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, Inigo Garcia-Bryce, Enrique Garguin, Simon Gunn, Carol E. Harrison, Franca Iacovetta, Sanjay Joshi, Prashant Kidambi, A. Ricardo Lopez, 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

In this edited collection the contributors question the current academic understanding of what is known as the global middle class. They see middle-class formation as transnational and they examine this group through the lenses of economics, gender, race, and religion from the mid-nineteenth century to today. They challenge the dominant Western definition of modernity and the middle class, and argue that in order to remove the Western and European focus in discussions of modernity people must look toward a reimagining of the entire category and history of the middle class to better shape the discussion of its future.

About the Author

A. Ricardo Lopez 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 Sao Paulo, 1920-1964.

Reviews
"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
"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 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, University of Wisconsin, Madison
"The Making of the Middle Class 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 onglobal cultural identities, the history of globalization, practices of modernity, imperialism, and neoliberalism." -- Lisa Ubelaker Andrade * H-Soz-u-Kult, H-Net Reviews *
"The book is a welcome addition to a historiography that, at least for Latin America, has focused too much on elites and/or subalterns...This book, however, is important in that it allows us to take a fresh look at what the ambivalent and 'fuzzy' realities of middle class(es) might mean for the modern age." -- Stefan Rinke * Hispanic American Historical Review *
[T]he volume undoubtedly represents a step forward in the development of a field of middle-class studies. The insights of the introduction, the intelligence of the commentaries and afterword, and the variety of methods at play and of issues dealt with in each individual article will surely make of this book a fundamental read for scholars to come." -- Ezequiel Adamovsky * Social History *
"[A] carefully crafted anthology...The panorama of the book's examples dazzles the reader's mind." -- Linda Young * Canadian Journal of History *



Book Information
ISBN 9780822351290
Author A. Ricardo Lopez-Pedreros
Format Paperback
Page Count 464
Imprint Duke University Press
Publisher Duke University Press
Weight(grams) 626g