As a child I saw the past not through pictures or photographs but through the words of my nan and grandad, my mom and dad, and all the older members of my family. The past of which they told me was the world in which they had grown up, that of English working-class people living in a great manufacturing town. Through them I saw the bustling streets which dominated their lives, the cramped houses which they struggled to keep clean, and the hard jobs which earned them their living. Through them I felt the rough textures of their being, I smelled the pungent odors which enveloped them, and I tasted the food and drink which sustained them. Most of all, through my family I heard the expressive voices of English working-class people. Powerful and evocative were their words, the more so because they were spoken in their own language—in the accent and dialect of Birmingham.

John Barzman's study of labor and politics in the Norman port of Le Havre is the latest in a long line of monographs on workers in a single city. Based on extensive work in local, departmental, and national archives, this highly detailed account of the composition of working-class neighborhoods, the local trade union movement, labor politics, community protest, and strikes is surely the leading source for workers and the labor movement in Le Havre for its period. Though its title only promises a study of dockers, metal workers, and Le Havre's large number of women working under irregular employment conditions, most other industrial and occupational groups of both sexes are discussed at length. Barzman is especially interested in the roots of the changed postwar configuration of French labor after World War One. Accordingly, he chooses the time frame for his study around the dates of what he views as a “cycle of radicalization” that ran from 1912 to 1923, rather than the standard cutoff date of 1914.

However depressing its subject matter, the translation of Ulrich Herbert's exhaustive study on the more than 7.6 million foreigners who were forced into slave labor in Nazi Germany during World War Two is to be warmly welcomed. It is a model study because of its broad archival research base as well as its findings. When the German original appeared in 1985, it helped to redefine the agenda for the study of the Third Reich, and since then a new generation of historians has come along to work on questions that Herbert and others had begun to lay out.

This book surveys some recent developments in the political economy of postunification Germany. In particular, the essays investigate and analyze how the German industrial relations system has evolved over the past decade and ask whether the country's vaunted “social partnership” can survive the triple challenges of unification, European integration, and the new world economy. Although the editor of the volume, Lowell Turner, argues in his conclusion that “with varying degrees of optimism” all of the authors “agree that reform and adaptation is possible” (255), the essays diverge greatly in their assessments of the recent functioning and future prospects of corporatist institutions in Germany.

Pardon the horrible pun, but this book is an extremely “partisan” account of the politics in Milan (and in Italy) between 1943 and 1948. First, because it deals with the Resistance, the partigiani, Milan workers, and the Communist party during and after the war of liberation; second, because Behan's account condemns the Italian Communist party (PCI) for its “failure” to create socialism when it had the chance. The author is merciless on this latter charge, and the theoretical tail wags the historical dog so often in this book that exhaustion soon sets in. More importantly, the loud refrain of the Party's “betrayal” of a revolutionary alternative drowns out many of the stirring voices from the Milan factories and working-class neighborhoods.

“Here we provide only glimpses of particular settings,” Jane Burbank writes “In Place of a Conclusion.” The claim is a deceptively modest one. To be sure, Imperial Russia, a collection of twelve essays originally presented at workshops held in Washington, D.C., and Portland, Oregon, eschews the construction of grand narratives, at least those of failure that were so prominent in Soviet and Western historiography. If nothing else, the decision to focus primarily on the prereform period—eleven of the twelve essays are situated chronologically before 1861—militates against another walk down the path to revolution. Whether it also avoids narratives of success is less clear.

This a history of the ideas of the core leaders in the Menshevik party after its members were dispersed, persecuted, or forced into exile at the end of the Russian civil war. The author has admirably reconstructed and expounded the political opinions shared by the whole of the party in subsequent periods and those raised in mutual contrast by single personalities or groups. The story is largely based on personal memories, correspondence, and archives. In part, the research has been done on an exceptional source for the study of the Bolshevik revolution: the journal Sotsialisticheskii Vestnik, well known to every historian in the Soviet field. It was edited from 1921 to 1963 by the leadership of the party abroad (the optimistically soi-disant “Foreign Delegation”) first in Berlin and then in Paris and New York. Until the mid-1930s, the journal enjoyed the collaboration of a variety of people, straight from inside the Soviet Union: not only the rump of the Menshevik organization, but also, very possibly, influential Bolshevik personnel, such as D. Riazanov, as well.

