Pre-1500

One of the great interpretive arcs of history as an academic discipline is the opposition between pre-modern and modern societies. Stimulated by post-modern theory, historians have done much in the past decades to expunge the ideological baggage of history as a ‘great march of civilization’, but they continue to imagine the industrial revolution as a great hinge between two distinct epochs. For all its merits, this perspective also creates problems. Burdened by hindsight, medievalists and modernists are often inclined to understand a case-study as either a prefiguration of a nineteenth- or twentieth-century development, or as its foil. Some of the most important publications on the history of medieval European towns published in 2019 were about destroying such assumptions.

The first major contribution comes from Sam Cohn. Proceeding from a wide range of chronicles and other narrative sources from England, France, Italy and the Low Countries, he developed a critique of a model of revolts developed by Charles Tilly and other historically interested sociologists and political scientists. According to this model, social unrest in pre-modern cities was usually spontaneous and local in nature, limited to a single parish, market or neighbourhood, whereas modern protest is much more of a premeditated, city-wide phenomenon. Cohn shows that this dichotomy is false, as there is ample evidence for carefully planned revolts that encompassed entire cities in fourteenth-, fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe. That is not to say that the patterns of urban revolt were completely static: as the author is careful to point out that by the sixteenth century, women became increasingly visible as agitators, next to the new dynamics of conflict that came with religious dissent between Catholics and Protestants. Politically speaking, however, medieval towns were just as integrated as industrial towns (Sam K. Cohn Jr, ‘The topography of medieval popular protest’, Social History, 44 (2019), 389–411).

This new insight tallies well with ongoing research into the social and economic organization of towns in medieval Europe. In his influential study The Pre-Industrial City (1960), the geographer Gideon Sjoberg argued that the morphology of pre-modern towns was usually concentric, with elites dominating the city centre and its public institutions, leaving the more peripheral neighbourhood to lower-ranking social groups.Footnote ¹ Follow-up research has shown, however, that the spatial segmentation of different social groups was usually not as extreme as Sjoberg suspected. In seventeenth-century Alkmaar and Delft, for example, the main streets were home to the high-income residences, whereas adjacent streets were dominated by lower-income residences, so that the rich and the poor mingled to a much greater extent than the older model allowed.Footnote ² This body of scholarship is reinforced with a new case-study, that is, mid-fourteenth-century Hull. A survey of property rents conducted in 1347 allows the charting of residential patterns, and in Hull, the rents were clearly shaped by the economic profile of the town. In this port town, too, the handful of extremely wealthy merchant families tended to cluster in specific parts of the town, rather than in the radially symmetric way that Sjoberg imagined (Catherine Casson and Mark Casson, ‘Property rents in medieval English towns: Hull in the fourteenth century’, Urban History, 46 (2019), 374–97).

Nineteenth- and twentieth-century historians not only imagined medieval towns as the foil to the urban societies in which they themselves often lived and worked, they were also often quick to see the deep roots of their own times in the medieval past they were studying. This is particularly true for the historians who worked on the many urban revolts that took shape in the Low Countries around 1300. Prominent medievalists such as Henri Pirenne speculated that these revolts were essentially ’modern’, in that they were shaped by a clash of interests between a small elite of proto-capitalist entrepreneurs and a vast proletariat of impoverished wage-labourers. This influential interpretation is now effectively destroyed with a revisionist article on credit networks in late thirteenth-century Ypres, then one of the leading textile centres of north-western Europe. The detailed analysis of thousands of IOUs reveals that Ypres was in fact home to a well-developed middle class of small merchants and commodity producers, who had a much greater access to capital than earlier generations of scholars allowed. Some of these men came to play prominent roles in the revolts that rocked Ypres and many other Flemish towns in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, which makes clear that the established interpretation does not hold water (Martha C. Howell, ‘Credit networks and political actors in thirteenth-century Ypres’, Past and Present, 242 (2019), 3–36). Rather, these revolts might be aligned more closely with those of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as Jack Goldstone has shown that these conflicts usually sprang from a combustible mix of demographic growth, frustrated middle groups and disaffected segments of the elite who faced downward social mobility.Footnote ³

Downward social mobility is also the central topic of a thought-provoking essay by Alex Brown, who points out that medievalists are prone to overstress opportunities for upward social mobility as a motivating factor for individuals and groups, while ignoring the possibility that those individuals and groups often acted out of fear. While mainly using evidence for landed elites, his argument also pertains to urban society, as he argues that the successful experiments in many European towns with guilds and fraternities as ‘artificial families’, as Anthony Black famously called them, may have much to do with the attempts of individuals to cement their social position after the Black Death blew large holes in the kinship networks that had traditionally helped an individual to maintain his economic and social standing (Alex T. Brown, ‘The fear of downward social mobility in late medieval England’, J. of Medieval History, 45 (2019), 597–617).Footnote ⁴

This focus on urban institutions resonates well with the contribution of Rory Naismith on the earliest history of the Husting and the Folkmoot, two governing bodies in medieval London. The paucity of the sources precludes anything but a speculative discussion, but it is likely that these institutions emerged from the networks for self-help and religious devotion that were omnipresent in Anglo-Saxon England. When London became more densely populated from the late ninth century onwards, the local peace guilds gained in size and prominence. As the town doubled as the capital of the young kingdom of England, the interest groups behind these mechanisms for self-help claimed legitimacy and power by redefining themselves as institutions that worked in tandem with the crown, so that by the turn of the twelfth century, the Folkmoot and the Husting had become increasingly visible as institutions in written sources (Rory Naismith, ‘The origins of the Husting and the Folkmoot’, History, 104 (2019), 409–24).

In light of the great upheavals of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, an important question is of course how urban political institutions evolved after their genesis in the High Middle Ages, and which interest groups dominated these institutions. This topic also received detailed scrutiny in 2019 with a set of articles that challenge the old narrative, according to which urban society saw a strong trend towards oligarchy in the Late Middle Ages. For England, Joe Chick has developed a fine-grained social network analysis of Reading, a monastic town with c. 3,000 inhabitants. This approach reveals that the town's political elite was not a self-contained group, as its individual members were embedded in socially diverse networks and transactions that encompassed many inhabitants who were not members of the political elite. More importantly, these networks did not shrink or wither with the passing of time. After the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1536 – an event that is suspected to have strengthened oligarchy – the networks of urban politicians were just as diverse as before (Joe Chick, ‘Urban oligarchy and dissolutioned voters: the end of monastic rule in Reading, 1350–1600’, Cultural and Social History, 16 (2019), 387–41). The evidence from the Low Countries also complicates long-held ideas about oligarchy. A set of four articles in Urban History, to which the present author contributed, develops a comparative analysis of the urban political elites of Ghent, Bruges, Mechelen and Antwerp, that is, four of the largest towns of the Southern Low Countries.Footnote ⁵ Just as in Reading, these towns were home to ‘open oligarchies’, as the social composition of political elites reveals a very high turnover in the dynasties that claimed most offices in urban government. While not all four towns show a consistent trend towards oligarchy, each of the four towns saw a rapprochement of its elite with that of the landed elites of its hinterland.

