A large proportion of the world's workers live in communities on the outskirts of cities, what for the want of a better word we might call suburbs. In different places, such communities take different forms. Working-class districts composed of dense, high-rise dwellings ring many European cities, like Paris and Moscow. By contrast, in the United States, Canada, and Australia, working-class suburbanization has been characterized by single-family homes, low density, and automobile dependency. In Latin America, Turkey, and parts of Africa, sprawling self-built communities of shacks and shanties surround major urban centers (a phenomenon that occurred in some North American cities during the early twentieth century).

In the United States, Canada, Australia, and even Britain there is a long and broad history of suburban working-class settlement. Conditions have improved and changed. Suburban workers once lived at the frontier margin of the urban economy; after 1945, occupying more standardized and financially leveraged subdivisions, they became part of its consumer apotheosis. Many writers have assumed that suburban residence rendered workers passive, but have couched their arguments in terms of long-term consequences, neglecting to weigh the immediate intentions of workers and their families. By acquiring homes in suburban communities, workers sought greater autonomy and control, similar to the goals that guided their actions in the workplace and the political arena. Indeed, the desire to own suburban homes has been expressed more strongly by the manual working class than by any other major group. The significance of the suburban worker remains unclear, and may most usefully be addressed within the framework of comparative research at the urban and national scales.

On September 17, 1911 a hunger revolt broke out in Ottakring, a proletarian suburb in northwest Vienna. But hunger and deteriorating living conditions were not the only causes of broad public unrest. The revolt was, to a greater extent, a spontaneous political articulation of a new social formation at the periphery of the metropolis composed of “old” underclasses and recently arrived migrants. Both faced miserable conditions of work, consumption, and family life, and the migrants lost their dream of a better life in the city. Mentally still rooted in the rural environments, the “lifeworlds” from which they had come, they experienced a fragmented urban topography driven by a chaotic mixture of sharp-cut urban planning and rationalization, and brutish Manchester-style capitalism. Instead of finding a new “Heimat” in the city, the new immigrants suffered from pauperization and collective estrangement. Their location in the new industrial quarters of the city brought them into misery and—in the perception of the elite—transformed them into the dangerous, amorphous “Other” of urban society. Their material poverty and cultural stigmatization allowed only a minimum of freedom and self-realization within the emerging formation of mass culture. Symbolic discrimination and economic marginality configured a specific suburban lifestyle modeled along the trajectories of assimilation and deviance, lethargy and revolt, power, impotence and emerging mass politics.

Planned working-class suburbanization began in Ireland in the early twentieth century, coinciding with a period of labor unrest and serious housing problems. Through a focus on Dublin in the first forty years of the century, this paper illustrates the persistence of debates about the relative merits of central as opposed to suburban housing, which were reflected in the policy oscillation of Dublin Corporation. It also shows an enduring policy bias towards the upper tier of the working class, which led to increasing class and social segregation. While changing policies tended to reflect the influence of political parties in power, the overall political weakness of the working class resulted in a failure to seize control of their own destiny.

From 1954 to 1958, District 65 of the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union (RWDSU), engaged in several campaigns to organize the new branch department stores opening in the suburbs of New York City. These department stores were a significant aspect of the post-World War Two suburban boom, significantly reshaping commercial space. The organizing drive was also an important, if neglected, part of the economic transformation of the suburbs in the US in the 1950s. Rather than contribute to the union's apathy, suburbanization sparked District 65's largest organizing drive of the decade. In branching out beyond New York City, District 65 adapted its organizing strategies, de-emphasizing its militant past and reaching out to women workers. By and large, District 65's efforts were unsuccessful, due to both challenges posed by the suburbs as well as the larger political and economic context of the US in the 1950s.

