Pre-1500

Despite a scarcity of articles in general this year, the quality of publications has been very high. The following studies are in many ways representative of the current state of medieval urban history. Many apply novel methods and approaches to existing debates, but several point to the new directions in which the historiography is moving. Thus, alongside well-known subjects such as civic ritual and urban oligarchy, this year's articles reveal a growing interest in the making and manipulation of civic histories and, most excitingly, a shift of focus to the more marginal elements of the urban community and to the place of migrants, minorities and aliens within the medieval town.

Given the assault of post-modernism upon the historical profession in the 1980s and 1990s, few historians would claim that we can ever fully know the truth of what actually happened in the past. All we have is the representation of those events in the historical record, whether in the form of narrative accounts or official government documents. If scholars are now disinclined to view the latter as any more historically reliable than the former, David S. Bachrach uses the example of the Rhineland city state of Worms to argue that medieval attitudes towards the writing of history were shaped by a growing respect for a burgeoning documentary culture consisting of administrative accounts, treaties, letters and charters. In ‘The rhetoric of historical writing: documentary sources in histories of Worms, c. 1300’, J. of the History of Ideas, 68 (2007), 187–206, Bachrach continues his excellent recent work on Worms through detailed analysis of two roughly contemporary chronicles of the late thirteenth-century city, the Annales Wormatienses, a civic chronicle, probably written by a layman employed by the city council, and the Chronicon Wormatiensis, an episcopal chronicle almost certainly composed by a cleric in the service of the bishop of Worms. Bachrach explores the ways in which the authors made extensive deployment of documents within their narrative accounts to bolster their claims to factual accuracy. In the case of the civic-sponsored Annales, the author exploited his knowledge of the city archives of Worms to track down appropriate governmental records from which he could quote verbatim in his narrative. This historical reliability was important for juridical and political reasons, since the chronicles could be produced in court on the occasion of conflict between the city council and the bishops of Worms. Yet, as Bachrach also acknowledges, if the historical methods of the authors of the chronicles were similar, their intentions were very different. The city council's patronage of a civic history was a self-conscious expression of collective identity and independence every bit as important as its political struggle with the bishops of Worms to preserve its autonomy. It is hardly surprising that the chronicles articulated, in both content and form, contrasting ideologies. The Annales presented a particular view of the city – unified and coherent – which drew upon a corporate civic mentality, whereas the author of the Chronicon, organized hierarchically around the lives of the individual bishops, exposed the social and political tensions which divided the urban community.

Such conflicting ideologies are also the focus of Jan Dumolyn's article, ‘The “Terrible Wednesday” of Pentecost: confronting urban and princely discourses in the Bruges rebellion of 1436–1438’, History, 92 (2007), 3–20. On Wednesday 22 May 1437, the Flemish city of Bruges witnessed a major confrontation between the citizens and their overlord, Philip the Good. The duke of Burgundy only just managed to escape with his life, but one of his closest advisers was not so fortunate. The dramatic events of this fateful day were part of a wider revolt by the Brugeois against Philip the Good, the political, economic and military causes of which have been much debated by urban historians. The point of departure for Dumolyn lies less in determining what took place on 22 May 1437 in Bruges, the precise details of which we can never be sure, than in exploring the ways in which the various accounts of the revolt reveal a more profound conflict over the memorialization and interpretation of the past. According to Dumolyn, ‘the social and political struggles between the centralizing dukes of Burgundy and their powerful and autonomous Flemish cities were mirrored in a discursive struggle for the representation of political events’ (4). In this particular case, Dumolyn draws upon various narrative accounts of the armed revolt of May 1437, from Bruges and Burgundian chronicles to an anonymous Middle Dutch folk song, first written down in the 1540s. He also makes use of ‘official’ diplomatic texts issued by Philip the Good in the immediate aftermath of the rebellion. According to the Bruges chronicles, the events of 22 May 1437 were an unforeseen accident, resulting from the violent actions of the duke's army within the city, but to Philip the Good and the Burgundian chronicles, what transpired that day was a deliberate and co-ordinated ambush. Most interestingly, Dumolyn detects ‘ideological elements’ in the competing accounts of the rebellion in the form of ‘ducal and urban registers of speech’ (17). Just as the struggle between Bruges and the duke of Burgundy was the product of a conflict between urban and princely ideologies, so both sides, in the sophisticated propaganda battle which followed the ‘Terrible Wednesday of Pentecost’, articulated their different political values in the war of words which the day provoked. In a self-conscious act of appropriation, Bruges adopted a princely and chivalric discourse of power, whilst the prince deployed an urban rhetoric of peace and good government.

A similar view of the disjuncture between the interests of central and urban government is expressed in Paul Oldfield's closely argued study of ‘Urban government in southern Italy, c. 1085–c. 1127’, English Historical Rev., 122 (2007), 579–608. Previous discussions of the communal movement have tended to focus upon the cities of northern Italy, so this article represents a welcome change of perspective. Just as historians have argued that the collapse of imperial power created by the Investiture Contest provided the conditions for the assertion and development of civic self-government in the north and centre, so Oldfield argues here that it was the absence of a strong central authority in southern Italy in the eleventh century, exacerbated by the arrival of Norman adventurers, which created a political environment in which various forms of urban life and structures of civic government could flourish. Thus, although the coronation of a king in Palermo on Christmas Day 1130 marked the effective establishment of a new Norman kingdom of Sicily, resistance to monarchical rule was led, significantly, by the cities of southern Italy, several of which had earlier assumed a position of autonomy and did not recognize any superior authority. It was only from the later twelfth century, argues Oldfield, that urban government in northern and southern Italy followed different paths.

A less polarized model of relations between central and civic authority is offered in Mario Damen's ‘Princely entries and gift exchange in the Burgundian Low Countries: a crucial link in late medieval political culture’, J. of Medieval History, 33 (2007), 233–49. The ceremonial which accompanied the ‘joyous entries’ made by the dukes of Burgundy on their first entry into a town have received considerable attention from scholars debating the concept of the ‘Burgundian theatre state’. Damen is more interested in the political role of gift exchange between the prince and his urban subjects. Gift exchange took two forms: one symbolic, the other material. The first occurred in the exchange of oaths between the prince and members of the civic elite, and represented a notion of ‘balanced reciprocity’ (248), in which both sides knew precisely what they were giving (expressions of loyalty) and when it was to be given. The second took place in the exchange of material gifts, and can be characterized as a more open-ended form of generosity, namely what Damen describes as ‘an example of generalised reciprocity’, whereby ‘the counter gift is not specified and it is not clear what or when it is going to come’ (248). It was precisely the more fluid nature of this type of reciprocity which made it so useful, because its very flexibility could only encourage negotiation. The strength of this article lies in its detailed analysis of the rules and mechanics of giving. Towns gave different types of gift, from consumables such as wine, to luxury goods like silverware. The latter were particularly useful because it was normal for the silver cups, jugs and pitchers to bear the town's coat of arms, thus providing the recipient with a permanent reminder of the identity of the giver, whose generosity would hopefully, at some point in the future, educe a counter gift.