Of course, urban policies were not just shaped by the social composition of a town's ruling class, but also by the instruments of government, and the ideological commitments of rulers and subjects. These topics, too, have been explored in recent publications. An important instrument of government is the police, and Trevor Dean has explored an exceptionally interesting case-study at the crossroads of the history of criminality and migration. In fifteenth-century Bologna, the policing forces were not generally recruited from the local populace, but from among young male emigrants who arrived in northern Italy from all corners of northern Europe and the Mediterranean. Strikingly, this use of immigrants for the surveillance and disciplining of urban subjects increased in times when Bologna was ruled by powerful seigneurial families. Apparently, ‘the interests of oligarchy were served by police forces composed of men with few contacts among themselves and none with local populations’ (Trevor Dean, ‘Police forces in late medieval Italy: Bologna, 1340–1480’, Social History, 44 (2019), 151–72).

The political ideologies that circulated in towns, then, are central to two articles on the Low Countries and England respectively. Minne De Boodt develops a tentative exploration of the polyvalent concept of the Common Good in the towns of fourteenth-century Brabant. The key source is a poem that was probably composed by an ally of the ruling elite and which aimed at warning the established ruling class that misconduct could lead to contestation, and, possibly, the overthrow of the regime. Texts such as this poem dovetail nicely with the research of Martha Howell, discussed above, about the political commitments of middling groups in towns. Whereas elites were above all preoccupied with keeping the peace and maintaining established hierarchies, members of the corporate milieu were preoccupied with accountability and representation (Minne De Boodt, ‘“How one shall govern a city”: the polyphony of urban political thought in the fourteenth-century duchy of Brabant’, Urban History, 46 (2019), 578–96). In a similar vein, Theresa Tinkle's article reveals the not-so-subtle political overtones in the plays organized as part of the Corpus Christi festival that was held annually in York, England's second town. In a context in which traitors sometimes became king (e.g. Henry IV, Henry VII) or kings became traitors (e.g. Richard II, Richard III) and back again (e.g. Edward IV), contemporaries reflected on these ambivalences through Jesus’ confrontation with the Sanhedrin and Pilate, a political exercise that was fused with reflection about ‘divine dominion and order that transcend the divided polity’. Tinkle's subtle analysis first and foremost aims to counter the long-standing historiographical tradition that proceeds from a crude dichotomy between early medieval representations of Jesus as a king and late medieval preoccupations with Jesus as a suffering man. It is sufficiently attentive to the political context, however, to reveal how much the Wars of the Roses impinged on the inhabitants of York, who frequently saw their Micklegate Bar adorned with the heads of attained traitors/pretenders (Theresa Tinkle, ‘York's Jesus: crowned king and traitor attained’, Speculum, 94 (2019), 96–137).

Another significant contribution to this line of enquiry comes from Marcus Meer, who successfully argues that heraldry was not an exclusive sign system that was intelligible only to the landed elites, but a language that was well understood by lower-ranking city dwellers, who used their intuitive understanding of heraldic communication to voice their discontent with unpopular leaders or elites. Coats of arms were often stolen, ridiculed or destroyed to convey a political message. Inversely, the crown and its aristocratic allies clearly expected their subjects to understand the meaning of the ostentatious display of, for example, the crown's coat of arms over a London gatehouse. The article mainly proceeds from well-documented examples from London, but a set of well-chosen comparisons with other European towns help to spell out the interpretive implications of the English evidence (Marcus Meer, ‘Reversed, defaced, replaced: late medieval London and the heraldic communication of discontent and protest’, J. of Medieval History, 45 (2019), 618–45). In sum, the publications of the past year have done much to improve our understanding of urban politics and its stakeholders.

One reason that heraldry was an effective vehicle for political communication was that it was ubiquitous, as coats of arms were used to decorate a wide range of material objects, ranging from texts over eating utensils to city gates. This resonates well with other research that focuses on the material dimensions of urban society and politics. A first article that deserves to be mentioned in this respect also concerns London. Zachary Stewart has reconstructed an early experiment of Henry III, who established the famous mausoleum of the English royal dynasties at Westminster Abbey (his Plantagenet ancestors were usually buried in their French dominions). Until 1246, Henry's ambition was for a burial site with the Knights Templar and thus he went to great expense to enlarge the Temple Church in London. Cementing the crown's alliance with the powerful and financially savvy Order of the Temple, the site also helped to project the crown's presence in the capital and to pronounce the crown's ambition to make London the undisputed political centre of the Plantagenet realm after Henry's father, John Lackland, had lost the Plantagenet possessions in France (Zachary Stewart, ‘A lesson in patronage: King Henry III, the Knights Templar, and a royal mausoleum at the Temple Church in London’, Speculum, 94 (2019), 334–84). A second article that explores the ways in which architecture was put to work for political purposes is dedicated to a mosaic floor that was installed in 1213 in the San Giovanni Evangelista Church of Ravenna. Depicting scenes from the notorious Fourth Crusade, which ended with the conquest of Constantinople in 1204, the mosaic floor has so far resisted consistent interpretation. This is remedied by Michael Angold, who points out that the mosaic's design is likely to have been shaped by Ravenna's delicate political position in the early thirteenth century. As the town freed itself from the influence of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II to side with the emperor's arch-enemy, Pope Innocent III, the inhabitants of Ravenna chose to depict the Fourth Crusade as a regrettable accident, an interpretation that matched the one favoured by the pope himself (Michael Angold, ‘A papal version of the Fourth Crusade: the mosaics of San Giovanni Evangelista at Ravenna’, Speculum, 94 (2019), 1006–32).

Royal funerary monuments and church decorations are of course objects tied to the highest strata of urban society, but some of the most exciting work of 2019 focuses directly on the houses and interiors of ordinary people. An exceptional series of inventories allows Jeremy Goldberg to reconstruct the domestic arrangements of the citizens of York. In this town, where houses usually had two, and often three, storeys, the typical arrangement was that the front room on the ground floor was largely, if not exclusively, dedicated to economic activities, whereas the back room was the place where family gatherings and social calls took place. Yet, the author is careful to point out that the evidence speaks against the dichotomy between the public and the private, or between the economic and the domestic that defines modern living arrangements. The assistants of a craftsman often slept in the work space, whereas the domestic space also doubled as the place where women worked at the spinning wheel during the day. These spaces were thus not strictly gendered or functionally defined. Rather, they displayed a distinct fluidity that is different from that of industrial homes. While basically patriarchal, these living arrangements ensured that patriarchy was effectively mediated by the polyvalent roles of women as shop managers, labourers, caregivers and partners. Only the upper-storey chambers had a more specific function as the locus of the couple's marriage bed. To pinpoint the specifically urban dimension of such arrangements of spaces and objects, the reader is well advised to cross-check Goldberg's article with similar research on peasant households. Thanks to the records of the royal escheators, who confiscated the goods of some of the crown's subjects after, for example, suicide, the living arrangements of rural households can be compared with those of urban households. The great similarity is the ground floor arrangement, with fluid circulation between a hall at the front and a kitchen and living space at the back. Just as in urban houses, the first-storey chamber was used as a bedroom. The great difference was that city dwellers clearly owed many more domestic objects and furnishings, and that peasants had a series of out-buildings around their main residence to store their agricultural tools and so on (Jeremy Goldberg, ‘Making the house a home in later medieval York’, J. of Medieval History, 45 (2019), 162–80, and Chris Briggs, Alice Forward, Ben Jervis and Matthew Tomkins, ‘People, possessions and domestic space in the late medieval escheator's records’, J. of Medieval History, 45 (2019), 145–61).

