters dealing with colonial conquest, resistance and colonial consolidation, taxation conflicts, gendered violence, verbal violence, radical nationalism, and labour disputes, the author aims to reveal how violence was considered legitimate by the colonialists and Nigerian groups alike and to demonstrate its influence on present-day Nigeria.

AMERICA

Crichlow, Michaeline A. with Patricia Northover. Globalization and the Post-Creole Imagination. Notes on Fleeing the Plantation. Duke University Press, Durham [etc.] 2009. xvi, 305 pp. £15.99.

Culture-creating processes known as creolization are usually associated with plantation societies and with subaltern populations remaking the cultural forms of dominant groups in the Caribbean and plantation America. Examining socio-cultural, political, and economic transformations in the Caribbean and addressing the ideas of Michel Foucault, Henri Lefebvre, Pierre Bourdieu, and others, Professor Crichlow argues that creolization must be expanded beyond plantations and the black Atlantic to include productions of culture wherever vulnerable populations live in situations of modern power inequalities.

Imperial Subjects, Race, and Identity in Colonial Latin America. Ed. by Andrew B. Fisher and Matthew D. O'Hara. [Latin America Otherwise. Languages, Empires, Nations.] Duke University Press, Durham [etc]. 2009. xiv, 303 pp. £59.00. (Paper: £14.99.)

The nine essays in this volume examine how Iberian settlers, African slaves, native Americans, and their multi-ethnic progeny understood who they were as individuals, as members of various communities, and as imperial subjects. The authors explore the relationship between colonial ideologies of difference and the identities that historical actors presented, performed, and defended in their interactions with one another and the Crown and the Church. They aim to show that from the early years of Spanish and Portuguese rule, perceptions of race and ethnicity were fluid.

Reclaiming Latin America. Experiments in radical social democracy. Ed. by Geraldine Lievesley and Steve Ludlam. Zed Books, London [etc.] 2009. xi, 263 pp. £65.00. (Paper: £18.99.)

This collection of thirteen essays on the electoral shift to the left in Latin America aims to warn against over-simplification of this so-called “pink tide” and to demonstrate the variety of political trends that led to it, based on two historical analyses of Latin America as a whole and ten case studies ranging from the anti-imperialism of the Bolivarian alternative for the Americas in Venezuela, Bolivia, and Cuba to the more gradualist routes being taken in Chile, Argentina, and Brazil. The volume also includes chapters on political developments in Nicaragua and Mexico.

Vielstimmige Vergangenheiten. Geschichtspolitik in Lateinamerika. Hrsg. Berthold Molden, [und] David Mayer. [Atención! Jahrbuch des Österreichischen Lateinamerika-Instituts, Band 12.] Lit, Wien [etc.] 2009. 322 pp. € 24.90.

The purpose of this volume is to promote the exchange of research results from different academic communities studying the politics of history and the culture of memory in Latin America. In essays in German, English, and Spanish the twelve contributors aim to present important figures and themes in historical debates in Latin American countries and, from a transnational perspective, to explore their significance for political behaviour. In the opening essay, editor Berthold Molden introduces the concept mnemohegemonics.

Cuba

Yaffe, Helen. Che Guevara. The Economics of Revolution. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke [etc.] 2009. xiii, 354 pp. £75.00.

Fifty years since the Cuban Revolution and over four decades after his death, Ernesto “Che” Guevara is still known mainly as a rebel commander and armed internationalist. His work in Cuba as President of the National Bank, head of the Department of Industrialization, and Minister of Industries has received little attention from historians, social scientists, and other commentators. Based on new archival research and interviews with his contemporaries and colleagues, this book records Guevara's contribution to industrial organization, economic management, and socialist political economy debates as a member of the Cuban government from 1959 to 1965.

Guatemala

Martínez Peláez, Severo. La Patria del Criollo. An Interpretation of Colonial Guatemala. Ed. and intr. by Christopher H. Lutz and W. George Lovell. Transl. by Susan M. Neve and W. George Lovell. Duke University Press, Durham [etc.] 2009. lii, 329 pp. $89.95 (Paper: $24.95.)

Severo Martínez Peláez (1925–1998), a Guatemalan historian and political activist, first published his history of Guatemala in 1970. Its main argument is that Guatemala remains a colonial society because the conditions that arose centuries ago under the dominance of imperial Spain have persisted. The economic circumstances that ensure prosperity for the elite group of criollos, people of Spanish descent born in Guatemala, cause deprivation for predominantly Maya Indians, whose impoverishment is shared by many mixed-race Guatemalans. The present English edition is a heavily abridged version of the original work.

Opie, Frederick Douglass. Black Labor Migration in Caribbean Guatemala, 1882–1923. Foreword by Richard Greenwald and Timothy J. Minchin. University Press of Florida, Gainesville [etc.] 2009. xii, 145 pp. Ill. £65.00.

Prior to the Great Depression, foreign-born workers of African descent were the largest group in Guatemala's Caribbean-coast workforce. Recruited by the Guatemalan government, they had come from the US South and the French and British colonial Caribbean as contract labourers for railroad construction projects. Using ethnographic data, among other sources, this book gives a detailed account of their experiences, their sufferings, and their struggles, and how they were inspired to organize by the ideas of Marcus Garvey.

Haiti

Smith, Matthew J. Red and Black in Haiti. Radicalism, Conflict, and Political Change, 1934-1957. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill 2009. xi, 278 pp. Ill. £24.95.

This is a study about the radical Marxist and black nationalist movements in Haiti during the little researched period from the end of the US occupation in 1934 until the rise of dictator François “Papa Doc” Duvalier to the presidency in 1957. Drawing on archival research, previously unused sources, and interviews, Dr Smith explores how radicalism evolved from a largely unified, elite-led movement in the 1930s into a wider, urban-based popular movement in the 1940s and 1950s that would serve as a blueprint for current forms of protest in Haiti.

The World of the Haitian Revolution. Ed. by David Patrick Geggus [and] Norman Fiering. [Blacks in the Diaspora.] Indiana University Press, Bloomington [etc.] 2009. xviii, 419 pp. Ill. $65.00. (Paper: $24.95.)

This collection of eighteen essays on the history of Haiti from 1791 to 1815 is the result of a conference held in Providence, Rhode Island, in 2004 to commemorate the bicentennial of Haiti's declaration of independence. The first five contributions consider the French colony on the eve of the 1791 slave insurrection, its history, material culture, and “free people of colour”. The next five deal with the events leading up to the revolution and its violent course, five others with the political and economic reverberations in other slave societies and in France, and the last three with its cultural representations.

Mexico

Wright-Rios, Edward. Revolutions in Mexican Catholicism. Reform and Revelation in Oaxaca, 1887–1934. Duke University Press, Durham [etc.] 2009. xiii, 361 pp. Ill. £15.99.

This study investigates how Catholicism was lived and experienced in the Archdiocese of Oaxaca during the turbulent period of modernization in Mexico from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century. Focusing on three “visions” of Catholicism: an archbishop's religious reform project, an elderly indigenous woman's career as a seer and faith healer, and an apparition movement that took shape around a visionary Indian girl, Professor Wright-Rios aims to reveal the complex interactions between the institutional church, individual clergymen, and lay practitioners.

