Pre-1500

From an empirical perspective, archaeologists and historians face a somewhat peculiar challenge, that is, to understand a past that is no longer with us through the discussion of wide range of objects – buildings, texts, textiles and so on – that are mere relics of that past. This challenge is complicated by what the anthropologist Arjun Appaduraj has famously called ‘the social life of things’. The material remnants of past societies do not survive in a vacuum: instead, these objects are used and re-used in new contexts in which they acquire new meanings, be it as cherished family heirlooms, as stuffy museum objects or as irritating obstacles for project developers. Consequently, these objects are suspended between the past and the present, in the sense that – as Joseph Morsel mordantly put it – ‘a restored castle is essentially a trophy of a new social system, whose might is expressed through the ruins of another social system’.Footnote ¹ Proceeding from the insight that the original meaning of objects is often clouded by the current context in which they function, historians and archaeologists are increasingly attentive to the question why – and if so, how – some material remnants of the past are re-used whereas others are not.

An inspiring contribution in this respect is the article of Mark S. Webb on the protection – or the lack thereof – of medieval buildings in British towns in the aftermath of World War II. Proceeding from a comparative discussion of Southampton and Coventry, the author reveals that the extent to which medieval buildings were protected and restored had much to do with the specific priorities of local interest groups. Coventry limited itself to preserving a restricted sample of ‘best examples’ of still-extant medieval buildings as the city council committed to an ambitious project of urban planning in which the car industry and engineering figured largely. The aim to make the most of the destruction caused by bombing raids to redevelop Coventry into a car-friendly modern town only met with scattered opposition. In contrast, Southampton saw a scenario in which a more conservative concept of urban development was championed by the town government, not in the least because the town's main economic interest – the shipping industry – was compatible with the preservation of entire blocks of medieval buildings which thus retained much more of their original context than their Coventry counterparts. Also, well-organized and dynamic heritage associations leaned in heavily on the decision-making process. This comparative analysis reveals much about how the concept of ‘medieval heritage’ was an intensely political project that was developed and mediated in the rapidly changing context of post-war Britain, while providing an unusual but thought-provoking bridge between contemporary historiography and medieval archaeology (‘Local responses to the protection of medieval buildings and archaeology in British post-war town reconstruction: Southampton and Coventry’, Urban History, 45 (2018), 635–59).

The modern management of urban space and its constituent buildings was of course prefigured by the contemporary attempts to manage the medieval town both as a discrete material environment and as an intellectual concept. This line of enquiry also saw significant work in 2018 with the contribution of Brecht Dewilde, Jan Dumolyn, Bart Lambert and Bram Vannieuwenhuyze on the city of Bruges in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. While the gradual collapse of Bruges’ traditional function as a gateway city for European trade had many causes, not least in the structural realignment of international trade networks, contemporaries tended to zoom in on a discrete environmental problem that was seemingly remediable, namely the declining navigability of the waterways that connected Bruges with the North Sea. Interestingly, the city council not only committed to investments in sluices, locks and canals, but also in what the authors appropriately call the ‘graphic identity’ of the town: a study of a wide range of maps that have been produced between the 1480s and the 1550s of Bruges and its environs reveals an increasing commitment to propagate the town's continuing accessibility to foreign merchants. Eventually, these projects came to an end in the mid-sixteenth century, when it became clear that the town would never regain its former glory. For historians, however, these experiments provide an unusually detailed and explicit testimony to the complex ideas that city-dwellers cultivated about their hometown. These maps were in that respect not just newly minted propaganda for recent investments in economic infrastructure, as they proceeded from older, pre-established notions in which the cultural and economic identity of Bruges was entwined with its function as a seaport (‘“So one would notice the good navigability”: economic decline and the cartographic conception of urban space in late fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Bruges’, Urban History, 45 (2018), 2–25).

The growing ease with which historians abandon traditional notions about ‘non-fictional’ texts as the only source for historical scholarship in favour of images and other textual genres is also revealed in Laura Crombie's discussion of the craft guilds of fifteenth-century Ghent, the other leading town of the late medieval county of Flanders. Building on the seminal project of Catharina Lis and Hugo Soly (Worthy Efforts: Attitudes to Work and Workers in Pre-Industrial Europe (Leiden, 2010)), the author expands the budding cultural history of labour with a discussion of a set of saints’ lives and poems that survive for the mason's guild. Through an illuminating comparison with the Corpus Christi festival of York, the article reveals a meticulous reification and sanctification of work as a source of both unity and hierarchy among the craftsmen (‘Craft guild ideology and urban literature: the Four Crowned Martyrs and the Lives of Saints Nazarius and Celsus as told by the Mason's Guild of fifteenth-century Ghent’, Urban History, 45 (2018), 404–25). This is an interesting observation that merits further reflection, as earlier research has revealed that precisely the building sector was susceptible to early experiments with putting out-systems that caused corporate bodies to split into an elite of entrepreneurs and a proletariat of economically dependent wage labourers.

Next to the progressively interdisciplinary character of medieval urban history, the dominant trend is the continued efflorescence of gender studies. The year 2018 provides a bountiful harvest in this respect, first with a cluster of articles that, taken together, do much to illuminate the deteriorating position of women in medieval society and its underlying causes. The first article that deserves attention in this respect is that of Denise Bezzina on the marital arrangements of women in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Genoa. An exceptional set of notarial documents allowed Bezzina to focus on the goods that married women from the elite and middling strata of urban society controlled independently from their dowries, the latter being more firmly controlled by their husbands. The use of dowries was a recently new phenomenon, as it was introduced in Genoa's legal framework in 1143 as an instrument for prominent families to defend their interests, if necessary at the expense of individual (female) members. The non-dotal goods did leave women some leeway to act independently, for example by favouring other family members with gifts or by investing their own assets as they saw fit. In time, however, both families and the municipal government adopted more restrictive customary practices that further eroded the position of women as independent asset holders (‘Charting the extrados (non-dotal goods) in Genoa and Liguria in the mid twelfth to thirteenth centuries’, J. of Medieval History, 44 (2018), 422–38). The detrimental impact of new property regimes in which women were progressively denied independent control over individual assets is revealed in full in Shennan Hutton's incisive article on the role of women in textile production in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Ghent. Through the combination of snippets of scattered evidence and the scrutiny of the dauntingly extensive registers of the Ghent aldermen, Hutton reveals the existence of a hitherto unexpected level of female entrepreneurship. While excluded from the top-tier segment of the production process (e.g. weaving, which was progressively conceived as a male-dominated, guilded profession), women were not only involved in the lower-level production process (e.g. combing, carding, spinning): as independent actors, or in tandem with a husband, they had a significant presence as mid-level entrepreneurs who either organized the acquisition, processing and distribution of wool or the lower end of retail sales. A crucial precondition for all these activities was that women had a significant measure of control over fungible assets – money, land or wool – that allowed them to leverage the necessary credit for their enterprise, so that legal changes that threatened women's property rights also undermined their capacity to participate in the urban economy (‘Organizing specialized production: gender in the medieval Flemish wool cloth industry (c. 1250–1384)’, Urban History, 45 (2018), 382–403). Next to urban elites who pushed for a more patriarchal organization of the family, economic crisis was also a factor in the declining fortunes of women. A detailed analysis of the challenging renteboeken for fifteenth-century Brussels allows Andrea Bardyn to assess that the share of women as urban landowners declined progressively with the economic crises that took shape in the Low Countries around 1400. While women had controlled c. 15–25 per cent of urban real estate in Brussels, this rapidly declined as poorer women were forced to sell off their land to make ends meet, leaving only some pockets of real estate in the hands of exceptionally wealthy women who were more rentiers than small-commodity producers (‘The gender distribution of real property ownership in late medieval Brussels (1356–1460)’, Continuity and Change, 33 (2018), 29–57).