A deep-rooted assumption about pre-modern urban housing is that the shift from wood to stone did much to mitigate the risk of fire. This idea is effectively challenged by David Garrioch's discussion of fire hazards. Houses in stone still used so much wood or other inflammable materials that the difference from wooden houses was not as great as usually imagined. Rather than fixating on a single variable such as building materials, historians would do well to work with ‘fire regimes’, that is, multifaceted configurations that ranged from the changing uses of fire over climate change to firefighting techniques and organization. With the passing of time, buildings became more resistant to fire than they had been in medieval times, but the risk of sudden conflagrations also increased as the urban landscape became increasingly dotted with ever-larger warehouses, breweries, refineries, factories, and so on, which housed vast quantities of inflammable or explosive materials. Another assumption that is exploded in this fascinating paper is the idea that medieval city dwellers had a fatalistic attitude towards fire, as concerted efforts at firefighting and fire prevention have a much older history than historians usually allow: the ordinances of late medieval towns in all corners of Europe reveal a consistent preoccupation with fire hazards (David Garrioch, ‘Towards a fire history of European cities (late Middle Ages to late nineteenth century)’, Urban History, 46 (2019), 202–24).

The observation that medieval towns were much more efficient at limiting fire hazards tallies well with the inspiring research of Janna Coomans on the sanitation regimes of medieval towns. Discussing the so-called ‘king of dirt’ and his assistants in fifteenth-century Ghent, the article provides a pertinent discussion of how fourteenth- and fifteenth-century towns were preoccupied with the sanitation of public spaces. Following in the footsteps of Mary Douglas, the author of the anthropological classic Purity and Danger (1966), Coomans points out that the contemporary concept of cleanliness was suspended between the traditional Galenic doctrine of humours and moral registers, so that Ghent's policies were just as much about regulating prostitution as about the clearing of waste and the catching of roaming pigs. This article is also of great interest to historians of the public sphere, as Coomans is careful to point out that the demarcation of private properties and public spaces was largely mediated through the sanitation policies of the urban government (Janna Coomans, ‘The king of dirt: public health and sanitation in late medieval Ghent’, Urban History, 46 (2019), 82–105).

Even if public health was an important concern for medieval cities, their efforts were hampered by the lack of understanding of the biological mechanisms behind illness and epidemics. The terrible impact of the Black Death on the towns of the Low Countries is again brought to the spotlight in an article that is especially attentive to the ways in which plague-struck towns managed to recoup demographic losses by attracting immigrants from the countryside, up to the point that the epidemiological impact of this pandemic is often partially obscured in the urban records (Joris Roosen and Daniel R. Curtis, ‘The “light touch” of the Black Death in the Southern Netherlands: an urban trick?’, Economic History R., 72 (2019), 32–56). Yet, events such as the Black Death rendered gaping holes in the urban fabric in that many families had lost members, and some of the consequences are highlighted in Nicole Rice's article on St Leonard's Hospital of York, which provided care to several hundred elderly and/or ill individuals, many of whom were women. This hospital too contributed to the York Corpus Christi Plays, and just as was the case with the political reflections of York citizens on the Wars of the Roses, the hospital appears to have sponsored scenes that highlighted the position of midwives and young mothers in late medieval urban society (Nicole R. Rice, ‘The feminine prehistory of the York Purification: St. Leonard's Hospital, civic drama, and women's devotion’, Speculum, 94 (2019), 704–38).

1500–1800

In our last year's review, we discussed Judy Stephenson's latest article, where she claimed that institutional wage series have a tendency to overestimate the earnings of building workers by 20 or 30 per cent. As stated in our review, her findings may have some serious ramifications for the classic ‘high wage hypothesis’ of Robert C. Allen. Traditionally, the industrial revolution has been explained by referring to a mix of high wages and the relatively low cost of energy, which spurred technological innovation, mechanization and industrial development. Yet, when the point of departure – the high wages – is questioned, the whole hypothesis becomes a house of cards. In a response, Robert Allen argues that Stephenson's findings do not undermine his hypothesis regarding the relatively high wages in Britain when compared to the rest of the world (‘Real wages once more; a response to Judy Stephenson’, Economic History R., 72 (2019) 738–53). Stephenson picks up the thread again in her latest reply (‘Mistaken wages: the cost of labour in the early modern English economy, a reply to Robert Allen’, Economic History R., 72 (2019) 755–96) where she underlines the implications of the use of piecework for the ‘high wage hypothesis’ which should, in Stephenson's opinion, not be mistaken for wages. Moreover, she argues that the historiography prior to Allen's hypothesis and more recent findings challenge the whole idea of a British high-wage economy. It is a discussion that will probably flare up again in the (near) future.

In his latest article, Allen corroborates the idea of relative prosperity in England and Wales during the industrial revolution with new evidence (‘Class structure and inequality during the industrial revolution: lessons from England's social tables, 1688–1867’, Economic History R., 72 (2019), 88–125). Therefore, he uses the social tables – for instance, Gregory King's estimates of population and wealth in 1688 – which are excellent sources to examine the structure and evolution of society in the early modern period and the nineteenth century. Following Lindert and Williamson's revision of the tables, Allen makes some crucial adjustments. The result is a meticulous analysis of six major classes across the industrial revolution. The research corroborates the idea that England was by and large a prosperous country in the eighteenth century. Yet, the composition of these social groups changed dramatically over time. While the landed gentry remained roughly the same in size, the number of farmers declined a little. At the same time, the upper middle class grew by a factor of seven, the lower middle class by eight. Between 1688 and 1867, the working class even quadrupled. In the eighteenth century, the number of poor tripled, but then fell quickly afterwards. During the early modern period, the largest income gains were for the landed classes and the upper middle class. Yet, in the early nineteenth century, the tide turned. Farmers and the lower middle classes were then growing richer. During the industrial revolution, the income of the middle class slowly but surely drew even with that of the landed classes. However, the latter succeeded in freezing their incomes at a high level. After 1846, the relative well-being of the working classes improved. Overall, changes in incomes – and the relative size of these groups – translated in a rising inequality at first, followed by a steady decline. Apparently, the benefits of economic growth slowly but surely percolated through to the lower rungs of society.

Peter Laslett's famous ‘nuclear hardship hypothesis’ still inspires a lot of research today. Laslett claimed that in a society dominated by nuclear families, and with rather weak relations with other kin, collective and formal aid prevailed. The most striking example of the latter in early modern England was the Elizabethan poor law. Parishes were forced to set up a poor tax tailored to the local needs. However, recent studies of family and kinship in Britain have questioned the basic idea of an isolated nuclear household. It forces us to look with a fresh perspective at the English poor. Jonathan Healey's latest article rides the wave (‘Kin support and the English poor: evidence from Lancashire, c. 1620–1710’, Historical Research, 92 (2019), 318–39). Tapping new evidence from the pauper petitions in seventeenth-century Lancashire, Healey suggests that family support – even with distant kin – was not uncommon. Families stuck together in times of crisis and provided a vital safety-net in times of dire need, which could be ‘inactive and unacknowledged for extensive period, but it could kick decisively into action when an immediate crisis occurred’. However, it remains extremely difficult to assess the impact of these extended family ties on the idea of nuclear hardship.

