Left History (E-Journal - York University)

McGlynn, Margaret

such as gender, or geographic factors like region. Ultimately, With Good Intentions
succeeds in its original goal of not being an apologist text, as the contributors are
quick to point to the Eurocentric biases of the individuals and organizations that
offered challenges and alternatives to colonial policies.
Melinda Nosal-Buzak
Wilfrid Laurier University
Samuel K. Cohn Jr., Lust for Liberty: The Politics of Social Revolt in Medieval Europe,
1200-1425 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).
In Lust for Liberty Samuel Cohn sets out to examine revolts in medieval Europe
between 1200 and 1425. The dates are chosen to allow a broad consideration of
the situation before and after the Black Death, and the field is a little narrower than
the title suggests, as he focuses on Italy, Flanders and France. Nonetheless, this is
an ambitious study, based primarily on chronicle evidence from the areas under
consideration, with judicial records from some Italian and French archives. In all,
Cohn is using 1,600 descriptions of popular revolt dealing with 1,112 separate inci-
dents (14).
Given the size of this database, Cohn begins by elaborating the problems
of defining revolt. He argues, for example, that a revolt does not need to be vio-
lent, nor does it need to involve only peasants, workers or artisans; indeed one of
the interesting themes of the work is the rebellion of the relatively powerful against
their overlords (4-8). He spends chapters two and three taking apart our assump-
tions about medieval revolt. Thus he argues that most medieval revolts were not
economic, nor were they bread riots of the starving, nor were they driven by
women (whom he later argues were almost entirely absent from medieval revolts),
nor did they necessarily fail.
Having spent the first few chapters disabusing us of our ideas about
medieval revolt, Cohn then moves on to construct new typologies. He lays out an
almost bewildering variety of revolts, including revolts of the people, revolts against
the Crown, against territorial dominance, against merchants and oligarchies, and by
women and youth, among others. This is the richest and densest chapter, and by
itself does the most to emphasize the variety of medieval revolt and the dangers of
setting up simplistic notions of ‘norms’ of ‘peasant revolt’. It also suggests the ubiq-
uity of revolt, not simply by the number and range of revolts that it elaborates, but
by demonstrating that judicial records reveal revolts that go unmentioned in local
chronicles, thus indicating that the real number of revolts is probably higher again.
The drawback to this chapter, and a problem that runs through the book, is that
many of these revolts get mentioned, sometimes numerous times, without the
revolt in question ever being fully described or contextualized.
Left History 12.2 195
Left History 12_2x6:12.2 1/28/08 11:17 AM Page 195
Having demonstrated that revolts cannot be simply categorized, in the
second half of the book Cohn moves on to examine them in more broadly cultur-
al terms. He argues again, and in rather more detail, that these revolts tended to be
political rather than economic, and focused on the acquisition of real, concrete ends
rather than the recovery of rights from some mythical golden age. Rather than try-
ing to overturn the hierarchy, he argues, medieval rebels often sought to join it, or
to prevent others from doing so (142-147). He also suggests that there are real dif-
ferences between revolts in northern Europe and Italy, even though we might
expect to see similarities between city revolts in Italy and Flanders. Most intrigu-
ingly, he argues that northern revolts tended to be inter-regional or even interna-
tional, with rebels quite consciously seeking support in other cities and even creat-
ing alliances across the city/country divide while in Italy, despite the apparent cross-
regional nature of the Guelph/Ghibelline parties, revolts tended to be confined
within a single city, with little evidence for communication of ideas or personnel
from revolt to revolt. He argues that this is largely due to the growth of the terri-
torial state in Italy, especially after the black death, and to the growing gulf between
the political rights of those in the city and those in the countryside, whether peas-
ants or magnates.
In the final section of the book Cohn takes on directly the impact of the
Black Death. He argues that after the Black Death the social status of the rebel was
higher than before, suggesting in the case of Flanders and France that the success-
ful revolts of the workers in the late-thirteenth century enabled the revolts of men
like the van Arteveldes a hundred years later. In Italy, on the other hand, pre-plague
rebels were more likely to be merchants, shop-keepers and well-to-do artisans
revolting against the aristocracy. Only in the 1340s, Cohn argues, do we see the
emergence of disenfranchised workers as rebels in Florence. After the black death
the number of revolts increases in both north and south, and Cohn argues that the
traditional focus on the big revolts of 1378-1382 has served to obscure the number
and range of revolts both before and after these years. He argues that the increase
in revolt after 1350 was the result of a new self- and class-confidence that workers
could change their social, economic and political worlds in the present, which only
grew as they appeared to triumph over the plague in the later fourteenth century.
He concludes that after the Black Death the meaning of liberty as a call to revolt
shifted, no longer referring to the maintenance of the privileges of a particular com-
munity, but rather to a broader sense of equality.
Much of this argument will sound familiar to an English historian; the his-
toriography of the 1381 revolt has long recognized that it was a product of rising
expectations, led by men well-respected in their community and looking for specif-
ic legal rights. Although Cohn does not deal with this revolt in much detail, since
it falls outside his geographic area, he does give the occasional nod to Hilton’s work
in particular. This book goes far beyond any individual revolt, however, by prob-
lematizing the nature and processes of revolt all across Europe in this period, and
Book Reviews196
Left History 12_2x6:12.2 1/28/08 11:17 AM Page 196
thus forcing us to re-consider the broader context of each one. It is a stimulating
and insightful book, with an argument as relevant to the teacher of the medieval
survey as to the specialist.
Margaret McGlynn
University of Western Ontario
David Porter, ed., Vision on Fire: Emma Goldman on the Spanish Revolution, 2nd ed.
(Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2006).
Robin Adèle Greeley, Surrealism and the Spanish Civil War (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2006).
Overwhelmed by civil war, defeated, and ruthlessly punished, the Spanish
Revolution of 1936 has left few traces in contemporary European politics and soci-
ety. Yet the groundswell of genuine revolutionary activity that accompanied the
Spanish Civil War has remained a significant international landmark for theorists of
social revolution, glorified as a hopeful alternative to the repressive outcomes of
Leninism and as a moment of popular victory, however fleeting, over the numer-
ous alleged forces of mass repression. The Spanish Revolution’s most salient qual-
ity was pluralism: various sects of rural and urban anarchosyndicalists, Marxist
socialists, and intellectual avant-gardists all shared in the revolutionary moment.
Their ideological differences led to insuperable disunity and lethal vulnerability, but
also created a dynamic conversation about the meaning and means of human liber-
ation. These two books illustrate this process from two very different perspectives,
reflecting the revolution’s pluralist appeal beyond Spain’s borders. David Porter
has reedited an earlier collection of the writings and correspondence of the noted
anarchist militant Emma Goldman, for whom the heady events of 1936 formed a
kind of climax for a career dating from her involvement in anarchist circles as a
youth in New York in the 1890s. For Goldman, Spain’s predicament of civil war,
urban and rural unrest, and its abundance of committed revolutionaries formed the
ideal mise-en-scène for the revolution she long had theorized. The Surrealist avant-
garde, the subject of Robin Adèle Greeley’s richly illustrated monograph, similarly
turned with great illusion to Spain as an open laboratory to achieve a synthesis of
art and revolutionary politics.
A skilled orator who was both inspirational to women and highly respect-
ed by her male comrades, Goldman attained great stature in revolutionary circles
during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This collection of her writ-
ings has been culled from several collections of private correspondences in the US
and Europe, in addition to material published in numerous leftist newspapers in the
1930s. The collection is impressive for its completeness, though this virtue also
Left History 12.2 197
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Samuel K. Cohn Jr. - Lust for Liberty: The Politics of Social Revolt in Medieval
Europe, 1200-1425

