Pre-1500

Financial and economic crises are recurrent in history. A special issue of Histoire Urbaine (33, 1 (2012)), entitled ‘Villes européennes et crises financières (XIVe-XVIe siècles)’, shows that in the medieval and early modern period cities played a crucial role in the development of such crises, just as they do today. Several case-studies on France, Spain and the Low Countries demonstrate that cities are and were financial and commercial centres which were governed by a small group of merchants, bankers and powerful families. And, as David Sassu-Normand notes in his introduction, medieval and early modern municipal authorities were even more adept than their twenty-first century counterparts in disposing of political power in order to tackle economic and financial difficulties. The close relationship between money and power in those cities made it easier for elite factions to abuse public revenues, because they could autonomously decide about urban spending and its fiscal consequences. Yet, he argues, the tied relationship between urban governors and the city's economy and finances could also have positive effects. Markets and budgets were not autonomous entities, because they were embedded in urban societies and manipulated by those who govern them. As a result, urban governors disposed of the political means to deal with financial crises, or at least to remedy some of their consequences. The case of late medieval Brabant, studied by Claire Billen and David Kusman in the same issue, shows that not only urban oligarchs but also less powerful citizens could intervene in the financial politics of a town (‘Les villes du Brabant face à la crise des finances du duché de Jean II. La crise d'une société entière?’, 63–80). In the duchy of Brabant, in around 1300, the ducal and urban finances were under considerable pressure due to warfare, manipulation of the mint and an economic downturn. In the principal cities of the duchy (Brussels, Antwerp and Louvain), discrete groups of citizens, such as craftsmen and self-made merchants, forcefully protested against the monetary and fiscal measures taken by the urban authorities. Their protests were not initially successful. By the 1360s, however, urban society had changed in Brabant. Both Billen and Kusman argue that the ideas that inspired the urban protests of the 1300s led to new, more successful revolts in the 1360s and afterwards. As a result, craftsmen gained rights of political participation in the cities mentioned. Using their newly gained political power, the rebels proposed constructive solutions to resolve the ongoing financial crisis in the cities of the duchy. The measures taken reflected the existence of a belief that the urban government should be fiscally sound and stable, and that it should not live beyond its means. Fiscal reforms led to more stable urban finances, though new challenges in the fifteenth century would upset the balance again. In short, the Brabantine case shows, once again, that politics and finance are closely knit together in the medieval city, but also, and more surprisingly, that social protest against headstrong governors ultimately led to far-reaching political and fiscal reforms. Therefore, this stimulating issue of Histoire Urbaine demonstrates that financial crises can have an unpredictable outcome.

That social protest and emerging ideas on justice and equity have led to judicial and political reform in medieval cities is also shown by Hagen Keller and Carl Hammer in case-studies on the Italian communes and thirteenth-century Oxford respectively (see ‘Norm, Rechstbruch und Strafe im “öffentlichen Bewusstsein” der italienischen Kommunen’, Historische Zeitschrift, 47 (2012), 149–75, and ‘Complaints of the lesser commune, oligarchic rule and baronial reform in thirteenth-century Oxford’, Historical Research, 85 (2012), 353–71). While Hagen Keller scrutinizes the ideas which inspired new notions of citizenship in twelfth-century Italy, Carl Hammer examines the demands of Oxford petitioners to eliminate abuses of local authority. Both conclude that the ‘prehistory’ of reform movements, as Hammer labels it, explains the outcome of institutional change in later periods. The first article discusses treatises on equity and justice written by Bernardino of Siena and Franco Sacchetti (fourteenth to fifteenth centuries). These texts show how the legal system of the twelfth-century communes had affected the behaviour of citizens. The emergence of a new understanding of legal norms, legal violations and punitive sanctions in the Italian city-states of the twelfth century would inspire citizens in future centuries to complain about the (alleged) maladministration of towns. Keller's careful analysis of the sermons of Bernardino, for instance, demonstrates that thinking about the misuse of power by urban authorities had changed fundamentally throughout the Middle Ages. Influenced by ideas on citizenship, town dwellers came to believe that urban rulers should be accountable for their political actions. Hammer gives one such example of rebels who were motivated by such ideas. He shows that townspeople in Oxford had clear ideas about the ‘just’ exercise of power. In 1253, the ‘lesser commune’ of Oxford (the ‘Minor Communia’, as the petitioners called themselves) presented Henry III with a petition in which they opposed a small group of powerful Oxford ‘greater burgesses’. These magnates had monopolized civic power and used it arbitrarily for their own ends in the areas of taxation, local administration and trade to the detriment of their fellow townsmen. Though, again (as in the case of Brabant), the petition did not lead to instant reform of the town administration, the article makes clear that it shaped expectations and memories that would inspire later generations of citizens to obtain privileges from ‘greater burgesses’ and barons.

Privileges and liberties are also central to the work of Mark Horowitz on English towns under Henry VII, and of James Bothwell on Lancastrian Leicester respectively, in ‘“Contrary to the liberties of this city”: Henry VII, English towns and the economics of law and order’, Historical Research, 85 (2012), 32–56, and ‘Making the Lancastrian capital at Leicester: the battle of Boroughbridge, civic diplomacy and seigneurial building projects in fourteenth-century England’, J. of Medieval History, 38 (2012), 335–57. Both scholars argue that English towns benefited from a good relationship with the king, and vice versa. Bothwell, for instance, calls the relationship between Leicester and the fourteenth-century lords of Lancaster (and, later on, kings) a ‘mutually beneficial association’. This increasingly positive relationship found physical expression in two ambitious building projects, namely the renovation of Leicester Castle, and the foundation of the Newarke Hospital in the decades between 1310 and 1370. This distinction, along with the city's growing connection to the English royal family, would bequeath Leicester a historic importance in the following decades. Horowitz also shows that cities could benefit from royal privileges, though he regards the English monarchy as the ultimate beneficiary. Realizing it was impossible to control local elites fully from the centre, the first Tudor king pursued a policy of financial and judicial constraints based in part on bonds designed to bring municipalities into the fold of royal rule. In return, local elites could use royal authority to strengthen their grip on the subordinated urban population. Discussing London in the early 1500s, Horowitz claims that reining in the city was a key development in the formation of ‘national’ law. Neither Horowitz nor Bothwell ignore the fact that tensions between the towns and the monarchy would continue to ebb and flow, though they stress that, in the end, a balanced harmony between both parties strengthened the political position of both the king and the leading elites in town.

Four articles discuss other aspects of the relationship between empowering monarchies and cities. Using the registers of deliberations and financial accounts, Neil Murphy considers the impact of war and Lancastrian rule on the political, social and economic structures at Amiens from 1422 to 1435 (in ‘Between France, England and Burgundy: Amiens under the Lancastrian dual monarchy, 1422–35’, French History, 26 (2012), 143–63). Towns lying in territories to the north and east of Paris, which came under English rule in the 1420s, have largely been ignored by historians of Lancastrian France. Murphy fills a lacuna by tracking the establishment and collapse of English power in the region. His detailed research into the history of Amiens in these turbulent times shows that the city benefited substantially from being ruled by two kings in some years, and (practically) by none in others. Though the effects of warfare were to the detriment of Amiens because war disrupted trade, collaboration between the leading merchants in town with, alternately, Valois, Burgundian and Lancastrian power provided opportunities for advancement. Like many northern French towns, the ruling administration of Amiens was prepared to give its allegiance to the Lancastrian king of France, or, after 1435, to the duke of Burgundy, in return for the provision of peace and stability. Provided that the town council paid its taxes on time and offered military support when requested, the mayor and échevins were left alone to rule the town as they saw fit. However, a violent revolt of craftsmen against attempts of the Burgundian dukes to increase taxation in 1435 led to the purge not only of the former representatives of the Lancastrian regime, but also of those municipal councillors strongly identified with the Burgundian cause. Violent repression was needed to re-establish the power of the ruling elite. In short, Murphy's article first shows that the leading families of Amiens could rule the city quite independently from higher powers during the studied decades. Second, however, Murphy shows that royal or ducal protection (if present) was not sufficient for the oligarchy to dominate subordinated citizens. Repression, too, was necessary for maintaining the established order.