Urban history with a social touch is also the focus in Benedetta Borello's latest article (‘Being brothers or pretending to be: merchants, artisans, inn-keepers, painters and brothers in seventeenth-century Rome’, European History Quarterly, 49 (2019) 5–27). Borello looks with a fresh eye at the importance of brotherhood – both in a strictly literal and a broad figurative sense – in an early modern metropolis. Male siblings often stuck together. They lived under the same roof and practised the same trade or craft, ranging from wealthy bankers, merchants or painters to famers, blacksmiths and publicans. Living together had some obvious benefits for younger brothers, who could capitalize on the family fortune and were able to learn the tricks of the trade passed down through the generations, while the pater familias or the firstborn could rest assured that the family business would be continued if they passed away. Due to the unwritten law of the affectio, the elder brother was bound to protect and to help his younger siblings when they were in need. Fraternal assistance was, however, far from unconditional. Family members who did not struggle to escape from poverty, unemployment or other mishap on their own were given the cold shoulder. Kinship was especially important for migrants who had to settle down in a foreign metropolis. Finding a new job, lodgings or friends was much easier when an elder or younger brother – or any other relative who had arrived some years before – was around and was able to show the ins and outs of urban life. Brotherly bonds had such a strong, symbolical resonance that many of craftsmen worked and even lived together, even if they were not related. The affratellamento was a common practice in early modern Rome. It provided more security for both partners; at least, in theory, because the ties that bound could easily wax weak. Fraternal relations were cemented by gifts, godparenthood and other symbolical exchanges. Myriad examples show that this mutual understanding could evaporate in a blink.

Women and the urban sphere are scrutinized in Danielle van den Heuvel's research (‘Gender in the streets of the premodern city’, J. of Urban History, 45 (2019), 693–710), by taking a fresh look at the powerful narrative that women gradually withdrew from the public sphere in between 1600 and 1850. Due to social and cultural changes associated with modernization, the presence of women on the streets became less acceptable as their natural habitat was increasingly envisioned as the fireside. Van den Heuvel debunks these classic stereotypes by reviewing some revisionist scholarship. Findings evidence that the traditional division between the private and the public sphere cannot be equated with a clear-cut rift between feminine and masculine spaces. On the contrary, new research on the gendered use of streets and other spaces shows that women were extremely active in appropriating space.

Taking a bird's-eye view over some classic and recent strands in the historiography on women's work in pre-industrial Europe, Jane Whittle also drops a bombshell with her recent article (‘A critique of approaches to “domestic work”: women, work and the pre-industrial economy’, Past and Present, 243 (2019), 35–70). Whittle starts with the observation that much of the historiography on women's labour – and on economic history as such – is clouded by a rather anachronistic definition of work, which was coined by classic economic theorists such as Adam Smith, David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill or even Karl Marx. They almost exclusively focused on wage labour, while other forms of work – household chores (washing, cleaning, cooking, etc.), caregiving (of children or the elderly) and toiling for subsistence – were largely ignored. Until recently, their narrow concept of work strongly determined how organizations such as the United Nations looked at the economies in developing countries. GDP was – and is often still – exclusively measured in terms of paid work. Unremunerated activities are usually brushed aside. Obviously, this modern lens is detrimental to our understanding of early modern economies where most labour was not remunerated. At the same time, it clouds our notion of women's work, who were often engaged in household or care work. It leads to some crude estimates, such as Stephen Broadberry et al.'s educated guess in British Economic Growth, 1270–1870 (Cambridge, 2015) that early modern women barely worked 30 per cent of men's average input, as they were entangled in endless household chores and childcare. Whittle points out that these figures have been rarely if ever corroborated with solid evidence. Time-use analysis, as pioneered by Sheilagh Ogilvie in her research on two communities in early modern south-west Germany,Footnote ⁶ and pursued by recent studies on pre-industrial Sweden and England, may provide a fresh perspective, as these studies show that women were more frequently engaged in agriculture, crafts and trade than previously assumed. Men might have worked less and women more. Moreover, traditional household and care work was more often outsourced and commercialized than one should think. Further research should spell out these differences in detail.

The Black Death is a recurrent topic in recent historiography. Joris Roosen and Daniel Curtis present some new evidence suggesting that the bubonic plague was no less severe in the Southern Netherlands than in other European regions, despite the tenacious truism about the ‘light touch’ of the epidemic in the Low Countries (‘The “light touch” of the Black Death in the Southern Netherlands: an urban trick?’, Economic History R., 72 (2019), 32–56). Roosen and Curtis also offer an explanation for this recurring myth of the unique position of the Low Countries. Drawing evidence from a broad variety of sources and a brand-new database of mortmain accounts, they argue that the densely populated countryside offered plenty of opportunity to make good the demographic loss of the cities in no time. Migration simply obscured the massive mortality. Moreover, the Low Countries did not recover much faster from the outbreak than other parts of Europe. Demographic pressure on the countryside provided a reservoir to replenish the losses. The variable impact of the plague is also at the heart of the contribution of Charles and Angela Evans (‘Plague – a disease of children and servants? A study of the parish records of St Peter upon Cornhill, London from 1580 to 1605’, Continuity and Change, 34 (2019), 183–208). Tapping evidence from late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century parish records, the Evans reveal that children were much more vulnerable to epidemic outbreaks than their parents. Servants in their teens and twenties were also a high-risk group. Nevertheless, the evidence does not reveal gender differences.

In their article, based on a large database of urban mortality rates in plague years, Guido Alfani and Marco Percoco provide an analysis of the demographic impact of an early modern outbreak that ravaged northern Italy in the early seventeenth century (‘Plague and long-term development: the lasting effects of the 1629–30 epidemic on the Italian cities’, Economic History R., 72 (2019), 1175–201). According to their analysis, the epidemic deeply disrupted economic life in large cities such as Milan and Venice. The authors’ research also provides a new perspective on long-term economic development in northern Italy and, especially when compared with the booming urban economies of north-west Europe, the progressive ‘ruralization’ of the peninsula. Comparative perspectives are also found in histories of disasters. David Garrioch examines why Paris was not consumed by fire in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, while other European cities witnessed cataclysmic blazes. The textbook example is, of course, the Great Fire of London in 1666 (‘Why didn't Paris burn in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries?’, French Historical Studies, 42 (2019), 35–65). Differences in building materials might explain why Paris was spared from great infernos, while London was set ablaze, but, according to Garrioch, there are other important differences. More than Paris, London was an industrial centre and a thriving consumption hub with an important seaport. All these activities contributed to a higher fire hazard. Another factor that may have tilted the balance was the increasingly effective fire preventions and the large investments in firefighting by the French monarchy. In Paris, the municipality was under direct royal control, while in London, a wide range of institutions was responsible for fire prevention. Moreover, both cities had a different ideology towards government intervention. London taxpayers were suspicious of the central state and therefore reluctant to invest in public infrastructure, such as fire protection and water supply. In Paris, providing access to water was seen as a vital public service and therefore a key responsibility for the government.

