IRSH 51 (2006), pp. 113–138 # 2006 Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis BOOK REVIEWS Fogel, Robert William. The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700–2000. Europe, America, and the Third World. [Cambridge Studies in Population, Economy and Society in Past Time.] Cambridge University Press, Cambridge [etc.] 2004. xx, 191 pp. £40.00. (Paper: £16.99.); DOI: 10.1017/S0020859006012351 This is a rather odd collection of lectures (the first three chapters) and essays (chapters 4 and 5), dealing, in the first sixty-six pages, with ‘‘the escape from hunger and premature death’’, and then moving to issues concerning the future of the health-care system which result from the success of this escape. Fogel’s speculations about the future in the second half of the book – (How long can we live? Can we continue to finance health care and retirement in the future?) – are interesting, and at times comforting, but beyond the expertise of the reviewer. What links these essays to the general theme of the book is that Fogel investigates some of the long-term consequences of the historical processes he analyses in the first half of the book. In the first three chapters Fogel presents his interpretation of what he has coined the ‘‘technophysio evolution’’. In the preface he briefly refers to this as the process by which a fifty-fold increase in income occurred in the United States, Japan, and western Europe, as a result of which ‘‘the peoples of these countries have greatly improved their health and more than doubled their longevity’’. This is elaborated in chapter 1, ‘‘The Persistence of Misery in Europe and America before 1900’’, which argues, as the title suggests, that major changes in life expectancy (and human welfare in general) occurred only after 1900. This argument is mainly based on data on food consumption, and repeated in chapter 2, which has the equally indicative title: ‘‘Why the Twentieth Century Was So Remarkable’’. The latter contains, among others, a chart of world population, summarizing Fogel’s view, showing an almost horizontal line before c.1850, and an almost vertical line afterwards. His point is: there was one major break in world history, and it occurred recently. A lot of what is discussed in these chapters has already been published by Fogel elsewhere (the lectures on which the first half of the book is based were given in 1996). The most interesting contribution of the present volume is the application of the idea of ‘‘Waaler surfaces’’ to this kind of historical research. These are three-dimensional relationships between height, weight, and risk of poor health or mortality. As we are all aware, there is an optimal relationship between height and weight (at a BMI of about 26). Nowadays, most of us are on the wrong side of it, in the sense that body weight is too high in relationship to height. In historical societies – before 1800 – people were much smaller, consumed much less, and may have had a BMI that was much lower than optimal. The hypothesis that is formulated on the basis of these insights is that a large part of the decline in mortality during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was linked to improvements in food consumption leading to an increase in the BMI-index towards the ‘‘optimal’’ BMI. This is all very interesting, but the fundamental problem of Fogel’s contribution to the debate about these issues is that it is not based on a sufficiently critical use of the underlying data. There is quite a lot of data on the height of individuals in the (recent) past, but information on weight is very scarce, and linked information on health risks even Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Univ of Michigan Law Library, on 12 Sep 2017 at 21:27:54, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859006022358 114 Book Reviews scarcer, which makes it very difficult to reconstruct historical Waaler surfaces (which leaves open the possibility that they may have changed over time). The hypothesis just mentioned, for example, is based on estimates of food production and consumption in eighteenth-century France, made in the 1960s by Toutain, estimates which have been severely criticized by his colleagues, most recently by Grantham. It is possible that Fogel and his associates have thoroughly reworked this material, because in many cases the author refers to an unpublished manuscript by Fogel, Floud, and Harris, which contains almost all the data and estimates on which the forthright statements of this book are based. But given the unavailability of this study, it is impossible to check the underlying data and estimates of Fogel’s present book. In fact, almost all of the sometimes rather crude assessments of the early modern economy and its labour force (such as on p. 33, that ‘‘individuals in the bottom 20 per cent of the caloric distributions of France and England near the end of the eighteenth century lacked the energy for sustained work and were effectively excluded from the labour force’’), seem to be based on these highly suspect estimates of food consumption during the ancien régime. In general, the picture that Fogel presents of the premodern economy and society is one-sided and much too pessimistic. Unfortunately, he seems to have missed the ‘‘revolution of the early modernists’’ (Jan de Vries) that in recent decades has led to a reassessment of the preindustrial economy. Jan Luiten van Zanden Modernizing Muscovy. Reform and Social Change in Seventeenth-Century Russia. Ed. by Jarmo Kotilaine and Marshall Poe. [RoutledgeCurzon Studies in the History of Russia and Eastern Europe]. RoutledgeCurzon, London [etc.] 2004. vi, 489 pp. £70.00; DOI: 10.1017/S0020859006022358 This weighty tome gathers together articles by many of the most prominent scholars of Muscovite history working in the United States and Europe today. With twenty pieces including a clear theoretical introduction by the editors, Jarmo Kotilaine and Marshall Poe, and a synthesis of the diverse contents and current state of the field by Paul Bushkovitch, the volume lives up to the promise of its title. The collection shows the careful work of the editors in maintaining a consistent focus on the matter at hand. Laudably committed to avoiding the tendency to conflate the ideas of modernization with Westernization, Poe and Kotilaine set forth a culturally neutral and admirably pragmatic definition of modernization as ‘‘the adoption of new institutions that are more efficient than their predecessors, or are at least perceived to be more efficient’’ (pp. 3–4). Although some of the authors find that the editors’ definition does not apply in the context they study, all, without exception, conclude that the seventeenth century, particularly its second half or last quarter, witnessed some recognizable and fairly dramatic modernizing trends. This overall finding cannot be characterized as surprising. Discussion of Peter the Great inevitably cycles back to the question of whether his reign should be characterized as a continuation of the more gradualist reforms of his predecessors or as a cataclysmic rupture with the past. Older texts generally emphasized the totality of Peter’s rejection of musty Muscovite ways; however, as Bushkovitch notes in his afterword, for at least several decades, a far more nuanced consensus has replaced this caricatured vision. We know now that even though his brazen disregard for traditionalist sensibilities would have outraged Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Univ of Michigan Law Library, on 12 Sep 2017 at 21:27:54, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859006022358 Book Reviews 115 his predecessors and decidedly shocked his contemporaries, Peter continued the modernizing (and Westernizing) work that was already well underway in the seventeenth century. What this volume has to offer, then, is not a novel rereading of late Muscovite history, but rather a welcome addition to the study of gradual change. Organized thematically, the volume opens with Janet Martin’s overview of the sixteenth-century background, which presents in stark terms the economic devastation wreaked by Ivan the Terrible’s destructive policies and by the wars and natural disasters of the century’s end. Using statistics to powerful effect, Martin shows, for instance, that by 1588, tax revenues from the Novgorod region had dropped to less than 7 per cent of the pre-Oprichnina figures. This historical introduction underscores the sheer necessity for change and increasing efficiency that faced Muscovite rulers from the very start of the seventeenth century. Leading off the lengthy section on ‘‘The State and Its Servants’’, Richard Hellie recaps his characterization, familiar to specialists in the field, of Muscovy as a successful state with a proto-Stalinist ‘‘extraordinary latitude to issue orders in its name and to try to carry them out’’ (p. 30). According to Hellie, seventeenth-century Muscovy managed to create a semicaste society, which ‘‘must have been the most total change of any society, effected by state fiat, in human history up to that time’’ (p. 41). Where other states developed along with the parallel development of ‘‘semi-independent sectors of economic and political action’’, this was not the case for Muscovy. Several of the subsequent articles sharply contradict Hellie’s contentions. Continuing the section on the state, Peter Brown’s article explains the structures and institutions that made up the state’s bureaucratic administration. Brown sets the tone for the general assertion of the volume that administration was quite rational and surprisingly effective in this period. George Weickhardt applies a Weberian model to describe development of the legal system toward more rationality, predictability, and efficiency, but he emphasizes that this occurred without any discernable Western influence: ‘‘Legal modernization in Muscovy thus bore a uniquely Muscovite stamp’’ (p. 79). In particular, the Muscovite twist meant that the newly issued 1649 law code was more an effort to define and regulate ‘‘a universe of duties and bondage than it was an affirmation of rights’’ (p. 95). Marshall Poe’s ‘‘Absolutism and the New Men’’ summarizes the findings of his larger prosopographical study of the Muscovite elite, and traces the process by which new men were elevated into the highest ranks, while at the same time members of the old aristocracy shifted their energies toward administrative rather than traditional military service. This transformation, Poe argues, prefigured Peter’s Table of Ranks with a new definition of elite status by which ‘‘office would confer rank, not rank office’’ (p. 114). Closing the section on state institutions, Donald Ostrowski contributes a provocative re-examination of ‘‘The Assembly of the Land (Zemskii sobor) as a Representative Institution’’. Reclaiming these shadowy assemblies from a sharply polarized and highly polemical literature, Ostrowski refutes both those who describe the assemblies as equivalents of Western parliaments and those at the other extreme who deny that they had any political significance at all. Ostrowski demonstrates convincingly that they served real and important consultative functions and argues less convincingly but very suggestively that their origins and functions should be tied rather to the Quritai tradition of the Mongol steppe. Shifting to the subject of economic development, Jarmo Kotilaine’s article explores the meaning of mercantilism in Russia. Maria Solomon Arel’s piece stands out for its Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Univ of Michigan Law Library, on 12 Sep 2017 at 21:27:54, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859006022358 116 Book Reviews substantive archival work, and breaks new ground in examining the nature of state monopolies on export commodities, specifically tar, caviar, and potash, in the first half of the century. ‘‘The Military and International Relations’’, the next section, begins with Paul Dukes’s effort to place Muscovy’s Smolensk War in the broader context of the pan-European Thirty Years’ War. Dukes argues for the need to avoid analyzing Russia’s international situation in isolation from the rest of Europe. Next follows William M. Reger IV’s marvelous study of ‘‘European Mercenary Officers and the Reception of Military Reform in the Seventeenth-Century Russian Army’’. This piece uses the idea of ‘‘reception’’, with its implications of active choice, as a productive category for analysis. Remarkably in such a short piece, Reger manages to compare Russia’s military modernization not only with the standard western European benchmarks but also with the more proximate and in many ways more revealing neighbors, the Ottoman Empire and Poland. Carol B. Stevens’s piece on ‘‘Peter the Great and the Military Reform’’ similarly refuses to settle for a model that relies on western Europe as the sole inspiration for Russia’s