Suchergebnisse

ResumenTradicionalmente se ha afirmado que los grandes terratenientes dominaron el estrato superior de la elite económica argentina en el medio siglo que sucedió a la emancipación. Según esta versión, la crisis de independencia obligó a la elite colonial a desplazar sus negocios desde el comercio hacia la actividad rural, que pronto se convirtió en la base de las principales fortunas del país. A partir de un análisis de los inventarios sucesorios de los de los mayores contribuyentese de Buenos Aires para fines de década de 1830, este trabajo sugiere que, lejos de limitarse a invertir en el sector rural, una parte importante de los grandes capitalistas de mediados del siglo XIX incursionaron en distintas esferas de actividad. El trabajo sugiere que la diversificación de activos fue resultado de los esfuerzos de los capitalistas rioplatenses para enfrentar la inestabilidad económica y política que caracterizó a esas décadas.

ResumenLas estadísticas de precios y, en particular, las de alimentos son mucho más abundantes que las de consumo. Este artículo propone uti-lizar estas estadísticas para analizar las variaciones cualitativas en el consumo y, más concretamente, la composición de la dieta, una variable de difícil observación, pero con notables implicaciones en la evolución de las condiciones de vida, salud y mortalidad de las poblaciones. Concretamente, se han escogido los años comprendidos entre 1910 y 1912, en un periodo de importantes cambios en la mortalidad española, para analizar la variación provincial en los niveles y en las estructuras de precios al consumo. Los índices de precios relativos estimados sugieren que las diferencias regionales en la composición de las dietas eran muy significativas y que se deben tener en cuenta en los análisis de los nive-les de vida y de mortalidad.

ResumenEn 1921 México producía un cuarto del petróleo mundial, siendo el segundo mayor productor en el mundo, pero para 1930 ya sólo representaba el 3 por cien de la producción. Hasta la fecha la mayor parte de la discusión se ha basado en los hechos acaecidos en México para explicar el declive de la industria petrolera, poniéndose muy poca atención en los acontecimientos de la industria petrolera en otros lugares, salvo en Venezuela. Prácticamente ningún esfuerzo se ha dedicado a entender las razones del auge, ignorando así los cambios masivos que tuvieron lugar en la industria petrolera durante la Primera Guerra Mundial y la inmediata posguerra, y sobre todo, olvidando la crisis energética que se produjo entre 1918 y 1921. Estos eventos son cruciales a la hora de comprender el primer auge de la industria petrolera mexicana y sientan las bases para comprender mejor el posterior súbito declive.

RESUMENEn los últimos años se ha cuestionado la condición de monopolio natural de la industria eléctrica. La fase de generation ya no es considerada como un monopolio natural, y se debate que la fase de distribución lo sea. Este trabajo parte de las principales aportaciones que se han realizado desde la teoría industrial en vistas a su aplicación a la Sociedad Hidroeléctrica Española, como empresa significativa de la industria eléctrica española del período de entreguerras. El resultado del análisis ha confirmado el carácter de monopolio natural de cada una de las fases de generación, transporte y distribución. Dado que la industria eléctrica del período de entreguerras presentaba una estructura monopolística, estos resultados indican que era el tipo de organización óptima.

A few years ago I began researching the evolution of the physical design and planning of the three greenbelt towns that were initiated in Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Administration. While I was quite familiar with the context and social milieu of one of those towns because it was close to my home, I had never before visited Greenbelt. On my first trip there, I arranged to meet a University of Maryland professor at a local café. Since she and her students had been conducting material culture studies of Greenbelt, I thought meeting her first would be a good way to introduce me to the town. While we talked over dinner, I learned she was also a Greenbelt resident. After dinner, she told me she was on a Greenbelt committee that was making a presentation to the City Council that evening, and she had arranged for the committee to join us in the café so they could plan their presentation. Shortly, three people arrived and joined us at the table, brainstorming ideas for the upcoming council presentation. After being in town less than two hours, I was in a Greenbelt committee meeting.