Fire – but even more prominently social and spatial segregation – is the focus of Mads Perner's recent article (‘Segregated behind the walls: residential patterns in pre-industrial Copenhagen’, Social History, 44 (2019), 412–39). Drawing data from censuses, tax registers and other classic sources, Perner not only provides a meticulous analysis of the residential patterns in Copenhagen between 1711 and 1845, but he also adds an innovative element by coding these sources with HISCO (Historical International Standard Classification of Occupations) and HISCLASS (International Historical Class Scheme). It enables him to move beyond the classic models of Sjoberg and Vance on segregation in early modern cities. Copenhagen followed the classic core-periphery model, as the lion's share of upper-class citizens were mainly found in the city centre, while the less fortunate ones were driven to the fringes. However, the model was thwarted by two anomalies. First of all, the elite's monopoly of living in the Old Town was never absolute. Low- and middle-class neighbours were never far away, as they lived in the less posh – and more affordable – side streets. These findings tie in with Clé Lesger and Marco H.D. van Leeuwen's concept of ‘around the corner’ segregation.Footnote ⁷ Moreover, vertical segregation was ubiquitous with the rich and the famous living on the ground and first floors, while lower-class citizens lived in cramped conditions in attics, garrets and cellars. Interestingly, this modus vivendi was disrupted in the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as a series of fires reduced the Old Town to ashes. In the aftermath, the houses in the city centre were transformed into smart, fashionable apartments. As a result, prices rocketed and gentrification ran rampant. Lower classes were increasingly ousted to outer Christianshavn, western Sankt Annae and other fringe areas. Fires – and the policy of the city council – strengthened the tendency towards horizontal segregation.

Not social segregation, but ethnoreligious ghettoization in early modern Italy is put under the microscope by Guillaume Calafat and Michael Gasperoni (‘Une économie de ghetto? Activités et acteurs économiques juifs dans l'Italie du XVIIe siècle’, Dix-septième siècle, 282 (2019), 117–48). Drawing evidence from a series of sources, they argue that we have to rethink the classic stereotype of impoverished, deprived and powerless Jewish communities, who were, from the middle of the sixteenth century onwards, increasingly forced to live in urban ghettos. Their meticulous and comparative analysis shows the immense flexibility and resilience of these Jewish communities in adapting to rapidly and dramatically changing circumstances. First of all, the conditions varied widely across the Italian peninsula, as the elbowroom of Jews in the ghettos of Urbino, Mantua or Rome was poles apart from the freedom of action in Livorno or Pisa. Yet, even in the former, where the odds to develop their talents were much more restricted, Jews were found in a whole range of occupations, including bankers, merchants, craftsmen, retailers, schoolmasters and pedlars. In the late seventeenth century, the Roman community was hit hard when Pope Innocent XI ordered the closing of the Jewish banchi after a series of devastating epidemics of plague. It led to grinding poverty in the ghetto. Yet even in Rome, the Jewish community adapted quickly to the new circumstances by specializing in the second-hand trade in clothes or by launching into real-estate. For Jewish traders and merchants, prospects were brightest in Livorno (Leghorn) where they were protected by a battery of ducal laws and regulations. To bolster the economic boom of the harbour, officials even actively enticed Jewish merchants from far and near – especially Levantine, Sephardic and Tedeschi – to come to Tuscany. Catholic quibblers, who were asking for a restriction of the Jewish privileges in the seventeenth century, were rebuffed by the government, as they were well aware of the parallel between a thriving economy and these ethnoreligious freedoms.

During the last few decades, academia has been flooded by a series of books and articles on the history of emotions. Numerous historians have taken a look at early modern love, hate, anger, sadness, melancholy and a range of other feelings. At the same time, the history of the senses – of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and feeling – has been on the march ever since Alain Corbin's pioneering work. For a long time, urban history was only marginally affected by these new strands of history. In her introduction to the latest issue of Histoire Urbaine, Pauline Valade provides a fascinating overview of these new lines of research in French urban history and muses on how these trends can reinforce each other (‘Sens et émotions dans la ville: des critères d'urbanité?’, Histoire Urbaine, 54 (2019) 5–18). It ties in with yet another strand in (French) urban history to look at the histoire vécu or how local residents experienced their own city. To uncover their everyday emotions and sensations, ego-documents have been hailed as promising sources. A recent textbook example of this histoire croisée of history of the senses and emotions is Gaël Rideau's analysis of religious processions in eighteenth-century France (‘Émotions, sens et expérience religieuse. Le cas des processions urbaines en France au XVIIIe siècle’, Histoire Urbaine, 54 (2019) 37–54). Rideau sets out to uncover the experiences of the various protagonists: the church and the police, travellers and participants. For the counter-reformation church, processions were an ideal instrument to overwhelm the senses of the faithful in every possible way – by the smell of incense, by the dramatic tolling of bells, entrancing prayers and sweet-voiced hymns, by the cadence of marching bodies and the almost magical touch of the reliquaries, and, last but not least, by the visual spectacle – in order to arouse strong emotions. Jansenists often saw these emotions as fake and superficial and pressed for more modest – and more heartfelt – acts of devotion. The critique was often shared by Protestant travellers, who witnessed these popish processions on their Grand Tour through Europe and reacted with anxiety, derision or bewilderment. Another leading figure was the police. They tried to control emotions and religious zeal, quite often in tandem with religious dignitaries, as processions often turned into rows and riots.

Not the scent of the city, but the fragrance of the surrounding countryside is the focus of the analysis in Pierre-Benoît Roumagnou's latest article (‘Parfum de banlieu. Les mauvaises odeurs et les environs de Paris au XVIIIe siècle’, Histoire Urbaine, 54 (2019), 19–36). Even though the rural fringe of Paris was in the eighteenth century increasingly envisaged as a place for Sunday walks, picnics and other fresh air entertainments, there was also a growing flood of complaints about bad smells. Foul and fetid activities were increasingly banned from the city centre and transferred to the rural suburbs, where the sharp tang of the bleaching fields, the reek of stud farms, the stink of dumped night soil, the whiff of graveyards and the fumes of factories were mixed into an unbearable odour. There was also the endless trail of cattle brought to Paris for slaughter, that littered the streets with smelly dung and rancid carcasses, and a stream of urban corpses carried along by the rivers. Especially in the eighteenth century, the olfactory pressure on the rural fringe increased rapidly, as a flood of procès-verbaux and official reports evidence. Complaints were not only lodged by the rural population, but also by the urban elites who had fled the evil-smelling and unruly city to their country houses, manors and estates to find some peace. During the late eighteenth century, the nuisance was no longer limited to the sweltering summer months; the stench was also unbearable in spring and autumn, and even in cold winter months, as malodourous activities were increasingly transferred to the countryside.

Tea is centre stage in Wouter Ryckbosch's latest analysis (‘From spice to tea: on consumer choice and the justification of value in the early modern Low Countries’, Past and Present, 242 (2019) 37–78). Drawing evidence from a wide array of sources – including philosophical and medical treatises, sermons, songs and ballads, plays, probate inventories and so much more – Ryckbosch traces continuity and change in the value conventions between the middle of the seventeenth and the late eighteenth centuries. Loosely inspired by conventions theory and Luc Boltanski and Lauren Thévenot's On Justification: Economies of Worth (Princeton, 2016), he unpacks the various social and cultural frameworks that led to another valuation of tea throughout history. While tea in the middle of the seventeenth century was predominantly valued for its highly symbolical and ceremonial qualities – in forging relations between friends and foes – it soon became treasured for its utilitarian value, as a medicine for hangovers and headache, but also for more serious ailments. In the early eighteenth century, when tea evolved from a luxury good into a staple of mass consumption, the symbolical and practical value gave way to fierce competition. Moral crusaders slated the idea that tea was increasingly popular among middle- and lower-class consumers. Their biting criticism reveals the tension between the different conventions of value: those of the market and those of traditional social hierarchy and order. Ryckbosch's exhaustive analysis debunks and hones some highly teleological models in economic history, which reduce long-term evolutions in consumer behaviour to a black-and-white-opposition between the gift culture of medieval or renaissance Europe and modern – read rationalized and utilitarian – consumption. In reality, evolutions were much more complex. Ryckbosch's analysis is a powerful call to look beyond the simple facts and figures. If we truly aim to understand why consumption evolved in early modern Europe – and at different stages in various locations – we have to take the complex triangle between economic factors, social relations and cultural norms into account.