If the position of women was structurally deteriorating in western Europe between the thirteenth and the sixteenth century, this is not to say that women were only hapless victims. Another, equally important line of research is bringing to the fore the ways in which women continued to eke out positions for themselves in the public sphere in the face of increasingly pronounced biases against women. A particularly illuminating example comes from the city-state of Bologna. This self-conscious political community had a difficult relationship with the Dominican order, which had an important foothold in the town. As a religious order with inquisitorial prerogatives that was under the direct authority of the papal see, the Dominicans had provoked much outrage in May 1299 by denying confession to a heretic who was about to be executed and by exhuming another condemned heretic for a post-mortem burning. In the weeks that followed, several hundreds of individuals – three-quarters of whom were women – came to the inquisitor of Bologna to confess and to be absolved for slander and defamation against the inquisitor himself. Proceeding from a thoughtful and nuanced reading of the administrative records that testify to this curious penitential procession, Melissa Vise provides an urban twist to a line of enquiry that goes back to Caroline Walker-Bynum's classic study on food consumption as an vehicle for female empowerment (Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley, 1987)). Vise convincingly argues that these women were exploiting the theatrical opportunities provided by a highly public act of penitence at the church of San Domenico to secure their own safety while giving a powerful voice to their own religious and social concerns in an increasingly hostile climate (‘The women and the Inquisitor: peacemaking in Bologna, 1299’, Speculum, 93 (2018), 357–86).

This fruitful attention to ambiguity is also present in one of the very few publications of 2018 that addresses the early medieval town, that is, Shane Bobrycki's brilliant article on a relatively well-documented case of popular unrest in Dijon. At a given moment in the 840s, several hundred people had congregated in the largest town of this precocious urban settlement to engage in religious performances that baffled the ecclesiastical authorities. Here, too, women were very prominent, but while being attentive to gender, the author engages in a broader project, that is, probing the ambiguities in political power in pre-modern societies. While being deeply suspicious of crowds as potential sources of unrest and heresy, religious and secular authorities also relied on the crowd to implement their policies. In a context in which both the church and the polity only had an extremely limited administrative apparatus, rulers relied by necessity on public gatherings of their subjects for the implementation of decision-making, dissemination of news, tax-gathering and so on. While challenging an important strand of the extensive scholarship on Carolingian societies – i.e. the idea that Carolingian elites were relatively powerful vis-à-vis their subjects when compared to earlier or later empires – this article creates important conceptual spillovers for scholars who have no particular interest in Carolingian political history or the earliest stages of medieval urbanization by drawing attention to what anthropologists call ‘slant-wise behavior’, that is, actions that ‘do not sit easily on an “axis” of domination and resistance’ (p. 31). Some events, such as the gathering of a crowd in Dijon's main church in the 840s, are perhaps better understood as the actions of subaltern groups that simply pursue their own interests without any intent of challenging the authorities, even if those authorities are prone to read these actions as ‘resistance’ (‘The flailing women of Dijon: crowds in ninth-century Europe’, Past and Present, 240 (2018), 3–46). This is a valuable lesson for urban historians for different stripes, I think, because our discipline has a long-standing tradition of imagining urban communities as either arenas of conflict, or as consensus-driven collective bodies. This promising perspective may help us to develop a third, analytically balanced approach of how different interest groups interacted, and how their views have shaped the available sources.

This attention to the social basis of urban government also returns in several other articles that were published in 2018. Brendan Osswald provides a forceful reminder that urban elites were often fragile with his discussion of regime change in the Byzantine city-state of Iôannina (situated on the mainland of modern Greece; ‘La révolution de 1411 à Iôannina: comment interpréter la Chronique des Tocco’, Revue Historique, 685 (2018), 23–58), and two articles on Netherlandish towns also zoom in on dissent within the urban community. The first article concerns a Joyous Entry that was organized in the Brabantine town of Antwerp in January 1478. Having become the consort of Mary of Burgundy, the heiress to the Burgundian Netherlands, Maximilian of Austria was keen to receive the oaths of loyalty of the citizens of Antwerp, as this town was gradually replacing Bruges as the most important forum for international trade and banking in north-western Europe. He may have received more than he had bargained for, however, because the Antwerp political community was in turmoil. Traditionally, Antwerp was one of the very few large cities in the southern Low Countries where the craft guilds had no representatives in the city council, but some of the textile guilds had claimed this right in the aftermath of the unexpected death of Mary's father, Duke Charles the Bold (d. 1477). The tense political atmosphere also impinged on the Joyous Entry of Maximilian: an exceptionally detailed description of the various pageants that were staged during the prince's procession through the Antwerp streets allows Kim Overlaet to study the ways in which various interest groups expressed their loyalty to their new prince while also giving him a strong signal to respect the privileges and autonomy of the town. The guilds of the butchers and the fishmongers, for example, had organized a play in which the murder of Caesar was re-enacted, whereas the merchant's guild had chosen a play about a king who was exiled to a monster-infested island. Joyous Entries, so the author concludes, were not so much a simple display of princely power as a site of dissension, in which city dwellers claimed public urban spaces to articulate and to further their own agenda in ways that resonate surprisingly well with Shane Bobrycki's discussion of ‘slant-wise’ political actions (‘The “joyous entry” of Archduke Maximilian into Antwerp (13 January 1478): an analysis of a “most elegant and dignified” dialogue’, J. of Medieval History, 44 (2018), 231–49).

Similar tensions also surface in the registers of the aldermen of the Hainaut town of Mons, which reveal that urban policies were not only rooted in the top-down decisions of established elites, but also in the many petitions submitted to the aldermen by city dwellers who had no official representation in the town's bench of aldermen. In an analysis that closely mirrors the argument developed in Christian Liddy's Contesting the City. The Politics of Citizenship in English Towns, 1250–1530 (Oxford, 2017), Valeria Van Camp and Jelle Haemers show that frustrated middling groups circulated fierce critiques of the city council, and formulated ambitious proposals for reform, including demands for greater accountability of the aldermen, tax reforms and craft guild representation. What emerges is a complex situation in which the Mons ruling class was careful to take such demands seriously, precisely to make sure that its domination would not be challenged in more fundamental and unpredictable ways (‘“Li ville est mal gouvernee.” Les registres du conseil de Mons, le rapport avec ses comptes communaux et la crise politique de 1424–1428’, Histoire Urbaine, 52 (2018), 137–66).

That disgruntled inhabitants of fifteenth-century Mons tended to concentrate on the city finances and the city accounts when they demanded greater transparency of their aldermen is no coincidence. The uses of public money also figure largely in the article of Robin McCallum on the loans of English towns to the crown in the fourteenth century (‘Loans from English provincial towns to the crown during the reigns of Edward II and Edward III’, Historical Research, 91 (2018), 605–27). Contrary to a long-standing tradition in which state formation is imagined as a process of centralization, the English crown gradually shifted from a relatively centralized approach towards credit, in which hefty loans were secured from a small aggregate of Italian firms (the Bardi, the Peruzzi and so on), towards a more decentralized approach in which a wide array of smaller loans were secured from individual merchants, urban governments, prominent noblemen and so on. What the detailed analysis of the loans from towns to Edward II (reign: 1307–27) and Edward III (reign: 1327–77) reveals is a complex situation in which the costs and benefits were often unequally distributed. If small towns often reaped benefits from their increasingly close bonds with the crown, then the frequent demands for loans also contributed to the economic difficulties of some towns. Within towns, some individuals acquired much power and status by brokering credit to the king, the most famous example being William de la Pole, a Hull merchant and the founder of a noble dynasty that eventually challenged the Tudor claim to the English crown. Others, then, were not so lucky as they became the target of royal intimidation.

