Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Capitalist Modernity and Communist Revolution
- 1 Memories of Home: Native-place Identity in the City
- 2 The Awakening Self: Individuality and Class Consciousness
- 3 After Patriarchy: Gender Identities in the City
- 4 Saving the Nation: National and Class Identities in the City
- 5 Workers and Communist Revolution
- Index
- References
Introduction: Capitalist Modernity and Communist Revolution
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Capitalist Modernity and Communist Revolution
- 1 Memories of Home: Native-place Identity in the City
- 2 The Awakening Self: Individuality and Class Consciousness
- 3 After Patriarchy: Gender Identities in the City
- 4 Saving the Nation: National and Class Identities in the City
- 5 Workers and Communist Revolution
- Index
- References
Summary
This book is an exploration of how the social identities of peasants who left their villages to work and settle in St Petersburg, from the 1880s to 1917, and in Shanghai, from the 1900s to the 1940s, were transformed under the impact of capitalist modernity. St Petersburg and Shanghai stood out as the exemplars of capitalist modernity in Russia and China, respectively, two societies that were very different in cultural terms yet which shared the condition of being overwhelmingly agrarian and politically enfeebled. The book explores how the experience of wage labour and city life challenged migrants' understandings of themselves, and asks how changes in their social identities contributed to the political, social and cultural ferment that eventuated in revolution. It is an attempt to explore the formation of a working class from a new angle, by focusing on transformations of social identity that did not relate directly to the growth of class consciousness or to the growth of revolutionary political sentiment, the aspects of class formation on which the historiography to date has tended to concentrate. Its central thesis is that the identities of peasants who became workers were transformed by a number of processes other than those directly related to wage labour and capitalist production and along a number of axes other than that of class, and that capitalist modernity provides a better optic than capitalist production through which to analyse identity formation.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Revolution and the People in Russia and ChinaA Comparative History, pp. 1 - 36Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2008
References
, ‘Invisible City’, Guardian, 15 March 2006.
, ‘Urban Revolution in the Late Russian Empire’, in (ed.), The City in Late Imperial Russia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), p. 327.Google Scholar
, ‘On the Eve: Histories and Identities of Some Revolutionary Workers, 1870–05’, in and (eds.), Making Workers Soviet: Power, Class and Identity (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), p. 29.Google Scholar
and (eds.), North China at War: The Social Ecology of Revolution, 1937–45 (Lanham MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000);
, Mobilizing the Masses: Building Revolution in Henan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994).Google Scholar
, Jacqueries et révolution dans la China du XXe siècle (Paris: Éditions de La Martinière, 2005), p. 454.Google Scholar
, ‘On New Democracy’ (1940), Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, vol. 2 (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1972), pp. 339–84.Google Scholar
and (eds.), Russian Modernity: Politics, Knowledge, Practices (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000);CrossRef
, Stalinist Values: The Cultural Norms of Soviet Modernity (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 2003).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, All that is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (London: Verso, 1983), p. 16.Google Scholar
, ‘Some Observations on Multiple Modernities’, in and (eds.), Reflections on Multiple Modernities (Leiden: Brill, 2002), pp. 27–41.Google Scholar
, ‘Multiple Modernities or Varieties of Modernity?’ Current Sociology 54, 1 (2006), 77–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, ‘Routes to/through Modernity’, in , and (eds.), Global Modernities (London: Sage, 1995), p. 137.Google Scholar
, ‘Popular Culture and the Construction of Postmodern Identities’, in and (eds.), Modernity and Identity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 141.Google Scholar
, ‘Social Theory and the Politics of Identity’, in (ed.), Social Theory and the Politics of Identity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), p. 12.Google Scholar
, ‘The Problem of Social Identities in Early Twentieth Century Russia’, Slavic Review, 47, 1 (1988), 3–4;Google Scholar
