of text beginning with a superscript numberleft over from the line above. It is also some-thing of a pity that the part of Britain domi-nated by declining heavy industry issometimes referred to as the manufacturingbelt, but also as the ‘axial belt’ and as the ‘fac-tory belt’, without any indication that thethree labels refer to the same or to differentareas. But these are relatively minorquibbles in a book with an excellent andvery full bibliography, and which will retainvalue as an insightful economic analysis ofearly twentieth-century British industrialchange across the regions of Britain.

Brian ShortUniversity of Sussex, UK

doi:10.1016/j.jhg.2008.01.012

373Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 34 (2008) 371–392

Blair A. Ruble, Creating Diversity Capital:Transnational Migrants in Montreal,Washington, and Kyiv, Washington, DC,Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2005, 256pages, US$22.95 paperback.

Although social scientists tend to identify cit-ies like New York and London as classic ‘im-migrant destinations’, these traditionalgateways are now sharing their entrepot statuswith cities that are smaller yet increasingly dy-namic in their economic and demographicmakeup. In his book, Creating Diversity Cap-ital: Transnational Migrants in Montreal,Washington, and Kyiv, Blair Ruble draws ourattention to three such cities that are also historicplaces of cross-cultural tension – between Fran-cophones and Anglophones in Montreal,Blacks and Whites in Washington, DC, andUkrainians and Russians in Kyiv. Pointingto diminishing bifurcation and increasing‘multiculturalism’ in these cities, Ruble makes

the argument that the increased presence ofimmigrants has created an openness towardout-groups (‘diversity capital’) instead of themore common in-group ‘trust’, or ‘socialcapital’.

The text not only ‘places’ the concept of di-versity capital, it also examines the interplay ofinternational migration with the political andcultural agendas of national minorities in re-ceiving areas (e.g. Francophones in Quebecand African Americans in Washington). His-torical geographers in particular will appreci-ate Ruble’s review of the historic events ineach city that bore transformations from land-scapes of bifurcation to landscapes of diver-sity. Ruble starts by contrasting all threecities with New York City, which ‘embraceddifference’ early in its history, incorporating18 languages by the 1640s (p. 4). Montreal’shistorical experience is more contentious. Fol-lowing the conclusion of the French and In-dian War in 1763, Montreal—with its two‘old races and religions’ living side by side—became home base for Canada’s ‘unending re-negotiation with itself’ (p. 10). By the 1800s,Montreal was a city of ‘two solitudes’ whereFrancophones and Anglophones (includingmost new immigrants) lived in a ‘sequence ofghettos’ (p. 13). In Washington, DC, the de-scendants of British settlers and African slavesbecame increasingly segregated under Presi-dent Woodrow Wilson’s anti-Black employ-ment policies in the 1910s and urban renewalstrategies that pushed African Americans outof Southwest DC in the 1950s. Although Rus-sian labor migration and ‘Sovietization’ pro-jects in the 1950s and 1960s ultimatelysuppressed spatial expressions of ethnic differ-ence in Kyiv, the latent tensions among thecity’s Russian, Ukrainian, Yiddish, Polish,and new immigrant groups were evident dur-ing the 2004 presidential election and the sub-sequent pro-Ukrainian Orange Revolution.

374 Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 34 (2008) 371–392

Ruble argues that acts of national minorityself-determinism in Montreal, Washington,and Kyiv have since acted as catalysts forthe creation of diversity capital. In Montreal,Bill 101 – the policy that required enrollmentof immigrant children in French-languageschools in 1977 – resulted in ‘a collective real-ization that immigrants are routinely becom-ing Francophone’, thereby making ‘thesecessionist movement less and less urgent’and immigration more desirable (p. 42). InWashington, the achievement and subsequentfailure of ‘Home Rule’ (i.e., autonomous self-governance) in 1975 led to the disintegrationof the mainly Black ‘civil rights municipal re-gime’ and the emergence of a new multi-polarregime (p. 118). According to Ruble, theseevents have helped create more integratedand diverse cultural landscapes. He findsthat Montreal’s Francophone and Anglo-phone residents are less residentially segre-gated than in the 1960s and that theeconomic and educational integration pro-moted by immigration has increased the fre-quency of encounters between the two,resulting in a new ‘daily dance of life’(p. 61). In Washington, a dispersed immigrantsettlement pattern has created a new educa-tional milieu in which only three of its six re-gional school districts are majority-Black ormajority-White (p. 75). Ruble also hints atsome potential difficulties. For example, howwould Montreal’s new immigrants fall into‘zero-sum language politics’ of Quebec asFrancophones lumped them with AnglophoneCanadians as ‘not us?’ (p. 12). Similarly, Kyiv’spolicymakers ‘can either draw on transnationalcommunities to define an inclusive post-Sovietidentity for their metropolitan region or canseek out new pariahs against whom to delin-eate precisely what it means to be ‘‘Ukrai-nian’’ (p. 28). These potential avenues ofdiscrimination and exclusion, though men-tioned, are never explored in detail.

