Pre-1500

‘In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love. They had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.’ Orson Welles' oft-cited words in Carol Reed's 1949 film The Third Man provide the conclusion to one of the most famous scenes in cinematic history, but they also point to a question which continues to occupy the thoughts of historians of fifteenth-century Florence: why did this city emerge as a centre of artistic and architectural production and patronage?

In ‘Warfare and economy in Renaissance Italy, 1350–1450’, J. of Interdisciplinary History, 39 (2008), 167–209, William P. Caferro demonstrates that warfare was a ubiquitous and persistent feature of life in the Italian peninsula during this period and suggests that military conflict may have had an indirect impact upon the materiality of urban culture. On the one hand, competition between city states and other powers within Italy brought terminal decline to some and made Florence even more attractive ‘as a centre of the arts and as a market for artists’ (208). On the other hand, it was not economic growth per se that stimulated cultural activity, but the growing spending power and conspicuous consumption of soldiers. In ‘Preaching magnificence in Renaissance Florence’, Renaissance Quarterly, 61 (2008), 325–69, Peter Howard explores the sensibility of another important group within Italian urban society: the merchant elite. He too denies a straightforward correlation between culture and the economy. Although the availability of disposable income was an essential precondition of Florence's cultural energy, such profit also prompted reflection about the underlying tensions between piety and the accumulation of wealth. Preachers such as Fra Antonino Pierozzi, a Dominican friar and later archbishop of Florence, whose sermons attracted a public audience of merchants, lawyers and politicians, engaged with the spiritual anxieties of the Florentines. Through detailed analysis of the sermons of Antonino Pierozzi, Howard shows convincingly that from as early as the 1420s public preachers had developed a theology of ‘magnificence’ which encouraged Florence's citizens to think about the physical environment of their city in a particular way. ‘Magnificence’, one of the cardinal virtues, was now defined not as perseverance or fortitude, but as lavish spending on public building projects, and was both a moral and civic virtue. The construction of ecclesiastical and secular structures could be justified not only as a means of salvation but as a public duty, for the common good of the city.

One merchant who definitely came under the influence of Pierozzi was Tommaso Spinelli, a Florentine banker and patron of the arts, who paid for the archbishop's funeral himself and chose to be buried with their personal correspondence. In ‘Tommaso Spinelli: the soul of a banker’, J. of the Historical Society, 8 (2008), 303–22, William Caferro draws extensively upon the Spinelli family archive to provide a fascinating explication of the merchant ethic in fifteenth-century Italy, which combined occasionally hard-nosed business activity and a deep commitment to the faith. In the case of Spinelli, he managed to square the circle through his role as a papal financier. Profit was both material and spiritual. Caferro presents a suitably rounded portrait of ‘a devout banker who drew little distinction between his financial and religious service to the church’ (319). The business papers of another banking family are the subject of J.L. Bolton and Francesco Guidi Bruscoli's ‘When did Antwerp replace Bruges as the commercial and financial centre of north-western Europe? The evidence of the Borromei ledger for 1438’, Economic History Review, 61 (2008), 360–79. This article is part of a larger project on the banking records of Filippo Borromei and Company, specifically the ledgers relating to the main headquarters at Bruges for 1438 and to its London office for the years 1436–39. Here Bolton and Bruscoli use the financial accounts of the company to address a familiar debate about the decline of Bruges and the rise of Antwerp as the centre of the commercial and financial system in northern Europe, a development which has generally been viewed as discernible only in the last decades of the fifteenth century. The evidence of the ledgers, by contrast, indicates that Antwerp was already integrated into this network by the 1430s, notably through the trade of south German merchants, and that, if Bruges continued to perform a financial role as the most important international money market in northern Europe, it was through London that much of the company's commercial activity was directed. What is also striking from this account is the precarious and short-term nature of international business. Banks such as that of Filippo Borromei or Tommaso Spinelli only lasted for a few years, either by accident or design. Companies were continually reorganized and financial fortunes could fluctuate wildly in a relatively short space of time.

In this inherently uncertain economic context, the bonds of family might prove invaluable. In ‘Relations professionnelles et relations fraternelles d'après le journal de Lucas Rem, marchand d'Augsbourg (1481–1542)’, Médiévales, 54 (2008), 83–98, Aude-Marie Certin argues that fraternal relations could be of fundamental importance in the professional career of a merchant at the end of the middle ages because they were a potential source of financial and emotional security. Her principal source is the diary of a merchant from the south German city of Augsburg, yet although they were composed on a daily basis, the personal notes of Lucas Rem, covering the period 1498–1540, are organized in such a thematic way that they have much more in common with the Tuscan ricordanze studied by Christiane Klapisch-Zuber. Such writings are relatively numerous in Italy and Germany in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, certainly compared to France, but Certin makes sensitive use of one example of this material to consider the interaction between the familial and business lives of Lucas Rem and his younger siblings. Rem was from a distinguished Augsburg family whose wealth was founded principally upon long-distance trade. He worked in several European cities for the Welser, a renowned Germany banking firm, and two of his younger brothers, Andreas and Hans, followed him into the same company, an indication perhaps of the strength of the fraternal bond. In late 1517 and early 1518 the three brothers, on the initiative of Lucas, secured a release from their previous employment, and formed their own company in the name of the Holy Trinity, a reminder once more of the inseparability of trade and religion. The fraternal ties documented here are also the focus of Caroline Jeanne's account of the experiences of Parisian widows in ‘Seules ou accompagnées? Les veuves Parisiennes et leurs fratries à la fin du moyen âge’, Médiévales, 54 (2008), 69–81. Jeanne considers the impact of the death of a husband upon the fortunes of a Parisian widow. Her interest lies not in the vertical ties between widows and their children, but rather the horizontal connections between widows and their brothers and sisters, as well as brothers-in-law and sisters-in-law. She emphasizes the plurality of experiences from mutual aid to bitter conflict. In the case of the German merchant, Lucas Rem, the meaning and strength of the fraternal tie was similarly inconsistent. To Lucas, the company he established with his brothers was an extension of the familial structure, in which he, as the eldest brother, was both head of the family and head of the business. He expected his younger brothers, like his own children, to show him obedience and respect. His younger brothers, by contrast, were headstrong and sought independence in the world of work. Ultimately, Certin suggests, trade operated according to its own set of values, which valorized the restless and inexhaustible energy of the mercantile spirit.

A different picture emerges in Martha Howell's thought-provoking study of the history of ‘companionate marriage’, an idea which she finds rooted in urban life, especially the highly commercialized cities of northern Europe such as Douai. In ‘From land to love: commerce and marriage in northern Europe during the late middle ages’, Jaarboek voor Middeleeuwse Geschiedenis, 10 (2007), 216–53, Howell redefines the concept of ‘companionate marriage’, hitherto largely understood as a marriage contracted voluntarily, primarily for love, and built upon mutual support. She presents a more pragmatic interpretation of this model of marriage, which combined love, intimacy and work, and which emerged as a practical solution to a specifically urban problem, namely the instability of the sources of urban wealth. In contrast to land, which was heritable and less prone to fragmentation and which provided a family's patrimony in the countryside, commerce was an inherently risky enterprise and profit from trade more uncertain. Equally, urban households lacked the networks of support associated with landholding. More isolated and more vulnerable to impersonal economic forces, urban couples had ‘to work hard to preserve what they had and harder still if they were to move ahead’ and they had to work together because ‘their household's chief task was to manage movable wealth’ (238). Commerce and marriage went hand in hand.

This image of the ‘profitable’ marriage would have struck a chord with the Parisian lawyer, whose personal compilation of a collection of disparate texts reminiscent of the commonplace book is the subject of Nicole Pons’ ‘Honneur et profit: le recueil d'un juriste parisien au milieu du XV^e siècle’, Rev. Historique, 645 (2008), 3–32. The manuscript dates from the second third of the fifteenth century and the compiler of the material is identified as a lawyer who probably worked in Paris at either the Chambre des comptes or the Cour des aides, the two principal financial offices of the French royal government. One of the central themes of the book, according to Pons, is contempt of poverty and idleness. A poem copied into the manuscript equates poverty with dishonour and denigrates the lazy and stupid man who ends his life in despair. Poverty is the product of idleness. Only industry can avert it. A more ambivalent attitude towards poverty in France is revealed by Susan McDonough in ‘Impoverished mothers and poor widows: negotiating images of poverty in Marseille's courts’, J. of Medieval History, 34 (2008), 64–78. She uses the legal record of a debt case in the city of Marseille at the beginning of the fifteenth century to explore contrasting views of poverty. On the one hand, a litigant presented an elaborate narrative of poverty drawing upon contemporary notions of Christian charity designed to elicit a favourable response from the judge. Yet this religious discourse stood at odds with a legal culture in the city of Marseille grounded in the tradition of Roman law, in which poverty had negative connotations since it was believed to make litigants and witnesses susceptible to bribery. The attitude of the Parisian lawyer was shaped by a bourgeois ethic decidedly unambiguous in its disdain of poverty. The inclusion in his compilation of Laurent de Premierfait's Livre des Yconomiques, a revision of Nicole Oresme's translation of the pseudo-Aristotle's Economics, reflects a mind preoccupied with issues of conjugal relations, household management and the domestic economy that were the source of profit and honour within a city.

