Book Review

Cooperatives in New Orleans: Collective Action and Urban Development

Tuuri, Rebecca

2022

Overview

Drawing extensively on local newspapers, city directories, census records, interviews, local archival collections, and secondary works from many disciplines, she attempts to show how cooperatives contributed to the city's modernization by helping build flood-control infrastructure, consumer programs, and cooperative food markets. According to Gessler, this cooperative drew on French republican ideals, utopian socialism, \"Caribbean and African diasporic survival politics,\" and the traditions of local creole of color mutual aid societies, as it called on the city to develop a public works plan that would give jobs to the unemployed and upgrade municipal flood control (p. 180). [...]although Gessler argues that all these cooperatives were \"internationally inspired,\" more sustained evidence on the ways that New Orleans cooperatives drew on global ideas and philosophies would be helpful (p. 183).

• Publisher: Southern Historical Association
• Subject: 20th century / Capitalism / Central business districts / Cities / Collective action / Consumers / Cooperatives / Diaspora / Grocery stores