Eley, Geoff

Peace in the Neighbourhood

Laugen, R. Todd

Because of these limitations, I would caution against assigning this book to
undergraduates, unless they have a strong background in labour and political his-
tory. Even graduate students will need a brief introduction before they jump in.
Despite these limitations, Lause once again does a great job of showing the depth
of political currents during this period. He demonstrates the link between ante-
bellum land reform ideals and the rise of post-bellum radicalism, and carries the
political history of period beyond the constraints of sectional strife.
Jane Flaherty—Texas A&M University
Shelton Stro m q u i s t , Reinventing “The People”: The Progressive
Movement, the Class Problem, and the Origins of Modern Liberalism
(Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006).
In Reinventing “The People” Stromquist offers an elegant synthesis of recent work on
the Progressive movement and a nuanced analysis of the importance of class for
understanding reform. Integrating scholarship in political, urban, women’s, and
labour history with insightful archival investigations, Stromquist captures key ten-
sions at the heart of progressivism. Most reformers responded to the dislocations
and unrest generated by industrial capitalism with proposals to renew democracy
and promote social harmony while minimizing the importance of class. Radical,
labour-oriented reformers, however, struggled to maintain a focus on economic
inequalities against a middle-class core of activists. The latter worked to empow-
er “the people” even as they excluded recent immigrants and African Americans
from full citizenship. Ultimately, violent clashes between labour and capital from
1909 through 1914 and during the immediate postwar period shook Progressives’
faith in prospects for cross-class harmony. Yet Stromquist argues that progres-
sivism left a fundamental legacy to twentieth-century liberalism: a denial that struc-
tural class inequalities matter in American society.
Stromquist defines the Progressive movement primarily in terms of ideology
and networks. Drawing significantly on republican ideology, early twentieth-cen-
tury reformers hoped to redefine ‘the people’ in order to exclude corrupting influ-
ences such as party bosses and corporate monopolists. A new language of reform,
shaped especially by muckraking journalists, stressed social harmony and the need
to transcend class differences. Progressives also created networks across diverse
communities, which Stromquist perceptively reconstructs. Linking settlement
houses, social work conferences, the National Consumers League, the National
Child Labour Committee, Women’s Trade Union League, and the Progressive
Party of 1912, Stromquist connects reformers who advanced a common vision of
civic harmony. Middle-class activists dominated these largely nonpartisan reform
networks. At times, women organized along lines of shared feminine identities to
bridge class divisions. But Stromquist is also sensitive to assertions of defiance by
working-class women, as during the ‘uprising of the 20,000’.
Book Reviews138
Such popular challenges periodically shifted the context for reform and threat-
ened the authority of middle-class Progressives to define the interests of ‘the peo-
ple’. Among the strengths of Stromquist’s work is his attention to urban politics
as crucial sites for asserting radical reforms animated explicitly by class concerns.
In cities like Detroit, Cleveland, Milwaukee, and San Francisco, independent
labour or socialist parties often drove reform campaigns for public ownership of
utilities. Middle-class Progressives, by contrast, tended to embrace nonpartisan,
‘good government’ reforms that effectively reduced working-class political partic-
ipation. While Stromquist deserves praise for his insightful comparison of urban
campaigns, more work is needed to uncover the extent of local, working-class pol-
itics and labour responses to both corporate manipulation of government and
bureaucratic, non-partisan Progressive reform.
Compared to organized members of the working class, other social groups
lacked a voice within the core Progressive movement. New immigrants and
African Americans migrating northward appeared as easy prey for corrupt party
bosses in the eyes of many white, middle-class reformers. Consequently, these
Progressives tended to circumscribe the boundaries of ‘the people’ along ethnic
and racial lines. Some even demonstrated support for immigration restriction and
eugenic campaigns in order to reengineer the civic community. Though settlement
activists largely opposed restriction, they nonetheless remained suspicious of eth-
nic employment agents and fraternal organizations.
In his examination of the founding of the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People, Stromquist does not shrink from identifying the
racial limits of Progressives’ commitment to democracy. Cooperation with black
leaders like W.E.B. Du Bois proved short-lived as white reformers retreated from
addressing the pressing problems of black inequality during the Progressive Party
campaign of 1912. White reformers tended to marginalize efforts at interracial
cooperation. Stromquist contends that this left to liberal heirs of progressivism
the boundary of race as the “new class problem” (164).
More immediately though, reformers confronted a surge in labour conflict.
Responding to strikes by steelworkers, garment and textile workers, and miners,
Progressives pressed for a federal investigation of class unrest. Here Stromquist
considers the competing Progressive agendas which animated reformers on the
US Commission on Industrial Relations (USCIR). Chairman Frank Walsh articu-
lated the hopes of radical reformers. He used the commission’s authority to lay
bare the autocratic despotism of employers like John D. Rockefeller and to ques-
tion the integrity of reformers dependent upon corporate philanthropy. In one of
the commission’s final reports, Walsh insisted that structural class divisions
remained the central problem for America that only and the political mobilization
of labour and a redistribution of power could remedy. Dissenting from Walsh’s
vision, labour economist John Commons refused to concede that class inequalities
were endemic. Reconciliation could instead result from scientific inquiry into eco-
Left History 12.1 139
nomic conditions, remedial labour legislation, and proper machinery to administer
it.
Stromquist insightfully observes that the USCIR was a watershed in the
Progressive movement. Though Walsh attempted to keep his vision of class-
based progressivism alive through his work on the National War Labour Board, it
was Commons’ vision that prevailed in the 1920s. It was thus not just the impli-
cations of militarism and expanded state power that divided Progressives during
World War I. The postwar strike wave continued to challenge Progressive hopes
of transcending class conflict. Worker hopes to define industrial democracy in
favourable terms foundered as most reformers embraced the Commons ideal of
rationalized labour-management relations. Progressives bequeathed to twentieth-
century liberalism a retreat from the structural inequalities of American capitalism.
Reinventing “The People” is a remarkable analysis of the complexities of the
Progressive movement through the lens of class. Stromquist ultimately offers a
hopeful vision of class-based reform that might have been.
R. Todd Laugen—Metropolitan State College of Denver
Paul Ort i z , Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden History of Black
Organizing and White Violence in Florida from Reconstruction to the
Bloody Election of 1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).
William P. Jones, The Tribe of Black Ulysses: African American Lumber
Workers in the Jim Crow South (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005).
In 1954, pioneering African-American historian Rayford Logan dubbed the years
around the turn of the twentieth century the ‘nadir’ of African-American history.
Abandoned by their European-American former allies in the North, black
Southerners suffered the twin defeats of disfranchisement and segregation.
Logan, however, was by no means the first African-American intellectual to view
these years as a time of acquiescence and accommodation: during the 1920s, Alain
Locke and others associated with the Harlem Renaissance proclaimed the emer-
gence of a ‘New Negro’, more assertive than his predecessors in challenging white
supremacy. The first historians of the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and
1960s similarly proceeded upon the assumption that the struggles they chronicled
represented a new determination to overthrow Jim Crow.
Logan’s work, which stressed the abandonment of African Americans to
white racism, and hence the complicity of the federal government in creation of
the South’s totalitarian system, was intended to challenge the then prevailing his-
toriography, which emphasized the wrong headedness of Reconstruction and the
virtues of North-South reconciliation. By focusing on white oppression, howev-
er, Logan and others left the implication that African Americans should be viewed
primarily as victims. Such a portrait has become the target of attack by a recent
Book Reviews140


