Ball's social and economic history of the “working lives” of residents of the city of São Paulo is a much-needed addition to the city's historiography. Despite São Paulo's unusually rapid growth during the Old (or First) Republic (1889-1930), empirically based histories of early twentieth-century São Paulo are few and far between, especially when compared to the vast literatures on Rio de Janeiro and other immigrant cities. Even fewer texts are available to readers without a firm grasp of Portuguese. Ball's rigorous yet accessible analysis should facilitate the inclusion of São Paulo as a point of comparison in studies of immigration and migration writ large, urban inequality, industrialization, and labor.

In the first chapter, Ball suggests two ways in which São Paulo departs from the typical immigrant city: subsidies encouraged the immigration of entire families rather than individual men, while the state's Hospedaria de Imigrantes, based in São Paulo City, enabled many families to remain in the state capital. By racist design, the hospedaria was intended to connect European and, after 1907, Japanese newcomers with rural employers, but Ball's investigation of thousands of hospedaria files reveals that urban businessmen also contracted hospedaria residents, among them Brazilian nationals. Ball mines these records for statistical patterns, finding, for example, that despite a higher literacy rate than many of their European peers, Brazilian migrants were more likely to be contracted by rural rather than urban employers. Ball's attention to national, racial, and gender differences, along with her deft interweaving of quantitative and qualitative methods, clarifies in-migration to São Paulo and raises questions about the role of institutions not only in attracting immigrants and migrants but also in distributing them.

The remaining five chapters elaborate on the trends that Ball identifies in the hospedaria's archive. Chapter 2 synthesizes existing studies and crunches new numbers to argue for working Paulistanos’ relatively good quality of life before 1913. An economic downturn and World War I, however, led to skyrocketing prices, which, in the context of family-based immigration, pressured women and children to enter the workforce in high numbers. In the third chapter, Ball triangulates hospedaria records with labor and the mainstream press to argue that the presence of family members contributed to many laborers’ decision to not strike. Also undermining São Paulo's labor movement was the hospedaria's ready supply of workers; immigrants, especially unskilled Portuguese, served as strikebreakers more often than those of African descent. By innovatively focusing on replacement workers, the chapter adds to historians’ explanations of the relative conservatism and fragmentation of the city's early labor movement.

Chapter 4 sheds light on why few Afro-Brazilians and Portuguese stood behind the picket line by statistically testing for workplace discrimination. Ball's wage studies and analysis of hiring practices at four companies point to gendered inequality in pay, promotion, and hiring as well as anti-Black and anti-Portuguese discrimination in hiring and promotion.

If Ball's sample suggests that World War I had little effect on discriminatory practices, her final two chapters stress the war's repercussions. Chapter 5 contrasts the textile industry's continued reliance on cheap labor and policing to the managerial innovations of the transportation and construction sectors, the origins of James Woodard's “revolution in commerce.” The sixth chapter explains how that revolution propelled a small percentage of laborers into a “working middle class,” even as the post World War I economy erected new barriers to social mobility for those left behind.

In shifting the debate from industrial production to the experiences of those who produced, Ball persuasively makes the case for the significance of “new economic history” to our understanding of São Paulo and urban development in the Americas (3). The narrative could be more neatly stitched and a few conjectures would have benefited from introducing surprisingly absent scholarship on immigration and labor by Brazilians. Nonetheless, Ball's methodological clarity and use of “mini biographies” to enliven painstaking statistical analyses render the book relevant and approachable for upper-level students and researchers alike.