The steam-driven transport revolution of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries dramatically altered the geography of globalization, fuelling rapid urbanization at an unprecedented scale in port cities across the globe. Whereas global historians have primarily studied port cities because of their function in globe-spanning networks, this special issue explores the intersection of global and urban history from a socio-environmental perspective. Crucially, the contributions to this issue underline that the creation of port cities, and their social histories, must be understood in relation to local landscapes, both built and natural, and their transformations over time.

The essays that follow aim to capture aspects of the unique style of R.J. Morris, aspects which taken together represent the formidable legacy that he leaves to the global world of urban history.

Arcaded houses forming porticoes are characteristic of many medieval European towns in Spain, France, Switzerland, Italy, Germany, Czechia, Poland, Silesia and Ukraine. They are a unique feature at the border between public and private space, used for commerce, crafts and communication. Taking the arcaded houses of Silesia as a case-study, this article focuses on the legal and urban contexts in which they were constructed and removed. Comparison with the broader European context suggests that the form and appearance of arcaded houses in Silesia follow similar patterns and chronology to those that have been observed in much better-studied regions.

The Dutch city of Leiden experienced economic and demographic growth from the last quarter of the sixteenth century onwards. This article analyses its effects on the urban private housing market by charting both the ratio of owners to tenants and the spatial patterns of housing wealth. Housing inequality increased in Leiden, reinforcing existing economic disparities and patterns of residential segregation. These dynamics were mainly caused by migration, which created great demand for housing. Gaining an insight into the pre-modern housing market also helps us to understand how inequalities were (re)produced and how they affected the daily lives of urbanites differently.

Two characteristics that defined Bob Morris were his empathy and his humanity. As a person, not just as a teacher and scholar, these elements infused his approach to people no matter their age or status. This short appreciation considers his contributions to urban and social history, his capacity for synthesis and analysis and his sensitivity in exploring places and spaces using text, data and images. Bob Morris’ humility was the hallmark of an exceptional historian, colleague and friend.

Between the 1770s and the 1870s, there were no fewer than eight attempts to establish colonial footholds along the coasts of Sabah, the northern quarter of Borneo. This article charts the history of these abortive settlements and, in doing so, subverts established narratives of colonialism and urbanization that usually centre on the British North Borneo Company from the 1880s. It argues that these settlements should be regarded as part of a persistent but sporadic struggle to colonize and control the shores of Sabah. Their repeated frustrations and failures reveal the ways in which coastlines imposed constraints on thalassocracies.

Excrements are slippery objects of historical inquiry. They are seldom nominated, often tiptoed around. Excreta are only apparently trifling matters, yet they bear the traces of events that could not be otherwise observed. They demand consideration of the mundane and seemingly apolitical dimension of everyday life. They show up in archival trickles that, if followed up seriously, point to what political and economic histories may have swiped out of plain view. Excrements in 1859–69 Port Said convey that the Suez Canal Company may not have been at all that concerned or effective in its management of public hygiene in the encampments and towns sprouting along the canal. The Egyptian government was similarly unimpactful, but tried to tackle some of the issues confronting booming towns in Egypt and elsewhere: planning flaws, ‘miasmatic effluvia’, desertic and acquatic dumpsters and a seemingly ever-growing volume of and proximity to trash.

Scholarship on brewing in early modern London is torn between two irreconcilable stories, one positing stunning growth before 1560 and the other insignificant change until after 1720. Careful attention to company and court records as well as state papers, however, reveals that by 1600 London brewing had boomed, likely making it Europe’s largest brewing centre, led by individual houses operating on scales close to the largest of the mid-eighteenth century. Such breweries were accurately perceived to be large scale and highly profitable, clustered along the Thames in urban industrial zones.

Bob Morris was elected as president of the European Association for Urban History (EAUH) ahead of its 2002 conference in Edinburgh. Bob’s presidency, and the Edinburgh conference specifically, took place at an important point in the development of urban history within Europe and further afield. First, the programme reveals several emerging themes and topics of interest that have since shaped the sub-field in new and innovative ways. Second, Bob’s informal and collegial approach towards networking is reflected in the decision to place the EAUH on a quasi-formal constitutional basis. Both of these developments reflect, in part, Bob’s own research interests, as well as the sub-field’s welcoming approach to younger researchers, including taught and research postgraduate students, interested in networking with more established scholars.

The nineteenth century was an era of rapid urban growth, increasing temporal awareness, and a rising demand for precision. Time measurement and display became particularly important in this context, not just for scientific or military purposes, but also for administrations, businesses and for the general public. There was, however, one significant problem: making all the public clocks show the same and correct time, which led to the development of urban temporal infrastructures as symbols of urban modernity and a source of civic pride. This article presents an account of the origins of two temporal infrastructures in Paris, focusing particularly on the electrical network devised by the scientists of the Paris Observatory.

Bob Morris first influenced social historians in Hungary through personal contacts, but these contacts were later strengthened by institutional networks. The post-transition historiography of Eastern Europe found concepts in Morris’ work that dovetailed with the rise of interest in researching the history of the public sphere and the understanding of structural changes in society. However, because of the different historical traditions of the region, these concepts could not be easily transposed. Nevertheless, the work of Bob Morris is often cited in research on modern urban forms of associational life. His work on urban history is systematically being introduced to younger generations through one of the principal handbooks for teaching social history at the university level. Most importantly, Bob Morris’ approach to research and his enthusiasm for conversation with scholars at all stages of their careers will long be remembered, and his work guides urban historians across the continent.