United States of America

Berlin, Ira. The Making of African America. The Four Great Migrations. Viking, New York 2010. 304 pp. $27.95.

In this new synthesizing overview of four centuries of history of people of African descent in America, Professor Berlin distinguishes four periods of mass migration that demarcate African-American life from the seventeenth until the twenty-first centuries: the original Middle Passage, the migration to the American South, the great migration to the North, and the recent immigration by people of African descent to the United States. He argues that African-American communities, families, and individuals have thus alternated continuously between great movement and deep rootedness, an experience constantly remaking black culture. See also David Palmer's review in this volume, pp. 336–339.

Cordillot, Michel. Révolutionnaires du Nouveau Monde. Une brève histoire du mouvement socialiste francophone aux États-Unis, 1885–1922. Lux Éditeur, Montréal 2009. 212 pp. $19.95; € 13.00.

Socialism in the United States had its heyday between the mid-1880s and the early 1920s. This small study explores the vast influence of French immigrants on American socialism in this period. Professor Cordillot deals with the various French immigrant groups involved, from the exiles of the Paris Commune to miners from northern France, and examines their contributions to socialist political struggles, for example with the French-Canadian socialists expelled to New England, and their experiences and problems in adapting to their new life in the United States.

Hahn, Steven. The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. [etc.] 2009. xvii, 246 pp. Ill. £16.95; € 19.80; $21.95.

Based on the Nathan I. Huggins Lectures at Harvard University, the three essays that Professor Hahn has collected in this volume deal with the political activism of slaves and freed people in the United States from the slave emancipations of the eighteenth century through slave activity during the Civil War to the twentieth-century black power movements. In the first chapter, the author considers the dynamics of black politics in the process of emancipation; in the second he argues that historiography may have overlooked a massive slave rebellion during the Civil War; while in the last essay looks at the development and influence of Garveyism.

Maeda, Daryl J. Chains of Babylon. The Rise of Asian America. [Critical American Studies Series.] University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis [etc.] 2009. xviii, 203 pp. Ill. $20.00.

This book is a cultural history of the Asian-American movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Its main themes are Asian-American struggles with and against whiteness, the emergence of Asian-American identity in relation to blackness, and transnational sympathies with Asians, constructed through opposition to the war in Vietnam. Drawing on the Black Power and anti-war movements, Asian-American activists argued that all Asians in the United States should resist assimilation and join forces against racism within the country and imperialism abroad.

Norris, Jim. North for the Harvest. Mexican Workers, Growers, and the Sugar Beet Industry. Minnesota Historical Society Press, St. Paul 2009. xi, 223 pp. Ill. $22.95.

Throughout most of the twentieth century, thousands of Mexican migrant workers, residing, legally or illegally, in Texas, travelled north each year to work for six to eight weeks as betabeleros (sugar beet workers) in the sugar beet fields of the Minnesota-North Dakota Red River Valley. The author examines the development of complex relationships between the parties involved in the sugar beet industry: the American Crystal Sugar Company, the sugar beet growers who formed the powerful RRVSBGA association, and the migrant workers.

Orenic, Liesl Miller. On the Ground. Labor Struggle in the American Airline Industry. [The Working Class in American History.] University of Illinois Press, Urbana [etc.] 2009. xiv, 281 pp. Ill. $25.

Focusing on baggage handlers, this book examines the challenges and successes of unionization at four US airlines from the 1930s through the 1960s. Drawing on company and union records, as well as on interviews with former baggage handlers, Professor Orenic charts how these unskilled workers, who described themselves as “fleet-service clerks”, “ramp agents”, or “equipment servicemen”, formed mutually beneficial alliances with their skilled co-workers, such as aircraft mechanics, and made substantial gains in wages and working conditions, even in the era of supposedly “complacent” labour in the 1950s and 1960s.

Page, Benjamin I. [and] Lawrence R. Jacobs. Class War? What Americans Really Think about Economic Inequality. University of Chicago Press, Chicago [etc.] 2009. xiii, 142 pp. $13.00; £9.00.

The widening economic inequality that Americans experienced since the 1970s might have been expected to ignite class warfare but in fact coincided with the ongoing decline of organized labour, a political drift toward the Republican Party, and an embrace of conservative policies that rely on private markets instead of government. Drawing on hundreds of opinion polls conducted since the 1930s, including a new comprehensive survey, the authors aim to show that across economic, geographic, and ideological lines, most Americans favour free enterprise and practical government programmes to distribute wealth more equitably.

Parker, Christopher S. Fighting for Democracy. Black Veterans and the Struggle against White Supremacy in the Postwar South. [Princeton Studies in American Politics.] Princeton University Press, Princeton [etc.] 2009. xv, 266 pp. € 16.95.

This book is about the relationship between military service and political activism among African Americans. Drawing on interviews conducted with twenty-five veterans as well as data collected in the South during the 1960s for the Negro Political Participation Study, Professor Parker argues that black veterans’ willingness to challenge white supremacy when they returned home depended to a significant extent on their military experiences during World War II and the Korean War.

Shell-Weiss, Melanie. Coming to Miami. A Social History. [Sunbelt Studies.] University Press of Florida, Gainesville [etc.] 2009. xv, 337 pp. Ill. $39.95.

Miami developed over the twentieth century from a small settlement into the fifth largest urban area in the United States, its population and character transformed and shaped by successive waves of immigrants. This social history of the city's development integrates immigration history in the context of the growing Latinization of Miami with issues of gender, race, and cultural identity, and in that of the history of labour, economics, and working-class activism. Professor Shell-Weiss aims to show in particular how pivotal women have been in the development of the only major American city founded by a woman.

Social History of the United States. The 1900s. Ed. by Brian Greenberg [and] Linda S. Watts. The 1910s. Ed. by Gordon Reavley. The 1920s. Ed. by Linda S. Watts, Alice L. George [and] Scott Beekman. The 1930s. Ed. by Cecelia Bucki. The 1940s. Ed. by Mark Ciabattari. The 1950s. Ed. by John C. Stoner [and] Alice L. George. The 1960s. Ed. by Troy D. Paino. The 1970s. Ed. by Laurie Mercier. The 1980s. Ed. by Peter C. Holloran [and] Andrew Hunt. The 1990s. Ed. by Nancy Cohen. ABC-CLIO, Santa Barbara (Calif.) [etc.] 2009. xlix, 433 pp.; xlv, 465 pp.; xlvii, 445 pp.; xliii, 444 pp.; xlv, 411 pp.; xlv, 421 pp.; xlv, 413 pp.; xliii, 358 pp.; xlv, 438 pp.; xlvii, 446 pp. Ill. $995.00; £686.95 (10 vols).

