Pre-1500

The most striking feature of this year's publications is the large number of articles about the economic, financial and business history of medieval towns. ‘What was the Hanse?’ (Was war die Hanse?) sounds like the sort of question that might be asked in an undergraduate examination, designed to elicit a wide range of responses, from the purely descriptive to the more analytical. The question has, in fact, generated a substantial, if rather problematic, historiography, as two studies of the Hanse make clear. The tendency to define the Hanse as a ‘state’ or to see it as endowed with ‘state-like’ qualities does not do justice to the complexity of a more loosely framed and highly adaptable commercial and urban network.

In September 1399, the Bruges magistrate, almost certainly on the order of the duke of Burgundy, issued an ordinance prohibiting the settlement of bills of exchange by book transfer and decreeing that bills, whether they had been drawn in Bruges and were payable elsewhere, or whether they were simply payable in Bruges, should henceforth be settled in cash. As Stuart Jenks observes in ‘Die Finanzierung des hansischen Handels im Spätmittelalter am Beispiel von Preußen’, Hansische Geschichtsblätter, 128 (2010), 1–18, the prohibition lasted until October 1401 and had disastrous results on the European financial system, a system which had been built around credit. Around 1400, the Hanse's trade in Flanders was organized around the exchange of raw materials from the east for manufactured goods, primarily Flemish cloth, in the west. Since Prussian merchants accumulated cash resources only when they sold their cloth in the east during the winter, they needed access to credit in order to finance their purchases of cloth in Bruges. As Werner Paravicini first suggested, credit was possible because of the yearly itineration of crusading knights from the west travelling to fight the pagans in Prussia. These knights, who started out in November for Königsberg and returned home the following April, preferred to cover their costs by borrowing money in Prussia rather than by transporting large sums of hard cash. While the Teutonic Knights advanced the money, they insisted that western crusaders find Prussian merchants who would be prepared to repay the loans to the crusading order in Prussia. Credit instruments were thus drawn up in which the western crusaders were to pay their debt to the Prussian merchants in Bruges at the end of June, while the merchants were in turn compelled to repay the Teutonic Knights in Prussia at Christmas. The Prussian Hanse merchants, therefore, were able to purchase cloth in Flanders with long-term commercial credit. The delicate balance of this economic and financial equilibrium was disturbed in 1399. At first glance, it would appear that the Hanse reacted to the Bruges ordinances ponderously and painfully slowly, qualities which, as Jenks points out, seem to confirm everything historians – viewing this mercantile association through the lens of a ‘state’ or ‘quasi-state’ organization – have suspected about the Hanse. On the contrary, Jenks argues, the Bruges Kontor, fully aware of the economic and monetary implications of the Bruges crisis, regularly informed Lübeck of fluctuations in the currencies in which the loans involving Prussian merchants were made; Lübeck in turn was at great pains to consult as widely as possible with the Hanseatic towns and merchants in Prussia; and the ban, proclaimed by the Hanseatic assembly in Lübeck in 1401 on credit operations in Flanders, was economically sensible.

One of the questions which Jenks raises for further research is the nature of the relationship between these Prussian merchants – acting, effectively, as guarantors of loans – and the Hanseatic traders more generally in Bruges. In ‘Rules of inclusion, rules of exclusion: the Hanseatic Kontor in Bergen in the late Middle Ages and its normative boundaries’, German History, 29 (2011), 1–22, Justyna Wubs-Mrozewicz provides a detailed analysis of another of the Hanse's merchant communities abroad: the Kontor (trading station) of Bergen. In contrast to the Hanse as a whole, Wubs-Mrozewicz argues that the late medieval history of the Hanse Kontor in Norway was characterized by the proliferation of rules and regulation, the promotion of the values of hierarchy and obedience and, most of all, a growing vigilance, informed by a notion of exclusivity, towards the boundaries between Hansards and non-Hansards. The confraternity, dedicated to St Catherine and St Dorothea, to which all Hanseatic merchants – and only Hansards – could belong, suggests that the ‘collective aspect of the social life in the Kontor, apparent in the rules on commensality, conviviality and confraternity, was well embedded in the late medieval urban culture’ (p. 14). This observation could, however, have been developed much further. What is so noticeable about the statutes of the Bergen Kontor – those insisting on oath-taking and the payment of taxes by new members, as well as the prohibition against Hanseatic merchants revealing secrets to non-Hansards, particularly matters discussed at meetings – is that they mirror the principles and practices which increasingly typified urban communities across late medieval Europe.

In the case of some towns, this coincidence was the product of deliberate emulation. The English town of Bristol, for example, served as an exemplum of political and constitutional privilege and development for many urban communities in Ireland. In ‘Late medieval Ireland and the English connection: Waterford and Bristol, ca. 1360–1460’, J. of British Studies, 50 (2011), 546–65, Brendan Smith illuminates the durability of the important economic ties between Bristol and Waterford, which were based on the exchange of goods, but which also, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, were enhanced by the movement of people through migration. Bristol was known for its cloth manufacture and export. In ‘Making and marketing woollen cloth in late-medieval London’, London J., 36 (2011), 89–108, John Oldland offers a useful survey of the cloth trade in the capital. In the case of the London drapers, co-operation rather than conflict was the defining feature of relations between merchants and artisans.