Shelton Stromquist - Reinventing “The People”: The Progressive Movement, the
Class Problem, and the Origins of Modern Liberalism

Bronfman, Alejandra

circumvented counterstrategies of Chinese power against Japan’s osmotic expan-
sion” (123). Chapters four, “Multiethnic Agrarian Communities” and five,
“Colonial Governmentality,” discuss the role of the state in the formation of
Korean subjectivity during the Manchukuo period, unearthing “historically specif-
ic expressions of contradictory national and capitalist dynamics” (123). In closing
her last chapter, “Specter of the Social,” Park refers to Lee Chongsok’s scholar-
ship, which identified three major constitutive connections between Koreans in
Manchuria and the North Korean regime that followed the Second-Sino Japanese
War: “the national united front that encompassed diverse political camps so as to
create a unified state in the postliberation period, the land reforms that distributed
land to peasants, and the priority given to mobilizing and benefiting the masses”
(230). Park sees his connections less obviously, stating that the “multifaceted
Korean history in Manchuria shows that Korean politics and anti-Japanese revolu-
tionary movements were anything but unified” (230).
As it began, Park’s book ends with excerpts from Kim Mans?n’s 1948 short
story called “Dual Nationality” (Ijung kukch?k) that shed insight onto the dual
workings of nationalism and capitalism. For the protagonist Elder Pak, a resident
of Kando, nationality is a tool for accumulating wealth and safeguarding “his sov-
ereignty over his labour, which is embodied in his land” (231). To secure owner-
ship of his land, he was naturalized as Chinese but hid his certificate during the
Manchukuo era. Japan’s osmotic expansion forced internationalization on the part
of everyday Koreans; internationalization that was mirrored in Chinese and
Korean socialist movements that sought to defeat Japan. But Japan’s defeat
quelled the same forces that gave rise to internationalism. Kim’s story ends with
Elder Pak’s unfortunate death at the hands of the retreating Manchukuo army in
1945. The ending “attests to the breakdown of a colonial order that had enjoined
pluralistic inclusion of all ethnic and national groups. This story also reveals that
Elder Pak’s dream was a fragile emanation of the colonial order, a dream that was
shattered when this order came to an abrupt end” (233). Interspaced with narra-
tives that capture the meanings of daily experiences, Park, Hyun Ok, Two Dreams
in One Bed, exposes the socially conflicting conditions that gave rise to the North
Korean ideology of self-reliance (chuch’e).
Janice C. H. Kim—York University
Jorge Ibarra, Prologue to Revolution: Cuba, 1898-1958 (Boulder: Lynne
Rienner Publishers, 1998).
Jorge Ibarra is an eminent historian who, in the past thirty years, has written near-
ly a dozen books on social, cultural, and political histories of both the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries in his native Cuba. While historians of Cuba from Europe
and the Americas have known of his distinguished status and drawn from his
wide-ranging research for many years, this edition of the book, published in 1998,
Book Reviews160
was the first of his works to be translated into English and as such introduced him
to a much broader audience. As the title promises, it offers a sweeping analysis of
the social and political transformations that created the conditions for the coming
of the Cuban revolution.
One of Ibarra’s main axes of analysis is the relationship between the United
States and Cuba, and in particular the intertwining of the two economies through
trade and finance. From the implementation of the reciprocity treaty in 1903, US
markets were opened to Cuban sugar, and in return, Cuba was open to US invest-
ment. Investments included sugar mills and plantations but extended beyond
those to mining operations, utilities, and maritime and railway transportation,
among other things. In addition to increases in investment in the years after the
treaty, the two countries became further entangled as U.S. banks opened branches
in Cuba. Since they were larger and could draw from more extensive resources in
the United States, it was more appealing for investors to rely on their services as
opposed to those of Cuban banks, which suffered in consequence. Moreover,
these banks lent money directly to the Cuban government. Through this kind of
interdependence, Ibarra argues, the US managed to siphon off the economic sur-
plus which might otherwise have remained in Cuba. Widespread foreign invest-
ment did not necessarily translate into higher income levels for a majority of
Cubans. Instead, a small proportion enjoyed higher wages relative to the rest of