It is ironic that in their pique over the Soviet regime's failure to live up to its name as a true dictatorship of the proletariat, historians have given short shrift to workers in the USSR. In his monograph Kenneth Straus wants to bring us back to the Soviet working class, to see the stuff it was made of, and to examine its relationship with the state. How refreshing to see a historian of Soviet Russia who is still willing to use unfashionable terms like class consciousness! Straus integrates elements from the theories of Marx, Durkheim, Weber, and Thompson to draw his picture of the Soviet working class, explaining not only why it indeed needs to be regarded as a class but why it would define itself neither in opposition to management nor to the Soviet regime.

The revolutions ending Communist rule in 1989–1991 have presented special challenges to labor history. We have been witness to the largest social upheaval in the European world since the Russian Revolution. Yet society does not seem to have taken part in this revolution the way it did eighty years ago. Workers in particular seem bafflingly silent. Were not the workers terribly exploited by the Communist regimes? Were they not also capable of expressing determined opposition to the regime (most prominently in Poland, but elsewhere as well)? Yet workers have been relatively quiet across the region; though nearly every country has seen dramatic strikes, there is little evidence that another revolution is at hand. Political engagement, too, has faded faster than even the natural course of disillusionment might predict. Moreover, workers' activism has not followed expected lines: workers attacking student demonstrators in Romania, voting for a Perot-like enigma in a Polish presidential election, or for neo-fascists in Russia and elsewhere. Where are the politically conscious workers of the past? If we assume, as we should, that understanding labor must be a key to interpreting the post-Communist era, then we face some difficult questions.

Does class consciousness require the rejection of the possibility of a just wage system? In this history of changing modes of thought in the labor movement, Lawrence Glickman argues strongly for a vision of wage labor that can also be class conscious, through the medium of a politically engaged consumerism. In recounting the genesis and evolution of working-class demands for the “living wage,” he seeks to rescue labor activists who largely accepted the normalcy of capitalist wage relations in the United States from what often has been the condescension or indifference of labor historians. Glickman places the demands derived from the consumerist side of the productive wage relation at the heart of evolving notions of labor's rights between 1870 and 1920. His work thus stands in sharp contrast to historians of consumer culture who have portrayed consumption as an individualizing fulfillment of desires—and hence a politically paralyzing set of values and practices. Recovering and reconnecting a pattern of argument and demands from Ira Steward to Samuel Gompers to John L. Lewis, Glickman builds a case for consumerism as an essential element of working-class notions of political economy. Finally, he argues that the legacy of these earlier champions of the worker-as-consumer was central to the shape of the modern economic policies formalized at the level of the state during the New Deal.

What is fascism? Was there ever a fascist movement in the United States? Philip Jenkins chooses to sidestep the more theoretical debate about the nature of fascism in order to employ a definition that uses a cluster of characteristics: right-wing authoritarianism, antidemocratic sentiment, the exaltation of military and paramilitary tactics, a sort of anticapitalism, a hostility to unions, and pursuit of the integration of social groups through a single party, a totalitarian central state, and corporatist economic structure.

Philip Scranton's important book is the first systematic effort to understand the character and development of specialty producers across the US economy after the Civil War, when they played a significant but little investigated role in industrialization. The book is an effective complement to, and in part a critique of, the thesis that the emergence of mass production and managerial firms generated a new, more guided and progressive kind of capitalist development. Building on the flexible specialization literature, Scranton argues that the focus on mass production and the managerial firm is too narrow because it misses the growth of specialty producers, which he conceives as firms that manufactured to custom order or in small batches. Endless Novelty explores “the industrial and institutional dynamic” of specialty manufacturing in the 1865–1925 period, a dynamic which Scranton maintains was different from but just as important as that of mass production. Ascending before or alongside the managerial firm, specialty producers generated a significantly larger share of manufacturing output—roughly half of all manufacturing value added over the 1890 to 1923 period. Moreover, Scranton argues, they were technologically and organizationally innovative and produced machinery and related elements required for mass production. If the argument is right, Chandler's thesis explains only part of the transformation of American manufacturing and must be complemented and in part underpinned by the history of specialty production.

The publication of Chinatown, New York: Labor and Politics, 1930–1950 (1979) and The New Chinatown (1987, rev. ed., 1996) established Peter Kwong as an authority on New York City's Chinese-American community. His latest book confirms this position. Kwong retraces some familiar ground, but only after first probing the causes, characteristics, and consequences of illegal Chinese immigration. He discusses this problem in relation to the immigration and labor policies of the United States government and organized labor while maintaining that the fundamental difficulties Chinese illegals encounter originate in the American marketplace. “The problem of illegal immigration, including Chinese immigration,” Kwong contends, “can only be understood in the context of the underlying supply-and-demand principle enshrined in traditional U.S. economics” (7). In brief, an abundance of low-wage jobs exist, made possible by lax enforcement of governmental labor standards and a weak labor movement. Indeed, the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, which imposed sanctions on employers who “knowingly” hire undocumented immigrants, has instead led to their employment on substandard terms without reducing their numbers.