This ten-volume social history of the United States aims to “bridge the gap between 20th-century history as it played out on the grand stage and history as it affected – and was affected by – citizens at the grassroots level”, bringing together lesser-known events and individuals that, according to the publisher, changed the course of American history in the twentieth century. Each volume covers a decade of the twentieth century (a decision explained in the introduction to the series), and each volume is divided into six or seven chapters devoted to major themes in the history of that decade. The 1990s volume, for example, contains chapters on “Corporate Capital in the Morgan Era”, “Working-Class Life in Industrial America”, “The Peopling of Modern America”, “Urban Life”, and “Progressivism and Social Reform”. The chapter named “Working-Class Life in Industrial America” comprises four essays about the changing meaning of work, the American Federation of Labor and craft unionism, the changing composition of the workforce, and industrial feminism. The chapter opens with a general survey and a timeline of the major events and highlights in the four essays that follow. Boxes inserted in the text provide additional information on women and office work, department store clerks, immigrants and housework, the issue of female competition, the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, and the founding of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union. Tables provide statistical data on occupations of male and female workers, clerical workers, strikes, and union membership. Photographs depict people at work, on strike, or demonstrating. The chapter concludes with short biographies of Samuel Gompers, Clara Lemlich, and other key figures, and a bibliography. The other chapters in this and the other nine volumes are organized in a similar manner, each opening with a series introduction, a volume introduction and an index of “Issues of the 20th Century” that classifies all the encyclopaedia's essays according to the following headings: Society and the State, Economy, Environment, Business, Demography, Work and the Workplace, Labor, Immigration/Migration, Popular Culture, Class, Rural/Agricultural, Urban/Suburban, Region, Sex and Gender, Race, Religion, Leisure, Crime and Justice, Social Movements, Children, Family, Youth Culture, War and Society, Violence and Protest, Radicalism and Reform, Conservatism, Health, Housing, and Transportation. The “Labor” heading, for example, lists The Triangle Fire and the IWW and Syndicalism (1910s), Changes in the Industrial Production (1920s), Post War Labor (1940s), Radicalism and Communism (1950s), The New Immigrants (1980s), Immigration by the Numbers, Immigrants and the American Economy, Immigrant Life, Immigration Policy, Restricting Immigration and Immigrants (1990s). Under “Work and the Workplace” we find The City Rethought and Rebuilt (1900s), Fordism and the American Factory System, Strikes and Sabotage (1910s), Women in the Workplace (1920s), The Labor Movement (1930s), The “Good Fight” and Race Relations at Home and in the Military. Under “Class” we find The Quest for Equal Rights (1910s), Proletarian Culture and the “Cultural Front” (1930s), African American Workers, Women Workers (1950s), Persistence of Poverty and Unemployment (1970s), The Conservative Ascendancy, Feminism and its Critics, Demographic Transformation (1980s), The New Gilded Age and the American Social Divide (1990s). Comprising chapters on The Civil Rights Movement, The Student and the Antiwar Movement, The Antipoverty Crusade, The Counterculture Movement, Politics of Gender and Sexuality, Identity Politics and the Environmental Movement, the 1960s volume is devoted entirely to social movements. The volume on the 1930s, with chapters on Modernity and Mass Production, Mass Consumption and Leisure, Urbanization, Politics and Suffrage, Radio, Magazines, and Mass Communication, American or Un-American (which concludes with an essay on eugenics), Modernity and Social Movements, and The End of the 1920s, focuses on modern life and modernity. At the end of each volume are indices of persons and events in the twentieth century and specifically for the decade covered by the volume.

Vapnek, Lara. Breadwinners. Working Women and Economic Independence, 1865–1920. [Women in American History.] University of Illinois Press, Urbana [etc.] 2009. x, 216 pp. Ill. $70.00. (Paper: $25.00.)

In this study of American labour feminism from the end of the Civil War through the victory in the struggle for women's suffrage, Professor Vapnek examines working-class women's individual decisions and collective strategies for organization in combination with middle-class women's programmes for labour reform. She demonstrates how in some cases labouring women allied with middle-class labour reformers, as in the formation of the Women's Trade Union League, while in others they clashed, as in the working-class women's response to efforts by the Domestic Reform League to take them back to positions as domestic servants.

Uruguay

Gregory, Stephen. Intellectuals and Left Politics in Uruguay, 1958–2006. Sussex Academic Press, Brighton [etc.] 2009. vii, 234 pp. £55.00.

This book examines how the engagement of intellectuals in Uruguayan political life changed during the half century before the left gained power for the first time in the electoral victory of the Frente Amplio in October 2004. In the first part the author argues that in the 1960s Uruguayan intellectuals – unsuccessfully – helped unify a fragmented left. Following the coup in 1973, the military attempted to replace the intellectuals they had banned. In the second part he examines the transition to democracy after 1985, when the energies of the progressive intelligentsia were dispersed, as the left became better organized and came closer to assuming power.

Bangladesh

Schendel, Willem van. A History of Bangladesh. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge [etc.] 2009. xxvi, 347 pp. Ill. £15.99.

This history of the Bengal delta, the area that corresponds roughly with modern Bangladesh, begins by explaining how geographical conditions have shaped Bangladesh society and then deals briefly with the eras of Mughal and British colonial rule. The largest part of the book, which is devoted to the most recent developments, examines the partition of Bengal in 1947, when Bangladesh became East Pakistan, the war with Pakistan, and the birth of Bangladesh as an independent state in 1971. Intended for a non-specialist readership, it contains ample text boxes and photographs.

Burma

Charney, Michael W. A History of Modern Burma. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge [etc.] 2009. xiii, 241 pp. Ill. £40.00; $80.00. (Paper: £14.99; $24.99.)

This general history of modern Burma traces the country's development from its colonial past to 2008, when it was struck by cyclone Nargis. Dr Charney explores key themes, such as the political division between lowland and highland Burma, Buddhist monastic opposition to state control, the chronic failure to foster economic prosperity, the economic and political dependency on the People's Republic of China, and the ways in which the military has exerted its control over the country, including the house arrest of Aung San Suu Kyi, leader of the pro-democracy movement.

China

Han, Dongping. The Unknown Cultural Revolution. Life and Change in a Chinese Village. Pref. by Fred Magdoff. Monthly Review Press, New York 2008. xviii, 186 pp. Ill. $16.95.

This concise study of China's Cultural Revolution challenges the established narrative that describes this period as one of great social upheaval leading to economic disaster, the persecution of intellectuals, and frequent instances of senseless violence. Based on interviews and records from his own rural county in the Shandong province, the author aims to show that the Cultural Revolution helped overthrow local hierarchies, establish participatory democracy and economic planning in the rural communes, and expand education and public services, and led to dramatic improvements in quality of life, infrastructure, and agricultural practices in rural China.

India

Ahuja, Ravi. Pathways of Empire. Circulation, ‘Public Works’ and Social Space in Colonial Orissa (c.1780–1914). [New Perspectives in South Asian History, vol. 25.] Orient BlackSwan, Hyderabad 2009. xiv, 362 pp. Maps. [Incl. map.] Rs. 695.00.

This study about the social history of transport explores the circulation of people and goods and the related emergence of infrastructure in India, in particular in the region of Orissa from the pre-colonial period of the late eighteenth century through World War I. In the first part of the book Dr Ahuja drafts a conceptual framework to analyse colonial transportation history, and in the second part she offers an empirical reconstruction of the transformation of the circulatory regime in the specific contexts of British-ruled districts and princely states of Orissa. See also Prakash Kumar's review in this volume, pp. 339–341.

Choudhury, Deep Kanta Lahiri. Telegraphic Imperialism. Crisis and Panic in the Indian Empire, c.1830. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke [etc.] 2010. xii, 277 pp. Ill. Maps. £55.00.