, ‘Identities, Power and Social Interaction in Revolutionary Russia’, Slavic Review, 47, 1 (1988), 21–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
and , ‘Introduction’, in and (eds.), Shanghai Sojourners (Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, 1992), pp. 11–12.Google Scholar
, Red Petrograd: Revolution in the Factories, 1917–18 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983);CrossRefGoogle Scholar
‘Gender and Class: Women's Strikes in St Petersburg, 1895–1917, and Shanghai, 1895–1927’, Social History, 19, 2 (1994), 141–68;CrossRef
‘Workers and Supervisors in St Petersburg, 1905–1917, and Shanghai, 1895–1927’, Past and Present, 139 (1993), 131–77;CrossRef
‘Craft Consciousness, Class Consciousness: Petrograd 1917’, History Workshop, 11 (1981), 33–56.CrossRef
, Like Cattle and Horses: Nationalism and Labor in Shanghai, 1895–1927 (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2002), ch. 10.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, ‘The Case for Comparing Histories’ and ‘On Rereading an Earlier Essay’, in (ed.), Modes of Comparison: Theory and Practice (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), pp. 98–117, 118–136.Google Scholar
, Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1984).Google Scholar
, ‘On Alternative Modernities’, in (ed.), Alternative Modernities (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2001), p. 18.Google Scholar
, A Crooked Line: from Cultural History to the History of Society (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), p. 193.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, An All-Consuming Century: Why Commercialism Won in Modern America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), p. 1;Google Scholar
, ‘Nationalism, Consumerism and the Image of the Individual in Shenbao Newspaper’, University of Leeds, PhD, 2004, p. 140.
, Beyond the Neon Lights: Everyday Shanghai in the Early Twentieth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), p. 251.Google Scholar
(ed.), China Year Book, 1926–27 (Tientsin: North China Daily News and Herald, 1927), p. 898.
and (eds.), Entertaining Tsarist Russia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), p. xx.
and , ‘Identity’, in , Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley: University of Calfornia Press, 2005), p. 88.Google Scholar
, ‘Is “Identity” a Useful Cross-Cultural Concept?’, in , Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 27–40.Google Scholar
, ‘Constructing Primordialism: Old Histories for New Nations’, Journal of Modern History, 73 (2001), 866.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, From the Soil: The Foundations of Chinese Society. With an introduction and epilogue by and (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), p. 20.Google Scholar
, Crafting Selves: Power, Gender, and Discourses of Identity in a Japanese Workplace (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 10, 24.Google Scholar
and , Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations (London: Macmillan, 1991), p. 26;CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, ‘Historians and Discourse Analysis’, History Workshop Journal 27 (1989), 37–65.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, ‘Some Observations on the Question of “Hegemonic Discourse” ’, in and (eds.), New Labor History: Worker Identity and Experience in Russia, 1840–1918 (Bloomington: Slavica Publishers, 2002), pp. 177–206.Google Scholar
Some readers may expect a book on social identities to draw upon Foucault's conception of governmentality. I agree with Peter Holquist that a form of governmentality began to emerge in Russia during the First World War, as forms of population surveillance and statistics developed, but the extent of state penetration of society in both late-tsarist Russia and republican China was limited, and state functions remained essentially extractive and coercive in nature (more so in China than in Russia). , Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia's Continuum of Crisis, 1914–21 (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2002);Google Scholar
, and (eds.), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).CrossRef
, Beyond the Neon Lights (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). For an equally outstanding study of St Petersburg, SeeGoogle Scholar
, Proletarian Imagination: Self, Modernity and the Sacred in Russia, 1910–1925 (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), p. 148.Google Scholar
, Cong Shanghai faxian lishi: xiandaihua, jinchengzhong de Shanghai ren ji qi shehui shenghuo, 1927–37 [Discovering History from Shanghai: Modernization, Urban Shanghainese and their Social Life, 1927–37] (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1996), p. 243.Google Scholar
(ed.), Shanghai shi zhinan [Guidebook to Shanghai] (Shanghai: Zhonghua shudian, 1933), pp. 138–9.