Given the nature of this environment, where the home was not simply a private sphere and where the household was also a place of work, assumptions about the gendered character of space within the late medieval city need to be tested more rigorously. In ‘Theft and gender in late medieval Bologna’, Gender and History, 20 (2008), 399–415, Trevor Dean questions the belief that male and female patterns of theft were fundamentally different in terms of the types of theft which men and women committed and the kinds of goods which they stole. This is a perception, Dean observes, that is often based upon an assumption about men's dominance of the public sphere of marketplaces and streets, areas which lent themselves to particular forms of theft. Dean adopts a firmly empirical approach and analyses the evidence of theft prosecutions in the trial registers from the podestà's court in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Bologna. Although the figures are strikingly different, with vastly more men than women indicted for theft, his findings suggest that existing views about the dichotomous character of male and female criminal behaviour need revision.

Three articles published this year address the subject of urban identity. In ‘Tall buildings in medieval London: precipitation, aspiration and thrills’, London J., 33 (2008), 201–15, Derek Keene provides a useful survey of the types of high-rise structures in London. In densely populated commercial districts such as Cheapside, pragmatic concerns of trade and profit determined the building of multi-storey houses. Yet tall buildings were also an articulation and instrument of ‘ideology and power’ (201), notably the power of royal and ecclesiastical lordship within the city. The Tower of London and St Paul's Cathedral were two of the capital's tallest buildings into the modern period. Medieval London contained over 100 parish churches, whose towers and spires perhaps contributed to a sense of the city's sacred character.

In ‘À l'ombre de Rome: les villes de Tolède et Pampelune dans le codex de Roda’, Cahiers de civilisation médiévale, 51 (2008), 129–42, Helena de Carlos Villamarín examines the influence of the Eternal City upon the written and visual representation of the Spanish cities of Toledo and Pamplona in the Roda codex. The descriptions of the two cities are to be found in the second part of the manuscript, which was written between the end of the tenth and the beginning of the eleventh centuries at Nájera in the kingdom of Navarre. The first and more substantial section of the manuscript is occupied by Paulus Orosius's Historiarum Adversus Paganos Libri Septem, but historians have struggled to find a unitary and cohesive theme in the second part. Villamarín argues that what provides the organizing principle for the entire manuscript and what explains the inclusion of the descriptive writing about Toledo and Pamplona is the notion of translatio imperii, an idea which informed Orosius’ work about the death and birth of empires and the transfer of power from one dominant regime to another. Cities were emblematic of this imperial hegemony. According to the codex, Toledo was the first city founded in Spain, to which all other towns submitted. Just like the fall of Babylon, whose primacy passed to Rome because of the sinful behaviour of its inhabitants, other cities emerged in Spain following the demise of Toledo. The city of Pamplona, the capital of the kingdom of Navarre, was the successor to Rome's imperial legacy. In the context of the Spanish Reconquest and the formation of new Christian kingdoms in the peninsula, the idea of Pamplona as another Rome had a potentially wider political significance.

In ‘L'organisation de l'espace et la hiérarchie des villes dans le royaume latin de Jérusalem’, Cahiers de civilisation médiévale, 51 (2008), 213–22, Michael Ehrlich explores the history of another ideal city, Jerusalem, as part of a larger reassessment of the pattern of urban settlement within the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem. According to the influential work of the crusading historian, Joshua Prawer, the crusader kingdom at the end of the twelfth century had a Frankish population of at most 120,000 people, at least three-quarters of whom lived in the cities of Acre, Tyre and Jerusalem. Of these, Jerusalem was the smallest and Acre the largest. This estimate was based in part upon the theory that the Frankish incomers lived almost exclusively in cities along the Mediterranean coast. Ehrlich reinterpets a well-known source, the list of military obligations for the defence of the kingdom contained within John of Ibelin's Livre des assises, in order to draw a very different picture of the level and spatial distribution of urbanization among the Frankish settlements. By his reckoning, the Franks lived in twelve cities, and the resident Frankish population in Tyre, Acre and Jerusalem was much smaller than previously thought. In the kingdom of Jerusalem, pilgrimage was the critical determinant of both urban location and size, which explains why Tyre, although a port city, occupied a relatively low position in the urban league table. It lay off the main pilgrimage route and did not contain any of the principal holy sites. What also emerges clearly in Ehrlich's account is the impact which the annual arrival of pilgrims to the Holy Land must have had upon the cities of Acre and Jerusalem. Apart from the obvious economic benefits arising from the influx of pilgrims, the extraordinarily fluid population of temporary and permanent settlers must have given these cities a distinctive character.

A number of articles investigate the relationship between the church and the city. In ‘The dance of death in London: John Carpenter, John Lydgate, and the Daunce of Poulys’, J. of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 38 (2008), 285–314, Amy Appleford asks why John Carpenter, London's common clerk, commissioned a series of panel paintings of the Dance of Death, which were hung around the walls of the cemetery known as the Pardon Churchyard adjoining St Paul's Cathedral and which were accompanied by verses from John Lydgate's poem, the Daunce of Poulys. The location of the panels and the choice of subject were a deliberate statement, by the keeper of London's collective memory, of the primarily civic character of the city's identity. Appleford sees the poem and the images as ‘a specifically civic monument’ and as a symbolic extension of civic power into the spiritual realm, within a longer struggle ‘on the part of the city's governors for cultural dominance over other London jurisdictions’ (290–1). The Pardon Churchyard, within the walled precinct of St Paul's, included in its centre the tomb of the parents of London's patron saint, Thomas Becket. The Becket tomb was the focal point of civic ritual, notably a series of mayoral processions which took place throughout the year. In the 1420s, however, the dean of St Paul's, Thomas More, enclosed the churchyard. John Carpenter's response, according to Appleford, was to open up the space once more and to invest it with a civic character again. The version of the Dance of Death at St Paul's included several representatives of London's civic authority, including the mayor and his household but, organized horizontally around the walls of the churchyard, the paintings also expressed the city's essentially communal and associational identity.

The notion of the city as a contested space between civic and ecclesiastical authority is also the subject of Véronique Beaulande's ‘La force de la censure: l'excommunication dans les conflits de pouvoir au sein des villes au XIII^e siècle’, Rev. Historique, 646 (2008), 251–78. Conflicts between urban communities and the ecclesiastical bodies in their midst were far from unusual in the middle ages. In thirteenth-century France the church made frequent recourse to the spiritual weapon of excommunication as bishops and chapters strove to defend their temporal rights of lordship against the growing political aspirations of citizens. Historians, Beaulande explains, have tended to be critical of the church's use of canonical censures in these conflicts: the punishment of excommunication, in particular, was imposed too frequently and aimlessly and reflected the ineffectiveness of this spiritual sanction. The northern French cities of Laon and Rheims and their relations with a range of ecclesiastical institutions in the first half of the thirteenth century are the focus of this article. The frequency of excommunication is not at issue: the civic rulers of Laon were subject to at least twenty-four sentences during the thirteenth century as a whole. Equally, the causes of conflict are not Beaulande's primary concern; and certainly, violence arising from the existence of competing jurisdictions within a single urban space can be found in many other cities during the late middle ages. The distinctive feature of this article is its exploration of the role of canonical censures within the mechanisms of dispute resolution, for excommunication appears here not so much a spiritual penalty designed to encourage the sinner to perform penance as a means for ecclesiastical institutions to assert their political control within the city through the right to grant absolution. Citizens within Laon and Rheims – individually and collectively – were subject to a potent discourse of excommunication in which their actions against the church were equated with heresy. Even more significantly, Beaulande demonstrates how the privilege to excommunicate and absolve became a tool in conflicts over authority and power between different ecclesiastical bodies within the cities. This was particularly evident in Rheims, where there was as much hostility between the archbishop and the canons of the cathedral chapter as between the church and the civic authority of the mayor and aldermen.

