Mining for the Nation

Mining for the Nation
Author: Jody Pavilack
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 418
Release: 2011
Genre: History
ISBN: 0271037695

"Examines the politics of coal miners in Chile during the 1930s and '40s, when they supported the Communist Party in a project of cross-class alliances aimed at defeating fascism, promoting national development, and deepening Chilean democracy"--Provided by publisher.

Fighting Unemployment in Twentieth-Century Chile

Fighting Unemployment in Twentieth-Century Chile
Author: Ángela Vergara
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Total Pages: 342
Release: 2021-04-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 0822988313

In Fighting Unemployment in Twentieth-Century Chile, Ángela Vergara narrates the story of how industrial and mine workers, peasants and day laborers, as well as blue-collar and white-collar employees earned a living through periods of economic, political, and social instability in twentieth-century Chile. The Great Depression transformed how Chileans viewed work and welfare rights and how they related to public institutions. Influenced by global and regional debates, the state put modern agencies in place to count and assist the poor and expand their social and economic rights. Weaving together bottom-up and transnational approaches, Vergara underscores the limits of these policies and demonstrates how the benefits and protections of wage labor became central to people’s lives and culture, and how global economic recessions, political oppression, and abusive employers threatened their working-class culture. Fighting Unemployment in Twentieth-Century Chile contributes to understanding the profound inequality that permeates Chilean history through a detailed analysis of the relationship between welfare professionals and the unemployed, the interpretation of labor laws, and employers’ everyday attitudes.

A History of Chile 1808–2018

A History of Chile 1808–2018
Author: William F. Sater
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 593
Release: 2022-10-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 1009170201

An updated edition of the definitive, highly regarded history of Chile in the English language.

Company Towns in the Americas

Company Towns in the Americas
Author: Oliver J. Dinius
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2011-01-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0820337552

Company towns were the spatial manifestation of a social ideology and an economic rationale. The contributors to this volume show how national politics, social protest, and local culture transformed those founding ideologies by examining the histories of company towns in six countries: Argentina (Firmat), Brazil (Volta Redonda, Santos, Fordlândia), Canada (Sudbury), Chile (El Salvador), Mexico (Santa Rosa, Río Blanco), and the United States (Anaconda, Kellogg, and Sunflower City). Company towns across the Americas played similar economic and social roles. They advanced the frontiers of industrial capitalism and became powerful symbols of modernity. They expanded national economies by supporting extractive industries on thinly settled frontiers and, as a result, brought more land, natural resources, and people under the control of corporations. U.S. multinational companies exported ideas about work discipline, race, and gender to Latin America as they established company towns there to extend their economic reach. Employers indeed shaped social relations in these company towns through education, welfare, and leisure programs, but these essays also show how working-class communities reshaped these programs to serve their needs. The editors’ introduction and a theoretical essay by labor geographer Andrew Herod provide the context for the case studies and illuminate how the company town serves as a window into both the comparative and transnational histories of labor under industrial capitalism.

Born with a Copper Spoon

Born with a Copper Spoon
Author: Robrecht Declercq
Publisher: UBC Press
Total Pages: 366
Release: 2022-11-15
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 0774865059

Over the past two centuries, industrial societies hungry for copper – essential for light, power, and communication – have demanded ever-increasing quantities of the metal. Born with a Copper Spoon examines how the metal has been produced, distributed, controlled, and sold on a global scale. However, this is not simply a narrative of ever-increasing and deepening global connections. It is also about periods of deglobalization, fragmentation, and attempts to sever connections. Throughout history, copper production has spawned its own practices, technologies, and a constantly changing political economy. Large-scale production has affected ecologies, states, and companies, while creating and even destroying local communities dependent on volatile commodity markets. Former president of Zambia Kenneth Kaunda once remarked that Zambians were “born with a copper spoon in our mouths,” but few societies managed to profit from copper’s abundance. From copper cartels and the futures market to the consequences of resource nationalism, Born with a Copper Spoon delivers a global perspective on one of the world’s most important metals.