Two further articles represent the continuing engagement of medieval urban history with material as well as textual culture. In ‘Siena in the early middle ages: new data from the excavation at Santa Maria della Scala’, Early Medieval Europe, 15 (2007), 290–314, Federico Cantini presents the results of a recent archaeological investigation of the site of the tenth-century hospital of Santa Maria della Scala and makes an important contribution to the debate about the changing character and function of the city in the post-Roman world. Stratigraphic analysis reveals a picture of gradual crisis, decay and contraction of urban space within the former Roman city, but overall, Cantini's study emphasizes the continuity and adaptation, rather than cessation, of urban life. The remains of stone buildings from the ninth century indicate a revival of Siena rather than a new beginning. In ‘“Vivre noblement”: material culture and elite identity in late medieval Flanders’, J. of Interdisciplinary History, 38 (2007), 1–31, Wim De Clercq, Jan Dumolyn and Jelle Haemers present a fascinating cultural study of the character of elite identity in the fifteenth century through the lives of two self-made men, Peter Bladelin (c. 1410–72) of Bruges, and William Hugonet (c. 1420–77) of Mâcon. Their origins were urban and their careers began among the urban political elite of the Low Countries, giving them the experience in law, finance and administration which made them so attractive to the Valois dukes of Burgundy in their construction of the Burgundian ‘state’. Bladelin, at first a councillor in Bruges, soon assumed a series of major ducal financial offices and, towards the middle of the fifteenth century, became the treasurer of the Order of the Golden Fleece. In subsequent years, he frequently acted as an intermediary between the city of Bruges and the Burgundian court, but when he died, his will made absolutely no reference to his background as a burgess and native of Bruges, describing him instead as ‘knight, lord of Middelburg in Flanders, councilor and master of the court of our lord the Duke of Burgundy, Count of Flanders’ (6). His noble status, according to De Clercq, Dumolyn and Haemers, had supplanted his urban identity entirely. In this respect, he was entirely characteristic of those ‘bourgeois upstarts aspiring to a higher social standing’ (4), whose social climbing was predicated upon imitation of the nobility. And yet, when we look at what he did with his wealth, notably his foundation of a new town of 200 hectares at Middelburg, north-east of Bruges, I would suggest that Bladelin's story can be read differently. Why construct a town, particularly one that was laid out so meticulously on a regular, rectangular grid pattern? The new town was also the site of a castle, whose entrance lay at the end of the main street leading south towards Bruges. Was the town, therefore, built to serve the needs of the castle, Bladelin's new residence, and later the home of William Hugonet? According to the authors of this article, the foundation of a town, and of a castle within it, was an expression of feudal lordship and of the lord's mastery over the countryside, and the town, in particular, was ‘an arena to project his social and political ambitions and to display his new identity as a nobleman’ (13). However, the establishment of a new town was highly unusual in this period, and Middelburg, with its moat, wall and town gates, was defiantly urban. Bladelin's decision to locate his principal residence immediately adjacent to a new town, it might be argued, reflected a more complex sense of personal identity borne of the interconnectedness of town and country. Ambitious social climbers in this period did not always have to abandon the town for the countryside.

One of Bladelin's many purchases was a triptych painted in the late 1450s by the celebrated Flemish panel painter, Rogier van der Weyden. Van der Weyden was, of course, one of the leading lights of the Flemish Renaissance. Others included Jan van Eyck, Petrus Christus and Hans Memling, all of whom were members of the gild of St Luke in Bruges, an umbrella organization incorporating the various crafts involved in the production of works of art in the city. It is this gild which is the focus of Peter Stabel's ‘Organisation corporative et production d'oeuvres d'art à Bruges à la fin du moyen âge et au début des temps modernes’, Le Moyen Âge, 113 (2007), 91–134. The state of the economy of fifteenth-century Bruges has been the subject of considerable debate. The picture we now have is one of expansion and growth in the first half of the fifteenth century, followed by decline in the second half of the century, particularly from the 1480s. Even the market for works of art, which had been sustained by demand from the princely courts of Europe and from the wealthy burgesses of the Low Countries, Italy, Spain and the Hanseatic towns, suffered profoundly in the last quarter of the fifteenth century and the beginning of the sixteenth century, when there was a rapid fall in the production of paintings. Stabel's view of the fortunes of the Bruges art market is very different. Quantitative analysis of the register of admissions to the Bruges gild of St Luke indicates that the numbers of masters and apprentices entering the gild remained fairly constant and only dropped significantly after 1520. He also argues that the evidence of the increasing concentration of production within an ever decreasing number of workshops ignores the existence of a group of highly mobile journeymen who lacked the means to set up business in their own right, but who provided a specialist labour market from which the master craftsmen were able to draw. In this respect, the article has a wider significance to urban historians for the understanding of the nature of gilds and the position of gilds within the world of work. In the case of the gild of St Luke, first mentioned in Bruges in 1358, previous emphasis has been on the regulatory and restrictive character of the rules governing the production and sale of works of art, which helped to create an extremely hierarchical structure that could only stifle entrepreneurial initiative and prevent the gild from responding creatively to economic change. Gild regulations, according to Stabel, were characterized by pragmatism rather than prescription, and they only ever sought to define, in a very broad way, the code of conduct expected of members and the quality of the goods produced. The boundaries between the different crafts which constituted the gild were deliberately imprecise, allowing craftsmen to negotiate constantly with other members of the gild in the production of art. The master craftsmen in the gild of St Luke were also alive to the possibility of new outlets for their goods. They were able to respond to the changing economic situation in Flanders so quickly because they did not simply rely upon commissions. Bruges had a market for mass-produced ‘art’, and works were sold in markets, stalls, workshops, taverns and inns. In a conclusion which echoes the recent work of Gervase Rosser, Stabel argues that the organization of work remained largely a matter of ‘individual negotiations’ (134).

Kate Crassons presents a very different picture of urban social and economic relations in ‘The challenges of social unity: the Last Judgment pageant and guild relations in York’, J. of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 37 (2007), 305–34. Crassons is interested in contemporary attitudes towards poverty and charity within an urban context, which she explores through the prism of the final pageant of the York Corpus Christi cycle, the Last Judgment play performed by the city's wealthy mercers. The Last Judgment pageant was based upon Christ's discussion of the works of mercy in the twenty-fifth chapter of St Matthew's gospel, in which Christ's welcome to those souls who were to be saved was rooted in a discourse linking the reward of salvation and the Christian duty of indiscriminate charity and kindness to strangers. The pageant presented a broadly inclusive notion of the urban community, whose members were bound by reciprocal ties of love and generosity, an image belied, Crassons shows, by the reality of an acutely divided and hierarchical urban social structure. Drawing heavily upon Heather Swanson's view of the antagonistic character of relations between the civic oligarchy and the craft system, she sees the play cycle as the instrument of an oppressive and uncharitable civic elite. The craft gilds were largely responsible for the production of the York mystery plays, whose performance, the crafts frequently complained, was a cause of their own collective poverty and insufficiency. The crafts, in turn, appealed to the mayor and ruling council of York, a political elite dominated by the mercers, for charity to assist in the cost of performance. Crassons suggests that it was through sometimes competing and contradictory discourses of poverty and charity that the civic elite was able to legitimize its power. The recent work of Gervase Rosser and P.J.P. Goldberg has modified Swanson's conclusions and some historians might find it difficult to accept Crassons' interpretation of the craft system. Crassons might also have explored further the notions of fraternity and mutual assistance which permeated more voluntary associations. A previously lost account roll of one such York gild has been edited this year by Philippa M. Hoskin in ‘The accounts of the medieval Paternoster gild of York’, Northern History, 44 (2007), 7–33. The roll of 1399–1400 records the names of over 150 members, male and female, lay and clerical, and the gild drew its membership almost exclusively from the city of York and from those of middling wealth and social status. The greatest expense was the annual gild feast, whose cost amounted to over a third of the gild's total receipts for the year, and one of the avowed purposes of the communal meal, as Rosser has argued elsewhere, was the promotion of charity among members. However, Crassons' article deserves further attention for its provocative ideas on the nature of the civic ethos, the morality of civic government and the meaning and extent of community within the late medieval city.

These subjects are also explored, albeit from a different direction, in James Lee's ‘“Ye shall disturbe noe mans right”: oath-taking and oath-breaking in late medieval and early modern Bristol’, Urban History, 34 (2007), 27–38. Using Bristol as his case study, Lee explores the language of the oaths of office rather than the ceremonial which surrounded the practice of oath-taking. In pursuing this form of textual analysis, he offers a novel approach to the debate about the character of civic government in late medieval England and, in particular, the question of urban oligarchy. His central point is that, whilst the oaths of civic office at once reminded new office-holders of their collective responsibilities towards the urban community, they simultaneously created division and differentiation within the civic body. The oath represented a transitional moment, in which the oath-taker acquired a new identity and entered a new world of the civic elite, whose members were bound together by rules of office and codes of conduct which emphasized the confidentiality of its discussions. Civic oaths, therefore, reinforced notions of hierarchy and order. The taking of an oath was inherently both an inclusive and exclusive act which, in a civic context, highlighted the unequal distribution of political power within the city. In Lee's persuasive reading, such oaths were the foundations of urban oligarchy.

