The Making of the Middle Class: Toward a Transnational History (Radical Perspectives) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822351293 ISBN 13: 9780822351290

Publisher: Duke University Press, 2012

Synopsis

In this important and timely collection of essays, historians reflect on the middle class: what it is, why its struggles figure so prominently in discussions of the current economic crisis, and how it has shaped, and been shaped by, modernity. The contributors focus on specific middle-class formations around the world—in Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas—since the mid-nineteenth century. They scrutinize these formations in relation to the practices of modernity, to professionalization, to revolutionary politics, and to the making of a public sphere. Taken together, their essays demonstrate that the historical formation of the middle class has been constituted transnationally through changing, unequal relationships and shifting racial and gender hierarchies, colonial practices, and religious divisions. That history raises questions about taking the robustness of the middle class as the measure of a society's stability and democratic promise. Those questions are among the many stimulated by The Making of the Middle Class, which invites critical conversation about capitalism, imperialism, postcolonialism, modernity, and our neoliberal present.

Contributors. Susanne Eineigel, Michael A.Ervin, Iñigo García-Bryce, Enrique Garguin, Simon Gunn, Carol E. Harrison, Franca Iacovetta, Sanjay Joshi, Prashant Kidambi, A. Ricardo López, Gisela Mettele, Marina Moskowitz, Robyn Muncy, Brian Owensby, David S. Parker, Mrinalini Sinha, Mary Kay Vaughan, Daniel J. Walkowitz, Keith David Watenpaugh, Barbara Weinstein, Michael O. West

About this title

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.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Making of the MIDDLE CLASS

Toward a Transnational History

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2012 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5129-0

Contents

Introduction: We Shall Be All: Toward a Transnational History of the Middle Class A. Ricardo López with Barbara Weinstein................................................................1Thinking about Modernity from the Margins: The Making of a Middle Class in Colonial India Sanjay Joshi........................................................................................29The African Middle Class in Zimbabwe: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives Michael O. West................................................................................................45Between 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......................................................................................................75The Gatekeepers: Middle-Class Campaigns of Citizenship in Early Cold War Canada Franca Iacovetta..............................................................................................87COMMENTARY ON PART I Barbara Weinstein........................................................................................................................................................107The Conundrum of the Middle-Class Worker in the Twentieth-Century United States: The Professional-Managerial Workers' (Folk) Dance around Class Daniel J. Walkowitz...........................121Becoming Middle Class: The Local History of a Global Story—Colonial Bombay, 1890–1940 Prashant Kidambi............................................................................141Conscripts of Democracy: The Formation of a Professional Middle Class in Bogotá during the 1950s and Early 1960s A. Ricardo López...................................................161The Formation of the Revolutionary Middle Class during the Mexican Revolution Michael A. Ervin................................................................................................196COMMENTARY ON PART II Mary Kay Vaughan........................................................................................................................................................223A Middle-Class Revolution: The APRA Party and Middle-Class Identity in Peru, 1931–1956 Iñigo García-Bryce.....................................................................235Revolutionary Promises Encounter Urban Realities for Mexico City's Middle Class, 1915–1928 Susanne Eineigel.............................................................................253Being Middle Class and Being Arab: Sectarian Dilemmas and Middle-Class Modernity in the Arab Middle East, 1908–1936 Keith David Watenpaugh..............................................267COMMENTARY ON PART III Brian Owensby..........................................................................................................................................................288The City as a Field of Female Civic Action: Women and Middle-Class Formation in Nineteenth-Century Germany Gisela Mettele.....................................................................299Putting Faith in the Middle Class: The Bourgeoisie, Catholicism, and Postrevolutionary France Carol E. Harrison...............................................................................315Siúticos, 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....................................................355COMMENTARY ON PART IV Robyn Muncy.............................................................................................................................................................377AFTERWORD Mrinalini Sinha.....................................................................................................................................................................385BIBLIOGRAPHY...................................................................................................................................................................................395CONTRIBUTORS...................................................................................................................................................................................431INDEX..........................................................................................................................................................................................435

Chapter One

Thinking about Modernity from the Margins THE MAKING OF A MIDDLE CLASS IN COLONIAL INDIA Sanjay Joshi

As inhabitants of a world structured by modernity, it is absolutely vital that we better understand the middle class. Not only in India, but in most parts of the world, the middle class has played a crucial role in defining what it means to be "modern." Broadly defined, modernity in this sense refers to new models of organizing social, political, and economic relations, which, we are told, draw their inspiration from the ideas of the Enlightenment and material circumstances following from the triumph of industrial capitalism. These models, in turn, have become yardsticks or standards, against which many parts of the world—particularly the non-Western world—are judged and found wanting. It is this apparent lack of modernity characterizing non-Western middle classes that I seek to explore in this chapter.

