The Making of the Middle Class

In this edited collection the contributors question the current academic understanding of what is known as the global middle class. They see middle-class formation as transnational and they examine this group through the lenses of economics, gender, race, and religion from the mid-nineteenth century to today. They challenge the dominant Western definition of modernity and the middle class, and argue that in order to remove the Western and European focus in discussions of modernity people must look toward a reimagining of the entire category and history of the middle class to better shape the discussion of its future.

A. Ricardo Lpez 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 Sao Paulo, 1920-1964. Mrinalini Sinha is the Alice Freeman Palmer Professor of History at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is the author of Specters of Mother India: The Global Restructuring of an Empire, also published by Duke University Press.