In this study of the development of the telegraph system in the British Indian Empire from the 1830s into the twentieth century, Dr Choudury interprets this communication network as one of the most important transnational phenomena of the British Empire. He aims to show how British India became a crucial strategic and commercial factor in the global telegraph network, how Indian colonial society and the British imperial system were transformed by the new communication network, while at the same time the technology remained largely dependent on human labour (see also the author's article in IRSH Supplement 11, “Uncovering Labour in Information Revolutions, 1500–2000”, pp. 45–71). See also Michael Mann's review in this volume, pp. 341–343.

Gidwani, Vinay. Capital, Interrupted. Agrarian Development and the Politics of Work in India. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis [etc.] 2008. xxv, 337 pp. Ill. $25.00.

In this history and geography of agrarian capitalism and labour politics in central Gujarat, India, Professor Vinay examines how the entrepreneurial landowning Patel caste became the dominant caste of agrarian capitalists in the region, as well as a powerful global diaspora of merchants, industrialists, and professionals. Investigating the Patels’ ascent, he analyses its broad implications for the nature of labour and capital worldwide. See also the book review by Sanderien Verstappen and Mario Rutten in this volume, pp. 344–346.

Guha, Ranajit. The Small Voice of History. Collected Essays. Ed. and with an introd. by Partha Chatterjee. Permanent black, Ranikhet 2009. x, 666 p. Rs. 895; € 30.00.

This collection brings together forty-four essays, book reviews, and lectures, written between 1947 and 2008 by the founder of the Subaltern Studies group, the Indian historian, Ranjit Guha. Three-quarters of these essays were previously published in a variety of journals and collections, albeit poorly accessible to an international readership in some cases; eleven are published here for the first time. The editor has ordered the text in six thematic sections: “Rules of Property”; “Subaltern Histories”; “The Two Histories of Empire”; “The Promise of Nationhood”; “Democracy Betrayed”; and “Exile”. In his introduction, Professor Chatterjee offers an intellectual biographical portrait of Dr Guha.

Israel

Horrox, James. A Living Revolution. Anarchism in the Kibbutz Movement. Foreword by Uri Gordon. AK Press, Edinburgh [etc.] 2009. v, 168 pp. £13.00; $17.95.

In this history of the early kibbutz movement, Mr Horrox examines the development of these communities based on cooperative, egalitarian principles against the background of the early development of Palestinian-Jewish and Israeli society. The author aims to show that the early kibbutz movement, both in its intellectual roots and in its practical evolution, was strongly influenced by anarchism and more particularly by anarchist cooperative ideas.

Japan

Kawashima, Ken C. The Proletarian Gamble. Korean Workers in Interwar Japan. [Asia-Pacific. Culture, Politics, and Society.] Duke University Press, Durham [etc.] 2009. x, 297 pp. £59.00. (Paper: £14.99.)

As the largest migrant labour force in Japan during the 1920s and 30s, Koreans experienced extreme instability on the labour and housing markets. Professor Kawashima examines in this study how the labour power of Korean workers in Japan was commodified in a context of racist and contingent conditions of exchange and state-induced racism. Demonstrating that the Korean minority was deeply divided, he also describes how migrants organized successfully in the Korean and Japanese communist labour unions. See also Kristine Dennehy's review in this volume, pp. 346–348.

South Korea

Song, Jesook. South Koreans in the Debt Crisis. The Creation of a Neoliberal Welfare Society. [Asia-Pacific. Culture, Politics, and Society.] Duke University Press, Durham [etc.] 2009. xxvi, 201 pp. £14.99.

This book offers a comprehensive impression of developments in South Korean welfare society during the Asian Debt Crisis (1997–2001). Drawing on her experience during the crisis while employed at a public works programme in Seoul, Professor Song provides an ethnographic assessment of the efforts by the state and civilians to regulate social insecurity, instability, and inequality through assistance programmes. She aims to demonstrate that South Korean neo-liberal social management not only prioritized particular population groups (the homeless and underemployed youth) but within these groups also discriminated between “deserving” and “undeserving” welfare citizens.

Australia

Campo, Natasha. From Superwomen to Domestic Goddesses. The Rise and Fall of Feminism. Peter Lang, Bern [etc.] 2009. vii, 263 pp. Ill. € 44.50

This is a study of feminism in Australia as represented in the popular media between 1980 and 2007. Dr Campo sets out to demonstrate how its meaning in Australian public memory shifted from an understanding that it had liberated women to lead fulfilling lives to a memory of feminism as oppressive, wrong-headed, dangerous, and overly ambitious.

EUROPE

The Idea of Work in Europe from Antiquity to Modern Times. Ed. by Josef Ehmer and Catharina Lis. Ashgate, Farnham [etc.] 2009. xv, 386 pp. Ill. £60.00.

Focusing on developments in late medieval and early modern Europe, the sixteen chapters in this volume, based on papers presented at a conference organized at the University of Salzburg in 2003, explore perceptions, attitudes, cultures, and representations of work. In the first contribution, Catharina Lis deals with perceptions of work in classical antiquity. Other themes covered include the relation between work and identity; representations of work in images and in literary texts; perceptions of work in early modern theoretical literature; and perceptions of work and labour practices.

France

Le commerce du luxe à Paris aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles. Echanges nationaux et internationaux. Sous la dir. de Stéphane Castelluccio. Peter Lang, Bern [etc.] 2009. xvii, 421 pp. Ill. €58.00.

The fifteen essays in this collection, based on a conference, explore the luxury trades in Paris during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Some contributions are about the producers and merchants of jewellery, tapestries, paintings, porcelain and other luxury goods; others focus on their clients – mainly European princes – and their purchases and collections. The volume opens with an article on the lottery of Madame Rambouillet, whose catalogue of articles put up for lottery offers a wealth of historical information.

Jaurès, Jean. Les années de jeunesse (1859–1889). Textes rassemblés, present[é]s et annotés par Madeleine Rebérioux et Gilles Candar. [Oeuvres de Jean Jaurès, tome 1.] Fayard, Paris 2009. 657 pp. € 32.00.

This first volume in a planned seventeen-volume edition of Jean Jaurès’ works covers the years of his youth, his studies, his loves, and his entry into politics, featuring hitherto unpublished letters and previously unknown articles from local newspapers in Tarn, the department where Jaurès was born and for which he was a Republican député from 1885 to 1889. The material is divided into seven thematic chapters, each with an introduction by one of the editors.

Lafargue, Paul. Paresse et revolution. Écrits 1880–1911. Préf. et ann. par Gilles Candar et Jean-Numa Ducange. [Texto.] Éditions Tallandier, Paris 2009, 431 pp. € 10.00.

Paul Lafargue (1842–1911), prolific journalist and pamphlet writer, participant in the Paris Commune of 1871 and in the Section Française de l'Internationale Ouvrière (SFIO), and a son-in-law of Karl Marx, is best known for his pamphlet, Le droit de la paresse. Intending to convey a broader impression of Lafargue's interests, this volume reproduces a selection of pamphlets and articles that Lafargue wrote for newspapers such as Le socialiste, L'Egalité, Le Petit Sou, and L'Humanité on various topics including the suppression of black people, the position of women in society, the Russian Revolution of 1905, and Victor Hugo.

Mencherini, Robert. Midi rouge, ombres et lumières. Une histoire politique et sociale de Marseille et des Bouches-du-Rhône 1930 à 1950. 2. Vichy en Provence. [Collection Histoire: enjeux et débats.] Éditions Syllepse, Paris 2009. 600 pp. € 23.00.

