The design and regulation of urban space is contentious and unpredictable, with enormous implications for broader social, economic, and political relations. This insight, now commonplace among historians of the twentieth-century city, is increasingly being applied in the work of their Gilded Age and antebellum counterparts (Elaine Lewinnek, The Working Man's Reward: Chicago's Early Suburbs and the Roots of American Sprawl [2014]; Noam Maggor, Brahmin Capitalism: Frontiers of Wealth and Populism in America's First Gilded Age [2017]). Andrew Heath's In Union There Is Strength: Philadelphia in the Age of Urban Consolidation is the latest and most ambitious work to take up the “spatial turn” in this way, providing a new narrative of nineteenth-century urban growth by linking party formation, booster economics, settler colonialism, and white homeownership together around the process of place-building. In doing so, it suggests both the promise and the limitations of examining one century's patterns of urbanization with the concepts and vocabulary of another's.

Heath organizes his book around the struggle for, and consequences of, Philadelphia's amalgamation with its surrounding territories in 1854. He begins by exploring the fractious social and political geography of preconsolidated Philadelphia and how these very tensions provoked a shared interest among the combatants in expanding the city's municipal boundaries. Downtown boosters promoted amalgamation as a means of expanding the city's tax base and debt-accruing power in order to acquire larger commercial and transportation facilities. Protestant reformers aligned with the Whig Party saw amalgamation as necessary for bringing the suburban working class under their centralized supervision. Artisans saw expansion as an opportunity to improve their living and financial conditions through homeownership.

Many of these visions of a consolidated metropolis were in conflict: fiscal conservatives disagreed with boosters over the use of debt as a means of financing public improvements, and suburban legislators jostled with central-city representatives over how much autonomy they would enjoy under the new city's charter. By the late 1850s, however, the nascent Republican Party provided an institutional and ideological vehicle for aligning boosterism, reform, and white property ownership across the metropolitan landscape. Heath draws fascinating parallels between this party's policies promoting the settler colonization of the American West, the war to “save” the Union, and suburban expansion; future historians will surely build on his work to draw similar connections between urban politics and policies nominally lodged at the “national” or “international” scale.

Nonetheless, the centrifugal forces unleashed by consolidation helped undo some of the goals of early consolidators. Real-estate speculators on the city's periphery competed with central-city boosters for costly urban improvements. Political corruption and graft on the city's periphery was enhanced, rather than diluted, under Republican Party auspices. Finally, the very railroads that had expedited consolidation in the first place were responsible for the Depression of 1873 and the strike wave four years later—even a self-professed “city of homes,” it seemed, was not immune to the antagonisms of industrial capitalism. Many wealthy citizens, aghast at the city's tumult, corruption, and expense, left the city they had struggled to consolidate only twenty years before. Plus ça change.

One of the more promising themes in Heath's study is how the “growth machine” paradigm of urban political economy—whereby rentier capitalists unite with local politicians to enhance local property values—is simultaneously more established and more fragile than many historians have heretofore appreciated. Like many historians under the “new history of capitalism” ambit, Heath emphasizes the legal and political framework that enabled “private” real-estate growth and speculation. He also emphasizes how this quest for higher property values could unite working-class homeowners with corporate boosters, an alignment that other historians have typically traced to the post–World War II era. (A paradigmatic example of this interpretation is in Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America [2007].) And yet the wave of labor unrest following the crash of 1873 indicates that this alignment could be brittle; as Heath says of middle-class Philadelphians during that decade, “Both the public and private city had failed them” (p. 223). Additional sources from ordinary workers before and after this decade, particularly African Americans, would indicate the extent to which workers’ political consciousness was truly changed under nineteenth-century “growth liberalism.”

And yet, to invoke this term presents analytical dangers, to which Heath is not entirely immune—not so much of presentism as of relying too heavily on concepts and trends drawn from histories of the postwar era. This is evident in his discussion of working-class homeownership, a topic that historians of the nineteenth century have, in following their twentieth-century counterparts, increasingly begun to take up. Heath suggestively reads back the form and politics of modern suburbia to Civil War–era Philadelphia but does not discuss how the specifically nineteenth-century dimensions of his artisan suburbanites—a producerist suspicion of real-estate speculation, close ties to machine politicians, and above all the wave of strikes in 1877 that followed homeownership growth—complicate our understanding of later suburban development. How and why did these ideologies and practices of place-making change? Heath suggests that the labor upheavals of the 1870s made some reformers question environmental improvement, even homeownership, as a salve to social tensions. If so, why did this “spatial fix” seem to return in the post–World War II era?

Of course, these were not Heath's intentions in writing this book. As it is, In Union There Is Strength succeeds in showing how urban expansion in the nineteenth century was born of complex political struggles on the local and national level and was not merely determined by broader technological or economic processes. (Two examples of books taking these interpretations—both by the same historian, interestingly—are Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Boston, 1870–1900 [1978] and The Private City: Philadelphia in Three Periods of Its Growth [1996] by Sam Bass Warner.) The book's very success, however, points the way to a new phase of urban history: one that reads this history forward from the nineteenth century, not just back from the twentieth.