In colonial Lucknow, the middle class was both a product and the producers of modernity. It was the product of modernity because without the new professions, new institutions, or new notions of the importance of a category called the "public," all of which came with British rule to Lucknow, well-to-do Indian men from so-called service communities—social groups and families who had traditionally served in the courts of indigenous rulers and large landlords—could never have fashioned themselves into a middle class. The power they acquired in colonial Lucknow was derived from their being champions of modernity, and it was their efforts that created newer, modern forms of politics, culture, domesticity, and religion. In that sense, the middle class was also the producer of much of what came to define modernity. To highlight cultural projects as central to middle-class formation is not to deny the significance of either economic structure or, indeed, the historical context of changes in the nature of legal and economic regimes that accompanied the transition to colonialism. The one objective factor that distinguished most of the people who came to be termed middle class in colonial India was the fact that they belonged to the upper strata of society, without being at the very top. Most of them were upper-caste Hindus or ashraf (high-born) Muslims, and many belonged to the so-called service communities. For the most part they came from families that were financially comfortable, but not so rich that they did not have to earn a living. This was one factor that distinguished them from the richest strata of Indian society, such as the major hereditary landlords or the remnants of the indigenous aristocracy. It also clearly put them well above the vast majority of India's poor.

Examining the rise of a middle class in colonial Lucknow, however, necessarily takes us beyond simple economic indicators of income and occupation in defining this social category. Though members of the middle class had certain commonalities of social and economic background, it was not simply their similarities in education, occupation, or profession that made them a middle class in colonial India. Nor was it traditional status alone that upper-caste Hindus or ashraf Muslim men deployed to make distinctions between themselves and other social groups in colonial India. Rather, it was by transforming traditional cultural values and the basis of social hierarchy that a distinctive middle class emerged. It was not simply the objective circumstances of their existence that made a hitherto less significant group of intellectuals and bureaucrats into key political and social figures. Rather, efforts of cultural entrepreneurship made the middle class a significant player in the social and political life of colonial India. In colonial India, as elsewhere around the world, a middle class emerged from processes through which intellectuals and activists created a new and distinctive social category through a "self-conscious interposition between people of rank and the common people."

The sort of imaginations the middle class in India drew on derived a great deal from models originating in Victorian Britain. Yet in the circumstances they found themselves in, Indian constructions of the modern could not be identical with the ideal types of modernity established by European philosophers or advocates of the middle class in England. A close investigation of the construction of an Indian middle class in a local milieu reveals multiple, often contradictory, pressures constituting middle-class politics in colonial India. It certainly demonstrates the extent to which traditional ideas played a role in the construction of modern ideas about religion, community, gender relations, and the nation, propagated by the Indian middle class. Thus their modern ideas about politics contained elements drawn from much older ideas about political and social organization. Their belief in modernization coexisted with the reinforcing of older hierarchies, their nationalism was complicit with what has been termed "communalism," and their belief in progress coexisted with their advocacy of tradition.

The contradictions of their politics emerged from the contrary pulls of their social situation. On the one hand, ideas and institutions that came with colonial rule allowed them to represent themselves as enlightened representatives of public opinion, through which they sought to replace the older, aristocratic paradigm of respectability in Lucknow. But on the other hand, it was equally important for men who were traditionally a part of respectable society to also clearly distinguish themselves from the lower orders. Therefore they were compelled to use a more traditional vocabulary, with which they were quite familiar given their respectable status in precolonial Lucknow, thus emphasizing the inherent inferiority of the lower classes. Although this duality certainly allowed them to emerge as the opinion makers in Lucknow, it also limited their agenda in that middle-class politics continued to retain a profound ambivalence about popular politics, which it sought to "discipline and mobilize" rather than persuade and include in its political endeavors.

Taking into account new ideas about gender relations makes the social origins of the contradictions in middle-class positions even more apparent. Middle-class interventions constructed a new ideology of gender relations that deployed new ideas about the equality of the sexes and the importance of education and modern training for women, but they also used a much older vocabulary drawn from the ideology of stridharma, which can best be defined as husband worship. This stitching together of older and newer ideas created a modernity full of tensions and different possibilities. Although this modernity allowed for a certain disciplining of women, it also provided opportunities for critiques of patriarchy. However, limits framed by their own middle-class lifestyles also prevented middle-class women from breaking completely with the discourse on gender relations created by a fractured modernity. Middle-class feminist politics therefore continued to maintain a relationship with modernity and tradition that was at least as ambivalent as that of the men's.

Middle-class contradictions evident in Indians' ideas about religion and the nation equally reflect the contrary pulls arising from the circumstances of their existence rather than any conscious effort at duplicity or deception. The new religiosity of the middle class was not a guise or cover for some other, "real" political interest. However, the modern religiosity they sought to construct revealed the opposing forces underlying their social, political, and intellectual agenda. Similarly their oscillation between secular and religious nationalism was not simply a political tactic, but a product of the fact that in the 1920s, both secular and religious imaginings were equally critical to middleclass nationalism. These contradictions both enabled and limited middle-class politics, giving middle-class Indians a more significant presence in the political arena, yet circumscribing how far they could take their reformist, nationalist, or revivalist agenda.