From 1954 to 1958, District 65 of the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union (RWDSU), engaged in several campaigns to organize the new branch department stores opening in the suburbs of New York City. These department stores were a significant aspect of the post-World War Two suburban boom, significantly reshaping commercial space. The organizing drive was also an important, if neglected, part of the economic transformation of the suburbs in the US in the 1950s. Rather than contribute to the union's apathy, suburbanization sparked District 65's largest organizing drive of the decade. In branching out beyond New York City, District 65 adapted its organizing strategies, de-emphasizing its militant past and reaching out to women workers. By and large, District 65's efforts were unsuccessful, due to both challenges posed by the suburbs as well as the larger political and economic context of the US in the 1950s.

This essay explores working-class political culture in Mexico City's burgeoning industrial suburbs and traces the emergence after 1968 of vigorous protest movements demanding union democratization and improved urban services. The first postwar generations of factory workers took on cosmopolitan identities and considered the suburbs an escape from the problems of the countryside and inner city. By the 1970s, however, unresponsive and corrupt union and municipal officials had made many workers feel like second-class citizens. Protest movements, while highly disparate, all sought more meaningful political participation and advocated ideas of equal opportunity and access, thus indicating that suburban laborers had begun to question a state that previous generations had viewed as sympathetic to the working class.

Gecekondu (squatting) has been the dominant form of urbanization in the major cities of Turkey, especially Istanbul, just as it has been in most developing countries. Istanbul receives an estimated 500,000 migrants each year from the rural areas of the country, most of whom become squatters. The old city is surrounded by gecekondu settlements, which include sixty-five percent of all buildings in Istanbul. In these areas the dominant economic activities are as informal as the housing.

In this paper I argue that adopting an explicitly spatial theoretical framework can add significantly to our understanding of working-class life. Specifically, I argue that workers are spatial as well as historical social agents and that they seek to shape the economic landscape in ways which facilitate their political and economic goals, though they clearly do not have free range to do so—workers make their own geographies, though not under the conditions of their own choosing. The paper explores how capitalism functions as a spatial system, what this means for workers' spatial praxis, and how workers can try to shape capitalism's geography to their own ends. The paper is in three main sections. The first section lays out the conceptual basis for understanding capitalism as a spatial system. In the second section I examine a number of ways in which a sensitivity to matters spatial can help us understand workers' social praxis. The third section explores some issues related to how the changing geography of capitalism is providing new challenges to workers and organized labor.

In all the upheaval of 1905 in Russia, one of the most violent and volatile areas was Ekaterinoslav Province, which included Donbass coal miners, militant railroaders, and heavy industrial factory workers in and around the mines, the towns, and the province's capital city. Although protest and upheaval were by no means new to the region, in 1905 the province witnessed not only a chain of strikes, meetings, and demonstrations throughout the year, but one of the largest and most militant armed uprisings in December and several destructive anti-Jewish pogroms among the hundreds that swept South Russia in October.This characterization of the region is most fully and persuasively outlined in Charters Wynn's important study, Workers, Strikes, and Pogroms: The Donbass-Dnepr Bend in Late Imperial Russia, 1870–1905 (Princeton, 1992). The present essay, though greatly indebted to Wynn's pioneering work, seeks to build on, critique, and modify some of its conclusions.

I read Harry Braverman's seminal Labor and Monopoly Capital shortly after it came out in 1974. I eagerly absorbed his account of how capitalists used technology to strip skill from workers, in order to cheapen labor and heighten managerial control over the work process. I read with interest how proprietors took the deskilling model developed in a blue-collar setting and extended it to clerical and service jobs, increasingly wiping out distinctions in the workforce.

This book is one of the most important contributions to the history of the postwar European left to be published in the last two dozen years. The French educated Greek political scientist furnishes a study that is truly groundbreaking. For, by analyzing the most recent major paradigm shift occurring within European social democracy, Moschonas provides an explanation for what many readers of International Labor and Working Class History (ILWCH) have felt and experienced for quite some time, i.e. the fact that “today's social democracy has opted not simply for another strategy, but for another identity” (232). “Social democracy has ceased to be an effective force for even the moderate promotion of equality and working-class influence, particularly trade-union influence” (291). Or, more precisely yet: “Social democracy has (. . .) been transformed from a political force for the moderate promotion of equality within a socio-economic system that is by definition inegalitarian, into a force for the moderate promotion of inequality in the face of forces that are even more inegalitarian” (293). In sum, European social democracy has become part and parcel of the neoliberal “consensus.”