And propaganda? Christian Liddy shows that medieval iconography provided urban elites with a powerful means of propagating power. ‘Urban politics and material culture at the end of the Middle Ages: the Coventry tapestry in St Mary's Hall’, Urban History, 39 (2012), 203–24, an in-depth analysis of the production and functional use of a splendid piece of tapestry, hung in Coventry's town hall in around 1500, explores the construction of late medieval urban oligarchy. The deployment of imagery of royal power and Christian ideology in the art piece, connecting the city's governors to the monarch and, ultimately, to God, seems to suggest that Coventry's urban rulers had firm control over the city's population. However, as Liddy compellingly demonstrates, the use of the tapestry was in fact born of a feeling of vulnerability on the part of a contested urban elite. Contemporary enclosure riots in the 1480s and 1490s had undermined the authority of Coventry's urban oligarchs, who tried to re-establish their regime by means of iconographical propaganda. Therefore, on the tapestry, the city's rulers invoked the power of the sacred and placed themselves in the company of kings and saints. Instead of a symbol of their actual power, the tapestry can be interpreted as a sign of the weakness of the civic rulers, who feared a confrontation with their fellow citizens. Such a conclusion leads Liddy to note that the local political world within which urban elites operated was considerably more febrile than British historiography suggests.

Jan Dumolyn and Jelle Haemers’ ‘“A bad chicken was brooding.” Subversive speech in late medieval Flanders’, Past and Present, 214 (2012), 45–86, also shows us a more dynamic political culture than historians have discovered in medieval towns so far, defined as it was by conflict, debate and negotiation rather than by the triumph of oligarchy. Their analysis of the discursive production and oral utterances of the popular opposition in the principal towns of the county of Flanders (thirteenth to fifteenth centuries) reveals that subversive utterances, though always risky, must have been common in daily politics in these urban centres. Rebels ‘brooded many eggs’, as a popular medieval expression rightfully claimed, which meant that, from the elite's point of view, wicked people were hatching a malicious plan and speaking about the strategy with which to carry it out. Listening to the voices of those mostly considered by historians to be the ‘voiceless’ of society, Dumolyn and Haemers explore the verbal strategies and the sophisticated political beliefs of urban rebels. Ranging from the rallying cries of lynch mobs to an elaborately constructed juridical justification of a revolt, it turns out that rebels in late medieval Flanders strategically appropriated elements of legitimate political discourse and entered the field of negotiation with urban rulers in order to be heard and to accomplish their aims. In addition, both scholars show that the forms and outcomes of these speech acts were determined by the (urban) space in which they were performed, and by the specific political balance of forces in the given moment. Only when they failed to influence political decisions with words did the popular classes resort to physical violence to make their points.

Daniel Lord Smail also shows that using physical violence was just one way of resolving conflicts between townsmen and their rulers in the late medieval town. Though historians have focused excessively on it, given its spectacular nature and the attention medieval chroniclers have paid to it, interpersonal violence was not the main strategy employed to influence the behaviour and decisions of others. In ‘Violence and predation in late medieval Mediterranean Europe’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 54 (2012), 7–34, Lord Smail disagrees with the claim of many historians that ‘old regime sovereignty’ was built on the rumours of torture and the spectacles of punishment that displayed the frightening capacity of rulers to visit violence on the body of town dwellers. The major claim of his article is that the regulation of debt was far more influential than the repression of interpersonal violence in Mediterranean Europe. Records from fourteenth-century Lucca and Marseille suggest that simple instances of debt recovery were at least three to four times more common than criminal prosecutions. Therefore, ‘predation’, as Lord Smail calls it, the practice of seizing goods by the urban government for the repayment of debt, was a more familiar punishment for criminals in these towns. Being seized was a shameful fate. As a result, Smail argues, the considerable investment made in the infrastructure for coercive measures to reclaim debt in Lucca and Marseille is a sign that late medieval urban courts of law were primarily engaged in the regulation of honour. Given this factor, one can more easily grasp why courts routinely transformed violent offenders into debtors. Indebtedness, in this world, was a vector of shame. Smail concludes that penal justice could indeed be violent at times, but if the two cities mentioned are at all representative, the late medieval court system seems not to have been especially violent toward the bodies of the violent. Therefore, his article, and those of others quoted here, demonstrate that the history of urban politics needs to be redesigned.

The relationship between the sovereign and the city, harmonious or not, cannot wholly explain the routine of daily politics in medieval towns. Conflicts among citizens, fought with violence, with words or through legal means, were also an essential aspect of their political culture.

In 2012, the social history of town dwellers was another popular theme in the historiography of medieval cities. Four articles which relate to the theme of women's history focus on marriage and women's economic activities in an urban context. Two of them were published in a special issue of the Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales on history and gender (67, respectively pp. 629–55 and 657–78). ‘Genre et paix. Des mariages croisés entre quatre communes de la Marche d'Ancône en 1306’, by Didier Lett, sheds light on a peculiar marital alliance. Namely, in 1306, four cities in the region of Macerata (Camerino, Matelica, San Severino and Fabriano) decided to bury the hatchet after long-lasting conflicts. A peace treaty, signed by the four cities for that occasion, stipulated that their inhabitants would ‘intermarry’. A number of men of the city of Camerino would be married to female citizens of the other towns. Though those marriages were never performed, the study of the concordia shows that inter-urban marriages were considered by contemporaries to be a means of reconciliation. Women, Lett states, functioned as a ‘vecteur de la paix’ because they had to procreate ‘pacified children’. These would become full burghers of the two towns concerned, which (the treaty hoped) would never quarrel again. In the end, however, underlying economic and political rivalries undermined this remarkable attempt to pacify conflicts in urban Macerata. The treaty would remain a dead letter. A study of fourteenth-century marital practices in two cities of the Holy Empire (Strasbourg and Basel) also concludes that marriages were central in pacifying citizens. Furthermore, Gabriela Signori's contribution to the Annales issue (‘Similitude, égalité et réciprocité. L'économie matrimoniale dans les sociétés urbaines de l'Empire à la fin du Moyen Âge’) reveals that marriage was not necessarily a sign of male domination. The marital alliances in these Rhine cities did not deprive women of economic and social autonomy. On the contrary, they could trade in goods, sell annuities and act as creditors without the interference of the husband. Equality between sexes seems to have been the norm in those cities, even after marriage. Urban law on the dowry (called ‘Widem’ or ‘Mächtnis’ in the southern principalities of the empire) protected both marriage partners, and made them equals if a matter concerning the dowry was taken to court. Signori's careful analysis of the remaining evidence in the urban archives reveals that women made use of these laws to trade in movables, (parts of) houses and renten. Therefore, her article highlights the fact that historians so far have neglected the economic activities of women within urban communities. This apparent low visibility of women can be partially attributed to the nature of the available sources and methodologies used to analyse them. When analysing their affairs through notarial acts, however, Signori turns to documents prepared by women. Therefore, her study argues that such sources should be the first point of reference in this field of research.

Similarly, a third article demonstrates that the economic and social diversity of commercial centres offered women the opportunity to play an active role in the money and property market. In ‘Wills, marriage and business contracts: urban women in late-medieval Cyprus’, Gender and History, 24 (2012), 310–32, Aysu Dincer examines the position of urban women within the mercantile and artisan communities of the Cypriot port town of Famagusta in the fourteenth century. During this period, Cyprus became the main intermediary between the Muslim East and the Christian West, which offered many opportunities for immigrants, male and female, in commercial hubs, such as Famagusta. Again, notarial accounts show women who were able to survive and act on their own and in their own name, from young girls investing their dowry money to women arranging their own marriage contracts, to widows lending large amounts. Dincer lists three interrelated factors as the main contributors to this independence: mass immigration, with a lack of strong patrilineal kin groups, into an affluent merchant town. Some of the women in her samples had lost their immediate family, while others gained independence through successive marriages and involvement with business affairs. If they were more independent, this is partly because factors that could curb this independence were weaker, Dincer argues. Such reasons dictated that they had a share, and played a role, in the social and economic life of their town. The same goes for tenth-century Rome. The research of Maria Laura Marchiori shows that Roman women of diverse social backgrounds could be involved in economic activities in their hometowns, and the commissioning of art in particular, in around the year 1000. Though many details about her social background remain unknown due to the lack of sources, the noble woman and nun Berta acted as a patron of a luxurious evangeliary. Despite the lack of a donor portrait on the manuscript, her patronage was clearly articulated in the first-person voice of the cover's inscription. Marchiori suggests that Berta was not the only woman active on the Roman art market. If true, then by extension it might be postulated that in tenth-century Rome, women exercised authority over financial resources and autonomy in their public representation or commemoration. Evidence for this phenomenon is also found in contemporary charters where scribes often designate a female patron as a rogatrix and donatrix, that is, not just the one who asks for the donation to take place, but the one who does the giving (‘“Rogatrix atque donatrix”: the silver cover of the Berta Evangeliary and the patronage of art by women in early medieval Rome’, Early Medieval Europe, 20 (2012), 111–38).