Soon after its founding by white, Anglo coal diggers in Ohio in 1890, the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) rose to occupy a position of preeminence and leadership in the American labor movement. Indeed, during the twentieth century it led many important progressive struggles, most notably in developing industrial unionism, establishing collective bargaining in the nation's industrial life through the achievements of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), and attempting to organize workers across racial and ethnic lines. Further, the UMWA's leaders and colorful militants—John Mitchell, John L. Lewis, Richard Trumpka, “Mother Jones,” and many others—figure prominently in US labor history. Evaluating the history of the UMWA and its contributions to the labor movement is a worthwhile task. Moreover, those who would understand American labor history in this century must begin with the United Mine Workers.

Reading the United States congressional debates leading to the passage of the welfare legislation in 1996, I was struck by the vehemence with which many members of Congress disparaged the poor's “entitlement” to public assistance. How had the national conversation about social rights turned so against welfare-reliant women and children? What factors contributed to the disentitling of those most vulnerable in our society? Why was there so little feminist outcry against the coercive new legislation? Gwendolyn Mink's new book attempts to answer these important questions. In a concise and accessible presentation, Mink explores the historic precursors, legislative context, and political pressures that led to the termination of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC)—the economic safety net for poor women and children first established by the Social Security Act of 1935. Mink emphasizes two powerful points throughout her analysis: First, the loss of the social right to economic security undermines women's equality, and second, feminists, to a certain extent, have been complicit in this process.

The desire for compliant labor and clashes with various noncompliant labor forces: This dynamic forms the guiding thread of Jacqueline Jones's impressive survey of American work. Oddly, the subtitle announces that the book is about “black and white labor” while the introduction explains that the book concerns “the jobs performed by Africans and their descendants in America” (13). Although these descriptions do not match up, both of them are, in fact, accurate. Jones has written a history of racism and resistance, subordination and insubordination.

The first reaction of a perhaps overly jaded reviewer with a long history of skepticism about the Communist Party of the United States is to ask whether this work is really necessary. A volume in the Annals of Communism series, it consists of ninety-five documents from Moscow archives relating to American Communism's relationship with the Communist International (Comintern) and its successor organizations. The documents, ranging from detailed instructions for American Communists to arrest and death certificates for unfortunates caught up in the purges of the 1930s, have powerful exemplary value. They tend to be arranged in small clusters of two or three and to be introduced by clearly written narratives that summarize them and explain their significance. The decision to organize the book topically rather than chronologically leads to some repetition but does not detract from its considerable impact.

As a renowned scholar of the Ottoman slave trade and of the Egyptian state– society relations during the Ottoman centuries, Ehud Toledano, in this new book, offers us his synthesis of the available knowledge on Ottoman slavery. Along the way he attempts to put the question of Ottoman slavery into a larger world-historical context and debate. He dissects the different forms of slavery in the Ottoman Empire in order to understand the relations that emerged from these forms and then attempts informed comparisons with other historical contexts of slavery. This review will provide some guidelines to reading the book and then discuss the themes that Professor Toledano himself presents as key markers.

Western scholars of world history, Wong reminds us early in this thought-provoking volume, often feel little compunction in basing their knowledge of China on a few items of secondary literature (ix). The observation will most likely elicit a knowing nod from many of us who labor in nonwestern fields. The reason for such misplaced confidence is, simply put, that historical writing, including that on the non-European sphere, has long been shaped by themes and trajectories drawn from the European experience. As a student of Chinese history and as someone committed to both the intellectual and pedagogical value of comparative history, Wong sets himself an ambitious agenda: “to dislodge European statemaking and capitalism from their privileged positions as universalizing themes in world history” (1). He seeks to do so by comparing the European case to “the dynamics of economic and political change in a major non-Western civilization,” that is, China, and to create “strategies of comparison that avoid privileging European categories of analysis and dynamics of historical change” (2). His objective is thus to delineate a new history that takes into account the multiple trajectories of change across time and space. “These comparisons,” Wong suggests, “can then be used to extend and revise social theory” (6). How successful is he in this important endeavor?