Textiles are also the subject of a study of the tapestry-makers who provided luxurious fabrics to the court of the Burgundian dukes, Philip the Bold and John the Fearless, in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. In ‘Paris, Arras et la cour: les tapissiers de Philippe le Hardi et Jean sans Peur, ducs de Bourgogne’, Revue du Nord, 93 (Jan.–Mar. 2011), 11–31, Katherine Wilson follows the grain of recent Burgundian historiography in locating the mercantile suppliers within a commercial nexus between town and court. Drawing on the accounts of ducal expenses (specifically the accounts of the receiver general of the ducal finances), she identifies around 130 individuals who, in the period 1363 to 1419, were involved in the supply, repair, packaging or transport of a tapestry to the Burgundian court. The two most common places of origin of those providing services were Paris (a major ducal residence in this period) and Arras (famous for the high quality of its textile products). Placing to one side the single handful of regular suppliers from the two cities, most tapestry-makers appeared less than five times in the ducal accounts – indeed, the majority delivered a tapestry only once – and this pattern was as true for those living in Paris and Arras as elsewhere. Although ducal orders could be lucrative, they were not a sufficient source of steady income for the majority, so why did individuals, engaged in a wide variety of trades, bother to supply the court at all? Wilson finds an answer in the work of Gervase Rosser on the importance of credit, reputation and honour within an urban milieu. She argues that, in the case of Arras, the opportunity of ducal service was part of a strategy of personal and familial social consolidation and improvement for aspirational and entrepreneurial individuals. It was a source of prestige to suppliers and signalled to other consumers, in a burgeoning urban market for tapestries, the high value of their products.

In ‘“Le goût pour l'Orient.” Demande cosmopolite et objets de luxe à Bruges à la fin du Moyen Âge’, Histoire Urbaine, 30 (2011), 21–39, Peter Stabel explores more fully the urban demand in the southern Low Countries for a particular category of luxury commodity: the exotic object associated with the Near East, central Asia and the Far East. Stabel considers the application, within a Burgundian context, of Richard A. Goldthwaite's notion of the emergence of a culture of consumption in the Italian cities of the Renaissance, encompassing urban elites, rich merchants and artisans. Stabel uses both indirect and direct evidence to assess consumer habits and, specifically, the taste for the Orient, among the inhabitants of Bruges: the presence of eastern goods, notably oriental rugs, on Flemish paintings and miniatures of the fifteenth century, and, secondly, the recording of items of moveable wealth in household inventories. The results of Stabel's investigation seem, on first inspection, contradictory. A sample of 80 inventories of Brugeois, drawn mainly from the middle layers of urban society and made between 1436 and 1444, does not reveal the possession of any object distinguished by its eastern provenance. On the other hand, the representation of eastern objects such as rugs and carpets on Flemish panel paintings was reserved almost exclusively to those produced in Bruges. They do not appear in the works of art made by master painters active in the other artistic centres of the Low Counties, such as Ghent, Tournai and Brussels. The differences in these iconographical sources, Stabel explains, were the consequence of the presence in Bruges of a large and diverse community of Italian merchants, many of whom were patrons of the Flemish paintings in question, and of a multiplicity of artistic crafts which dominated the supply of a range of luxury goods to the court of the dukes of Burgundy. While some Brugeois merchants owned paintings depicting oriental objects, they did not possess the objects themselves. The luxury goods which really mattered to a broad cross-section of Brugeois society – as a means of social and cultural distinction – were the silk fabrics, brocades and velvets produced in Italy rather than imported from the east.