Such intra-church conflicts, which were played out in the public places of the city, are also the focus of Holly J. Grieco's ‘Franciscan inquisition and mendicant rivalry in mid-thirteenth-century Marseille’, J. of Medieval History, 34 (2008), 275–90. In Marseille, in roughly the same period, rivalry between the Dominican and Franciscan friars crystallized on the question of inquisitorial authority within the county of Provence, following the recent acquisition by the Friars Minor of control of the inquisition in the region. The chief interest of Grieco's study is its use of inquisitorial evidence, not to explore the nature of heresy and the discourse of inquisition, but to retell the story of a conspiracy involving an attempt by the Dominican convent to implicate one of the Franciscan inquisitors in a plot against the new count of Provence, Charles of Anjou, an episode which shaped to a considerable extent the contours of social and political life in the city in the mid-thirteenth century.

In ‘Histoires d'eau: les conflits sur l'approvisionnement en eau de Carpentras (XIV^e–XV^e siècles)’, Médiévales, 53 (2007), 23–38, Valérie Theis looks at the history of another Provençal city. Carpentras, which lies about 16 miles north-east of the city of Avignon, was part of the Comtat Venaissin, a region which entered papal control in 1274. In the early fourteenth century, on the election of Pope Clement V, Carpentras became one of the principal residences of the papal court, but it suffered from a chronic lack of water. Clement V's solution was to purchase a spring, which flowed from the Alps and which had previously supplied the neighbouring village of Caromb. The acquisition was, in one sense, a benevolent act of lordship which satisfied the needs of both the papal court and the inhabitants of Carpentras, for whom this natural resource was obviously essential. Yet, as Theis explains, the procurement of the spring was also an assertion of the temporal power of the papacy and an attempt to strengthen its roots in a city by a pope whose successors would make Carpentras the capital of the Comtat Venaissin. Indeed, it was inhabitants of the city who had to pay for the cost of constructing the underground pipes which supplied the water to Carpentras. More seriously for the city, the pope's actions led to a prolonged dispute with the community of Caromb which continued intermittently until the second quarter of the fifteenth century.

Four articles deal with aspects of urban political culture. In ‘War and society in the north of England, c. 1477–1559: the cases of York, Hull and Beverley’, Northern History, 45 (2008), 125–40, David Grummitt considers the impact of war, notably military conflict with Scotland, upon the financial and political fortunes of three northern English towns at the end of the middle ages. As Grummitt points out, this is a period which urban historians of late medieval England have described in terms of the consolidation of urban decline and the development of urban oligarchy. His contribution is useful in showing how the military demands of the crown paved the way to political negotiations between urban elites and the royal government, and between civic rulers and their urban subjects. War was part of a larger story, in which the growing ‘ambitions of the rulers of the Tudor state’ in the first half of the sixteenth century were matched by the aspirations of urban magistrates, ‘vis-à-vis their own inhabitants and their aristocratic neighbours’, as they sought ‘a closer identification with the aims of the Crown to further their own jurisdictional and economic goals’ (140). In ‘Privileges and novelties: the political discourse of the Flemish cities and rural districts in their negotiations with the dukes of Burgundy (1384–1506)’, Urban History, 35 (2008), 5–23, Jan Dumolyn pursues a more original approach to the relationship between cities and princely powers. He focuses upon the interaction between the count of Flanders and the representative institution known as the ‘Four Members of Flanders’ and argues, through textual analysis of certain keywords, that there was ‘a discernible political language’ in the Flemish towns of Ypres, Ghent and Bruges (21). It was a language which cherished the public good over private interest, unity and brotherhood over division, privilege and custom over novelty. Dumolyn's view that the utterly conventional notion of the common good had a specifically economic and financial meaning within the urban milieu of Flanders is particularly interesting. A similarly close reading of texts is found in Gary Ianziti's ‘Leonardo Bruni, the Medici, and the Florentine Histories’, J. of the History of Ideas, 69 (2008), 1–22. Ianziti offers a new reading of Leonardo Bruni's History of the Florentine People, whose last three books he interprets not so much as a civic history of Florence but rather as an encomium of the newly installed Medici regime. In his rewriting of the city's history, Bruni offered ‘a Medici history of Florence’ (5), in which the Medici were presented as ‘good citizens’ for their courage and heroism on behalf of the Florentines. The problem with this kind of elite discourse is that it so rarely allows the historian to hear the voices of the lower orders within urban society. In ‘“Criers and shouters”: the discourse on radical urban rebels in late medieval Flanders’, J. of Social History, 42 (2008), 111–35, Jan Dumolyn uses a range of narrative sources from the Low Countries to explore the ways in which chroniclers represented the actions and words of these groups. In their accounts of urban rebellions in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, contemporary writers described the lower orders, whom Dumolyn identifies with the unskilled, the apprentices and journeymen, as irrational, foolish and arrogant. The most radical urban rebels in Flanders and Brabant, however, were called ‘criers’ and ‘shouters’. ‘Criers’ were ‘those who did not want to make peace or compromises’, whilst the term ‘shouters’ was a synonym for agitators who were believed to be responsible for mobilizing others (123). This account has wider resonances for historians of urban revolt in other parts of Europe. In equating the actions of the rebels with noise and rendering their voice incomprehensible, as Dumolyn points out, the chroniclers ‘totally ignored the actual aims and aspirations of the lower classes and reduced their speech acts to forms of animalized and brutal behavior with the “shouting” (clamor) as an expression of the capital sin of wrath (ira)’ (123). This was a deliberate act of textual suppression, which only makes it more difficult to recover what the rebels shouted, if indeed they shouted at all.

All of this year's articles raise questions for future research. Collectively, they testify to the current vigour of medieval urban history, a view reinforced by Monica H. Green and Daniel Lord Smail's absorbing account of ‘The trial of Floreta d'Ays (1403): Jews, Christians, and obstetrics in later medieval Marseille’, J. of Medieval History, 34 (2008), 185–211. The two historians reflect upon the significance of an extraordinary criminal case brought in the city of Marseille against a Jewish midwife for the death of a Christian woman during childbirth. Green draws upon her unrivalled knowledge of the history of women's healthcare in medieval Europe and Smail uses his longstanding acquaintance with the records of Marseille to discuss a wide range of topics: from the distribution and identify of midwives and the state of medical knowledge in the city, to the nature of Jewish–Christian relations within Marseille. The field of medieval urban history is one which encompasses many different approaches and gains strength from the work of those who would not necessarily see themselves as ‘urban’ historians.

1500–1800

Beginning with the urban economy and retailing, we will then consider other aspects of social history, including the impact of enclosure upon early modern towns, gender and masculinity in the urban context, religion in the English regions and inter-urban cultural emulation. We conclude with enlightenment culture and industrialization examined from a history of education perspective.

The special design of shops as urban retail spaces has often been associated with the nineteenth century; however as Patrick Wallis demonstrates in ‘Consumption, retailing, and medicine in early modern London’, Economic History Review, 61 (2008), 26–53, many of these changes were already occurring on a smaller scale during the early modern period. Wallis examines the development of specialist retail shops in the metropolis arguing that apothecaries made major alterations to the material form and arrangement of their shops, including making prominent displays of jars and collections of erotica. Work by Jon Stobart represented recently by ‘Leisure, luxury and urban specialisation in the eighteenth century’, Urban History, 35 (2008), 216–36, which is co-authored with Leonard Schwarz, has shed much light upon the geographies of early modern urban retailing. Building upon such work and using surviving shop inventories, jars and other paraphernalia, Wallis examines the appearance of apothecaries’ shops, their internal layout, display of goods and the significance of their urban location. Recognizing that there were distinctive aspects of the consumption of medicine and medical goods, Wallis seeks to break down the barriers between understanding of apothecaries’ shops and other aspects of European retailing, arguing that whilst London's pre-eminence was becoming established, this was encouraged by changes in Dutch, French and Italian patterns of consumption. He concludes that European apothecaries’ shops developed in broadly similar ways, through cultural borrowing and emulation, with English and Dutch shops being ‘almost identical in form and content’. More broadly, Wallis recommends that driven by the need to encourage customers, analysis of product characteristics should be more fully integrated into accounts of early modern retailing and consumption. He also emphasizes that the economic implications of commodities, including their ‘technical and social characteristics’, require that there be greater differentiation between shop varieties. Medical commodities were unusual, for instance, because of the nature of these products and how they were applied and used.