In this autobiographical account of labor relations on the Montreal waterfront, Alexander C. Pathy gives an insider account of the volatile relationship between shippers and longshoremen. Pathy worked as a lawyer and then official of the influential Maritime Employers Association (MEA). The MEA was in the forefront in changing employment relations to better fit the introduction of technological changes brought on by containerization. As in most ports around the world, the introduction of containerization was riven with challenge and controversy. The Port of Montreal, and the lesser ports of Quebec City and Trois-Rivieres, shared this common experience. According to Pathy up to 1960 the respective ports had seen little strife. Indeed, it would seem that the relations between the two sides had been relatively amicable. This would change once ship owners and stevedores embarked on a rationalization scheme to make the loading and unloading of cargo that much more efficient and speedier. Beginning in 1960, negotiations became increasingly heated and hostile. Not least was the problem of language. In what could be best described as mutual ignorance the employers negotiated in English, while the union representatives, reflecting the membership, spoke in French. It was no wonder that misunderstandings could occur because of poor translation. But according to Pathy more than language, the principal point of conflict was perception. Each side brought to the table mutual suspicion and hostility. The problem Pathy contends was, "Each party did not see its glass half full but half empty."(40) Therefore, negotiations over gang size, technological improvements, hiring methods, and union jurisdiction all became major issues of contention. Adding to the complexity of the situation was the role of Canadian government. Canadian industrial relations law gave the government a vital stake in the negotiations. Just as important, as both official and wildcat strikes broke out, the government scrambled to stabilize the situation as ships were diverted to US ports. The loss of trade and thereby revenue was seen as a critical impairment to the maritime economy.

This paper examines the official discourses that shaped the parameters of everyday life and the reactions of socialist citizens to them in Hungary's first socialist city, Sztálinváros, during the 1950s. Concentrating especially on the regulation of working-class leisure, it argues that the authorities sought to frame social conflict in terms of a struggle between the civilized and the backward, the rural and the urban. In so doing it provides an insight into the nature of early state socialism as a project of cultural transformation.

Joshua H. Howard's fascinating book examines the experiences of Chinese arsenal workers in Chongqing, China's wartime capital in three wars: the Anti-Japanese War, the Civil War, and class war from 1937 to 1953. Several clear and compelling arguments presented in Professor Howard's study have brought new approaches to the field of Chinese labor and new ways of seeing twentieth century China.

With the relatively recent renovation of the American welfare system, the current dispute over faith-based organizations administering federal aid, and the wanton usage of the term family values in political discourse, few can deny that debate over the family, welfare, and the state remains heated. To add greater depth and nuance to this debate, Sherri Broder has delved into the complex relationships between the subjects and objects of social reform in late-nineteenth century Philadelphia. She explores how wealthy reformers, evangelical rescue workers, the labor movement, and laboring people "all drew on the discourse of the family"—which revolved around contested definitions of what constituted a tramp, unfit mother, or neglected child—"to define themselves variously as gendered members of different social classes, as respected family and community members, as political actors, and as people with claims on the state, the police, and public and private social services"(6). Utilizing local and national labor periodicals, the published works of charity organizations and individual reformers, and the institutional records of the Pennsylvania Society to Protect Children from Cruelty (SPCC) and the pseudonymous "Haven for Unwed Mothers and Infants," Broder moves topically throughout five chapters dissecting different components of Philadelphia's discourse on the family.

This paper examines the special challenges faced by working-class people in writing convincing autobiographical self-presentations for membership to the Romanian Workers' Party during the early 1950s. Special attention is paid to the nature of the verification process [verificare] required for existing and new members of the Party. I argue that the experience of one's self as always-already proletarian made the process of writing one's autobiography particularly difficult given the Party's desire for a narrative that stressed conversion to a proletarian identity.