Urban minorities are studied in two articles, even though their social backgrounds are totally different. Juliette Sibon and Claude Denjean published an interesting piece on the comparative history of Jews in a late medieval urban context (‘Citoyenneté et fait minoritaire dans la ville médiévale. Étude compare des juifs de Marseille, de Catalogne et de Majorque au bas Moyen Âge’, Histoire Urbaine, 32 (2011), 73–100). In some Mediterranean cities, Jews could have citizen rights, as for example in Marseille and in Sicilian towns, while in others, in the region of Aragon, for example, Jews could never have qualified as cives. However, both scholars show that this juridical reality masks the fact that in all of the cities and regions mentioned, Jewish merchants had certain social and economic privileges which made (some, or most of) them fortunate town dwellers – but not ‘burghers’. In Provence, however, as in Valence, Jews could participate in all aspects of social life, and even in urban politics. However, chronology matters. In the cities of Catalonia and Majorca, Jews lost their rights after the Reconquista, while at the same time Marseille welcomed their expertise in the production of cloth. Taking these chronological and geographical differences into account, Sibon and Denjean deduce that ‘le cadre urbain’ in itself shaped conditions and possibilities for Jews, a specific space in which they could participate in the ‘convivencia’. That cities also offered a framework in which nobles could easily integrate is shown by Arie Van Steensel (‘Noblemen in an urbanised society: Zeeland and its nobility in the late Middle Ages’, J. of Medieval History, 38 (2012), 76–99 – see also his ‘Kinship, property, and identity: noble family strategies in late medieval Zeeland’, J. of Family History, 37 (2012), 247–69). Though this urban minority had of course a totally different background from Jews, their participation in urban life can be compared. Van Steensel's prosopographical analysis of the late medieval Zeeland nobles points out that the noble and civic worlds existed alongside each other, although social boundaries were often crossed – the same can be said about Christians and Jews in the Mediterranean world. Relations between nobles and townsmen were multi-dimensional, and towns performed a range of functions for the nobility. Some nobles had economic interests in cities as Vlissingen, Veere and Middelburg; others who settled in these towns were swiftly integrated into the urban political elite. The urban markets offered nobles consumer goods and luxury products; the town was also an arena for cultural and religious activities. Informative case-studies outline how nobles resided in towns, took up urban offices, acquired citizenship and married into urban families. In short, this article sheds new light on the distinction which is often artificially made between the nobility and urbanites.

The division between town and countryside was also once regarded as a distinctive characteristic of medieval European society. Two articles, however, focus on the mutually beneficial relationships that urban and rural environments often enjoyed. By focusing on late medieval Florence and Tuscany, Daniel Curtis’ article suggests that there were no rural interests standing in direct opposition to urban interests, simply because there was no sharp distinction made between rural and urban in those days (‘Florence and its hinterlands in the late Middle Ages: contrasting fortunes in the Tuscan countryside, 1300–1500’, J. of Medieval History, 38 (2012), 472–99). Rural elites could be, at the same time, urban citizens or burghers. Many wealthy signori of the Florentine contado had citizen rights, or lived in the Tuscan capital. The bond between the city and its hinterland was reinforced by a network of landed and family relationships and the very fact that, despite the rise of the city as an international gateway, the city's economic fortune was still undoubtedly tied up in agrarian interests. However, Curtis remarks that the differing configuration of rural societies can explain why cities could also reduce their rural hinterlands to poverty and decay. For some fortunes made in rural settlements in the Florentine contado declined in the course of the fourteenth century, due to urban exploitation. Curtis argues that the feudal structure of villages in the vicinity of Arezzo, for instance, clarifies why Florentines were less integrated in these rural areas. As a result, the article reads like a plea for the reconsideration of the impact of urbanization and urbanity on rural society as a whole, and vice versa. When explaining urban rise and decline, historians cannot afford to ignore the economic and social reality of the countryside. That is also one of the main concerns of Tim Soens, Eline Van Onacker and Kristof Dombrecht. In a contribution to a dossier consisting of reviews of Wim Blockmans’ new synthesis of the history of the urban Low Countries (Metropolen aan de Noordzee (Amsterdam, 2010)), these three scholars argue that the endogenous dynamics of surrounding rural areas and smaller towns have to be taken into account when studying the urban economies of the late Middle Ages. Large towns, like Florence, or Bruges and Antwerp, dominated their hinterland, but that does not mean that the history of minor towns was written within the city walls of their mighty neighbours. Soens and others show that the economic activities of the fifteenth-century Campine area, between Scheldt and Meuse, were closely connected to nearby Antwerp, but they were not shaped by the prosperous port town. Likewise, cultural life in small towns in the countryside was not as ‘urban-modelled’ as some Belgian or Dutch historians might have suggested. Fraternities and cross-bow guilds did appear in smaller towns around Bruges (like Damme, Sluis and Dudzele), but not in others. This unequal spread cannot be explained by the distance to the city, but rather by the existence of commercial contacts, and above all by the presence of a local elite using these kinds of manifestations to enhance their social and cultural capital. Therefore, the article concludes, the respective agency of both the great metropolises of the medieval west on the one hand, and the minor towns and the rural communities that surround them on the other, deserves further historical attention (‘Metropolis and hinterland? A comment on the role of the rural economy and society in the urban heart of the medieval Low Countries’, Low Countries Historical Rev., 127 (2012), 82–8).

New insights into the economic history of cities can also be delivered by studying overseas relationships. That is the conclusion one can draw after reading Rosamond Faith's ‘The structure of the market for wool in pre-Conquest Lincolnshire’, Economic History Rev. 65 (2012), 674–700. Not only local peasants who produced goods for Lincoln's market, but also a network of Anglo-Scandinavian shippers and traders, members of a merchant elite, played an important part in the early medieval economy of this growing city. In Lincoln, whose rise as an important commercial and industrial centre originated in the period of the Scandinavian settlement, a self-consciously Anglo-Scandinavian merchant class evolved during the tenth century which owed much of its wealth to overseas trade or to controlling inland markets. Goods brought overland were loaded at transhipment points along the Trent, many of them owned or established by Danes or Norse, or at least by men with Scandinavian names, to travel upriver to the midlands, or down river to the Humber (and thence Northumbria) and down the coast to London and Kent. Therefore, Faith shows, Scandinavian shipmen were central to this trade. Moreover, the availability of cash, thought to have been a factor in the Flemish people's major role in the later medieval market for wool, could also have worked in favour of Scandinavian traders in this earlier period. Their significance for the rise of the urban centres in pre-Conquest Britain mirrors the importance of the Hanseatic tradesmen in later centuries. In ‘“Homines Imperii” und “Osterlinge”. Selbst- und Fremdbezeichnungen hansischer Kaufleute im Ausland am Beispiel Englands, Flanderns und des Ostseeraumes im 12. und 13. Jahrhundert’, Hansische Geschichtsblätter, 129 (2011), 1–59, Carsten Janke gives an overview of the trading and the privileges of the Osterlinge in port towns on the North Sea. Many publications have already dealt with the complexity of the commercial and urban network of the Hanse (see the review of periodical literature in the Urban History volume of 2012). Janke's contribution adds to this extensive historiography by asserting that the ‘Gemeinschaftsbildung’ of the Hanseatic merchants was their main strategy in maintaining a leading position in the late medieval economy. By gathering data, the author shows that, from 1250 onwards, the Hansards were not only good at establishing internal ties within their own community, but also at collaborating with local merchant communities and competing ‘foreign’ trade networks of, for instance, Portuguese and Italian shippers. As a result, these overseas relationships were a source of economic gain, social benefits and urban prosperity in Britain, on the continent and in the urbanized regions surrounding the Ostsee.