Just as is the case for the other articles on urban politics discussed above, this discussion of the many facets of the financial interactions between kings, towns and individual townsmen is part of a larger revisionist project in which urban authority is no longer imagined as a self-contained and static concept, but as a dyadic and flexible relationship between different actors. Glenn Ehrstine's article also helps to rethink urban politics, albeit from a somewhat different perspective that owes more to cultural than to social history. In a thought-provoking argument, he probes the religious dimensions to city finances with a study of the financial importance of indulgences for the aldermen of Zerbst, a town of c. 5,000 inhabitants in the principality of Anhalt in the German empire. Investigating the organization of the sale of indulgences in a town that was close to Luther's Wittenberg, Ehrstine shows that not only the church, but also the urban government was an important stakeholder. Confronted with heavy expenses in the wake of a fire in 1504, the Zerbst aldermen did what they could to fan the selling of indulgences on the town's budding Corpus Christi festival, as the revenues from pilgrims were important for the town coffers, at least until the 1530s. Primarily an intervention in the fierce debate on the early stages of the Reformation, in which laymen are usually imagined as the naive victims of clerical exploitation, this article also does important work for urban historians, in that it provides a powerful testimony to urban government as a social project that proceeded from an axis of the ‘public’/‘private’ and the ‘religious’/‘secular’ that was different from that of modern times (‘Raymond Peraudi in Zerbst: Corpus Christi theater, material devotion, and the indulgence microeconomy on the eve of the Reformation’, Speculum, 93 (2018), 319–56).

From discussions of urban public finances, it is only a small step to the finances of individual city dwellers. This topic too has received privileged attention with the special issue Le crédit au quotidien in Histoire Urbaine (vol. 51). Whereas the importance of microcredit for rural economies in the Middle Ages has been revealed by the recent scholarship of inter alia Chris Briggs, urban microcredit is a hitherto understudied subject and the editors of this special issue, Martha Howell and Claire Billen, have done a great service to the historians of medieval towns by remedying this lacuna. What lends cohesion to this wide-ranging set of seven papers is the willingness of all authors involved to leave behind the well-known world of commercial credit, as evinced in the archives of great merchants, in search of the world of small-scale credit. The papers range from thirteenth-century Ypres and Tournai in the Netherlands (Martha Howell and Claire Billen and David Kusman, respectively) over fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Valladolid in Spain (David Carjaval), fifteenth-century Treviso in Italy (Matthieu Scherman), fifteenth-century Basel in the Swiss confederacy (Gabriela Signori) to fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Marseille and Lucca (Dan Smail), but a common theme is the ubiquity of small loans that do important work in a wide range of social and economic contexts.

As a sample of a burgeoning field of scholarship, these papers show enormous promise. Howell's discussion of microcredit in thirteenth-century Ypres, for example, dovetails nicely with Shennan Hutton's work for fourteenth-century Ghent, as she too can identify a hitherto hidden milieu of mid-range entrepreneurs between the better-documented masses of ‘proto-capitalists’ and ‘proto-proletarians’ that figure so largely in the older scholarship on Ypres. Gabriela Signori hints at a fascinating shift in fifteenth-century Basel from horizontal credit networks (e.g. within a guild) to vertical networks between the rich and the poor. Dan Smail, then, even challenges the common-sense understanding of medieval historians of ‘money’ as something inextricably entwined with bullion, as he points out that commodities often fulfilled a similar function as coins within credit relations. Many of these lines of enquiry connect in fruitful ways with comparable research for the towns of early modern Europe (e.g. the work of Craig Muldrew on debt in seventeenth-century King's Lynn as discussed in The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (New York, 1998)).

In the final analysis, medievalists do not only have to investigate the history of European towns through the flawed but persistent concept of ‘The Middle Ages’ as the interval between c. 500 and c. 1500 CE, they also face the greater challenge to integrate their findings in the broader analytical framework of pre-modern urban societies. The past year saw important steps in this direction with the long-run analysis of social inequality of Branko Milanovic. Medieval towns figure largely in his analysis, as key data are derived from the recent scholarship of Wouter Ryckbosch and Guido Alfani on social inequality in Netherlandish and Italian towns respectively. Milanovic's comparative discussion of social inequality ranges from Greek city-states to the burgeoning settlements of the Thirteen Colonies and confirms again that urbanization is an important variable: as income from capital is distributed more unequally than income from labour, the concentration of capital in towns makes sure that urban communities are hotbeds of increasing inequality (‘Towards an explanation of inequality in premodern societies: the role of colonies, urbanization, and high population density’, Economic History R., 71 (2018), 1029–47). The various contributions on medieval urban history that appeared in 2018 make clear that historians, if only intuitively, are working hard to understand how contemporaries experienced, understood and mediated the impact of such structural trends on their daily lives. An unusually explicit and pertinent discussion of this issue that also bridges the divide between medievalists and early modernists is presented in Jim van der Meulen's article on Nieuwkerke, a small village in the hinterland of Ypres that evolved into a town with the rapid development of its textile industries in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. A critical comparative discussion of this boom phase with the earlier and later phases of limited or non-existent growth reveals that the collective organization of entrepreneurs as a community of equals who shared equally in the profits was crucial to explain the sudden economic efflorescence of Nieuwkerke. This critical study of the economic advantages of collective action and how contemporaries perceived social inequality is an important element for further discussions of the ways in which the social, economic, political and cultural facets of urban societies were intertwined (‘Corporate collective action and the market cycle of the cloth industry in Nieuwkerke, Flanders, 1300–1600’, Social History, 43 (2018), 375–99).

1500–1800

Differences in economic development remain centre stage in economic history. In recent years, large datasets have enabled historians to investigate traditional grand narratives in economic history from a new perspective, as broad, regional comparisons came within reach. Clearly, this strand of research has been gaining momentum in recent years. Mattia Fochesato, for example, addresses the issue of a ‘little divergence’ in late medieval and early modern Europe in his latest article ‘Origins of Europe's north–south divide: population changes, real wages and the “little divergence” in early modern Europe’, Explorations in Economic History, 70 (2018), 91–131. Drawing on big data on real wages and population shocks in no fewer than 14 European cities from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century, he tackles this issue and addresses how real wages responded to demographic shifts in urban environments in the long run. In his analysis, the trend in four north-western cities seems to have deviated from the wider European evolution. Urban wages in Antwerp, Amsterdam and London – as well as in Oxford – escaped the classic Malthusian trap of falling living standards when population increased. From the sixteenth century onwards, north-western European cities thus experienced a ‘little divergence’. Among a wider range of explanations, Fochesato points to the importance of changing fertility regimes, the development of favourable labour organizations and the birth of a different growth model, based on technological changes, which might have created the conditions for increasing output and supporting further population development (a synthesis of the Boserupian and Malthusian models). These factors led the four cities on a different path of development and may thus have caused a ‘little divergence’.

In a way, Wallis, Colson and Chilosi also deal with the debate on the little divergence in ‘Structural change and economic growth in the British economy before the industrial revolution, 1500–1800’, J. of Economic History, 78 (2018), 862–903. They present a large-scale time series analysis of evolving sectoral ratios in male labour for pre-industrial England and Wales, based on an elaborate survey of probate inventories and apprenticeship data. According to the authors, the occupational structure can be read as a reliable indicator for economic development. Therefore, by looking at some structural changes in the composition of the (male) labour force, they uncover some subsequent steps in industrial development. The results of their analysis are quite striking. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the share of the agricultural labourers in England remained all but stable. After 1600, their numbers decreased steadily, while the trend even intensified in the middle of the seventeenth century. In most parts of England, the share of the agricultural workforce shrank, while the proportion of workers in industry and services soared. Not only urban environments saw their economy transformed; the same evolution was seen in the countryside. Even within Britain, some regional divergence occurred, as the Welsh economy saw less conspicuous changes.