The commercial environment of a very different kind of urban centre is discussed in Richard Goddard's groundbreaking study, ‘Small boroughs and the manorial economy: enterprise zones or urban failures?’, Past and Present, 210 (2011), 3–31. The article reassesses the economic fortunes of small seigneurial boroughs in the late Middle Ages, many of which, between their foundation in the thirteenth century and their loss of distinctively urban features (such as burgage plots and a market) by the early modern period, are seen as having failed. The argument about failure, as Goddard wisely counsels, depends greatly on definition and criteria. While they enjoyed a market, places such as Alvechurch and Broadway in Worcestershire, Prestbury in Gloucestershire and Kineton in Warwickshire were never conceived as towns. These small boroughs were established alongside villages, as two halves of a single manorial economy, in which each sector contributed to the overall economic interests of the lord. Goddard thinks it more useful for small boroughs – characterized by the presence of a market and a particular form of landholding, free of the usual restraints found in villages – to be understood as ‘medieval enterprise zones’ (p. 17). Just like modern industrial and commercial zones, small boroughs offered tax breaks in the guise of burgage tenure, and were designed to attract settlement and trade, from which the enterprising lord could benefit directly and indirectly. As the creation of an advantageous set of economic circumstances in the thirteenth century, these boroughs were inherently speculative investments, whose fortunes were dependent upon the wider economic challenges confronting lords and tenants in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Goddard's article adds to the work of Richard Britnell and extends our understanding of the process of commercialization in medieval England by revealing how actively seigneurial lords sought to promote and take advantage of economic change. In ‘Friedrich Barbarossa als Gründer von italienischen Städten. Lodi – Alessandria/Caesarea – Crema’, Mitteilungen des Instituts für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung, 118 (2010), 27–60, Ferdinand Opll emphasizes the primacy of political factors in twelfth-century town foundation in northern Italy. Opll's article is a comparative study of three cities in the kingdom of Lombardy, all founded to different degrees and in different ways by Emperor Frederick I. Most is known about the refoundation of Lodi, an episcopal city located on the river Lambro until its destruction by the Milanese in 1158, when a new settlement emerged, under imperial oversight, on the banks of the river Adda, about four miles east of the old town. Within a couple of years, a whole new city was laid out, with walls and gates, a cathedral, a network of streets and an enormous main square designed to accommodate the emperor's military requirements. Crema was newly founded in 1185 on the site of the old fortified town, which had been destroyed by the emperor himself in 1160 after a month-long siege. Alessandria, by contrast, was not a new foundation in a material sense. Originally established in 1168 by the towns of the Lombard League in their struggle against Frederick I, Alessandria's imperial refoundation in 1183 was nominal in the literal sense. Alessandria – named after Pope Alexander III and, therefore, a symbol of defiance against the emperor – was given a new name (Caesarea) by Frederick I and a hitherto papal town was brought directly under imperial control. Opll argues convincingly that the similarities in the pattern of town foundation outweighed the differences. All three cities were the product of political circumstances. Lodi, for example, would not have emerged without the city's confrontation with Milan, which prompted the inhabitants of the town to solicit the emperor's aid. In each case, the process of town foundation bore the personal stamp of the emperor himself. Frederick I saw Lodi not just as a bulwark against the power of Milan but as a personal refuge, and conducted a tour of the new settlement during an official ceremony in August 1158. In 1185, the emperor personally led the Cremese back to their ancestral home and remained there for a month with his army during the initial reconstruction of Crema, whose walls now displayed the imperial eagle. Opll's study ends with the intriguing suggestion that the urban experiences of Frederick Barbarossa and of the German princes who accompanied him during his Italian campaigns after 1158 created an increased awareness of the political importance of cities and might provide a further explanation for the growing princely influence on, and interest in, town politics in Germany from the late twelfth century.

The need to examine more closely the administrative and political framework of urban settlement is also argued by Brian Ayers in ‘The growth of an urban landscape: recent research in early medieval Norwich’, Early Medieval Europe, 19 (2011), 62–90. Ayers does not simply summarize the main findings of archaeological excavations over the last 30 years which have modified hypotheses about the origins and development of Norwich before the Norman Conquest. Multi-disciplinary research, he argues, is the key to future discoveries. Further excavations might help to define more precisely the physical boundaries of the early urban centre, but more attention should be paid to the wider administrative structures and political entities which shaped urban development. In the case of Norwich, ‘the administrative significance of the Anglo-Scandinavian borough’ (p. 87) remains imperfectly understood. Archaeologists have uncovered evidence of a pre-Conquest street pattern in the form of a rectilinear settlement, but who was responsible for this configuration? Some kind of ‘centralized planning’ is implied, Ayers concludes (p. 88). The political influences on town planning are also explored in ‘From the myth to the margins: the patriarch's piazza at San Pietro di Castello in Venice’, Renaissance Quarterly, 64 (2011), 353–429. Areli Marina combines history, art history and archaeology to trace the history of the cathedral square in Venice over the longue durée. Situated on an island at the eastern edge of the Venetian archipelago, the cathedral, with its adjoining square and episcopal complex, occupied a marginal position (literally and metaphorically) within civic culture. Although there was a burst of rebuilding in the later fifteenth century, associated politically with the incorporation of the Venetian see within a new ecclesiastical office of the Patriarchate of Venice and artistically with the advent of humanism, the campo of San Pietro was a fairly undistinguished site around 1500. It was, according to Marina, just like the other campi bordering parish churches in the city. The square did not look like ‘the seat of a prince of the church or an important civic space’ (pp. 387–8). Marina locates the reason for this anomaly in the extra-mural politics of strained relations between the Venetian republic and papal authority. Longstanding and deep-seated distrust of the papacy meant that into the sixteenth century civic processions and dogal visits to the cathedral were few and far between. Such occasions would imply submission to the pope, so political rituals took place at San Marco on the command of the doge, who summoned the bishop/patriarch to attend.