Middle-class activists sought to be modern, but their social positions meant that they would use the resources of tradition to construct their modernity. This was not simply the product of being a colonized people, though colonialism undoubtedly inflected their modernity. Looked at from the perspective of an ideal-typical modernity, the politics of the middle class of colonial Lucknow would be found wanting. They were not egalitarian enough to perceive the lower social orders as equal citizens. They were not liberal enough to allow even women from their own class equality within the home. They were not secular enough to keep away from Hindu nationalist imaginings of the nation. How are we to understand these contradictions, especially given that they existed in a class that so consciously copied the model of a progressive, egalitarian, liberal, secular middle class?

Writing about the history of the middle class in India, one is necessarily and always confronted by a series of questions about the nature of modernity: What is it? How do we understand modernity? And why must "our modernity" be different from "theirs"? It is, of course, interesting that it is those who write about the non-Western world who feel compelled to engage with and address these questions. Similar contradictions, as we shall see, abound in the history of the heart of Western modernity, but seldom do these create the same degree of angst among their chroniclers. For the moment, rather than decrying the differences between Western and non-Western histories, I will simply argue that engaging with these questions from the margins can help us better understand the meaning of modernity.

One way of trying to understand these contradictions of middle-class politics is to point to the impossibility of a true modernity in a world peopled by Homo hierarchicus, as Louis Dumont's work suggested, echoing the sentiments of many generations of Orientalist scholars and colonial administrators before him. Do these contradictions, alternatively, prove right those critics who argue against using the category of middle class in Indian history at all? Colonial India never had an Industrial Revolution, which these scholars assume is a necessary precondition for a strong and vibrant middle class. Or, should we follow the lead of Partha Chatterjee, along with some other scholars of the Subaltern Studies collective, and trace the contradictions of the middle class to the colonial milieu that compelled the Indian middle class to define its modernity in ways very different from those used in the West? Underlying all these questions, ostensibly about the peculiarities of the Indian case, are comparisons between the failures, lacks, or deviations of that case and certain supposedly originary models of middle-classness. To try to answer such questions, then, we too need to undertake a comparative exercise, to contrast the Indian experience with the metropolitan middle class, which operates as the standard against which the Indian case is being judged.

Even a cursory examination of the literature on the middle class in England, for instance, reveals significant variation between a messy and complicated historical reality and the model of a progressive, enlightened middle class that emerged "like the rising sun" out of the Industrial Revolution. Such scholarship questions the causal connection between rapid industrialization and the emergence of a middle-class society. But it also reveals that public-sphere interventions were critical in establishing certain myths about middle-class formation, which now stand as models used to judge non-Western historical developments. Moreover, general surveys of European history reveal that, much as in Lucknow, hierarchy was very much a part of domestic as well as public life for the European bourgeoisie of the mid- to late nineteenth century. Eric Hobsbawm notes that ideas about representative government, civil rights, and liberties were part of the political vocabulary of the middle class, but only so long as they were "compatible with the rule of law and with the kind of order which kept the poor in their place." If we take into account attitudes toward women, children, and servants, then "the structure of the bourgeois family flatly contradicted that of bourgeois [public] society." In fact, Hobsbawm goes on to argue that a sense of superiority was central to the constitution of the bourgeois man, and "the monopoly of command—in his house, in his business, in his factory—was crucial to his self-definition."

These are, of course, fairly well-known facts about nineteenth-century European history, and they could well be elaborated on. The model of a liberal, democratic, progressive middle class that seizes power from a decadent, enfeebled, feudal elite to reorder society and politics along the lines suggested by the philosophes of the Enlightenment is a myth that has been undermined repeatedly by historians of Europe. The really interesting part about all of this is that even masses of counterfactual examples have not dented the power and persistence of the model of an ideal-typical modernity. Thus, despite recognizing differences between different European middle classes; despite acknowledging the importance of self-constitution in the making of the middle class; and despite surveying literature that points to the persistence and power of older ideas, institutions, and classes in European society in what is known as the long nineteenth century, a review article on the subject concludes that the existence of the middle classes in Europe depended on "certain historical constellations, among them the tradition of the Enlightenment," which were specific to European history. "It is not very likely," Jürgen Kocka concludes, "that they will be found in many other parts of the world."

One can dismiss this as yet another example of Eurocentric historiography, but the issues that such reviews raise are of greater significance simply because of the assumptions that underlie this understanding of history, and its implications for those of us who happen to work on non-European histories. If the import of such essays was simply to point to the specificity of historical experience in different parts of the world, there would be no reason to disagree. However, despite recognizing the regional variations within Europe, the different meanings and political connotations that equivalent words carry in different European languages, and even the fact that the category has been used "as a polemical or affirmative code word in public debates," Kocka affirms the existence of a pan-European middle class. What allows him to do this—despite plenty of evidence to the contrary even from the authors he reviews in this essay—is the notion of a shared liberal tradition to be traced back to the European Enlightenment, which apparently makes industrialists and professionals, living under different economic and political circumstances across a large continent, "a middle class." Implicit in this formulation, however unintentionally, is the assumption that other social groups that constitute themselves as middle classes in other parts of the world must ultimately also be judged by these standards.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Publication date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0822351293
• ISBN 13: 9780822351290
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 460
• Editor: López