In this book a distinguished group of historians focuses on this dialectal relationship between capitalism and its pre-capitalist heritage.

Introduction: Capitalism and its pre-capitalist heritage Pat Thane and Geoffrey Crossick; 1. The politics of class struggle in the history of society: an appraisal of the work of Eric Hobsbawm Eugene D. Genovese; 2. Working class and sociability in France before 1848 Maurice Agulhon; 3. Men and women in the Parisian garment trades: discussions of family and work in the 1830s and 1840s Joan Wallach Scott; 4. Craft traditions and the labour movement in nineteenth-century Germany Jürgen Kocka; 5. Structures of subordination in nineteenth-century British industry Richard Price; 6. The first of May 1890 in France: the birth of a working-class ritual Michelle Perrot; 7. Civic rituals and patterns of resistance in Barcelona, 1890-1930 Temma Kaplan; 8. English landed society in the nineteenth-century F. M. L. Thompson; 9. British and European bankers 1882-1914: an 'aristocratic bourgeoisie'? José Harris and Pat Thane; 10. Problems of Jewish assimilation in Austria - Hungary in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Peter Hanak; 11. Alternatives to class revolution: Central and Eastern Europe after the First World War Iván T. Berend; 12. Vicissitudes of feudalism in modern Poland Antoni Macak; Index.