reforms. She instead employs the concept of a ‘‘common zone’’, comprising Europe, Russia, the Ottomans, and the steppe, as the relevant context for Russia’s military history. In this broadened arena, she provides a clear and specific description of exactly what Peter the Great’s vaunted military reforms meant. Her piece is followed by Graeme Herd’s examination of the strel’tsy revolt of 1698. Herd draws primarily on diaries by General Patrick Gordon, his son-in-law, Alexander Gordon, and the Austrian Secretary, Johann Korb. Shifting gears, the volume proceeds to ‘‘Religion and Culture’’, where Debra Coulter’s fascinating study of ‘‘Church Reform and the ‘White Clergy’’’ moves into territory almost untouched in English-language literature and demystifies many aspects of the appointment, ordination, education, and function of the ‘‘white’’ or parish clergy. She demonstrates that here too, Muscovy witnessed an acceleration of regulation and control and a drive toward efficiency in the seventeenth century, long anticipating the church reforms of Peter the Great. Somewhat mischievously, Georg Michels’s ‘‘The Limits of Church Reform’’, is positioned immediately after Coulter’s piece, destabilizing the picture of a rationalizing church with a disheartening description of chaos, inefficacy, and violence in religious matters. The contributors to the section on ‘‘The Arts and Sciences’’ uniformly agree that modernization in their sphere of activity had little to do with ‘‘increased efficiency’’, nor are they willing to equate modernization with either Westernization or secularization. In her overview of art and architecture in the seventeenth century, Lindsey Hughes detects a ‘‘cautious, transitional Muscovite model of Westernization’’, most in evidence in the 1690s, but she insists that the developments of late seventeenth-century culture reflect not only Western influences but also more traditional iconographic and Byzantine roots, as well as a powerfully lingering religious framework. Like Reger, she emphasizes selectivity in the preferences Muscovites demonstrated as they chose which art forms they wished to patronize. Eve Levin’s entertaining article on ‘‘The Administration of Western Medicine in Seventeenth-Century Russia’’ follows the work of the Apothecary Chancery, which administered Western-style medicine to the Moscow elite and more broadly to the service class. Levin makes the strong claim that ‘‘By combining Western medicine with Muscovite government, the Russians created the first state-administered centralized health-care system in the Western world’’ (p. 363). The Russians adapted Western medicine in their Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Univ of Michigan Law Library, on 12 Sep 2017 at 21:27:54, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859006022358 Book Reviews 117 own, quintessentially Muscovite way, subjecting Western doctors and pharmacists to typically Russian modes of regulation and service. Nikolaos A. Crissidis offers a close study of the cosmological and planetary curricula offered by the Greek Leichoudes brothers in their teaching at the Muscovite Academy, one of the first schools of higher learning in Muscovy. Crissidis finds that their scientific views drew heavily on multiple cosmological systems, largely derived from Jesuit texts on Aristotelian natural philosophy. While reinforcing Hughes’s point about the lasting power of an Orthodox vision, Crissidis argues that these teachings had ‘‘rather radical implications’’ in the Muscovite context. ‘‘Theology, or to be more precise, religious belief, were not any more the sole purveyors of all truth’’ (p. 393), well before Peter’s reforms. In the most speculative section of the volume, ‘‘Self and Society’’, Nancy Shields Kollmann examines the evolving notions of identity, both collective and individual, detectable in a variety of sources throughout the seventeenth century. Both she and Daniel Kaiser, in the following essay, see increasing articulation of a sense of individual identity as something worthy of acknowledgement and expression. Kollmann finds it in portraits, secular tales, legal defense of honor, while Kaiser finds a steady progression in the expression and validation of individual lives (and deaths) on the decorative motifs of Muscovite tombstones. He employs a sequence of illustrations to drive home his point in visual terms. He concludes that ‘‘the sense of individual identity to which these epitaphs attest demonstrates an awakening awareness of self’’ (p. 459). Finally, returning full circle to the afterword, Bushkovitch offers a skilful summary of the major trends and developments of the seventeenth century as precursor to Peter. He stresses the high degree of continuity and identifies particular areas of sharp rupture, particularly the secularization of Russian culture which signified ‘‘the most radical break in Russian culture between Kievan times and the Stalin era’’ (p. 471). Underscoring the extent to which Peter did indeed enact radical breaks with the past, Bushkovitch stresses the degree to which this purportedly all-powerful emperor was actually threatened on all sides by hostile elites, resistant to his changes, eager to undermine his reforms and perhaps even topple him from the throne. Only his force of personality, Bushkovitch implies, allowed him to bulldoze his transformative agenda forward. In other words, however much the seventeenth century anticipated Peter with stolid, piecemeal efforts toward modernization, Peter still effected a revolution from above. Valerie A. Kivelson Lucassen, Leo. The Immigrant Threat. The Integration of Old and New Migrants in Western Europe since 1850. [Studies of World Migrations.] University of Illinois Press, Urbana, [etc.] 2005. xii, 277 pp. $16.99; DOI: 10.1017/S0020859006032354 The acid test of a scholarly book is whether we learn something new from reading it – a more stringent version, whether we learn something new about a subject we thought we already knew well. By that tougher standard, Leo Lucassen’s new book, The Immigrant Threat, passes with distinction. The book is motivated by an ambition that many scholars of immigration have, whether deliberately or not, dropped. All too often, contemporary scholars prefer to see the present era of immigration as sui generis and to point to the many differences that distinguish it, in Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Univ of Michigan Law Library, on 12 Sep 2017 at 21:27:54, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859006022358 118 Book Reviews their view, from the past; either implicitly or explicitly, they claim that the past has little or nothing to teach us about the present and near future. However, a more balanced view requires that we look for continuities and parallels, not just differences; indeed, how can we evaluate the significance of the differences without taking the similarities into account? Granted, tracing the continuities and identifying the parallels complicate the task of the scholar because they require in-depth knowledge of the past as well as of the present. But in light of the potential of immigration to transform host societies, altering their cultures and possibly dividing them along ethnic lines, should we ask any less of ourselves? Lucassen’s book is enormously salutary in this respect because it rescues a nearly lost history, that of earlier immigrations to western European countries, such as the movement of Italians to France. Thus, it counters one of the myths of the present, that in western Europe immigration is fomenting novel diversity in ethnically and culturally homogeneous nation states, a mythology enshrined in the former axiom of German conservatives, ‘‘Wir sind kein Einwanderungsland’’ [We are not an immigration country]. Indeed, recognizing the success of European societies in integrating earlier immigrations becomes a challenge to their contemporary leaders and publics to find ways to integrate present-day newcomers – the task is not hopeless, in short. It is also a challenge to the current generation of scholars, many of whom prefer to envision a multicultural future, although often without much attempt to identify the route by which one would get there from here, or even to spell out the nature of that multiculturalism. Lucassen has these implications firmly in mind in writing The Immigrant Threat, and he has – correctly, in my view – focused his attention on the nature of the perceived threat from immigrants and their children as the key to their reception. And for his materials, he has selected what he describes as the ‘‘large and problematic’’ immigrations, the hard cases, in other words. In these ways, he is respectful of a considerable sociological tradition, dating back to Herbert Blumer’s famous essay on prejudice as a sense of group position, that identifies minority-group threat as the trigger for the implementation of majoritygroup exclusions. The book is therefore structured by distinctions among the different kinds of threats that immigration can pose for the societal majority. For both past and present, the typology presented is tripartite, though with somewhat different categories in the two eras and with some ambiguous placement of the cases taken to exemplify them. One category of threat the eras share is religious: in the past, this was marked by the Irish immigration to England, while in the present the threat is posed by Muslim immigrations, such as that of the Turks to Germany. One of the book’s trenchant insights is that the anxieties about Muslims in Europe are remarkably similar to those felt more than a century ago about Catholic immigrants in Protestant lands. Another type of threat that is, with some difference in precise configuration, shared between the eras is to national identities: this is exemplified in the earlier period by the Poles in Germany, while in the present it is perceived as the refusal of major immigrant groups, such as the north Africans in France, to integrate. For the present period, differences in color seem to loom much larger than in the past, and accordingly Lucassen takes the West Indian migration to Great Britain as one of his paradigmatic cases. But, on closer inspection, a racial factor was not altogether absent from the past immigrations, for the British viewed the Irish, a people they conquered and dominated over several centuries, as their racial inferiors, even if skin color was not readily available as a marker. The Irish case, I might add, suggests the need for skepticism about the frequently drawn distinction between the US and Europe invoked in explanation of the Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Univ of Michigan Law Library, on 12 Sep 2017 at 21:27:54, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859006022358 Book Reviews 119 role of race on the western side of the Atlantic – the claim is that the US experienced slavery on its own territory while Europe experienced it only in its distant colonies. The English colonization of nearby Ireland did not involve slavery, to be sure, but it did involve what could be described in the American context as a Jim Crow regime, a different legal regime for the conquered people, which required the conquerors to formulate and believe a rationale to justify its position of superiority and the other group’s subordination. As Americans know all too well, such rationales can develop into elaborate cultures whose effects persist over long periods of time. An examination of the experiences of north Africans in France, also analyzed by Lucassen as one of the three contemporary cases, deepens the skepticism about the conventional US–Europe distinction; and here I gained new insight from the book even though the north African situation was one I had studied and written about. The key to this case, as Lucassen describes it, is what happened in Algeria, which was incorporated into France in the middle of the nineteenth century, shortly after its conquest. Algerians became French nationals, but they did not gain the rights of French citizens until after World War II, a full century later; and they were the subjects of a separate legal system. Such a system, analogous in important respects once again to Jim Crow in the US, gives rise to denigrating stereotypes of the subject group, prejudices that the dominant group feels necessary in order to justify its rule. After the French defeat in the war of independence, approximately a million pieds noirs set sail for the metropole, where they quickly integrated into the French population, spreading the stereotypes about the ‘‘Arab’’ they brought with them. This is an insightful analysis, which illuminates a variety of aspects of the north African situation in France. For instance, Michele Tribalat, in her book Faire France (1995), tells us that, in the period of universal military service in France, second-generation Algerians had an extraordinary record of being