When Democracy Breaks

When Democracy Breaks
Author: Archon Fung
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 377
Release: 2024-02-02
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0197760813

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read on the Oxford Academic platform and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Democracy is often described in two opposite ways, as either wonderfully resilient or dangerously fragile. Both characterizations can be correct, depending on the context. When Democracy Breaks aims to deepen our understanding of what separates democratic resilience from democratic fragility by focusing on the latter. The volume's collaborators--experts in the history and politics of the societies covered in their chapters--explore eleven episodes of democratic breakdown, from ancient Athens to Weimar Germany to present-day Russia, Turkey, and Venezuela. Strikingly, in every case, various forms of democratic erosion long preceded the final democratic breakdown. Although no single causal factor emerges as decisive, linking together all of the episodes, some important commonalities--including extreme political polarization, explicitly anti-democratic political actors, and significant political violence--stand out across the cases. Moreover, the notion of democratic culture, while admittedly difficult to define and even more difficult to measure, may play a role in all of them. Throughout the volume, the contributors show again and again that the written rules of democracy are insufficient to protect against tyranny. While each case of democratic decay is unique, the patterns that emerge shed much light on the continuing struggle to sustain modern democracies and to assess and respond to the threats they face.

Britain and the Growth of US Hegemony in Twentieth-Century Latin America

Britain and the Growth of US Hegemony in Twentieth-Century Latin America
Author: Thomas C. Mills
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 318
Release: 2020-10-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 3030483215

“The editors have assembled an outstanding group of scholars in this very welcome addition to our understanding of Latin American external relations and British foreign policy towards the region in the 20th century.”— Victor Bulmer-Thomas, Honorary Professor, Institute of the Americas, University College London & Former Director, Chatham House “This is an important and timely book, reappraising the UK’s role in Latin America in the 20th century. What emerges is far more interesting than the usual narrative of linear UK decline in the face of growing US predominance.”— Peter Collecott, CMG, UK Ambassador to Brazil, 2004–2008 This book explores the role of Great Britain in twentieth-century Latin America, a period dominated by the growing political and economic influence of the United States. Focusing on three broad themes—war and conflict; commercial and business rivalries; and responses to economic nationalism, revolution, and political change—the individual chapters cover a number of countries and issues from 1914 to 1970, stressing the reluctance with which Britain ceded hegemony in the region. An epilogue focuses on Anglo-American relations and concerns in Latin America in the more recent past. The chapters, all written by leading scholars on their particular subjects, are based on original research in a wide variety of archives, going beyond the standard Foreign Office and State Department sources to which most earlier scholars were confined.

In the Shadow of War and Empire

In the Shadow of War and Empire
Author: Görkem Akgöz
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 394
Release: 2023-12-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004687149

In the Shadow of War and Empire offers a site-specific history of Ottoman and Turkish industrialisation through the lens of a mid-nineteenth-century cotton factory in the “Turkish Manchester,” the name chosen by the Ottomans for the industrial complex they built in the 1840s in Istanbul, which, in the contemporary words of one of the country’s most prominent contemporary Marxist theorists, became “the secret to and the basis of Turkish capitalism" in the 1930s.

For a Proper Home

For a Proper Home
Author: Edward Murphy
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Total Pages: 377
Release: 2015-01-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0822980215

From 1967 to 1973, a period that culminated in the socialist project of Salvador Allende, nearly 400,000 low-income Chileans illegally seized parcels of land on the outskirts of Santiago. Remarkably, today almost all of these individuals live in homes with property titles. As Edward Murphy shows, this transformation came at a steep price, through an often-violent political and social struggle that continues to this day. In analyzing the causes and consequences of this struggle, Murphy reveals a crucial connection between homeownership and understandings of proper behavior and governance. This link between property and propriety has been at the root of a powerful, contested urban politics central to both social activism and urban development projects. Through projects of reform, revolution, and reaction, a right to housing and homeownership has been a significant symbol of governmental benevolence and poverty reduction. Under Pinochet's neoliberalism, subsidized housing and slum eradication programs displaced many squatters, while awarding them homes of their own. This process, in addition to ongoing forms of activism, has permitted the vast majority of squatters to live in homes with property titles, a momentous change of the past half-century. This triumph is tempered by the fact that today the urban poor struggle with high levels of unemployment and underemployment, significant debt, and a profoundly segregated and hostile urban landscape. They also find it more difficult to mobilize than in the past, and as homeowners they can no longer rally around the cause of housing rights. Citing cultural theorists from Marx to Foucault, Murphy directly links the importance of home ownership and property rights among Santiago's urban poor to definitions of Chilean citizenship and propriety. He explores how the deeply embedded liberal belief system of individual property ownership has shaped political, social, and physical landscapes in the city. His approach sheds light on the role that social movements and the gendered contours of home life have played in the making of citizenship. It also illuminates processes through which squatters have received legally sanctioned homes of their own, a phenomenon of critical importance in cities throughout much of Latin America and the Global South.