Lisa Keller's study of public protest and the struggle for order in nineteenth-century London and New York is a welcome addition to the fast-growing field of comparative urban history – not only because the book is, in the author's words, a study of two of the ‘most influential cities on the planet’ (p. xii), both of which spent much of the century striving clumsily to strike a balance between freedom and rights versus order and control. The goal for civic officials on both sides of the Atlantic was to construct modern urban terrains that provided enough freedom to sustain democracy, but enough rules to maintain an orderly everyday life. Many cities, Keller rightly points out, still lack this balance; and it remains unclear whether London or New York achieved it before the nineteenth century's end.

But the ground was paved for urban stability and a politically engaged citizenry during the rapid, messy growth of the two capital cities. The banishment of chaos and uncertainty was the first step and it was arrived at by heated negotiation between the city's residents and the state. Keller's book surveys this negotiation, tracing the evolving dynamic between freedom and order, couched as it was in the belief that the right to use public space was a defining aspect of democracy, in five interrelated ways: the demographic and spatial expansion of the cities themselves; the development of police forces to replace militias; the machinations of the protesting public; its commitment to free speech and assembly; and the legislative attempts to mitigate the two. These agents, Keller shows, both managed and caused disorder in the streets and open spaces amid large-scale changes to the landscape and the challenges posed by poverty, class divisions, as well as racial, ethnic and gender prejudices.

In the process, Keller finds that London was by and large better than New York at preserving freedom in the relentless contest over free speech and assembly. New York's officials eventually realized that while they could not stop public assemblies, they could authorize them. This was the city's way of controlling crowd events before they happened, Keller argues, even if it rarely prevented violence and riot. Bringing order to New York also meant cleaning up the city; building parks; improving policy, licensing, infrastructure and controls; easing traffic congestion; and cracking down on crime. Of course these same changes were happening in Victorian London at exactly the same time, and contributed similarly to the re-ordering of the cityscape, but Keller stops short of fleshing out the comparison or showing causal connections between regulation and improvement regimes in either city or how they affected the protesting public. Nor is there a critique here of the actual expressions of dissent. While Keller does quite helpfully show that London and New York were on similar trajectories in ‘projecting an image of freedom within a framework of safety and order’ (p. 224), it appears by the book's end that issues of order and disorder had more to do with unresolved struggles for space and imbalances between public order, liberty, free speech and assembly that continued into the twentieth century.