the Cuban working classes, creating the “so-called worker aristocracy” (19). Thus,
the stage was set for the kinds of social formations and economic volatility which
Ibarra suggests led to increasing discontent by the 1940s and 50s.
One of Ibarra’s principal contentions is that the problem in the years pre-
ceding the revolution was not extensive poverty but rather social fracturing. On
one hand, the bourgeoisie, with an eye on two targets, failed to develop a steadfast
loyalty to the nation. Instead, even as they owned factories and engaged in man-
ufacturing, they also controlled imports. If it was economically feasible, they
would encourage imports to the detriment of nationally made goods. Rather than
protecting local industries, they were more interested, argues Ibarra, in protecting
their own profits. On the other hand, the working classes enjoyed differential lev-
els of success in fighting for wage increases and improved working conditions.
Their gains in the wake of labour struggles of the 1930s raised their expectations
and led to increasing discontent as those gains disappeared with the corruption
and repression in the context of Batista’s dictatorship beginning in 1952. Ibarra
also takes note of different social sectors, devoting separate chapters to women,
racial and ethnic stratification, rural and urban workers, and generational differ-
ences. Initially many of these sectors experienced exacerbated inequalities, as
those who benefited did so at the expense of a majority of unemployed or mar-
ginalized. Yet once those who were better off began to suffer under the condi-
tions of the dictatorship, this allowed for a unity that had not previously existed.
The unity that created the momentum in which Batista’s dictatorship was over-
Left History 12.1 161
thrown was not, Ibarra argues, driven by class interests. Rather, it was the over-
coming of class interests and the widespread adoption of national-popular senti-
ments that changed the course of history.
Ibarra relies on a materially based analysis to support his claims. Getting at
the social through the material, he carefully and thoroughly accounts for rising and
falling standards of living. Wages, prices, landownership, and demographic reali-
ties make up the substance of his observations. For readers more accustomed to
cultural history, especially beyond the linguistic turn, this may be somewhat diffi-
cult to digest. But the payoff is in a clear, lucid, and compelling account of a com-
plex society in the midst of social change.
Alejandra Bronfman—University of British Columbia
Paul Buhle, Tim Hector: A Caribbean Radical’s Story. Afterword by Eusi
Kwayana. (Jackson, Miss.: University Press of Mississippi, 2006)
Tim Hector, native of Antigua, maestro of vistas of direct democracy and nation-
al purpose for Caribbean peoples, is a paramount historical actor deserving close
examination and wide recognition. Those interested in the history and politics of
Caribbean civilization, but also critical vantages on philosophy and world civiliza-
tion as a whole, will find him a compelling figure. Pan-Africanist, partisan of
Caribbean federation, master of labour strikes and fighter of corruption; Hector’s
political journalism and aesthetic statements in his newspaper Outlet captured per-
sonalities embodying self-emancipation from racism and empire for peoples of
African descent. This insurgent was often found in the forefront, with the more
famous Walter Rodney of Guyana, opposing authoritarian yet often populist post-
colonial regimes. Claiming to benevolently rule in labour’s name, wielding the
superficial shell of a welfare state, sometimes co-opting the banners of Black
Power, nationalized property, and ‘workers’ participation’; the new regimes in these
former British colonies could only have been profoundly subverted by anti-
bureaucratic visions of building a good life through direct popular self-manage-
ment. Glimpses of that generation’s struggle are what this volume offers.
Paul Buhle’s Tim Hector captures this creative disciple of C.L.R. James in a
panorama of Caribbean Left politics of the second half of the twentieth century.
Not so much a comprehensive study of Hector’s life and work, it is partially a type
of memoir at a distance from a sympathetic observer offered in solidarity to a
friend. Offering concise and engaging portraits of colonial and postcolonial his-
tory, not merely in Antigua but equally in Jamaica, Trinidad, Grenada, and Guyana;
Buhle’s study reflects many of the challenges Hector and his generation confront-
ed.
Chronicling many of Hector’s original perspectives and proposals for a
wider audience, this native of this tiny peripheral island begins to come into focus.
Readers will find allusions to the late 1960s and 1970s, Hector’s years attending
Book Reviews162