This volume, the second of a trilogy on the political and social history of the city of Marseille and the Rhone delta, covers the period between June 1940 and November 1942, examining the consequences for the region of the establishment of the Vichy regime and its “National Revolution”, which involved the banning of trade unions, the dissolution of representative bodies, persecution of Jews and other “undesirables”, and exerting control over the population through numerous youth and other political and non-political organizations (on volume I, see IRSH, 51 (2006), p. 529).

Messenger, David A. L'Espagne Républicaine. French Policy and Spanish Republicanism in Liberated France. Sussex Academic Press, Brighton [etc.] 2009. xi, 196 pp. £55.00.

This book examines France's relationship with Franco's Spain in the context of postwar French politics and foreign policy, in particular during the period 1943–1946. Using not only traditional diplomatic resources, but also newspapers and texts by associations and individuals connected with the Resistance, Professor Messenger explores how, after World War II, the idea of justice and renewal arose in political and public debates about the cause of Spanish republicanism in liberated France, and how simultaneously ideas on national security and Realpolitik influenced policy toward authoritarian Spain.

Mouvement ouvrier et formation. Genèses: de la fin du XIXe siècle à l'après Seconde Guerre mondiale. Sous la dir. de Guy Brucy, Françoise F. Laot et and Emmanuel de Lescure. L'Harmattan, Paris 2009. 150 pp. € 14.50.

From the outset the labour movement has had to deal with the issue of education in its various aspects, such as courses for trade-union activists, vocational training, and adult education. The seven contributions to this volume, based on a conference organized in Lyons in April 2006, explore the ties between education and the labour movement in France, from the end of the nineteenth century to the postwar period, in chapters on Georges Sorel's theories about education, the Fédération des Amicales d'instituteurs, the universités populaires of the late nineteenth century, a Christian women's union's professional and activist training, education at the CFTC-CFDT, the Centre confédéral d’éducation ouvrière, and the Jeunesse ouvrière chrétienne.

Plack, Noelle. Common Land, Wine and the French Revolution. Rural Society and Economy in Southern France, c.1789–1820. Ashgate, Farnham [etc.] 2009. xiv, 215 pp. Maps. £65.00.

This study explores how Revolutionary, Napoleonic, and Restoration legislation transformed the tenure of communal land in one region of southern France (the department of the Gard). Contesting revisionist historiography, Dr Plack argues that the Revolution's agrarian policy profoundly affected French rural society and the economy, with privatization of common land, alongside the abolition of feudalism, and the transformation of judicial institutions as key aspects of the Revolution in the countryside. In the region of the Gard, this led to an increase in viticulture.

Sand, George. Oeuvres complètes. Sous la dir. de Béatrice Didier. Le diable à Paris 1845-1846. Le Diable aux Champs 1857. Édition critique établie par Jeanne Goldin. [Textes de littérature moderne et contemporaine, vol. 114.] Honoré Champion Éditeur, Paris 2009. 652 pp. Ill. € 120.

The new volume in this valuable series contains first of all the three contributions that George Sand wrote for Le Diable à Paris, a project conceived by the publisher Hetzel, who joined writers such as Balzac, Nerval, and Nodier to illustrators such as Gavarni. One of Sand's pieces, “Relations d'un voyage chez les sauvages de Paris”, was inspired by the Iowa Indians brought to Paris by George Catlin in 1845. Her dialogue Le Diable aux champs, originally written in 1851 but published only in 1855–1857, completes this well-annotated book. The editor provides interesting additional documents, bibliographies, and various indexes.

Schrupp, Antje. Virginie Barbet. Une Lyonnaise dans l'Internationale. Préface de Claire Auzias. Suivi de Correspondance, De l'hérédité, Manifeste des femmes lyonnaises adhérentes à l'Internationale, Pourquoi je suis collectiviste, Déisme et athéisme, Réponse d'un membre de l'Internationale á Mazzini. [Collection Commune Mémoire.] Atelier de création libertaire, Lyon 2009. 118 pp. €10.00.

Virginie Barbet founded the Lyons section of the Alliance de la démocratie socialiste and wrote for socialist newspapers, reporting on the strike of the Lyons silk workers in 1869, and writing about socialist and feminist theory. By relating her position in the First International and publishing some of her texts, this volume sheds light on the work of this woman, who always remained in the shadow of male leaders of the International. The chapters about Barbet's work are taken from Schrupp's dissertation, Nicht Marxistin und auch nicht Anarchistin. Frauen in der Ersten Internationale (see IRSH, 46 (2001), p. 492).

Sutherland, D.M.G. Murder in Aubagne. Lynching, Law, and Justice during the French Revolution. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge [etc.] 2009. xvii, 316 pp. £50.00.; $95.00.

The discovery in the archives in Paris and Marseille of a wave of sensational revenge murders in the small town of Aubagne near Marseilles in 1795 provided the foundation for this study of violence in Languedoc and Provence during the French Revolution. Using the techniques of micro-history, Professor Sutherland examines factionalism, models of Mediterranean violence, vendetta, terror, and counter-terror in small towns like Aubagne and examines how this led to the murders and prison massacres in the south of France after the fall of Robespierre in 1794.

Tilburg, Patricia A. Colette's Republic. Work, Gender, and Popular Culture in France, 1870-1914. Berghahn Books, New York [etc.] 2009. xiii, 231 pp. Ill. $90.00; £55.00.

Belle époque writer, performer, and cultural icon, Colette, unlike most of her contemporaries in France, attended a secular public school as part of the first generation of girls whose education reflected the secular revolution of the 1870s. This biographical detail is the foundation for a book that relates republican ideas to cultural innovation. By examining republican pedagogical culture and cultural settings such as the music hall and republican school memoirs, Professor Tilburg argues that the morale laïque, in addition to reaffirming republican values, inadvertently helped organize and make acceptable the social and sexual rebellion of bourgeois women such as Colette.

Whitney, Susan B. Mobilizing Youth. Communists and Catholics in Interwar France. Duke University Press, Durham [etc.] 2009. xii, 318 pp. Ill. £77.00. (Paper: £18.99.)

In the two decades following World War I, both communists and Catholics cultivated strong youth movements in France. In this study, Professor Whitney explores the origins, ideologies, major campaigns, styles of political and religious engagement, and male and female branches of these two youth movements. With a special focus on the place and role of gender, she analyses the impact of World War I, the role of work and leisure, the impact of the Depression, the importance of Soviet ideas and active intervention in French communist youth politics and the state's increased attention to youth in the Popular Front period.

Germany

Cox, John M. Circles of Resistance. Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany. [Studies in Modern European History, Vol 62.] Peter Lang, New York [etc.] 2009. viii, 200 pp. € 47.00.

Taking as its point of entry the sabotage of the “Soviet Paradise”, a Nazi propaganda exhibition in Berlin in 1942, this study explores resistance networks of young German Jews and other young dissidents during the Nazi dictatorship. Central to this study are the Herbert Baum groups, led by members of Germany's Communist Party (KPD). The author aims to demonstrate that young German Jews created an intellectually robust subculture under the Third Reich, thereby offering a reconsideration of traditional views on leftist and Jewish resistance and the youth subcultures of Nazi Germany.