Debunking a traditional and highly teleological narrative is also the point of departure in Stefan Hanβ’ latest article (‘The fetish of accuracy: perspectives on early modern time(s)’, Past and Present, 243 (2019) 267–84). Hanβ claims that our modern obsession with accuracy has clouded our understanding of early modern time awareness and temporality, as they are – measured against this modern benchmark – often portrayed as primitive, irrational and antediluvian. Hanβ quotes Lucien Febvre's famous characterization of rural communities in the sixteenth century as societies out of time: ‘we find fancifulness, imprecision, inexactness everywhere, the doing of men who did not even know their ages precisely. Time was not measured with accuracy. No one bothered to keep track of it, reckon it, or regard in in an exact way.’ Footnote ⁸ Classic theories such as Reinhart Koselleck's Sättelzeit similarly draw a sharp line between pre-industrial and modern time consciousness. Feelings of acceleration, restlessness and progress would only have occurred in the nineteenth century. The fetish of accuracy thus becomes a powerful tool to ‘other’ early modern societies, but also to set the west apart from ‘the rest’. Letters, diaries and other egodocuments show that the reality was much more complicated, as sixteenth-century writers cared about precision. They did not necessarily use clocks to keep track of time, but the stations of the sun, the length of common prayers or even their own pulse provided efficient alternatives to measure time. Most early modern people used several beacons – natural, social and horological – to locate events in time, so their temporal horizon is best described with the concept of pluritemporality. These practices lingered on in the nineteenth century and even beyond.

Post-1800

Cities and their populations have always been prime targets for warring parties. The enemy is hit hardest in urban settlements, as this is where economic activity, people and power are usually concentrated. With the advent of nuclear weapons and the doctrine of mutual assured destruction, during the Cold War it became possible to wipe whole cities out in a matter of minutes. Even today, there is still fear of a nuclear holocaust, and for good reasons. In 2019, the United States withdrew from the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) with Russia, making western Europe more vulnerable to Russian aggression. Recently, senior Moscow official Konstantin Kosachev reminded Britain that in the case of a nuclear attack, dozens of British major cities would be annihilated. The danger is not as clear and present as during the 1950s and 1960s, however, when Britain was frequently on high alert. In 1949, the Civil Defence Corps was established to mobilize and take control of local areas in the aftermath of a major national emergency, such as a nuclear attack. By the mid-1950s, its ranks had swelled to 500,000 volunteers, who – in contrast to what one might expect – were primarily based outside Britain's major cities and towns. Matthew Grant (‘Making sense of nuclear war: narratives of voluntary civil defence and the memory of Britain's Cold War’, Social History, 44 (2019), 229–54) demonstrates how a lack of faith that cities could be protected from devastation meant that the organization was much stronger in the countryside and suburban areas. This is where the survivors of a thermonuclear blast would need rescuing, emergency housing and food supplies. The fear of nuclear war heightened again during the 1980s, when the Thatcher government adopted the Reagan Doctrine and tried to curtail the Soviet Union's influence in other parts of the world. In response to the growing warmongering, many British cities declared themselves nuclear-free zones, with Manchester taking the lead. As Ellen Boucher shows in ‘Anticipating armageddon: nuclear risk and the neoliberal sensibility in Thatcher's Britain’, American Historical R., 124 (2019), 1221–45, Labour-led city councils realized that their constituencies would be the first to be reduced to rubble in case of a nuclear attack, and were therefore quick to join the disarmament movement.

The current climate crisis is a global catastrophic risk similar to the nuclear dangers of the post-war period. In ‘From the Cold War to the warmed globe: planning, design-policy entrepreneurism, and the crises of nuclear weapons and climate change’, Planning Perspectives, 34 (2019), 463–95, Zachary Lamb and Lawrence J. Vale investigate how planners working in Cold War America responded to existential threats by proposing to deconcentrate metropolitan regions – a concept known as ‘dispersal for defence’. Not only do the authors innovatively bring planning theories and empirical findings together, they also examine what lessons can be learned in adapting cities to climate change in our own time. Although not driven by geopolitical considerations, the creation of new towns was another policy to move people away from overpopulated and congested cities. While new towns are usually considered a quintessential product of the European welfare state, Janina Gosseye in ‘“Uneasy bedfellows” conceiving urban megastructures: precarious public–private partnerships in post-war British new towns’, Planning Perspectives, 34 (2019), 937–57, gives evidence of the important role private actors played in financing, designing and exploiting British new town schemes. Gosseye analyses the collectivist elements of megastructures – buildings capable of incorporating both shopping facilities and administrative and civic functions – in the new towns of Cumbernauld, Runcorn and Irvine, and concludes that to understand the lofty societal ambitions of such structures we need to consider the role of the state as well as the market. Connecting the advent of the shopping centre in the post-war era to the pedestrianization of North American cities in the interbellum, Kelly Gregg in ‘Conceptualizing the pedestrian mall in post-war North America and understanding its transatlantic transfer through the work and influence of Victor Gruen’, Planning Perspectives, 34 (2019), 551–77, proposes to add the role of key planning individuals. Gregg downplays the influence of European urbanism in the United States by suggesting that pedestrianization was a wholly American planning strategy for the revitalization of downtown retail districts, which were already struggling with growing automobility and suburbanization in the 1920s.

Victor Gruen, who fled his home country Austria in 1938 after German annexation, is one of the millions of Europeans who crossed the Atlantic during the age of mass migration. After an extensive study of Great Famine refugees in nineteenth-century New York, Tyler Anbinder, Cormac Ó Gráda and Simone E. Wegge, ‘Networks and opportunities: a digital history of Ireland's Great Famine refugees in New York’, American Historical R., 124 (2019), 1591–629, conclude that local social networks were far more important in determining the fate of new arrivals than assumed so far. In addition, the authors discovered that many Irish migrants accumulated significant savings after their arrival in the United States, enabling them to ascend the socio-economic ladder quickly. During the modern period, migration not only occurred on the transatlantic axis, but also within nations. In particular, London has always been a magnet for those inhabitants of the British Islands searching for a better life, which, as Kevin Schürer and Joey Day demonstrate in ‘Migration to London and the development of the north–south divide, 1851–1911’, Social History, 44 (2019), 26–56, contributed to a growing economic disparity between the north and the south as early as the mid-nineteenth century. Drawing on an impressive collection of digitized census data, the authors investigate the geographical origins of migrants from the place of departure instead of destination. In the aftermath of the Paris Commune of 1871, London became a destination for Communard refugees as well. Arguing in favour of a more spatial approach to migration patterns, Laura C. Foster, in ‘The Paris Commune in London and the spatial history of ideas, 1871–1900’, Social History, 62 (2019), 1021–44, carves out the spaces in which French refugees exchanged intellectual ideas. This results in a multifaceted and localized understanding of how the newcomers moved within and across London's communities and physical places – an approach to the topic of migration that urban historians can only agree with.