A question raised by Lee's study is the familiar issue of how urban elites sought to maintain stability, order and power within their towns. In ‘Fama publica, infamy and defamation: judicial violence and social control of crimes against sexual morals in medieval Castile’, J. of Medieval History, 33 (2007), 398–413, Jesús Ángel Solórzano Telechea argues that one of the ways in which town councils in Castile justified their power was through a policy of exclusion that increasingly defined the urban community in relation to the ‘other’. The basis of this exclusion was a civic morality, or, rather, a magisterial ideology associating sexual morality with the concept of good government. In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries Castilian urban elites, with the encouragement of the crown, waged a campaign against a wide range of sexual offences, most notably the crime of sodomy, previously defined by the church as an individual sin of lechery and now described as a social danger to the good order of the community as a whole. Since sodomy was seen as the most terrible offence contra natura, Castilian urban councils chose to articulate and publicize their status as guardians of the ‘common good’ through the judicial process of sodomy accusations and trials. This process led simultaneously to the public shame, dishonour and social exclusion of the accused and their family and to the enhancement of the good reputation, social standing and honour of the Castilian town councils within the urban community. Solórzano Telechea views the defence of urban society against alleged sodomites as a form of social and political control within a wider ‘internal struggle of the Castilian urban elite’ (413). It is, however, unfortunate that the precise nature of this conflict is never fully explained, particularly in the light of Solórzano Telechea's suggestive comment about the rhetorical marginalization of the lower orders within Castilian towns, whose members were elsewhere described as ‘hideous, dirty, harmful, lecherous and brutal’ (407).

Minorities of a different sort are the subject of Tom Beaumont James' ‘Migration and the Southampton melting pot in the fifteenth century’, Southern History, 28 (2006), 1–23. The town of Southampton had a very different trajectory from other English provincial urban communities in the fifteenth century: although never large, certainly not by continental standards, it experienced population growth between the last quarter of the fourteenth century and the first quarter of the sixteenth century, such that its population of around 2,000 at the end of the period placed it among the top 5 per cent of English towns. Why, therefore, was Southampton different? James' hypothesis is that migration, rather than fertility, was the key factor in explaining Southampton's exceptionalism. He tests this hypothesis using various quantitative methods, including surname change and replacement rates among male testators. The failure of the latter to ‘produce sufficient children to replace themselves in Southampton’, according to James, ‘strengthens the view that immigration was essential for the town even to sustain population size in the century or so following 1450, when it grew significantly’ (6). James pays particular attention to the presence of English migrants rather than the better studied alien community within Southampton. Dominated numerically by migrants, Southampton emerges from this analysis as a town enriched socially, culturally and economically by the contribution of outsiders. It is an arresting and attractive picture, but one which further research might qualify.

Immigration, particularly Italian, certainly helped to sustain the cities of the Frankish kingdom of Jerusalem. In ‘The Italian quarters of Frankish Tyre: mapping a medieval city’, J. of Medieval History, 33 (2007), 147–65, Merav Mack uses predominantly textual evidence, largely a thirteenth-century report and inventory by a Venetian official, to study the topography of Tyre and to map out the physical extent and composition of the semi-autonomous Venetian, Genoese and Pisan quarters which constituted the commercial centres of the city. Mack reconstructs, so far as is possible, the layout of Tyre and records the buildings, plots and public amenities such as bakeries, shops, bath-houses and churches in each of the Italian quarters. The churches were dedicated to the patron saints of the three Italian cities from which many of the inhabitants of the Frankish city were drawn, and the ties between the Italian quarters in Tyre and their mother cities were strong. Yet at the same time, there was something distinctive about the urban landscape in this Frankish city. Individual Genoese, Venetians and Pisans did not always live solely within the borders of their quarters, but thirteenth-century Tyre was very much a series of cities within a city. When Marsilio Zorzi drew up his report of the Venetian possessions in Tyre, he complained that the Pisans' church of St Peter encroached upon the Venetian quarter by around five feet. It would be fascinating to know more about how this urban space, formally separated into distinct quarters, alongside a royal area, was experienced by its inhabitants and visitors. How, moreover, did Muslims fit into this complex urban mosaic? This question is addressed in Marwan Nader's article, ‘Urban Muslims, Latin laws, and legal institutions in the kingdom of Jerusalem’, Medieval Encounters, 13 (2007), 243–70, which moves beyond the physical contours of the urban landscape to explore the legal, social, economic and political experiences of the Muslim population in the city of Acre during the thirteenth century. Nader presents a more fluid picture of the internal boundaries within the Frankish cities of the kingdom of Jerusalem, in which city-dwelling Muslims, though they might inhabit a separate quarter of the urban community and though their social and legal status was fundamentally inferior to the incoming settlers, were increasingly assimilated for commercial reasons into Frankish urban society. In particular, he shows how both Muslims and Christians made extensive use of the royal Cour des bourgeois within Acre in cases of debt, credit and contract. Such was the level of integration between the two communities, according to Nader, that the Arab historian, Usāmah ibn Munqidh (d. 1188), deployed the word burjasi – a transliteration of the French bourgeois – to describe those engaged in trade and merchandise, whether Muslim or Christian. It is to be hoped that the work of Mack and Nader will inspire further research on the subjects of urban migration, minorities, identities and acculturation, not just on the frontiers of medieval Europe, but in its heartlands.

1500–1800

The growth of urban population during the final decades of the eighteenth century, particularly in manufacturing towns, has long been regarded as providing important evidence for the impact of industrialization. In ‘English county populations in the later eighteenth century’, Economic History Review, 60 (2007), 35–69, E.A. Wrigley produces revised population statistics for the period, which he claims are more accurate than previous estimates which were based upon the completeness of marriage records of Anglican parish registers following the requirements of Hardwicke's Act (1753). Wrigley contrasts his figures with those of John Rickman, director of the first English census in 1801, who tended to underestimate the growth rates in industrial counties compared to those mainly dependent upon agriculture. He argues that using hundreds as units of description makes possible the construction of regional units with a ‘far greater degree of internal homogeneity’ than possible when employing county units. Although Wrigley's paper does not directly address the question of urban population growth in the period, he does note that many counties included towns or boroughs that are treated separately in the PRA (Parish Register Abstracts) and that growth was often vigorous in towns even when sluggish in rural hinterlands, thus providing support for the traditional emphasis upon urbanization as a motor of industrialization.