1500–1800

It seems as though there was a lot of talking, singing, whispering and shouting going on in early modern cities. Even the most secluded and guarded of contexts, the papal conclave, was remarkably porous. Information leaked both in and out, the doings of cardinals, populace and foreign ambassadors were constantly subject to excitable deliberations. Periodical articles engaging with the early modern period are to a remarkable degree concerned with issues of information flows, publicity and the relationship between oral and written media. This is in part a consequence of a special issue of the J. of Early Modern Studies on oral history, but in a wider perspective can be seen as a wave of research trying to grapple with the communicative practices of the public sphere now that the Habermasian version has fallen out of favour. In lieu of Habermas, inspiration has been sought from among others Filippo De Vivo's Information and Communication in Venice: Rethinking Early Modern Politics (Oxford, 2007). Seen together, these articles portray the early modern city as dominated by an active, talkative and heterogeneous population, highly attuned both to the audible aspects of the city and its moods.

One, often tacit, premise in these works is that early modern cities were societies based on presence, what Rudolf Schlögl has termed Anwesenheitsgesellschaft, in which constant observation, social interaction and circulating media must all be taken into account. Urban space, in this sense, was a shared place of experience and observation. Presence certainly was a prerequisite for what John M. Hunt terms a unique ephemeral public sphere surrounding the papal conclaves in Rome, the article from which the introductory example is taken: ‘The conclave from the “outside in”: rumor, speculation, and disorder in Rome during early modern papal elections’, J. of Early Modern History, 16 (2012), 355–82. Here, crowds pressed as close to the meeting as possible in the hope of influencing or picking up some sort of news about who the new pope would be, and then passed information on within the city. Hunt states that Romans were given an exceptional opportunity to comment on and to influence the election of the pope through oral communication and that this constituted a fragmented public sphere which in some senses can be seen to coincide with Habermas’ eighteenth-century version. The fragmentation, popular participation in high politics and the inventive use of several media that Hunt describes is, however, less unique than he portrays it to be, as the wealth of recent articles on information and media logics in early modern cities suggests.

In Daniel Bellingradt's ‘The early modern city as a resonating box: media, public opinion, and the urban space of the Holy Roman Empire, Cologne, and Hamburg Ca. 1700’, J. of Early Modern History, 16 (2012), 201–40, Schlögl's culture of presence is the point of departure. Bellingradt takes his cues from socio-economic studies of modern cities. But he also states that the culture of presence was fundamentally transformed by the increased use of media. Simultaneously, readers came from a broadening social spectrum: ‘the regular circulation of news cultivated the potential power of a sensitized public interest’ (p. 204). The focus of the articles is the ‘mediality’ of early modern cities and the interplay of oral, written and printed means of communication. Bellingradt uses the term ‘resonating box’ to capture the ‘echo effects’ (p. 217) of the circulatory aspects of media production, consumption and reception in an early modern city. These amplified and extended the reach of local debates into everyday discourse creating a multivalent public. Resonance was, according to Bellingradt, fashioned through the increase of murmurs and rumours into public debates and popular involvement in local issues: people spoke at taverns and inns, on market squares and in the streets, outside churches, in household conversations. Stakeholders worked strategically using print, manuscripts and oral communication not only to reach legitimate political and clerical institutions, but also to mobilize popular support in particular issues.

Bellingradt speaks of the early modern public as highly sensitized to local debates and everyday discourse. Non-verbal signals related to print were easily interpreted by those who were unable to read official postings on church doors – tearing postings down, or moving them to the gallows, shamed and opposed the views printed on them. Similarly, Rosa Salzberg and Massimo Rospocher speak of an urgent desire for information among the urban population in early modern Italy in ‘Street singers in Italian renaissance urban culture and communication’, Cultural and Social History, 9 (2012), 9–26. Street singers in Renaissance Italy had a central role in the media logics of cities, collecting and disseminating news through print, rumour and in song, and thereby also creating a market for entertainment and information. Thus, street singers also fostered the transfer of works across oral, scribal and printed media and were consequently continuously attacked by religious and civic authorities. Salzberg and Rospocher particularly point to north Italian street singers’ positioning of themselves on the central piazzas on market or feast days in order to conduct business as effectively as possible. As can be expected, city authorities attempted to limit their presence and control the activities taking place on the piazza. Measures to reduce the harmful spread of disinformation and rumour and profanation of sacred places by street singers included making clear divisions between government business, religious devotion and entertainment on the piazzas or barring them altogether on Sundays and religious holidays. Street singers subverted the notion of a socially and politically ordered city.

Bellingradt's conclusions are resonant for other studies of urban media logics: the public became even more observant, but also involved, in local politics by stimulating and amplifying communications. Bellingradt, Hunt, Salzberg, Rosprocher and others thereby strike further new blows to the priority traditionally given to the emergence of the public sphere in England, and the long-held idea of the dominance of oral communication and face-to-face interaction in the early modern city.

The metaphor of a resonating box could certainly be attractive to a wider range of urban historians interested in the information flows and communicative practices of cities in the early modern period. Contemporary comments on the cacophony of political debates certainly chime in with this understanding of the city. It is also a means of depicting urban space as particularly dense with activity and information which in turn would have generative effects for social life, politics and culture. The resonating box metaphor does however also suggest a bounded city divided from the rest of the world. It is not surprising that this term has been used for free imperial cities in Germany and the urban republics of northern Italy whereas cities under the scrutiny of absolute rulers and increasing pressures from state formation might have created other media logics. Indeed, the metaphor begs the question how all these resonances interacted with each other.

In contrast to the previous articles’ underscoring of the entwining of oral, scribal and printed media, Elizabeth Horodowich states in ‘Introduction: speech and oral culture in early modern Europe and beyond’, J. of Early Modern History, 16 (2012), 301–13, that ‘the exchange of ideas and information in the early modern world was predominantly and overwhelmingly by word of mouth’ (pp. 301–2). Indeed, the issue seeks to highlight how orality played a crucial role in ‘all of the most significant movements and events in early modern history’ (p. 309). The emphasis on orality is mediated, however, in that public opinion is seen as formed through the expression of a variety of voices. The interaction between print and orality in Horodowich's account, however, remains opaque. Here we are encouraged to view the subtleties of language and communication, rather than their political effects, and invited to discover the use of different registers and associations of words.

Other articles are equally concerned with what is audible in the city, although they start not from an understanding of expressions of public opinion, but from scholarship on the senses and the city. This field, often concerned with registering the use of the five senses, is here complemented by what in some cases extends to piecing together sensual experiences in order to create an understanding of the city itself. Using what she terms ‘linguistic archaeology’, Elizabeth S. Cohen carefully uncovers the different registers of spoken language in early modern Roman courts in ‘She said, he said: situated oralities in judicial records from early modern Rome’, J. of Early Modern History, 16 (2012), 403–30. Cohen argues that the historian can indeed, by use of exceptional sources, have access to highly differentiated oral cultures. The starting point is that orality in the early modern period was entwined with writing and that it constituted a large and intricate web of practices in which nearly everyone took part. Oral cultures, she reminds us, differed greatly, were internally heterogeneous and were used discriminately. A historian attuned to the subtleties of varied and situated oralities will be able to recover oral cultures in written sources. By contrast, Carolyn Steedman's analysis of an English mid-eighteenth-century text describing London called Low-Life: Or, One Half of the World, Knows not how the Other Half Lives offers a quite opposite impression of what can be heard in ‘Cries unheard, sights unseen: writing the eighteenth-century metropolis’, Representations, 118 (2012), 28–71. Steedman discusses how the text may convey how everyday life in the past was captured and understood by high and low. Among the many implications brought forth from Low-Life, Steedman notes the sounds of the city, but it is not the roar of the Victorian city that is heard. The eighteenth-century metropolis is overpowered by the tolling of bells, hammering on doors, music from street musicians and people quarrelling. People's voices are muted and impossible to understand through closed doors. Voices in this eighteenth-century text lack messages and do not make anything happen in the hearers’ minds, quite unlike the resonating boxes and public spheres discussed above. Steedman's introductory remarks on history as ‘that which never was such as it is told by the historian’ (p. 28 and note) opens up questions about whether the heightened sensibilities among urban dwellers in early modern Europe are not really the product of the strained hearing of historians themselves, driven by democratic sensibilities to uncover the voices of the previously unheard. In this respect, sources such as Low-Life are suggestive of that imagined cacophony from which historians try to distil audible and comprehensible elements.

