This book uses a socio-historical approach with feminist insight to examine the work of Chinese women in colonial Malaya, specifically those who worked as prostitutes, mui tsai, domestic servants, tin and rubber workers, hawkers and construction workers. The study questions the view that all women in traditional society were subordinated.

Originally published in 1979, this book examines differing forms of international, interracial working- class action and the relationship between workers’ struggles in the periphery and those in advanced capitalist countries. It analyses the nature of class alliances forged in the countryside and the urban sprawls of the developing world among workers, students and the unemployed. The volume draws on theoretical debates and detailed empirical studies dealing with a wide range of countries in Asia, Latin America, Africa and the Caribbean. Each of the sections is preceded by a linking editorial comment and the editors also provide an introductory overview. Reviews of the original edition of Peasants and Proletarians: ‘This is an important book both for historians and for social scientists. It draws attention to a previously underestimated labour force that has grown into a significant – indeed, indispensable – part of the international economic structure.’ Lynda Shaffer, Journal of Asian Studies, 39 (4) 1980. ‘This book offers a truly impressive and solid compilation of material on labour in the Third World. The sheer range of scholarship concerning many different types of workers over a timescale of nearly I00 years in countries and political situations as various, for example, as Lagos in the I890s, Jamaica in the 1930s, and socialist Algeria or Chile under Allende, is sometimes bewildering, but never fails to stimulate and absorb the reader.’ Paul Kennedy, Journal of Modern African Studies, 19 (4) 1981. ‘Peasants and Proletarians is a very major contribution. The editors' introduction, though brief, successfully raises many of these issues and outlines an approach to them...The twenty-one readings, concerned with early forms of resistance, rural workers, strategies of working-class action, migrant workers in advanced capitalist states, and contemporary struggles, offer geographical and intellectual breadth in their exploration of the diversity of Third World experience.’ Joel Samoff, ASA Review of Books, Vol. 6, 1980.

Proletarian and Gendered Mass Migrations connects the 19th- and 20th-century labor migrations and migration systems in global transcultural perspective. It emphasizes macro-regional internal continuities or discontinuities and interactions between and within macro-regions. The essays look at migrant workers experiences in constraining frames and the options they seize or constraints they circumvent. It traces the development from 19th-century proletarian migrations to industries and plantations across the globe to 20th- and 21st-century domestics and caregiver migrations. It integrates male and female migration and shows how women have always been present in mass migrations. Studies on historical development over time are supplemented by case studies on present migrations in Asia and from Asia. A systems approach is combined with human agency perspectives. Contributors include Rochelle Ball, Shelly Chan, Dennis D. Cordell, Michael Douglass, Christiane Harzig, Dirk Hoerder, Muhamad Nadratuzzaman Hosen, Hassène Kassar, Kamel Kateb, Amarjit Kaur, Kiranjit Kaur, Gijs Kessler, Akram Khater, Elizabeth A. Kuznesof, Vera Mackie, Adam McKeown, Tomoko Nakamatsu, Ooi Keat Gin, Aswatini Raharto, Marlou Schrover, and Patcharawalai Wongboonsin.

This collection of original essays provides a rare in-depth look at peasant life in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European Russia. It is the first English-language text to deal extensively with peasant women and patriarchy; the role of magic, healing, and medicine in village life; communal economic innovation; rural poverty and labor migration from the village perspective; the agricultural hiring market as workers' turf; and the regional components of the late nineteenth-century agrarian crisis. Originally published in 1991. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