A city must stand on stable ground for it to be a place of residence, sociability and peace. If so, the following is an exploration of how a city came to be in a wetland, with marshy ground, with an overflowing river, with stormy seas and with lowland liable to flooding. A wetland, the key ecology in what follows, was not easily urbanized. Indeed, in the late modern moment, taken in what follows simply as a shorthand to refer to the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, earth was dug, water was channelled, a river estuary was changed, reefs were affected, harbours were built and sea flow appeared to change. Yet, the manipulation of terrain of various kinds did not create a space which was a smooth site of connection and meeting for colonists and colonized. Rather, nature obstructed these fluid experiments of engineering in various ways. Simultaneously, the people who congregated at these sites forged new ways of considering their status in the ‘new imperial’ colony. The colonial reorganization of nature ran parallel with colonial attempts at arranging people; yet, both nature and people did not yield automatically to the hand of this new regime of modelling and segmenting environments in and around the sea and land.

Once the disorderly output from the mainframe was pushed to one side, R.J. Morris was quick to realize the potential of the early Apple Mac personal computer to enhance how he taught the historical method. In this article, I reflect on Morris’ pedagogy in the fields of urban history and middle-class formation, and in his approach to nominal record linkage. These insights come from my experience as both an undergraduate and postgraduate student under his guidance and then later as collaborator in the classroom and in research. When teaching the power of the computer to advance the historian’s craft, Bob Morris never lost sight of the ‘concept’ as his favoured means of exploring and understanding historical transformation.

This article studies public amusement in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Gothenburg, Sweden, and argues that historians of urban and popular culture need to take the hybrid character of modernity more seriously. The case of the small peripheral port city of Gothenburg, more clearly than large metropoles or rapidly growing urban centres, showcases how turn-of-the-century urban culture was negotiated through the confrontation of traditional and innovative forms of popular amusement. Hence, insights from Gothenburg can prompt a more critical, nuanced view of ‘urban modernity’, marked not only by the emergence of commercial mass entertainment but also by the resilience of itinerant performers, for example. The article draws on different types of source material that from different perspectives embrace the co-constitutive character of practices and representations of pleasure through which people in Gothenburg negotiated urban change.

Steam navigation in the 1850s and the Rubber Boom beginning in the 1890s connected the Amazonia to the world. This article studies Iquitos, a major riverine port city in Peru, to interrogate the kind of urban environmental regime produced by the contrast between the modernizing impulse of the rubber era and the conditions of the rainforest and the customs of its peoples. Studying urbanization as an eco-technical process that involves both the longue durée and contingent critical junctures reveals pervasive connections between social inequalities and environmental conditions. The long-term trajectory of Iquitos reveals a vicious cycle of urban inequalities and precarious urbanization.

The making of the Passeio Público, Lisbon’s first public garden, is filled with contradictions, advances and setbacks. By looking at the long-term history of this green infrastructure, from its inception in 1764 until the inauguration of the boulevard built on its footprint in 1886, and considering the various technical-scientific, artistic, economic, social and political factors, this article demonstrates that the so-called public garden of the ancién régime was in fact made by the Liberals. Political issues and the Liberals’ narration of events were primarily responsible for the disappearance of the Passeio Público.

From the shores of the Black Sea to the banks of the Mississippi River, more than mere distance separated the nineteenth-century port cities of Odessa and New Orleans. Although these ports emerged in distinct political and geographical settings, a comparative analysis reveals striking parallels between these two southern metropolises, each positioned at the territorial edge of continental empires. This article aims to examine the common challenges these cities encountered in their development, the factors that divided their cosmopolitan populations and how socio-environmental vulnerabilities contributed to their urban fragmentation.

R.J. (Bob) Morris’ contribution to debates around the history of class, associational culture and urban governance have underpinned numerous publications across the decades. This article extends the appreciation of Bob’s work to reflect on how his approach to documenting, demystifying and disseminating the history and heritage of cities and industrial places – including through his use of photography – made a notable impact at the interface between urban and public history and has had a lasting impact on future generations of urban historians’ approach to understanding the historic built environment.

Bob (or R.J.) Morris was probably best known in academic circles for his histories of class and specifically the British middle class. This essay traces his thinking about class in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain from an early study of class consciousness to his later attempts to rework ideas about social structure and culture in a post-Weberian direction. A feature of this intellectual trajectory was the increasing importance of the city and urban place in the account of class formation, most evident in his work on Leeds. In the process, Bob carved out a distinctive type of urban social history which has proved highly influential in historical studies of social structure not only in Britain but in Europe and beyond.

The filling of the lagoons and creeks that framed the city and island of Lagos changed the relationship between people, power, land and the water at the turn of the nineteenth century. As elites in the city negotiated power with British colonial administrators, ordinary Lagosians pushed back against the measures that threatened to displace them and rewrite cultural space through the demands and logics of ‘slum clearance’ and anti-malarial campaigns. This article examines how these struggles over water, land and urban space were the catalysts for cultural change.