Claiming the City: A Global History of Workers' Fight for Municipal Socialism. By SheltonStromquist (London &amp; New York: Verso Press, 2023), pp. xii + 867. $<scp>US80</scp>(hb)

The political and cultural foundations of the modern world were shaken in the 1890s as political mobilisation and widespread industrial action contested the emerging shape of industrial modernity. Employing a judicious and unique mix of national overview and place-based analysis of labour and working class radicalism, Shelton Stromquist's Claiming the City ranges across Sweden, the United Kingdom, Germany, the United States, Australia, and Canada from 1870 through to the 1920s. The “city” itself, as Stromquist argues, became a key subject for a radical critique of the problems of contemporary society and a crucial site where radicals sought to engage and intervene. The first step in making a better world for the activists and organisers that Stromquist identifies was to build socialism and democracy in their own urban communities. The author argues that his approach is not just a matter of adding a local take on national or global histories of labour and socialist radicalism but recasting the entire project and seeing the local frame as a whole submerged tradition or alternative politics that shifts our understanding of the whole. Stromquist's book promises no less than a revision of the history of radicalism and socialism itself through the lens of locality. As Stromquist notes, “the vibrant realm of municipal politics illustrates how we might fundamentally recast the story of the emergence of a new labour and socialist politics across urban landscapes…” (p. 9). This remarkable book was more than two decades in the making. It is destined to become a well-thumbed work of reference and a mine of scholarly insights for this formative period of the modern world. Stromquist, a Professor of History at Ohio State University and now an Emeritus with that institution, has spent many years working on it. The work is underpinned by a vast breadth of scholarship from all of the case studies countries as well as the detailed literature on individual cities and towns. The reach of Stromquist's scholarship is impressive — so much so that one wonders what staff in his interlibrary loans department made of his diverse global interests. Not content conducting an office-bound review of the existing work he has travelled to, and researched at, many of the major library and archival holdings in his case study sites. The footnotes show the depth of his research effort as he cites contemporary newspapers, trade union and political party records as well as dairies and other manuscript material. I caught a small glimpse of that globe-trotting effort when I was at the University of Newcastle and the author visited. I took him on a tour of the city and I can recall his energetic enthusiasm and thoroughly engaged demeanour. It is clear that the author has done the same thing across the world many times over. Conceptually the work sits at a productive juncture between global and local studies, a paired opposite which has so much potential to illuminate both the wider patterns of change and the manifestation of those changes in particular contexts. Stromquist's analysis takes us both deep into particular places but also catches the at times wildfire-like spread of ideas and concepts through transnational connections. His approach is a creative fusion of local and global, a “translocal” approach (p. 6), which hitherto has encountered some resistance from peer reviewers, at least in my experience. In a work of this scope there will always be parts that might not please every reader. At more than 850 pages the author could hardly have requested more room from his publishers who should be commended for publishing a work of this length and not pushing back on authors who want to make a grand statement with a vast compendium-style work. Given my own research interests it is perhaps inevitable that I found the Australian material less compelling than the discussion of say the German situation where Stromquist deftly divides Germany into discrete geographical sections and types of cities to characterise local radicalism. For Australia he offers an extended discussion of Richmond in suburban Melbourne (which has been overdone in my view as an exemplar of working class culture and politics), as well as an overview of Broken Hill, Melbourne, Sydney, and Brisbane plus a few tantalising glimpses and mentions of other places, but nothing as satisfying as his analysis of cities and regions in Germany or of the United States. In offering locality as a site of grounded working class radicalism and socialism, the counter-mobilisation of capital and its various allies reclaiming and reshaping locality to suit their interests (embodied in various forms of industrial welfarism and scientific management for example) is left hanging somewhat. This is a key theme that emerged in my own work on Australian localities including Mount Morgan, Port Kembla, and Port Pirie — all places beyond Stromquist's purview. If local conditions were such fertile ground for labour and socialist activists, then why did they keep losing out all the time? And how did we end up with social democratic parties evincing a thoroughly compromised radicalism increasingly disconnected from the everyday material life of working people, and especially from the experience of city life itself? I thoroughly commend the author for his impressive scholarship and valuable insights. I hope the book draws in many readers, and that they find it as illuminating and as stimulating as I did.

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