Metropolitan finance is also the subject of two articles which examine early modern banking and, in particular, Hoare's bank in Fleet Street which was one of the earliest to take a private, non-mercantile clientele. In ‘The emergence of a private clientele for banks in the early eighteenth century: Hoare's Bank and some women customers’, Economic History Review, 61 (2008), 565–86, and ‘Private borrowing during the financial revolution: Hoare's Bank and its customers, 1702–24’, Economic History Review, 61 (2008), 541–64, Anne Laurence and Peter Temin and Hans-Joachim Voth utilize the surviving records to examine the customers who placed deposits with the bank. They provide a response to the argument that as well as facilitating British government borrowing and consequently the ability to wage wars, the so-called financial revolution from the end of the seventeenth century equally impacted upon private banking. The evidence for the activities of customers at Hoare's Bank marshalled by Temin and Voth suggests that private credit did indeed become cheaper, although it did not become more widely available; indeed they contend that through the governmental reduction of the usury rate in 1714, banks were actually discouraged from expanding their client base.

The extent to which slavery was a driving force behind British industrialization is still, of course, highly disputed and although a convincing case can be made concerning Bristol and Liverpool, the impact upon the metropolitan economy remains harder to assess. In ‘The City of London and slavery: evidence from the first dock companies, 1795–1800’, Economic History Review, 61 (2008), 432–66, N. Draper considers the case of the first dock companies established in the metropolis on the eve of abolition. At the heart of the article is a prospographical study of the composition of the founding shareholders in the West India and London docks. The key findings are that over a third of investors were active in the trade, either as slave owners, in shipping, trading, finance or insurance of slave produce. Other individuals were also tied into the trade through investment in the West India Docks, although they hardly acted as a monolithic body. He concludes that there is no question that the slave economy was pervasive in the City of London economy, with at least 300 of the 929 investors in the two dock monies being involved in the slave economy, whilst of these it was central to the business lives of over 200. This accords with evidence that although the West India trade only accounted for a small amount of total shipping volume, it probably constituted around a third of metropolitan overseas trade by value during the 1790s, although it would be an exaggeration to say that the City was ‘built on slavery’.

Different aspects of trade in Edinburgh and seventeenth-century England are examined in Martin Rorke, ‘Trade and traders: Edinburgh's sixteenth-century exporting community’, Historical Research, 81 (2008), 447–62, and Peter McCullough, ‘Print, publication and religious politics in Caroline England’, Historical J., 51 (2008), 285–313. The former exploits a variety of sources including exchequer records and customs books, church, guilds and civic records from which it is possible to compile lists of most of the goods imported into Edinburgh and, by collating with other sources, produce a reasonably complete prosopography of the characteristics of the estimated 800 or so merchants who shipped them. Rorke emphasizes how compared with London where trade was controlled by companies, the Edinburgh export trade was driven by a very large and varied group of merchants from diverse backgrounds, although native traders still predominated. As easily the largest Scottish trading centre and market for goods, Edinburgh attracted merchants from other part of the country, who saw the opportunity to rise in status to become burgesses and potentially hold civic offices, but their entry to privileges accorded by the town was carefully controlled. However, there was a hierarchy within this merchant trading community with privileges varying between members of the merchant guild, merchant burgesses, unfreemen and outsiders, such as restrictions concerning the types of goods that could be sold and duties that had to be paid, enforced by the threat of prosecution. McCullough also mines various archival sources, many of them under-exploited by scholars of early modern economic and urban history, to demonstrate the impact of political and religious ideology upon the book trade. He uses a case study of the bookseller Richard Badger to provide an insight into politics, religion, the book trade, and how these were affected by Laud's religious reforms during the reign of Charles I.

More attention has tended to be paid to enclosure from the perspective of rural rather than urban history reflecting exaggerated divisions between the two fields. However, studies of enclosure such as S.J. Thompson's ‘Parliamentary enclosure, property, population and the decline of classical republicanism in eighteenth-century Britain’, Historical J., 51 (2008), 621–42, have implications for urban history even though towns are not the primary object. Thompson contends that a new range of arguments were utilized against enclosure after 1700 in response to the greater role of parliament in the process which explored the perceived effects of parliamentary enclosure on property and population in eighteenth-century Britain. One consequence of this was to ‘undermine the credibility of the classical republican economic vision of agrarian simplicity’ which was eroded by a lack of appreciation of the disjunction between ancient and modern economies. As Thompson notes, Georgian opponents of enclosure such as Richard Price, who analysed metropolitan parish registers and bills of mortality, emphasized the extent to which enclosure and consequent urban immigration mattered because they had a direct negative effect on both rural and urban populations. On the other hand those more favourable to enclosure such as Sir James Steuart considered that by freeing up labour it provided workers who could be employed in urban industries and manufactures, which in turn benefited agriculture.

The political importance of contested urban spaces and the struggle for control within towns is documented in different ways in Phil Withington, ‘Citizens, soldiers and urban culture in Restoration England’, English Historical Review, 123 (2008), 587–610; Amanda Vickery, ‘An Englishman's home is his castle? Thresholds, boundaries and privacies in the eighteenth-century London house’, Past and Present, 199 (2008), 147–73; and two articles on the subject of eighteenth-century Stockholm by Karin Sennefelt. Withington focuses upon a disturbance at the funeral of Henrietta Mary Stanley at York Minster in January 1686 when the soldiers and townspeople fought with each other. According to Withington, rather than being a straightforward encounter involving a mob of ‘common people’, the riot demonstrates the potential for conflict in Restoration society and underlying tensions and allegiances manifest in disagreements over Minster spaces and the nature of public authority and loyalty which were only gradually softened by fashionable urban culture. York was, of course, important as the historic capital of northern England, and the control of military force within the city became the focus of trouble, but beyond specific local causes, the event more broadly demonstrates ‘the continuing presence, and importance, of an independent citizenry, its identity still forged communally and corporately as well as by class’. The ramifications of the civil war were still felt by many ordinary citizens in English towns who considered that they had the right to act in defence of the values promoted by parliament and the protectorate which meant that royal garrisons had to proceed with caution.

Vickery examines the psychological shifts that helped to bring about the concept of privacy in early modern England which saw the family change from an economic institution suppressing individuality into an ‘introspective emotional unit, built round children – a haven from snooping strangers’. Beginning with an evocative, fictional, metropolitan house based upon details drawn from the proceedings of the Old Bailey, Vickery is interested in how these ‘psychological shifts were inscribed in the fabric of houses’. Rather than search for ‘epistemic shifts in the conceptualization of elite private space’ she examines the ‘mundane tools and everyday tactics used by ordinary Londoners to draw physical and psychological boundaries within doors, and to control access to space and possessions’. An important example of the impact of the greater desire for domestic privacy was the greater prevalence of locks which, through closing off rooms within the house, helped to encourage and reinforce privacy and to separate private from public lives, individuality from family and communality. Whilst recognizing the importance of keys going back to classical antiquity and the ‘spread of legal understandings of burglary’, Vickery contends that as the proliferation of locked metropolitan rooms demonstrates, the multifarious ways that they were employed was a response to ‘galloping urbanization and dense overcrowding’. As provincial towns grew more rapidly than the metropolis, so they increasingly felt the impact of multiple occupancy, with lodgers and extended family members requiring their own private territories within the home. So privacy within the home was emphasized and the domestic space was preserved against external incursion, reflecting concerns about criminality.

The Swedish state was unusual in enlightenment Europe in that between 1719 and 1772 it had a free constitution in which the representatives of four estates of the realm, the nobility, clergy, burghers and peasantry, met in the national parliament (Riksdag) to decide on matters of war, taxation and legislation, whilst the monarch largely fulfilled ceremonial duties. Two studies by Karin Sennefelt provide important insights into government and politics in eighteenth-century Stockholm, the capital of this realm (then comprising Sweden and Finland). In ‘Social and political thresholds in Stockholm, c. 1720–1770’, Urban History, 35 (2008), 185–201, Sennefelt examines political action in the public sphere and particularly how ‘spatial negotiations of inclusion and exclusion’ were conducted in squares, wine shops and other places, concluding that political participation in the city was conditioned by individual access to places. This was in turn determined by social status, boundaries or thresholds between places becoming especially politically significant, with the important qualification that the character of political spaces varied according to whether the Rikstag was meeting. In ‘Citizenship and the political landscape of libelling in Stockholm, c. 1720–70’, Social History, 33 (2008), 145–63, Sennefelt focuses primarily upon information concerning libels that were posted around the town. She does not attempt to spatialize the Habermassian public sphere as has been the trend in recent studies, but to consider political action in public places and to ‘map the use of place in the creation of political identity’. She concludes that through libelling, and the significance of place in its interpretation, ‘the political map of the city was re-drawn’.