Another public space within the urban landscape receives attention in ‘St Mary's Guildhall, Boston, Lincolnshire: the archaeology of a medieval “public” building’, Medieval Archaeology, 55 (2011), 226–56. Kate Giles and Jonathan Clark focus on the construction and internal and external furnishings of a guildhall built in the late fourteenth century in the Lincolnshire port town of Boston by the wealthy fraternity of St Mary, whose members over the course of the fifteenth century included merchants, customs officials, mayors of the staple and major landowners. According to the authors, the Boston example ‘adds further support to a growing understanding of the pattern of construction, form and function of late-medieval public buildings’ (p. 249). What does ‘public’ mean here? The answer is not clear. More persuasive is the emphasis which Giles and Clark place instead (though they do not use the term) on the quality of bricolage which characterizes both provincial and metropolitan guildhalls. Guildhalls were a type of structure which ‘drew on both contemporary domestic and ecclesiastical architecture for inspiration’ (p. 250). For example, the west façade of the Boston guildhall, adorned with a large, five-light Perpendicular window containing images of the Twelve Apostles and a bell tower, had a self-consciously ecclesiastical appearance. The same idea of bricolage (to borrow Claude Lévi-Strauss’ concept more explicitly) informs the most ambitious and thought provoking of this year's articles: Jan Dumolyn's ‘Une idéologie urbaine “bricolée” en Flandre médiévale: les Sept Portes de Bruges dans le manuscrit Gruuthuse (début du XV^e siècle)’, Revue Belge de Philologie et d'Histoire, 88 (2011), 1039–84. Ostensibly, this is a detailed study of a single text, namely a Middle Dutch allegorical poem contained in a volume of prayers, songs and poems which once belonged to the library of Louis de Gruuthuse, an important nobleman in Bruges in the second half of the fifteenth century. Dumolyn suggests that the poem in question was written and initially recited in January 1414, on the occasion of Bruges’ Twelfth Night celebrations, which were organized annually by the Brugeois jousting confraternity, the Company of the White Bear, and which included a tournament on the main square as well as a banquet in the Poortersloge attended by nobles from outside the city and the aldermen and councillors of the town. The poem takes the form of a speech to the ‘king of the White Bear’ delivered by a hermit, who claims to have left Bruges in his youth because of the absence of fraternal love in the city. The hermit explains that he now returns to Bruges and wishes to present a scale model of the city, to each of whose seven gates he attaches the initial letters of two virtues, which spell the acrostic ‘BRVCGHE’. The poem's message is one of unity and harmony among Bruges’ governing elite, which had in fact divided into two factions between 1394 and 1411 in a struggle for control of the city. Only after 1411, when the Brugeois craftsmen had led a revolt and overthrown the ruling faction, was there reconciliation between the great families of the town, who joined forces against a common enemy. The poem, therefore, was composed within a specific political context and was designed to address particular problems arising from faction and division. The 14 virtues appended to the gates of the scale model of Bruges included those of ‘fraternity’ (broederscap), ‘unity’ (eendrachticheit) and ‘honour’ (eere), which were part of a corporatist discourse associated with brotherly love and the world of the crafts and fraternities. They also included three of the four cardinal virtues – ‘fortitude’ (cracht), ‘prudence’ (vroescap) and ‘justice’ (recht) – most commonly found in the genre of princely advice literature known as ‘mirrors for princes’. Dumolyn's point is that the poem's discourse contained no independent urban features, but appropriated a range of elements drawn from the broader culture within which townspeople were located and applied them specifically to the social and political conditions of the city in the early fifteenth century. His final observation, which deserves most attention, is that all of the virtues represented on the gates were described explicitly as gifts of God. Do we see in the poem, therefore, a discursive version of André Vauchez's concept of la religion civique, in which religious formulae and discourse served as instruments of a manipulative lay, civic, political ideology? Dumolyn thinks that this is a question mal posée. The whole subject of ‘civic religion’ in the Middle Ages is interrogated more fully in a recent volume of Histoire Urbaine, 27: 1 (2010) dedicated to the theme of ‘Religion civique XV^e–XVI^e siècle’. Dumolyn concludes that the urban political language of Bruges in the late Middle Ages could only express itself in terms of the hegemonic, and fundamentally Christian, discourse of contemporary society.

A political text with a very similar, reconciliatory purpose is reinterpreted in Gwilym Dodd's ‘Was Thomas Favent a political pamphleteer? Faction and politics in later fourteenth-century London’, J. of Medieval History, 37 (2011), 397–418. One of the articles reviewed last year was an account by Clementine Oliver of the metropolitan world in which the clerk by the name of Thomas Favent moved. Favent was the author of a tract about the political crisis of 1386–88 in England, which had at its centre the royal court, the king's favourites and the major nobility, but which also had a strong London dimension in so far as the political factions at Westminster were entangled in the factional politics of the capital during the 1380s. Dodd is not convinced by Oliver's thesis, expressed in her 2010 monograph, Parliament and Political Pamphleteering in Fourteenth-Century England, that Favent's text (written in Latin) is an early example of a political pamphlet. He regards it as ‘a short history or chronicle’ (p. 401) written primarily for an elite audience of London's civic rulers, whose ranks were divided between rival factions headed by John of Northampton and Nicholas Brembre. Favent's Historia recounted the crimes committed by Brembre as mayor of London and presented his demise as the outcome of divine judgment and, more significantly, as the result of the collective and unified will of the London citizens. In rewriting recent history, as Dodd shows, the ‘purpose of the Historia was not to prolong old struggles but to draw a line underneath them’ (p. 415).