While hearing and orality make up the majority of articles engaged with the senses, sight is not completely ignored. Nancy E. van Deusen offers an insight into the understanding of visual signs and symbolism in her article on the descriptors and different knowledge that was employed to categorize indios in Castilian villages and cities in the sixteenth century: ‘Seeing Indios in sixteenth-century Castile’, William and Mary Quarterly, 69 (2012), 205–34. During this century, over 2,000 children and adult slave and freedpeople had crossed the seas from Spanish and Portuguese colonies to labour in Castile. Castilian villagers and townspeople, slave traders, merchants and court witnesses made sense of indios in their midst within a decidedly globalized context and referenced people from other places of the world, employing first-hand knowledge of the facial features of, for instance, those born in Peru in comparison with those of Arabic decent. This ongoing process of classification had to do with the cultural and physiognomic mosaic in Seville in particular, and the ensuing problems of fitting ‘new’ peoples into extant colour codes. While classification of indios did shift over the sixteenth century, it was never set within the kind of rigid system of classification that came to characterize the casta system. The term loro (laurel, used to describe brown skin) became a particularly pliable descriptor that denoted enslaveability and was adopted to the ethnic pluralism already present in Seville in the late fifteenth century. By the 1560s, however, the term indio itself had transformed into a term to describe skin colour and was now synonymous with slavery.

An alternative reading of heightened sensitivity of early modern cities is to interpret social and political action in terms of varying levels of agency and negotiation between individuals and urban institutions. A number of articles point to the importance of human agency not only in forming institutions, but in using institutions to circumvent social and political norms in order to exert some sort of power over otherwise restricted lives. This is not to deny the outright power and coercion exercised by urban institutions, but does show how much the legitimacy of civic and legal institutions was based on negotiation. Michelle A. McKinley discusses the legal struggles of slave Margarita de Torres to gain her own and her children's freedom in late seventeenth-century Lima after her testamentary manumission had been challenged by her owner's heirs in ‘Till death do us part: testamentary manumission in seventeenth-century Lima, Peru’, Slavery and Abolition, 33 (2012), 381–401. Despite the odds stacked against persons in the legally ambiguous state between property and personhood, the courts could be used by powerless people to mobilize the law on their behalf and slaves could sometimes prevail against their owners. The law was in fact utilized in a way that was not intended by legislators, as slaves could invoke their owner's property rights in them in order to gain their freedom. In addition, Margarita's demands were ‘decorously veiled in a paternalist discourse of protection and abjection’ (p. 396) and made use of her own very limited range of action. Whether she ever was granted freedom, we do not know. In a similar vein, David M. Turner argues in ‘Disability and crime in eighteenth-century England: physical impairment at the Old Bailey’, Cultural and Social History, 9 (2012), 47–64, that disabled persons could use courts in eighteenth-century London as an arena to present their experiences and to supply accounts of their lives – in a sense, court appearances can be seen as a form of identity formation. Conceptions of disabled people as inclined towards criminality and fraud were rife, and had to be addressed by the disabled in courts whether they were victims or perpetrators of crime. In many cases, physical incapacity was also employed as a mitigating factor by disabled defendants. How guilds attempted to soften the blows of illness, death and failing businesses is thoroughly discussed in Marco H.D. van Leeuwen's investigation into welfare for the middle classes in early modern Dutch cities: ‘Guilds and middle-class welfare, 1550–1800: provisions for burial, sickness, old age, and widowhood’, Economic History Rev., 65 (2012), 61–90. In his foray into this understudied area, van Leeuwen examines how urban institutions took pains to buttress the social status of the middle classes by offering insurance, compensation for lost income, sickness benefits, old age pensions, assistance to widows and for burials. Van Leeuwen argues that these welfare benefits can be seen as a form of compensation for the middle classes’ lack of political influence in a corporatist political regime. The implicit contract between early modern citizens and states therefore included provisions for middle-class welfare and reduced the risk of conflict between the middle classes and urban elites, even when the middle classes in some cases were compensated less than the poor. Reduced political agency was possible to negotiate in exchange for security of social status. This not only shows the constant negotiation going on within urban governance, but also highlights how social status was such a highly valued commodity that it could indeed balance political weakness.

Taking as her starting point recent interpretations of the early modern state as created from the ‘bottom up’, Griet Vermeesch highlights the importance of interaction between citizens, local authorities and the central state through a study of petitioning and lobbyists in eighteenth-century Brussels: ‘Professional lobbying in eighteenth-century Brussels: the role of agents in petitioning the central government institutions in the Habsburg Netherlands’, J. of Early Modern History, 16 (2012), 95–119. Vermeesch refreshingly attempts to understand petitioning through the intermediaries between ordinary people and the state and investigates how petitions actually came to be presented to rulers. Of particular interest are the agents en cour who were professional lobbyists appointed by the privy council of the Austrian Netherlands to write and facilitate petitions to the proper authorities. The agents came from relatively humble backgrounds, but had access to valuable networks and contacts with powerbrokers. In theory, anyone could use the services of the agents to forward their own grievances, but steep fees indicate that access to government circles in Brussels was a luxury that was unaffordable to those of modest means. Despite this, Vermeesch finds that accessibility to the state was in a sense democratized thanks to the agents.

While the term negotiation is common fare in continental European studies, inspired by the likes of Peter Blickle and Wim Blockmans, it seems less viable in English historiography. Mark Latham's article ‘From oligarchy to a “rate payer's democracy”: the evolution of the Corporation of London, 1680s–1750s’, Urban History, 39 (2012), 225–45, is framed squarely within the historiography of English towns and he argues that the Corporation's development from oligarchy to what he terms democracy was part of an inexorable shift towards bureaucratization. The study might have benefited from a comparison with the many other European cities enveloped in bureaucratic reform at the same time, and the many negotiations that conditioned this process. As Latham's results suggest, it was the everyday, often consensual, workings of administration increasingly entrusted to commoners, rather than its executive aspects, that drove an evolution towards democratization.

Cities were invariably sites of protest, rebellion and war. As several articles show, heightened conflict did not diminish the importance of information strategies or negotiation. The analysis of cities’ relations with rulers and state formation mentioned above is immediately present in Violet Soen's investigation into the campaign waged by the Habsburg governor-general, Alexander Farnese, during an episode in the Dutch Revolt: ‘Reconquista and reconciliation in the Dutch Revolt: the campaign of Governor-General Alexander Farnese (1578–1592)’, J. of Early Modern History, 16 (2012), 1–22. Throughout Farnese's campaign, he laboured not only to conquer, but to reconcile cities with Philip II, thus re-establishing a dialogue between city and ruler. Of particular interest here is Farnese's shrewd discourse which was used to aggrandize him and to demobilize insurgents. Cast as a sign of clemency, pardons were regularly granted to cities by Farnese. In addition, Farnese increasingly granted oubli de passé – a means of forgiving and forgetting what had happened. This type of forgiveness struck at the heart of rebellious mobilization, as it worked as a means of forgetting a ‘heretical past’ in the southern Netherlands where the legitimacy of insurgents was founded on tales of persecution and repression. In religious matters, however, Farnese was much less moderate, ordering investigations into the most destructive heretics and ordered Protestants who were not prepared to convert to leave the cities. This religious policy fundamentally worked against any ambition to revive the economic activities in the conquered cities, as many Protestant and better-off citizens emigrated according to the terms of ius emigrandi. In another discursive strategy, Farnese's propaganda recast royal clemency as his own in a direct response to rebel propaganda which portrayed Spaniards as innately cruel. Farnese's campaign towards reconciliation was therefore cleverly contrived in relation to public opinion in the Low Countries.

