Rent Strikes: A History of Tenant Actions across the World. Edited by LucasPoy and HannesRolf. UCL Press, 2025. 362 pp. £55.

Rent Strikes is a welcome contribution to the academic literature on tenant protest. There is a dearth of research on the subject: as Alison Ravetz has argued, housing in Britain has been positioned at the end of a great series of struggles such as the Corn Laws, Chartism, the New Poor Law and the fight for trade unions. The nature of rent strikes, too, makes them more elusive. David Englander has suggested that the uncertain nature of tenants’ associations added to the complexity of defining working-class politics because organizing people as consumers in society is very different from doing so at the point of production. Edited by Lucas Poy and Hannes Rolf, Rent Strikes is an ambitious book, bringing together thirteen chapters that extend over a broad temporal and geographical range. The contributions cover the period from 1914 to 2020 and the continents of North, Central and South America, Europe, Africa and Australasia. These studies also include different issues, specific to the location of the strikes. For example, Jacob Zumoff focuses on rent strikes in Panama and the accompanying issues of colonialism and racism, due to its minority population of West Indians. The French strikes (as featured in Nathan Crompton's chapter) involved the colonial legacy of Algerian tenants, while the Leiden strikes (as discussed by Bart van der Steen) attracted the support of the Netherlands’ Maoist Socialist Party. Lisa Vollmer shows how the strikes in 1970s West Berlin had their own unique character, due to the city's particular Cold War status, while Giulia Novaro and Eugenia Crosetti note the distinct contribution of Puerto Rican women to the Harlem strikes in New York. This diversity could leave the student of rent strikes adrift in a sea of microhistories of contrasting protests which have no connection with each other. However, the editors are aware of the limitations of such an approach and emphasize that the book is a starting point for study rather than a comprehensive synthesis of rent activism and state that the intention of the book for historians is to initiate further research. The editors’ conviction is that homes are a right and not merely a source of capital, and they hope the volume provides lessons for activists of today. On the whole, this is what the book does. While this writer cannot comment on whether it is a primer for activists, it provides starting points for the historian, partly because it has been edited to show common themes. It is split between protests before and after the Second World War. It highlights, in the separate studies as well as the introduction and conclusion, themes such as landlord–tenant relations and their power dynamics, the conditions and actions of tenants from a global perspective, as well as, for example in the chapters by Rolf and Vollmer, analysis of public landlordism. This transnational perspective means that strikes in both Western and non-Western countries are examined, and it demonstrates why tenant organization has taken different forms in different contexts. But there are also several commonalities. The unity of tenants was often short-lived, with tenants’ associations’ efficiency dwindling after the initial agitation and falling into crisis which led to the associations being disbanded. A common reason for this was that homeownership could seriously divide tenant collectives, and the protagonists were often diverse: women, children, shopkeepers and people from different ethnic and racial groups. Indeed, ethnic diversity, particularly after the Second World War, caused by mass emigration could result in unity but could also be a source of discord. The catalyst for activism was often a significant deterioration of housing conditions. A sudden rise in rents was a critical trigger along with a shared opinion about the unfairness of rents and rent increases. There was also frequently an affiliation with left-wing political parties and trade unions, but an even stronger similarity was that socialization in public and private spaces was key to politicization and activism. A recurrent theme is that the active role of women was vital, but it is a pity that this is not always developed; for example, Elinor Chisholm's chapter could have elaborated on the observation that the New Zealand movement included many women activists. However, many case studies show that women played a decisive part in terms of organization at a neighbourhood level, and this was visible in the first stages of protest, but there was also tension between this grassroots activism and the male leadership of tenants’ associations in later stages. Men were much more likely to be in such positions because they were more likely to have skills from previous experience and their actions were more likely to gain leadership attention. The temporal division of strike action also contributes to a better understanding, enabling a pattern to emerge. The editors suggest that rent strikes came in two waves, one after the First World War and another the 1960s and 1970s, which were periods of profound social crisis. In his contribution to the book, Bart van der Steen also argues that many strikes have occurred at a moment of change, when ‘laissez faire’ policies were giving way to a far more pro-active government policy of renewal and redevelopment of housing. In this ‘grey’ area between two eras, there were opportunities for new political action. Because there is so little scholarly research on rent strikes, and because of the nature of popular protest, these studies have been based predominantly on primary sources. This is engaging for the reader and has tried to return the voices to activists who left few, if any, written sources themselves except through their interaction with those in authority when they appeared in official historical records. This is also often true of newspaper reports, which many of the scholars have used. Others, including Novaro and Crosetti, have interviewed protagonists and have gained insight into their beliefs and motives, while Ill-Raga and Bonshom-Guzmán have used digital research methods, drawing on emails and online tenants’ meetings. Such approaches have attempted to examine events from the perspective of the tenants. This aspect has been missing from earlier histories, in which, as Alison Ravetz noted in her book on Council Housing and Culture (2001, p. 164), their voices have been ‘tinged with middle-class perceptions’, and where as Mark Clapson has observed in his study on the Working-Class Suburb (2012, p. 2) the ‘social evolution of the working class’ is rarely found. Poy and Rolf's book is a significant addition to the academic literature on rent strikes. Few works have analysed this activism, let alone on such a large scale, yet by studying all types of rent struggles, the volume attempts to show common factors and to make protagonists visible. It is useful to the historian wishing to study protest from the point of reproduction as it examines the militancy of consumption and its connective relationship to production. This has brought into focus the role of working-class women and the politicizing effect of housing struggles. It tries to accentuate their agency, and this is particularly important for those whose actions do not fit neatly into the history of political militancy. The privatization of housing, and different governments’ focus on homeownership since the 1980s, changed the nature of rent protest and led to a decline of resistance because it divided families who were now attracted to what was once a minority tenure. However, in the last twenty years, in Britain certainly, there has been a decline in homeownership among younger people, and the relevance of the debate around renting, particularly in the private sector, is becoming increasingly pertinent, as are the findings of this volume.