excused from having to serve: on the one hand, because of the remaining bitterness in the Algerian community from the war and all that preceded it, many of them did not want to serve the French military; on the other, because of the stereotypes about Arabs and suspicions about their capacity for patriotism, French military officers often did not want them in the armed forces. However, this mutual agreement to excuse them deprived them of experiences in one of the chief assimilatory agencies in French society. There is one respect in which I think that Lucassen does not push hard enough. As a conceptual standard to measure the successful incorporation of an immigrant group, Lucassen does not wish to use the concept of assimilation, an understandable decision given what many – more in Europe than in the US – would see as its problematic aspects. For it, he substitutes the vaguer concept of ‘‘integration’’, defining it as ‘‘the general sociological mechanism that describes the way in which all people, migrants as well as nonmigrants, find their place in society’’ (p. 18). The problem is that this is not an incisive standard. In all Western societies, there is sufficient openness to allow some divergence of outcome within immigration-derived populations: some individuals and families do well – they attain high levels of education, enter professional occupations, move into affluent neighborhoods, and they or their children marry into the native majority. These indicators of ‘‘membership’’ are especially to be found in the 1.5 and second generations, raised in the host society. Thus, when we look over time at the trajectory of a group that entered as lowwage immigrants – the Turks in Germany and the north Africans in France come readily to mind – almost inevitably we see some degree of progress in terms of entry into the Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Univ of Michigan Law Library, on 12 Sep 2017 at 21:27:54, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859006022358 120 Book Reviews society. It’s hard, in other words, to imagine that the hypothesis of progress could be falsified; and therefore we should conclude that the underlying concept may not be incisive enough. The key question, as underscored by the concept of ‘‘segmented’’ assimilation, is not whether the group becomes a part of the host society, but what sort of part it becomes. Yet, in the end, Lucassen is convincing that the comparison between past and present has produced a ‘‘feast of recognition’’ (p. 198) of similarities between different eras, notwithstanding the obvious differences. These differences speak with some degree of reassurance to the anxieties about integration in contemporary western European societies. To be sure, Lucassen’s book is not the last word on these difficult matters, but I agree with him that historical analysis is essential to the conceptual and empirical work that must be undertaken to understand fully the impact of immigration in North America as well as Europe. If this project still requires much more digging, one can fairly say that Lucassen’s important new book provides valuable spade work. Richard Alba Fighting the Slave Trade. West African Strategies. Ed by Sylviane A. Diouf. [Western African Studies]. Ohio University Press, Athens; James Currey, Oxford 2003. xxvii, 242 pp. $59.95. (Paper: $26.95.); DOI: 10.1017/ S0020859006042350 Sylviane A. Diouf, author of the acclaimed Servant of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas, has accomplished two feats by editing this anthology, Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies. The volume contains the proceedings of a conference she co-organized at Rutgers University in 2001. The first feat is that in this book Sylviane Diouf has gathered together the finest specialists on the slave trade and slavery in Africa. Joseph Inikori, Martin Klein, Paul E. Lovejoy, and David Richardson are a few of the eminent participants. The second feat is undoubtedly that she has broached a subject hitherto overlooked but nonetheless important, as it is difficult to cover despite its relevance. This book addresses the current ideological debate, in which Africans are blamed for the massive deportation of their brothers. The work also touches on the political debate about claiming reparations from the West, assigned sole responsibility for the disastrous effects of the slave trade over several centuries. The lack of in-depth studies about resistance strategies among West African societies and states is in fact attributable to the scarcity of European written sources encompassing a broad chronological and geographic scope. The silence among oral and omissions in written sources of African societies traumatized after several centuries by participating in or resisting this other type of traffic, namely in human beings, has been a major impediment to conducting such research. Historians and anthropologists have focused on slavery in the New World and the demographic purge conveyed through a detailed account of the slaves exported from Africa for various reasons. The impact of the slave trade on the internal evolution of political, economic, and social institutions in African societies is just beginning to be explored, thanks to comprehensive monographs about the history of the different kingdoms during the slave-trade era. In varying measures and depending on the cases, these works review the resistance strategies pursued by the Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Univ of Michigan Law Library, on 12 Sep 2017 at 21:27:54, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859006022358 Book Reviews 121 populations or the states to protect themselves from the perpetual threat of permanent deportation overseas. These silences are due in part to the belated abolition or the tolerance of domestic slavery, which coincided with and prolonged the Atlantic trade by the colonial powers. The silences colour discussions about this traumatic memory of the loss over the course of several centuries until recently of individual and collective liberties among Africans from an entire continent. The book derives part of its importance from all these reasons. The authors pursue new approaches from their respective disciplines to this hidden side of the complex history of the slave trade arising both from resistance movements and from adaptation to a new economic system based on the connection of the continents by the Atlantic for the benefit of Europe. Sylviane Diouf has wisely classified the different contributions according to three principle themes: defensive strategies, protective strategies, and offensive strategies. The first theme is covered by the contributions from Elysée Soumoni on lacustrine villages in Benin, from Thierno Bah on the populations raided by Sokoto, from Dennis Cordell about central Africa, from Adama Guèye about the transformations of habitat in Senegambia, and from Martin Klein about defence strategies among the Wasulu and the Masina. All demonstrate the ways that people used their surroundings and changes in architecture and habitat, and how they resorted to migration and constructed fortified sites to protect themselves from raids by neighbouring states that were often more powerful. Only Martin Klein covers the institutional responses on the part of the political and social organizations of the Wasulu decentralized state and the Masina centralized state to protect themselves from the trade and/or participate in it. In addition to describing the surroundings in minute detail, Elysée Soumoni addresses the fundamental problem of the way lacustrine village populations relate to their refugee past. The postcolonial state now uses this past to establish a tourist policy (e.g. with the Dogons in Mali) that effectively buries them alive in their soil with no prospects for modernization or alleviation of the poverty that has resulted from their cycle of isolation. The second theme on the protective strategies is introduced by Sylviane Diouf. She describes how slaves en route to deportation, or in some cases after they had already been deported, were re-purchased by their families. The article by Paul Lovejoy and David Richardson covers the internal strategies deployed by the slave vendors in Calabar to protect themselves from being sold to the boats of the Negro slave traders stationed at the ports they controlled. Sylviane demonstrates that the re-purchase was a double-edged sword, in that one or more slaves were often sent in the place of those fortunate enough to be released in time. Lovejoy and Richardson describe the limits of self-protection on the part of the slave vendors, who were vulnerable to the rivalries between the different ports of trade and to the practice of pledges rendering them subject to deportation by Negro slave traders from Europe. Third, on the subject of offensive strategies, John N. Oriji and Walter Hawthorne respectively examine offensive strategies in the Ibo and Balantes nations, where the ‘‘stateless’’ decentralized societies protected themselves by using defensive sites and even participated in the trade as a defence mechanism. Ismaël Rashid, on the other hand, analyses an extended series of slave revolts along the coast of Upper Guinea that call into question the institution of slavery. This article is certainly the richest, thanks to its original elaboration on the attempt by Ivan Mendez in 1975 to explore resistance in Africa on the part of selected slaves to escape servitude and deportation. On the same note, David Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Univ of Michigan Law Library, on 12 Sep 2017 at 21:27:54, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859006022358 122 Book Reviews Richardson describes a considerable number of slave revolts in Africa prior to embarkation on and during the long passage and relates them to the specific conditions in the regions of origin and the circumstances of their capture. Joseph Inikori reveals the link between political fragmentation and the intensification of the trade and the resulting territorial and institutional consolidation of the states to seek protection from and possibly participate in the slave trade to guarantee the survival of their own subjects. Finally, Carolyn Brown addresses the difficult theme of the memories concealing the traumas suffered by the Biafran people by examining oral traditions. The wealth of each contribution to this book is difficult to convey in detail. This work opens new horizons for understanding the complexity of the slave trade and its consequences for African societies. The main problem thus far, in my view, has been considering the possibilities of studying individual aspects of the slave trade (demographics, resistance, participation, and profits) without relegating this economic phenomenon in the global history of changing African societies to the specific context of European domination of the Atlantic. For reasons that are often difficult to understand, eminent historians, such as John K. Thornton in Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, try to reattribute initiation of the trade to the Africans based on scattered sources on the continent as a whole at various points in time. Admittedly, the sources lend themselves to various interpretations in this context. And whether they were passive or active, Africans have emerged from the Atlantic adventure as the losers from the fifteenth century to the present. Grasping the regional and local effects of the slave trade that continued without interruption over the course of several centuries requires an understanding of the evolution of African history and the sequences over time and space. Only such an approach will avert pithy formulas about the role of African slave purveyors, as well as the resentment harboured by African Americans, such as Henri Louis Gates Jr, who rather disdainfully accuses the Africans of having sold them. This accusation conceals the unique shared fate of Africans on both sides of the Atlantic. Comparing the poverty today of Haiti with that of the Congo makes sufficiently clear that this common history has been shaped by Europe’s economic, political, and cultural domination since the fifteenth century. The slave trade is but one sad episode that is only starting to be perceived in its full complexity thanks to monographs on the different ports of the slave trade in Liverpool, Nantes, Bordeaux, etc., and thanks especially to Joseph Inikori’s excellent work Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England: A Study in International Trade and Economic Development, which is the finest publication about the slave trade since Eric Williams’s Capitalism and Slavery (1944). Deciphering the overall continuity and discontinuities of African history at both local and regional levels requires a very straightforward approach to the facts. Research should be encouraged on themes as overlooked