Two articles demonstrate very well the importance and complexities of inter-urban emulation in enlightenment Europe. In ‘Vauxhall on the boulevard: pleasure gardens in London and Paris, 1764–1784’, Urban History, 35 (2008), 24–47, Jonathan Conlin examines the famous Vauxhall pleasure gardens that flourished adjoining the metropolis during the eighteenth century and the less-well-known Parisian pleasure gardens that, as their names suggest, sought to emulate the English gardens, but actually became quite different kinds of place. One of his most important conclusions concerns the relationship between gardens and the urban economy. Conlin contends that ‘pleasure gardens tamed those fears surrounding commercial expansion of the metropolis common at the mid-century’ and challenged the belief linking spread of luxury commodities with social dislocation. In ‘British perceptions of Florence in the long eighteenth century’, Historical J., 50 (2007), 837–59, Rosemary Sweet considers the impact of European urban culture upon British society. Rather than focusing upon the art and antiquities of Italy in the ‘short’ eighteenth century, and using a rich range of sources including printed works, guides, journals and unpublished correspondence, Sweet examines perceptions of the urban Florentine environment until 1820. She emphasizes that the responses of British travellers to Italian cities show remarkable continuity over the eighteenth century, which is one of the factors that gives the Grand Tour ‘heuristic value as a concept’. However, there were considerable changes in these experiences and perceptions over the period as Sweet demonstrates, such as the shift from an emphasis upon Medici patronage around 1700 to a ‘richer and more diverse range of responses to the city’ by the end of the century. Sweet seeks to establish why Florence came to be preferred by English travellers to other Italian cities, how representations of the city changed during the eighteenth century and the extent to which these were facilitated by British cultural developments rather than Italian influences. She concludes that although British perceptions of Florence tended to be more consistent than they were to other Italian cities such as Rome and Venice, by the end of the century British tourists were displaying much more informed and wide-ranging interests in the former, anticipating Victorian idealizations.

Of the regional history journals, Northern History and Midland History published a series of articles in 2008 concerning early modern English society, most having a religious focus, but all emphasizing to different degrees the extent to which church authorities concerned themselves with estate management. In ‘Ecclesiastical estate management in County Durham during the eighteenth century’, Northern History, 45 (2008), 159–71, Anne Orde underlines the importance of urban and industrial properties for the church and explains why greater attention was paid to them by the bishopric and the cathedral chapter than was given to rural tenants because of the opportunities they presented for economic exploitation. Parochial and economic management of ecclesiastical authorities is also the subject of Alex Craven's ‘Ministers of state: the established church in Lancashire during the English Revolution, 1642–1660’, Northern History, 45 (2008), 51–69, which examines how ambitious reforming policies were pursued at the instigation of centrally appointed government committees.

More generally, Diana Newton, ‘The impact of reformation on north-east England: a preliminary survey’, Northern History, 45 (2008), 37–49, and Sylvia Watts, ‘The impact of Laudianism on the parish: the evidence of Staffordshire and north Shropshire’, Midland History, 33 (2008), 21–42, show the complexities of negotiations between local and regional church officials and the national ecclesiastical authorities concerning the implementation of national reforms. In the former, Newton reveals how the bishop of Durham and the urban oligarchy in Newcastle played major roles in the course of the Reformation, although they were careful to negotiate with other centres of power in the area. This resulted in the survival of many local parochial traditions and a complex process of change in religious practices. A reminder that this included continued adherence to the old religion comes from Geoff Baker's ‘William Blundell and late-seventeenth-century English Catholicism’, Northern History, 45 (2008), 259–77, which tries to counter the relative neglect of seventeenth-century English Catholicism by emphasizing the degree to which some were able to maintain power and influence despite facing growing national hostility. On the other hand, rather than religion having been the primary reason for opposition to Henry VIII in the north of England, in ‘The Wakefield conspiracy of 1541 and Henry VIII's progress to the North reconsidered’ (217–38), Christopher J. Sansom contends that this well-coordinated revolt had its roots in unrest concerning the burden of taxation in Yorkshire. Finally, in ‘Population trends in north-east England, 1548–1563’ (239–58), John S. Moore demonstrates how church records and comparative analysis with other English counties can be utilized to reconstruct population figures for sixteenth-century northern counties. The chantry certificates for Durham, Northumberland and Yorkshire of 1546–8 and the ecclesiastical census of 1563 for Durham and Chester dioceses, for instance, provide a more effective basis for such estimations than incomplete subsidy assessments, muster rolls and parish registers.

Gender and women's history continue to produce much research with implications for urban history, without the urban usually being the primary focus of work. An exception to this is Jessica Warner, Janine Riviere and Kathryn Graham's interesting study of violent inter-sexual comradeship in ‘Men and women fighting side by side: Examples from an English town, 1653–1781’, J. of Family History, 33 (2008), 156–72, which utilizes court sessional papers to explore gender dimensions of violence in what they claim was ‘arguably the most violent town in eighteenth-century England’ – Portsmouth – with its volatile mixture of sailors, prostitutes and soldiers. Amongst the succession of trials involving assaults, riots and bastardy that proliferated in the town's sessions papers are a relatively small group (369 out of 7,590) that involved men and women fighting together against a common enemy or victim. Although numerically small compared with the likely number of assaults upon women (which were in any case probably seriously underreported), they contend that the fact that the sexes were prepared to fight with each other on some occasions, admittedly in the unusual context of Portsmouth society, reveals interesting exceptions to general trends about early modern inter-sexual violence.

Another article on gender with an urban focus is ‘Soul, purse and family: middling and lower-class masculinity in eighteenth-century Manchester’, Social History, 33 (2008), 12–35, in which Hannah Barker argues that the historiography of British eighteenth-century masculinity contrasts with that of adjoining periods. Here, Barker takes a cultural historical approach which emphasizes the impact of the public life rather than the more social historical approach that she claims has been hitherto prevalent. Concerning itself with the impact of the concept of politeness, the social historical approach has privileged representations of masculinity in literature and the arts which have tended to have a metropolitan and elite-dominated perspective even though the ‘social and geographical reach of the gendered codes described in such accounts was likely to have been limited’. Her study of provincial non-elite masculinity in Manchester focuses upon the diaries of four men (a draper, a whig maker, bottle-washer turned Methodist preacher and grocer), mostly written during their twenties and thirties. Barker concludes that the masculinity of these men was ‘expressed in terms of mastery of the self, devotion to God, hard work and family life’, and whilst results failed to fulfil expectation of masculinity for all, yet these expectations reveal the continuities inherent in British masculinity throughout the whole period, providing a marked contrast with the prevailing ‘supposedly hegemonic’ model of the polite elite gentleman. On the face of it, Barker's study is opposed to Henry French and Mark Rothery's ‘Upon your entry in the world’: masculine values and the threshold of adulthood among landed elites in England 1680–1800’, Social History, 33 (2008), 402–22, which is based upon a British Academy research project entitled ‘Practices of politeness: changing norms of masculinity in landed society, 1660–1800’. Yet although French and Rothery use elite family correspondence they find that these too emphasize the importance of inculcating qualities such as steadiness, firmness, courage and manliness in male children with many shared assumptions and continuities, including a partially articulated impulse towards self-expression and masculine autonomy.

A special issue of European History Quarterly, 38 (2008), no. 3, on the subject of the lives of single women and men in early modern Europe from the perspective of gender provides a European contrast to the above studies of English masculinity. This includes a review of the subject by Silvia Evangelisti, Margareth Lanzinger and Raffaella Sarti (365–74); Sandra Cavallo, ‘Bachelorhood and masculinity in Renaissance and early-modern Italy’, 375–97; Simvia Evangelisti, ‘To find God in work? Female social stratification in early-modern Italian convents’ (398–416), and Raffaella Sarti, ‘“All masters discourage the marrying of their male servants, and admit not by any means the marriage of the female”: domestic service and celibacy in Western Europe from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century’ (417–49). With its emphasis upon men remaining as bachelors through choice rather than unfortunate necessity, Cavallo's study demonstrates the extent to which European masculinity could be experienced in different ways from England as interpreted by Barker, French and Rothery. Biographical research produces many cases where marriage was postponed or avoided and so bachelorhood in these cases seems to have been motivated by ‘demographic constraints’, ‘labour conditions’ and broad kin or personal advancement strategies. Such men had their masculine status assured through being heads of households rather than families per se, or through civic or professional responsibilities, in shops or hospitals, with ‘forms of artificial fatherhood’ appearing to have been a ‘common occurrence’ in the world of Italian artisans. In this Cavallo suggests that the Italian experience seems strongly differentiated from that of Germany or Protestant England, where marriage formed such an important part of masculine identity and where there were no celibate priest figures to act as role models.