The recasting of economic history away from simple functionalism towards more sophisticated cultural and social analyses of economic practices and institutions continues apace as evident from: Sheilagh Ogilvie, ‘“Whatever is, is right”? Economic institutions in pre-industrial Europe’, Economic History Review, 60 (2007), 649–84; Barbara M. Benedict, ‘Encounters with the object: advertisements, time and literary discourse in the early eighteenth-century thing-poem’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 40 (2007), 193–207; T.W. Nechtman, ‘A jewel in the crown? Indian wealth in domestic Britain in the late eighteenth century’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 41 (2007), 71–86; Padhraig Higgins, ‘Consumption, gender and the politics of free trade in eighteenth-century Ireland’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 41 (2007), 87–105; Paul Slack, ‘The politics of consumption and England's happiness in the later seventeenth century’, English Historical Review, 122 (2007), 609–31. In urban history this has traditionally taken the form of relatively straightforward equations between urban size, functions, economic demands and the presence or absence of economic institutions and behaviour, or between urban economies, social and cultural life. Slack demonstrates the political and intellectual dimensions of consumption and the importance of consumer goods as symbols of status, wealth and political or moral worth, or signs of the opposite. He focuses upon two of the first late seventeenth-century writers to extol the benefits of consumption. One of these, Nicholas Barbon, specifically celebrated the social good wrought by urban expansion and improvement in A Discourse Shewing the Great Advantages that New Buildings and the Enlarging of Towns and Cities Do Bring to a Nation (1678). As Slack shows, Barbon emphasized that there was a ‘peculiar happiness’ and advantage in the encouragement given to consumption, the arts and industry, commerce and economic growth by urban construction. In her study of early modern economic institutions, Ogilvie counters the traditional arguments that the existence and character of economic institutions can be explained by their efficiency at serving particular functions by emphasizing the ‘human’ side of economic life. This receives some support from Benedict who seeks to build upon studies of commercialization and consumption by critiquing the notion that there was a clear distinction between subjectivity and objectivity, between human and thing in Georgian society. Following Bourdieu, she emphasizes the degree to which the practices surrounding the use and description of objects and the circumstances in which they appear ‘define those objects themselves’, with the margins between the two appearing ‘hazardously pervious’ in the Georgian period. In a section on advertising and urban space, for instance, Benedict focuses upon advertisements as the most common literary descriptions of things and how they obtruded into everyday life and urban spaces through encouraging a ‘new understanding of physical relations between bodies and objects’.

In ‘The changing role of fairs in the long eighteenth century: evidence from the north midlands’, Economic History Review, 60 (2007), 545–73, Ian Mitchell examines the evidence concerning fairs in the six north midland counties of Derbyshire, Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire, Cheshire, Shropshire and Staffordshire. Whilst it is accepted that this is an unusual regional grouping, it does provide the opportunity to include a good mix of market, county, industrial and agricultural centres. The study reveals that some large towns did not have particularly important fairs, whilst specialist fairs of national significance were still sometimes held in small places. Mitchell offers an overview of the quantifiable data concerning fairs, and their principal roles, whilst the second part of the paper explores the extent to which fairs continued to perform their agricultural functions during the eighteenth century before declining early in the nineteenth century. He concludes that ‘far from being relics of a barbarous age’, fairs were resilient and adaptable with important retail and social functions. Whilst the growth of retail has been regarded as a key feature of the urban renaissance, shops and fairs existed together during the period with fairs often providing important business for shopkeepers.

As we have seen in these reviews over the years the Habermasean concept of the public sphere has been applied to early modern public and semi-public urban places in Europe and North America. Attempts have recently been made to use the concept to examine the development of early modern public culture in non-European towns. In ‘Coffeehouses: rethinking the public and private in early modern Istanbul’, Journal of Urban History, 33 (2007), 965–86, Selma Akyazici Ozkocak employs Habermas's ‘core concept’ of the public sphere as an analytical tool ‘to understand how far the coffee houses contributed to the formation of the cultural public sphere in the early modern Ottoman context’. The analysis provides an important opportunity for comparison with the more studied coffee houses of Britain and Europe, although as a boundary or bridge between Europe and Asia, Istanbul should not be defined as non-European. Moving beyond recent analyses of the state's attitude towards the coffee houses and questions of policing and control, Ozkocak examines them as a distinctively urban public space for the ‘production of people's collective, social, and cultural experience’. Coffee imported into Europe and served in seventeenth-century English coffee houses, for instance, was, of course, regarded as a Turkish drink and the coffee-house model was therefore, in many ways, originally a Turkish phenomenon, and it is significant that, as in post-Restoration London, the earliest examples were established in centres of international trade. From the evidence of trade directories, artistic representations and other sources, Ozkocak is able to map how the distribution of coffee houses across the crowded and growing city formed an alternative social arena to the mosque for verbal communications between private citizens, especially bachelors and poorer males, as women were excluded. It seems likely, however, that for a variety of reasons Istanbul was hardly typical of Ottoman society as a whole, and therefore coffee houses probably did not help in the development of the public sphere to the same degree in other parts of the empire.

Other aspects of early modern urban sociability are explored in Phil Withington, ‘Company and sociability in early modern England’, Social History, 32 (2007), 297–307, and Christian Kuhn in ‘Urban laughter as a “counter-public” sphere in Augsburg: the case of the city mayor, Jakob Herbrot (1490/95–1564)’, International Review of Social History, 52 (2007), supplement, 77–93. According to Withington, the notion of company – much of it urban-centred – forms a useful category of analysis for early modern society. Early modern company encompassed multiple forms of social interaction and varied in terms of rules, and conventions as well as the politics of participation, function and meaning. In Kuhn's view, ‘reading and signing provided a forceful communicative structure in semi-literate urban society’ and a popular media of protest. His study of Augsburg, the largest city in Reformation Germany, and the series of ballads, satires, polemics and other written pieces that were generated there, demonstrates the role of ‘urban laughter in the public sphere’. Kuhn suggests that ‘humour was of essential importance to the public’ in early modern towns, facilitating the development of a ‘counter-public in the sense of an independent political arbiter’.

On the other hand, some groups managed to remain aloof from involvement in everyday urban society and maintain their distinctive identities. The position and perception of immigrants in early modern urban society is addressed by Susanne Lachenicht in ‘Huguenot immigrants and the formation of national identities, 1548–1787’, Historical Journal, 50 (2007), 309–32. Lachenicht contends that although the immigration of Huguenots was portrayed in subsequent national histories as having been encouraged by the congruity between their values and those of host societies centred upon the virtues of frugality and industry, the reality was that such groups tended to remain aloof from the cultures into which they had moved. This is evident in the formation of a distinctive Protestant Huguenot identity in overwhelmingly Catholic early modern France, where the Huguenots asserted themselves as a ‘self confident’ and even avowedly superior minority, but in fact they were only one of a number of immigrant groups with distinctive identities.

The character and incidences of urban crime and its reporting feature in Esther Snell, ‘Discourses of criminality in the eighteenth-century press: the presentation of crime in the Kentish Post’, Continuity and Change, 22 (2007), 13–47, and Peter King, ‘Newspaper reporting and attitudes to crime and justice in late-eighteenth century and early nineteenth-century London’, Continuity and Change, 22 (2007), 73–112, whilst Ritta Laitinen in ‘Night time street fighting and the meaning of place: a homicide in a seventeenth-century Swedish provincial town’, Journal of Urban History, 33 (2007), 602–18, emphasizes the special quality of urban street spaces which shaped both ritualistic and emotionally driven ‘criminal’ behaviour. Whilst, as King demonstrates, newspaper reporting of crime was central to its popular interpretation, particularly in the metropolis, Snell emphasizes that at the provincial level readership was more varied. She considers that the average reader of the Kentish Post would have been from the urban middling and upper classes. Newspapers were ‘more readily available in towns where they incurred less postage through having to be delivered by newsmen, and literacy rates were higher. It is also significant that the Kentish Post was subtitled the ‘Canterbury Newsletter’, as Snell's study of crime reporting in the newspaper demonstrates that much of the reporting which was not taken from London newspapers was centred upon the county town and featured in a ‘Canterbury’ section.

