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Addressing the question of economic growth, this book focuses on the implications of industry re: Polish social structure, organization of farms, and changes in rural culture and large social groups. Emphasizing way and quality of life, this book includes the following major sections and article titles: (1) Industrialization and Changes in the Social Structure (Types of Industrialization; Types and Forms of Industrialization and Rural Socioeconomic Development: The Polish Experience; Changes in the Rural Social Structure; Dual Occupation in Polish Agriculture; Social Changes in Suburban Villages; The Impact of Industrialization on the Transformation of the Rural Settlement Structure and the Occupational Structure in Southern Poland; Physiotactic and Environmental Protection); (2) Agriculture and the Farm (Changes in Individual Farming During the 30 Years of the Polish Peoples Republic; Processes of Differentiation of Peasant Farms in Poland; Collective Farming in Poland; Sociological Problems of Polish State Farms); (3) Changes in the Way of Life (Transformation of the Way of Life and Values; Processes of Rationalization of Social Attitudes of Polish Peasants; The Young Rural Generation in the Polish Peoples Republic; The Young Generation's Aspirations and Orientations; Theoretical and Practical Implications of the Different Meanings of Unequal Access to Education; Changes in the Situation of Country Women). (JC)

This book addresses the role that rural schools can play in promoting community and developing a community-oriented world view. Specifically, this book suggests that rural schools, through concerted pedagogical and curricular attention to the dynamics of their particular place, can rekindle community allegiance and can nurture the fulfillment that one finds in meeting community obligations. Part 1, "The Creation of Community from a Historical Perspective," examines the ideas upon which community was built in the past. The chapters in this section propose that intradependence, cyclic time, and the avoidance of risk--three agrarian communal characteristics--were once a vital part of the health and well-being of communities; that these characteristics, though in severe decline, still linger in rural portions of the United States; and that the decline of these characteristics has coincided with the rise of an industrial world view encompassing notions about the self, the economy, the proper role of government, and the role of education as training for successful competition in a global economy. Part 2, "Public Policy and the Subordination of Community," chronicles historical developments that undermined community elements and bolstered cultural infatuation with the individual. In this section of the book, rural history represents an American tragedy perpetrated by urban commercialist interests under the guise of "progress," resulting in the decline of rural communities. Part 3, "Education and the Renewal of Community," addresses the simultaneous renewal of rural schools and communities based on rebuilding rural communities on an educational rather than an economic foundation. The chapters in this section provide examples of ways that this renewal process can be initiated in both the community and schools. Contains references in chapter notes and an index. (LP)

This book consists of 17 essays about living with the land and the importance of reinvigorating the values of rural life. The essays include personal reflections about growing up in rural Minnesota and opinions about the state of neglected rural towns and people. The author grew up during the 1950s on an 80-acre farm that his family rented in Rosewood Township, Minnesota. His father supplied the tools, the labor, and the seeds and kept two-thirds of the crop. His family lived off of the land--every summer his mother canned vegetables, fruits, jams, sauces, and meats for the winter. The book suggests that the industrialization of farming has marginalized rural culture and led to the impoverishment of rural towns and communities. Bread baking provides an example of how industrialization changed everyday life. When store-bought bread replaced home baking, the family abandoned more than a habit of living--they lost a piece of rural culture that influenced various aspects of their quality of life. Since 1910, industrialization has reduced the farm workforce from about 50 percent of the U.S. population to less than 2 percent and led to the development of a handful of huge, agribusiness corporations that dominate the American agricultural economy. The book suggests that individuals should oppose any economy that sees people as an expendable resource, that does not consider the health of communities, and that defines reductions in human labor as efficient regardless of nonpecuniary consequences. It questions what kind of values rural people are teaching their children when they sell themselves, in the name of economic development, as ideally suited to the least attractive kinds of factory work, or when they allow the rest of society to dump its toxic trash on rural land for the sake of a few jobs. Recommendations are offered for education, agriculture, and economic development that will reinvigorate rural communities and a rural way of life. (LP)

Part of a geography series which stresses understanding of the environment through mastery of specific skills and concepts, the secondary level textbook investigates the interrelationships between humans and the goods they produce. The book is presented in 26 chapters organized around five main themes: (1) agricultural production, (2) manufacturing production, (3) difficulties that men of different backgrounds experience in living and producing together, (4) the relationship between living standard and health, and (5) interactions between men and specific environments. Cognitive, affective, and psychomotor objectives are listed in the introduction, and a final chapter suggests questions and activities for measuring student mastery of the objectives. Chapter format generally includes background information, illustrations, maps, graphs, and discussion questions. Some chapters also include learning activities such as library research, map work, essay assignments, and model construction. The major learning activities, however, are presented in the final chapter in which students are directed to apply analytic skills developed throughout the global system series to hypothetical farm and factory data. Specifically, students are expected to construct a map and systems diagram of the farm and factory from information presented, explain the layout of each site, and determine whether the uses to which men are putting the site are suitable in terms of suggested variables. (Author/DB)

The papers in this volume are concerned with rural development, with emphasis on the problems of low-income groups. Stephen McDonald explores economic factors in farm outmigration. Virgil Christian, Jr. and Adamantios Pepelasis discuss the extent and importance of economies of size in agriculture. Thomas Till analyzes the nature and extent of nonmetropolitan industrialization, especially in the South. In his analysis of economic growth, poverty, and race in the nonmetropolitan Deep South, James Walker makes it clear that poverty in the U.S. is disproportionately a nonmetropolitan Southern phenomenon. Niles Hansen defines the growth center concept, evaluates the experiences of the Appalachian Regional Commission and the Economic Development Administration, and concludes with a defense of a human resource development and growth center strategy. Ray Marshall summarizes the issues and concludes that economic development depends heavily on the quality of human resource development; public policy should make it possible for those who elect to remain in rural areas to develop themselves to the point where they can at least earn enough to elevate themselves out of poverty. Marshall suggests that the kinds of activities likely to promote rural human resource development should include improvements in the quality and quantity of rural education (especially vocational-technical education) to prepare people for nonfarm as well as farm jobs. (BR)

Part of a geography series which stresses understanding of the environment through mastery of specific skills and concepts, the secondary level textbook examines environmental systems as they exist at present. A system is defined as one of a large number of elements (people, cities, rocks, soils, air, clouds) which make up the environment. Although developed for use in Australian secondary schools, the material and activities can be adapted for use in other countries by replacing Australian examples with other examples more relevant to students. The text comprises 15 chapters, 14 of which describe a specific system including the following: desert, barrier reef, swamp, farm, cattle station, mine, bakery, communication, urban and rural neighborhoods, and a garage repair shop. Skills and objectives are listed in the introduction and tests are included throughout the text. The format of each chapter generally includes background information, illustrations, maps, graphs, and discussion questions. Learning activities suggested to help students observe elements of a system and analyze spatial relationships between them include role playing, surveys, library research, map work, class reports, debates, and field trips. The final chapter suggests questions and activities for evaluating student skills and understanding of textual material. (Author/DB)