The relationship between memory and revolt is also explored by Jelle Haemers in ‘Social memory and rebellion in fifteenth-century Ghent’, Social History, 36 (2011), 443–63. On this occasion, however, the subject is not the official memory of the dominant elite, but of the alternative, counter-memory, of a politically disenfranchised group within urban society: the craftsmen in the Flemish city of Ghent, whose persistent hostility towards the centralizing ambitions of the dukes of Burgundy coalesced periodically in revolts over the course of the fifteenth century. Haemers argues that the ‘pattern’ of rebellion discernible in late medieval Ghent, marked by similarities in the forms of collective action, mobilization and aims, can be explained by the remembrance of past revolts. Rebellious memory in Ghent was sustained primarily by means of songs, ballads and poems celebrating rebel heroes from previous uprisings, but it was also kept alive through ‘a tradition of written accounts of rebellious customs’ (p. 455). Haemers constructs this argument around the fragment of a text, which was copied in 1539 during Ghent's revolt against Emperor Charles V and which described an earlier Ghent revolt against the emperor's great-grandfather in 1477. The text was included in a book of memory preserved by a member of one of the weavers’ guilds and was copied by his son. Many examples of this kind of family chronicle are known from late medieval Germany (Familienbuch), Italy (libro di ricordanze) and France (livre de raison). In ‘Chroniques urbaines et livres de famille: les villes allemandes du XVe au XVIe siècle. Comparaison entre Augsbourg et Hambourg’, Histoire Urbaine, 28 (2010), 17–43, Gregor Rohmann examines the relationship between town chronicles and family books and compares the modes of historical writing found in Augsburg and Hamburg to consider why examples of the two literary genres are considerably more numerous in the urban milieu of southern and eastern Germany than in the Hanseatic world of northern Germany. As Rohmann acknowledges, his study is a contribution to a field largely staked out in recent years by Pierre Monnet, who has demonstrated a close interaction between town chronicles and family books in terms of both their authorship and content. In Augsburg, where there was a lively, albeit relatively late, tradition of chronicle writing about the city composed by members of the town council and by heads of families close to the council, urban chronicles from the second half of the fifteenth century narrated a history of the town that was dominated by the history of its leading families. Simultaneously, the authors of family books, also extant from the fifteenth century, turned to the town archives and council registers for information about their family histories. Rohmann sees the difference in the literary traditions of Augsburg and Hamburg as a reflection of a social and political reality. In contrast to Augsburg, where a patrilineal concept of kinship and inheritance increasingly took root, the Hanseatic city of Hamburg was a society which was not shaped by agnatic family ties and by a reverence for the lineage, but which was structured around a broader attachment to the kindred that encouraged the sharing of inheritance among sons, daughters and wives. In a city such as Hamburg, therefore, there was absolutely no need for the compilation of a family book. After all, which family's history should be recorded?

In ‘Memoria in der Stadt. Die Basler Anniversarbücher (13.-15. Jahrhundert)’, Zeitschrift für die Geschichte des Oberrheins, 158 (2010), 137–57, Gabriela Signori discusses a particular form of medieval memory: the liturgical remembrance of the dead by the community of the living. Basel is an excellent choice for the study of memory in the late medieval city. The Swiss city has 19 examples of a genre of writing known as ‘anniversary books’, which were kept by a range of ecclesiastical institutions (parochial, collegiate, monastic and cathedral) as a record of the services to be performed annually on the anniversary of the benefactor's death. The purpose of Signori's article is essentially to draw these books – only one of which has been the subject of a modern, scholarly edition – to the attention of the wider academic community. Perhaps the most interesting book in Signori's inventory is one that she herself has recently edited: the Basel gravebook (Gräberbuch), produced in the late fifteenth century to help the priests of the cathedral locate the tombs of benefactors for the purposes of spiritual intercession on their anniversaries. Signori claims that the Basel gravebook is a unique document in a European context and provides historians with an unrivalled opportunity to reconstruct a late medieval church from the inside. The book distinguishes the gravestones by row and then by individual number, but it also offers textual and artistic descriptions of the appearance of each tomb monument, notably of the heraldic arms carved on the stone slabs. Signori's article might then be of considerable interest to historians engaged in research on late medieval commemoration, particularly in an urban setting, as indeed might ‘Grave stuff: litigation with a London tomb-maker in 1421’, Historical Research, 84 (2011), 572–85. From the evidence of a lawsuit begun in the royal court of common pleas in the case of a breach of contract, Nigel Saul, Jonathan Mackman and Christopher Whittick are able to identify a mason engaged in tomb production in the capital about whom nothing was previously known.

This review concludes with three articles which relate, in different ways, to the theme of ‘community’. In ‘Rebuilding St. Margaret's: parish involvement and community action in late medieval Westminster’, J. of Social History, 45 (2011), 148–71, Katherine L. French returns to a familiar question: how inclusive was the late medieval English parish? French takes issue with some of Clive Burgess’ recent work, notably on the London parish of St Mary at Hill, and argues that the need to finance the rebuilding of the Westminster church during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries stimulated ‘new fundraising schemes that consciously expanded parish involvement and participation by social status and sex’ (p. 152). These Westminster parishioners did not simply comprise an urban elite of male parish and civic leaders, but included women, day labourers and domestic servants. Moving from the parish to the religious fraternity, Laura Crombie argues that ‘for all the ideals of community they proclaimed, guild feasts were not statements of equality’ (p. 12). In ‘Honour, community and hierarchy in the feasts of the archery and crossbow guilds of Bruges, 1445–81’, J. of Medieval History, 30 (2011), 1–12, Crombie makes interesting use of the guild accounts of the archers of St Sebastian and the crossbowmen of St George to suggest that the evidence of their dining arrangements reveals the hierarchy and exclusivity which marked social relations within the two fraternities. Although all guild members could in principle attend the meals, not all did; nor did those present sit together, eat identical food and consume the same drink. In ‘Youth and old age in late medieval London’, London J., 36 (2011), 1–22, E.D. Spindler turns to a different kind of community within an urban framework: the relatively privileged members of the London community of citizens. Spindler explores the role of life-cycle, specifically the periods of transition from youth to adulthood and from adulthood to old age, in determining an individual's place in urban society. For this task, he uses the petitions submitted to the mayor's court registering conflict between apprentices and masters and the evidence of exemption from jury service in the records of the London mayor and aldermen. Spindler emphasizes the fundamentally destabilizing nature of apprenticeship. Historians interested in the social history of late medieval towns might wish to reflect on the broader implications of Spindler's conclusion that ‘precariousness, disenfranchisement and the loss of independence during certain life stages were inherent parts of the experience of urban life’ (pp. 18–19).

