Capital is a notoriously cosmopolitan subject, passing across time and space with breathtaking impunity. That rootlessness keeps intensifying, most dramatically in the tidal wave of globalization that has overtaken the world during the past few decades, threatening to undermine the very system of state sovereignty that so ardently nurtured capital's conquest of the world's economy to begin with. These developments have rightly inspired a wave of global scholarship as well, of history examined from a transnational, or supranational, perspective. Unfortunately, the resulting rash of studies often mimic—if not reify—the abstractions and teleologies of the global market itself, becoming testimonials to the reigning neoliberal zeitgeist, whether intending to do so or not. This is not the case with the present volume, however, whose collection of critically engaged and engaging essays edited by Christof Dejung, David Motadel, and Jürgen Osterhammel is effectively organized around that pivotal event in the making of the modern world, the bourgeoisie's reinvention of moral and material life in its own image. The reader is accordingly treated to close readings of the highly labile intersection between local and global, national and international, and old and new.

This achievement is to also be attributed to the broad catchment of systems and sensibilities falling under the aegis of the global bourgeoisie. These include the very idea of civilized progress, together with celebrations of human agency (of an increasingly personal, or liberal, variety); an economy based on utility, competition, free trade, and alienable property rights; the constitution of a political sphere strictly separated from private life; the rule of law, as instituted by new commercial, civil, and criminal codes; an ambitious cartographic project for redrawing territorial boundaries and jurisdictions; a transformed class structure (that includes the demise of an old estate of rentiers and the advent of a suitably educated professional cadre of technocrats); changed perceptions of change itself, as well as social difference; the emergence of poverty and underdevelopment, often in racial guise, as categories of social thought and public policy; the role of benevolence and public charity in forging cultural identities; denunciation of the parochial and provincial (together with an extensive repertoire of accompanying rituals and traditions); the dramatic rise in (measurable) standards of living and their expression in styles of consumption and commercialized leisure; a novel habitus of deportment, hygiene, and enlightened taste; a Malthusian focus on fertility rates; new models of family life and gender relations that recast patriarchal privilege for a post-absolutist age; the expansion of educational opportunity; urbanization; the creation of bureaucratic administration and the unprecedented reach of expertise into the realm of both public and private welfare; the enhanced status of science (including the science of management) and the correlative decline in religious piety (particularly as an organizing principle for public life); ideals of meritocracy; an explosive growth in the circulation of the written and especially the printed word; and, last but not least, heretofore unknown levels of social and geographical mobility (which were a function of the escalating movement of persons alongside goods in a labor market that served to upend organic hierarchies). This broad range of subjects is examined in an equally broad variety of settings: interwar Iran, modern Britain, the early industrial United States, India both before and after the country's independence, German East Africa, postwar Japan, the British Caribbean, the late Ottoman Empire, Weimar Germany (including an arresting comparison between the Muslim and Jewish communities of Berlin), Spanish America, Tsarist Russia, and post-Maoist China.

The most obvious response to this plethora of material is comparative, namely the examination of processes of embourgeoisement as they unfolded in separate times and places in order to establish common or diverging patterns. The reader's attention is also drawn to the interdynamic between the extraterritorial and site-specific character of bourgeois class formation, as revealed in each chapter, to one degree or another. And so, we learn of the nostalgia in Bengal for vernacular sweets whose very prevalence was a function of the prosperity generated from global trade, or of the embrace of Western constitutionalism by a rising “middle class” in Iran that used these novel protocols of governance to depose traditional elites while organizing resistance to the West. In addition to such dialectics, The Global Bourgeoisie offers telling examples of the dedicated political and ideological effort required for constructing a putatively natural—because improved—social order, or way of life (which is a far more apt formulation than “lifestyle,” an advertising motto wielded indiscriminately throughout this volume that should be banished from critical discourse, except as the object of etymological attention).

That is not my only plaint. Curiously enough, there is little engagement in this volume with the very structures of a capitalizing economy, and particularly with the production of those consumables that play such a central role in the assorted accounts of cultural production. The reader will also be frustrated by the absence of any theoretical engagement with capitalism's extraordinary success in coordinating between the global and local, which prove to be coterminous sites of bourgeois power. Lastly, the very category of “middle class” is treated far too casually by all the authors, serving them as a self-evident, interchangeable shibboleth for “bourgeoisie,” which it is not. As a result, an opportunity has been lost for interrogating this important but hackneyed concept, whose common use in this collection is, if anything, testimony to the American bias of global culture, including its scholarship. The fact is, the “middling sort” was born as an Anglo-Saxon construct for expanding popular participation in government, eventually developing into a “middle class” for promoting a unique and uniquely American conceit, namely the existence of an inclusive and even classless polity. The various studies comprising The Global Bourgeoisie make no such claims, however, describing instead the ascent of indigenous groups to dominion status, often by cooperating with foreign imperialists and repressing the rest of the native population, which points to a decidedly different sense of “middle.”

But such reservations should not distract us from the extraordinary empirical richness and often subtle analysis offered by this collection of essays that help us grapple with the realities of a globalizing world, then and now.