Published in 1922, this book examines changes in rural life during the 19th century, and resulting problems and effects on rural schooling in the early 20th century. The book suggests that by the early 20th century, rural schools had lost their former importance to the community and were far behind compared to the progress of urban schools. The first half of the book provides background information and describes problems associated with changing rural life, while the second half focuses on the need for reorganization of rural education. Specifically, chapters in Part I cover changes in the nature of rural life from colonial times through 1890; an overview of changes in rural conditions resulting from urbanization, reorganization and commercialization of agriculture, and farm tenantry from 1890 to 1920; effects of social change on rural society, local government, and the rural church; effects of social change on rural schooling including inadequacies of rural schools, increasing needs and costs, and the burden of taxation to fund rural schools; and needed changes, including institutional reconstruction and reorganization to improve rural schools, homes, community centers, and churches. Chapters in Part II cover fundamental needs in rural education; issues involving school organization and maintenance; the need for better school buildings and teaching equipment; reorganization of rural education, focusing on consolidated school systems; development of a new curriculum that prepares rural students for urban life and work; training needs of rural teachers; issues concerning rural leadership, evaluation of the school superintendency, and efforts towards achieving a reorganized county school system; and examples of rural education, ranging from a one-room school to a county-unit school system. Contains an extensive bibliography, an index, and numerous photographs, figures, diagrams, and maps. (LP)

He “was the very embodiment of a traditional masculine character.” So Ashraf Pahlavi remembered her father Reza Shah, founder of the Pahlavi dynasty. “Although I feared my father, I shared some of his qualities: his stubbornness, his fierce pride, and his iron will,” wrote his powerful daughter, the twin sister of Mohammad Reza Shah, the second and the last Pahlavi ruler of Iran. Reza Shah left behind no autobiographies, but as Amin Banani notes, he “had to perfection the politician's talent for opportunism.” While still uncertain in his power, for example, “he knew how to play upon the religious emotions of the people.” He was “antagonistic toward the clergy,” although he was “basically apathetic to religion.” There was also “a definite ideological motivation” in his political actions. Dedicated to nationalism and statism, he sought a rapid adoption of “the material advances of the West [by] a breakdown of the traditional power of religion and a growing tendency toward secularism.” He built a modernizing, Westernizing, and centralizing state in Iran, a state that was based on a strong army and repression, not the consensus of the governed. Reza Shah introduced policies that altered the lives of Iranian women. For the first time, some women entered into the modern sectors of the economy, public and non-sex segregated schools were established, family laws were modified, and unveiling was enforced forcibly in 1936. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

“Since American military and other aid has brought my country such important direct and indirect benefits,” declared Mohammad Reza Shah in an autobiography written a few years after the CIA returned him to the throne, “I hope I shall not sound ungrateful if I state my conviction that we have been receiving glaringly inadequate amounts of it.” In fact, the Cold War brought American military and economic aid to Iran by the late 1950s, helping the Shah consolidate his power against communism and the secular and religious opposition. He expressed his own preeminence in a 1973 interview with Oriana Fallaci: “Where there's no monarchy, there is anarchy, or an oligarchy or a dictatorship.” Iran's integration into the world market and the ensuing economic growth based on rising oil revenues bolstered the state's power. Unleashing the unpredictable forces of change and expediently defending the throne with either co-optation or repression, the state launched several projects that changed the structure of the economy, the labor force, and the gender division of labor. Urban communities expanded with migration from rural areas, and the enlarging industrial and service sectors absorbed even more workers. More women, unveiled and educated, followed Western fashions and joined the growing labor market. Many began working in gender mixed occupations, while experienced the “double day,” working both inside and outside the home. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The whole history of our state has been a search for ways to settle and provide stimuli to settle Siberia. Thanks to the industrialization and mass settlement of Siberia … Russia's population is scattered across a vast land mass in cities and towns with few principal connections between them…. One-third of the population has the added burden of living and working in particularly inhospitable climatic conditions…. Costs of living are as much as four times as high as elsewhere in the Russian Federation, while costs of industrial production are sometimes higher. Introduction Having experienced a probably unprecedented economic decline throughout the 1990s, Russia finished the decade and entered the new millennium with unexpectedly good economic news. After the 70 percent drop in the ruble's value in August 1998, Russian domestic production picked up. The multiplication of world oil prices since then – between January 1999 and summer 2000, the price of oil increased from $9 to $35 per barrel, while in early 2003, on the eve of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, the price approached $40) – has filled Russian state coffers to an unanticipated extent, enabling the state to finance the war in Chechnya and still meets its external debt-servicing obligations as well as wages and pension arrears at home. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

View of an American political scientist: “ … the sheer size of the government varied directly with the effort devoted to extraction, state making, protection, and, especially, war making but inversely with the commercialization of the economy and the extent of the resource base.” View of a Russian historian: “Autocracy and serfdom were the price the Russian people had to pay for national survival.” The Argument The purpose of this chapter is to investigate whether the apparent and distinctive tradition of Russian autocracy, under its Tsarist or Soviet guise, is an entirely random phenomenon and, to the extent that it is not, to identify its permissive conditions. We do so admittedly with an eye on the present: How much have the historical and environmental circumstances that have sustained Russian autocracy changed? How susceptible to political intervention are these circumstances? Finally, how might these circumstances be changed or ameliorated by political action by Russians and their foreign partners? The argument advanced in this chapter may be summarized as follows: Russian political development has been shaped by the same set of factors that influenced the contours of European political development and the evolution of the various European states in particular. Whatever the degree of Asiatic (that is, Mongol) influences on Russian political culture – and they were significant – as Russia emerged from the northern Russian forest zone under the leadership of Muscovy, Russian rulers found themselves increasingly constrained to participate in an international political system dominated by more powerful and technically more advanced European states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What Goddess, or what Muse must I invoke to guide me through these vast, unexplored regions of fancy? – regions inhabited by wisdom and folly, – by wit and stupidity, – by religion and profaneness, – by morality and licentiousness. If you think about it, the wreckage of families in the novels of Jane Austen is unnerving. In the novels of her sister authors it is appalling. These women – Charlotte Smith, Mary Wollstonecraft, Fanny Burney, Maria Edgeworth, among the less obscure ones – describe what was to them a terrifying shift in their society's concept of the family, a profound change that marks the difference between the world of Grandison, the world they had lost, and the world in which unhappily they found themselves