In another investigation into the resonating box, Bellingradt's article ‘Organizing public opinion in a resonating box: the Gülich rebellion in early modern Cologne, 1680–1686’, Urban History, 39 (2012), 553–70, focuses on the strategic deployment of early modern media logics. The leader of the uprising, Gülich, as well as city and imperial authorities made use of ‘media impulses’ ranging from oral to hand-written and print. By combining different media, Gülich and his followers not only influenced the urban public sphere in an abstract sense, but managed to by-pass the usual rules for election and co-optation and install a new city council. In portraying the efficiency of urban media logics, certain sacrifices are made, particularly regarding the lower orders which seem pliable and ever ready to hum along to the tunes of their literate superiors. The authorities paradoxically recognized the public sphere and its dynamics as an effective arena for political action through their own use of incriminating pamphlets that lamented their use by rebels.

Public opinion played a lesser part in the temporary ousting of the Jesuits from Malta in 1639, as discussed by Manuel Buttigieg in ‘Knights, Jesuits, carnival, and the Inquisition in seventeenth-century Malta’, Historical J., 55 (2012), 571–96. Instead, conflicts between Jesuits and the Order of St John (of Malta) were based on conflicting confessional and national identities. Buttigieg details how anti-Jesuit sentiments grew in Malta and Valletta in particular, as Jesuits were seen as interfering with not only the affairs of the hospitallers, but unduly influencing the grand master himself. The Jesuits had initiated a process of confessionalization whereby they tried to remodel the religious practices of hospitallers. A curtailing of women's participation in the carnival in 1639 sparked off the expulsion, starting with the ransacking of the Jesuit College by a crowd of hospitallers while Maltese spectators stood outside cheering them on. Buttigieg shows how elements of the traditional carnival, the violence, irreverence and caricature, were used by noble hospitallers whose social status was so high they became impossible to punish for their transgressions. The two crowds, the hospitallers and the locals, were distinct and separate during the ransacking, reinforcing the hierarchical precedence of the hospitallers rather than turning the world completely upside down.

The final thread discussed here is consumption in its various guises. Certainly William C. Baer's article ‘The house-building sector of London's economy, 1550–1650’, Urban History, 39 (2012), 409–30, is not framed within the field. The aim is rather to chart the trials of builders and the building process at a time when the city's population grew from 70,000 to 400,000 in a century. Baer points to the sheer bulk of building supplies brought into London – the timber, bricks, tiles, water and sand – and gives attention to the less spectacular aspects of consumption among broad social strata. Eminegül Karababa, on the other hand, is concerned with the staples of the history of consumption in the West, finding traces of small luxuries, fashionable and leisure items among the lower orders of early modern Ottoman society – those items identified by many previous scholars as signs of ‘democratization’ of consumer goods (‘Investigating early modern Ottoman consumer culture in the light of Bursa probate inventories’, Economic History Rev., 65 (2012), 194–219). She does so through an extensive investigation into probate inventories from the Anatolian town of Bursa in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. While elite consumption in the Ottoman empire has been relatively well studied, the use of luxury goods below the elites remains elusive. Democratization of consumption is perhaps not what most readers would expect in the Ottoman empire because interventionist economic policies prevented the formation of a class which accumulated capital. However, Karababa finds that consumer goods related to leisure activities and fashion spread to the lower orders between the mid-sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries, and foreign wares from Iran, India, China, England, the Netherlands, France and Mediterranean cities were among items imported to Ottoman markets. In the process of charting the dispersion of consumer goods in Bursa, Karababa challenges narratives of the genesis of consumer culture and posits an ‘alternative early modern consumer culture’ (p. 212) by showing how the absence of mercantilist policies in the Ottoman state came to foster greater consumption of luxury goods among the lower orders. Ottoman economic policies were not only intended to achieve increased revenues, but also had the explicit goal of providing for necessities within society. Exports were only permitted when there was a surplus. Providing abundance within Ottoman society therefore created positive conditions for the development of consumer culture. In addition, the importance of an emergent middle class is questioned by Karababa's assertion that extensive social mobility within Ottoman society – between rural and urban, ruled class and ruling class, Christianity and Islam – opened up possibilities for a range of individual trajectories. Social mobility in urban areas stimulated social interaction between different social groups and ‘encouraged the formation of a variety of consumer tastes’ (p. 200). The heyday of taste communities came roughly a century later, in the metropolis of consumption, art and science, Paris. Charlotte Guichard discusses in ‘Taste communities: the rise of the amateur in eighteenth-century Paris’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 45 (2012), 519–47, how the amateur arose during the Enlightenment as an intermediate figure between the early modern patron and the modern (art) collector and how taste came to frame a specific relationship between society and knowledge. The amateur was to be found in a variety of fields from natural history to antiquity and engaged in artistic patronage, social relationships with painters, and amateur practice in art and the sciences. Within this context, amateurs contributed to the designation of taste as a series of practices turned towards objects and their understanding, their materiality and display. Increasingly criticized for anti-patriotism and for taking part in coteries, amateurs ceased to be normative models within the art worlds as art worlds were redefined in relation to the new conceptions of the public sphere on the eve of the Revolution. Finally, in Laura Newby's ‘Copper plates for the Qianlong emperor: from Paris to Peking via Canton’, J. of Early Modern History, 16 (2012), 161–99, the story of how the Quianlong emperor in the 1760s came to order 16 copper plates from France is retold. The designs, made by Jesuit artists in Peking, depicted the recent victories over the Mongols and Turkic Muslims in present-day Xinjiang. Western engravings displayed a craftsmanship and detail that did not exist in China and the technique was ideally suited for mass production, all good reasons why the Quianlong emperor might make the commission. The article is not, however, simply an entertaining rendition of harmonious cross-cultural exchange and co-operation. Like Karababa, Newby challenges perceptions of development and interaction between east and west in the early modern world, advocating the global dynamics of the commission. Newby attempts to understand the diverse political agendas and conflicting aspirations that were invested in the prints as they made their way from imperial commission in Peking, to merchants in Canton, to the minister of state and engravers in Paris and back again. The specificities of Chinese and French notions of allegiance, power, honour, trade, art, fashion, craftsmanship and history are exposed as we move from one city to the next. In commissioning the plates, the Quianlong emperor had no intention of creating cultural or economic links with the west. Neither did he want to introduce a new fashion or art form. His objective was ‘to acquire for the Qing court, in perpetuity, the technique of detailed copperplate illustration which could provide a new and efficient means of broadcasting and celebrating the dynasty's victories’ (p. 198). Newby concludes that the copperplate prints were not part of an early modern framework because of their artistic fusion or cultural co-operation. Instead, she argues that the multiplicities of inadvertent interconnections that the commission produced are what characterize them as such.

Post-1800

As in recent years, writing on the modern period continues to be characterized by authors’ desires to explore familiar concepts of urban history in new settings. The periodical literature for the post-1800 period features a wealth of case-studies of colonial cities and also a growing number of articles on twentieth-century cities which test notions like civic pride, urban regeneration and reconstruction in new time-frames.

The question of how cities were viewed by outsiders yields a number of interesting studies. Joseph De Sapio's study of Victorian London, ‘A reign of steam’, London J., 37 (2012), 42–55, uses the writings of Continental travellers to illuminate the disconcerted, sometimes shocked reaction that the industrial modernity of the metropolis could elicit in visitors. Nevertheless, there was a distinction between their largely negative reactions to symbols of industrial modernity, such as factories and gas works, and the more favourable responses to cultural products. De Sapio locates his analysis in the context of patterns of urban tourism emerging in the nineteenth century and notes that for some Continental visitors, London was unsettling because it represented what European cities might soon become. Travel writing, in De Sapio's study, reflected not only on the place visited, but also on the visiting self.

