Bøker av S. A. Smith

A deeply engaging study, unmatched in its depth, of factory life in Petrograd over the course of Russia's revolutionary year.

A panoramic account of the Russian empire from the last years of the nineteenth century, through revolution and civil war, to the brutal collectivization and crash industrialization under Stalin in the late 1920s

Connects the rise of Chinese nationalism to the growth of a Chinese working class. This title shows how workers' refusal to be treated "like cattle and horses" (a line from an anonymous worker's poem on poor working conditions) derived from a fresh but powerfully felt sense of dignity.

A unique comparative account of the roots of Communist revolution in Russia and China. Steve Smith examines the changing social identities of peasants who settled in St Petersburg from the 1880s to 1917 and in Shanghai from the 1900s to the 1940s. Russia and China, though very different societies, were both dynastic empires with backward agrarian economies that suddenly experienced the impact of capitalist modernity. This book argues that far more happened to these migrants than simply being transformed from peasants into workers. It explores the migrants' identification with their native homes; how they acquired new understandings of themselves as individuals and new gender and national identities. It asks how these identity transformations fed into the wider political, social and cultural processes that culminated in the revolutionary crises in Russia and China, and how the Communist regimes that emerged viewed these transformations in the working classes they claimed to represent.