as strategies of resistance to the slave trade. The present work, edited by Sylviane Diouf, has satisfied my hopes. I regret that I declined the invitation to participate in this gathering at Rutgers. At the time, however, I had briefly abandoned my research on this period of the slave trade to explore the history of Senegambia in the twentieth century. After all, I feel that we have not sufficiently considered the continuity of our history and the ongoing role of these four centuries of the slave trade in the current fate of the African people. Reappropriating our history involves recovering our individual and collective liberties seized from us over several centuries through our inability to break free from the European control of the Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Univ of Michigan Law Library, on 12 Sep 2017 at 21:27:54, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859006022358 Book Reviews 123 Atlantic since the fifteenth century. Reconquering the Atlantic, as well as the Sahara, for our own benefit is the major challenge that faces Africa in the twenty-first century, if we are to avoid missing the conquest of space already in full swing. Boubacar Barry Austin, Gareth. Labour, Land and Capital in Ghana. From Slavery to Free Labour in Asante, 1807–1956. [Rochester Studies in African History and the Diaspora.] University of Rochester Press, Rochester, NY 2005. xxiv, 589 pp. Ill. £50.00; $75.00; DOI: 10.1017/S0020859006052357 Labour, Land and Capital in Ghana is a very welcome and refreshing social-economic history of the Asante polity of present-day Ghana (West Africa). The study is welcome, because the number of in-depth economic studies of nineteenth-century precolonial African states is few. As such, the book makes an important contribution to our knowledge of processes of economic – and social – transformation in Africa at the advent of colonialism. The book fits into a tradition of detailed historical studies of the Asante people and state, but is the first book-length study to focus on the Asante economy rather than the state and state-relations. It is also the first modern case study to provide an analysis of the long-term transformation of a large West African economy between the end of the Atlantic slave trade in the early nineteenth century and the advent of independence halfway through the twentieth century. The book starts with a discussion of context and concepts, and deals with general theory and debate and their usefulness as instruments for the understanding of the concepts of property and the market in Asante. After this theoretical introduction, two broad periods determine the structure of the book. The first period encompasses the years 1807 to 1908, in which Asante was still an independent state (until 1896), and the economy was dominated by slavery on the one hand and highly gender-specific social relations in production and the division of labour on the other. The second period, 1908 to 1956, was marked by the multiple transformation of the Asante economy; the incorporation of the economy into the British colonial economy; the shift from coerced labour to free labour; and, perhaps most importantly, the rise and pre-eminence of cocoa production. In the period after 1807, the year in which the British prohibited the (Atlantic) slavetrade, a gradual decrease of the export opportunities for the Asante in this sector set in. Austin analyses how export production shifted first from slaves to kola nuts and gold, and then, towards the end of the century, to cocoa. Austin applies the Nieboer thesis to the Asante economy of the nineteenth century, explaining convincingly how Asante, with an unfavourable labour-to-land-ratio, chose slavery as a solution to the problem of harnessing labour. Among (economic) historians of slavery, this thesis is well-known, and generally accepted. In that sense, Austin does not provide us with many new insights. This is also true of the changes that took place in the control over the means of production that Austin describes. For much of the nineteenth century, social and political elites with enough capital and power to accumulate slaves dominated the economy. Only when control over, and access to, land changed in the late nineteenth century, under pressure of both political changes and the introduction of a cocoa economy, did small producers and sharecroppers, who relied on their own labour, become prominent. The political act of the abolition of domestic slavery and ‘‘human pawning’’ by the British in 1908 sealed this process. Austin’s Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Univ of Michigan Law Library, on 12 Sep 2017 at 21:27:54, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859006022358 124 Book Reviews original contribution here is that he gives us a full overview of the process as it took place over a century and a half, on the basis of a mass of empirical material and many case studies, solidly grounded in the model of the factor market. The third part of the book examines land, labour, and factor markets from 1908 till 1956, the era in which cocoa was king. Here Austin covers new ground, and this section constitutes a book in itself. It is problematic that the two chosen themes, the ‘‘social relations of production and trade’’, and ‘‘freedom and forest rent’’, overlap quite a bit, leading to a large number of cross-references that take their toll on the reader. A combined and more concise analysis would have been an option. In both sections the transformation of credit systems and its influence on capital markets is the central argument. After 1908, investments in slaves and ‘‘human pawns’’ were replaced by the mortgaging of farms (without the land) and a credit system of cash advances against the crops in the field, to be harvested the following season. The latter system, which can be seen as a successor to the advance-credit system used in the slave trade, was highly successful, according to Austin, because it enabled cocoa brokers to lower the risk of price fluctuations and strengthened their bargaining position with their European lenders. Whether this is really the case remains to be seen, because credit on future crops constituted a high-risk loan at all times and therefore incurred high short-term interest rates. Although very complete in its treatment of the chosen subject matter, the book does leave some questions unanswered about the wider context of the transformation process of the Asante economy. Most important here is the relationship with, and the nature of the transformation process that took place in the neighbouring Gold Coast in the same period, where conditions and circumstances were at the same time very similar to and vastly different from the Asante area. Striking to the urban historian is the fact that Austin’s focus on agriculture – both cash crops and subsistence – keeps him far away from the towns and from the nascent colonial state in the Gold Coast. This is especially the case for the period after 1880. By then the British had formally annexed the Gold Coast and had started a ‘‘colonial development project’’ which would eventually lead to the conquest of Asante and territories to the north, and to the formation of a colonial economy over which the British authorities had full control, and in which European businesses reigned supreme. In this process, the coastal towns of Accra and Takoradi developed into important business hubs, and it also included the transformation of Kumasi, the capital of the Asante state. After 1896, when the Asante king was deposed and exiled, the character of the town changed drastically from the economic and administrative capital of an African nation to a secondlevel colonial administrative centre and economic staple (for subsistence goods) and transit market for export goods. Austin does not take into account the new role and position of these towns and others, nor does he consider the importance of the accompanying new trade network that developed, including a new road network, and the introduction of the train and motorcar Austin does not take into consideration at all. Missing too in this respect is the role of Asante (and Gold Coast) businessmen who ventured into the marketing and creditprovisioning of the new export trade, and often set up businesses both in Asante and on the coast. Admittedly, this subject still awaits further research, but there are sufficient references to this new type of entrepreneurship, which we see in the Gold Coast colony as well: ‘‘gentleman-farmers’’, either of noble or commoner status, combining cash-crop farming with active marketing in the towns, be it local, regional (Kumasi) or ‘‘national’’ (Accra). In addition, in some cases their entrepreneurship went further and included Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Univ of Michigan Law Library, on 12 Sep 2017 at 21:27:54, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859006022358 Book Reviews 125 investments in other fields, like mining, shipping, and banking, spreading the risks. Finally, Austin does not refer to new forms of migration that resulted from the transformation of the Asante economy (e.g. ex-slaves who did not want to assimilate; workers to the gold mines in the southwest of Asante and the adjacent Gold Coast area). Having said all this, the overwhelming impression left on the reader is one of awe. Austin has the gift of explaining complex economic processes in a lucid and uncomplicated manner. The economic theory underpinning Austin’s arguments never overshadows the rich empirical descriptions and analyses, making the book a joy to read. A minor criticism one could make here is that Austin has a tendency to write as if he were lecturing a class of students. With this style, there is little room for the questioning of arguments by and ‘‘debate’’ with the reader, which at points can become annoying. The readability of the book matches the importance of the arguments made, and it makes without doubt a very substantial contribution to both our knowledge about the transformation of slave economies in (West) Africa in the nineteenth century, and the mechanisms that structured the colonial economy of cash-crop agriculture. On top of that, the book opens up several avenues of new research. Michel R. Doortmont Hyslop, Jonathan. The Notorious Syndicalist. J.T. Bain – A Scottish Rebel in Colonial South Africa. Jacana Media, Johannesburg 2004. xviii, 342 pp. Ill. £24.95; DOI: 10.1017/S0020859006062353 This publication by Jon Hyslop is a welcome addition to autobiographical and biographical studies on personalities of the early South African labour and socialist movement – a field of research that seems to have been somewhat neglected since the prolific production of labour studies in the so-called revisionist period of the 1970s and 1980s in South African historiography. For this seminal study Hyslop did exhaustive research in institutions ranging from the National Archives and university libraries in South Africa to the International Institute for Social History in Amsterdam and archive depositories and libraries in Scotland and England. The book maps out the fascinating, almost unbelievable, life-story of James Thompson Bain, Scottish rebel and socialist. Born in 1860 into a poor Dundee family, Bain grew up in the typical squalid and overcrowded working-class environment so characteristic of industrial Britain in the nineteenth century. Child labour was common practice, with children frequently beginning to work at age seven or eight. Not surprisingly, Bain would become bitter about industrial capitalism and Hyslop traces this sentiment back to the harsh experiences of child labour in Dundee in the 1860s. At the age of sixteen Bain joined the British army to escape from poverty. In 1878 Bain joined the 1/13th Light Infantry in South Africa and took part in the suppression of the Pedi tribe in the Transvaal, who were resisting colonial rule. Bain then took part in the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879 in Natal, after which he returned temporarily to Britain. In 1883 he left the army to train as a fitter in Scotland and became a member of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers (ASE). Like many artisans of this time, Bain as an autodidact became a dedicated reader and developed a particular fascination with the writings of Thomas Carlyle, which transformed his life. In Edinburgh he apparently fraternized with leaders of the Scottish socialist movement such as William Morris, and Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Univ of Michigan Law Library, on 12 Sep 2017 at 21:27:54, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859006022358 126 Book Reviews socialist personalities such as Prince Kropotkin. He also became a member of the socialistorientated Scottish Land and Labour League. In 1888 Bain returned to South Africa as an immigrant and settled originally in Cape