adrift. … the family will be studied less for its own sake, as an isolated phenomenon of historical social structure – a statistical mean household size – but rather as an important and still poorly fathomed intermediary between economic change and its qualitatively experienced effects, as for example on social relations. This book is about how family relationships were represented in eighteenth-century English fiction and what those representations tell us about changes in actual families in that period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transition and the Agricultural Economy Consider now the similarities and the differences among the three transitions toward modernization in general, the structural transformations they called forth, the changes they set in motion within the different frameworks in which they arose, and the conceptions advanced during their unfolding by the reformers who proposed the measures. In the pursuit of the same goal, namely “catching up” with the continually developing countries of Western Europe, the three Russian transitions toward modernity called forth many valid proposals and set in motion methods of changes; yet all ultimately yielded only limited results. Poor and underdeveloped Tsarist Russia aimed quite decisively from the 1890s on to surmount its backwardness, notably by supporting the expansion of some of Russia's industries oriented toward export, and forcefully developing Russia's railway network with substantial help from foreign capital. Yet, the succeeding Soviet Russia still inherited a backward, war-ravaged economy that in its turn tried to develop by emphasizing from 1928 on the rapid growth of heavy industry (oriented primarily toward military production), deliberately neglecting the civilian needs, and rejecting the import of foreign capital. After all this, however, Soviet Russia also failed to “catch up” and, as its leaders had pretentiously sought, to “surpass” the West. Finally, the patrimonial state of Boris Yeltsin and then of Vladimir Putin inherited the largely obsolescent Soviet industry within the limits of a former empire shattered in all its structural components. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Territory and Population The Soviet Union succeeded the Tsarist reign after the revolution of October 1917. The Union lasted seventy-three years, after which it collapsed and was dismembered in 1990–1. During its existence, the Union's socioeconomic and juridical framework underwent a number of crucial transformations. Immediately after the revolution, during the Civil War, the Bolsheviks in power established what came to be known as the rule of War Communism (1917–21), which aimed on the economic plane at eliminating market relations and replacing them with an all-out system of centralized commands and controls. This system was in turn discarded in 1921 and replaced by a new coordinating mechanism called the New Economic Policy (NEP) (1921–8), which aimed at economic recovery and reconstruction and which for the purpose combined centralized command with the reestablishment of certain market relations. The NEP was followed in 1928 with an all-embracing policy of massive industrialization and of collectivization of the peasantry, inaugurating the era of Central Plans. After World War II, various attempts at reforming the planning system were undertaken, notably in the 1960s and then in the 1980s. The first became known as “The New System of Planning and Economic Incentives,” the second, much vaster in scope, named perestroika (restructuring), aimed at eliminating many aspects of the inefficient and disintegrating central planning system and at returning in some respect to the organizational concepts of the NEP. I will examine in detail each of these phases later on. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Landholding The basic factors that shaped the framework of Soviet agriculture and determined its landholding, farming methods, and performance were, the nationalization of land, the collectivization of the peasant farming, the growth of state farms, and the state policies on investments and taxation in this sector. In 1928, as much as 80 percent of the Soviet Union's population were still in agriculture and forestry, while 8 percent were in industry and construction, 2 percent in transport, 3 percent in trade, and the balance of 7 percent in all the other sectors. By 1940, the population in agriculture accounted for 54 percent, that in industry and construction for 23 percent, and the balance of the other 23 percent in all the other sectors. As the deep processes of sectoral changes continued, by 1987, only 19 percent of the population were stated to be in agriculture, while 38 percent were accounted for in industry and construction, and the balance of 43 percent in all the other sectors. The process of collectivization developed at rapid speed from 1930 on. In the precollectivization period, toward the end of the NEP in 1927, barely 0.8 percent of the peasant households were in the agricultural collectives. By 1928 this percentage had risen only to 1.7 percent and by 1929 to 3.9 percent. As the massive process began to unfold in the centralized planning era, the percentage of peasant collectivization rose by 1930 to 23.6 percent, by 1931 to 52.7 percent, and finally by 1940 to 96.9 percent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Principles of Action On the eve of the great reform commanding the peasant emancipation, the immense agricultural Russian Empire relied on feudal farming methods, on handicraft, small-scale industry, and a few larger-scale factories, on a barely begun railroad network, and on a slowly emerging banking system. If economic development is taken to mean expanding output, along with making continuous changes in the technical and institutional arrangements by which this output is produced and distributed, the Russian economy was then obviously far behind the changes that had been taking place in the Occident. I will consider later on, in detail, the structural characteristics and the performance of each sector of the Russian economy. For now, recall in broad outline that on the eve of the emancipation, the country's landlord and peasant farming relied on archaic methods of sowing and plowing, yields were low, and very severe general crop failures were occurring often. The increase of population after the emancipation provided an expanding labor force, which remained poorly employed while the growth of capital and new technologies continued to be limited. The country's general economic and cultural backwardness made the native businessmen timorous, diffident, unadventurous, and dependent on the state, which in turn tended to rely heavily on imported foreign technicians, businessmen, and capital. The Empire's manufacturing output continued to be modest in the decade following the emancipation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agricultural Policy The complex, tangled, ambivalent liberation of agriculture from its medieval shell in 1861 gave in time impetus to broader changes in agriculture, as well as in industry, transport, commerce, banking, and the government's receipts and expenditures. These changes were affected at times directly by clearly formulated governmental policies, at times indirectly and hesitantly by democratic policies evolved under circumstantial pressures domestic or foreign. I shall examine the character and scope of these policies in all the indicated sectors and conclude on their combined impact on the economy as a whole. The liberation of agriculture from certain medieval bounds involved historically three key elements: first, the emancipation of the serfs along with the abolition of variously defined feudal rights; second, the liberation of the ownership of land from certain legal restrictions and greater mobility regarding land transfers; and third, the partial release of agriculture from the ancient culture and usages of cultivation methods and land management. To what extent did the reform of 1861 and subsequent related measures actually help liberate agricultural labor through land ownership and offload ancient agricultural customs and methods? The reform of 1861 certainly aimed at recasting the Russian agrarian society on new bases, by creating a landowning peasantry and by buttressing the management of the land allotted and purchased by the peasants through the authority of the communes. Recall that the reform abolished the bondage rights of the gentry over the peasants' serfs settled on their estates as well as over the manorial servants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Millions of women – wives and family members of workers and employees, servants, women in handicrafts and artels, landless women, poor peasants, collective farmers, eastern tribal women – this entire mass, once occupied with exhausting and dulling household labor, is now joining the great socialist construction of the country. The composition of the new working class takes its shape in large measure from unused reserves in the working-class family. In the spring of 1929, the Party