Comparing the three cities in a consistentway also proves difficult. Unlike Montrealor Washington, Kyiv recently experienced im-perial occupation, subsequent upheaval, andeconomic transition. Today, it lacks botha stable economy and defined ethno-spatialboundaries. Diversity capital, then, is lessreadily measurable in Kyiv than in the othertwo cities. Although Ruble argues that na-scent multiculturalism in Kyiv provides an‘invaluable counterpoint’ (p. 25), most of itsimmigrants live on the fringes of the cityand participate largely in the informal econ-omy. In fact, the Kyiv study seems to painta picture of exclusion as much as it does mul-ticulturalism. Barcelona or Brussels, instead,may have been more appropriate options fora third study. The methodology, too, is insome ways inconsistent. Ruble and his col-leagues use primary data only in their Kyivstudy, for which they conducted ‘semi-struc-tured’ interviews in 233 Kyiv households be-tween June and December 2001 (p. 200).The absence of primary research tools in theMontreal and Washington cases makes thevolume appear uneven.

Most importantly, the text is unclear onhow, specifically, the presence of immigrantscreates diversity capital. Ruble’s explanationis a bit vague: As they learn to accommodateone another, immigrants create the buildingblocks for ‘policies and institutions that havethe overall effect of integrating diverse groupsand cultural practices in a just and equitablefashion’ (p. 52). Yet the text really only provesthat new immigrants have changed the politi-cal and social landscape, using examples suchas a Quebec politician’s entreaty to ‘turn awayfrom fantasies of independence or sover-eignty’ or the increasingly multi-ethnic patronbase at an Ethiopian family’s jazz club (pp.101, 151). In many cases, Ruble bypasses op-portunities to demonstrate the existence of ac-tual tolerance and inclusion. Chapter three,

rural areas, the principal reason for this, Ma-zoyer and Roudart suggest, is the tendency ofagricultural prices, measured in purchasingpower terms, to fall. Some farms in LatinAmerica, South Africa, and the Ukraine areas technically advanced as any in Western Eu-rope or North America, but their labour costsare lower. Consequently they can producegrain cheaply and release it on to the worldmarket at low prices, where the liberalizationof international agricultural markets ensuresthat it becomes available everywhere. Farmersin the European Union and the USA can onlysurvive with the aid of government assistance.Some farmers in developing countries find itdifficult to survive at all, and as market pricesdecrease, they have to sell a greater propor-tion of their output to buy their non-food re-quirements. If they had benefitted fromtechnical change so as to increase yields andoutput this might not create a problem, butmany of them have not. The so-called ‘GreenRevolution’ in low income countries led to in-creased outputs for those with access to high-yielding varieties and the necessary fertilizers,pesticides and irrigation, but not everybody,

375Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 34 (2008) 371–392

for example, mentions the presence of Latinosin once predominately African Americanneighborhoods and their occupation of‘more secure niches’ in the urban economyof Washington, but never assesses whetherthis change has created harmony or tensionbetween Blacks and Latinos.

Though exciting in its optimism, CreatingDiversity Capital seems premature in its cele-bration of an emergent multiculturalism thatis mostly symbolic. Its emphases on demo-graphic change and policy shifts rather thanstructural inclusion suggest the promotion ofdiversity in rhetoric but not necessarily in ac-cess or equality across ethnocultural groups.While Ruble’s book provides an excellentoverview of immigration in three less-studieddestinations, readers must assess its messagecritically rather than view it as a commemora-tion of multiculturalism’s success.

Nathaniel LewisQueen’s University, Canada

doi:10.1016/j.jhg.2008.01.011

Marcel Mazoyer and Laurence Roudart(translated by James H. Membrez), AHistory of World Agriculture: from theNeolithic Age to the Current Crisis, London,Earthscan, 2006, 528 pages, £22.95paperback.

It is the subtitle, with its reference to ‘the cur-rent crisis’, that best identifies the concerns ofthis book. And the current crisis is hunger.About 840 million people do not have contin-uous access to enough food to satisfy theirbasic energy needs, and nearly another twobillion suffer from mineral or vitamin defi-ciencies. Despite the output increases of thelast fifty years, the number of hungry peopleis not decreasing. Since most of them live in

and especially those with small farms, hadsuch access. The result was that they had togo to work on larger farms for low pay, orjoin the rural exodus to the towns and cities.And in future their land will either be under-exploited just when extra output is required,or will be farmed using high-technologymethods that will lead to ecological and socialproblems. Moreover, their continued low in-comes, either on their farms or as low-paid ur-ban workers, restrict their demand forindustrial products and so limit the growthof the world economy.

The solution, claim Mazoyer and Roudart,is to bring an end to the international pricewar by stopping the liberalization of trade.We should recognize that ‘agricultural andfood products are not commodities like others’