Elizabeth Perry begins her chapter in this volume – “Labor Divided: Sources of State Formation in Modern China” – with an insightful summary of recent trends in the historiography of working classes. She argues that in reaction to the “unfulfilled promises of Marxism,” recent generations of labor studies “have been obsessed with ‘why not’ questions: Why did workers not develop a class identity? Why did workers … not flock to radical political parties? Why did working-class parties … not engineer Marxist revolutions?” Perry is understandably ambivalent about this “search for sources of weakness in the working class.” The search has led to a deeper appreciation of the diverse and often conflicting forces that comprise any proletariat. She questions, however, why such “intraclass divisions” are understood and analyzed solely as “obstacles” to political organization and action, a logic that is rooted in the belief in a particular trajectory or class project for labor (“the ‘true’ mission of the proletariat”).

In similar fashion, since World War I analysts have wrestled with the unfulfilled promises of liberalism. Theorists in various colonial and dependent territories asked one “why not” question in particular: Why did the indigenous middle class not engineer bourgeois revolutions? For instance, M. Roy and other delegates to the Third International answered this question by combining imperialism theory and nationalism in a formulation that continues to guide thinking on this subject.