In Reforming Urban Labor, Janet Polasky... compares and contrasts two capital cities, London and Brussels,... focus[ing] on the initiatives of those progressive reformers or social engineers around the turn of the century who sought to reduce inner-city densities while remolding the working classes in their own provident, law-abiding, bourgeois image by reshaping the workers' environment..... It is in the comparative angle and in her painstaking mastery of two national historiographies that Polasky really scores, since each city's contrasting trajectory helps to illuminate and problematize the different circumstances and choices made.- Brian Lewis (Journal of Modern History) Inventive in offering a finely tuned comparative approach to the 'social question,' this book covers the period of roughly 1880 to 1914, with a concluding chapter that briskly takes the analysis through the present. The settings compared are Brussels and London, as well as their respective hinterlands.... Reforming Urban Labor is elegantly written and revealing of its topic in ways that only the best comparative history achieves.... This is a history with resonance, and representative of a scholarly field that is likely to make a return in the shadow cast by the most recent crises of capitalism.- Casey Harison (American Historical Review) Polasky presents a finely designed comparative study of the social engineering that linked housing and transportation reforms, and of the social good that they were supposed to engender: Students of urban history will recognize such familiar reformers as Henry Mayhew, Charles Booth, and Emile Vandervelde, but this book places them in the context not only of their research activities but also of the social and political struggle to win better housing for workers.... She is able to present a complex, intertwining, up-to-date history of two political and cultural spaces by designing chapters around themes common to both of them, showing both similarities and differences. In short, Reforming Urban Labor is a tour de force of comparative history.- Leslie Page Moch (Journal of Interdisciplinary History)
