"The Making of the Middle Class is a first-rate collection of essays by top scholars writing on a topic of enormous interest: the middle class as an evolving conception and historical reality. The contributors focus on locales around the world. While the issues that they raise take locally specific forms, their essays converge around shared central questions, giving this stimulating ... Read morecollection a rare intellectual unity and focus."—Michael Frisch, University at Buffalo, SUNY "Both materially grounded and sensitive to notions of subjectivity and discourse, this timely and provocative volume challenges us to historicize the multiple, transnational formations and meanings of the middle class. Modernity itself is thus recast as a set of entangled, locally rooted processes that did not begin in 'the West' and travel elsewhere, but were mutually constituted and reconstituted in a global and colonial context."—Florencia E. Mallon, University of Wisconsin, Madison “The Making of the Middle Class brings together new work on a subject—the history of the middle class—that has previously seen only fragmented historical discussion.Yet, the volume does more than simply bring the middle classes back into the fold of global history. Rather, by taking a transnational lens, it has spurred an ambitious project to connect the history of the middle classes to broader discussions onglobal cultural identities, the history of globalization, practices of modernity, imperialism, and neoliberalism.”
Lisa Ubelaker Andrade
H-Soz-u-Kult, H-Net Reviews
“The book is a welcome addition to a historiography that, at least for Latin America, has focused too much on elites and/or subalterns...This book, however, is important in that it allows us to take a fresh look at what the ambivalent and ‘fuzzy’ realities of middle class(es) might mean for the modern age.”
Stefan Rinke
Hispanic American Historical Review
[T]he volume undoubtedly represents a step forward in the development of a field of middle-class studies. The insights of the introduction, the intelligence of the commentaries and afterword, and the variety of methods at play and of issues dealt with in each individual article will surely make of this book a fundamental read for scholars to come.”
Ezequiel Adamovsky
Social History
“[A] carefully crafted anthology…The panorama of the book's examples dazzles the reader's mind.”
Linda Young
Canadian Journal of History
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