Throughout history and certainly during the modern period, Jewish migration has made up a large chunk of the world's human flows. In Europe, Jewish population groups have readily been used as a scapegoat for crises and epidemics, but not in the case of a cholera outbreak in the Italian cities of Florence, Ferrara and Modena during the 1830s. In an effort to manage the disease, Christian and Jewish authorities bonded together to overrule the confessional divisions expressed by the city's centrally located ghettos, as Myrna Gene Martin demonstrates in ‘Outsiders on the inside: Italian Jewish ghettos and cholera in the 1830s’, European History Quarterly, 49 (2019), 28–49. In other locations and time periods, urban Jewish minorities fared less well, most notably during the inter-war period. Focusing on Vienna and Bratislava, Miloslave Szabó, in ‘From protests to the ban: demonstrations against the “Jewish” films in interwar Vienna and Bratislava’, J. of Contemporary History, 54 (2019), 5–29, investigates antisemitic campaigns to ban ‘Jewish’ films and bolster nationalist sentiments. By comparing disturbances surrounding the screening of All Quiet on the Western Front and Golem in the Austrian and Slovakian capitals, Szabó aims to overcome the division between ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ modes of antisemitism. He concludes that the upheavals over the films were carefully orchestrated by right-wing political groups, and should be seen as precursors to the further exclusion of Jews from urban public life later during the 1930s. In the private sphere as well the Jewish populations of European cities were confronted with a growing hostility and an increasing number of discriminatory measures. In ‘The home experience of German Jews under the Nazi regime’, Past and Present, 243 (2019), 175–212, Guy Miron researches the emotions Jewish members of the bourgeoisie attached to their homes in the face of expulsions and forced evictions to smaller dwellings. By combining theories from the cultural and spatial turn with private and public sources, i.e. diaries, correspondence and Jewish newspapers, Miron explores the ‘problem of home’ at a period when the home lives of Jews in Berlin and other German cities became increasingly instable and threatened by external events and developments.

As several other contributions on Jewish urban history in this periodical review demonstrate, antisemitism was not confined to continental Europe and World War II. By examining the experiences of Jewish women workers from Glasgow's Gorbals district through the use of oral history, Avram Taylor, in ‘“We have never employed Jewish people”: young Jewish women's experiences of education and employment in Glasgow from the 1920s to the 1950s’, Cultural and Social History, 16 (2019), 467–89, shows the intrinsic links between class, gender and ethnicity. Although the first two factors were much more important in determining the career choices of Taylor's respondents, questions of religion and identity played a significant role as well. Combining a political-institutional approach with the everyday life perspectives of Jewish citizens in the GDR, Sarah E. Wobick-Segev offers an explicitly spatial examination of the Jewish religious minority of East Berlin from the late 1940s until the early 1960s in ‘Negotiated places: making Jewish space in postwar East Berlin’, German History, 3 (2019), 540–59. By singling out traditional Jewish places and more modern urban spaces such as cafés and restaurants as loci of interest, Wobick-Segev nuances the complex relationship between Jews and the East German authorities. In doing so, the author grants significant agency to a population that was nearly annihilated during the preceding years. Although antisemitism has always been present in the United States as well, during the 1933–34 world's fair American Jews were highly successful in representing their contributions to universal progress, interfaith collaboration and commitment to the American nation and a future Jewish state, as exemplified by Maxim G.M. Samson in ‘Off-white, on-stage: Jewish self-representation at Chicago's 1933–1934 world's fair’, J. of Historical Geography, 65 (2019), 9–18. Chicago was a logical place to exhibit the virtues of the American-Jewish people, as the city had the third-largest Jewish population in the world at the time. As such, the windy city serves not only as a setting but also as a medium in Samson's analysis.

Other forms of discrimination than antisemitism feature prominently as well in this year's selection of journal articles. In the urban context, redlining and urban redevelopment are well-known examples to keep races divided, in particular in the United States. In 1974, Boston's city authorities introduced an Adult Entertainment District (AED), which was meant to contain sexual commerce within one specific area and safeguard the economic viability of the city centre. As Anne Gray Fischer shows in ‘“The place is gone!”: policing black women to redevelop downtown Boston’, Social History, 53 (2019), 7–26, the introduction of the AED drew many black women to the streets of central Boston, who became readily associated with sexual deviance and the wider urban crisis of the 1970s. According to Gray Fischer, this decade saw the implementation of a new urban economic order infused by racial and gendered hostility, which was organized around private investment capital, white home ownership and downtown commercial entertainment. Another racially charged issue in post-war urban America was the drug trade. Amund R. Tallaksen lays bare the connections between race and drugs in ‘Junkies and Jim Crow: the Boggs Act of 1951 and the racial transformation of New Orleans’ heroin market’, J. of Urban History, 45 (2019), 230–46, by investigating how the heroin economy went from Italian-American into African-American hands, which was largely the result of the introduction of mandatory sentences for drug convictions. This in turn led black leaders to demand stronger law enforcement in the black neighbourhoods of New Orleans, where intra-racial crime had not been taken seriously by an overwhelmingly white police department. Thus, on the one hand, the black takeover of the heroin trade led to a closer association between race, poverty and crime, while on the other hand, it led to the realization that black communities calling for more police protection and stricter sentencing were equally affected by drug trafficking as white neighbourhoods.

During the post-war period, not only the city centres of Boston and New Orleans were faced with urban decay, social misery and racial issues. The massive influx of Afro-Americans in the preceding decades, known as the ‘Great Migration’, led to the large-scale migration of people with Caucasian ancestry from the racially mixed inner cities to the more homogeneous suburbs of American cities, a phenomenon that has since become known as ‘white flight’. In ‘“A bigoted, prejudiced, hateful little area”: the making of an all-white suburb in the Deep North’, J. of Urban History, 45 (2019), 300–20, Chad Montrie traces the ordeals black families had to go through after moving to Edina, a suburban town on the outskirts of Minneapolis, where they had to confront a hostile white majority. Montrie is not the only one to complicate the dominant narrative of an exclusively white flight in the J. of Urban History this year, as demonstrated by Nicholas Di Taranto's ‘Phoenix and the fight over the Papago-Inner Loop: race, class, and the making of a suburban metropolis, 1969–1979’, 45 (2019), 211–29. During the 1970s, the sprawling suburbanization of Phoenix and growing car ownership was accompanied by a freeway construction spree, leading to the destruction of many black and working-class neighbourhoods. Di Taranto demonstrates how the freeway revolts were triggered by race and class discrimination, and how the disputes revealed the changing relationship between local and federal governments during Nixon's presidency. Racial issues also played a role in the post-war redevelopment of San Francisco's Chinatown, where an ethnic enclave became surrounded by physical barriers and was encroached by rising property values and ultimately the dislocation of low-income populations, as examined by Chuo Li in ‘Postwar urban redevelopment and the politics of exclusion: the case of San Francisco's Chinatown’, J. of Planning History, 18 (2019), 27–43.