"Elegantly written essays. . . . Roseberry is the real gem, an anthropologist with extensive Latin American field experience and an impressive scholarly grasp of the histories of anthropology and Marxist theory."--Micaela di Leonardo, The Nation "An extremely stimulating volume . . . rich and provocative, and codifies a new depature point."--Choice "As a critic . . . Roseberry writes with sustained force and clarity. . . . his principal points emerge with a directness that will make this book attractive to a wide range of readers."--American Anthropologist "Roseberry in among the most astute, careful, and theoretically cogent of the anthropologists of his generation. . . . [This book] illustrates well the breadth and coherence of his thinking and guides the reader through the complicated intersections of anthropology with history, political economy, Marxism, and Latin American studies."--Jane Schneider, CUNY In Anthropologies and Histories, William Roseberry explores some of the cultural and political implications of an anthropological political economy. In his view, too few of these implications have been explored by authors who dismiss the very possibility of a political economic understanding of culture. Within political economy, readers are offered sophisticated treatments of uneven development, but when authors turn to culture and politics, they place contradictory social experiences within simplistic class or epochal labels. Within cultural anthropology, history is often little more than new terrain for extending anthropological practice. Roseberry places culture and history in relation to each other, in the context of a reflection on the political economy of uneven development. In the first half of this books, he looks at and critiques a variety of anthropological understandings of culture, arguing for an approach that sees culture as socially constituted and socially constitutive. Beginning with a commentary on Clifford Geertz's seminal essay on the Balinese cockfight, Roseberry argues that Geertz and his followers pay insufficient attention to cultural differentiation, to social and political inequalities that affect actors' different understandings of the world, other people, and of themselves. Sufficient attention to such questions, Roseberry argues, requires a concern for political economy. In the second half of the book, Roseberry explores the assumptions and practices of political economy, indicates the kind of problems that should be central to such an approach, and reviews some of the inadequacies of anthropological studies. William Roseberry is a professor of anthropology at the New School for Social Research.

A critical edition of the text that defined communist party ideology in Stalin’s Soviet Union The Short Course on the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks) defined Stalinist ideology both at home and abroad. It was quite literally the the master narrative of the USSR—a hegemonic statement on history, politics, and Marxism-Leninism that scripted Soviet society for a generation. This study exposes the enormous role that Stalin played in the development of this all-important text, as well as the unparalleled influence that he wielded over the Soviet historical imagination.

This ambitious work traces a social history of semicolonialism in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century China. It takes as its central concern the intertwining of two antagonistic forces: elite constructions of modernity shaped globally, and an alternate line of peasant resistance and development. Nantong county and the northern portion of the commercially advanced Yangzi Delta form its focal points. Lying in the hinterland of and connected in myriad ways with the treaty port of Shanghai, which in the late nineteenth century became the center of imperialist activity in China, the northern delta is an ideal locale for examining how the acquisition, transmission, and contestation of power may have changed during the extended moment of semicolonial encounter. The author’s specific project is to unravel the multiple strands of the semicolonial process and thereby the dominant and alternative histories it embodied. In emphasizing semicolonialism as a structural context shaping events, the book opens up a pivotal but silent area in the history of modern China. In confronting the development of capitalism as a historical phenomenon and suggesting that its consequences for land and labor on a global scale need greater theoretical and historical scrutiny, the book forces a new understanding of China’s modernity. The book is in two parts. The first delineates key long-term dynamics in the political, economic, and social history of the area from the late Ming dynasty to the Opium Wars. The second part begins with an examination of the rise of modernist urban power in the context of accelerating growth in the textile and cotton trades, focusing on such topics as economic restructuring under Shanghai’s impetus, new forms of economic and political organization, and contention as well as cooperation within the urban elite. Turning to the countryside, the book then examines the regearing of the rural economy to the needs of urban capital, local and global; outlines the emergence of modern landlordism and other rural “capitalisms”; analyzes class formation in the peasantry associated with changes in labor organization, tenurial arrangements, and the gendered division of labor; and traces the coalescence of a distinctive political discourse through which peasants contested certain development schemes and advanced alternative conceptions of community and nation.

An account of the way social relations governing the production of cotton in Peru's South Coast changed as capitalism penetrated Peru's agrarian base; the analysis is unusual in that the author looks at the plantation system from a "peasant" poi

Examines the evolution of Lenin's thinking on the place of the Russian peasant in theory and in the potential reality of Marxist revolution.

How do peasants, producing mainly for themselves, become capitalist farmers, producing largely for sale? What happens to farm sizes, farming practices, and the relationships between cultivators and others in the process of this transition? How far does it vary from region to region? Is it inherent in the peasantry, or must it be instigated by landlord, townsfolk or the state? These are some of the questions addressed by Göran Hoppe and John Langton in this 1995 study of rural change in Sweden. Eschewing both traditional narrow empiricism, and the recent trend to over-employ modern social theory, the authors have carefully combined theories about the transition from peasantry to capitalism with meticulous analysis of the abundant Swedish records. In doing so, they reveal the wide geographical variety and rich socioeconomic complexity of the changes which occurred in the process of modernization in the nineteenth century.