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The contributors question the current academic understanding of what is known as the global middle class. They see middle-class formation as transnational and they examine this group through the lenses of economics, gender, race, and religion from the mid-nineteenth century to today.
List of contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: We Shall Be All: Toward a Transnational History of the Middle Class / A. Ricardo López with Barbara Weinstein 1
Part I: The Making of the Middle Class and Practices of Modernity 27
Thinking about Modernity from the Margins: The Making of a Middle Class in Colonial India / Sanjay Joshi 29
The African Middle Class in Zimbabwe: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives / Michael O. West 45
Between Modernity and Backwardness: The Case of the English Middle Class / Simon Gunn 58
"Aren't We All?": Aspiration, Acquisition, and the American Middle Class / Marina Moskowitz 75
The Gatekeepers: Middle-Class Campaigns of Citizenship in Early Cold War Canada / Franca Iacovetta 87
Commentary on Part I / Barbara Weinstein 107
Part II: Labor Professionalization, Class Formation, and State Rule 119
The Conundrum of the Middle-Class Worker in the Twentieth-Century United States: The Professional Managerial Workers' (Folk) Dance around Class / Daniel J. Walkowitz 121
Becoming Middle Class: The Local History of a Global Story-Colonial Bombay, 1890-1940 / Prashant Kidambi 141
Conscripts of Democracy: The Formation of a Professional Middle Class in Bogotá During the 1950s and Early 1960s / A. Ricardo López 161
The Formation of the Revolutionary Middle Class during the Mexican Revolution / Michael A. Ervin 196
Commentary on Part II / Mary Kay Vaughan 223
Part III: Middle-Class Politics in Revolution 233
A Middle Class Revolution: The APRA Party and Middle-Class Identity in Peru, 1931-1956 / Iñigo García-Bryce 235
Revolutionary Promises Encounter Urban Realities for Mexico City's Middle Class, 1915-1928 / Susanne Eineigel 253
Being Middle Class and Being Arab: Sectarian Dilemmas and Middle-Class Modernity in the Arab Middle East, 1908-1936 / Keith David Watenpaugh 267
Commentary on Part III / Brian Owensby 288
Part IV: Middle-Class Politics and the Making of the Public Sphere 297
The City as a Field of Female Civic Action: Women and Middle-Class Formation in Nineteenth-Century Germany / Gisela Mettele 299
Putting Faith in the Middle Class: the Bourgeoisie, Catholicism, and Postrevolutionary France / Carol E. Harrison 315
Siúticos, Huachafos, Cursis, Arribistas, and
Gente de Medio Pelo: Social Climbers and the Representation of Class in Chile and Peru, 1860-1930 / David S. Parker 335
"Los Argentinos Descendemos de los Barcos": The Racial Articulation of Middle-Class Identity in Argentina, 1920-1960 / Enrique Garguin 355
Commentary on Part IV / Robyn Muncy 377
Afterword / Mrinalini Sinha 385
Bibliography 395
Contributors 431
Index 435
About the author
A. Ricardo López is Assistant Professor of History at Western Washington University.
Barbara Weinstein is the Silver Professor of History at New York University. She is the author of For Social Peace in Brazil: Industrialists and the Remaking of the Working Class in São Paulo, 1920–1964.
Summary
The contributors question the current academic understanding of what is known as the global middle class. They see middle-class formation as transnational and they examine this group through the lenses of economics, gender, race, and religion from the mid-nineteenth century to today.