This article explores the historical relationship between scientific research and labor management by investigating the state supervision of color perception in British workers (1870s-1920s). Whereas eighteenth-century scientific writers had described color blindness as an individual idiosyncrasy, color blindness was interpreted in the late nineteenth century as a social contaminant. As multiple sites of labor and industry were saturated with color—for example, through the deployment of flashing red and green lights on ships and railways—the color vision of workers became an increasingly significant medical and legal concern. Starting in the 1890s, the Board of Trade developed new efforts to legislate the admittedly subjective realm of color perception. But British workers also publicly opposed the Board's efforts to regulate their perception and objected to the "modernist" palette that was commonly used in color vision tests. I trace the emergence of color blindness as a class-specific pathology and consider both the denigration and the valorization of workers' perceptions in modern British industrial society.

Golfo Alexopoulos begins her first chapter by analyzing a 1917 Soviet poster titled "Autocratic Structure." At the top of a stratified pyramid is Russia's tsar, whose fur-trimmed cloak is draped around four layers of oppressors: the priests; the judges and bureaucrats; the police; and the landowning and bourgeois elite. Holding everyone up with their toil at the bottom of the pyramid are the workers and peasants. All but that last stratum were expected to disappear under the proletarian dictatorship because members of the exploiting classes, the former people, would stand outside the embrace of revolutionary society. The 1918 constitution of the Russian Republic codified their outsider status, specifying that they could not vote, receive public assistance, or work in the civil service or military. They also languished on the lowest rung of the Soviet ladder when it came to securing housing, jobs, and ration cards, and, by the decade's end, became candidates for exile and forced labor. Through her examination of Stalin's outcasts, Alexopoulos demonstrates that the meanings of social class and, by extension, citizenship, shifted in response to policies and historical circumstances. In other words, notions of what constituted a Soviet citizen evolved in tandem with the changing definitions of who was to be excluded from the polity.

As textile and apparel production has been at the center of almost every major episode of industrialization since the sixteenth century, so too has it been a vanguard sector in the process of deindustrialization experienced by advanced capitalist countries beginning in the twentieth century. Thus it is no surprise that this sector would play a fascinating role in the world's first postcolonial effort at economic integration between two countries at vastly different levels of economic development. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), implemented in 1994, was expected to speed the two already ongoing trends of a rising apparel sector in Mexico and a steadily declining sector in the United States. US apparel firms would be expected to be an important contributor to Ross Perot's infamous "sucking sound" of jobs moving from the US to Mexico.

For some time now, sociologists, economists and assorted futurologists have flooded the pages of learned journals and the shelves of libraries with analyses of the continuing decline of industrial and other forms of labor. In proportion to the decline of working time, those social scientists proclaim, the forward march of leisure has become an irresistible trend of the most recent past, the present and, most definitely, the future. Those of us living on planet earth have on occasion wondered about the veracity of such claims which, quite often, appear to stand in flat contradiction to our experiences in everyday life. The work of the Italian sociologist Pietro Basso is thus long overdue and proves to be a welcome refutation of this genre of, to paraphrase Basso, obfuscating hallucinations.

Robert Rodgers Korstad's dramatic story of tobacco workers in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, during the 1940s and 1950s, reveals the intricate connections between a local struggle for better wages and working conditions and the broader fight for racial democracy and civil rights. On June 17, 1943, a group of black women at the Reynolds Tobacco plant stopped work, rejecting the authority of a dictatorial white foreman and expressing long-simmering anger over speed-ups, dangerous working conditions, and unjust wages. With the help of organizers from the left-leaning United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA), hundreds of black (and a few white) workers at Reynolds built Local 22 of the Food, Tobacco, Agricultural, and Allied Workers of America (FTA-CIO). Korstad eloquently tells us how the FTA succeeded. He points to the temporary convergence of factors, an active federal government in labor relations, the labor movement's aggressive Southern Front, and the move in the urban South toward white supremacy with "a lighter touch" (376) that created a moment of extraordinary opportunity for "working-class blacks [who], through their participation in the labor movement, were in the vanguard of civil rights efforts of the 1940s."(422)