This book offers the first detailed study of the essential relationship between thought reform and the "dangerous classes"--The prostitutes, beggars, petty criminals, and other "lumpenproletarians" the Communists saw as a threat to society and the revolution. Aminda Smith takes readers inside early-PRC reformatories, where the new state endeavored to transform "vagrants" into members of the laboring masses. As places where "the people" were literally created, these centers became testing grounds for rapidly changing ideas and experiments about thought reform and the subjects they produced. Smit.

The Laboring Classes in Renaissance Florence investigates the part of Renaissance history that refers to the notarial and criminal archives of Florence. The book presents the relations between the laboring classes and the ruling elite. It demonstrates the class struggle that happened in the Renaissance period. The text also describes the progress of class struggle in periods preceding the Industrial Revolution. It discusses the reforms of the political strategies, list of protests, and awareness of artisans and laborers in preindustrial milieu. Another topic of interest is the tax revolt, food riot, and rural rebels' resistance during the Renaissance period. The section that follows describes the emergence of ethnic ghettos, impact of immigration, and distribution of population. The book will provide valuable insights for historians, students, and researchers in the field of medieval history.

This is the second volume of a two-volume social history of nineteenth-century Hankow, a city of over one million inhabitants and the commercial hub of central China. In the first volume, Hankow: Commerce and Society in a Chinese City, 1796-1889 (1984), the author emphasized the dynamism of late imperial commerce, the relation of the metropolis to its hinterland, and the corporate institutions of the city, notably its guilds, which assumed a number of functions we normally attribute to a municipal government. In this volume, the focus is on the people of Hankow, in all their ethnic diversity, occupational variety, and constant mobility, and on the social bonds that enabled this mass of people to live and work in a crowded city with much less disruptive social conflict than occurred in Hankow's counterparts in early modern Europe. Built into the argument of the book is a running comparison nineteenth-century Hankow with such cities as London and Paris in the somewhat earlier period when they, too, were experiencing the growing pains of nascent preindustrial capitalism. How are we to account for the fact that the cities of early modern Europe were so much more prone to protest and social upheaval than Hankow was in a comparable stage of development? The author finds the answer in the cultural hegemony of an activist elite that fostered moral consensus, social harmony, and an aura of solicitude for the well-being of residents at every social level, exemplified in such service institutions as poor relief, firefighting, and public security. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, however, the social bonds that had held Hankow together were beginning to fragment, as social polarization and growing class-consciousness fostered an atmosphere of increasing unrest.

Reproduction of the original: The Dangerous Classes of New York by Charles Loring Brace

This book presents the new Precariat – the rapidly growing number of people facing lives of insecurity, on zero hours contracts, moving in and out of jobs that give little meaning to their lives. The delivery driver who brings your packages, the uber driver who gets you to work, the security guard at the mall, the carer looking after our elderly...these are The Precariat. Guy Standing investigates this new and growing group, finding a frustrated and angry new underclass who are often ignored by politicians and economists. The rise of zero hours contracts, encouraged by fat cat corporations as risk-free employment, and by silicon valley as a way of outsourcing costs and responsibility, has been exacerbated by the COVID pandemic. At the same time, in its experience of lockdown, the western world is realizing the true value of these nurses, carers and key workers. The answer? The return of income security and meaningful work - the principles 20th century capitalism was built on. By making the fears and desires of the Precariat central to economic thinking, Standing shows how concepts like Basic Income are not just desirable but inevitable, and plots the way to a better future.

This text covers the history of criminal justice from a critical perspective and explores the historical biases of the criminal justice system. The overall theme of this book is that both the making of laws and the interpretation and application of these laws throughout the history of the criminal justice system has, historically, been class, gender, and racially biased. Moreover, one of the major functions of the criminal justice system has been to control those from the most disadvantaged sectors of the population, that is, the "dangerous classes." This theme is explored using a historical model, tracing the development of criminal law through the development of the police institution, the juvenile justice system, and the prison system.

Peasants, religious heretics, witches, pirates, runaway slaves, prostitutes and pornographers, frequenters of taverns and fraternal society lodge rooms, revolutionaries, blues and jazz musicians, beats, and contemporary youth gangs--those who defied authority, choosing to live outside the defining cultural dominions of early insurgent and, later, dominant capitalism are what Bryan D. Palmer calls people of the night. These lives of opposition, or otherness, were seen by the powerful as deviant, rejecting authority, and consequently threatening to the established order. Constructing a rich historical tapestry of example and experience spanning eight centuries, Palmer details lives of exclusion and challenge, as the "night travels" of the transgressors clash repeatedly with the powerful conventions of their times. Nights of liberation and exhilarating desire--sexual and social--are at the heart of this study. But so too are the dangers of darkness, as marginality is coerced into corners of pressured confinement, or the night is used as a cover for brutalizing terror, as was the case in Nazi Germany or the lynching of African Americans. Making extensive use of the interdisciplinary literature of marginality found in scholarly work in history, sociology, cultural studies, literature, anthropology, and politics, Palmer takes an unflinching look at the rise and transformation of capitalism as it was lived by the dispossessed and those stamped with the mark of otherness.