Notwithstanding the ubiquitous presence of large datasets, most historical information is still based on the craft-like analysis of primary sources. The recent contributions of Judy Z. Stephenson and Vincent Geloso highlight the importance of a careful historical contextualization in the interpretation of these sources. London wages were, for instance, higher than in other early modern cities in western Europe, or so it is usually claimed in historiography. However, a close reading of the sources – the wage records of bricklayers, carpenters and other ‘builders’ upon which such claims are built, sheds new light on the organization of the building sites. In ‘“Real” wages? Contractors, workers, and pay in London building trades, 1650–1800’, Economic History R., 71 (2018), 106–32, Judy Z. Stephenson elucidates how large-scale building contractors monopolized the market for large-scale construction projects. The contract rates included costs above and beyond the compensation of workers. More importantly, Stephenson argues that the wages that were actually paid were substantially lower than has been estimated in the past, which seems to question the whole idea of the assumed wage gap between London and Paris. Obviously, these findings may have some ramifications for the high-wage economy hypothesis of Robert Allen. Traditionally, the industrial revolution has been explained by referring to high wages – and the relatively low cost of energy – which spurred technological innovations, mechanization and industrial development. However, when the point of departure – the high wages – is challenged, the whole hypothesis becomes a house of cards.

A similar discussion is tackled by Vincent Geloso in ‘Were wages that low? Real wages in the Strasbourg region before 1775’, J. of Interdisciplinary History, 48 (2018), 511–22, where he looks into the assumed differences in real wages between London and Strasbourg (Alsace – France) in order to establish whether the chasm between London and the rest of France was even wider than the rift between London and Paris. Geloso argues that Allen underestimated wage levels outside Britain. France might have been poor, but it was not so badly off as Allen suggested. Empirical evidence from the Strasbourg region seems to mitigate the differences between France and England. Whereas wages in Britain were probably overestimated, those of France were seriously underestimated.

For many years, capital markets have been analysed from a variety of perspectives. In ‘Benefits of empire? Capital market integration north and south of the Alps, 1350–1800’, J. of Economic History, 78 (2018), 637–72, David Chilosi, Max-Stephan Schulze and Oliver Volckart combine three strands of research on the functioning of late medieval and early modern capital markets in which an analysis of annuity markets, interest rates and capital markets is integrated. Drawing on a large dataset covering some 29,000 individual interest rate observations from more than 100 cities over a period of almost 500 years, the authors examine markets in the Holy Roman Empire and Italy. Although most historians agree that the capital markets south of the Alps were more advanced than to the north, the article evidences that the annuity markets in the Holy Rome Empire were better integrated in terms of interest rate dispersion than their Italian counterparts. Moreover, the size – and scope – of the financial market was larger in the north, especially around Lübeck and Hamburg. Institutions may be key to explain these differences in market integration. Chilosi, Schulze and Volckart claim that foreign investors to the north of the Alps were, all in all, better protected than in Italy. Urban administrations in the Holy Roman Empire gradually improved the quality of their institutional framework in order to attract more foreign investments.

Not financial capital but human capital is put under the microscope by Begoña Álvarez and Fernando Ramos Palencia in ‘Human capital and earnings in eighteenth-century Castile’, Explorations in Economic History, 67 (2018), 105–33. Based on a unique database on mid-eighteenth-century Castilian households, the relationship between human capital and (male) labour earnings is examined in depth. The authors find a positive and statistically significant correlation between skills (basic skills like literacy, numeracy and occupational skills) and average earnings, although straightforward causal relations remain somewhat blurred. Moreover, there is a striking difference between the urban and the rural environment: links between human capital and wages were stronger for urban than for rural workers. Labourers with higher skills were not only better remunerated in their main occupation; they were also more prone to diversify their earnings through ‘by-employment’. Yet, the most important finding is the authors’ suggestion that these differences in human capital may have contributed to a growing inequality in earnings in early modern Castile.

Transport is also deemed an important variable in economic development. In their recent article, Bart Ballaux and Bruno Blondé really pounded the metaphorical millstone round the neck of transport history to pieces, by reconstructing a reliable transport price series, based on…millstones (‘Road transport productivity in the sixteenth-century Low Countries: the case of Brabant, 1450–1650’, Economic History R., 71 (2018), 707–26). Even though historians agree on the central role of transport in economic development, the lack of reliable data makes it virtually impossible to assess the assumed impact in practice. However, Ballaux and Blondé move beyond this barrier by creating a new transport price series. In fact, the financial stewards of the ducal domains in Brabant were price-takers, who had few if any options than to accept the price of professional carriers when they wanted to transport millstones to the mills on their domains. Drawing on these sources, Ballaux and Blondé were able to isolate the mechanisms which dominated price formation in road transport. It becomes clear that agriculture held a tight grip on the sector, as land transport was predominantly cast as an agricultural service, which was, amongst other factors, strongly determined by the price of horse fodder. Therefore, price inflation in the sector was not demand-led. The absence of productivity gains confirms the position of land transport as a major pre-industrial bottleneck.

More efficient and extensive transport networks will certainly have affected migration patterns in the eighteenth century. In ‘Modelling regional imbalances in English plebeian migration to late eighteenth-century London’, Economic History R., 71 (2018), 747–71, Adam Crymble, Adam Dennett and Tim Hitchcock tackle an important question on vagrant migration. From which parts of England did London draw its lower-class migrants in the late eighteenth century? Early modern towns and cities needed a constant influx of migrants to compensate the urban graveyard effect. This is certainly the case for booming metropolises such as eighteenth-century London. Based on the place of origins of some 11,500 individuals, Crymble, Dennett and Hitchcock conclude that London encountered some competition with the industrializing areas of the north, while towns in the West Midlands and the West Country produced more migrants to London. Large numbers of women were drawn to the capital from up to 130 kilometres around London.

Natural disasters have evolved into a topical theme in history, as historians try to measure the resilience of early modern societies in cases of cataclysmic floods, droughts, fires, storms, earthquakes and other calamities. In his most recent article, Colin Roose looks at the impact of plague on crime in early modern Bologna, ‘Plague and violence in early modern Italy’, Renaissance Quaterly, 71 (2018), 1000–35. Even though much ink and paper has been spent on the human effects of epidemic outbreaks – including debates on wages and (in)equality, demographic shifts and the development of medical professions – few studies have analysed the link with crime patterns. Drawing on a longitudinal database, Roose argues that crime rates – and especially homicide – spiked after the outbreak of plague in 1630 in Bologna. Manslaughter was still committed by the usual suspects, who were predominantly male, young and armed with knives (or firearms). Yet, these murders, committed in the slipstream of the pandemic pestilence, differed from the ordinary violence through the profile of victims. Compared to the period before the plague, the number of victims that were acquaintances of the suspect soared. Violence was more and more directed towards people who knew each other more or less casually, through friendship, neighbourliness or a common hometown. Moreover, the number of homicides directed upward or downward through channels of authority rose. In particular, the violence between noble families, such as the powerful Bentivoglii and Ruine clan, revived, when the checks and balances of a highly regulated society fell away, resulting in a downward spiral of blood feuds. Apart from these vendettas, the Bolognese government had to cope with a surge in cases where ruffians smeared the doors and windows of houses with dirt, excrement and other pestilent substances, which was a classic tool to ostracize unwanted individuals and families from society. It all hints at the vulnerability of a society under stress.