Dollard, Catherine L. The Surplus Woman. Unmarried in Imperial Germany, 1871–1918. [Monographs in German History, Vol. 30.] Berghahn Books, New York [etc.] 2009. x, 272 pp. $95.00; £47.50.

This book is about the demographic surplus of unmarried women, known as the Frauenüberschuß, and the debate about it, which, according to the author, was uniquely German. In the first section Dr Dollard investigates stereotypes of the unmarried woman in German literature and sexology, conducts a demographic examination of the female surplus, and explores how the German women's movement combined the construction of the female surplus with the ideology of spiritual motherhood. The second section offers biographical case studies of seven prominent single women and reformers: Lily Braun, Ruth Bré, Elisabeth Gnauck-Kühne, Helene Lange, Alice Salomon, Helene Stöcker, and Clara Zetkin.

Korzetz, Ingo. Die Freikorps in der Weimarer Republik. Freiheitskämpfer oder Landsknechthaufen? Aufstellung, Einsatz und Wesen bayerischer Freikorps 1918–1920. Tectum Verlag, Marburg 2009. 181 pp. Ill. € 24.90.

Based on a large source collection from the Bavarian state archives, this study aims to offer a detailed exploration of the creation, employment, and character of the Bavarian Freikorps, the voluntary (para)military Free Corps. The Free Corps was a central force in stabilizing the parliamentary democratic system of the Weimar Republic in the tumultuous first two years of its existence (1918–1920), when, under the supreme command of SPD Minister of Defence Gustav Noske, they were pivotal in suppressing the communist revolutions. The author offers a comprehensive description of the Free Corps’ early origins and social structure, and the motivation and mentality of its membership.

Kundnani, Hans. Utopia or Auschwitz. Germany's 1968 Generation and the Holocaust. [Crises in World Politics.] Hurst & Company, London 2009. xiii, 374 pp. £16.99.

In this history of the German Left since the 1960s, the author uses biographies of leading members of the 1968 generation to show that, despite the anti-fascist rhetoric of the West German 1968 generation, tendencies existed in the student movement to relativize the Holocaust and to put the Nazi past behind them. The author aims to reveal how this ambivalence toward the Nazi past influenced the foreign policy of Gerhard Schröder's and Joschka Fischer's red-green government of 1998–2005.

Last, George. After the “Socialist Spring”. Collectivisation and Economic Transformation in the GDR. [Monographs in German History, Vol. 26.] Berghahn Books, New York [etc.] 2009. xxxviii, 250 pp. £45.00.

This book analyses the role of low-level political and economic functionaries in organizing and managing the collective farms and in implementing and drafting agricultural policy in the German Democratic Republic from the 1960s to the 1980s. Focusing on the region of Erfurt, Dr Last examines how East Germans responded to the end of private farming, and how the regime pursued its objectives. In doing so, he seeks to provide an historical analysis of the SED dictatorship that qualifies the traditional top-down model of the functioning of authority in the GDR.

Mayer, Gustav. Als deutsch-jüdischer Historiker in Krieg und Revolution 1914–1920. Tagebücher, Aufzeichnungen, Briefe. Hrsg. und eingel. von Gottfried Niedhart. [Deutsche Geschichtsquellen des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts, Band 65.] R. Oldenbourg Verlag, München 2009. 494 pp. € 69.80.

Gustav Mayer (1871–1948) was a member of the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD) and a pioneering historian of the German and European labour movements. His works include a biography of Friedrich Engels and an edition of the papers of Ferdinand Lassalle. This is an edition of Mayer's diaries, notes, and letters, from World War I through the revolutionary postwar years. Besides his wife Flora, his most important correspondents and interlocutors were Friedrich Meinecke, Hermann Oncken, Karl Jaspers, Karl Kautsky, and Camille Huysmans. The volume also reproduces notes and letters on the Stockholm Conference and the situation in Russia in 1917.

Miller-Idriss, Cynthia. Blood and Culture. Youth, Right-Wing Extremism, and National Belonging in Contemporary Germany. [Politics, History, and Culture.] Duke University Press, Durham [etc.] 2009. xvi, 233 pp. £14.99.

This study provides an ethnographic analysis of how patterns of national identity in Germany are constructed and transformed across generations. Drawing on research she conducted at three vocational schools in Berlin between 1999 and 2004, Professor Miller-Idriss examines how the working-class students and their middle-class, college-educated teachers, mostly members of a generation that hold their parents’ generation responsible for National Socialism, struggle with their different views about citizenship and national pride. She argues that teachers’ well-intentioned, state-sanctioned efforts to counter nationalist pride often elicit a backlash, increasing the appeal of extremist right-wing groups to their students.

Palmowski, Jan. Inventing a Socialist Nation. Heimat and the Politics of Everyday Life in the GDR, 1945-1990. [New Studies in European History.] Cambridge University Press, Cambridge [etc.] 2009. xv, 342 pp. Ill. £60.00; $99.00.

One of the explanations for the vehement and sudden collapse of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), an apparently stable state, is the difficulty citizens had identifying with the GDR. In this study, Professor Palmowski explores how the socialist regime invented a “national” identity in the GDR, and how citizens engaged with it. He argues that, since socialism contradicted its own ideals of community, identity, and environmental care, citizens devised rival meanings of nationhood and identity, which allowed them to abandon their “nation” with remarkable ease.

Richthofen, Esther von. Bringing Culture to the Masses. Control, Compromise and Participation in the GDR. [Monographs in German History, Vol. 24.] Berghahn Books, New York [etc.] 2009. ix, 239 pp. £55.00.

This dissertation (University College London, 2005) is a study of the complexities of cultural life in the German Democratic Republic from the 1950s to the 1980s, focusing especially on the 1960s and 1970s, and examining the three groups of cultural agents: participants in state-organized cultural activities, cultural functionaries, and SED leaders. Challenging the totalitarian top-down perspective, the author argues that cultural life was determined by interaction and interdependence on all sides and concludes that this provides the key to understanding the functioning of the East German dictatorship.

Schulz, Gerhard. Mitteldeutsches Tagebuch. Aufzeichnungen aus den Anfangsjahren der SED-Diktatur 1945-1950. Hrsg., komm. und eingel. von Udo Wengst. [Biographische Quellen zur Zeitgeschichte, Band 25.] R. Oldenbourg Verlag, München 2009. 269 pp. € 34.80.

Throughout his life Gerhard Schulz (1924–2004), a pioneer in contemporary historiography in West Germany, kept a diary. His diary is particularly rich for the period from 1945 to 1950, when he lived in the Soviet Occupation Zone and GDR. As a student and one of the “Neulehrer” (teachers trained in the context of de-Nazification), he witnessed the Bolshevization of the SED. He increasingly drifted away from the system, eventually moving to West Berlin in 1950. His diary documents the birth of the SED dictatorship, described from an individual perspective.

Great Britain

John, Angela V. Evelyn Sharp. Rebel Woman, 1869–1955. Manchester University Press, Manchester [etc.] 2009. xv, 281 pp. € 16.99.