, ‘Introduction: Interpreting Chinese Modernity, 1900–1950’, in (ed.), Becoming Chinese: Passages to Modernity and Beyond (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), p. 5Google Scholar
, Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of New Urban Culture in China, 1930–1945 (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), ch. 1.Google Scholar
, Jiu Shanghai renkou bianqian de yanjiu [Research on Population Change in Old Shanghai] (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1980), p. 141.Google Scholar
Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution, vol. 1 (in three vols.) (London: Sphere, 1967), p. 23.
, Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture and Community in Interwar Japan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. xvii.Google Scholar
Li Dazhao wenji [Collected Writings of Li Dazhao], vol. 1 (2 vols.) (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1984), p. 539.
Wan Qing Shanghai shehui de bianqian: shenghuo yu lunli de jindaihua [Social Change in Late Qing Shanghai: The Modernization of Life and Ethics] (Tianjin: Renmin chubanshe, 2002).Google Scholar
, ‘Shanghai Modernity: Commerce and Culture in a Republican City’, China Quarterly, 150 (1997), 380.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, ‘Neither Peasant Nor Proletarian: The Workers of Ivanovo-Voznesensk’, Brown University, PhD, 1997, p. 44.
McKean argues that the workforce of the capital was ‘still at the transitory stage between agriculture and industry’. , St Petersburg: Between the Two Revolutions (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), p. 29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, Peasant and Proletarian: The Working Class of Moscow in the Late Nineteenth Century (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1979), pp. 50, 24.Google Scholar
, From Cotton Mill to Business Empire: The Emergence of Regional Enterprises in Modern China (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), pp. 105–7.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), ch. 4.Google Scholar
(Frank Dikötter), ‘Minguo shiqi de modeng wanyi, wenhua pincou yu richang shenghuo’ [Modern things, cultural pick-and-mix and daily life in the republican era], in (ed.), Zhongguo de chengshi shenghuo [Urban Life in China] (Taipei: Lianjing chubanshe, 2005), pp. 477–95.Google Scholar
, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), pp. 2, 5, 3.Google Scholar
, ‘The Age of Migration in China’, Population and Development Review 27, 3 (2001), 499–524.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, ‘The Social Control of Peasant Labor in Russia: the Responses of Village Communities to Labor Migration in the Central Industrial Region, 1861–1905’, in and (eds.), Peasant Economy, Culture and Politics in European Russia, 1800–1921 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 52–100.Google Scholar
, Krest′iane i gorod v kapitalisticheskoi Rossii vtoroi poloviny XIX veka (Moscow: Nauka, 1983), pp. 102–3.Google Scholar
, Peasant Dreams and Market Politics: Labour Migration and the Russian Village, 1861–1905 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998), p. 57.Google Scholar
, Formirovanie rabochego klassa Rossii (Moscow: Izdatel′stvo sotsial′no-ekonomicheskoi literatury, 1958), p. 143.Google Scholar
, ‘Patterns of Migration and Settlement in Prerevolutionary St Petersburg: Peasants from Iaroslavl and Tver′ Provinces’, Russian Review, 56 (1997), 24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, Internal Migration During Modernization in Late Nineteenth-Century Russia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 73, 88, 151–2.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, Muzhik and Muscovite: Urbanization in Late Imperial Russia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), p. 34;Google Scholar
Statisticheskie dannye Petrograda (1916), p. 9.
, Between the Fields and the City: Women, Work and Family in Russia, 1861–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 99.Google Scholar
and , ‘Changements démographiques et grèves ouvrières à Saint-Petersbourg, 1905–14’, Annales ESC, 40, 4 (1985), 792.Google Scholar
, Hankow: Commerce and Society in a Chinese City, 1796–1889 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1984), pp. 233–43.Google Scholar
Cihai, vol. 3 (Shanghai: Shanghai cishu chubanshe, 1979), p. 4010.
, Zhongguo liumang shi [History of Chinese Vagrants] (Beijing: Shehui kexue chubanshe, 1993), pp. 31–4.Google Scholar
(ed.), Tongjibiao zhong zhi Shanghai [Shanghai through Statistical Tables] (Nanjing: 1932)
, ‘Introduction’, and (eds.), The Chinese City Between Two Worlds (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974), p. 11.