Jorge Ibarra - Prologue to Revolution: Cuba, 1898-1958

Quest, Matthew

thrown was not, Ibarra argues, driven by class interests. Rather, it was the over-
coming of class interests and the widespread adoption of national-popular senti-
ments that changed the course of history.
Ibarra relies on a materially based analysis to support his claims. Getting at
the social through the material, he carefully and thoroughly accounts for rising and
falling standards of living. Wages, prices, landownership, and demographic reali-
ties make up the substance of his observations. For readers more accustomed to
cultural history, especially beyond the linguistic turn, this may be somewhat diffi-
cult to digest. But the payoff is in a clear, lucid, and compelling account of a com-
plex society in the midst of social change.
Alejandra Bronfman—University of British Columbia
Paul Buhle, Tim Hector: A Caribbean Radical’s Story. Afterword by Eusi
Kwayana. (Jackson, Miss.: University Press of Mississippi, 2006)
Tim Hector, native of Antigua, maestro of vistas of direct democracy and nation-
al purpose for Caribbean peoples, is a paramount historical actor deserving close
examination and wide recognition. Those interested in the history and politics of
Caribbean civilization, but also critical vantages on philosophy and world civiliza-
tion as a whole, will find him a compelling figure. Pan-Africanist, partisan of
Caribbean federation, master of labour strikes and fighter of corruption; Hector’s
political journalism and aesthetic statements in his newspaper Outlet captured per-
sonalities embodying self-emancipation from racism and empire for peoples of
African descent. This insurgent was often found in the forefront, with the more
famous Walter Rodney of Guyana, opposing authoritarian yet often populist post-
colonial regimes. Claiming to benevolently rule in labour’s name, wielding the
superficial shell of a welfare state, sometimes co-opting the banners of Black
Power, nationalized property, and ‘workers’ participation’; the new regimes in these
former British colonies could only have been profoundly subverted by anti-
bureaucratic visions of building a good life through direct popular self-manage-
ment. Glimpses of that generation’s struggle are what this volume offers.
Paul Buhle’s Tim Hector captures this creative disciple of C.L.R. James in a
panorama of Caribbean Left politics of the second half of the twentieth century.
Not so much a comprehensive study of Hector’s life and work, it is partially a type
of memoir at a distance from a sympathetic observer offered in solidarity to a
friend. Offering concise and engaging portraits of colonial and postcolonial his-
tory, not merely in Antigua but equally in Jamaica, Trinidad, Grenada, and Guyana;
Buhle’s study reflects many of the challenges Hector and his generation confront-
ed.
Chronicling many of Hector’s original perspectives and proposals for a
wider audience, this native of this tiny peripheral island begins to come into focus.
Readers will find allusions to the late 1960s and 1970s, Hector’s years attending
Book Reviews162
Acadia University in Nova Scotia and McGill University in Montreal, very engag-
ing. He was part of the Black Power movement in Canada, the network of
Caribbean radical immigrants and students including Robert Hill, Alfie Roberts,
Rosie Douglass, Ann Cooles, and Franklyn Harvey. This movement and moment’s
apogee was the Computer Riot at Sir George Williams University (now part of
Concordia University) and the banning of Walter Rodney by Jamaica, refusing him
reentry after attending the Black Writers Conference in Montreal.
Occasionally some of Hector’s most far-reaching critiques, for example of
Maurice Bishop’s Grenada Revolution and Michael Manley’s social democracy, are
toned down or muted in Paul Buhle’s account. However, sharply defining global
power relations of the empire of capital, Buhle captures a sense of tragedy, a great
moment passing, and the rise and decline of oppositional currents. Hector’s life
embodies noble strength in the face of great tribulations. This generosity the
author extends to the region’s insurgent actors with rare exception, where there is
a place for almost all intellectual creativity and political resistance.
Hector’s later writings, it is true, lament that he failed with his generation
to facilitate the Caribbean peoples toward a more robust self-determination. This
reality of the later archive, and Buhle’s reading, partially functions to minimize the
heat and nuances of past debates among Caribbean socialists from below and
statesmen on high. Buhle partially depicts Tim Hector, and many of his genera-
tion’s, mature compassion. Yet Hector faithfully chronicled these contestations
earlier and more comprehensively than most participant observers, begging a more
critical balance sheet. After taking full inventory of this project, Paul Buhle’s nar-
rative is surely an important contribution to the historiography of the field; for
save few scholars, such as Perry Mars, Obika Gray, Brian Meeks, and the fine oral
histories of David Scott to be found in the journal Small Axe, the stock of the
postcolonial Caribbean Left’s politics has barely begun to be assessed widely and
with rigor. Especially this is true where partisans of direct democracy and work-
ers self-management are concerned.
Buhle shifts the scholarly field, for perhaps the first time in a major work,
centering another insurgent Caribbean anti-Stalinist thinker besides C.L.R. James.
There is a much larger archive of these clever sages and the author gives notably
short attention to Bukka Rennie’s New Beginning Movement (Trinidad) and none
to George Myers of the Unemployed Worker Council movement in Jamaica for
such an ambitious survey with an original gloss. But the concise yet informative
afterword by Eusi Kwayana commenting on Tim Hector’s legacy, informs Buhle’s
audience about an important historical riddle, and provides an endorsement from
Hector’s generation that cannot be ignored.
Hector’s generation of Caribbean libertarian socialist thinkers began to
redefine in the face of defeat their original project. Seeking ‘power sharing’, a type
of oppositional party politics they previously rejected, they became pleased if
regimes, with less luster and ambition to break imperial dependency than ever
Left History 12.1 163
before, considered their perspectives and proposals as their own. Some found this
disappointing. Now another generation must raise and renew the profound ambi-
tions of these uncompromising elders breathing new life into their ideas. Paul
Buhle’s Tim Hector, summing up and extending the archaeology of postcolonial
Caribbean resistance, has broken new scholarly ground pointing to a landscape of
political thought and intellectual history that rewarding upon first read will get bet-
ter with further research and inquiry.
Matthew Quest—Brown University
Florencia E. Mallon, Courage Tastes of Blood: The Mapuche Community
of Nicolás Ailío and the Chilean State, 1906-200 (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2005).
There is no aboriginal community as important to the national myths, histories,
and historical memories of the conquest society that defeated it as the Mapuche
to Chile. Legendary among non-natives for their purported ‘savagery’ and suc-
cessful resistance to European rule, the Mapuche came to epitomize to other
Chileans (and to generations of historians) a dangerous, uncivilized, even subver-
sive cultural challenge to modernization and nation building projects after 1830.
Remarkably, and despite a rich Spanish language scholarship on the subject, very
little has been written in English on the Mapuche. Florencia Mallon has taken a
giant leap toward correcting that neglect with this sophisticated, innovative, and
riveting analysis.
Mallon’s method is striking. A year ago, I taught a university history
course on aboriginal peoples and the state in twentieth-century Latin America. My
history students, most of whom had never cracked open an ethnology, grumbled
that most of the assigned readings were by anthropologists. Over the past decade,
through thoughtful analysis and methodologies that have bridged anthropology
with history, Thomas Abercrombie, Diane Nelson, and other anthropologists have
shaped how historians understand Latin American aboriginal pasts. Mallon is the
first historian working in English to reclaim some of this ground for history by
creatively and effectively drawing on these anthropological works, but by moving
the anthropology/history methodological fusion back toward the historical.
The author describes her methodology as dialogical. While it draws on
oral history and ethnology techniques, Mallon’s interview process is novel. Most
refreshing, it dispenses with the now tiresome apologias of some scholars on their
identity-based limitations as outsiders and non-natives. Mallon is interesting,
blunt, and frank about who she is and what that means. For good or for bad, she
is a white, middle class history professor from Wisconsin who sympathizes open-
ly with the plight of the Mapuche on problems of land rights and power. This is
no mea culpa. It is a thoughtful reflection on a methodology that depends on inter-
view subjects having become the author’s friends, having met and expressed inter-
Book Reviews164


Paul Buhle, Tim Hector - A Caribbean Radical’s Story. Afterword by Eusi
Kwayana

Miranda, Susana P.