Poverty was also one of the ingrained risks of early modern life. Due to the recent buzz on inequality, the topic has garnered massive attention in the last years. Despite all this new research, some questions remain unsolved, such as the complex relation between poverty and consumption. Joseph Harley sheds new light on the issue in his latest article by combining evidence from pauper inventories in labourers’ probate inventories from Kent in the long eighteenth century, ‘Consumption and poverty in the homes of the English poor, c. 1670–1834’, Social History, 43 (2018), 81–104. Even if the lion's share of the evidence refers to the rural countryside, a more urban dimension is not entirely ruled out. Harley's article endorses some earlier hypotheses, launched by King, Muldrew, Sneath and others, that the material lives of poor people improved radically in the long eighteenth century as ownership of earthly necessities (beds, chests, chairs and tables) and luxury goods (clocks/watches, cutlery, tea items and books) slowly but surely increased. On the other hand, Harley also provides a fresh perspective by examining regional differences. It was, up until recently, uncertain whether the spread of consumption items among poor people followed the same concentric circle model that defined consumer evolutions in the upper and middle tiers of society, whereby new and fashionable items first appeared in London, spread to surrounding provinces and finally popped up in even the most remote corners of the country. Harley's evidence seems to suggest that the same was true for the poor: new items first showed up in pauper inventories in Kent, then in Essex and eventually – with a considerable delay – in Dorset. More thought-provoking is Harley's suggestion that we have to use a more multilayered concept of the poor, which is still – all too often – used as a catch-all term. In reality, the consumption patterns differed widely from the relatively rich top rung labourers’ probate inventories to the few belongings of the homeless/mobile poor. Lifecycle – and sheer bad luck (unemployment, sickness, the sudden death of a husband) – could radically reshuffle one's material lifestyle, as the penniless poor were forced to pawn or sell some or most of their belongings. Harley urges us to look at these meaningful differences within the broad concept of the poor and penniless in more detail.

Social history has been drawn to the study of all sorts of subaltern groups in the last few decades. In the slipstream of this evolution, the early modern elderly have moved centre stage. According to Anita Boele and Tine De Moor, early modern Holland – and particularly its urbanized core – was the birthplace of a modern, commercialized and above all specialized elderly care (‘“Because family and friends got easily weary of taking care”: a new perspective on the specialization in the elderly care sector in early modern Holland, Economic History R., 71 (2018), 437–63). In contrast with southern Europe, commercialized institutions, resembling the present-day ‘service flats’ for the elderly, were developed which were accessible only for those who could afford it. Moreover, care for the elderly in Holland was specialized towards target groups such as couples or singles. These institutions stand in sharp contrast to the (poor) relief houses in southern Europe that provided only temporary support. Both authors argue that this development was embedded in a tenacious moral culture, which emphasized individual independence and the ability to cope for oneself rather than relying on family support.

Whereas Boele and De Moor look at the remains of the day in the human lifecycle, Charmian Mansell's research is focused on an earlier stage in life. It has long been assumed that (domestic) service was limited in time and bound to an early occupational state in life; a hypothesis which was inspired by the work of Peter Laslett and Ann Kussmaul. Therefore, historians have been studying live-in service as a life phase, preparing young men and women for later stages. Life proper only started when they had acquired the skills and capital to marry and form their own households. However, as Mansell demonstrates by using church court depositions of the dioceses of Exeter, Gloucester and Winchester between 1548 and 1649, female servants were not restricted to the age category of 15 to 24, nor did service involve a narrow scope of activities (see ‘The variety of women's experiences as servants in England (1548–1649): evidence from church court depositions, Continuity and Change, (2018), 315–38). Due to specific social and economic circumstances, service could present a solution to a subgroup of urban and rural women that is neglected in recent studies.

Some months ago, Brussels became the canvass of an unknown street artist, who specialized in rather crude and offensive tableaus. One day, the Belgian capital woke up with the mural of a giant penis on a side wall. Not long after, a scene of a masturbating woman was daubed on one the façades on Avenue Louise. At the Boulevard Barthelemy, a scene of slaughter was sprayed, while uncovered buttocks were seen defecating on the Steenkoolkaai. While some passers-by were slightly amused, other were shocked by the obnoxious and subversive message of these murals. Even though graffiti was also widely used in early modern Europe as an everyday communication strategy, historians have often ignored the potential of this – quite unconventional – source. Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis changed tack with a special issue on the topic, in which the articles of Maartje van Gelder (‘Graffiti in Venetië. Teksten, tekeningen en posters in een vroegmoderne Italiaanse stad’, Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis, 130 (2018), 73–94) and Bram Vannieuwenhuyze (‘De vertekstlozing van de stad. De vergankelijkheid van publieke opschriften in achttiende-eeuws Brussel’, Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis, 130 (2018), 95–118) provide fresh perspective. Maartje van Gelder uses various sources to examine graffiti (in a wide sense) in early modern Venice, including the criminal files of the Consiglio die Dieci, the paintings of Canaletto and Longhi and a recent flood of archaeological reports about scrawls and scribbles on the walls of San Marco, the Lazaretto and the Prigioni Nuovo. Above all, these sources evidence how early modern Venetians deployed all sorts of media – ranging from some quick dashes of charcoal on doors to hastily hung posters on columns, statues and walls – to voice their support for the Doge and the various councils or, by contrast, to express more subversive ideas. The latter were taken very serious by the Consiglio dei Dieci, as seditious slogans or images disturbed the carefully crafted image of a stable and secure republic. Punishment was, therefore, severe.

Law-abiding, informative and subversive inscriptions, posters and graffiti are also the focus of Bram Van Nieuwenhuyze's latest article, which zeroes in on early modern Brussels. Drawing upon a previously unknown manuscript collection of, what was presumably, a club of antiquarian inscription-hunters, Nieuwenhuyze maps the spread of public inscriptions in the residential area around the Groote Markt, where text was written on monuments, civic buildings, churches and private dwellings. Most likely, graffiti – especially the more subversive, abusive or sexual kind – was also ubiquitous in other neighbourhoods, but the, presumably, upper-class writers of the manuscript had little or no interest in the seamy side of Brussels. Whereas the (limited) historiography on the topic seems to emphasize continuity, as graffiti, inscriptions, signs and billboards had been part and parcel of everyday life since the Middle Ages, Nieuwenhuyze's article suggests some radical change in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Fuelled by new ideas on architecture and urbanism, façades and walls were increasingly plastered over, limewashed or painted. The manuscript of the Brussels antiquarian inscription-hunters can, in this regard, be seen as an ultimate attempt to save this public graffiti before blanchiment. Nieuwehuyze explicitly calls for more comparative research to fine-tune or hone this hypothesis.

