The contributors question the current academic understanding of what is known as the global middle class. They see middle-class formation as transnational and they examine this group through the lenses of economics, gender, race, and religion from the mid-nineteenth century to today.

Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: We Shall Be All: Toward a Transnational History of the Middle Class / A. Ricardo López with Barbara Weinstein 1
Part I: The Making of the Middle Class and Practices of Modernity 27
Thinking about Modernity from the Margins: The Making of a Middle Class in Colonial India / Sanjay Joshi 29
The African Middle Class in Zimbabwe: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives / Michael O. West 45
Between Modernity and Backwardness: The Case of the English Middle Class / Simon Gunn 58
"Aren't We All?": Aspiration, Acquisition, and the American Middle Class / Marina Moskowitz 75
The Gatekeepers: Middle-Class Campaigns of Citizenship in Early Cold War Canada / Franca Iacovetta 87
Commentary on Part I / Barbara Weinstein 107
Part II: Labor Professionalization, Class Formation, and State Rule 119
The Conundrum of the Middle-Class Worker in the Twentieth-Century United States: The Professional Managerial Workers' (Folk) Dance around Class / Daniel J. Walkowitz 121
Becoming Middle Class: The Local History of a Global Story-Colonial Bombay, 1890-1940 / Prashant Kidambi 141
Conscripts of Democracy: The Formation of a Professional Middle Class in Bogotá During the 1950s and Early 1960s / A. Ricardo López 161
The Formation of the Revolutionary Middle Class during the Mexican Revolution / Michael A. Ervin 196
Commentary on Part II / Mary Kay Vaughan 223
Part III: Middle-Class Politics in Revolution 233
A Middle Class Revolution: The APRA Party and Middle-Class Identity in Peru, 1931-1956 / Iñigo García-Bryce 235
Revolutionary Promises Encounter Urban Realities for Mexico City's Middle Class, 1915-1928 / Susanne Eineigel 253
Being Middle Class and Being Arab: Sectarian Dilemmas and Middle-Class Modernity in the Arab Middle East, 1908-1936 / Keith David Watenpaugh 267
Commentary on Part III / Brian Owensby 288
Part IV: Middle-Class Politics and the Making of the Public Sphere 297
The City as a Field of Female Civic Action: Women and Middle-Class Formation in Nineteenth-Century Germany / Gisela Mettele 299
Putting Faith in the Middle Class: the Bourgeoisie, Catholicism, and Postrevolutionary France / Carol E. Harrison 315
Siúticos, Huachafos, Cursis, Arribistas, and Gente de Medio Pelo: Social Climbers and the Representation of Class in Chile and Peru, 1860-1930 / David S. Parker 335
"Los Argentinos Descendemos de los Barcos": The Racial Articulation of Middle-Class Identity in Argentina, 1920-1960 / Enrique Garguin 355
Commentary on Part IV / Robyn Muncy 377
Afterword / Mrinalini Sinha 385
Bibliography 395
Contributors 431
Index 435

A. Ricardo López and Barbara Weinstein, eds.