adopted the first five-year plan. The plan, taking up three volumes and more than two thousand pages, allocated 64.5 billion rubles to investment, 78 percent of which was targeted for heavy industry and 50 percent for new construction. Adoption of the plan, in the words of one economist, was “tantamount to turning the country into a vast construction site.” After a decade of unemployment and exclusion, the gates to the working class came tumbling down. Almost 2.3 million people entered the waged labor force in 1930, followed by 6.3 million more in 1931. Party leaders, labor officials, and planners critically noted at the time that this mass influx of new workers occurred “samotek,” or independent of any state plan or policy. The building of huge new industrial complexes and hydroelectric stations such as Magnitostroi, Kuznetsstroi, and Dneprostroi drew thousands of workers. Hungry town dwellers and dispossessed peasants massed at new construction sites and factory gates in search of work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fulfillment of the plan in 1931 and the following years demands a series of maneuvers from the labor force: a group of men must leave work, and women must replace them. Men, after retraining in their positions, will be sent to jobs that would be harmful to the female organism. In the summer of 1930, as hundreds of thousands of unemployed workers, peasants, and women poured through the tumbled gates to the working class, planners quietly tucked away a set of elaborate blueprints for the deployment of women in the files of the Commissariat of Labor (NKT), the State Planning Commission (Gosplan), and the Council of People's Commissars (SNK). The plans, redrafted many times, had resulted in a final, detailed document entitled “The Five-Year Plan for Female Labor.” Never published or publicly discussed, this plan had emerged from countless meetings of NKT, Gosplan, the Committee to Improve the Labor and Life of Women (KUTB), and other commissariats and departments throughout the spring and summer of 1930. Planners based their plan for female labor on intensive research into Soviet industry in 1930. Surveying the advances of rationalization and mechanization in various industries, they set target figures and training quotas for women throughout the economy, specifying their numbers and placement in various sectors, industries, shops, and jobs. The plans, preserved in the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF), are fully revealed and analyzed for the first time in this chapter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

STUDIES ATTEMPTING to explain the origin of the Industrial Revolution in England usually go no farther back than the late seventeenth century. There were a few attempts in the 1960s to take the story to the medieval period. A. R. Bridbury tried to demonstrate that the economic growth that led to the First Industrial Revolution can be traced to the late Middle Ages. In 1968 Sidney Pollard and David Crossley made such an attempt. Then in 1969, in a rather provocative paper, Max Hartwell invited historians to take a long-term view of the thousand years of English economic history that preceded the Industrial Revolution, in part, to mitigate the parochialism arising from, “the tendency of each historian to elevate his period, his growth factor, his depression or crisis, to a status of prime importance, either in the history of capitalism or of industrialization … ” More recently, in an intellectual effort covering more than 20 years and devoted to the development of an institutional theory of economic history and economic performance, Douglass North has traced the rise of the Western World from the era of the hunters and gatherers to the Industrial Revolution in England. North's central focus is to identify the critical long-term institutional changes that determined the direction of long-term economic change and performance, the central factors responsible for major institutional shifts over long periods of time, and the mechanisms by which change was effected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT This chapter discusses time trends and related patterns in the health index that emerge across sites arranged by categories, such as climate, settlement size, and topography. A substantial decline in the index occurred in the millennia before the arrival of Columbus. The good health of the least complex societies did not occur because the Western Hemisphere was a biological Garden of Eden, an epidemiological paradise substantially free of pathogens so detrimental to health in other parts of the world: pre–Columbian populations were among the healthiest and the least healthy in our sample. While pre–Columbian natives may have lived in a disease environment substantially different from that in other parts of the globe, the original inhabitants also brought with them, or evolved with, enough pathogens to create chronic conditions of ill health under conditions of systematic agriculture and urban living. Our research suggests that life became “nasty, brutish and short” for the typical person with the rise of agriculture, government, and urbanization. The transition may have been driven by several factors, including resource depletion, efforts by leaders to redistribute wealth and power, and a voluntary desire to live with material goods and lifestyle provided by urban areas. This project reveals a rich and varied history of health in the Western Hemisphere, as indicated by substantial variation in the health index of those who lived during the past several millennia. Although none of these populations were healthy by standards of the middle or late twentieth century, they were widely arrayed on the health index and its components. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT This chapter describes the data used for the Western Hemisphere project, discusses the format in which the information was coded, and explains the health index, which is a method for measuring and comparing health status using skeletal remains. Skeletal lesions measure primarily chronic health conditions, but they can reflect acute infections to the extent that they affect physical growth, the formation of linear enamel hypoplasias, and other conditions that register on bones. The database contains measurements of seven basic health indicators from12,520 skeletons of people who lived in North, Central, or South America over the past 7 millennia. For purposes of analysis, many of the 218 sites where people lived were combined into 65 sites based on ecological and chronological similarity. The health index adjusts for the age distribution of the population and incorporates the severity of lesions indicating biological stress. The current (Mark I) version of the index gives equal weight to the health indicators, but this assumption and others explained in the chapter could be modified based on additional research. The Mark I health index could also be readily adapted to incorporate length of life. The index rankings reveal considerable diversity in health status, with Native Americans being among the most but also among the least healthy groups who lived in the Western Hemisphere prior to the end of the nineteenth century. Social scientists have devised many approaches to measuring the standard of living. Economists use national income accounts and related measures, such as gross national product per capita, to depict material aspects of the quality of life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Industrialization and urbanization are regarded as preconditions of working-class political mobilization. These processes create and intensify the social problems and grievances of the working classes and lower classes in general; at the same time, they constitute the structural preconditions for these problems to become sources of organization and mobilization efforts. The resulting social mobilization gives rise to new social groups; it increases the self-awareness of those already existing; and it intensifies existing conflicts and provokes the explosion of latent ones. Linking social mobilization processes with the left's electoral mobilization postulates the following underlying causal chain: that the formation of the working class – in the sense of the creation and spread of given class conditions – impinges directly on the development of class consciousness, which in turn leads to the structuring of the class cleavage. According to this hypothesis, cross-country variance is to be explained by differences in the available proportion of potentially mobilizing voters, the latter in turn resulting from the quantitative spread and qualitative consequences of the formation of working-class conditions. This general hypothesis is the subject of this chapter. CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK The belief in a relationship between industrialization, working-class formation, and the political response of labor is common to both historical socialist thinking and more recent post–World War II literature. However, the emphasis on what this means is different. The relationship