The theme of visitors’ perceptions is continued in Vivian Bickford-Smith's article on the idea of local colour as an urban characteristic. ‘Providing local color?: “Cape coloureds”, “Cockneys”, and Cape Town's identity from the late nineteenth century to the 1970s’ offers a new assessment of what makes urban places distinctive, J. of Urban History, 38 (2012), 133–51. In a study of representations of Cape Town by visitors, observers and promoters, he finds that it was not just the physical characteristics of the place, its history and functions that commentators found distinctive. The appearance and activities of its inhabitants were also noted as features which supposedly made the place distinct. In the era before air travel, colonial port cities were ‘pre-eminent sites of cultural exchange’ (p. 134), and Cape Town's coloured inhabitants were encountered by travellers arriving into port in a manner similar to the way in which European travellers reacted to distinctive social or occupational groups such as London Cockneys. Using contemporary newspapers, commemorative publications, memoir and feature films, the author finds that visitors’ representations of key lower-class groups including Cape Town's ‘Coloured Flower Sellers’, ‘Coons’ and ‘Malays’ focused on their cultural and behavioural characteristics. He argues that the ‘colorful’ depictions of these groups served to provide a non-threatening image of the urban proletariat, appealing not only to outsiders, but also palatable to the city's middle classes.

Two further studies of urban life in a colonial context appear in the J. of Historical Geography, 38 (2012). Liora Bigon, in ‘“Garden city” in the tropics? French Dakar in comparative perspective’, 35–44, conducts a case-study of the transmission of garden city ideas to the context of a colonial city. In an important addition to the otherwise British and European-focused historiography on garden cities, this article shows that the concept was employed selectively by planners in the colonial administration of Dakar. As well as helping to create a prestigious image for residential districts designed for its own employees, the cité jardin also became a mechanism by which class and racial segregation was underpinned. Bigon argues that ultimately it helped to highlight colonial power in Dakar and ‘only sharpened the gap between the expatriate bourgeoisie and the indigenous population’ (p. 44). In the same issue, the east African city of Nairobi is the focus for Laragh Larsen's study of the fate of public monuments following the end of colonial rule. In ‘Re-placing imperial landscapes: colonial monuments and the transition to independence in Kenya’, 45–56, he traces the post-independence fortunes of the statues and war memorials put up in the Kenyan capital in the first half of the twentieth century. Although concerns were voiced in the colonial administration that monuments depicting British monarchs and key settler figures might become targets of ‘political spite’, there was no direction from officials at the Colonial Office about how to deal with the problem, and no precedent offered for them to follow. As a result, the colonial administration developed its own policy. It perceived personal likenesses of prominent settlers as the most likely symbols to cause offence, and thus the statue of Lord Delamere, who had arrived from Britain in 1903, was identified as the first to be removed. No sooner was it taken down, in November 1963, than the plinth where it had once stood became a magnet for souvenir sellers or, in Larsen's words, was ‘quickly appropriated by members of Kenya's African population’ (pp. 49–50).

Another post-colonial urban study is provided by John Rennie Short in his contemporary examination of the Australian town of Alice Springs, ‘Representing country in the creative postcolonial city’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 102 (2012), 129–50. The author argues that the city epitomizes a mixture of continuing colonial and emerging post-colonial identities. While its physical organization still reflects the marginalization of indigenous peoples, with a high degree of residential segregation of Aboriginal inhabitants, in other respects, the post-colonial character of the town is much more evident. The adoption of the Aboriginal name, Mparntwe, alongside Alice Springs, and the new commercial and cultural value afforded to Aboriginal art, the author argues, provide indicators of a process of re-alignment going on not just on a local, but also on a national scale. Unlike other Australian cities, however, Alice Springs is, according to Short, a place where the Aboriginal presence is ‘large and constant’ and thus the post-colonial process is all the more tangible.

Landscape and the challenges of the natural environment loom large in Short's study and it is a theme reflected in a number of other journal articles in 2012. The Autumn 2012 issue of Pennsylvania History, for instance, is devoted to ‘Environmental histories of the mid-Atlantic’. It includes a study of relations between urban centres and the natural landscapes around them by Ellen Stroud, entitled ‘Dirt in the city: urban environmental history in the mid-Atlantic’, Pennsylvania History, 79 (2012), 428–39. Stroud's article appears as one of 10 ‘new perspectives’ in which contributors were asked to review recent literature as well as to offer their own thoughts and research findings. Stroud's piece thus provides a useful introduction to the way in which historians, even before the advent of modern ‘environmental history’ have made connections between mid-Atlantic cities like Pittsburgh, New York, Philadelphia and Washington, and the natural environments beyond their boundaries. The ways in which parks and waterways brought nature into the cities and the use of accessible mountains for recreation by New Yorkers have, as Stroud shows, been examined in a range of studies dating back to the 1930s. Earlier still, individual pioneers like Mira Dock, a Botany graduate from the University of Michigan, brought interests in nature and in urban reform to bear on the cities of the mid-Atlantic. Dock toured Pennsylvania in the 1890s lecturing on the value of trees in an urban setting. Her message found a receptive audience and helped create pressure for the formation of a forest commission by the Pennsylvania State Legislature.

Coastal cities in particular, provide an important context for studying the environmental dimension to urban life, as demonstrated in Andrew Kahrl's study, ‘Sunbelt by the sea: governing race and nature in a twentieth-century coastal metropolis’, J. of Urban History, 38 (2012), 488–508. Kahrl explores the rise of Virginia Beach, Virginia, which was transformed from a modest resort town for the wealthy into a sprawling community and holiday destination for the middle classes in the course of the twentieth century. Local authorities fought a constant battle against the challenges of the environment, in particular the area's coastal erosion, its weather extremes and its mosquitos, but the author contends that its efforts to control nature were inseparable from controls over the local inhabitants. Efforts to increase the appeal of the resort to white, middle-class families adversely affected the rights and activities of the local African-American population who found themselves an unwelcome presence on the resort's streets during the tourist season and occupied areas of the poorest areas of the city which suffered from under-investment and neglect. The case of Virginia Beach, Kahrl contends, illustrates the extent to which environmental features had a bearing on the shape of urban and political life in coastal communities.

Elsewhere, the rural–urban relationship is central to Louise Miskell's assessment of the impact of agricultural shows on provincial towns in Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century, ‘Putting on a show: the Royal Agricultural Society of England and the Victorian town, c. 1840–1876’, Agricultural History R., 60 (2012), 37–59. The annual shows of the Royal Agricultural Society were, it is suggested, attractive events for towns to stage in this period, partly because of their potential to pull in thousands of visitors and generate revenue for local businesses, but also because they presented an opportunity for the marketing and promotion of the attractions of the host town, both to visitors and to a wider, newspaper-reading public. Close links with the countryside and a culture of rurality pervaded even some of the largest industrial towns of the period as town leaders hailed the purity of their water supplies or built lavish new corn exchanges. Indeed, claiming to serve as a centre for a large rural hinterland was part of the status-enhancing rhetoric of many civic leaders in this period. The shows of the country's most prestigious agricultural society presented towns with important opportunities to demonstrate this influence and to celebrate their close connections with the countryside.

A rather different assessment of the urban–rural relationship is offered by Toby Lincoln in ‘The rural and urban at war: invasion and reconstruction in China during the anti-Japanese War of Resistance’, J. of Urban History, 38 (2012), 114–32. At times of conflict, Lincoln argues that the experience of rural and urban locations, even those of relatively close proximity to one another, could be very different. His analysis of the Japanese invasion of China in 1937 emphasizes the very different impact the conflict had on town and countryside. As Japanese planes targeted cities to maximize disruption to communications and economic activity the inhabitants of remote rural areas experienced little change in their lives. While terrified city dwellers fled aerial bombardment, villagers living along the route of the main transport arteries had their crops burned and their buildings attacked by invading troops. But away from these communication routes life continued as normal – even commercially buoyed by the arrival or refugees from the city looking for accommodation and food. The author argues that space is an important analytical tool for measuring the experience of conflict and argues the case for a greater consideration of spatial variations in the assessment of how conflict could impact on society.