This is the first biography of the journalist, feminist, and writer of schoolgirl fiction, Evelyn Sharp. A Manchester Guardian journalist for over four decades, she became the first regular contributor to its Women's Page. Before and during World War I she was a militant suffragette, editing the newspaper Votes for Women. Increasingly committed to pacifism and international humanitarianism, she worked with Quakers in Weimar Germany and in 1922 in Russia, where she helped famine victims. This biography draws on Sharp's publications, as well as on letters and diaries describing her experiences, such as famine relief in Soviet Russia and daily life in war-time Kensington.

Kay, Alison C. The Foundations of Female Entrepreneurship. Enterprise, Home and Household in London, c.1800–1870. [Routledge Studies in Business History, vol. 17.] Routledge, New York [etc.] 2009. xii, 185 pp. Ill. £85.00.

The author of this book sets out to reveal why business was a useful and possible avenue for women in nineteenth-century London and to examine the types of trades women engaged in. Using a variety of evidence ranging from trade cards to memoirs and combining data from fire insurance records, directories, and the census, Dr Kay also explores the relationship between home, household headship, and enterprise. By investigating how the endeavours of London's women entrepreneurs tied in with Victorian values, as opposed to representing a breakaway or escape, the book conveys a picture richer than the stereotypical widow-proprietor and thus adjusts the historical record.

Molinari, Véronique. Citoyennes, et après? Le droit de vote des femmes et ses conséquences en Grande-Bretagne, 1918–1939. Peter Lang, Bern [etc.] 2009. vi, 291 pp. Ill. € 49.50.

In 1918, after a half-century of struggle, British women were among the first in Europe to obtain the right to vote. This study aims to explain the course of events in the two decades that followed, when 8.5 million women voters joined the electorate. To what extent did women's suffrage change the political landscape in Britain? While suffragettes regarded women's suffrage as an instrument to oppose numerous legal, economic, and social inequalities, the author also examines whether the enfranchisement of women resulted in other reforms and in a more general improvement of women's lives.

Navickas, Katrina. Loyalism and Radicalism in Lancashire, 1798–1815. [Oxford Historical Monographs.] Oxford University Press, Oxford [etc.] 2009. x, 274 pp. £55.00.

Drawing on sources such as letters, diaries, and broadside ballads, this book focuses on the politics of ordinary inhabitants of Lancashire during the Napoleonic wars, a period of violent popular politics, in which highly active and vocal groups emerged: extreme republicans, more moderate radicals, Luddites, early trade-unionists, and networks of “Church-and-King” loyalists and Orange lodges. The author aims to shed new light on the complicated dynamics between these movements, and to highlight Lancashire's distinctive political culture and its role at the heart of the Industrial Revolution.

Winstanley, Gerrard. The Complete Works of Gerrard Winstanley. Vol. I. Vol. II. Ed. by Thomas N. Corns, Ann Hughes, and David Loewenstein. Oxford University Press, Oxford [etc.] 2009. xii, 600 pp; 465 pp. $335.00.

Marking the 400th anniversary of his birth, this is the first complete edition of the works of Gerrard Winstanley (1609–1676), well-known as a leader of the True Levellers or Diggers in 1649 and afterwards. Included are three early treatises (not previously reprinted), which put his writings in defence of the Digger movement in a new light. A few manuscripts and dispersed texts are added. The editors, coming from English and History departments, have provided a 100-page introduction, abundant notes identifying Winstanley's many references to scripture, for example, and a biographical appendix.

Italy

Adorni, Carlo. 1921. Nascita del Partito Comunista e sviluppo del fascismo a Livorno. Edititrice “Il Quadrifoglio”, Livorno, 2009. 224 pp. Ill. € 15.00.

The author presents a series of vignettes and images to convey an impression of the events of 1921 in the industrial city of Livorno, an anarchist stronghold, and in the town of Cecina to its south. This was the year when Bordiga and Gramsci left the congress of the Italian socialists to found the Partito Comunista Italiano, but it was also the year that the local Fascio, founded in late 1920, entered the political scene, together with a relatively strong group of anti-fascist Arditi del popolo. Depicted in this format, Livorno figures as a microcosm to Italy's macrocosm.

Galzerano, Giuseppe. Enrico Zambonini. Vita e lotte, esilio e morte dell'anarchico emiliano fucilato dalla Repubblica Sociale Italiana. Galzerano Editori, Casalvelino Scalo 2009. Ill. 333 pp. € 23.00.

This is a biography of Enrico Zambonini (1893–1944), an anarchist from the province of Reggio Emilia, who from the 1920s onward spent much of his life in exile, including in Spain, where he fought in the Civil War. Arrested in France and extradited to Italy in 1942, he escaped and joined the resistance but was soon caught and shot. The author, who has written extensively on Italian anarchism (see e.g. IRSH, 53 (2008), pp 364–365), has gathered many details of Zambonini's life, and quotes at length from archival and other documents. Biographies of both his friends and some police informers are appended.

Hilwig, Stuart J. Italy and 1968. Youthful Unrest and Democratic Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke 2009. x, 185 pp. Ill. € 50.00.

In this study Professor Hilwig aims to contribute to the literature on the 1960s student revolt by considering both the role of students and the response by the establishment to the events in Italy. Focusing on Turin in 1967 and 1968, he seeks to balance the global causes of the student revolt with a thorough investigation of local and national aspects of student activism. He also investigates the role of the popular press in Italy in shaping the course of the student movement.

Izzo, Francesca. Democrazia e cosmopolitismo in Antonio Gramsci. [Studi Storici Carocci, no 148.] Carocci editore, Roma 2009. 246 pp. € 25.00.

The nine chapters of this book were all published previously in one way or another between 1985 and 2008 but are reprinted here, largely with major revisions. They have in common a focus on Gramsci's Quaderni del carcere, even though his earlier thought receives ample consideration, most notably in the longest chapter, “I Marx di Gramsci”. With the Italian reception of Gramsci as an important instrument, the author's perspective is that of broadly conceived political philosophy, but in her discussion of “democracy beyond the state” she spells out some of its actual implications.

Novecento contemporaneo. Studi su Lelio Basso. Con la Guida alle fonti per lo studio dei Comitati di solidarietà democratica. A cura di Giancarlo Monina. Ediesse, Roma 2009. 310 pp. € 16.00.

This volume brings together seven original studies concerning the intellectual and political career of the prominent Italian socialist politician, lawyer and writer Lelio Basso (1903–1978). It contains essays on Basso's views on Christian democracy, his encouragement of anthropological research in Italy, the work of Basso compared to that of Wolfgang Abendroth, and Basso's human rights activism, including the organization of the second Russell Tribunal on Latin America. The collection concludes with a chapter on Basso's work for the Comitati di solidarietà democratica and a guide to the sources for this postwar pro-partisan defence committee.

The Netherlands

Rood Verzetsfront. Aanzetten tot stadsguerrilla in Nederland. Een reconstructie. Red. Paul Moussault [en] Jan Lust. Papieren Tijger, Breda 2009. 352 pp. Ill. € 25.00.

In the 1970s and 1980s the Netherlands, like other European countries, had to face the emergence of groups seeking a violent overthrow of the existing political order. This volume offers a historical reconstruction of the activities of Dutch organizations such as Rode Jeugd (“Red Youth”), Rode Hulp (“Red Aid”), and, particularly, Rood Verzetsfront (“Red Resistance Front”), and is based on interviews with former members of these groups and on documents from the Dutch secret service, as well as the East German Stasi. Co-editor Moussault is a former member of Rood Verzetsfront. Annexes include documents and a “genealogy” of Rood Verzetsfront.