Recent re-interpretations of colonial and post-colonial history are explored in a collection of stimulating essays in The William and Mary Quarterly, 64 (2007), which provide much additional information for urban historians. These include: Jack P. Greene, ‘Colonial history and national history: reflections on a continuing problem’, 235–50; David Armitage, ‘From colonial history to post-colonial history: a turn too far?’, 251–4; Willie Graham et al., ‘Adaptation and innovation: archaeological and architectural perspectives on the seventeenth-century Chesapeake’, 451–524; Peter Thompson, ‘Inventive localism in the seventeenth century’, 525–48; and Carole Shammas, ‘The housing stock of the early United States: refinement meets migration’, 549–90. Greene and Armitage underscore the recent emphasis upon continuities between colonial and post-colonial history in North America which has included attention to previously neglected groups such as women, native Americans, children and African Americans. They, and Thompson, emphasize the degree to which each English colony was becoming a state with its own ‘distinctive, functional and authoritative polity’ within individual systems of law and constitutions. The fascinating analysis of the archaeology and construction of settlements at Jamestown and associated colonies conducted by Graham et al. demonstrates how European models and technology were adapted to American conditions. These settlements are now known to be much better preserved beneath the surface than had been previously imagined. Finally, Shammas' detailed examination of housing stock in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries emphasizes the major variations that occurred, presenting a much more complex picture than mere progressive development towards European – and particularly British – models. Many American colonial towns, for instance, were re-built in a manner associated with the English urban renaissance during the eighteenth century and exhibited traits of refinement in their brick-built structures, as the many surviving buildings in Massachusetts demonstrate. However, there was also considerable resistance, particularly in rural and newly settled areas, where other types of dwelling – notably log cabins – proved highly durable and adaptable to local needs.

The greater emphasis upon continuity between colonial and post-colonial periods, centred upon urban society and culture, is also evident in Eric Tagliacozzo, ‘An urban ocean: notes on the historical evolution of coastal cities in greater southeast Asia’, Journal of Urban History, 33 (2007), 911–32. Here Tagliacozzo emphasizes the importance of the non-western city as a ‘discrete unit of enormous importance’, vital to the development of the modern world economy. However, he contends that the burgeoning new mega-cities of south-east Asia, which have ‘always existed on a lifeblood of international commerce’, were in fact the product of centuries of demographic evolution. It is therefore necessary to examine the special pattern of these cities' development, which allows us to gain an insight into future patterns of urban growth. It is only in the ‘distant and colonial past’, he suggests, ‘that we can sift for geographical clues’ for future development. Manila, for instance, continued to serve as the economic and political centre of the Philippines through the Spanish and American colonial periods, whilst Jakarta and Rangoon served similar functions for the Dutch and British empires respectively, just as Hong Kong did from the nineteenth century.

Turning to early modern urban government and politics, questions concerning office holding and social stability are explored in Joachim Eibach, ‘Burghers or town council: who was responsible for urban stability in early modern German towns?’, Urban History, 34 (2007), 14–26, and Henrik Langeluddecke, ‘“The poorest and sympleste sorte of people”? The selection of parish officers during the personal rule of Charles I’, Historical Research, 80 (2007), 225–60. Langeluddecke emphasizes the considerable differences between local government in England and in continental countries where professional civil servants were being introduced. English local government, in contrast, relied upon male volunteers from counties and communities, whilst local gentry and aristocracy served as JPs, lords and deputy lord lieutenants, sheriffs, and in local militias. Local government in villages in towns relied upon ‘ordinary men’ (and occasionally female householders) who served as constables, churchwardens and overseers of the poor and whose selection was sanctioned by local custom. Churchwarden's accounts, vestry minute books, overseer's accounts and audit books reveal that, despite a considerable increase in the burden of work during the 1630s resulting from the reform projects of Charles I, many of the urban and village elites continued to serve willingly as parish officers, not least because office holding allowed them some licence to temper unpalatable royal dictats for their own and their communities' benefit. Moreover, as the author admits, parish officers also served ‘because they stoically accepted that it was their turn’ and enjoyed the job and status that went with it, with everyday work often looking very different in practice to the activities specified in statutes and administrative manuals.

The changing nature of conflict resolution in German towns is explored by Eibach who contrasts struggles between burghers in late medieval towns with the way that the management of dispute was transferred to the authority of town councils. At Frankfurt am Main, for instance, criminal court records demonstrate that although councils and courts increasingly intervened to settle disputes, burghers remained loyal to the notion of formal and informal duties of peacekeeping rituals.

The massive expansion of gender and women's history has had major implication for urban history even where the study of urban life has not been the primary focus, and it has become abundantly clear that towns provided opportunities for some women to thrive within, and sometimes challenge, patriarchal society. The importance of the role played by women in the early modern economy, particularly the urban economy, continues to be elaborated: Judith M. Spicksley, ‘“Fly with a duck in thy mouth”: single women as sources of credit in seventeenth-century England’, Social History, 32 (2007), 187–207; Gayle K. Brunelle, ‘Policing the monopolising women of early-modern Nantes’, Journal of Women's History, 19 (2007), 10–35; Amy Louise Erickson, ‘Possession – and the other one tenth of the law: assessing women's ownership and economic roles in early-modern England’, Women's History Review, 16 (2007), 369–85; Carmel Biggs, ‘Women, kinship and inheritance: Northamptonshire, 1643–1709’, Journal of Family History, 32 (2007), 107–32; Chloe Wigston Smith, ‘“Calico madness”: servants, consumption and the calico crisis’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 31 (2007), 29–55. Brunelle contends that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century lower-working-class women were the mainstay of trade in towns as street vendors, shopkeepers and innkeepers despite opposition from urban authorities. Such a role could also be recognized by early modern contemporaries, as Smith demonstrates. She shows how even female servants could be regarded as important consumers, even if not arbiters of taste. Pamphleteers opposed their supposed penchant for calico which was assumed to have had a deleterious effect on certain branches of the textile industry, particularly the sale of woollens. Erickson further explores the sources for female property ownership and economic roles, and compares the legal situation of English women with the rest of Europe. Biggs utilizes probate documents to compare the bequests of male and female testators, concluding that there were not many significant differences, although women making a will seem to have been more likely to make special provision for other female members of the family than their male counterparts.

The twentieth anniversary of the publication of Davidoff and Hall's seminal work on the English middle class, the ‘most influential work in British gender history’, and a book that has had a profound impact upon urban historians, provides an opportunity for Kathryn Gleadle to reassess its impact in ‘Revisiting Family Fortunes: reflections on the twentieth anniversary of the publication of L. Davidoff and C. Hall (1987) Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (London: Hutchinson)’, Women's History Review, 16 (2007), 773–82. In Gleadle's view, the book was pioneering in exploring the female contribution to business in both urban and rural areas, although as recent research has revealed, this could move beyond the family-centred ambit emphasized by the authors. More recent work on female involvement in the urban public sphere has suggested that women were able to get involved in public cultural and especially some forms of political activity. In ‘The female Cicero: young women's oratory and gendered public participation in the early American Republic’, Gender and History, 19 (2007), 260–83, Carol Eastmann emphasizes how elite urban girls in private boarding academies had greater access to oratorical education than their rural counterparts, and consequently enjoyed greater privileges and everyday opportunities to embody them. She does, however, warn that the sources are biased towards urban centres. This is also evident in Grace E. Coolidge, ‘“A vile and abject woman”: noble mistresses, legal power and the family in early-modern Spain’, Journal of Family History, 32 (2007), 195–214. Coolidge contends that although constrained within a thoroughly patriarchal system, as aspirants to aristocratic family life noble mistresses might still utilize the legal system to claim a stake in inheritances and use their seemingly ambiguous social and moral position for advantage. More active female interventions in traditional male worlds are evident in the special issue on the subject of European History Quarterly, 37 (2007), entitled ‘Gender, war and the nation in the period of the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars’ edited by Katherine Aaslestand, Karen Hagemann and Judith Miller which suggest that times of political turbulence, particularly in urban contexts, provided new opportunities for female engagement in the political realm. This includes Hagemann, ‘“Heroic virgins” and “bellicose Amazons”: armed women, the gender order and the German public during and after the Anti-Napoleonic wars’, 507–27, and David Hopkin, ‘Sieges, seduction and sacrifice in revolutionary war: the “Virgins of Verdun”, 1792’, 528–47. During the French wars women publicly claimed for the first time the right to carry weapons and fight collectively although they faced a ‘complex and ambivalent public response’. Hopkin emphasizes how many women found themselves ‘on the cusp between an old regime culture of war’, and its revolutionary replacement. As the episode of the French virgins who offered sugared almonds to the king of Prussia and his army at Verdun demonstrates, the experience of war allowed them to engage in public politics.