Inscriptions, graffiti or posters were often made, chalked down or posted up under the cover of darkness. From dusk till dawn, hoodlums, vandals and other ruffians virtually ruled the streets, as public lighting was still limited in early modern Europe. Lanterns and streetlamps thus became an important weapon to fight nocturnal daubing, robbery, violence and other serious mischief. Even though experts have unveiled this gradual enlightenment of Europe, less attention has been paid to its relation to the Enlightenment. Darin McMahon zeroes in on the cross-fertilization of both phenomena in his latest article on public lighting in Paris, ‘Illuminating the Enlightenment: public lighting practices in the siècle des Lumières’, Past and Present, 240 (2018), 119–59. Drawing upon a patchwork of sources, McMahon argues that numerous technical improvements in light technology were due to Lavoisier, Rabiqueau and other enlightened scientists. A real milestone was the réverbère, which spread like wildfire in the second half of the eighteenth century. Equipped with an oil reservoir and polished surfaces, it broadcast light more efficiently than earlier lanterns and thus triggered a revolution in public lighting. At the same time, these technical improvements changed the rhythm of early modern life. Artificial light enabled people to work longer hours, while shops, coffeehouses and theatres extended their opening hours. Le souper (supper) was served at nine or ten o’ clock in the evening and increasingly even later. Improvements in public lighting enabled the public to navigate freely between salons, restaurants and other hubs in Enlightenment Paris. McMahon suggests that these innovations were increasingly perceived – or branded – as a modern marvel, which set Paris apart from the Greek and Roman heritage. Moreover, illumination projects were also increasingly used to set north-west Europe – Paris’ example was soon followed by London, Amsterdam and other large metropolises – apart from Mediterranean Europe or from the rest of the world, where darkness still ruled. Due to Enlightened thinking, Enlightenment was increasingly equated with civilization and progress. McMahon also maps the resistance against this policy, as the local police registers in Paris were rife with incidents where the commis allumeurs (lamplighters) were mocked, harassed or even assaulted. The réverbères were also frequently smashed by citizens, who protested against heavy taxes, state intervention, or invasive Enlightened policies as a whole. (Street) light was fraught with symbolical meaning.

Civic and urban culture have been in the spotlight in recent years, whereby the vibrant cultural transfers between early modern cities have been increasingly uncovered. It is a topic in two recent articles of Amanda Spies-Gans and Charlotta Wolff. Spies-Gans’ essay takes as its subject the rise of female artists in the burgeoning exhibition scene in London and Paris in the long eighteenth century: ‘Exceptional, but not exceptions: public exhibitions and the rise of woman artists in London and Paris, 1760–1830’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 51 (2018), 393–416. Through an analysis of some compelling quantitative and qualitative evidence, the paper convincingly debunks the classic idea that women artists were still on the sideline in the early modern art scene and that exceptions such as Moser or Kauffman remained rarae aves. Exhibition catalogues from the Royal Academy in London and the Salon in Paris evidence that female painters, sculptors and other artists were slowly but surely gaining ground. Their presence was even more marked in Paris than in London, where respectively around 17 per cent and 9 per cent of all exhibitors at the end of the ancien régime was female. Quite surprisingly, the number of exhibited works of art was inversely proportional, as women sent in fewer entries in Paris than in London, which seems to point at different dynamics of inclusion/exclusion, whereby London, Paris and other hubs where part of a wider European trend.

Cultural transfers are also part and parcel of Charlotta Wolf's latest article about the dissemination of the Opéra-Comique in the Nordic Countries, ‘Opéra-comique, cultural politics and identity in Scandinavia, 1760–1800’, Scandinavia J. of History, 43 (2018), 387–409. Wolff convincingly argues that the rise of the Opéra-Comique, which was a fresh scion of the Neapolitan commedia and the French vaudeville, on the Scandinavian peninsula was not only furthered by courts, nobles and diplomats, but was also applauded by a civic public. Due to the well-known story-lines, often based on the literary bestsellers of Marmontel, Voltaire, Sedaine and other high- and low-brow writers of the Enlightenment and translated into the vernacular, these libretti became a powerful medium for ideological purposes. Popularized by the oeuvre of André-Ernest-Modeste Grétry, both radical and more moderate ideas from French Enlightenment thinkers found their way to the Danish, Norwegian and Swedish public, who were completely won over by Le Huron (1767), Lucil (1769) and Silvain (1770). Even though subversive content was not entirely ruled out, the cultural and political agenda of urban elites was often aligned with that of Scandinavian courts. Enlightened ideas were often enthusiastically supported by Scandinavian kings. Last but not least, Wolff also identifies a process of cultural adaptation and appropriation, as the Opéra-Comique was not swallowed hook, line and sinker by Scandinavian publics. Small – but meaningful – adaptations were key. Models of virtue and simplicity promoted in pastoral operas resonated well with the ideals of frugality and simplicity bound to the Nordic character. Obviously, these and other modifications fuelled the idea of a unique national identity.

Post-1800

The last two months of 2018 saw the streets of central Paris filled with the gilets jaunes, a broad political movement of dissatisfied French citizens. Unlike most extra-parliamentary action in history, the protesters were not united by any political party or union. The yellow vests unleashed a civil disorder not seen for decades in Paris – a city with a long and cherished tradition of street action. Protesters were keenly aware of this history, making references to the abdication of President Macron's predecessors and the infamous protests of May 1968. In an ironical way, Haussmann's interventions of the 1850s and 1860s have utterly failed in the prevention of urban riots. On the contrary, in our time of live reporting and social media, the sheer size of the boulevards only amplifies the visual effects of the cat-and-mouse game played by demonstrators and law enforcers. Thus, the well-known observation by David Harvey that it is bodies on the street and in the squares that really matter in achieving political and social change, not the ‘babble of sentiments’ on Twitter or Facebook, has been turned upside down. Given Macron's promise to reverse some of his climate measures, ‘bodies in the streets’ can indeed make a difference, but only when combined with widespread media coverage.

Civil unrest in cities and attempts to quell uprisings loom large in our catch of modern urban histories this year. In 2013, it was not the boulevards of Paris but the streets of Istanbul that provided a dramatic backdrop to clashes between protesters and riot police. In the introduction of a special issue dedicated to the Gezi protests, ‘A momentary lapse of reason? Gezi in social-historical perspective’, J. of Historical Sociology, 31 (2018), 82–93, Spyros Sofos argues that ‘Gezi’ needs more historical contextualization. Instead of seeing the events as a transformative moment in Turkish politics, Sofos presents the outburst of collective action and mass mobilization as a ‘happening’ characterized by rupture and liminality. While the urban environment merely serves as a background to Sofos’ analysis, other articles suggest a stronger relationship between people's behaviour and their surroundings. In a similar but less violent way than the Gezi protests, public kissing in the streets of Mumbai can be seen as an act of civil disobedience as well, argues Sneha Annavarapu in ‘“Where do all the lovers go?” – The cultural politics of public kissing in Mumbai, India (1950–2005)’, J. of Historical Sociology, 31 (2018), 405–19. Annavarapu ties the entity of kissing couples in public space, as portrayed in a local English newspaper, into larger discussions about urban development, pleasure and the imagination of the modern city. By doing so, the author shifts our focus towards discourses of the Indian urban middle class and its contradictory ideas of publicness, safety and privacy.

With acts of transgression in public spaces come issues of policing and reclaiming what local authorities understand to be civic order. In ‘Liberating madness – Punishing insanity: Soviet hippies and the politics of craziness’, J. of Contemporary History, 53 (2018), 832–60, Juliane Fürst examines how Soviet authorities dealt with the emergence of hippies in the streets of post-war Moscow. As per usual in the history of cities, these undesirable elements were expelled from central areas, in this case to psychiatric institutions where they could not threaten Soviet society's status quo. While police forces have always been responsible for maintaining order in urban settlements, their tasks have changed considerably over the last two centuries. In ‘Police–public relations in transition in Antwerp, 1840–1914’, European R. of History, 25 (2018), 147–65, Margo de Koster, Barbara Deruytter and Antoon Vrints demonstrate that police activity in nineteenth-century Antwerp was not only directed by orders from above, but could also be influenced from below. Using police statistics covering all offences registered by the local police force between 1843 and 1913, the authors complicate our understanding of the institutionalization of urban law enforcement and its relationship with local communities. During the post-war period, this relation turned rather sour in American cities, of which recent police killings and urban rioting are a stark reminder. In ‘Police misconduct, community opposition, and urban governance in New York City, 1945–1965’, J. of Urban History, 44 (2018), 643–68, Themis Chronopoulos narrates the mobilization efforts by the black freedom movement against police brutality in New York City, while Andrew Baer explains why police misconduct often went undocumented in ‘The men who lived underground: the Chicago police torture cases and the problem of measuring police violence, 1970–2016’, J. of Urban History, 44 (2018), 262–77.