Town, where he got married. After a short spell on the Kimberley diamond fields Bain and his family moved to the gold fields of the Witwatersrand in 1892, where he held several jobs in the flourishing mine-related industries of Johannesburg. Because of his own sufferings as a child labourer and his Carlylean radicalism, he felt an implacable hatred for the capitalist Johannesburg mine-owners, or Randlords, as they were known. In the working-class environment of Johannesburg Bain soon begun to advocate socialism and distributed copies of Blatchford’s Merrie England and the Clarion. There he came into contact with the well-known South African novelist and socialist, Olive Schreiner. He was centrally involved in pioneering the labour movement on the Rand and in founding the first substantial labour organization there, popularly known as the Labour Union. Bain also founded a local branch of the ASE, became the editor of a socialist newspaper, the proBoer Johannesburg Witness, in 1899, and founded a socialist organization, the International Independent Labour Party. Bain’s hatred of the Rand mine-owners led him to sympathize with the Boer cause during the Anglo-Boer War of 1899–1902. Already in 1896 he had became a Transvaal citizen and a secret agent of the Transvaal government. When the war broke out, he joined the so-called ‘‘Irish Brigade’’ as the only British-born labour leader to have fought on the Boer side. In 1900 Bain was captured by the British forces. Although he was a naturalized Transvaal citizen, his life was in serious danger as the British military authorities were initially undecided on a policy towards captured ex-British subjects. Fortunately for Bain, the military governor of Johannesburg decided against treating him as a traitor and for the remainder of the hostilities he was transferred to Ceylon as a prisoner of war. Bain and his family returned to Johannesburg in 1903. In postwar Johannesburg Bain emerged as an admired orator and effective labour organizer. After moving to Pretoria in 1906 he became a prominent co-founder of the socialist Transvaal Independent Labour Party, and was host to the renowned Scottish labour and socialist leader, Keir Hardie, during his visit to South Africa in 1908. In addition, Bain was a founder of the Pretoria Socialist Society and later of the short-lived South African Socialist Society. In the first national election for the Union parliament of South Africa in 1910, he ran unsuccessfully as a candidate of the South African Labour Party (SALP). It was also in Pretoria socialist circles that Bain met Gandhi during one of the latter’s visits to town. In 1913 the post of organizer of the Transvaal Federation of Trade Unions was offered to Bain in order to revive the organization. This opportunity opened up new vistas for him. It would eventually prove to be one of the two highlights of his career as a South African labour activist. From a labour perspective, his actions as a strike leader in the miners’ strike of 1913 and the general strike of 1914 would bring him fame and elevate him to prominence. From the government’s point of view, his involvement in these strikes would bring him notoriety. Bain was a pivotal figure in spreading the 1913 strike, which began on one mine but would eventually involve approximately 18,000 workers on 63 gold mines. The magnitude and intensity of the strike was such that the government was forced to sue for peace. Bain was the leader of the strike committee which brokered a deal with the government that favoured the strikers in order to settle the dispute. Industrial peace was not to last too long as a general strike broke out in 1914. Being the Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Univ of Michigan Law Library, on 12 Sep 2017 at 21:27:54, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859006022358 Book Reviews 127 organizer of the Federation, to which the union of South African Railways employees was affiliated, Bain once again became involved, but his fortunes as a prominent strike leader changed somewhat. When some of its members received redundancy notices in January 1914, the railways union declared a strike that soon escalated into a general strike. This time, though, the government was ready to deal with its labour adversaries. Martial law was proclaimed and Bain and eight other prominent strike leaders were arrested. In the dead of night and under armed guard they were transferred by train to Durban, where they were deported and shipped to Britain. Bain and his fellow deportees spent the next seven months in Britain where, inter alia, they spoke in Hyde Park, London, at the biggest British labour demonstration of the pre-World-War-I era, protesting at the illegal deportations. Bain also travelled widely in England, Wales, and Scotland, holding innumerable meetings with various organizations in the British labour movement. After the outbreak of World War I, in October 1914, the deportees were finally allowed to return to South Africa, where Bain resettled in Johannesburg. When the SALP split in 1915 on the war issue, Bain briefly joined party dissidents in the newly-formed anti-war International Socialist League. But he soon fell foul of this organization’s leadership over differences in the interpretation of socialist doctrine. However, in the wake of the Russian Revolution and the progress of communism in western Europe, Bain soon found himself at the forefront of South African industrial action once more – the second highlight of his career. In 1919 the Johannesburg town council decided, in the light of the adverse postwar economic conditions, to retrench some thirty artisans at the power station where Bain was also employed. A strike was called, and under Bain’s leadership the strikers ousted the town council from City Hall and established a so-called Board of Control, dubbed the ‘‘Johannesburg Soviet’’, with Bain himself as chairman. The Board of Control ran the city’s municipal services for a few days before the council yielded to the strikers’ demands that the retrenchment of power workers be rescinded. In October 1919, however, Bain fell ill with an unknown disease and died while recuperating from an operation. Hyslop is a first-class prose stylist with an ability to extrapolate his narrative to the broader canvas of world affairs related to the international and South African labour movement. Bain’s life story is further enlivened with information on other renowned personalities, historical events, and places. Hyslop’s book is an excellent mix of biography, social history, and commentaries on the literature of this field. He has succeeded splendidly in portraying the contradictions and complexities of Bain’s character. Bain accepted the segregationist principles of white labour protectionist politics that prevailed through much of the British Empire and beyond. The radical politics of his time blinded Bain to the racial injustice on which Transvaal society in particular was based. He was torn between white labourism and the radicalism of the revolutionary syndicalists, and vacillated between them for much of his life. In Hyslop’s own words: ‘‘Bain was a man who lived in a complex world of tensions between empire and national identity, between rootedness and migrant life, and between the dream of a universal egalitarianism and the self-interested politics of race [:::]. James Bain lived his life as a traveller in search of Utopia’’. This book is highly recommended to all lovers of labour history and is essential reading for scholars of the history of the South African labour movement. Wessel Visser Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Univ of Michigan Law Library, on 12 Sep 2017 at 21:27:54, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859006022358 128 Book Reviews Nowak, Karin. Spanien zwischen Diktatur und Republik. Korporatismus, organisierte Interessen und staatliche Sozialpolitik 1919–1936. [Veröffentlichungen des Instituts für soziale Bewegungen: Schriftenreihe A: Darstellungen, Band 29.] Klartext, Essen 2004. 344 pp. Maps. A 39.00; DOI: 10.1017/ S002085900607235X Although social conflict has been an omnipresent phenomenon in the first half of Europe’s twentieth century, the Spanish Civil War occupies a special place in this context. In the course of three years, social-economic tensions erupted in an unprecedented explosion of violence. In comparison with Italy or Germany, where the most critical moments of social unrest were neutralized by the takeover of totalitarian regimes, in Spain similar plans, prepared by the military forces, actually failed. The result was a three-year struggle that left behind an economically destroyed and socially deeply divided country. Social and economic backwardness, as illustrated by the multitudes of poor agrarian labourers in the south, was without any doubt a key factor in Spain’s exceptional path to civil war. And it became evident from a true social revolution, following the outbreak of war, that resulted in an almost complete transfer of economic power to the working classes in industry and agriculture. This study by Karin Nowak, however, ends where the history of the Spanish Civil War begins. Nevertheless, her work points to one of its key issues: the history of organized labour relations. Over a period of seventeen years prior to the outbreak of war Nowak examines the relationship between labour and capital in its ideological, institutional, and juridical dimensions. And, following her basic conclusions, things look very different from what might be suggested from the catastrophic civil-war perspective. Peaceful mechanisms of interest mediation between entrepreneurs and working-class organizations had evolved long before the outbreak of violence, and the author does not hesitate to characterize them as effective and truly ‘‘modern’’. A key player in this game was the Spanish state, that little by little laid the juridical basis for organized labour relations, while on the other hand establishing social policy as a proper field of state action. All this is analysed meticulously and with great care and clarity. A truly innovative point in Nowak’s work is reached by uniting three different perspectives: the ideological (discourses in parties and institutions), the legislative (the legal framework for labour relations), and the practical (the functioning of organized conflict mediation). As a theoretical reference Nowak cites the concept of ‘‘societal corporatism’’ developed by Philippe Schmitter in order to distinguish labour relations in Western democracies from state corporatism in authoritarian regimes.1 The structure of the study follows the turning points of the political chronology. By choosing the seventeen years before the war Nowak is able to focus on three politically very different periods: the late Restoration era (1919–1923), the dictatorship of General Miguel Primo de Rivera (1923–1931), and the republican period in times of peace (1931– 1936). In all three parts the emphasis of her study is on the questions of what kind of corporatist mechanisms developed and how they worked. The first corporatist traces she finds are the so-called comisiones mixtas de trabajo installed in the industrial city of Barcelona just at the end of the Restoration era. In Nowak’s view, however, corporatist initiatives at this time appear very much born by necessity, given the difficulties of the 1. Philippe Schmitter, ‘‘Still the Century of Corporatism?’’, Review of Politics, 36 (1974), pp. 85–131. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Univ of Michigan Law Library, on 12 Sep 2017 at 21:27:54, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859006022358 Book Reviews 129 liberal state in containing the rising tide of social unrest unleashed by the boom of the Spanish economy during World War I. A different impression is drawn from the analysis of the dictatorship’s social policy. In contrast to the political elite of the monarchy, General Primo de Rivera welcomed at least one part of the organized labour movement as a political partner. In trying to broaden the social basis of his regime, the dictator made substantial efforts to integrate labour interests by means of corporatist organs. Nevertheless, the most courageous step towards societal corporatism is to be found under the Second Republic. Strongly influenced by the first socialist-republican coalition government, corporatism was transformed into an ‘‘instrument of economic democratization’’ (p. 309). The network of the so called jurados mixtos (formerly named comités paritarios) was extended to all branches of economy and to all parts of Spain, including agriculture, probably the most conflictive sector of the Spanish economy that until then had stayed outside state-organized interest mediation. And the evidence gathered by Nowak suggests that, at least until the so-called Revolution of October 1934, corporatist mechanisms in general did a good job in reducing social conflict. On the other hand, Nowak points to several structural defects limiting the success of Spanish corporatism such as, for example, organizational weaknesses in workers’ and especially employers’ associations – throughout the whole period entrepreneurs did not manage to unite in a single association. Therefore, success in many cases depended on the pragmatism of individuals. According to the concept of societal corporatism, Nowak identifies in each of the three periods a diffuse mixture of ideas. In the second and third periods, the term corporatism comprised contradicting concepts, such as authoritarian or even fascist version of corporatism as well as a socialist idea of workers’ participation. Corporatism under the dictatorship was strongly inspired by the paternalistic world-view of the general himself, whereas under the republic it came to be an instrument of labour interest. However, lying at the heart of class conflict, corporatist experiments also serve to highlight the deep social divisions in Spanish society. Long before the republic the attempt to bridge the social and economic gaps proved difficult, if not impossible, because with every concession the state granted to the workers a partial withdrawal of employers’ associations followed. Furthermore, the effectiveness of corporatist mechanisms suffered from the traditional split of the Spanish labour movement in two rival factions. While anarcho-syndicalism, which gathered nearly 2 million followers, always stood aside, it was the socialist trade union, Unión General de Trabajadores, that during the dictatorship and the republic could effectively monopolize collaboration within the corporatist networks. Therefore, the success of corporatism always depended on regional and local power relations between the two trade unions. On the other hand, it cannot be ignored that corporatist organs as effective mechanisms of interest mediation only covered concrete issues like wage and labour rights conflicts, whereas the more fundamental contradictions of Spanish society persisted. Although Spanish corporatism adds some unique aspects to the evolution of the western European welfare state, it did not prove sufficient to contain social conflict and block the way towards violence and bloodshed. Sören Brinkmann Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Univ of Michigan Law Library, on 12 Sep 2017 at 21:27:54, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859006022358 130 Book Reviews Murphy, Kevin. Revolution and Counterrevolution. Class Struggle in a Moscow Metal Factory. [International Studies in Social History.] Berghahn Books, New York [etc.] 2005. xi, 234 pp. £45.00; DOI: 10.1017/ S0020859006082356 Revolution and Counterrevolution examines working-class life in Russia in the first third of the twentieth century, from the first Russian Revolution until the end of the first Soviet Five-Year Plan, by which time the formation of the Stalinist system had been more or less completed. The author challenges both Soviet and Western historiographies of the working class and the Russian Revolution. In his opinion, the majority of earlier studies have suffered from the limitations of methodologies strongly influenced by the Cold War and its legacy. Beyond that, the author believes that, even though former Soviet archives have been accessible for the past fifteen years, few studies have yet been undertaken to test prevailing conceptions against empirical data now available. Revolution and Counterrevolution is Kevin Murphy’s attempt ‘‘to fill a long-vacant gap in the study of the Russian working class by providing the first systematic, archival-driven study to span the revolutionary era’’ (p. 1). The author builds his case ‘‘on the strength of the rich but limited pre-archival studies that have avoided the crude Cold War methodology’’ (p. 5), among which he lists the works of E.H. Carr, Robert W. Davies, and Donald Filtzer. Pointing to the central role of the factory as an institution in Russian and Soviet society, where the factory served not just as a place of work but also as a centre of the social and cultural life of its workers, Kevin Murphy chooses as his methodology a deep and detailed study of a single factory – the Hammer and Sickle metalworking plant in Moscow. For his history of the working class of this factory, the author makes use of an extremely rich collection of sundry official and private documents from Russian archives and additional material from the local press. The author expertly handles this wide array of sources to write a lively archive-based plant history, which is one of the undoubted merits of the book. Some criticism might be expressed, though, concerning the use of worker memoirs and autobiographies which were written in the early 1930s as part of a Soviet campaign with the express purpose of writing a socialist history of the working class in Russia.1 The factory chosen by Kevin Murphy for his case study has been the subject of several recent studies.2 The particular interest in this factory from historians can be explained by two factors: the existence of an extensive factory archive, and the strategic importance of what was the largest metalworking factory in the Soviet capital. However, this very fact – the strategic importance of the Moscow factory – means that developments in Moscow had some particular features different from developments elsewhere in Russia. In 1. See more about the general problems of investigating Soviet workers’ memoirs and autobiographies: Diane Koenker, ‘‘Scripting the Revolutionary Worker Autobiography: Archetypes, Models, Inventions, and Markets’’, International Review of Social History, 49 (2004), pp. 371–400; and about the specificity of Soviet workers’ memoirs of the early 1930s: Sergei Zhuravlev, Fenomen ‘‘Istorii fabrik i zavodov’’: gor’kovskoe nachinanie v kontekste epokhi 1930-kh godov (Moscow, 1997). 2. Recent studies in which the Moscow metalworking factory figures include: David L. Hoffman, Peasant Metropolis: Social Identities in Moscow, 1929–1941 (Ithaca, NY, 1994); Kenneth M. Strauss, Factory and Community in Stalin’s Russia: the Making of an Industrial Working Class (Pittsburgh, PA, 1997); and Andrei Markevich and Andrei Sokolov, ‘‘Magnitka bliz Sadovogo kol’tsa’’: stimuly k rabote na Moskovskom zavode ‘‘Serp i molot’’, 1883–2001 gg (Moscow, 2005). Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Univ of Michigan Law Library, on 12 Sep 2017 at 21:27:54, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859006022358 Book Reviews 131 scrupulously telling the story of the Hammer and Sickle factory, the author pays scant attention to general issues related to Russian industrial development or to comparisons between the Moscow factory and other plants away from the capital. One could reasonably wish for more of a discussion about parallels (or differences) between the history of this factory and the history of the country as a whole, and about how knowing something of the history of the factory might affect our understanding of the history of the country. The theoretical foundation for the study is Marxism, which, in the author’s view, provides ‘‘the most convincing framework for understanding the political economy of the Soviet Union’’ (p. 7). The class struggle of the proletariat at shop and factory levels is the focus of the analysis. The author investigates the conflict between employers and employees over surpluses produced by the workers, as well as the political dimensions of this conflict. The problem, however, is that for the period after the 1917 Revolution the author does not distinguish the class of exploiters from the state, although, viewed from many perspectives, a distinction should be made. The author often substitutes the investigation of class struggle and relations between classes for an analysis of relations between workers and the Soviet regime and of what he calls working-class militancy. For Kevin Murphy, the latter is characterized by workers’ ability and willingness (or unwillingness) collectively to defend their rights and to challenge the factory management and the regime. The level of working-class militancy is closely linked to the degree of class solidarity and unity. According to the author, historians of the Russian Revolution should look first of all to workers’ own perceptions of themselves as a class, rather than to other identities that might also apply, as ‘‘the history of the Russian revolution is the history of class struggle’’ (p. 229). Through his analysis of a single factory, Kevin Murphy attempts to unravel a conundrum of Russian history: ‘‘Why [did] the most unruly proletariat of the century come to tolerate the ascendancy of a political and economic system that, by every conceivable measure, proved antagonistic to working-class interests?’’ (p. 2). Or, in other words, how was a revolution based on the idea of social equality transformed into the Stalinist dictatorship it became – a dictatorship which ‘‘represented a veritable counterrevolution in which the drive for accumulation triumphed over human need’’ (p. 228)? Framing his questions in this way, the author focuses his attention on the NEP period, during which the struggle over the further development of Russian revolution unfolded. Three of the book’s six chapters deal with the 1920s, successively investigating the transformation of revolutionary institutions at factory level, strike activity, changes in the workers’ daily lives, and political struggle at the Hammer and Sickle factory during the NEP period. The first two chapters illustrate the militancy of Moscow metalworkers in the pre-revolutionary period, and during the revolutionary and first post-revolutionary years. The last chapter looks at the demise of workers’ collective actions as well as their attitude toward the formation of the Stalinist system during the first Five-Year Plan. Kevin Murphy paints a picture of class struggle at the Moscow metal factory during the period covered in his book. In the years prior to the Revolution, he describes a period that was characterized by chronic social instability, during which the labour movement rode three waves of ascendancy alternating with temporary periods of retreat. The majority of workers were generally sympathetic to socialism and did not manifest loyalty to any particular party. The third wave, when the proletariat was most keenly aware of its own collective strength, proved decisive for the events of 1917. Class conflict had given the Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Univ of Michigan Law Library, on 12 Sep 2017 at 21:27:54, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859006022358 132 Book Reviews workers an awareness of their place and of what was happening around them, and had politicized them and brought them closer to the main left-wing parties and movements. In response to the economic collapse during the civil war, labour militancy was gradually replaced by individual workers’ concerns for their own personal survival and an apolitical atmosphere. While the state did not use its power against the proletariat, war communism created a rift between the working class and the regime. With recovery in the early 1920s and higher wages, and with the Party attending to workers’ concerns, this rift narrowed. Workers actively used official channels (mainly through their trade unions) to arbitrate their grievances and resolve labour conflicts, leading to their increased loyalty to the regime. The industrialization drive and the growing preoccupation of officials with the problem of efficiency of production altered the balance in favour of the state. The activities of both Party and trade union at factory and shop levels gradually shifted from labour advocacy to efforts to increase productivity. As Kevin Murphy clearly demonstrates, even the state policy of replacing the cultural inheritance of tsarism with a pervasive socialism manifest in the daily life of the workers was subordinated to the regime’s productive aspirations. Workers’ needs and wages were sacrificed for industrialization. Naturally, such shifts caused worker discontent, even if there were relatively few overt expressions of that discontent. Rather than ascribing this passivity to the deterrent of repression, Kevin Murphy ascribes it to the workers’ convictions that Soviet representatives would continue to respond favourably to their demands, and that it was still possible to effect changes within the existing system of official institutions. The political opposition fed on worker dissent, but the latter had parochial rather than general ideological roots, and at any rate the number of opposition activists was not great. What can be said, nonetheless, as the author points out, is that the majority of workers did not support the formation of the Stalinist system and might have had the potential to drive it from power. ‘‘Workers in the ‘Hammer and Sickle’ factory’’, writes Murphy. ‘‘were neither terrorized by the early Soviet state nor impressed with Stalinism’s agenda’’ (p. 224), as has been suggested by revisionists or by totalitarian historiography. The main social engineering tool of Stalinism was the threat of hunger and the state’s control of the food supply. In addition the state managed to recruit a minority of workers to police the shopfloor. Beyond this, a massive inflow of former peasants and labour turnover at unprecedented levels amplified the divisions within the working class, which served to speed the demise of worker militancy. Finally the regime gradually adopted more coercive measures as substitutes for voluntary political conviction. All these developments did not transform workers into docile productive units, but a shift from collective actions to individual survival behaviour did occur. Kevin Murphy’s observations, mentioned above, generally have solid arguments and are quite convincing, but some objections and critical notes to his analytical approach and general scheme could be expressed. First, one could wish to know more about the importance of intra-class differences among workers. With the exception of important departmental and gender differences, there is no discussion on how characteristics of workers, like social and regional origin, age, or level of skills, affected their behaviour. Discussing the extent to which workers were unified, the author seems to presume that it could not have been otherwise. In fact, even before the Revolution, the owner of the factory had used wage and social policies as a tool to divide workers, and to link skilled workers from particular Russian provinces, and even particular villages, with the interests Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Univ of Michigan Law Library, on 12 Sep 2017 at 21:27:54, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859006022358 Book Reviews 133 of the factory. Taking into account identities other than class could help to explain some of the ‘‘anomalies’’ of class struggle at the factory, as for example during the first All-Russian strike of October 1905, when Moscow metalworkers expressed less militancy than their counterparts from other factories. Second, workers at the Hammer and Sickle factory did not comprise a stable group. A high level of turnover was a particular feature of the factory workforce, not only during the first Five-Year Plan; due to hard labour conditions only between one-third and one-half of factory workers were more or less permanent employees. In studying shifts in long-term trends, like the tendency towards militancy among Moscow metalworkers, consideration must therefore be given to the fact that this group itself changed over time. The arrival of ‘‘new’’ workers at the factory gate could have the effect of increasing divisions among workers and thus reducing militancy. On the other hand, because these ‘‘new’’ workers were still outsiders to the factory community and were less bound by loyalty to the enterprise, their presence might have had the opposite effect and increased worker militancy. Third, the relationship between class struggle and political development is not always clear. During several sub-periods, the author asserts that the majority of workers were apolitical, had little awareness of differences between parties and political movements, etc. It is rather difficult to understand how these statements can be reconciled with the general presumption by the author of a combative Russian working class. At times, it seems that it would be more sensible to turn the author’s investigation on its head; rather than attempting to explain the demise of worker militancy in the late 1920s, it would be more appropriate to seek an explanation for the several waves of worker militancy in previous years. Finally, the author’s thesis that repression played only a minor role in the development and imposition of Stalinism seems arguable. One could start from the fact that the threat of repression could be just as effective as repression itself. Indeed, Kevin Murphy himself shows the increasing role of coercive measures in the late 1920s and early 1930s. If we compare worker militancy during late war communism and the first Five-Year Plan, we see that the workers’ response to the hunger they faced was much more militant during the time of war communism. Absent the factor of terror, we might well conclude that the emergence of Stalinism amounted to an accident of history, as workers did not support it and might well have had the potential to overthrow the regime. Notwithstanding these critical comments, Kevin Murphy’s book is an important contribution to the history of the Russian Revolution and the emergence of Stalinism. It should be of interest not only to scholars of Russian history but also to specialists in labour movements, as it is one of the few studies to examine the labour dimension at factory level during Russia’s revolutionary era. Andrei Markevich Carrigan, William D. The Making of a Lynching Culture. Violence and Vigilantism in Central Texas, 1836–1916. University of Illinois Press, Urbana [etc.] 2004. xi, 308 pp. Ill. $35.00; DOI: 10.1017/S0020859006092352 William Carrigan’s goal in this interesting book is to tell the story of the history of mob violence in a relatively small section of Texas that he refers to as ‘‘central Texas’’. Carrigan Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Univ of Michigan Law Library, on 12 Sep 2017 at 21:27:54, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859006022358 134 Book Reviews considers his focus on the history of a restricted geographic area to represent a new approach to the study of lynching, for which previous work can be divided roughly into two genres: (1) in-depth case studies of individual incidents, and (2) cross-sectional comparative studies that exploit information about many incidents, across several geographic areas (usually counties or state), to conduct sophisticated statistical analyses. The second original contribution of Carrigan’s approach is his reliance on the concept of ‘‘historical memory’’ to explain the persistence of mob violence within central Texas across the eighty-year period included in his study. Regarding the role and importance of historical memory, Carrigan writes (p. 187), ‘‘Lynching and mob violence, in short, had been praised for generations. Historical memory in central Texas accorded great prestige to the region’s Indian fighters, to those who helped collapse the Reconstruction government through violence, and to the men who defended the honor of white womanhood. Participation in a well-ordered lynch mob was, for the region’s Anglo Americans, a rite of passage, a public duty, and a source of prestige.’’ Conflict between whites and a melange of other racial and ethnic groups in central Texas is at the heart of Carrigan’s story. Native Americans, Mexicans, and African Americans complicated the lives of Anglo settlers as they sought to exploit the area’s resources and to establish a segregated society in which they sat, unchallenged, atop the racial and ethnic hierarchy. According to the author, it is through the Anglos’ history of exterminating, subjugating, exporting, and enslaving these groups that the area acquired its historical memory. Those traditions, and the culture that they created, justified and glorified the use of extralegal violence when it helped the dominant group to achieve its objectives. Carrigan relies on the experiences of the different racial and ethnic groups in central Texas to organize his story of the history of mob violence. This story begins and ends with the gruesome lynching of Jesse Washington in Waco, Texas. On 16 May 1916, 15,000 central Texans watched as Washington was mutilated and burned in a carnival-like atmosphere. The area’s historical memory of extralegal violence against Native Americans, Mexicans, and African Americans helped to justify Washington’s barbarous lynching in the minds of mob members. And, according to Carrigan, Washington’s lynching subsequently helped to bring an end to mob violence in central Texas. The book’s seven chapters put each of central Texas’s racial and ethnic groups – including Anglos – in the spotlight to examine the area’s history of mob violence and vigilantism. Native Americans and Mexicans already occupied this part of Texas before Anglo settlers from the US and abroad arrived in large numbers. Carrigan recounts the conflict with Mexico over this territory, and the eventual independence and statehood of Texas. This was an extremely violent era and it spawned (or at least intensified) the racist attitudes that Anglos held about Mexicans. During this period, the Texas Rangers acquired a reputation, bordering on reverence, that was based largely on their willingness to enforce their own brand of justice while ignoring formal legal procedures. Thus, according to Carrigan, the history of the region’s independence, the conflict with Mexico (and therefore with Mexicans), the glorification of extralegal violence, and a racist ideology predisposed central Texas to the acceptance of mob violence, a key ingredient in its historical memory. The shameful history of the treatment of Native Americans in the United States has been told before, and in greater detail, by other historians – from the massacres of women and children to the use of biological warfare in the spread of deadly infectious diseases like smallpox. But, Carrigan’s book pushes this literature into new terrain by linking those despicable behaviors to the creation of the area’s historical memory. According to Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Univ of Michigan Law Library, on 12 Sep 2017 at 21:27:54, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859006022358 Book Reviews 135 Carrigan, Anglo violence against Indians reinforced mob violence in Texas in three ways: (1) it provided the form of the mob, itself; (2) it obscured the true reasons for the conflict (i.e. land acquisition) by emphasizing racial and cultural grievances (e.g. the need to protect masculine honor and white womanhood); and (3) it provided the heroic models (e.g. Indian fighters and Texas Rangers) for emulation by violent mobs in future generations. The lynching of African Americans has been the focus of most previous research on mob violence in the United States, and African Americans are the primary focus of four chapters which allow Carrigan to focus specifically on their exposure to mob violence during four different eras – slavery, reconstruction, redemption, and the early twentieth century. As others have pointed out, slave holders were reluctant to destroy their valuable property by killing slaves, even if they were comfortable imposing extreme forms of corporal punishment. During the slavery era, African Americans in central Texas were at greatest risk when Anglos feared violent insurrections, as during the ‘‘Panic of 1860’’, when there was widespread concern that slaves would rise up and fight for their freedom. In fact, the threat of slaves escaping to Mexico, where slavery was illegal, was far greater than the threat of insurrections. But, Carrigan points out (p. 76): ‘‘Whatever the actual extent of slave participation in these plots, it is clear that Texans from 1856 until the outbreak of the Civil War embraced vigilantism and extralegal action as the primary means of preventing slave resistance and encouraging white unity in the emerging sectional crisis.’’ During Reconstruction, central Texans, like other southerners, bristled under the control of federal troops and Republicans. No longer slaves, African Americans could not expect the same protection that they had enjoyed as valuable property. Indeed, their freedom to compete politically and economically with Anglos put blacks at much greater risk. Carrigan emphasizes the political basis for mob violence against blacks during Reconstruction, as Anglos lashed out against carpetbaggers, Republicans, and others who had suddenly gained power. But, he also acknowledges the role of other social forces such as the collapse of the central Texas economy following the Civil War, and the penury and frustration that this caused for many Anglos. Following Reconstruction, the political influence of blacks withered and the character of mob violence against them changed. Now, Anglos in central Texas drew from their historical memories to construct and justify a violent strategy for maintaining their social dominance. Other scholars have referred to the lynching of blacks during this period as a form of state-sanctioned terrorism, and Carrigan’s story about central Texas seems to provide general support for that claim. Police officials refused to protect their prisoners against mobs; courts declined to prosecute well-known members of lynch mobs; and, for the first time, accusations of rape and sexual assault became common justifications for the lynching of black men. This was an era during which mob violence became racialized and when central Texas joined the rest of the American South in using lynching to terrorize and subjugate its black citizens. From 1897 to 1905 there were no lynchings in central Texas, for reasons that Carrigan does not describe very convincingly. After 1905 lynching intensified, possibly as a result of Anglo frustration resulting from specific court cases in which accused blacks were granted retrials, or from isolated glitches in the well-oiled process of arrest-trial-convictionexecution for black defendants. Finally, according to Carrigan, the lynching of Jesse Washington in 1916 ushered in a new era when influential whites grew less tolerant of mob violence and hoped to avoid the negative publicity, tarnished community image, and damaged economy that ensued. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Univ of Michigan Law Library, on 12 Sep 2017 at 21:27:54, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859006022358 136 Book Reviews Carrigan’s reliance on the concept of historical memory will appeal more to some scholars than to others. For example, social scientists interested in explaining variation in the intensity of mob violence over time or across space will probably question the added value of this predictor to their multivariate models. They may also ask how a causative agent such as historical memory, which is largely constant within an area from year to year, can account for temporal swings in the frequency of mob violence such as occurred in central Texas during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. One consequence of his emphasis on historical memory is the disappointing explanation that Carrigan offers for the steep decline in lynching that occurred after 1916. In a restricted geographic area, with a distinct historical memory that condoned and justified mob violence, what social or economic forces were powerful enough to eradicate lynching as a form of social control? While Carrigan mentions some possible candidates, such as economic concerns over negative publicity and the out-migration of African Americans, these receive too little attention. But, these are relatively minor quibbles with an otherwise impressive piece of scholarship. Carrigan’s well-written and carefully-researched book is definitely a valuable addition to the rapidly growing literature on the history of mob violence and vigilantism in the American South. Stewart E. Tolnay Roscigno, Vincent J. and William F. Danaher, The Voice of Southern Labor. Radio, Music, and Textile Strikes, 1929–1934. [Social Movements, Protest, and Contention, vol. 19.] University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis [etc.] 2004. xxviii, 177 pp. $59.95; DOI: 10.1017/S0020859006102357 The Voice of Southern Labor is an important contribution that offers a highly engaging analysis of Depression-era mobilization in the textile mills of the southern United States. The book describes how labor militancy evolved from sporadic and highly localized efforts in 1929 into a major regional revolt that coalesced during the General Textile Strike of 1934. The authors’ thesis is that the advent of radio initiated new links between workers in dispersed mill communities at the same time that it connected them in immediate, symbolically significant ways to national politics. Radio facilitated the sharing of folk music among southern textile workers, but more than that, mill musicians themselves bridged culture and class by effectively framing labor’s concerns in their overlapping roles as co-workers, labor organizers, and even martyrs. Early radio stations relied heavily on local talent for programming, and as textile workers entertained listeners with songs like ‘‘Weave Room Blues’’ and ‘‘Cotton Mill Colic’’, they gave voice to struggling mill-hands while dramatizing their plight. Many workers alternated between careers in music and jobs in the mills, and the dissemination of their music at union events, during social occasions, or through radio broadcasts, helped forge a shared culture that was rooted deeply in the mill experience. Radio was also critical in spreading information within and between communities, and importantly, broadcasts connected the White House to remote, rural locales. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s ‘‘fireside chats’’ addressed the concerns of working people, and encouraged many listeners to regard the federal government as both a change agent and an ally. Focusing on the role of radio, Roscigno and Danaher explore how 400,000 southern textile workers were able to Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Univ of Michigan Law Library, on 12 Sep 2017 at 21:27:54, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859006022358 Book Reviews 137 overcome isolation, economic disadvantage, and employer paternalism to develop a shared oppositional consciousness that produced one of the largest strikes in US history. That the textile workers’ mobilization of 1934 occurred with limited and largely ineffectual support from established labor organizations makes this story all the more compelling. A significant part of this book’s appeal is that it provides a satisfying, multi-level account. The authors describe the rhythms of mill-village life as effectively as they relate key political, technological, and economic developments on the national stage. Readers learn about porch-side and lunch-break gatherings of musicians who had recently migrated from the mountains and fields to work in the textile communities of the southern Piedmont. Much of the material in this book comes from contemporaneous accounts provided by textile workers, but the authors were also able to locate and interview several surviving mill musicians who performed in their communities and on radio during the early 1930s. Roscigno and Danaher undertake a content analysis of the music itself by examining dominant themes in the mill-song lyrics; they quote from and discuss thousands of letters sent by textile workers to President Roosevelt; and they statistically investigate the spatial association between radio stations and strike activity across the southern states. In short, the analysis moves effectively between discussions of the social psychological and cultural processes that engendered activism and the structural variables, such as legislation, technological innovation, and geography, that affected its timing and distribution. Taken together, this material creates a vivid and methodologically rigorous portrait of the links between mill, music, and mobilization. This research raises important questions about the role of unions in focusing workers’ grievances and initiating collective action. Unions may be necessary for sustaining labor mobilization over the long term, but the authors suggest that labor organizations are not required for its genesis. Roscigno and Danaher show how the music – performed by the workers themselves and disseminated throughout the region by the new technology of radio – cultivated a sense of shared experience and forged a unifying identity that transcended the local village. As textile workers’ grievances mounted, music promoted labor solidarity and even offered a recipe for social change. Although radio was only part of this story, the authors illuminate one way that shared culture might, if only fleetingly, bring class consciousness into being. This account also reminds us that it was not so long ago that musical competency and even proficiency were quite common. Home-grown performances provided the basis for meaningful, shared experiences as they satisfied workers’ need for entertainment and diversion. Singing, playing instruments, and performing for neighbors and co-workers was woven deeply into the culture. At a time when much of our music is manufactured for us as consumers rather than being produced directly by us as a cultural product, this book serves as a subtle reminder of what we may have lost. The Voice of Southern Labor is very much about the experiences of workers and the processes that lead to their mobilization. As such, it examines the 1930s textile mobilization almost exclusively through the lens of class dynamics. Less prominent, but also interesting, is the authors’ attention to the ways in which gender and family roles mediated workers’ experiences, sometimes bringing their sense of exploitation into sharp relief. Missing, however, is any sustained or in-depth attention to the role of race. Although the majority of US blacks lived in the South during this period, and despite the ubiquity of racial inequality during the 1930s, we learn little about how workers’ identities were racialized. As whites living and working in a social, political, and economic context Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Univ of Michigan Law Library, on 12 Sep 2017 at 21:27:54, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859006022358 138 Book Reviews that was thoroughly unequal by race, how did textile workers’ position of privilege inform their emerging sense of class identity? This question goes unexamined in this book. The authors briefly mention that African Americans were generally absent from the southern mill villages through the mid-1930s, and to the extent that blacks were present, they occupied the lowest rungs on the employment ladder. This racial separation, the authors argue, promoted a sense of common identity among whites by maximizing cultural homogeneity in the mill villages. However, this cohesion could hardly have been devoid of racial significance or meaning. There are numerous reasons for this; I will briefly discuss two of these. First, white millhands could not have overlooked blacks’ potential role as competitors or replacement workers. If Massachusetts and Pennsylvania employers in the shoe and cutlery industries had been willing to transport Chinese workers from California to break strikes in the 1870s, what would prevent textile employers from bringing in black labor from the next county? If Pittsburgh and Chicago employers in steel and meatpacking were able to recruit thousands of black workers from the South during and after World War I, what would keep textile employers from hiring black workers from a neighboring town? Second, the architecture of racial inequality was well established throughout the South in the 1920s and 1930s. Lynchings, segregation, and rigid codes of racial interaction structured southern identities around the color line. Even in communities that were largely white, Jim Crow was never far away. Indeed, Jim Crow segregation was what made it possible for anyone to work in an all-white job or live in an all-white area of town. Thus, it is hard to believe that white textile workers did not fashion their shared sense of identity against the backdrop of racial privilege, and it seems equally implausible that the music itself would not have conveyed something, even implicitly, about this highly racialized milieu. If southern mill music was building solidarity, it was not building solidarity among workers generally, but among white workers. At some level, race would have had to have been salient in this process. My primary critique of this book is that race remains almost completely invisible in a community and regional context where it had to have mattered tremendously. I know that neither of the authors is insensitive to these matters, and race has been an important focal point in much of their other work. Roscigno and Danaher never say that race is irrelevant to the story of the southern textile workers’ mobilization, but by omission they seem to imply that white mill-workers’ collective identity was racially inert. Although the role of race warrants a more detailed treatment, The Voice of Southern Labor does offer a compelling and original analysis. This compact and readable book connects micro-level processes of identity formation to the development of oppositional culture and collective action. Importantly, the account suggests one way that technological innovation can provide the spark necessary to ignite a social movement. Structural conditions may be favorable for collective action, but as the authors argue, media ‘‘can be directly influential when it shapes prospective movement participants’ perceptions of political opportunity and sense of efficacy’’ (p. xxiii). Radio and the shared culture that it fostered were significant in transforming a loosely felt and uncoordinated sense of injustice in 1929 into a mass mobilization in 1934. In this sense, perhaps the authors’ most significant contribution is to specify one possible mechanism for the crystallization and diffusion of social movement activity. Cliff Brown Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Univ of Michigan Law Library, on 12 Sep 2017 at 21:27:54, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859006022358