1500–1800

Various studies explore the relationship between economic expansion and urban development. In ‘Economic credit in Renaissance Florence’, J. of Modern History, 83 (2011), 1–47, J.F. Padgett and P.D. McLean examine the social and institutional reasons for the emergence of Florentine commercial capitalism. Focusing upon international banking, they compare Florentine commercial credit with financial activities in close rival city states of Venice and Genoa, concluding that Florence functioned more like the latter with a ‘decentralized diffusion’ of credit throughout the economy through a widespread network of companies. In Venice, on the other hand, maritime investment was kept quite separate from banking. Rather than seeking to apply neoclassical economics, Padgett and McLean contend that the organization of Florentine capital markets was largely determined by its specific spatial, temporal and cultural context. For instance, Florentine republican political institutions fostered ‘public transparency and efficiency’ in addition to private networks and helped induce an ‘overlay of multiple social roles’ including those of merchant and politician.

Although focusing on a different part of the urban economy and employing different language, C. Lesger, ‘Patterns of retail location and urban form in Amsterdam in the mid-eighteenth-century’, Urban History, 38 (2011), 24–47, ultimately comes to some similar conclusions. According to Lesger, patterns of retailing in eighteenth-century Amsterdam, determined by ‘location theory’, already had a remarkably ‘modern’ character despite the fact that local government and trading guilds did not interfere through regulation or ‘concern themselves with the location choices of shopkeepers’. The location of urban retailing was, of course, determined by the need to provide access to high-quality goods for as large a proportion of the population as possible (‘general accessibility’) but also shops were positioned along the main through streets and access roads so that they maximized opportunities of intercepting potential consumers passing by (‘linear accessibility’). Key to this were the high-quality shops along ‘radial streets’ which linked the main shopping thoroughfares with the city centre, markets, canal ring and town gates, and were less concentrated in those areas furthest from the urban centre. Concentrations of retailing in the urban peripheries were more ‘difficult to study’ but whilst there appeared to be ‘no significant secondary shopping centres’, shop locations did seem to be determined by levels of prosperity in local neighbourhoods (‘special accessibility’). Overall, the author concludes that ‘perhaps the most surprising outcome of this study’ is that twentieth-century principles associated with study of the modern shopping industry provide an effective means for explaining the location of shops in eighteenth-century Amsterdam. In both periods, the main factors that ‘determined to a large extent’ the structural configuration of shopping were the behaviour of purveyors of convenience and shopping goods, urban size and the three forms of accessibility, reinforced by ‘morphological and social-spatial’ structures that had been developed over centuries

Further light is thrown on domestic consumption and material culture by S. Flavin, ‘Consumption and material culture in sixteenth-century Ireland’, Economic History Rev., 64 (2011), 1144–74, C. Lucey, ‘Keeping up appearances: redecorating the domestic interior in late eighteenth-century Dublin’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, 111 (2011), 169–92, and N. Tosney, ‘The playing card trade in early modern England’, Historical Research, 84 (2011), 637–56. Flavin employs statistical evidence from 11 Bristol customs accounts and port books to analyse Irish patterns of consumption during the sixteenth century especially to the most anglicized and urbanized part of Ireland with closest English and European connections, including the port towns of Wexford, Waterford, Limerick and Galway on the Atlantic coast. Whilst many of these goods were of increasing financial value, he argues that they show how a growing range of commodities was being consumed, especially across the south-east of Ireland, which mirrored similar changes in Europe and England. Whilst Ireland may have been behind other European countries in some respects, largely as a ‘function of English colonialism’, it was ‘gaining access to the increasingly sophisticated and diversified range of consumer goods produced and traded’ available across Europe and therefore fully participating in the growing early modern international economy. As Lucey demonstrates, patterns of Irish material consumption in the eighteenth century were also determined by the latest British and European fashions. The transformation of Dublin townhouses by neoclassical interior decoration was closely related to the parallel transformation of older buildings into the latest fashionable architectural style between 1770 and 1800. The Dublin domestic interior embodied ‘a conspicuous display of social status and prescient attitudes to fashion and taste’ but was also determined by practical considerations such as the necessity to repair or restore rooms and various constraints including the prohibitive costs of replacing everything according to the latest fashions. Lucey distinguishes between what may be termed ‘active’ and ‘passive’ engagement with the semantic meaning typically ascribed to the neoclassical style suggesting that ‘distinct material responses’ reflected many ‘concerns, economies and circumstances’ dependent on ‘perceptions of audience and actors in shared and infinitely mutable contexts’. Finally, Tosney's study provides a more unusual approach to consumption and material culture, underscoring the extent to which playing cards had become ‘deeply embedded’ in English society and culture by the late seventeenth century and represented a major source of government revenue through stamp duty, despite the level of fraud that this also instigated. Playing cards were attractive in domestic settings and semi-public places such as taverns because of the wide variety of games that could be played and they demonstrate the rise of middle-class urban sociability (which is not directly covered in the article). The gaming industry grew to such an extent that it was controlled and regulated by a chartered Company of Makers of Playing Cards; however, as Tosney makes clear, with the growth in the physical size and population of London, and, to a lesser extent, other cities, regulation became more difficult.