In urban America, race not only influences the relationship between law enforcers and the communities they are supposed to serve, but electoral politics and residential dynamics as well. In their introduction to a special section, ‘African American urban electoral politics in the age of Jim Crow’, J. of Urban History, 44 (2018), 123–33, Lisa Materson and Joe William Trotter study the involvement of African Americans in party politics during the era of Jim Crow, thus emphasizing the importance of independent black candidates and politics in urban constituencies, in particular for the defection of black voters from the Republican to the Democratic party during the early twentieth century. Sharony Green focuses on a different aspect of black urban affairs in the United States by examining the twentieth-century migration patterns of Afro-Americans in the greater Miami region, ‘Tracing black racial and spatial politics in South Florida via memory’, J. of Urban History, 44 (2018), 1176–96. Through dozens of interviews with people of African descent, Green offers a multifaceted narrative of their experiences while dispelling the myth that black communities in South Florida were heavily segregated. During the early 1980s, Britain experienced its fair share of racial tensions as well. In ‘“A tactical manoeuvre to apply pressure”: race and the role of public inquiries in the 1980 Bristol riot’, Twentieth Century British History, 29 (2018), 129–55, Simon Peplow examines how public inquiries into police violence during Bristol's St Paul's riot of 1980 were seen by black communities as a means to participate more actively in the British political system.

An important background to the riots in American and British cities was the urban crisis of the 1960s and 1970s, when inner-city pollution, congestion and social misery led ever more families to opt for a better future in the suburbs, exacerbating the spiral of decay in central districts. In ‘Multiple deprivation, the inner city, and the fracturing of the welfare state: Glasgow, c. 1968–1978’, Twentieth Century British History, 29 (2018), 605–24, Aaron Andrews traces the emergence of the concept of ‘multiple deprivation’ in social policies for inner Glasgow, which was particularly hit hard by deindustrialization and poverty. Andrews argues that the locating of depressed areas by government agencies gave impetus to the identification of the ‘inner city’ as a policy problem, which in turn led to a fragmentation of the universalist principles upon which the post-war welfare state was built. As in many other western nations, the destination of those deciding or forced to leave the inner city were the new towns. In the case of Scotland, these welfare-state utopias not only promised a better life, but also produced a whole new working-class identity, as argued by Lynn Abrams et al. in ‘Aspiration, agency, and the production of new selves in a Scottish new town, c. 1947 – c. 2016’, Twentieth Century British History, 29 (2018), 576–604. By drawing on both archives and oral histories, Abrams corrects the myopic view of places such as East Kilbride as utter failures, mainly by focusing on the lifestyles and social relations of aspirational new towners. Central to Abrams’ analysis is the intrinsic relationship between human behaviour and the living environment, which is also the topic of Edmund Ramsden and Matthew Smith's ‘Remembering the West End: social science, mental health and the American urban environment, 1939–1968’, Urban History, 45 (2018), 128–49. By examining studies of Boston's West End, the authors demonstrate that psychiatrists, social scientists and planners soon discovered that urban renewal, despite its benign intentions, did more harm than good in improving the mental health conditions of inner-city residents.

Public memories can quickly turn into urban branding, as demonstrated by Tracy Neumann in ‘Reforging the steel city: symbolism and space in postindustrial Pittsburgh’, J. of Urban History, 44 (2018), 582–602. In response to rapid deindustrialization and urban decline, a growth coalition of consultants, city officials and business leaders strove to enhance Pittsburgh's image as a rusty hellhole into a dynamic and liveable city. Informed by theories associated with the spatial turn, Neumann distinguishes between the imagined space of local boosters and the material space of decaying factories and warehouses, thus demonstrating how the city was transformed into a commodity ready to consume by out-of-towners. In short, sites of production changed into items of cultural consumption. The first American city to launch itself into the post-industrial era was Baltimore, which from the 1960s onwards regenerated its dilapidated waterfront into a bustling attraction for tourists and suburbanites. In Stockholm, we should take a much longer view when investigating harbour redevelopment, argues Natasha Vall in ‘A view from the wharf: historical perspectives on the transformation of urban waterfront space in Stockholm during the twentieth century’, Urban History, 45 (2018), 524–8. Already in the early twentieth century municipal planners dreamed of a waterfront landscape cleansed of its industrial legacy, while abandoned areas were occupied by itinerant worker communities as early as the 1950s. In more theoretical examinations of waterfront regeneration, André Fernandes et al. in ‘The cultural heritage in the postindustrial waterfront: a case study of the south bank of the Tagus estuary, Portugal’, Space and Culture, 21 (2018), 170–91, and Angieskza Kanior in ‘The revitalization of the old harbour in Reykjavik by a cultural economy’, Space and Culture, 21 (2018), 424–38, demonstrate that in Lisbon and Reykjavik value-oriented appropriation and conservation processes have resulted in meaningful and respectful placemaking for both tourists and residents. Leon Gooberman comes to similar conclusions for Cardiff in ‘The state and post-industrial urban generation: the reinvention of south Cardiff’, Urban History, 45 (2018), 504–23, although he is more sceptical about the social impact of the locally led regeneration efforts of the 1980s.

The conservation groups of the post-war era were born out of the struggle against urban redevelopment, which can be seen as a broader movement against the deterioration of our living environment. As recently observed by Sharon Zukin, campaigns to save historic buildings from the wrecking ball have often been misused by city officials and property developers to claim space and take it away from others without direct confrontation. In our time, idle harbour cranes and converted warehouses usually only serve as a background to the consuming behaviour of a new urban middle class that seems obsessed with authenticity. Not in the case of Britain's provincial retail markets, says Sarah Mass in ‘Commercial heritage as democratic action: historicizing the “Save the market” campaigns in Bradford and Chesterfield, 1969–1976’, Twentieth Century British History, 29 (2018), 459–84. The lived heritage of a public space accessible to people from all walks of life as opposed to the privatized space of the modern shopping centre was something worth fighting for, as Mass concludes after digging into the archives of civic amenity, community action and heritage societies. Another place where preservationists might seem unlikely to make themselves heard is Northern Ireland, a region more readily associated with destruction rather than conservation of the built environment, according to Andrew McClelland in ‘A “ghastly interregnum”: the struggle for architectural heritage conservation in Belfast before 1972’, Urban History, 45 (2018), 150–72. The lack of legislation and inventories made the threat of demolition in 1960s Belfast more acute than elsewhere in Britain, argues McClelland on the basis of pre-statutory lists created during the second half of the decade.

As elsewhere in the western world, in particular buildings designed in the revival styles of the nineteenth century were seen as unworthy of heritage status. Architecture from this century was considered to be unoriginal and too flamboyant. In addition, the tenement houses of the Second Industrial Revolution were poorly constructed and haphazardly planned. Berlin's so-called Hobrecht Plan, presented in 1862, is generally understood as one of the first attempts to control and regulate the sprawl of European cities during the second half of the nineteenth century. In ‘Understanding the Hobrecht Plan. Origin, composition, and implementation of urban design in the Berlin expansion plan from 1862’, Planning Perspectives, 33 (2018), 633–55, Felix Bentlin investigates the expansion scheme's underlying ideas, design process and characteristics as well as the political and economic actors responsible for its implementation. According to the author, the scheme can still serve as an example of sound urban planning – an observation that reminds us of what Shane Ewen has called the ‘present-mindedness’ of urban historians. To expand, Berlin and other European cities had to tear down the walls that had protected them from invading armies up until the nineteenth century, as illustrated by Anna Ross in ‘Down with the walls! The politics of place in Spanish and German urban extension planning, 1848–1914’, J. of Modern History, 90 (2018), 292–322. Ross examines contemporary debates about the rapidly changing and expanding urban landscapes of Berlin and Madrid as a conversation between state officials and their citizens about what it meant to be modern, thus adding a political dimension to our knowledge of nineteenth-century urban planning.

