Politics and Class in Milan: 1881-1901.

Louise Tilly seems to have directed her new book, Politics and Class in Milan, 1881-1901, more toward labor historians than scholars of modern Italy. Much of the material is already available in other overviews of the nineteenth-century working class in Milan by Franco Della Peruta and Volker Hunecke. She also draws on the works of the masters of Italy's strong tradition of economic history like Gastone Manacorda, Giuliano Procacci, and Stefano Merli. What is most innovative is her project to fit this rich assemblage of research into the grid of the theoretical model of class formation developed by Ira Katznelson and Aristide Zolberg for their cross-national collection of essays published in 1986. This makes the Italian data comparable to those for France, Germany, England, and the United States, which have already been analyzed within the Katznelson-Zolberg framework.

Tilly critiques previous Italian theories of working-class development for being linear and deterministic. Earlier economic historians have argued too simplistically that industrialization, the organization of labor in factories, or depressions automatically and irrevocably turned the unorganized poor into a self-conscious and active proletariat. Another weakness of such theories was their reliance on national data that obscured the wide diversity of economic development and working-class composition throughout the Italian peninsula. Instead, Tilly focuses on the most important industrial city of nineteenth-century Italy, Milan, in order to avoid abstractions and capture "the texture of reality". From this case study of Milan, she concludes that working-class formation is historically contingent on a variety of factors including political changes at the level of the national state. For example, she finds spurts of organizational activity in Italy after the expansion of the suffrage in 1882 and the legalization of strikes after the turn of the century. These political variables interact with economic factors, such as industrialization and proletarianization, which are necessary but not sufficient for explaining the appearance of unions, strike activity, and working-class parties in different nations. 'Filly admits that her thesis, by integrating so many factors, "runs the risk of indeterminacy" but concludes that this "is worth the risk".

Tilly's thesis is sensible and not particularly surprising. Her book is perhaps more useful for providing a gold-mine of information for students and scholars of European and labor history, especially those who do not read Italian. Her extensive and sophisticated tables tracing changes in demography, migration, and social class in Milan between unification and the First World War, first contained in her dissertation of 1974, have already been tremendously helpful to those of us working in Italian social history. In addition, the book presents systematic statistical information on wage rates, housing density, participation in working-class organizations, and strikes. Such quantitative data are interwoven with short biographical sketches of Milanese industrial and labor leaders as well as a narrative account of the development of working-class organizations and the local chapter of the Italian Socialist Party. In presenting this information, Tilly's chapters are models of clarity and precision.

Yet the book for the most part engages in interpretative skirmishes that no longer seem entirely relevant in the post-Soviet world. Most of the major economic theories that frame the study date from before 1980 and either advocated or denied the value of Marxism as an explanation of nineteenth-century Italian history. Because the debate was highly charged ideologically, it is curious that Tilly never explicitly states whether her model represents a rejection or simply a modification of Marxist or neo-Marxist interpretations. It is not clear how her model will assist the search by contemporary Italian historians, including those of the Left, to transcend the old ideological arguments and develop new approaches to studying working-class history.

Politics and Class in Milan misses an opportunity to more decisively outline one such innovative approach, the study of the intersection of the public and private lives of male and female workers. As a pioneer of this approach to women's history, Tilly would be the ideal candidate for redefining Italian working-class culture and consciousness in terms of the "private" sphere of family, sex, health, religion, and leisure as well as "public" roles on the job and in official organizations. Donald Bell successfully reconstructed a few of these aspects of private life in his recent study of the workers of Sesto San Giovanni, a factory suburb of Milan. As Tilly's own work on France has shown, this type of approach is necessary for the proper understanding of the lives of working-class women. In her preface to Politics and Class in Milan, Tilly explains that gender analysis is not more central to her book because she lacked the appropriate sources. She does, however, offer a detailed comparison of several "female" industries like garment, rubber, and tobacco making and persuasively enumerates the barriers to organizing female workers. These included the isolation in private homes of domestics and garment workers, two of the largest categories of female employees; the low wages that made female work more precarious; and the clustering of women in industries with little capital available to reward successful strikes.

That Tilly chose Milan for her case study is indeed felicitous. The recent electoral gains by the right-wing "Leagues" in Milan should not obscure its significance as the historical center of socialism in Italy, both as a popular movement and an intellectual heritage. For comparative historians, Milan shows that labor organization and strikes could precede an industrial revolution and even the concentration of work into large factories. Yet its unique regional qualities did not prevent Milan from providing a model and inspiration for working-class formation throughout Italy. As a thorough treatment of such an important and often neglected industrial center, Politics and Class in Milan will become a staple in courses on Italian and comparative labor history.

Mary Gibson John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York