The flow of people, capital, products, images and ideas across the world has intensified to an unprecedented speed and scale. A dominant neo-liberal ideology views globalisation as an autonomous and disembodied process that is governed by impersonal market laws. To balance this, there is a great need for ethnographic studies that analyse how social actors relate to and shape these flows by different actions, connections and struggles. This might create a better understanding of the heterogeneous patterns of economic, political and cultural change that the world faces today. In this light, Frances Rothstein presents an interesting long-term study of the contradictions and complexities of modernisation in the rural community of San Cosme in Tlaxcala, Mexico. She illustrates how globalisation transforms community life as part of a multi-sited ethnography of garment production.

In the first chapter, the study engages with the wider anthropological and development literature on globalisation and its emphasis on the intensified connections and time-space compression in the contemporary world. In her arguments, however, she mainly builds on the work of David Harvey and Karl Marx. As a result, she views globalisation as the latest phase of capitalism that is characterised by a flexible regime of capital accumulation. The author's main interest is to offer a more refined analysis of complex global relations and the struggles between labour and capital. She aims to better capture the dynamism of capitalism through the following three analytical points. First, capital flows are diverse, uneven and changing, because capitalists continuously develop new accumulation strategies and commit capital flexibly. Second, labour also has some agency through the differential responses of ignoring, rejecting or innovating the wage labour that capitalism enforces. Third, capital intersects with other existing differences, including class, gender, kinship and age, producing a differentiation of the working class. Rothstein thus views the flow of capital as crucial, yet not all powerful.

More than three decades of anthropological field work allows Rothstein to observe and explain an interesting set of changes and continuities in San Cosme. In chapters two to five, she shows that, over the last half of the twentieth century, San Cosme changed from a peasant to a garment manufacturing community. In the 1970s, developments in the larger political economy contributed to a process of de-peasantisation in the rural family economy and to the emergence of a class of industrial factory workers. Although men engaged in wage labour for nearby urban textile factories, they retained their connection with the community, and most families continued to cultivate land and a flexible kinship system. In the 1980s, this allowed families to survive the economic crisis and the decline of factory work through an intensified reliance on agricultural subsistence production. Kinship networks thus enabled a flexible subsistence based on multiple income-pooling strategies, a pattern on which the emerging small-scale garment production of the 1990s was built. Rothstein reviews how the workshop owners subsidised their garment production, in response to international flexible production and national competition, by drawing on their families' unpaid labour, agricultural activities and other income. The question is whether this pattern that Rothstein observes is necessarily so well explained by class analysis. What is remarkable about these kinship networks is that they are neither peasant, worker nor small entrepreneurial networks, but that they at some points combine all of these traits, thus giving them their flexibility through time. More attention to the longer historical and cultural aspects of why social actors reproduce this dynamic family economy and how this shapes the impacts of globalisation would have enriched the study here.

Consumerism is another force behind globalisation. Yet, in chapter six, Rothstein evaluates critically the idea that consumption is now driving the global economy. She shows that the increased level of consumed commodities in San Cosme was accompanied by international flows of capital freed up by economic restructuring and the current regime of flexible accumulation in apparel production. Further, San Cosmeros at first became workers and then consumers since wage work allowed them to buy commodities. However, by giving causal priority to production and class, Rothstein downplays other influences. For instance, the cultural and ideological effects of television and other media, migration and urbanisation on consumptive and productive choices and the responses of people to these changes are relevant but largely ignored. One reason is that the author restricts the discussion on the symbolic dimensions of consumption and identity formation to structural or fixed characteristics, such as production, class, gender and age.

The advantage of Rothstein's materialist perspective on globalisation is theoretical coherence, but this also precludes the ethnographic documentation and imaginative interpretation of the emerging variety of responses and connections of globalisation. Social and cultural changes or continuities are invariably explained as the product of an underlying material reality of class struggle that is somehow more real. This view restricts the agency of social actors, since it becomes a function of class in response to capital, rather than a differential capability to draw on and connect varied social and cultural repertoires, relational networks and material resources in response to the political and economic transformations of globalisation. However, even if one disagrees with the theoretical perspective taken, there is more than enough useful information from the grassroots to consider different interpretations.

Nevertheless, this book does not convince entirely as a multi-sited ethnography of globalisation. First, the question remains as to whether San Cosme is such an excellent site to study the globalisation of apparel production, since it mainly produces for the national market. Moreover, the study fails to include many other strategic actors and sites in the commodity chain, in particular those external intermediaries and capitalist firms that reap the profits of garment production. The study argues that they increasingly concentrate the wealth produced in the community, but does not provide any evidence. Second, it lacks the kind of analytical and detailed ethnographic description of everyday life in the community that enables the interpretation of the cultural and ideological dynamics that also shape globalisation. The study fails to show how different people talk about, see and portray themselves in the process. Thirdly, some aspects of globalisation in San Cosme seem to escape the theoretical focus of the author: for example, politics at different levels reinforces or dilutes the impacts of globalisation. Further, the strong emergence of Protestantism and the drug trade are other signs of globalisation that deserve more attention. In sum, this is a challenging book that will be of interest to many scholars in the political economy of development, anthropologists of globalisation and researchers working on the impacts of neo-liberal policies in Latin America; however, it is less satisfying as an ethnographic interpretation of globalisation.