Toby Lincoln's dense paperback comes as the 23rd to be published since 2006 in Cambridge University Press's series New Approaches to Asian History. Books in this admirable series are intended for classroom use, and previous titles have focused on particular epochs or topics such as the partition of India, early 20th-century China, gender and sexuality in modern China, Asian military history, the Muslim empires (Ottoman, Safavid, Mughal), epidemics. An Urban History of China departs from its predecessors in its vast historical span, stretching from earliest antiquity to the present day, and in a subject-matter that is necessarily all-embracing if towns and cities are to be understood, as here, not just in physical terms but as administrative entities, economic systems, defensive enclaves, trading hubs, and settings for the everyday life of millions of men and women. “Cities,” Lincoln writes, “are so vibrant that it is almost impossible to find a part of human life that does not take place within them” (p. 259).

This style of urban history more resembles a busy crossroads of historiography than a secluded scholarly backwater. Over the span of 4,000 years of dynastic continuity and the forbidding dimensions of the national territory, Toby Lincoln is able to draw on a vast historical bibliography, not to mention poems, novels, travelogues and administrative documents. He never, however, loses sight of the simplifying pedagogical purpose of the New Approaches series. His book is presented in a chronological sequence of eight evenly balanced chapters, each divided into three parts – the urban system, the planning and governance of cities, and the everyday life and culture of townspeople. This template involves some confusing switchbacks within the extended historical spans of the early parts but comes into its own in the treatments of the 19th century, the Republic, the Maoist era, and the prodigious urban expansion of the past 40 years. As these are periods the author happens to teach at the University of Leicester, the book also makes a nice advertisement for his classroom style.

A good teaching text both reviews and engages with the literature. In telling the Urban History of China, Lincoln challenges received wisdom on several matters. His account notably makes no mention of Confucian texts but instead emphasizes the effects of trade and commercial markets in opening up the geomantic, hierarchical order of Imperial cities, even in such tightly controlled capitals as Chang'an in the Tang Dynasty. Secondly, he portrays the role of 19th-century Western imperialism less in terms of national humiliation than as one of the early sources of Chinese urban modernity. Thirdly, he challenges the idea of China as a special case that stands apart from the mainstream of global urban history. In an engaging postscript he goes on to apologize for the relatively slight coverage given to gender and to environmental history, but the mix is already so rich that readers can hardly complain.

From earliest times, foreign visitors have marvelled at what they saw in Chinese cities. Many details of Imperial city-building are truly marvellous: the scale of the Grand Canal and the other waterways that provided the Empire's principal communication web; the dimensions of urban roads (especially where the central lane was reserved exclusively for the emperor); the gigantic scale of walls and ditches; the hundreds of canal bridges; the thousands of boats and carts that converged on urban markets; the millions of city residents. Equally remarkable has been the ability of the authorities to keep track of these populations, whether through the gated wards and watchtowers of the dynastic eras, or the contemporary coverage of CCTV surveillance technology linked to facial recognition software. Lincoln draws a deft profile of the free-market consumerism of recent decades, showing how state communism defines its political boundaries. At the municipal scale he analyses the city planning mechanisms by which historic townscapes and agricultural landscapes have been cleared by public power and their sites mobilized for private industrial estates, technology parks, retail centres and gated residential communities. In describing the everyday life of cities since the reform era, he charts the stratified and divergent experiences of rich business and CCP élites, of the urban middle class and of the numerical majority of the population who subsist in poverty.

Toby Lincoln's narrative is accompanied by two statistical tables of urban population under CCP rule, 14 valuable maps of China's urban and transport systems from the Shang period (1700–1050 BCE) to the present day, four city plans, and just two images – one a medal of Chairman Mao and the other a rather murky reproduction, from a 1957 architectural magazine, of a bird's-eye view of the Beijing Agricultural Machinery Tractor Factory. Clearly, this book leaves untapped the immense iconographic resources of woodcuts, drawings, paintings and photography of cities and urban life. But you could say the author whets the reader's appetite for more, which is exactly what an introductory academic text should do.