Exploring Themes in the Scholarship on Twentieth Century Domestic
Work in Canada and the United States

Mathieu, Sarah-Jane (Saje)

blacks contributed to by courageously challenging housing’s color line (127, 224)?
Since Wiese features numerous black middle-class individuals who question what
they have in common with black wage earners, the reader might wonder if there is
a basis for solidarity and political action (264-269). In explaining that “community
service” and “profit-seeking” were not necessarily contradictory to black real estate
brokers securing more housing for black clients, Wiese points to “the malleability
of civil rights rhetoric for private gain” (133). I would extend his insight beyond
“civil rights” to suggest that the pliability of race was key to explaining the political
agenda of postwar black real estate, government and civic elites. Wiese interprets
their politics as contributing to a “tradition of spatial nationalism” that incorporat-
ed “self-help” and “black power” and culminates in the black elite politics typified
in Prince George’s county (277). I would argue instead that by emphasizing the
“malleability” of racial interests, this “territorial nationalism” also represents a class
politics that flowered in Prince George’s county from the seed planted by black pol-
icy elites fifty years ago.
Preston H. Smith II
Mount Holyoke College
Harvey Amani Whitfield, Blacks on the Border: The Black Refugees in British North
America, 1815-1860 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2006).
Blacks on the Border does double duty as important scholarship on the growing liter-
ature on the Black transatlantic experience, all the while also breaking out of the
well-worn mold of Canada-US history focused narrowly on business relations
between the two countries. The author’s stated goal is to bring to life the transna-
tional connections between blacks in the Mid-Atlantic’s Chesapeake and the
Lowcountry districts with those in Nova Scotia, both regions home to thriving
slave economies during the Eighteenth century. In fact, Whitfield reminds us that
for a time following the American Revolutionary War, Nova Scotia developed into
a ‘colonial slave society’, as American expatriates, turned Loyalists, exported with
them firmly held beliefs about the value of black life and the questionable benefits
of freedom for enslaved Africans. Whitfield posits that for “American exiles, the
institution of slavery became an important link to their former home as they
expanded the institution in Nova Scotia. Thus slavery, as much as freedom, influ-
enced Loyalist culture and society” (22). In truth, the Crown often rewarded white
Loyalists with persuasive financial incentives when heading to the Canadian
Maritimes, granting them larger land lots when they immigrated with their chattel.
Whitfield claims that despite the great distance between Halifax and Baltimore, for
example, as a result of slavery, war, and the shuttle migration of African Americans,
there developed a rich and often times complicated exchange between black com-
Book Reviews156
Left History 12_2x6:12.2 1/28/08 11:17 AM Page 156
munities along the Atlantic axis, what historian Ira Berlin has so adroitly called the
Atlantic littoral. In other words, Whitfield reminds readers that for much of the
Nineteenth century—especially during critical wars between Britons and
Americans—black communities in New England and the Canadian Maritimes
remained intimately connected with political developments south of the Mason-
Dixon line, precisely because so many people of African descent from New York
to Ile Royal, present-day Cape Breton, still had powerful kinship relations in the
South, whether actual or imagined.
Whitfield argues that during the Nineteenth century, the Canada-US bor-
der, so often presumed as a clear demarcation between slavery and freedom, British
abolitionist sensibility and American slaveholders’ steadfastness, was in fact seen as
more porous by African Americans intent on making their way into Nova Scotia.
He makes a compelling case for how borders matter and contends that Refugees
played an important role in shaping the meaning and perceptions of borders in the
New England borderlands. According to Whitfield, Boston, Providence, and New
Haven communities mirrored Nova Scotian ones with the chief distinction that as
part of British North America, Halifax became a linchpin in the transatlantic expe-
rience.
Blacks on the Border’s close and nuanced examination of the different types
of black migrants who made their way north, as freedpersons or bondsmen, is the
book’s real strength. Rather than lump together all blacks in Nineteenth century
Nova Scotia, Whitfield demonstrates how various push and pull factors landed
African Americans and West Indians in the Maritimes. His point is that in order to
fully appreciate the later makeup of black Nova Scotian communities, readers must
first understand who these early migrants were and how their political experi-
ences—as enslaved Americans or West Indians caught up in colonial rule—pro-
vides insight into how they articulated their political and social concerns once in
British North America. Chapter two is dedicated to explaining the powerful role
that life in the Chesapeake and Lowcountry played in establishing patterns of sub-
sistence for African Americans who eventually made their way to Halifax after the
War of 1812. For those migrants, whom Whitfield calls the Refugees, there
remained very real connections between these Mid-Atlantic and Maritime local
economies that then explain the status and perceptions of blacks once in Canada.
In other words, Whitfield tells us that throughout the Nineteenth century, tolerance
for African Americans in Nova Scotia ebbed and flowed with the availability of
waged work and the warring moods between Britons and Americans.
And when abolitionist feeling waned, blacks in Nova Scotia registered that
shift. Whitfield’s account of the hardships endured by black settlers, including
homelessness, famine, joblessness, and many health complications, is gripping.
White settlers concluded that black émigrés who abandoned their experiment with
Nova Scotia farming after weathering consecutive seasoned of failed crops proved
their inability to handle the full rewards of citizenship. Thus, in an exercise of tor-
Left History 12.2 157
Left History 12_2x6:12.2 1/28/08 11:17 AM Page 157
tured logic, white settlers read the decision made by Refugees to seek alternatives
in African utopian settlements like Sierra Leone as proof in the failure of freedom
and citizenship for former slaves unable to cajole crops from lands known to be
barren as early as the Eighteenth century. Similarly, black Nova Scotians who gave
up farming for city life were seen as corroborating the racialised myth that blacks
could not shoulder the responsibility of land ownership, ignoring the fact that lands
worked by generations of black Nova Scotians had often been leased, with land
titles withheld for fear of sparking strife with white American expatriates dissatis-
fied with rebellion, if not slavery itself.
To be sure, Blacks on the Border, presents some challenges that have more
to do with its intended audience than its author’s objectives. Canadians may be
more familiar with the historiography and topography that he describes in detail; for
some Americans, contemplating the intersections between the Maritimes and the
Mid-Atlantic may be refreshing food for thought. In either case, Blacks on the Border
is an engaging and informative text ideal for undergraduates, especially within the
context of a Black Atlantic/Black diaspora course. Though ambitious in scope, at
times Whitfield sacrifices some depth of analysis, producing a hurried handling, as
in the case of his explanation of Jamaican Maroon arrival in Halifax, and in partic-
ular his emphasis on polygamy (22). Likewise, when discussing Preston Refugees’
intent on securing land titles, Whitfield brings up the importance of land ownership
for Freedmen during Reconstruction in the United States. He misses the opportu-
nity, however, to make clear that land ownership remained a central driving force
of Reconstruction ideology precisely because it served as a correction to landless-
ness during slavery and reinforced belonging for four million emancipated African
Americans who would not be moved. At its core, land ownership, even before the
debate about what to do with the land itself, was held up by Nineteenth century
African Americans as an unimpeachable citizenship right. We see that same anchor
in the world that Whitfield creates for us in the Maritimes: blacks in Nova Scotia
belonged because they owned and worked the land beneath their feet. So much of
the social and political work that they then did was fuelled by a desperate need to
affirm their sense of place. The social and political organizations handily studied in
Blacks on the Border’s last chapter shed light on the diversity of opinions present
among black Nova Scotians, mirroring their varied backgrounds as newcomers/old
timers; freed persons/Freedom Seekers; urbanites/rural folk. Whitfield works
against the tempting narrative pull of describing black urban life as monolithic in
order to establish the power and scope of its presence. Instead, he uses canonical
institutions like churches and political organizations to give shape and contour to
the diversity of black life in Nineteenth century Nova Scotia.
Sarah-Jane (Saje) Mathieu
Princeton University
Book Reviews158
Left History 12_2x6:12.2 1/28/08 11:17 AM Page 158


