Overview

Reforming Urban Labor is a history of the nineteenth-century social reforms designed by middle-class progressives to domesticate the labor force. Industrial production required a concentrated labor force, but the swelling masses of workers in the capitals of Britain and Belgium, the industrial powerhouses of Europe, threatened urban order. At night, after factories had closed, workers and their families sheltered in the shadowy alleyways of Brussels and London. Reformers worked to alleviate the danger, dispersing the laborers and their families throughout the suburbs and the countryside. National governments subsidized rural housing construction and regulated workmen's trains to transport laborers nightly away from their urban work sites and to bring them back again in the mornings; municipalities built housing in the suburbs. On both sides of the Channel, respectable working families were removed from the rookeries and isolated from the marginally employed, planted out beyond the cities where they could live like, but not with, the middle classes. In Janet L. Polasky's urban history, comparisons of the two capitals are interwoven in the context of industrial Europe as a whole. Reforming Urban Labor sets urban planning against the backdrop of idealized rural images, links transportation and housing reform, investigates the relationship of middle-class reformers with industrial workers and their families, and explores the cooperation as well as the competition between government and the private sector in the struggle to control the built environment and its labor force.

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Reviews

Reforming Urban Labor is a milestone in comparative urban history. Janet L. Polasky weaves a masterly account of the movement to reform the working classes in London and Brussels. Superbly researched, the book portrays the idealized suburban images of quaint cottages, good housekeeping, and affordable commuter trains imagined as the site of citizenship and social improvement for the teaming masses of the city. Well-written and erudite, Reforming Urban Labor is a must-read in European urban history. -Rosemary Wakeman, Fordham University Lincoln Center

<p> Polasky presents a finely designed comparative study of the social engineering that linked housing and transportation reforms, and of the social good that they were supposed to engender: Students of urban history will recognize such familiar reformers as Henry Mayhew, Charles Booth, and Emile Vandervelde, but this book places them in the context not only of their research activities but also of the social and political struggle to win better housing for workers. . . . She is able to present a complex, intertwining, up-to-date history of two political and cultural spaces by designing chapters around themes common to both of them, showing both similarities and differences. In short, Reforming Urban Labor is a tour de force of comparative history. Leslie Page Moch, Journal of Interdisciplinary History (Summer 2012)

<p> Polasky presents a finely designed comparative study of the social engineering that linked housing and transportation reforms, and of the social good that they were supposed to engender: Students of urban history will recognize such familiar reformers as Henry Mayhew, Charles Booth, and Emile Vandervelde, but this book places them in the context not only of their research activities but also of the social and political struggle to win better housing for workers. . . . She is able to present a complex, intertwining, up-to-date history of two political and cultural spaces by designing chapters around themes common to both of them, showing both similarities and differences. In short, Reforming Urban Labor is a tour de force of comparative history. -Leslie Page Moch, Journal of Interdisciplinary History (Summer 2012)

<p> In Reforming Urban Labor, Janet Polasky . . . compares and contrasts two capital cities, London and Brussels, . . . focus[ing] on the initiatives of those progressive reformers or social engineers around the turn of the century who sought to reduce inner-city densities while remolding the working classes in their own provident, law-abiding, bourgeois image by reshaping the workers' environment. . . . . It is in the comparative angle and in her painstaking mastery of two national historiographies that Polasky really scores, since each city's contrasting trajectory helps to illuminate and problematize the different circumstances and choices made. Brian Lewis, Journal of Modern History (December 2012)

Author Information

Janet L. Polasky is Presidential Professor of History and Women's Studies at the University of New Hampshire. She is the author of four other books in European history, including Revolutionary Brussels, 1787–1793 and The Democratic Socialism of Emile Vandervelde.

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