The assumption of female inferiority and the relative weakness of women's legal position in patriarchal cultures is evident from continuing government interference in family life in some states, as Aurelio Espinosa argues in ‘Families and marriage in absolutist Spain: the elopement of Manrique de Lara and Luisa de Acunya y Portugal’, Journal of Family History, 32 (2007), 3–20. The pattern is even more clearly demonstrated when domestic violence and the – frequently studied – prosecutions for witchcraft are considered. In this respect, towns could serve as foci for the ritual condemnation of ‘outsiders’, whilst the relative anonymity of urban living provided a cloak for abuse rather than an opportunity for female empowerment. In ‘Witchcraft, politics, and memory in seventeenth-century England’, Historical Journal, 50 (2007), 209–308, for instance, Malcolm Gaskill weaves together two episodes separated by a generation. The initial event was the trial in 1653 of Anne Bodenham, an elderly cunning woman in Salisbury, who found herself embroiled in a feud in a gentry household that was exacerbated by political divisions within the city. Her arrest and examination evoked painful memories of an earlier scandal, the fateful association of the duke of Buckingham with Dr John Lambe, a sorcerer whom Bodenham claimed to have served in the 1620s. These tales, in turn, echoed an even older awareness of the perils of the diabolic, most prominently the pact of Dr Faustus. Together these narrative strands demonstrate how feelings of public disgust at Stuart corruption were revived in the commonwealth era and used as a polemical device by puritan activists who preached in towns and distributed broadsheets and pamphlets. Both stories are rich in gossip, rumour, rhymes, libels, anonymous notes and the practical uses of printed works, not to mention spells and curses, visions and dreams. As such, this article also shows just how complex a witch-trial could be, and serves as a reminder of the sophistication, ingenuity and ebullience of seventeenth-century communications and consciousness across the social order. The wider question of the abuse suffered by women and others in towns is explored by Greg T. Smith, ‘Expanding the compass of domestic violence in the Hanoverian metropolis’, Journal of Social History, 18 (2007), 31–54, which examines marital violence, the mistreatment of apprentices and servants. Smith shows how many sources are available, especially concerning elites, middling sorts and domestic violence that resulted in court proceedings; however, there is much less concerning the poor, servants, women and children against whom most domestic violence, of course, would have been directed.

Post-1800

In an era when one of the key measures of a city's economic success seems to be the size of its ‘carbon footprint’ it is perhaps not surprising to find a prominent place in the periodical literature on modern urban history in 2007 occupied by urban environmental history. The J. of Urban History devotes a special issue to the subject of European urban environmental history, 33 (2007). In the introductory article (691–701), the guest editors, Geneviève Massard-Guilbaud and Peter Thorsheim, acknowledge the lead of North American historians in this field, but argue that although their research has influenced the development of the discipline among Europeanists, other factors have also shaped their rather different approaches. The case studies featured in the special issue are confined to western European cities in the main but, as the editors' introductory survey article points out, research on urban environmental history by European historians is not yet abundant. The environmental history popular in Scandinavia, Germany, the United Kingdom and elsewhere has not, they argue, developed a strong urban dimension. Instead, the history of technology and the impact of pollution have provided entry points into research on environmental urban history for some European scholars and these influences can be seen in some of the contributions to this volume.

Charles Closemann's article on ‘Chaos and contamination. Water pollution and economic upheaval in Hamburg, 1919–1923’ (828–47), investigates the problems faced by municipal authorities charged with the task of maintaining water quality in the river Elbe during the economic upheavals of the early 1920s. While growth in manufacturing, commercial trade and shipping increased pollutants, a budget deficit severely curtailed the funds available to the municipality to inspect and treat the city's water supply. Peter Payer focuses on a different kind of pollution – that of noise – in his study of Vienna, 1870–1914 (773–93). He identifies a range of noise abatement strategies in these years which, he argues, reflected dominant middle-class concepts of how urban space should be regulated. A comparative study of gas lighting in Paris and London by Jean-Baptiste Fressoz (729–55) takes a more technological approach. As a new technology occupying a prominent place in the major social spaces of these two cities, gas lighting brought a level of technological risk into the urban environment. Fressoz argues that, rather than a new feature of postmodern society, awareness of risk and the need to balance it against the benefits of the innovation was an established part of nineteenth-century attitudes towards new technologies. The guest editors of this special issue acknowledge that the selection of articles presented amounts to ‘a sampling’ rather than a full representation of current research in European urban environmental history. The sense is that there may be more to come from this growing field of enquiry.

Interest in water has occupied not only environmental urban historians, but also those researching aspects of municipal government and urban culture. Alana Boland's study of water supply in urban China notes the development, from the mid-1990s, of premium water supplies for select urban areas, outside the remit of the municipality. ‘The trickle-down effect: ideology and the development of premium water networks in China's cities’, International J. of Urban and Regional Research, 31 (2007), 21–40, is a study of the development of a ‘dual water supply model’ in urban China which, Boland suggests, was well suited to the brand of economic liberalism developing in China's cities in the period. From the mid-1990s, select urban areas began to bypass municipal supplies and establish their own, premium networks. In contrast, Owen Roberts' contribution to Continuity and Change, 22 (2007) is a very different study of municipal attitudes towards water supply. In ‘Waterworks and commemoration: purity, rurality and civic identity in Britain, 1880–1921’ (305–25), he explores the ceremonies and commemorations associated with grand Victorian waterworks schemes in the latter decades of the nineteenth century. The inauguration of ambitious projects like the Vyrnwy reservoir and Elan Valley schemes, promoted by Liverpool and Birmingham respectively, generated a wealth of comment in the provincial press and also celebratory volumes commissioned by city leaders to mark their achievements. These materials provide Roberts with his evidence and he argues that the particular form of celebration organized by the different municipalities, reflected the political debate attached to these contentious and costly enterprises, but also helped promote a sense of pride and civic unity on their completion.

If waterworks schemes marked the height of ambition for nineteenth-century municipalities in their efforts to improve public health, in the inter-war years, local authorities delivered their own agendas for health provision with varied success. As part of a wider, Wellcome Trust-funded project on variations in health services in the pre-NHS era, Becky Taylor, John Stewart and Martin Powell examine the relationship between four county boroughs (one in Wales and three in England) and their respective government agencies, the Welsh Board of Health and the Ministry of Health, English Historical Rev., 122 (2007), 397–426. Their research reveals a complex picture of provision in which the municipalities displayed both a resistance to central interference in their public health plans, and a readiness to embrace it where this could bring added prestige and circumvent local disagreements. The result is an important contribution to our understanding of regional diversity in municipal health services prior to the establishment of the NHS.

Taylor, Stewart and Powell point out that the years immediately preceding the establishment of the NHS have to some extent been overshadowed in medical history as historians paid more attention to developments after 1945. In a similar way, the history of the inter-war period has had to contend for attention. This year, however, the 1918–45 era provides the setting for a number of journal articles dealing with Britain's larger cities and, in particular, their cultural underworlds. Andrew Davies' ‘The Scottish Chicago? From ‘hooligans’ to ‘gangsters’ in inter-war Glasgow’ examines the ‘rhetorical twinning’ of Glasgow with Chicago by journalists reporting on the former city's growing gang problem in the late 1920s and early 1930s, Cultural and Social History, 4 (2007), 511–27. A number of British cities attracted comparisons with American metropolises, not least late nineteenth-century Cardiff, which was also likened to Chicago, an analogy which was meant to say something about the pace of its urban expansion. In the case of Glasgow, contemporaries based their comparisons on the Chicago of Al Capone, which at once delighted the members of the Glasgow gangs and horrified the city's authorities. By employing these American reference points to report the development of gang culture in the city, journalists, the police and the judiciary were, according to Davies, replacing older notions of hooliganism with a new concept of the gangster as representative of the criminal underworld.