dominated the nineteenth-century debate on the “social question” and was at the heart of the theorizing of socialist thinkers. Marx's analysis of the social consequences of industrialization implied the formation of a new type of worker in large, machine-intensive manufacturing, which he characterized as socially homogeneous, functionally interchangeable, and economically alienated, that is, “abstract labor” potential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I think I need not tell them that they live by TRADE: That their Commerce has rais'd them from what they were, to what they are; and may, if cultivated and improv'd, raise them yet farther to what they never were;… It is obvious that the present strength and pre-eminence of this country is owing to the extent of its resources arising from its commerce and its naval power which are inseparably connected. VERY-long-term trends in the growth and structure of English foreign trade cannot be quantified with any precision. Nevertheless, developments over the centuries before the Industrial Revolution are fairly clear. First, there occurred a protracted but unmistakable shift in the composition of English exports away from primary produce (principally raw wool, but including hides, skins, tin, and lead) toward a concentration on woollen textiles. That shift had already proceeded a long way by the mid-fifteenth century, when about two-thirds of the value of English exports took the form of woollen cloth. Sales of woollens outside the realm multiplied by a factor of three over the following century and by the opening years of Elizabeth's reign accounted for 80% of the nation's total exports (which amounted, at that time, to roughly £750,000). Elizabeth's tiny kingdom enjoyed a comparative advantage in the manufacture of woollen cloth, which was exported undyed and unfinished, principally in the form of the internationally renowned broadcloth, but supplemented increasingly by cheaper and lighter fabrics such as “kerseys.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emergence of the youth salvation campaign at the turn of the century was certainly conditioned by middle-class perceptions of young workers' heightened visibility in Germany's flourishing urban centers and of their ever-greater indispensability as a major component of the Empire's economically vital industrial labor force. Young workers became both symbols and symptoms of the rapid social and economic modernization that Germany was undergoing: the massive migration from rural settlements and small towns to large cities, the shift from employment on farms and in handicraft workshops to wage labor in factories and offices, the transformation of Germany from an agrarian to an industrial state. Thus an analysis of youth as a sector of the population and as part of the work force during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries forms a necessary prerequisite for comprehending the anxieties, aspirations, and demands of the youth savers. In this context, it is also worthwhile to examine the legal provisions applying to youth in the Industrial Code. There are several reasons for doing so. First, since factory and apprenticeship regulations determined matters like the length of the workday and safety precautions, they concretely affected the physical and material well-being of young workers. Recognizing this, youth savers could propose amendments to the laws that would, for example, improve the health of young workers, thus safeguarding their fitness for military service or motherhood, as the case might be. Second, the laws embodied widely shared middle-class assumptions about the degree of autonomy youth should have from their families, the role of adults as moral overseers and preceptors, and the nature and importance of learning to labor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chapter 7 traces the process of transformation to the Capitalist mode of production, the pitiless tyranny of the formation of capitalist labour, the factors favouring the transformation in European cities, particularly in Britain, culminating in spectacular take-off at Manchester. It shows the special place of London, the horrors of the slums and the eventual outbursts of civic pride, the reform of urban government, flowering of the bourgeoisie and hazardous progress of the working class. It portrays the urban network in Britain and post-war urban rebuilding. Paris and its history are searched and sketched for the sources of urban charm and its modern travails, the drama of the Paris Commune and the Sacré Cœur, the failures and successes in housing the urban poor in post- World War II Paris. The cultural continuity and post-war reconstruction of German cities are illustrated. Urbanization in the United States is traced from the colonial to the industrial cities, the immigrant flood to the cities, the westward expansion of cities and railways, the failure of industrial slavery; the inter-relations of urban transport, technology and class; immigrants and bossrule, the ubiquity of violence and corruption, extreme wealth and exponential city growth. The post-World War I city scene of boom and stubborn depression is delineated, the post-World War II baby-boom and prolonged prosperity; the urban strategies of employers and workers, the dialectics of mass Black urban migration, the automobile age, ghettos and suburbs, the unfolding dynamics of suburban life, ethnicity and class, the farce of urban renewal and the difficulties of small towns. The penetration of the media is emphasized, the revolt of urban youth, social and sexual conventions overturned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chapter 5 explores the ancient cities of the developed Asiatic mode of production in the Sinic, Japanese, Islamic and Indie regions for their contributions to the overall achievements of human urbanization. IMPERIAL CHINA: FROM CITY-STATE TO WORLD METROPOLIS The emergence of the Chinese city The traditional city remains largely unstudied … much of traditional Chinese culture, and particularly its literate aspects, developed primarily in the city … where the elite class resided and where decisions of national and local affairs were made. The world's pre-modern urban history was mainly a Chinese phenomenon (Rozman, 1973:3). Of approximately 4% of the world's population living in cities of over 10,000 inhabitants in 1800, about one third, or 12 million, lived in China which led the world in economic development until the eighteenth century, when it may have been surpassed by Japan, as well as by western Europe. Some two-fifths of the world's population were in China and Japan, yet ‘until now there have been no knowledgeable comparisons of Chinese and Japanese cities with each other or with cities in other countries’ (Rozman, 1973:7). The Chinese people emerged from a blending of north and north-western, nomadic and pastoral Turks, Tungus, Mongols and Tibetans, with settled, agricultural Tai, Miao and Yao further south. The blending continued throughout Chinese history and is culturally paralleled by the joint heritage of northern Yangshao (Eberhard, 1960:48; Stover and Stover, 1976:18–24) and south-central Lungshan (Stover and Stover, 1976:24–6). The hand-coiled, white, red and black painted pottery of the former has striking echoes in Turkestan and Caucasus, while their more widespread grey pottery was a local tradition and their chopsticks, double steamers, tripods and woven silk became characteristically Chinese. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prior to the 1980s, Mexico and Kenya had strong reputations for effective state-led economic development and sustained state-dominated political stability in their respective continents. This chapter documents the extent to which expectations based on these reputations eroded and then broke down. The experiences of the two countries differ, yet the combined effect of economic and political change altered the context for state action in similar ways. In Mexico, the interaction of economic and political conditions indicates that economic crisis sharpened and accelerated an emergent political crisis. In contrast, Kenya provides a case of a country whose political crisis contributed significantly to deepening its economic problems. Deep and sustained economic crisis has farreaching consequences, as the case of Mexico explored here demonstrates. Although most frequently measured and discussed in terms of stagnant or declining rates of growth and indices of social welfare, extended economic crises also stimulate critical reassessment of the intellectual underpinnings of national development strategies. Such crises encourage citizens, policy makers, and politicians to question prior growth strategies and policy regimes, even those that had produced positive results in the past. In consequence, long-accepted notions about how development is best achieved become subject to greater skepticism and at times are held responsible for creating current conditions. Along with this questioning of appropriate routes to development, sustained economic crisis also has a profound impact on the