A fascinating special issue of History of Education, 37 (2008), part 4, examines ‘eighteenth-century education: discourses and informal agencies’. Whilst urban culture is not the primary focus of any contributor's essay, collectively they demonstrate the importance of the urban dimension in pedagogical history. For Olga A. Baird, in ‘I want the people to observe and to learn! The St. Petersburg Kunstkamera in the eighteenth century’ (531–47), the museum was an urban educational institution at the forefront of Tsar Peter the Great's autocratic crusade to modernize aspects of Russian public and private life. The St Petersburg Kunstkamera was not only a royal collection but, inspired by other museums across Europe, it was intended as a public institution for the improvement and benefit of the people, attracting an audience from all ranks drawn, no doubt, as much by its living ‘freak’ exhibits as by its dead and inanimate objects. In ‘The transformation of medical education in eighteenth century England: international development and the West midlands’ (549–99), Jonathan Reinartz undertakes a revealing exploration of medical education focusing upon the career of Thomas Tomlinson, who delivered one of the first lecture courses on the subject of anatomy in provincial England in the context of European developments. The growing importance of Georgian urban society looms large in the article, both in terms of increasing numbers and concentrations of patients and practitioners, but also with regard to audiences for medical ideas and practices. Reinarz examines the development of medical education in Leiden and the emergence of clinical pedagogy in Edinburgh and London. It is in Lichfield that the physician Erasmus Darwin presented one of the earliest provincial courses of lectures on anatomy in Georgian England, utilizing the body of an executed criminal which he advertised in the Birmingham newspapers. From the early nineteenth century, Reinartz demonstrates that the earliest medical colleges were established in provincial towns such as Manchester, Birmingham, Sheffield and Leeds where surgeons tended to take the lead rather than physicians, drawing upon their experience in private practice and role in urban medical institutions such as the charitable infirmaries.

Urban transformation is also pivotal in other essays in the volume which include: Ruth Watts and Malcolm McKinnon, ‘Eighteenth-century education: discourses and informal agencies’ (509–12); Ruth Watts, ‘A gendered journey: travel ideas in England c. 1750–1800’ (513–30); and Malcolm McKinnon Dick, ‘Discourse for the new industrial world: industrialisation and the education of the public in late eighteenth-century Britain’ (567–84). This work also relates closely to an important essay by Peter Jones on ‘Industrial enlightenment in practice: visitors to the Soho manufactory, 1765–1820’, Midland History, 33 (2008), 68–96. The articles by Jones and Dick demonstrate very well the resurgence of interest in Midland industrialization and English provincial enlightenment cultures that they have helped to lead. Dick emphasizes how the region provided the ‘intellectual and physical geography’ for the discourses for the new industrial world of Anna Seward, Matthew Boulton and James Keir, as it represented the ‘marriage of science and industrial practice’ in ‘probably the Western world's most advanced manufacturing region’. Centring, of course, upon the town of Birmingham, according to Dick it was the innovative technological and industrial organization of the Black country of south Staffordshire, north Worcestershire, the Potteries of north Staffordshire, Coalbrookdale and Ironbridge Gorge that drove Seward to give ‘poetic form to the destructive effects of smoke, chemicals and urban sprawl’. As well as providing wondrous itineraries for numerous foreign and British observers and sources of displeasure for some literary observers, Birmingham and its attendant manufactories such as the Soho works also provided important new markets for the multitudinous products pouring forth from these ventures. And women, of course, were a significant proportion of the market, participating, as Watts demonstrates so well, in the rich cultural life beyond the metropolis in centres such as Lichfield where Seward as the ‘leading literary voice of the Midlands enlightenment’, was nurtured by local intellectual circles.

Post-1800

In Olympic year, it is perhaps not surprising to find the host city for the XXIX Olympiad, Beijing, featuring in some of the periodical literature. The city which wowed the viewing public with its ‘Bird's Nest’ stadium, ‘Water Cube’ aquatic centre and towering media complex, which staged lavish opening and closing ceremonies showcasing Chinese culture and which sent its marathon runners through the vast expanse of Tiananmen Square and its road cyclists racing in the shadow of the Great Wall, has brought issues of urban planning, ceremonial and status into the public consciousness more than anywhere else. Shuishan Yu's article in the J. of Urban History, 34 (2008), 571–608, looks at rival planning schemes for the new capital of the People's Republic of China in 1950, and suggests that the transformation of Beijing in this period was a product of both architectural and political vision. Elsewhere in the J. of Urban History, 34 (2008), Kristin Stapleton's review essay on ‘Beijing: Olympic city’, 1013–20, evaluates a rich collection of books on aspects of Beijing's journey from imperial city to republic and to its contemporary incarnation as Olympic city.

The role of towns and cities as hosts and venues for cultural festivals and celebrations is examined in other places and other contexts in a number of journals. Charles Withers, Rebekah Higgitt and Diarmid Finnegan examine the staging of meetings of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) in towns and cities throughout Britain, Ireland and later Canada, South Africa and Australia, British J. for the History of Science, 31 (2008), 385–415. They argue that the different local and regional settings for the annual meetings produced varying types of scientific knowledge. Concerned to write ‘a historical geography of science rather than an urban history of science’ their interest lies not just in the towns and cities where the scientific congresses were held, but also in the movements, or ‘traffickings’ of the BAAS and its delegates between and beyond them. Although the focus of their research is the operation of the BAAS as a scientific organization, their study is of interest to urban historians for what it reveals about the towns in which the meetings were staged.

A more recent incarnation of the annual urban cultural festival forms the subject of a study by John and Margaret Gold in the Institute of Historical Research's online publication, History in Focus. The current issue, 13 (2008), is dedicated to ‘The City’ and includes an article by the Golds on the phenomenon of the ‘European Capital of Culture’ and the competition between cities for the right to this annually bestowed accolade. They argue that, in this guise, urban culture is more self-consciously commercial than the dominant cultural forms common to the industrial cities of previous eras, but point out that the urban cultural festival also has a long history, evident from the Middle Ages, but particularly popular from the middle of the nineteenth century. The staging of any cultural festivals raise issues of cost, benefit and legacy for the host city but, as the authors point out, recent European Capitals of Culture have derived considerable benefits by using the cultural festival model as a driver for post-industrial regeneration.

As well as these articles which use the visiting cultural event or festival as a window on cultural life in the city, a number of other authors provide case studies of urban culture by examining locally grown town-based institutions and cultural initiatives. Christopher Hilliard's examination of the literary underground of 1920s London centres on the city's Progressive Bookshop, operated by German immigrant Charles Lahr, Social History, 33 (2008), 164–82. Often overshadowed by other literary quarters of the city like Bloomsbury and Fitzrovia, the bookshop, located in the centre of the city, became, argues Hilliard, ‘the lynchpin of a network of readers and writers throughout Britain, and it was an entrée into the circuits of literary London to people from Wales and the English provinces’, 166. Elsewhere, Paul Elliott, Stephen Daniels and Charles Watkins explore the contribution of the town arboretum to the leisure and public culture of mid nineteenth-century Nottingham, Urban History, 35 (2008), 48–71. A significant green space in an increasingly congested manufacturing town, the arboretum was part of a council-supported scheme to provide walks, park space and recreation grounds for the inhabitants as well as to equip the town with open air recreational spaces that could match any of its nearby rival urban centres. They argue that, like many mid-nineteenth-century initiatives to promote ‘rational’ recreation, the place of the arboretum within the park scheme was fraught with contradictions: ‘Admission charges and strict policing maintained order but discouraged visits from the working class who were supposed to benefit’, 49.

There were no such tensions in the solidly middle-class musical culture of Birmingham and Leipzig which Antje Peiper examines in Cultural and Social History, 5 (2008), 53–73. The bases for her comparison are the Leipzig Gewandhaus and the Birmingham Triennial Festival which, she claims, were ‘the flagship cultural enterprise[s] . . . instantly and recognizably associated with their respective towns’, 55. She argues that the concert-going traditions and music repertoire of these events provided a channel for middle-class culture in the two settings which ‘encouraged and disseminated by the press . . . helped to define an emergent middle-class consciousness’, 71. Interestingly this piece appears alongside several other articles on music culture as a result of a flurry of article submissions to Cultural and Social History on the subject. Although the current collection was not planned as a special issue, the new editorial team at the helm of the journal, consisting of Padma Anagol, David Hopkin and Sean O'Connell, express an interest in highlighting music as the focus of a themed issue or a themed strand in future volumes.