Harvey Amani Whitfield - Blacks on the Border: The Black Refugees in British
North America, 1815-1860

Murton, James

Stephen Bocking - Nature’s Experts: Science, Politics, and the Environment; Harold L. Platt - Shock Cities: The Environmental Transformation of Manchester and
Chicago

C. H. Kim, Janice

But this would be misleading and too simple...the pattern was not one of linear
decline but rather of periodical revival… ” (273, 276). Indeed, they point out that
traditional Labour Day parades were “not pristine cultural creations”, but rather
expressions of the “possibilities and limitations of Victorian respectability” (276).
They also admit that the transmogrification of Labour Day into a largely privatized
holiday brought it back to one of the original goals of its founders: the opportu-
nity for workers to relax and enjoy a day away from work (115, 269). Nonetheless,
in the concluding sentences of the book, there is a hint of nostalgia for the politi-
cized demonstrations of yesteryear. After lamenting that there were “fewer of
these events than in the past” and that they “caught the local imagination much
less than their turn-of-the-century predecessors,” they conclude: “But they
revealed how important it has been to many Canadian workers to remind their fel-
low citizens that this was not just another day off work. They still have a message
to deliver” (278).
Lastly, it would be interesting to see Heron and Penfold reflect more
explicitly on the reflective and instrumental nature of such festivities. Heron and
Penfold cast their study in the context of broad social changes: they certainly illus-
trate how festivities reflected the social forces around them. But they also hint at
the transformative power of festivities, particularly in their analysis of May Day.
Here we see how May Day organizers challenged the established social order,
which led to subsequent harassment and repression (166-88).
This book obviously generates many questions of interpretation and
approach, which is the hallmark of an important contribution to scholarship. As
Joy Parr has reminded us in her seminal analysis of gender history: “Scholarship is
to open rather than extinguish questions, to discomfit rather than enshrine both
settled certainties and the collective practices they sustain.” (Canadian Historical
Review, 73, no. 3, 1995: 354) Not only will this study appeal to the academic com-
munity, but also to students and the general public. The monograph works espe-
cially well as an assigned text in an undergraduate history classroom. One further
strength that must be noted is the rich collection of photographs, sketches, and
advertisements in this work, which are not merely illustrative, but contribute in an
important way to the authors’ interpretations and conclusions. In this sense,
Heron and Penfold remind us that there is more to visual sources `than meets the
eye’.
Bonnie Huskins—University of New Brunswick
Hyun Ok Park, Two Dreams in One Bed: Empire, Social Life and the
Origins of the North Korean Revolution in Manchuria (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2005).
In 1948, what legitimated the People’s Revolutionary Army’s rise to power in
North Korea was the participation of many of its leaders and soldiers in anti-
Japanese struggles in Manchuria during the Pacific War (1931-1945). In a 1958
Book Reviews158
speech commemorating the tenth anniversary of the People’s Revolutionary Army,
Kim Il Sung underscored this historic connection declaring, “The anti-Japanese
guerrillas established the traditions of a fighting spirit … for a people’s power
which would oppose imperialism and safeguard the interests of the working peo-
ple” (Kim Il Sung, Selected Works, Vol. 2 (P’y?ngyang, 1971), 66-67). According
to Kim, the DPRK’s national ideology was based on international history. Hyun
Ok Park, in Two Dreams in One Bed, digs beyond the ideological, examining “the
social origins of the Korean communist movement and the ways in which the
nationalism espoused by the communists impeded their recognition of social rela-
tions in Manchuria,” undermining their claims to internationalism (23).
“Two dreams in one bed” refers to the ambitions and activities of
colonists and nationalists, as they resided in the “bed” of capitalism during the
Pacific War. The metaphor of “dreams” has both temporal and spatial meanings
as Koreans, Chinese, and Japanese competed for living and sleeping space in the
“bed” of Manchukuo (1932-1945). Her integration of capitalism, colonialism,
and nationalism challenges postcolonial scholarship, including those of Partha
Chatterjee, on the grounds that assuming the unity of ethnic nations overlooks the
cleavages intrinsic to capitalism. In examining Koreans in Manchukuo, Park does
not draw clear lines of subalternity but considers the “disjuncture of national gov-
ernmentality and capitalist expansion, addressing the people inside the circuits of
capitalist production and exchange.” Instead, she investigates the “subjectivity in
social practices through which people respond to multiple forces of power that
might not only propagate but also circumvent each other” (16).
Park focuses on Manchuria in the early-twentieth century and the “ongoing
construction of boundaries between national and non-national members, which
were inscribed in the relationship involving exchange of land; and the forces that
simultaneously shaped and destabilized national boundaries and social practices of
production and exchange” (19). To understand the “entwined abstraction of peo-