International maritime trade was crucial to the growth of various early modern towns. Ports, of course, benefited most obviously as O. Katsiardi-Hering demonstrates in ‘City ports in the eastern and central Mediterranean from the mid-sixteenth to the nineteenth century: urban and social aspects’, Mediterranean Historical Rev., 26 (2011), 151–70. According to Katsiardi-Hering, analysis of the cartographic, topographic and other depictions and descriptions of the city-ports of Trieste, Thessaloniki and Smyrna in the Habsburg and Ottoman empires demonstrates how identities and residential spatial arrangements were shaped by urban physical layouts and coastal, economic and geo-political locations. She explains how these three ports served as ‘economic poles or mercantilist-orientated states’ within large international empires, attracting sailors and merchants from abroad or by using free-port status, which provided special harbour facilities, reductions in import and export tariffs, facilities for loading, unloading and selling goods and other features. In A. Potofsky, ‘Paris-on-the-Atlantic from the Old Regime to the Revolution’, French History, 25 (2011), 89–107, on the other hand, we also see the impact of maritime trade upon another major international empire but in this case the imperial capital. Potofsky examines how the economic expansion of the French Caribbean aided the growth of Paris, highlighting the extent to which recent economic history has emphasized the importance of Atlantic Caribbean production upon French national economic growth. Potofsky illustrates these links by focusing upon Parisian businessmen with important Caribbean links, such as Jean-Baptiste Hosten, a successful speculator who made money on the Saint Domingue plantations, who, like other planters and entrepreneurs with imperial commercial interests, proved remarkably adept at riding the storms of international warfare and even revolution. He demonstrates how important the colonial dimension was to the late eighteenth-century Parisian real estate boom, particularly in the more fashionable districts, where, unlike in the French Atlantic ports, money from slaving investments and profits from sugar, cotton, coffee and other commodities was invested in prestigious projects.

The importance of the relationship between state government intervention and local economic growth is evident in a number of studies. As J. Hoppit, ‘The nation, the state and the first Industrial Revolution’, J. of British Studies, 50 (2011), 307–31, reminds us, the eighteenth century was ‘an era of unprecedented and extraordinary legislative fruitfulness at Westminster’, much of which facilitated economic growth by improving communications or clarifying matters concerning wealth, property or land, including local urban improvement agencies. Hoppit's emphasis upon the significance of parliamentary legislation as a motor of economic growth is supported by D. Bogart, ‘Did the Glorious Revolution contribute to the transport revolution? Evidence from investment in roads and rivers’, Economic History Rev., 64 (2011), 1073–121. Here, Bogart argues that the Glorious Revolution helped to drive the early British transport revolution by fostering a governmental and regulatory environment that encouraged investments in transport and offered more protection for the facilitators of new projects. The relative peace and stability from the 1690s encouraged new parliamentary acts that created river navigation authorities and turnpike trusts which improved transport connections and lowered the costs of moving people and goods, especially the London-centred road network with ‘towns and communities often spearheading road and river improvements with the explicit purpose of improving local transport links’. The need to project military power could provide an important incentive for improvements in transport communications although international rivalry and conflict could also, of course, provide considerable obstacles to the development of communications. In G. Rowlands, ‘Moving Mars: the logistical geography of Louis XIV's France’, French History, 25 (2011), 492–514, we see how, despite the outwardly magnificent court and apparent military power of Louis XIV's France, various natural and institutional obstacles impeded the king's ability to achieve full military mobilization for his European wars or to exploit the obvious strength in natural and economic resources and major importance of Paris. Finally, notwithstanding the difficulties of mobilization, when wars did break out, of course, they had a devastating, though varied, impact upon European (and colonial) economy and society, as H. Scott, ‘The Seven Years War and Europe's Ancien Regime’, War in History, 18 (2011), 419–56, demonstrates. Broadly, Scott contends that this war or set of conflicts had a ‘profound and lasting impact upon Europe's ancien regime’, serving as an inspiration for major reforms but also encouraging opposition to the absolutist monarchies because it caused an unprecedented economic burden upon European societies and had a major impact upon civil and political society. Moving beyond a historiography of the conflict dominated by analysis of fighting which has helped to undervalue war ‘as an agent of historical change’, Scott shows that Prussia, for instance, lost some 10 per cent of its population and saw its agricultural lands devastated, requiring Frederick the Great's government radically to improve internal communications and stimulate manufacturing by state subsidy and protectionism. Yet some states and cities benefited from the debt that crippled others, including the Austrian Netherlands, Amsterdam and the Dutch Republic and the northern Italian states whose banking industries thrived, paying for Europe's restoration.