A much more extreme example of racism in the American urban context was the growing political influence of the Ku Klux Klan in Detroit during the 1920s, as discussed by Russell MacKenzi Fehr in ‘Political Protestantism: the Detroit Citizens League and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan’, J. of Urban History, 45 (2019), 1153–73. While the Klan is usually associated with the Deep South and rural areas, MacKenzi Fehr demonstrates that the industrial powerhouses of the North also had their fair share of right-wing extremism, which in the case of Detroit was built on the legacy of the Protestant Detroit Citizens League of the 1910s. In a similar way to the latter organization, the Klan's political branch denounced the alleged downfall of conservative values in local politics and mobilized white voters fearing a growing Catholic influence. Detroit plays the leading role in a less negative way in Brandon M. Ward's ‘Suburbs against the region: homeowner environmentalism in 1970s Detroit’, J. of Planning History, 18 (2019), 83–101. Seeking greater political sovereignty, suburban homeowners employed environmentalism as a tool to rebel against the regionalization of urban planning efforts. Ward complicates the popular narrative of Detroit's rise and fall as the ultimate consequence of liberal policies, and places the protagonists of his article in an American tradition of suburbanites protecting neighbourhoods from change – mostly declining property values.

Planning Perspectives has a strong tradition of going beyond European and North American case-studies. This year is no exception, with many contributions examining colonial knowledge transfers and planning practices. Amine Kasmi, in ‘The plan as a colonization project: the medina of Tlemcen under French rule, 1842–1920’, Planning Perspectives, 34 (2019), 25–42, moves our focus from well-known examples such as the Haussmannization of Algiers and Le Corbusier's Plan Obus to the medieval medina of Tlemcen. Using a historical-morphological approach, Kasmi demonstrates how the French occupier rolled out the colonial city as an instrument to control and dominate a native social and physical fabric. In neighbouring Morocco in the city of Tetouan, the Spanish occupier left a more mixed legacy of slums and squatter settlements on the one hand, and a relatively strong social housing sector on the other hand, as Alejandro Muchada demonstrates in ‘Between modernization and identity: colonial social housing as a specific theoretico-practical corpus of colonial architecture – the case of Tetouan (Morocco, 1912–1956)’, Planning Perspectives, 34 (2019), 601–20. Adding a governance perspective, Robert Home in ‘From cantonments to townships: Lugard's influence upon British colonial urban governance in Africa’, Planning Perspectives, 34 (2019), 43–64, says the cantonments established under colonial rule have kept their distinct form and legal status in African cities down to the present day – visible in how the former townships are much better policed, funded and maintained than the peripheral urban areas where most of the African population continues to live. In comparison to other European empires, Germany's overseas territories have always been relatively small. Still, its colonial practices of the early twentieth century are still discernible in Qingdao's Dabaodao borough. Philipp Demgenski, in ‘Dabaodao: the planning, development, and transformation of a Chinese (German) neighbourhood’, Planning Perspectives, 34 (2019), 311–33, illustrates how German laws, regulations and ideology have created a path-dependent development leading up to the present-day situation, in which Dabaodao's future remains highly uncertain.

Besides the threat of nuclear annihilation, migration, discrimination and colonialism, two other recurrent themes in this year's periodical catch deserve attention: class and gender. Whereas nationalism is generally understood as an ideology disseminated by educated elites, little is known about the reception of nineteenth-century nation-building at the local level, in particular by the working classes. Using visual sources, Anne Petterson, in ‘The monumental landscape from below: public statues, popular interaction and nationalism in late nineteenth-century Amsterdam’, Urban History, 46 (2019), 722–46, asserts that we should pay more attention to how ordinary city dwellers responded to the ideological message ingrained in public statues and memorials. Philipp Reick also calls for giving the urban working classes more agency in ‘Desire or displacement? Working-class notions of urban belonging in late-nineteenth-century Germany’, J. of Urban History, 45 (2019), 1193–211. Taking nineteenth-century Berlin as a case-study, Reick says historians have largely neglected the ways in which working-class residents perceived their evictions from central to peripheral urban areas. Not only did the working classes oppose suburbanization because of their jobs and the deprivation of centrally located entertainment and leisure facilities, but also because they knew this would limit their opportunities for political participation and collective action. Working on a different time period but with a similar research agenda, Maud Anne Bracke brings gender into the equation by analysing the struggle for equality by female workers in Fiat's car manufacturing plants in ‘Labour, gender and deindustrialisation: women workers at Fiat (Italy, 1970s–1980s)’, Contemporary European History, 28 (2019), 484–99. According to Bracke, while women became acknowledged as fully fledged members of Turin's workforce, even at a time of rapid deindustrialization, they were also confronted with persistent gender-based prejudices.

The term ‘sex worker’ is relatively new and still rarely used outside the sex industry and academic circles. It was coined during the feminist second wave of the 1970s and 1980s, and hints at demands made by prostitutes to take their work more seriously. During the latter decade, King's Cross became the epicentre of London's street prostitution scene and subsequently the subject of a heated debate between council tenants and a local prostitute rights group. Judith R. Walkowitz, in ‘Feminism and the politics of prostitution in King's Cross in the 1980s’, Twentieth Century British History, 30 (2019), 231–63, sets the dispute against the background of Thatcherism, the polarization within feminist ranks, King's Cross’ spatial history and the mass media's sensationalism. The prostitute rights group's demands amounted to a safe space, which in a different way was also at stake for lesbians living in Nazi Berlin. While lesbianism was not illegal under national socialism and lesbians even enjoyed some toleration, the primary sources dug up by Samuel Clowes Huneke in ‘The duplicity of tolerance: Lesbian experiences in Nazi Berlin’, J. of Contemporary History, 54 (2019) 30–59, indicate that Berlin's police officials and bureaucrats shared a common language to investigate and describe transgressive sexual behaviour. In more recent times, urban police forces have often been accused of intolerance towards sexual minorities, of which the 1998 arrest of George Michael in a Los Angeles public bathroom is a notorious example. Investigating the acceptance of gay and lesbian behaviour and communities in the same city, Treva Ellison, in ‘From sanctuary to safe space: gay and lesbian police-reform activism in Los Angeles’, Radical History R., 135 (2019), 95–118, comes to the conclusion that the LAPD has a troubled history in dealing with individuals and collectives not abiding to official moral standards.

Struggles over people's rights, whether they concern workers, ethnic or sexual minorities, are often memorialized in public monuments and street names. As the recent upheavals over the removal of confederate monuments and the renaming of city streets in the United States demonstrate, history is very much alive in our everyday living environment. Brett R. Chloupek examines the politics behind street renaming and, very much in line with Petterson's approach to public monuments in Amsterdam, vernacular responses to artefacts from nationalist and communist periods in ‘Public memory and political street names in Košice: Slovakia's multi-ethnic second city’, J. of Historical Geography, 64 (2019), 25–35. Focusing on eastern Europe as well, Mihai Stelian Rusu studies the same topic in the Romanian city of Sibiu in ‘Shifting urban namescapes: street name politics and toponymic change in a Romanian(ised) city’, J. of Historical Geography, 65 (2019), 48–58. Working from an extensive database covering the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Stelian Rusu shows how contemporary ethnopolitics were spelled out in Sibiu's street names. That public history is always politically charged is also Pete Hodson's conclusion in ‘Titanic struggle: memory, heritage and shipyard deindustrialization in Belfast’, History Workshop J., 87 (2019), 224–49. Foregrounding lived social experiences rather than the official representation of the Titanic quarter in our own time, Hodson makes use of oral history to contest the city's rather naïve attempts at sanitized placemaking. His arguments demonstrate once again that urban history is not only about the past and who represents it, but also about the present and future of our cities’ social and physical fabric.