Russia Union of Soviet Socialist Republics

Halfin, Igal. Stalinist Confessions. Messianism and Terror at the Leningrad Communist University. [Pitt Series in Russian and East European Studies.] University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh 2009. 485 pp. Ill. £49.12.

In this new study of the Stalinist Great Purge and the phenomenon of mass confessions by many of the accused, Professor Halfin focuses on Leningrad Communist University as a microcosm of Soviet society to analyse the relation between subject and Stalinist state and the role of language and discourse in it. In his analysis, a sequel to his Terror in the Soul: Communist Autobiographies on Trial (2003) (see IRSH, 49 (2004), pp. 349f.), he explores how the new Stalinist conception of the self was constituted not only by a set of communist beliefs but also by constant anxiety about being a good communist.

Junge, Marc. Die Gesellschaft ehemaliger politischer Zwangsarbeiter und Verbannter in der Sowjetunion. Gründung, Entwicklung und Liquidierung (1921–1935). Akademie Verlag, Berlin 2009. 513 pp. Ill. € 59.80.

This is a detailed account of the Obshchestvo byvshikh politicheskikh katorzhan i ssyl'no poselentsev (OPK) or “Society of Former Political Prisoners and Exiles”, founded after the Russian Revolution of 1917 by revolutionaries aiming to research and document the revolutionary past, trace the stages that eventually led to victory, and establish a historical tradition of their own. The Society comprised anarchists, Mensheviks, anarcho-syndicalists, Bundists, and social-revolutionaries, in addition to Bolsheviks. During the 1920s it was tolerated as a relatively independent organization, but after 1929 it was increasingly drawn into the political dispute about “correct” interpretation of the past and was liquidated in 1935.

Khlevniuk, Oleg V. Master of the House. Stalin and His Inner Circle. Transl. by Nora Seligman Favorov. [Yale-Hoover Series on Stalin, Stalinism and the Cold War.] Yale University Press, New Haven [etc.] 2009. xxv, 313 pp. £25.00.

In this book the author aims to present and synthesize evidence about changing models of power in the upper political echelons in the Soviet Union between the late 1920s and the early 1940s. He focuses on the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (Politburo) and on the political and interpersonal dynamics that led to the disintegration of its oligarchic collective leadership and Stalin's rise. The book is divided into six chapters: one for each stage in the gradual consolidation of Stalin's dictatorship.

Kowalsky, Sharon A. Deviant Women. Female Crime and Criminology in Revolutionary Russia, 1880–1930. Northern Illinois University Press, DeKalb 2009. xii, 314 pp. $42.00.

In this study Professor Kowalsky examines the position of women in early Soviet society through the lens of deviance, exploring how Soviet criminologists understood female crime, and how their attitudes helped shape Soviet social and behavioural norms. After tracing the emergence of the discipline of criminology in the context of the modernizing state, she sets out to examine analyses by criminologists of female crime specifically and the general attitudes of these criminologists toward women. In explaining “traditional” female crimes, criminologists noted the offenders’ supposed backwardness and ignorance, material circumstances, and even biology.

Minczeles, Henri. Le mouvement ouvrier juif. Récit des origines. [Yiddishland.] Éditions Syllepse, Paris 2010. 220 pp. € 22.00.

This work, a sequel to the author's Histoire générale du Bund : un mouvement révolutionnaire juif (1995) (see IRSH, 42 (1997), pp. 100–102), traces the origins of the Jewish labour movement in the Czarist Russian empire from the 1860s to the creation of the Bund in Vilnius in 1897. During this period, according to the author, a decisive change took place within eastern European Jewish communities, when politics partially replaced religion, national and class consciousness emerged, and Jews gradually started to improve their economic plight. See also the book review by Rena Fuks-Mansfeld in this volume, pp. 335–336.

Ward, Christopher J. Brezhnev's Folly. The Building of BAM and Late Soviet Socialism. [Pitt Series in Russian and East European Studies.] University of Pittsburgh Press. Pittsburgh 2009. x, 218 pp. Maps. $50. (Paper: $ 24.95.)

The Baikal-Amur Mainline railway (BAM) was a major infrastructure project to create a trade route to the Pacific as an engine for the development of Siberia. In this social history of the BAM railway project, Professor Ward examines the recruitment of large numbers of workers from the various Soviet republics and other countries, and their daily life experiences, focusing in particular on poor planning and organization, dire working and living conditions, and staggering inefficiency, which he contrasts with the idealistic propaganda around the BAM project. See also Tatiana Voronina's review in this volume, pp. 351–355.

Spain

Babiano, José[y] Ana Isabel Fernández Asperilla. La patria en la maleta. Historia social de la emigración española a Europa. Fundacion 1o de mayo; Ediciones GPS. Madrid 2009. 305 pp. € 23.80; $33.58.

Issued by the research centre of the Comisiones Obreras, this book traces the conditions and modalities of Spanish labour migration to Europe, chiefly in the 1960s. In seven chapters the authors discuss the politics of Franco's state-led migration and the interests of the receiving countries; the importance of irregular migration; living conditions and workers’ organizations; the migrants’ social and cultural life strategies; political aspects of labour migration; the position and roles of women; and the final dilemma: whether to stay or to return. The study uses archival sources from various countries and contains a bibliography.

Lucea Ayala, Victor. El pueblo en movimiento. La protesta social en Aragón (1885–1917). Prensas Universitarias de Zaragoza, Zaragoza 2009. 599 pp. Ill. Maps. € 30.00.

Rural inland Spain at the end of the nineteenth century was usually depicted by writers and politicians as a place of apathy and conformism. This book, which is based on a dissertation (University of Zaragoza, 2006), sets out to show this picture to be false in the case of Aragon by detailing and analysing a wide range of collective actions that took place between 1885 and 1917. In addition to the labour movement, peasant protests, and anti-clerical and republican disturbances are covered (see also IRSH, 53 (2008), p. 372).

Sanabria, Enrique A. Republicanism and Anticlerical Nationalism in Spain. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke [etc.] 2009. xiii, 258 pp. Ill. £45.00.

This book is a history of Spanish anti-clericalism from 1875 to 1912, focusing on the radical republican, José Nakens Pérez, and his newspaper El Motín, and aiming to incorporate new perspectives on nationalism, gender, and the politics of religion to explain the anti-clerical tradition that existed before the Second Republic and the Civil War. Professor Sanabria argues, for example, that Nakens and other republicans were instrumental in helping anarchists imagine an anti-clerical and anti-monarchical community, and indirectly holds them responsible for the anti-clerical violence of the Civil War.

La semana trágica de Cataluña. Ed. Antoni Moliner i Prada. Nabla Ediciones, Alella 2009. 303 pp. Ill. € 24.00.

In the last week of July 1909 Catalonia was the site of a popular uprising that started in Barcelona as a protest against sending reservist troops to Morocco in the Melilla War. The eight contributions to this volume examine various aspects of this violent episode in Spanish history: late nineteenth-century Spanish anti-clericalism, Spanish colonial policy in Morocco, protest actions outside Barcelona, the role of Alejandro Lerroux's radical republicanism, the case of Francesc Ferrer I Guàrdia, the position of the employers, and the Semana trágica in the press and the cinema.