North China Herald, 12 December 1925, p. 490.
Chinese Economic Journal, 3, 5 (1928), 922.
, ‘Yangzhou: A Central Place in the Qing Empire’, in (ed.), Cities of Jiangnan in Late Imperial China (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993), pp. 124–5.Google Scholar
(ed.), Zhonggongdang shi renwu zhuan [Biographies of Past Members of the Communist Party], vol. 9 (Xi'an: Shaanxi renmin chubanshe, 1983), p. 107.
, Chinese Modernity and the Peasant Path: Semicolonialism in the Northern Yangzi Delta (Stanford: Stanford University Press 1999), pp. 216–19.Google Scholar
, and , Shanghai chanye yu Shanghai zhigong [Shanghai Labour and Shanghai Labour] (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1984; orig. 1939), p. 674.Google Scholar
, Land Tenure in Pre-Revolutionary China: Kiangsu Province in the 1920s and 1930s (London: Contemporary China Institute/SOAS, 1976), p. 40;Google Scholar
, The Rural Economy of Pre-Liberation China (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 168–72.Google Scholar
, One Industry, Two Chinas: Silk Filatures and Peasant-Family Production in Wuxi County, 1865–1937 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), pp. 127–9.Google Scholar
(ed.), Nanyang xiongdi yancao gongsi shiliao [Historical Materials on Nanyang Bros. Tobacco Company] (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1958), p. 308.
and , A Study of the Standard of Living of Working Families in Shanghai (Peiping: Institute of Social Research, 1931), p. 77;Google Scholar
, ‘The Hierarchy of Shanghai Prostitution, 1870–1949’, Modern China, 15, 4 (1989), 463.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
(ed.), China Year Book, 1925 (Tientsin: North China Daily News, 1925), p. 548.
, Factory Girls: Women in the Thread Mills of Meiji Japan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), p. 59.Google Scholar
, ‘Shanghai fangzhi chang zhong de baoshenzhi gongren’ [Contract Workers in the Shanghai Textile Factories], Huanian, 1, 22 (1932), 431;Google Scholar
, ‘The Contract Labour System and Women Workers: Pre- Liberation Cotton Mills in Shanghai’, Modern China, 9, 4 (1983), 421–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, Sisters and Strangers, Women in the Shanghai Cotton Mill, 1919–49 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), p. 126.Google Scholar
, Roots of Rebellion: Workers' Politics and Organizations in St. Petersburg and Moscow, 1900–1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), p. 23.Google Scholar
, ‘Populists and Workers: The First Encounter between Populist Students and Industrial Workers in St Petersburg, 1971–74’, Soviet Studies, 24, 2 (1972), 251–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, Perekhod k massovoi politicheskoi bor′be: rabochii klass nakanune pervoi rossiiskoi revoliutsii (Moscow: Nauka, 1987), p. 119.Google Scholar
, Mentalitet i sotsial′noe povedenie rabochikh, krest′ian i soldat Rossii v period mirovoi voiny (1914–1918gg.) (Ekaterinburg: UrO RAN, 2000), p. 148.Google Scholar
and , ‘Two Strike Waves in Imperial Russia (1905–07, 1912–14): A Quantitative Analysis’, in and (eds.), Strikes, Wars and Revolutions in an International Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, A Study of Chinese Boycotts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1933), p. 111.Google Scholar
Chinese Economic Monthly, 6 (March 1924), 2.
, ‘Le mouvement ouvrier à Shanghai de 1928 à 1930.’ Thèse à troisième cycle, Sorbonne (Paris, 1970), pp. 11, 45.
, ‘The Chinese War Economy’, in and (eds.), China's Bitter Victory: War with Japan, 1937–1945 (Armonk NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1992), p. 185.Google Scholar
, Shanghai on Strike: the Politics of Chinese Labor (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 109.Google Scholar
, The Making of the Chinese Industrial Workplace: State, Revolution and Labour Management (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 101;CrossRefGoogle Scholar