ple and land” that resulted from the “interplay of Japanese colonialism and capi-
talism,” Park draws on archival and secondary materials in Korean, Japanese, and
Chinese. Within Manchuria, Park specifically examines the Kando (Jiandao) and
other regions of Southeastern Manchuria, such as Fengtian, heavily populated by
Koreans (19).
Park’s book begins with description from An Sugil’s 1967 novel Pukkando,
which narrate the “epic of Korean migration of Manchuria from the 1860s to
1945 and lives caught between Chinese nationalism and Japanese imperialism”
(25). Chapter two, “Between Nation and Market” and three, “Agency of Japanese
Imperialism” compare the transformation of Korean migrants “into national sub-
jects and of land into national territory, which for both Chinese and Japanese
national politics were entwined with capitalist development in the two regions”
( 1 2 3 ) . Attempts to tra n s fo rm people and land faced ove ra rching tensions
“between the national and capitalists desire of the North east government, which
Left History 12.1 159
circumvented counterstrategies of Chinese power against Japan’s osmotic expan-
sion” (123). Chapters four, “Multiethnic Agrarian Communities” and five,
“Colonial Governmentality,” discuss the role of the state in the formation of
Korean subjectivity during the Manchukuo period, unearthing “historically specif-
ic expressions of contradictory national and capitalist dynamics” (123). In closing
her last chapter, “Specter of the Social,” Park refers to Lee Chongsok’s scholar-
ship, which identified three major constitutive connections between Koreans in
Manchuria and the North Korean regime that followed the Second-Sino Japanese
War: “the national united front that encompassed diverse political camps so as to
create a unified state in the postliberation period, the land reforms that distributed
land to peasants, and the priority given to mobilizing and benefiting the masses”
(230). Park sees his connections less obviously, stating that the “multifaceted
Korean history in Manchuria shows that Korean politics and anti-Japanese revolu-
tionary movements were anything but unified” (230).
As it began, Park’s book ends with excerpts from Kim Mans?n’s 1948 short
story called “Dual Nationality” (Ijung kukch?k) that shed insight onto the dual
workings of nationalism and capitalism. For the protagonist Elder Pak, a resident
of Kando, nationality is a tool for accumulating wealth and safeguarding “his sov-
ereignty over his labour, which is embodied in his land” (231). To secure owner-
ship of his land, he was naturalized as Chinese but hid his certificate during the
Manchukuo era. Japan’s osmotic expansion forced internationalization on the part
of everyday Koreans; internationalization that was mirrored in Chinese and
Korean socialist movements that sought to defeat Japan. But Japan’s defeat
quelled the same forces that gave rise to internationalism. Kim’s story ends with
Elder Pak’s unfortunate death at the hands of the retreating Manchukuo army in
1945. The ending “attests to the breakdown of a colonial order that had enjoined
pluralistic inclusion of all ethnic and national groups. This story also reveals that
Elder Pak’s dream was a fragile emanation of the colonial order, a dream that was
shattered when this order came to an abrupt end” (233). Interspaced with narra-
tives that capture the meanings of daily experiences, Park, Hyun Ok, Two Dreams
in One Bed, exposes the socially conflicting conditions that gave rise to the North
Korean ideology of self-reliance (chuch’e).
Janice C. H. Kim—York University
Jorge Ibarra, Prologue to Revolution: Cuba, 1898-1958 (Boulder: Lynne
Rienner Publishers, 1998).
Jorge Ibarra is an eminent historian who, in the past thirty years, has written near-
ly a dozen books on social, cultural, and political histories of both the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries in his native Cuba. While historians of Cuba from Europe
and the Americas have known of his distinguished status and drawn from his
wide-ranging research for many years, this edition of the book, published in 1998,
Book Reviews160


Hyun Ok Park - Two Dreams in One Bed: Empire, Social Life and the Origins
of the North Korean Revolution in Manchuria

Devlin, Jone

Nadine Hubbs - The Queer Composition of America’s Sound: Gay Modernists,
American Music, and National Identity; Judith A. Peraino - Listening to the Sirens: Musical
Technologies of Queer Identity from Homer to Hedwig

Not a member yet

Samuel K. Cohn Jr. - Lust for Liberty: The Politics of Social Revolt in Medieval Europe, 1200-1425

Peace in the Neighbourhood

Shelton Stromquist - Reinventing “The People”: The Progressive Movement, the Class Problem, and the Origins of Modern Liberalism

Jorge Ibarra - Prologue to Revolution: Cuba, 1898-1958

Paul Buhle, Tim Hector - A Caribbean Radical’s Story. Afterword by Eusi Kwayana

Exploring Themes in the Scholarship on Twentieth Century Domestic Work in Canada and the United States

Harvey Amani Whitfield - Blacks on the Border: The Black Refugees in British North America, 1815-1860

Stephen Bocking - Nature’s Experts: Science, Politics, and the Environment; Harold L. Platt - Shock Cities: The Environmental Transformation of Manchester and Chicago

Hyun Ok Park - Two Dreams in One Bed: Empire, Social Life and the Origins of the North Korean Revolution in Manchuria

Nadine Hubbs - The Queer Composition of America’s Sound: Gay Modernists, American Music, and National Identity; Judith A. Peraino - Listening to the Sirens: Musical Technologies of Queer Identity from Homer to Hedwig

1,044

1,130