Elsewhere in the J. of Urban History, 38 (2012), is a special issue devoted to exploring the relationship between cities and nationalism. It brings together a collection of articles which were originally presented as papers at a conference on ‘Cities and Nationalisms’ held at the University of London's Centre for Metropolitan History in June 2010. In a short introductory piece, Vivian Bickford-Smith sets out ‘The case for studying cities and nationalisms’, 855–61. In some respects, he finds it is surprising that the connection between cities and nationalism has not been more readily researched, especially given that nationalism is a phenomenon so associated with modernity, and so reliant on urban populations, spaces and communications for its spread. Yet at the same time, ideas of nationalism have often relied on rural imagery, especially in a European context and this is one reason, the author suggests, for the neglect of the urban relationship with nationalism. In the articles that follow in this special issue, the authors tackle the subject from a number of different perspectives with studies focusing on cities as diverse as Shanghai, Alexandria, Kinshasa, Kirkuk and Dublin. Prashant Kidambi's contribution on ‘Nationalism and the city in colonial India: Bombay, c. 1890–1940’, 950–67, examines the evolution of Indian nationalism in the city over a 50-year period. In the years before World War I, he argues, Bombay's middle classes expressed a particular brand of patriotism which combined elements of local identity with loyalty to the British empire. By the 1920s and 1930s, however, a new brand of popular politics was emerging which posed a more overt challenge to colonial authority. The influence of Ghandian nationalism in this period was crucial and the formation of the Nationalist Municipal Party in Bombay in 1922 brought this influence to bear on civic elections in the city in the inter-war period.

Alongside this burgeoning literature on colonial cities, British towns and cities continue to attract the attention of historians of the modern period, and this year interest in planning and governance occupies a prominent place in the periodical literature. David Barrie and Susan Broomhall, for example, offer an assessment of the development of police courts in Scotland in the first three decades of the nineteenth century, in ‘Public men, private interests: the origins, structure and practice of police courts in Scotland, c. 1800–1833’, Continuity and Change, 27 (2012), 83–123. As the authors point out, despite the fact that these courts came to be the places where most urban dwellers encountered the workings of the law from the late eighteenth century onwards, relatively little historical research has been carried out on their operation outside London. Barrie and Broomhall contend that the private needs of a new class of propertied businessmen underpinned the establishment of police courts in Scotland's cities, beginning with the court in Edinburgh in 1806, but that they successfully intertwined these needs with a rhetoric which emphasized the public good.

Much of the business of police courts was associated with drink-related crime and it was the way in which the problem of drunkenness, especially amongst women, was managed in the English city of Liverpool that forms the subject of an article by David Beckingham, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 102 (2012), 647–66. In ‘Gender, space, and drunkenness: Liverpool's licensed premises, 1860–1914’, Beckingham shows that women made up 40 per cent of the city's arrests for drunkenness in the study period and, moreover, that they were the target of campaigns by social reformers to control and regulate women's behaviour, not only in the pub and on the street, but also in the home. Magistrates used maps to work out the likely sphere of influence of public houses and in doing so promoted the scrutiny of female drinking patterns well beyond the realms of licensed premises. It was, Beckingham argues, a process that not only constructed notions of drinking women as ‘deviant’, but helped to ‘normalize’ the association between alcohol and men.

Much more direct interventions in the domestic lives of the inhabitants of British towns came in the form of housing projects undertaken by city planners, often in the name of improvement and urban regeneration. An ambitious analysis of housing schemes in different cities and also in different eras, is undertaken by Alice Mah in a study of ‘Demolition for development: a critical analysis of official urban imaginaries in past and present UK cities’, J. of Historical Sociology, 25 (2012), 151–76. She compares the city improvement scheme in Birmingham (1875–1914) with the neighbourhood regeneration scheme in Walker, Newcastle upon Tyne (2000–11) and argues that the cross-chronological comparison is a valid way of examining the development of urban policies which linked slum clearance with plans for renewal – or ‘demolition for development’. She argues that both cases demonstrate the limitations of property-driven regeneration schemes: ‘Physical renewal is not enough; social and economic issues of employment opportunities, skills retention, and skills training within the local community need to be addressed in any scheme which would have real impacts for urban development’ (p. 171).

Urban housing schemes were not only about renewal but also about bringing greater order and transparency to residential locations, and one important tool for achieving this was the adoption of house numbering. An interesting cluster of articles on this theme appears as a special section in Urban History 39, 4 (2012). There is, according to the introduction to this section by Reuben Rose-Redwood and Anton Tantner, 607–13, a need to take the history of house numbering seriously as an organizational device which became more sophisticated and uniform over time. American cities clearly played an important part in the evolution of numbering methods with, for example, the method of allocating even and odd house numbers to different sides of a street originating in Philadelphia in 1790. Reuben Rose-Redwood's own contribution to this section is a study of house numbering in New York, ‘“A regular state of beautiful confusion”: governing by numbers and the contradictions of calculable space in New York City’, 624–38. Rose-Redwood argues that up to the mid-nineteenth century, the city's authorities had great difficulty in devising numbering techniques that could keep pace with the development of the built environment. Streets often had to be renumbered in new numerical sequences as the built environment underwent different phases of construction and demolition. Not until the second half of the nineteenth century, the author argues, did a more systematic approach to the problem emerge in New York, with the adoption of a ‘decimal’ system based on the allocation of 100 numbers to each city block.

Elsewhere in Urban History, Peter Shapely considers housing schemes as just one aspect in a study of ‘Civic pride and redevelopment in the post-war British city’, Urban History, 39 (2012), 310–28. His article brings a welcome twentieth-century perspective to a theme more commonly explored by historians of the nineteenth-century city. Shapely argues that far from declining in the post-war period, civic pride was evident in the planning and development schemes undertaken in British towns after 1945. Bound up with ideas of modernism, health and dynamism, civic pride was no longer couched in the language of middle-class culture but was, instead, articulated through the schemes of the local developers and councillors charged with building for the future. It was evident in their choice of building materials like concrete and glass, and in their eagerness to market and promote their ideas in brochures, exhibitions and even on film as in Manchester where the publicity committee produced the hour-long marketing film, ‘A city speaks’ released in 1947.

Interestingly, this film forms the subject of Charlotte Wildman's study of ‘The projection of civic identity in Manchester’, Twentieth Century British History, 23 (2012), 80–99. Although, like Shapely, Wildman sees this feature film as an expression of civic pride, she argues that it was not part of the reconstruction narrative of the post-war period. Rather, she sees it as part of a municipal effort to boost civic identity on-going in the city since the 1930s. The film dwelled more on the grand housing projects of the 1920s and 1930s than it did on schemes of the post-war period. It examined Victorian Manchester in an effort to show how far the city had improved since then using comparative infant mortality rates, numbers of houses built. In this sense, it looked back from 1947, not forwards. This may have been one factor which limited the film's appeal with the public for it met with a lukewarm response from local people, even if other local governments were more enthusiastic about its message of progress.

The theme of inter-war civic pride which forms such a key part of this analysis of ‘A city speaks’ is explored further by Wildman in a study of ‘Urban transformation in Liverpool and Manchester, 1918–1939’, Historical J., 55 (2012), 119–43. Far from seeing these two northern cities as deprived and poverty stricken, Wildman argues for a re-think of such perceptions of the urban north of England in the light of the ambitious civic re-development programmes being promoted in the region in the inter-war period. Liverpool, for example, is seen as a city in the vanguard of civic planning and design in the years after 1918. The period was not without its problems. The author acknowledges the severity of strikes and race riots in 1919 and a growing sense of economic divide from the more prosperous southern cities as the Lancashire cotton industry collapsed and the port of Liverpool lost trade. But, running counter to these trends, a number of initiatives aimed to boost the two principal cities of the north-west of England. With high levels of spending and the formation of new municipal committees like Manchester's Town Planning Special Committee, important housing initiatives were promoted, notably the building of the Wythenshawe estate in Manchester. In Liverpool, some 140,000 people were rehoused in the inter-war years thanks to a house-building programme master-minded by the city's architect and director of housing, Sir Lancelot Keay. In addition, the construction of new public buildings and the staging of civic weeks in both cities in the period underpinned the sense of a concerted push to regenerate and celebrate urban progress in both places. Wildman's case for a re-evaluation of the inter-war period in the north of England is a convincing one, and perhaps points the way for some fresh perspectives from other historians on aspects of urban life in the twentieth century.