An article which fuses this theme of urban festival and celebration with the promotion of towns as tourist destinations is the study of ‘Old Home Week celebrations as tourist promotion and commemoration’ by François Noël in Urban History Review, 37 (2008), 34–46. The ‘Old Home Weeks’ of the title were festivals of local sports, pageants and parades held in towns across Ontario, including the railway town of North Bay which forms the focus of this study. North Bay's Old Home Week in 1925 incorporated the celebrations to mark the gaining of city status and included a street procession of floats depicting the town's historic connections with the fur trade and with native American culture as well as contemporary institutions and industrial interests. The anniversary ‘Old Home Week’ a decade later was held in the very different atmosphere of economic depression and ‘presented a more diversified’ view of the community, 43. The French Canadian population was prominent in the proceedings with their own souvenir book, dedicated floats and an entire day in the week devoted to their interests. Both events proved very successful in attracting visitors to the area and, argues Noël, offer a revealing view of the evolving social make up of the city.

Other contributions to the periodical literature dealing with tourism and urban development include Joan Banau's ‘Reinventing memories: the origin and development of Barcelona's Barri Gotic, 1880–1950’, J. of Urban History, 34 (2008), 795–832. This article examines the creation of a gothic quarter in Barcelona around the newly completed cathedral, from the remaining fragments of the largely dismantled historic infrastructure of the city. The creation of this heritage quarter was part of the city's attempt to appeal to mid-twentieth-century visitor tastes for historic tourist attractions. Alan Lessoff's focus is the rather different city of Corpus Christi, Texas, J. of Urban History, 35 (2008), 108–33. Its status as a ‘secondary city’ rather than a regional metropolis or state capital was, he argues, a crucial factor in limiting its ability to reorient its commercial efforts towards Mexico and Latin America in the late twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries. Tourism, the port and a retail trade grew only slowly in this period compared to the impact that industrial and military developments had had on the population and wealth of the city between 1920 and 1970.

This particular article features in a special issue of the J. of Urban History, 35, 1 (2008), devoted to the study of ‘Peripheral cities in the modern world’. In his introductory essay, 3–14, James J. Connolly explains that the purpose of the volume is to ‘fill a significant gap in our understanding of the urban experience’, 6, by looking beyond the metropolitan and assessing issues of globalization, urban identity and how a city should be defined in smaller urban settings. He argues that the urban historians have tended to assume that the much studied metropolises represented the norm of urban development, and the articles presented here, representing a selection of papers read at a conference on ‘Small cities’ in 2007, seek to offer different case studies of urbanization. While the volume is to be welcomed for bringing to light examples of research on lesser studied cities like Corpus Christi, Connolly's arguments about the paucity of ‘small city’ research seem grounded very much in the North American context, although the volume itself includes articles on China, Japan, Chile, Germany and South Asia, as well as the USA.

Some of the same themes surface in Maoz Azaryahu's contribution to Social and Cultural Geography, 9 (2008), 303–18. Following on from his recent exploration of the Tel Aviv seaside in Urban History, 34 (2007), 278–95, Azaryahu here examines Tel Aviv as ‘an aspiring metropolis’. Examining four phases in Tel Aviv's twentieth-century development, Azaryahu argues that the city, whilst acutely aware of its provincialism was, at the same time, ambitious for recognition as a metropolis on a par with Paris or New York. From its origins as the ‘first Hebrew city’, to its changed status after the declaration of Jerusalem as the Israeli capital in 1949 and its growing apartness from Jerusalem in the 1980s as it evolved a reputation for nightlife, and its trumpeting of its distinctive Bauhaus architecture in the 1990s, Tel Aviv's promoters adopted a variety of means by which to measure the changing status of the city in relation to other urban centres in Israel and beyond.

The major port cities continue to provide scope for the examination of a wide range of themes current in urban historiography, from globalization to security, race and immigration. Alan Mayne takes the latter issues as his focus in a study of San Francisco and Darwin, Urban History, 35 (2008). ‘Guardians at the gate: quarantine and racialism in two Pacific Rim port cities, 1870–1914’, 255–74, investigates the paradox of development in North American and Australian cities on the Pacific coast which dictated that ‘Trade with Asia was to be encouraged, but Asian culture and Asian people were to be kept at a distance’, 255. Although very different in size, Darwin and San Francisco were both key trading ports with growing Asian markets. Mayne describes the suspicious way in which unfamiliar goods imported from Asia were treated by customs officials in San Francisco and the invasive and time-consuming regulations imposed for the health checking of Asian passengers arriving in the port. There, and in Darwin, Asian immigrants were associated with health problems, specifically the importation of smallpox, and strict quarantine procedures were imposed to prevent the spread of feared infections beyond the ports of entry. Such policies not surprisingly created social tensions which influenced relations between these ports and their trading partners in Asia.

San Francisco features again, along with Barcelona and Lisbon, in Pedro Ressano Garcia's study of port authorities and municipal governments and their role in port development, Planning Perspectives, 23 (2008), 49–80. This is a case-study of waterfront planning and design which explores the relocation of port facilities and the implications of this for urban regeneration. Elsewhere writers examine the experience of ports faced with social problems of crime and industrial unrest. In Mumbai, the development of organized criminal activity mirrored changes in the economy. Liza Weinstein's study of Mumbai's ‘Development mafias’, International J. of Urban and Regional Research, 32 (2008), 22–39, traces the evolution of criminal activity in Mumbai from the 1950s, when rigid regulation of imports fostered a lucrative trade in black market smuggling, to the 1990s when spiralling property prices led criminals to turn their attention to the development of land. Weinstein sees these trends in Mumbai as symptomatic of a wider ‘liberalization and globalization of the Indian economy’, 23. Early twentieth-century Glasgow, meanwhile, receives attention from Matt Vaughan Wilson in a study of the city's waterfront strikes in 1911, International Review of Social History, 53 (2008), 261–92. 1911 was a year of upheaval in Britain as industrial unrest and strike action surfaced in a number of ports and industrial towns throughout the country. Wilson claims that Glasgow, considering its status as a major port with an active labour movement, has received less than its fair share of attention from labour historians. He argues that because of important variations in the pattern and organization of strikes in different locations, a Glasgow-centred study is justified. Here, according to Wilson, the strike action was more coherent and unified than in other locations and this set the tone for the unionization of waterfront labour in the city in subsequent decades.

A very different kind of labour debate surfaced in Stockholm a century earlier when the city's Tailors’ Guild applied for permission to open a clothes warehouse. Martin Wottle's examination of the discussion this sparked about the relationship between production and the development of consumer culture in the city, in Scandinavian Economic History Review, 56 (2008), 21–40, provides a number of interesting insights for urban historians. The Tailors’ Guild's applications to introduce a ready-to-wear industry in the city were repeatedly rebuffed, and visitors to the city in the early nineteenth century compared its retail trade unfavourably with other centres as a result. Wottle argues that, consequently, it ‘ran a palpable risk of being labelled a provincial town’, 22. He shows how the influence of the cloth manufacturers and the Board of Trade over the industry gave pride of place to the finishing of cloth while the needs of the consumer had little impact in the debate.

Awareness of consumer needs was much higher on the agenda in urban economies where market competition was intense. Stéphane Hoste, Reginald Loyen and Stephan Vanfraechem's study of port competition in Antwerp and Rotterdam after 1945, Research in Maritime History, 35 (2008), 57–84, weighs up the factors which determined levels of use of two ports which were, in their words, ‘notorious for their competition’, 58. Although infrastructure and the provision of deep water docks, warehousing facilities and port costs were all important in determining use, other factors such as labour relations also played a part in encouraging or deterring trade. Their analysis shows that Rotterdam expanded more rapidly than Antwerp in the 1950s and 1960s, but that thereafter their development was more even as the latter port outperformed Rotterdam in handling general cargoes. They conclude that competition between ports was based on multiple factors: ‘flexibility, tradition, personal contacts and the shipper's perception of the level of port performance’, 84, were all key factors in shaping performance.