The “highly-anticipated” fifth edition of Michel Beaud's classic A History of Capitalism delivers what it promises. In the first place, there is the rich original text, already widely recognized as an important examination of economic, social, and political history organized around the dynamic evolution of capitalism, now supplemented with previously unavailable diagrams and flowcharts. There are also significant additions to the original text, first published in 1981, which both extend the examination up to the end of the twentieth century (and a new “technoscientistic” stage of capitalism), as well as useful re-synthesizing of some of the original text with the benefit of hindsight. In short, the new edition of Beaud's book offers a usefully updated and improved version of what is already established as an important contribution to economic, social, and political history.

The dramatic transformations wrought by industrialization and the accompanying demographic shifts made nineteenth-century European cities veritable factories of contagion and disease. Contaminated water supplies, inadequate sewer systems, overcrowded housing, and poorly ventilated workplaces ensured the spread of typhoid fever, diptheria, tuberculosis, and cholera. Like their counterparts in other industrializing countries, French government officials recognized that the “social question,” common parlance for the political and social problems caused by poverty and general working-class discontent, constituted their most formidable domestic political challenge. But according to Andrew R. Aisenberg, the French state, unlike its European counterparts, was faced with a unique predicament: How could a government rooted in a political tradition that established the family as the “inviolable site” of individualism and liberty, justify intervention in the home in the name of the public welfare? In other words, how could the state address the “social question” if the home—especially the working-class home, the very locus of poverty and its attendant problems—was politically off-limits?

This massive volume, which brings together the latest research by Terry Martin with three earlier works of his, published in 1998 and 1999, is one of the major contemporary contributions to studies on the “nationalities question” in the former Soviet Union. It contains the most thorough and comprehensive analysis of interwar Soviet national policy.

Ana Pauker was a Romanian Jewish communist who, by the early 1930s, became a well-known figure of the international movement and, after World War Two, one of the leading political personalities in her country. Nevertheless, in 1952, she was purged together with two other members of the Politburo as a result of backstage maneuvers orchestrated by the fourth member of that political organ. Jailed for a short period, she was released after Stalin's death and lived the rest of her life completely marginalized, forgotten by her former comrades who never once ceased to praise her. However, Pauker never rejected her communist allegiance nor did she engage in writing her memoirs.

When living in Britain in the mid-1990s, I asked friends where I should go in the UK with my family for a week during a spring holiday. The advice among friends at Cambridge was to go to Devon. Morgan and Pritchard's book provides a partial explanation as to why I was given this advice. Since the late nineteenth century, seaside towns in Devon have been among Britain's premier resorts, promoting themselves as the “English Riviera.” This book examines the continuing success of resort promoters in maintaining the “social tone” of Devon's resorts and illuminates broader changes in the relationship of leisure and tourism to social stratification during the twentieth century.

Official statistics for 1972 (which certainly understated the total picture) recorded over twenty-five hundred strikes in Britain, a figure exceeded only once before (in 1970) and three times subsequently. The number of “days lost,” almost twenty-four million, was the highest since 1926, the year of the General Strike; in only two subsequent years has the total been greater. To a generation that reached maturity in a dark period of trade union defeat and decline, the record of those years of (at least partial) victory and advance must seem like another world. In providing a chronicle of trade union activism in that year, Darlington and Lyddon perform a genuine service.

Hagen Koo's recent book is the most comprehensive study on the Korean working class from the 1960s to the 1990s available in the English language. This study is a laudable attempt in the right direction towards balancing the overabundance of studies on economic development that focus on the role of the state generally to the detriment of the history of labor.

Complementary studies by Andrew Gordon and William M. Tsutsui of rationalization and control in the twentieth-century Japanese industrial workplace clarify the shifting stances of both workers and managers and demystify the origins and characteristics of “Japanese management.”