The nineteenth century was not only the century of urbanization but also the era of nation-building. Bringing both developments together, Zef Segal discusses the role of capital cities in the construction of German states in ‘The two-edged sword: capital cities and the limits to state centralization in mid nineteenth-century Germany’, J. of Historical Geography, 60 (2018), 52–63. Unlike European countries with established capital cities, Germany's new states had to build centres of civic-mindedness from the ground up. During the second half of the century, Paris set the example for European cities wanting to transform their centres into hubs of modern transport, leisure and consumption facilities. In her examination of documentary photographs taken in the streets of Paris and Montreal, Kathleen Lord uncovers how modernization processes affected retailing and consumer behaviour while calling for a more analytical approach to historical images in ‘The function of commercial streets in Montreal and Paris, 1853–1936’, J. of Urban History, 44 (2018), 1131–53. While Haussmannization might have resulted in grandiose boulevards and impressive public works, the renewal programme did not fundamentally address housing shortages in the French capital. Caroline Ford, ‘The Paris housing crisis and a social revolution in domestic architecture on the eve of the First World War’, J. of Modern History, 90 (2018), 580–620, explores why design became a technique of social intervention for architects striving to solve the Parisian housing crisis in the years leading up to the Great War. The nineteenth-century interventions in European cities were a source of inspiration for the American City Beautiful movement of the 1890s and 1900s, which in turn influenced the planning of cities under American colonial government. In ‘The Filipinization of the American City Beautiful, 1916–1935’, J. of Planning History, 17 (2018), 251–80, Ian Morley demonstrates that Filipino planners actively reshaped western ideas and practices, thus enriching our understanding of transnational knowledge transfers in the field of urban planning.

The interactions between the colonized and the colonizer are indeed a prominent feature of the periodical literature of 2018. Liora Bigon and Thomas Hart examine the spatial interactions between indigenous and western planning cultures in Dakar from the pre-colonial period up to the present in ‘Beneath the city's grid: vernacular and (post-)colonial planning interactions in Dakar, Senegal’, J. of Historical Geography, 59 (2018), 52–67. The authors reveal how and why French authorities were constantly forced to engage with local political customs and social practices, which led to a heavy entanglement and hybridization of planning cultures. In ‘“The perilous territory of not belonging”: exile and empire in Sir James Mackintosh's letters from early nineteenth-century Bombay’, History Workshop J., 86 (2018), 22–43, Onni Gust reads letters from John Mackintosh as performative acts through which the imperial judge expressed his feelings about being ‘exiled’ to Bombay. According to the author, these sentiments were employed by Mackintosh to position himself closer to the metropolitan Britain he knew so well, but also to enforce an affective separation from the multiracial society in which he had come to live.

Although the segregation of the colonized and the colonizers was common practice in Europe's overseas territories, it could not always prevent diseases from spreading, as highlighted by Alexandre White in ‘Global risks, divergent pandemics: contrasting responses to bubonic plague and smallpox in 1901 Cape Town’, Social Science History, 42 (2018), 135–58. White examines the global components of urban epidemics by exploring the role of medical experts and scientific knowledge in the framing of early pandemic threats, by which he sheds a new light on the relationship between the colonies and their connections to the rest of the world. In a similar way, Kate Marsh shows how encounters between peoples from different cultures, more specifically colonial workers and imperial migrants, fuelled fears about the spread of extremist political thought in the French port city of Le Havre in ‘Colonial workers, imperial migrants and surveillance: policing in Le Havre, 1914–1940’, 43 (2018), 1–29. Colonial empire affected the home front in often unexpected ways, as suggested by Dion Georgiou in ‘Restaging Mafeking in Muswell Hill: performing patriotism and charitability in London's Boer War carnivals’, Historical Research, 91 (2018), 744–71. Georgiou highlights how festivities in London, organized to garner support for an imperial war fought 6,000 miles away, gendered national and imperial identities and offered opportunities to a wide range of actors for assembling political, economic and social capital. The influence of colonial empire on urban communities, urban planning and social relations is also of special interest to Nora Lafi and Florian Riedler, who dedicated a special issue to the Ottoman city in ‘Themenschwerpunkt: Die osmanische Stadt’, Moderne Stadtgeschichte, 49 (2018), 5–15.

The year 2018 was fruitful for women's and gender histories published in urban history journals. Probably the most gendered space in western societies are the suburbs, although Edward Miller in ‘Gender differences in intercity commuting patterns in the Fox River valley, Illinois, 1912–1936’, J. of Historical Geography, 60 (2018), 89–99, remarks that a greater percentage of employed women commuted farther to work than men. This suggests that the so-called spatial entrapment thesis from the latter half of the twentieth century might not always be applicable to earlier periods, or to areas offering diverse employment opportunities within a single commutable area. Despite the growing demand for a female workforce in turn-of-the-century America, society considered women outside the domestic sphere to be at risk in the public city, as argued by Robin Bartram in ‘Emplacing risks in the city: class, politics, risk, and the built environment of women's residential clubs, 1896–1917’, J. of Urban History, 44 (2018), 219–38. Working with the concept of risk, Bartram investigates the establishment of residential clubs to produce safe spaces for women workers. By extension, she addresses the ways in which the built environment organizes populations and reproduces class and political ideologies, which is also Lena Oak Suk's research focus in ‘“Only the fragile sex admitted”: the women's restaurant in 1920s Sao Paulo, Brazil’, J. of Social History, 51 (2018), 592–620. Drawing from the archives of an elite philanthropic organization, Oak Suk evaluates the role of public dining in the construction of class and gender in early twentieth-century urban Brazil. Gendered rules of behaviour in public space are also central to Michal Shapira's ‘Indecently exposed: the male body and vagrancy in metropolitan London before the Fin de siècle’, Gender and History, 30 (2018), 52–69. According to Shapira, middle-class Londoners played an active role in negotiating acceptable behaviour in public spaces, which often came down to the regulation of male masculinity.

A last focal point in 2018’s periodical literature can be observed in the socialist city, which is the theme of a special issue by Daria Bocharnikova and Steven Harris, ‘Second World urbanity: infrastructures of utopia and really existing socialism’, J. of Urban History, 44 (2018), 3–8. In the words of the authors, the essays in the special collection underscore the value of re-examining how socialist cities were once part of the myriad relations that gave the Second World its ideological and material coherence in pursuit of socialist urbanity. Elsewhere, Zhu Qian analyses how Shanghai's suburbs were shaped by Maoist geopolitics, the urban-rural nexus, regional spatial strategies and radical political campaigns, ‘Shanghai's socialist suburbanization 1953–1962’, J. of Planning History, 17 (2018), 226–47. Pille Metspalu and Daniel Hess also examine socialist expansion schemes in ‘Revisiting the role of architects in planning large-scale housing in the USSR: the birth of socialist residential districts in Tallinn, Estiona, 1957–1979’, Planning Perspectives, 33 (2018), 335–61. The authors challenge the assumption that architects played only a minor role in the design of Tallinn's gargantuan housing estates of the post-war era, and designate a combination of international ideas about urban modernism and local expertise as the architects’ intellectual base. As with the majority of contributions discussed in this periodical review, what has mattered most for the shaping of our daily living environment was the most local of political cultures.