The cultural underworlds and the way in which they were regulated and policed is a theme pursued by a number of historians of modern cities in 2007. Elizabeth J. Remick's focus is the Chinese city of Kunming in the early twentieth century, where the police introduced innovative strategies for the control of prostitution, Modern China, 33 (2007), 423–61. In the face of considerable opposition, an attempt was made to bring prostitution under the control of local state bureaucracy through the establishment of police-managed brothels or jiyuan, where the activities of prostitutes could be supervised and controlled. The attitudes of the authorities towards prostitution in London in the inter-war period occupies the attention of two other historians. Stefan Slater's study of ‘Pimps, police and filles de joie: foreign prostitution in interwar London’, London J., 32 (2007), 53–74, draws on records from the Metropolitan Police Historical Collection to trace the history of female foreign prostitution in the city. Perceptions of the Soho district and the way public sexuality was policed there were shaped in part, according to Slater, by the notion that the problem of prostitution and vice in general was a foreign one. Matt Houlbrook's focus is on male illicit sexuality in the 1920s as symbolized by the humble powder puff, ‘“The man with the powder puff” in interwar London’, Historical J., 50 (2007), 145–71. This and other cosmetic items were deployed in court by the Metropolitan Police as evidence in cases of sexual soliciting in London – a strategy which the author suggests can only be understood in the context of the growth of consumer beauty culture in the city in the inter-war period.

Sexuality in London is explored in a slightly later period by Frank Mort in Social History, 32 (2007), 27–53. His study of ‘Striptease: the erotic female body and live sexual entertainment in mid-twentieth-century London’ again utilizes the records of the Metropolitan Police to explore the range of undercover surveillance activities undertaken by officers from the 1930s onwards in an attempt to regulate sexual behaviour in the metropolis. Mort's study, as well as adopting a police perspective on the subject, also looks at London's sex industry from the point of view of the providers of sexual entertainment by using the archives of two major performance venues in Soho, the Raymond Revubar and the Windmill Theatre. (The story of the latter is perhaps more widely known thanks to its portrayal in the 2005 feature film, Mrs Henderson Presents.) The Windmill, Mort points out, has an excellently preserved theatre archive and, using programmes, newspaper reports and the memoirs of those involved in the management of the two venues from the 1930s to the 1950s, he is able to present an illustrated analysis of the development of erotic entertainment in London. The result is a fascinating insight into the world of erotic theatre from the point of view of the providers. The consumers of this industry, with the exception of the plainclothes policemen who occasionally mingled with the audiences to carry out surveillance work, presumably find little voice in the written sources and, without the use of oral testimony, it seems likely that they will remain a more obscure part of the story.

Among London's more respectable cultural spaces were the art galleries which form the subject of Pamela Fletcher's study, ‘Creating the French Gallery: Ernest Gambart and the rise of the commercial art gallery in Mid-Victorian London’, in the electronic journal of visual culture, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, 6 (2007). Belgian-born Gambart, who arrived in London in the 1840s was, according to Fletcher, one of a group of art entrepreneurs active in mid-nineteenth-century London who were responsible for developing ‘a new kind of space for the exhibition and the sale of art – the modern commercial art gallery’. Gambart's ‘French Gallery’, established in Pall Mall by the mid-1850s, was one of the first commercial premises for the display and sale of art in the city and helped establish London's reputation in the second half of the nineteenth century at the centre of Europe's commercial art market. Its opening also symbolized an important point of transition, according to Fletcher, between the dominance of the Academy over the London art scene in the early decades of the nineteenth century, and flourishing gallery system that prevailed by 1900.

There is a rather different Franco-British dimension to Gavin Daly's study of smuggling in Historical J., 50 (2007), 333–52. An authority on the commerce and maritime trade of Napoleonic France, Daly's attention here is focused on the freedom enjoyed by English smugglers in the final years of the Napoleonic Wars, when the Napoleonic state, he suggests, ‘officially sanctioned and supported the smugglers, using them as a weapon of war against Britain and to boost domestic French industry’. The interest for urban historians lies in the role played by two French ports, Dunkirk and Gravelines, in this illicit exchange. To such an extent was Gravelines identified with the cross-Channel trade in contraband cargoes, that a special compound was developed for the landing and collecting of smuggled goods which became known as the ‘ville des Smoglers’. The activity of this smuggling hub on the French coast is investigated by Daly using police and customs records from both sides of the Channel and seen as a sign of the vibrancy of English smuggling in the early decades of the nineteenth century.

Simon Kitson also makes fruitful use of French police records in his study of the Marseille police in the 1930s, European History Quarterly, 31 (2007), 81–108. The history of policing in Marseille from 1936 to 1945 was the subject of Kitson's doctoral thesis. Here he focuses his analysis on the politics of the Marseille police during the Popular Front and his article raises some interesting questions about the peculiarities of place. Not only was Marseille's status as a major provincial port with a social and demographic character heavily influenced by Corsican, Spanish and Italian immigration arguably unique, it also had an unusual blend of local and national organization in its policing structures. While acknowledging the need for more studies of provincial French policing, Kitson concludes that police in Marseille during the Popular Front period were ‘generally opposed to fascism’, although it is his broader reflection on the issue of ‘how representative a study of the Marseille police is of wider trends in policing at the time’ that will no doubt resonate more widely among urban historians seeking to extrapolate findings based on single-location case studies into a wider analytical context.

The exploration of race and ethnicity in the modern city remains a major focus for historical research in a number of different geographical contexts this year. The issue of ethnic segregation in cities is addressed by Liora Bigon in a study of the Lagos steam tramway project and British colonial town planning in early twentieth-century Nigeria, J. of Historical Geography, 33 (2007), 596–618. Using contemporary plans, Bigon argues that the tramway reinforced informal patterns of residential segregation in Lagos, which traditionally demarcated the residential areas occupied by locals and expatriates. The laying of the tracks and the development of the tramway's associated facilities and services created physical and social separators in the city between the indigenous and settler populations. Similar themes are addressed in the J. of Urban History, 33 (2007) which devotes a ‘special section’ to the investigation of ‘Black Milwaukee’ to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Joe Trotter's, Black Milwaukee: The Making of an Industrial Proletariat, 1912–45. Roger Biles (539–43) and the other article authors in this special section of the journal examine the influence of Trotter's work as the first to challenge ‘ghetto synthesis’ as a way of understanding the marginalization and social exclusion of ethnic minority communities in American cities in the mid-twentieth century. Trotter shifted the analysis away from viewing the ethnic minority communities as segregated from their increasingly hostile white neighbours, and instead looked at the role of class and, in particular, conflict between labour and capital, in shaping their experience of urban life.

A number of other articles published in 2007 also address this theme of race intersecting with other identities in urban life. Jeffrey Vacante, writing in the Canadian Historical Rev., 88 (2007), 413–38, examines the influence of racial identity on ideas of manhood in early twentieth-century Quebec. According to Vacante, changes in female roles in the urban industrial environment of Quebec in the 1920s and 1930s threatened traditional ideas of masculinity and led men to reassess their racial identity as something that was culturally rather than biologically defined. Enocent Msindo is also interested in the relationship between ethnic and other identities in a modern urban environment. His study of ‘Ethnicity and nationalism in urban colonial Zimbabwe: Bulawayo, 1950 to 1963’, J. of African History, 48 (2007), 267–90, suggests that political commentators in Zimbabwe have too often failed to distinguish ethnicity from tribalism and viewed it as something which has retarded the development of African nationalism. Bulawayo, argues Msindo, is a useful location in which to test this idea. A cosmopolitan centre and a communications hub with a sophisticated infrastructure of government, trade union and political associations, the strength of identity among the various ethnic groups in the town provided an important base on which nationalism could flourish. In particular, he suggests that ‘ethnicity provided precolonial heroes for nationalists, platforms for political mobilization, and monuments that nationalists were able to turn into national symbols’ and concludes that ethnic identity worked with, rather than against, nationalism in the period before the split in the leadership of Zimbabwean nationalism in 1963.

