Leon Fink. Sweatshops at Sea. Merchant Seamen in the World's First Globalized Industry, from 1812 to the Present. The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill2011. 278 pp. Ill. $34.95;

Abstract

Jerram shows how women, completely outside the legal, political, and economic realm, claimed access to more and more spaces. In his chapter on sexuality Jerram follows more or less the same line of thought. He analyses the places where homosexuals were able to meet, and shows the fluctuating freedom of gay practices in the course of the twentieth century. His leading argument is that, influenced by the varying spatial possibilities, sexuality changed from being something people did to something they were, from a practice to an identity.The last chapter of the book is dedicated to the city itself. ''Building Utopia'' describes the origins and outcomes of town planning, and of planning as a general tendency in the twentieth century. Jerram elaborates on the various consequences of the idea that all problems in society could be solved by the government. For the city, he claims, the vision of modern planners to provide all residents with a warm and well-constructed house delivered great results. More than in the other chapters, Jerram takes a clear position, especially when he defends the postwar high-rise estates built across Europe. From the 1970s onward, he claims, the suburbs had a bad reputation among intellectuals and in the media. But it was not the estates that formed the problem; it was the policy of the city that allocated the houses almost exclusively to poor people, underinvested in education, and neglected health care. For decades, Jerram claims, residents were happy to live in the suburbs. His defence of suburbs contrasts with a large discourse on city planning that originates with the work of Jane Jacobs. She claimed that a high concentration of residents and the unplanned nature of older city neighbourhoods were essential to creating a successful city, with entrepreneurship, social control, and social contact.2 Jerram criticizes this idea, without mentioning Jacobs's work. Leif Jerram has written an outstanding book on the street level of European history, and convincingly showed its importance for the course and understanding of the twentieth century. Especially in the last few chapters, he has adopted a very personal style and showed his deep affection for the modern metropolis. This makes his book a joy to read, but it will also raise some eyebrows concerning the academic basis for some of his statements. As an argument for his idea that poverty is not necessarily synonymous with disintegration, he mentions the nicely decorated alleys of the poorer residents in his home city, Manchester, contrasting them with the alleys of the wealthy yuppies. But is every space that easy to interpret? On the whole, however, this personal approach is not at all problematic; indeed, it challenges us to look more closely at our own surroundings. With his ability to combine many different themes and subjects in a clear and comprehensive way, Jerram has written both an important historical study and a real page turner.