The fate of other ports during their most prosperous years as trading hubs, and during subsequent periods of decline, is explored elsewhere in the periodical literature. The Chilean port of Valparaiso, South America's leading Pacific port in the nineteenth century and hub of the global copper trade, is examined in the J. of Urban History, 35 (2008), 53–74, by Samuel J. Martland. He traces its development from its nineteenth-century heyday as a prosperous, cosmopolitan community which steered a successful course in serving both the interests of its far-flung trading partners, and of the Chilean state, to a place eclipsed in Chile by the development of Santiago. It is interesting to follow the story of Chilean urbanization forward into the twentieth century by comparing this article with the study of Santiago's development in the 1930–60 period by Luis Valenzuela in Planning Perspectives, 23 (2008), 263–90. Valenzuela examines the modernization of Santiago in the middle decades of the twentieth century through its public and private house-building schemes.

The examination of urban places through the experience of their minority immigrant residents is a feature of several journal articles published in 2008. The Irish presence in British industrial towns, especially from the middle 1840s, is examined in two articles by Paul O'Leary. In Urban History, 35 (2008), 237–54, he uses the reports compiled by the Morning Chronicle's correspondent on conditions of the poor labouring classes of Merthyr, to show how contemporaries interpreted the immigrants as culturally and materially poorer than their Welsh neighbours by contrasting the paucity of their homes and household goods. A different view of Irish immigrant life in Welsh towns, however, is derived from O'Leary's study of the tradition of the annual Corpus Christi procession in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Cardiff, Welsh History Review, 24 (2008), 77–101. Set in a broad context of historical studies of urban processions in Britain and Europe in the nineteenth century, this article suggests that this annual Catholic procession in Cardiff was a remarkably uncontested example of the appropriation of public urban space by a minority religious group in a major British town. O'Leary argues that the support of the Irish community by their co-religionist, the marquis of Bute, gave the event the powerful backing needed to enable it to go ahead on a weekday in the main thoroughfares of the busy commercial town centre until, like so many other aspects of town life, its traditional pattern was disrupted during the Great War.

These two articles, as well as signalling the potential of looking at the immigrant dimension as a means of understanding urban life, also mark something of a flowering of articles on Welsh towns this year. Following on from the special issue devoted to towns in Wales by Urban History, 32, 1 (2005), another journal has this year given over its pages to articles on ‘Urban communities in modern south Wales’. Llafur. The J. of Welsh People's History, 9, 4 (2007) appeared in Spring 2008 carrying ten articles dealing with aspects of the urban experience in Cardiff, Swansea, Newport and Merthyr Tydfil in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Covering themes ranging from town planning, urban celebrations and cultural life, to prostitution and urban regeneration, these articles contain some new research by a number of recent postgraduates and early-career academics as well as some contributions from established writers. The editorial, 2–9, usefully points to some important distinguishing features of the modern urban experience in Wales, particularly the close proximity of countryside and hillside for many residents of Welsh towns. It also laments the very obvious limitations of the volume, and of writing on towns in Wales in general at present, which has seen little research extend beyond the confines of the industrial south, or even outside the boundaries of the aforementioned ‘big four’ towns. A rare study based on a north Wales town, however, appears in the J. of British Studies, 47 (2008), 604–23. David Dutton's article provides an examination of National Liberalism in twentieth-century Wrexham, during and after the collapse of the National Government. Although his focus is firmly on the divisions and alliances in British Liberalism in the period 1936–68, his choice of the small but regionally significant north-east Wales town of Wrexham as a case study provides a welcome exposition of modern constituency politics in a place seldom visited by urban historians.

Something of a regional flowering is also evident in the pages of Midland History, 33, 1 (2008). Hailed by its two new academic editors, Richard Cust and Stephen K. Roberts, as ‘the beginning of a new era’, 1, this is the first issue produced in partnership with Maney Publishing in a new, larger format, twice yearly and with online access. Its modern history articles include a study of visitor impressions of Matthew Boulton and James Watt's Soho manufactory in Birmingham, by Peter M. Jones, 68–96, an assessment of the role of temperance in the 1895 general election in Derby, by Patrick Cassidy, 97–114, and Joseph Wacher's study of late nineteenth-century public health concerns in Birmingham over the issue of bovine tuberculosis and the contamination of milk supplies, 115–30. With its geographic remit extending across some of the most urbanized counties in England, Midland History has long been an important resource for urban historians, but with its promise of ‘more and longer articles’ and its move to a twice yearly format with online access, it looks likely to become a more influential organ of new research and writing on English towns and cities in the future.

The towns of another important urban and industrial region, the Soviet Baltic, form the subject of an article by Andis Cinis, Marija Drėmaitė and Mart Kalm in the Scandinavian J. of History, 33 (2008), 226–46. They examine three ‘mono-industrial towns’ (the phrase was commonly used in the Soviet Union), constructed by the Soviet state between the 1950s and the 1980s, and compare their development and characteristics to the capitalist company towns of the west. Their three chosen study cases, Sillamäe in Estonia, Stučka in Latvia and Sniečkus in Lithuania, were each creations of central Soviet planning but reflect three different eras: the Stalinist years immediately after World War II, the Khrushchev period of the late 1950s and the early 1960s and the Brezhnev era. Although, like company towns in the west, these three communities developed to foster industry and economic growth, the authors argue that they differ significantly from the single-industry settlements of capitalist countries because, as Soviet settlements, they also had a further agenda, as part of a process of denationalization in the Baltic republics. Imported workers were Russian speaking, the stimulus for building them came not from local entrepreneurship, but from the Soviet state, and from there, too, architectural design forms were imposed. Rather than just interesting case studies of industrial urbanization, these towns provide an insight into the strategy of ‘russification of the Baltics’, 240.

A number of useful articles with an urban history focus appear in Social and Cultural Geography this year. The claiming and use of urban space for a political purpose is the subject of Federico Caprotti and Maria Kaïka's study of land reclamation in the Pontine Marshes, Social and Cultural Geography, 9 (2008), 613–34. An earlier article by Caprotti on the use of the marsh area south of Rome by the fascist regime to create new towns in the 1930s appeared in the J. of Historical Geography, 33 (2007), 651–79. In this new study, he and Kaïka utilize 32 moving images on the Pontine Marshes project, which form part of a much bigger collection of newsreels and documentaries produced from the 1920s onwards, and take a fresh look at how fascist ideals and plans for the landscape were communicated through film, and present their findings as part of a special issue of Social and Cultural Geography dedicated to ‘Spaces of technology/technologised spaces’.

In volume 9 (2008), 431–52, Reuben S. Rose-Redwood explores the history of street-naming in New York with a study of the re-naming of streets on Manhattan's Upper West Side in the late nineteenth century, and in Harlem a century later. The city's streets laid out in the early nineteenth century were numbered, rather than named, and efforts to shift from number to name were fraught with political difficulties which, according to Rose-Redwood, saw the city's streetscape become a ‘memorial arena’. The Manhattan street-naming of the 1880s coincided with a period of removal of shanty dwellings, and so was particularly contentious, but was complete by 1890. In Harlem, meanwhile, streets and parks were renamed in the late twentieth century to commemorate civil rights leaders which, according to Rose-Redwood, amounted to ‘a creation of a commemorative space in which the symbolic capital of a street name could provide a “place” for acknowledging the important contributions of African Americans to the city and the nation’, 443.

The imprint left by commemoration of a different kind on English towns and cities is examined by Peter Webster in a study of the debates surrounding the issue of war memorials during and after World War II, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 44 (2008), 128–39. In a special issue on the theme of memorials in Europe, Webster's study identifies a shift away from the predominantly monumental stone memorials which sprang up in English towns and parishes after the 1914–18 conflict, and a greater emphasis in the 1940s debate on utility in commemoration projects. The notion that community centres, retirement homes, youth clubs and parks were more desirable than monuments or statues as a means of commemorating the dead became a recurrent theme in contemporary debate and ensured that the utilitarian approach, by the 1950s, became the ‘dominant mode of commemoration in Britain’, 207. Despite this, voices were raised in favour of the idea that memorials should, first and foremost, be beautiful and inspire reflection, and suggesting that halls and community centres were things that towns should provide for themselves anyway. There was also another strand to the debate on memorialization which favoured the preservation of ruins in the context of new buildings or re-developments, as in the case of Coventry Cathedral. Webster's article, along with the others in this special issue, provides a useful reminder in this, the ninetieth anniversary year of the Armistice, that methods of commemoration, so firmly rooted in place and reflective of the spirit and concerns of their age, are potentially important measures of transition in the urban landscape.