Matt Clement's study, ‘Bristol: civilising the inner city’, in Race and Class, 48 (2007), 97–114, examines St Paul's, St Jude's and Easton, three of Bristol's most deprived districts. It is a contemporary study of inner-city regeneration but likely to be of interest to urban historians because of the way it views the development of these areas, populated by poor white and ethnic minority communities, in a long historical context of attitudes towards race in the city. From the role of the slave trade in generating wealth in eighteenth-century Bristol, to the St Paul's riot in 1980 and the more recent climate of ‘Islamophobia’, Clement argues that a sense of distrust in the authorities has developed among the residents of deprived areas targeted for regeneration. The historical problems unearthed in the process of urban regeneration projects is also the subject of Deborah Talbot and Martina Böse's contemporary study of nightlife in Manchester and London, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 30 (2007), 95–118. They attribute the exclusion of the music, residential and cultural spaces of the black community from recent efforts to civilize and regenerate nightlife in their two study cities, to the historical association of black youth and their night-time activities with criminality and other social problems.

The attitudes of planners towards cities and their influence over the development of the urban environment in a number of different locations have been explored by historical geographers in 2007. For Frederico Caprotti the focus is on fascist urban planning in 1930s Italy, J. of Historical Geography, 33 (2007), 651–79. The Pontine Marshes, south of Rome, were effectively colonized in this period as part of the regime's grand project to create urban utopias in Italy's rural interior. As well as addressing the planning, architecture and design of new cities like Sabaudia, Caprotti examines the demographic dimension of the fascist New Towns project, which saw statistical and sociological analysis deployed to hand-pick families to occupy the new urban spaces. This was town planning on a grand scale, with every detail of urban life from external architectural features to, apparently, the dimensions of the mosquito nets in the bedrooms of houses located on the former marsh attended to. Elsewhere in the journal, historical geographers examine rather less centralized and all-encompassing examples of urban planning. In nineteenth-century Kentucky, where a constitutional change in 1850 led to the withdrawal of the state from involvement in turnpike road projects, local people took the lead and delivered their own road networks. Karl Raitz and Nancy O'Malley investigate the case of a neighbourhood road-building project in Bourbon County, J. of Historical Geography 33 (2007), 1–23. Led by a farmer, the residents planned and managed every stage of the building of a five-mile turnpike, from the route survey to the arranging of access rights, the hire of labour and the collection of tolls on the finished road.

In the same issue, Renia Ehrenfeucht and Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris draw our attention to the public spaces on the side of the road, and how these were constructed, defined and managed by municipal authorities and urban residents alike (104–24). Street improvements in late nineteenth-century Los Angeles included the construction of hundreds of miles of ‘sidewalks’. These multi-functional public spaces were designed to aid the movement of pedestrians around the city but they also provided venues for a range of commercial, political and communal activities. This article traces the increasing regulation of the sidewalk in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the attempts of municipal authorities to balance the needs of its varied users, from property owners to traders and campaign groups, as well as the pedestrian. There are echoes of this attention to the creation and regulation of public spaces in cities elsewhere in the periodical literature, notably in John Friedmann's ‘Reflections on place and place-making in the cities of China’, International J. of Urban and Regional Research, 31 (2007), 257–79. Friedmann's study of the small urban places of Imperial China through to the People's Republic does not specifically focus on ‘sidewalks’ as examples, but his idea of small spaces where life is contested, negotiated and subject to regulation, rather than just projected into public view, has much in common with the Los Angeles study.

Urban planning interests are also amply catered for, as usual, in the 2007 issues of Planning Perspectives. In a year which sees the editorial baton pass from Steven V. Ward to Helen Meller, a range of studies focusing on European towns and cities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is served up. Bernard Marchand's and Joëlle Salomon Cavin's study of two pioneers of planning in France and Switzerland in the middle of the twentieth century reveals that a strong anti-urban ethos influenced their work, Planning Perspectives, 22 (2007), 29–53. Jean-François Gravier and Armin Meili came from similar social and political backgrounds in France and Switzerland and developed a critical view of cities as damaging to both the health and morals of their inhabitants. Despite this, they each became active in the planning policies of their respective countries in the 1940s. The influence of overarching perspectives in shaping planning policy in also the subject of a study of Cardiff by Huw Thomas and Simon Coop, Planning Perspectives, 22 (2007), 167–93. This article explores the influence that particular planning doctrines could have on the development of the urban landscape. Their article traces the growth of Cardiff from the late Victorian period when the city emerged as the premier urban centre in Wales, but they suggest that it was not until the 1960s, by which time Cardiff had gained official status as the Welsh capital, that any coherent vision of the city begin to appear in planning documents. From this point on, however, they argue that a view of Cardiff as a planning area in which a clear doctrine should be implemented has proved a resilient and lasting feature of planning policy in the city. Another of the United Kingdom's capitals, Edinburgh, is the focus for a study by Robert Morris, who looks at the Victorian re-modelling of the city's castle and the role which this played in Edinburgh's nineteenth-century identity as a medieval historic city, Planning Perspectives, 22 (2007), 55–78. Capitalist William Nelson, historian David Wilson and soldier James Gore-Booth each brought to the re-development project knowledge of competing contemporary ideas of preservation and restoration. The approach they took to the castle owed more, argues Morris, to the latter, restorative method, and resulted in an enduring symbol of the city's identity as well as marking a shift in local attitudes towards the city's old buildings.

Another historic British city, Liverpool, celebrates its eight hundredth anniversary in 2007 and, fittingly, historians have turned their attention to analysing its cosmopolitan identity in the modern era. In Global Networks, 7 (2007), 412–29, Tim Bunnell traces the city's role as a major seaport and, in particular its maritime links with south-east Asia which gave rise to the development of a community of Malay seafarers in the city. Using oral interviews, Bunnell examines changes in the relationship of this migrant community with Malaysia and Singapore and how this evolved over the course of their lifetimes. He finds that ‘transnational connections are being forged in the post-maritime stages’ of their lives, in the community institutions of Toxteth where their memories and emotional attachments are most readily expressed. The starting point for John Belchem's analysis, ‘Liverpool: world city’, History Today, 57 (2007), 48–55, is similar to the global perspective adopted by Tim Bunnell. Belchem explores the place of cosmopolitanism in the identity of Liverpool during its glory days as a port in the late nineteenth century. Compared to the textile towns of the English north-west, and indeed to many other provincial British cities, Liverpool's culture was outward-looking, inclusive and diverse. It was this history of Liverpool as a ‘world city’ which, says Belchem, led the promoters of the successful European Capital of Culture 2008 campaign to adopt ‘The world in one city’ as their distinctive marketing tag. But a history of racial tension in twentieth-century Liverpool has rendered the city a much less attractive destination for new commonwealth migrants since 1945 and Belchem claims, on the basis of the 2001 census, that ‘in a startling historical reversal’, it is now one of Britain's least ethnically diverse cities.

Belchem's study of Liverpool raises interesting questions about the correlation between a city's public identity, as projected and communicated for marketing and promotional purposes, and its character and identity as experienced by those who inhabit it from one generation to the next. New technologies now enable city promoters to project urban images far and wide, and the implications of this for one group of cities – the capitals of central and eastern Europe – forms the subject of a study by Laura Kolbe in Planning Perspectives, 22 (2007), 79–111. Her survey of the municipal web pages of central and eastern European capitals analyses the use of images from symbolic buildings to city topography and maps to represent these cities to a wider audience. Kolbe detects a uniform ‘westernization’ in the choice of representative materials although she concludes that what internet resources reveal most about city identity is its dynamism. The selection and presentation of the urban image is constantly subject to alteration to suit new audiences and meet new agendas. What this suggests, rather like Belchem's study of Liverpool, is that the projected face of the city for wider public consumption might not always be recognizable to the inhabitants of the place, and that the work of the modern urban historian is sometimes to bridge the gap between public perception and historical experience of place.