economic interests supporting and benefiting from existing policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Technical capacity relates centrally to the influence of science and reason in policy making, the role of ideas in the search for solutions to public problems, and the institutionalization of analytic problem solving within the public sector. Technical capacity varies among states and within states over time, and technical analysis is rarely the sole basis on which public decisions are made. Nevertheless, the ability to use scientific knowledge as an input into decision making, and into the management of public affairs, is a distinguishing characteristic of modern states. As the problems faced by modern governments have grown increasingly more complex, and as the informational and analytic bases on which to make decisions has increased, technical capacity is increasingly required to identify the origin and nature of public problems and assess possible solutions to them. A wide range of activities carried out by the state can provide evidence of its technical capacity. A national statistics agency that is able to collect, process, analyze, and disseminate information about economic and social conditions is one example. Promoting policy-relevant research on important public health issues is another, as is the ability to build bridges and roads that meet reasonable construction and safety standards. Similarly, introducing and managing complex information systems, ensuring air traffic safety, monitoring inflation, regulating financial markets, carrying out research on new agricultural and livestock technologies, and providing for safe drugs and water supplies are all functions that imply the need for technical expertise in a variety of fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 1980s and 1990s witnessed economic and political crises of historic significance in Latin America and Africa. Throughout both regions, economies that were already fragile were almost destroyed by debt, inflation, low commodity prices, high interest rates, and devastating natural disasters. Political systems faced grave challenges to their right to govern societies that were themselves torn by division and unrest. Regime changes, civil wars, civic protest, and demands for human rights and accountable public officials characterized the political history of this era. The evidence is extensive and unambiguous: economic and political distress were hallmarks of an unsettled and unsettling era. Repeatedly, crisis exposed the weakness of existing state capacities to manage economic and political relationships. This chapter uses data from sixteen countries in Latin America and Africa to explore the scope, nature, and implications of economic and political crisis. It addresses four questions. First, what was the scope of the dual crises of economic and political development facing countries in these regions? Second, what factors explain the nature of the problems that confronted a wide range of governments? Third, what impact did economic and political collapse or near collapse have on various dimensions of state capacity? Finally, what consequences did crisis have for state–economy and state–society relationships? Subsequent chapters deal in greater detail with the same issues in Mexico and Kenya; this chapter indicates the extent to which these two countries shared in region-wide political and economic trends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study has explored and evaluated the ways in which business interest groups affected Brazilian development in the nineteenth century. In doing so it also has examined the business elite that comprised those groups, both as a key to comprehending group policies and for an understanding of the business elite itself. Business interest groups, unlike abstract concepts of class or sector, are concrete organizations created to influence government, and their actions are usually discernible and readily documented. While business interest groups cannot substitute in historical analysis for such abstractions as the “middle class,” their policies can illuminate the true political posture of one of its central elements, the business elite. Business interest groups, in particular the commercial associations, also provide handy units for study of the background and characteristics of that elite. Fundamental to it was foreignness. Aliens predominated among overseas traders and industrialists and were a sizable minority among factors. That so many businessmen did not become Brazilian when naturalization was easy and convenient indicates that their orientation and sympathies lay abroad. But if foreign predominance serves to explain much of the thrust of commercial association policies, its importance should not be exaggerated. There seems to have been little divergence in opinion between foreign and Brazilian directors or members of the associations on most questions. The interests and necessities of mercantile capitalism appear to have imposed themselves on all. In general, the associations wished to preserve the traditional economy with its strong overseas ties, attached more importance to foreign than to national markets, were more concerned with regional than national prosperity, and had little interest in the nationwide integration of communications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of business interest organizations in the nineteenth century reflected first the increasing prosperity and complexity of Brazil's international trade and later the significant growth of manufacturing. These organizations included commercial associations, industrial groups, and factor groups. Factors acted as intermediaries between the overseas merchant and the export producer, not only marketing the latter's commodities but usually furnishing him with credit and consumer goods as well. Commercial associations and factor groups were created to confront the problems and grasp the opportunities of an expanding economy based on foreign commerce. More specifically, commercial associations aimed at promoting the economic development of the region tributary to the entrepôt they represented and defending the general interests of overseas trade. Factor groups worked to bolster the prosperity of sugar and coffee exportation. Industrial groups promoted the spread of manufacturing. Realization of all such objectives required a favorable attitude from the state or its outright aid. Government intervention in the economy was a Brazilian tradition that even the fashion for economic liberalism in the nineteenth century would do little to weaken. Business interest groups would mainly affect Brazilian development by influencing the government's role in the economy. Advancing the interests of overseas trade, local prosperity, industry, or a specific commodity required collective representation. Large corporations were few in nineteenth-century Brazil, and individual business firms, as elsewhere, of limited size and economic impact. They usually consisted of several partners operating on such capital as they could raise themselves. Individually such partnerships, even those representing large overseas trading companies, could exercise little influence on government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The idea of writing a history of Brazilian business interest groups came by accident. Many years ago I arrived in Salvador to undertake research, only to find that my topic had been taken. Desperate to find another, and aware that the Commercial Association of Bahia had played a role in regional politics, I obtained permission to leaf through its archival records. The dusty nineteenth-century annual reports (relatórios), minutes (atas) of its meetings, and other records stored in the attic of its historic headquarters were something of a revelation. They indicated that the Bahian association, and by inference other commercial associations, had rather quietly exercised great influence on all levels of government. The commercial associations today remain among the most powerful of organized interest groups (also called pressure groups) in Brazil, but their impact obviously had been much stronger in the nineteenth century, when other organized interest groups were few, great corporations had yet to appear in any number, and countervailing, or contrary, influences were rare. As Philippe Schmitter has noted, “Until well into the twentieth century these commercial associations served as the sole aggregators of the interest of the conservative classes,” that is, merchants, industrialists, and planters. Wider research showed that the influence of the commercial associations was sometimes enhanced and sometimes contradicted by two other types of potent, although usually less enduring, business interest organizations: the factor and industrial groups. There is no book-length treatment of Brazilian business interest groups in the nineteenth century, although numerous histories of individual commercial associations have been written by members or employees of those organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Optimal