Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

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.

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The Making of the MIDDLE CLASS

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

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

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...