versus actual investment behavior Were investment requirements really “modest” during the industrial revolution? By the standards of the contemporary Third World and the late nineteenth century, Britain recorded very modest investment shares in national income (Williamson, 1984a). That fact has generated a long and active debate centered around the question: Was the investment share low because investment requirements were modest, or was the investment share low because of a savings constraint? The first argues that investment demand in the private sector was the critical force driving accumulation during Britain's industrial revolution, low rates of technical progress and an absence of a capital-using bias both serving to minimize private-sector investment requirements. The second argues that Britain's growth was savings-constrained. Until very recently, the first view dominated the literature. This dominant view sees early nineteenth-century Britain as so labor-intensive that investment requirements to equip new workers could be easily fulfilled by modest amounts of domestic savings, so easily in fact that domestic savings had to look for outlets overseas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Setting the stage Was city growth too fast or too slow during the First Industrial Revolution? Such questions are rarely posed of British historical experience, even though implicit judgments are being made all the time. Answers hinge on an assessment of the behavior of private labor and capital markets, on the one hand, and the provision of public social overhead, on the other. Most historians have taken the view that fast city growth was a Good Thing. After all, Britain underwent the industrial revolution first and was also more urbanized than her competitors. That historical correlation implies for most historians that Britain's fast-city-growth regime must have been optimal, that slower city growth would have been a mistake, and that faster city growth would have been infeasible. Anthony Wohl (1983) takes the contrary view. He argues that British authorities were unprepared for and surprised by the rapid city growth that carried the industrial revolution, with disastrous results. City governments didn't plan for the event, public-health officials were unprepared for the event, and city social overhead technologies were too backward to deal with the event. Furthermore, entrepreneurial and technological failure in the public sector, and rising land scarcity in the private sector, both served to breed levels of crowding, density, mortality, morbidity, and disamenities that were high even by the standards of the poorest Third World cities. Britain was simply unable or unwilling to house itself properly during the First Industrial Revolution. So much so that the 1830s and 1840s are seen by Michael Flinn (1965, p. 14) as a Malthusian retribution by disease. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two competing views Did factor markets fail during the British industrial revolution? Did distortions in capital markets serve to starve industrial firms for finance and suppress accumulation there? Did urban-rural wage gaps, inelastic city-labor supplies and lack of integrated labor markets serve to drive up the cost of labor in the cities, thus choking off the rate of industrialization? With regards to labor-market failure, the literature is of two minds. Labor markets did fail An extensive traditional literature takes the view that migrants were reluctant to move, wage gaps were large, and regional labor markets were fragmented. A century ago, Earnst Ravenstein (1885, 1889) published his classic work on internal migration, subsequently augmented by Arthur Redford (1926) and Alex Cairncross (1949, 1953). Ravenstein asked how many migrated, when they migrated, who migrated, where they migrated from, and where they migrated to. The same questions dominate modern migration studies. Thus, for example, the literature has been busy substantiating Ravenstein's and Redford's observation that the majority of migrants went only a short distance, and often by steps. Such observations have encouraged the belief that workers failed to move to the highest wage areas and thus that the perfect labor-market thesis must fail. There is an equally long tradition among British labor historians that there was a multiplicity of labor markets between 1750 and 1850, that regional labor markets were very poorly integrated, and that local autonomy reigned (Pollard, 1978). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Irish immigration and the labor-surplus model: Three questions To add to all the other social problems that Britain's cities had to face during the First Industrial Revolution, they also had to absorb the Irish. Rapid growth after the French wars made the absorption easier, but the Irish immigrants still serve to complicate any assessment of Britain's economic performance up to the 1850s. Would the cities have been able to cope with growth far more easily in their absence? Would common labor's living standards in the city have risen much more rapidly? Was rural out-migration strongly suppressed by Irish competition in Britain's cities? Was migration from the agrarian South deflected from northern cities by a glut of Irish labor? Did British industrialization receive a powerful boost by an elastic supply of cheap Irish labor? Did the Irish depress the standard of living of British labor? Qualitative accounts suggest that Irish immigration into Britain did not really become important until after the French wars, the 1820s often being offered as the benchmark decade. It is also true that unskilled labor's real-wage gains lagged far behind during the otherwise impressive secular boom up to the 1850s (Lindert and Williamson, 1983). Inequality was also on the rise (Williamson, 1985a), suggesting that the Irish glut at the bottom of the distribution may have played an important role. The gross correlation is seductive, lagging living standards and rising inequality coinciding with Irish immigration, but a clear assessment has always been clouded by the difficulty of controlling for everything else. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How did city labor markets work? The Todaro model Debate over Third World urbanization generates the same gloomy pessimism that characterized Britain in the early nineteenth century. Even the rhetoric is the same, Victorian and modern critics both citing urban underemployment, primitive housing, inadequate public services, poverty, and inequality (Williamson, 1988). As we have seen, many modern analysts view the Third World as “overurbanized,” a position shared by many Victorian reformers in nineteenth-century England. According to this view, the cities are too large and too many, and they got that way somehow through perverse migration behavior. Pushed off the land by technological events in agriculture, by famine, and by Malthusian pressure, rural emigrants flood the cities in far greater numbers than modern-sector jobs can be created for them. Attracted by an irrational optimism that they will be selected for those scarce high-wage city jobs, the rural emigrants keep coming. Lacking high-wage jobs in the growing modern sectors, the glut of rural immigrants spills over into low-wage service sectors, unemployment, and pauperism, while their families crowd into inadequate housing blighting an otherwise dynamic city economy. The cities find it difficult to cope with the immigrant influx, and authorities look for ways to close the cities to new immigrants. By focusing on expected rather than current earnings differentials, Michael Todaro (1969) developed a framework that could account for the apparent irrationality of rural immigrants rushing to the city even in the face of unemployment and underemployment. The Todaro framework and its extensions (Harris and Todaro, 1970; Stiglitz, 1974; Corden and Findlay, 1975; Cole and Sanders, 1985; Hatton and Williamson, 1989) has enjoyed considerable popularity over the past decade or so. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Internal migration between farm and nonfarm employment The previous two chapters have focused on migration between city and countryside. What about migration off the farm? After all, the countryside offered nonfarm employment opportunities, and these were quite significant in most parts of England. Under such conditions, rural emigration and off-farm emigration need not have been the same. Not too long ago, Sidney Pollard (1978) offered estimates of emigration from British agriculture over the century following 1751, concluding that “only about one-fifth of the additional working force in nonagrarian occupations was derived from the direct transfer out of agriculture,” and by comparison natural population increase was of “immense importance” (Pollard, 1978, Table 34 and p. 141). Pollard's conclusion would appear to be at variance with Chapter 2, in which we found that immigration contributed to about half of city growth (Table 2.5). However, Pollard made his calculations based on simplifications that matter to his conclusions. First, he ignored external migrations in his calculations, the Irish in particular. In effect, he treated the Irish as part of the nonagricultural natural increase. Second, Pollard assumed that the rate of natural increase was the same everywhere. I am sure that Pollard would be the first to agree that the natural rates were quite different in agriculture and nonagriculture. As we have seen in Chapter 2, the rate of natural increase was much higher in the countryside. The natural rate differentials were, in fact, much higher than in the contemporary Third World, making the problem of matching excess urban labor demand with excess rural labor supply all the more difficult. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction Although some cities grow without industry and some industries grow outside of cities, modern industrialization tends to be city-based. As a result, industrial revolutionary events tend to augment the demand for labor and capital in the city far more rapidly than in the countryside. Labor and capital supplies, on the other hand, tend to be abundant in rural areas, a result of centuries of gradual agrarian-based preindustrial development. One of the fundamental problems created by industrial revolutions is, therefore, to reconcile excess factor demands in the cities with excess factor supplies in the countryside. How do labor and capital markets cope with the disequilibrium? This question is as old as the British industrial revolution itself. Indeed, the previous chapter was motivated by the same question in which we identified the size of the population transfers that took place between countryside and city from the 1780s to well into the mid-Victorian era. City immigration rates turn out to have been high even by the standards of the contemporary Third World. The same was true of rural emigration. We also identified a selectivity bias in those migrations, young adults favoring the cities, leaving children and elderly dependents behind. Those young-adult migrations implied a human capital transfer because, as a consequence, the cities needed to invest less in rearing children to adulthood. As Melvin Reder pointed out some time ago, “it is cheaper to import workers than to grow them” (Reder, 1963, p. 224), because, after all, the costs of child rearing are borne by the area of origin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do we care about the urban demographic transition? A reconstruction of the demographic dimensions of the urban transition should help improve our understanding of the First Industrial Revolution. Certainly it is essential in searching for answers to any of the following questions: Did English cities grow more by natural increase than by migration? Did city immigration rates rise as industrialization accelerated? Did rural emigration rates respond vigorously to the employment demands of rapid city growth, or were rural Englishmen more attached to the land than has been true of other industrial revolutions? Was migration selective? If so, what was the impact of the selectivity on the city economy? What role did push and pull forces play in rural and urban labor markets? These questions have always been at center stage in debates about the First Industrial Revolution. The answers will hinge on an assessment of those forces creating and displacing jobs in the two labor markets, as well as on the migration behavior thought to link them, assessments which cannot be made without the prior demographic reconstruction performed in this chapter. Consider, for example, the Third World overurbanization debate which was initiated by Bert Hoselitz in the 1950s. His thesis was that urbanization was outpacing industrialization in the sense that urban populations were large relative to industrial jobs, at least when compared with late nineteenth-century experience (Hoselitz 1955, 1957). The implication was that urban labor was moving into low-wage, residual service underemployment by default. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Looking backward from the present The past quarter century witnessed unprecedented economic progress in the Third World as gauged by the standards of the First Industrial Revolution. Economic success of that magnitude has always created problems of dislocation and structural adjustment. City growth is one such problem, and given the unprecedented progress in the Third World, their city growth problems seem, at least to those who ignore history, unprecedented as well. By the end of this century, the United Nations forecasts urban population growth rates three times those of rural areas. Two billion people, exceeding 40 percent of the Third World population, will live in cities; some cities will have reached extremely large size – Mexico City at 31.6 million, São Paulo at 26 million, and Cairo, Jakarta, Seoul, and Karachi, each exceeding 15 million. Current rates of Third World city growth border on the spectacular, averaging between 4 and 5 percent per annum. Analysts and policymakers are sharply divided on the city-growth problem. Pessimists stress the Third World's inability to cope with the social overhead requirements of rapid urban growth and high urban densities, citing ugly squatter settlements, pollution, environmental decay, and planning failure as evidence of their inability to cope. Third World city growth is viewed by the pessimists as another example of the “tragedy of the commons,” a classic example of overuse of a collective resource. In contrast, optimists view city growth as a central force raising average living standards. They view urbanization as the natural outcome of economic development, and a requisite for the more rational use of economic resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It lasted eight years. Some fifteen to twenty million Chinese died as a direct or indirect result. The devastation of property was incalculable. And after it was over the Nationalist government and army were exhausted and demoralized. Thus it inflicted a terrible toll on the Chinese people and contributed directly to the Communist victory in 1949. The war with Japan was surely the most momentous event in the history of the Republican era in China. INITIAL CAMPAIGNS AND STRATEGY 1937–1939 The fighting began in darkness, not long before midnight on 7 July 1937. Since 1901, in accordance with the Boxer Protocol, the Japanese had stationed troops in North China between Tientsin and Peiping. And on that balmy summer night, a company of Japanese troops was conducting field manoeuvres near the Lu-kou-ch'iao (Marco Polo Bridge), fifteen kilometres from Peiping and site of a strategic rail junction that governed all traffic with South China. Suddenly, the Japanese claimed, they were fired upon by Chinese soldiers. A quick check revealed that one of their number was missing, whereupon they demanded entry to the nearby Chinese garrison town of Wan-p'ing to search for him. After the Chinese refused, they attempted unsuccessfully to storm the town. This was the initial clash of the war. That the Japanese must ultimately bear the onus for the war is not in question; their record of aggression against China at least since the Twenty-one Demands in 1915, and especially since they seized Manchuria in 1931, was blatant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Nanking regime was born of factional strife and bloodshed. In the early morning of 12 April 1927, gangs of thugs belonging to the Mafia-like Green Gang plunged through the streets of Shanghai, seized Communists and suspected Communists, and executed them on the spot with pistols or broadswords. Several thousand were massacred then and during the ensuing month. Chiang Kai-shek had split with the Communists; the first united front was ended. Six days later, on 18 April, the Nationalist government was inaugurated at Nanking. The challenge confronting the new government was awesome – nothing less than to turn back the tide of national disintegration that, for a century and more, had been washing over the Chinese nation. A central, national government had virtually ceased to exist. Political power had devolved into the hands of regional militarists, ‘warlords’, who too often were unconcerned for the popular welfare and sought only to enhance their wealth and power by reliance on military force. The sense of moral community – the broad and pervasive consensus regarding the values and proper relationships of cultural and social life, which had so richly contributed to the stability of traditional China – had disintegrated, and in its place were confusion and contention. Even the economic foundations of the traditional political system had eroded. THE INITIAL CONSOLIDATION OF POWER Because the Chinese were profoundly sensitive to the abject condition of their nation, to the ravages of warlord struggles, and to the humiliations of imperialist aggression, the Nationalist revolutionary armies had been greeted exultantly as their Northern Expedition moved from Canton in the south (beginning in July 1926) to Peking in the north (occupied in June 1928) (see volume 12). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]