With its size and complexity, London was, in many ways, something of a special case and presents valuable opportunities for analysis of the ownership and distribution of land and wealth. In ‘The English landed elite and the social environment of London c. 1580–1700: the cradle of an aristocratic culture?’, English Historical Rev., 126 (2011), 44–74, I. Warren highlights the extent to which the landed classes increasingly spent more time in the city reflecting and reinforcing London's growing political and economic importance as a centre of production and commercialized leisure. W.C. Baer, ‘Landlords and tenants in London, 1550–1700’, Urban History, 38 (2011), 234–55, is also interested in the increasing value of property and landownership amongst the elite within the city and agrees with Warren that landed families placed greater emphasis upon their urban interests as the development of larger townhouses and households demonstrates. Baer suggests that whilst the population of London was some 575,000 by 1700, probably some three-quarters of London households were tenancies with landlords numbering in the tens of thousands and tenants in the hundreds of thousands. Metropolitan tenancies produced major annual flows of rent and helped to propel the growth in housing. By this time, modern stereotypes surrounding each had already become established (such as the landlord as a ‘grasping, ruthless’ and ‘oppressive’ creature, prepared to cram tenants into any space possible). Baer concludes that, like rural landownership, patterns of ownership and the customs and complexities of landlord–tenant relations demonstrate the degree to which ‘economic, political and legal power’ across London was unequally distributed. However, these relations had to be negotiated carefully, and because property holdings were dispersed among so many different landlords who used them to supplement their incomes, the market seems to have operated quite freely and openly for tenants; furthermore, such considerations governing landlord–tenant relationships doubtless applied ‘to any urban area’ at different times ‘with similar magnitudes of impacts on a local economy.’ As J.F. Field, ‘Charitable giving and its distribution to Londoners after the Great Fire, 1666–1676’, Urban History (2011), 3–23, shows, the catastrophe that struck the city then and records of its subsequent recovery also provide a useful opportunity to assess the distribution of London wealth and property, its social and administrative structures and relationship with the English provinces. Field utilizes the records of the national charitable collection taken after the fire to examine how London was able to recover from a devastation that saw some 13,200 houses destroyed and some 100,000 made homeless, using internal and external donations obtained by a ‘brief’ transmitted through parishes. Through ‘urban solidarity’ and personal experience of urban fires, hundreds of pounds were raised. The children, the elderly and other vulnerable groups benefited most, especially widows, as these had most to lose, but entitlement was also determined by social status or relations. Overall, the evidence reveals patterns of charitable giving and how these funds were employed to aid recovery within the city, helping to explain why widespread unrest failed to occur and why London's social structures ‘did not collapse’ as they might have done had Westminster, the docks or the suburbs been severely damaged.

Various studies examine different aspects of early modern European urban government and civic pageantry, emphasizing how colourful and striking this could be with its processions, captivating musical performances, dazzling costume, fiery torches and illuminations. Inhabitants and visitors could either choose to watch and enjoy these displays or take part within rituals which were underpinned by varied social, cultural and political meanings. At one level, as N. Scott Baker, ‘Medicean metamorphoses: carnival in Florence, 1513’, Renaissance Studies, 25 (2011), 491–510, makes evident, where there was one dominant political family or group, civic pageantry could serve to reinforce their power or refine their image. In the dying days of Renaissance republican Florence, the Medici family used the iconography of the carnival of February 1513 to re-negotiate their relationship with government and foster an image of themselves as peacemakers and upholders of civic liberty. Whilst the Medici used the carnival to augment their power and ultimately propel them from proconsul to potentate, in, ‘“But the shows of their street”: civic pageantry and charivari in a Somerset town, 1607’, J. of British Studies, 50 (2011), 4–23, D. Underdown demonstrates that where urban politics was more evenly split between rival interests, this was reflected in disagreements surrounding civic pageantry, in an article that examines the hostilities or ‘culture wars’ surrounding civic celebrations which erupted at Wells in 1607 between early Stuart Puritans and their enemies. Underdown contends that whilst these reflected regional and civic identities, popular culture, political divisions and contested allegiances, there was more to this than simply disagreements between high church loyalists, tolerant traditionalists and religious zealots.. Abstract idealized conceptions of the city could also be designed to take the sting out of such divisions and suggest alternatives as J. Bishop, ‘Utopia and civic politics in mid-sixteenth-century London’, Historical J., 54 (2011), 933–54, and P. Robinson, ‘The multiple meanings of Troy in early modern London's mayoral show’, Seventeenth Century, 26 (2011), 221–39, demonstrate. Bishop shows how the production of the first English translation of Thomas More's Utopia in 1551 by a group of London citizens provided them with the opportunity to think about ‘good government’ and encourage social, political and governmental reform inspired by humanist notions of civic culture. In his study, Robinson explores how and why the figure of ‘Troynovant’ or the ‘New Troy’ increasingly featured in London's popular and elaborate seventeenth-century mayoral pageants despite increasing contemporary historical emphasis upon differences between the two cities. The evidence of 27 extant mayoral pageant texts from the period 1605–39 demonstrates how nearly all proclaimed London the Trojan capital reborn and Robinson suggests that the New Troy featured in civic writing and the pageant so much because it worked as ‘a shorthand signifier – a large finger pointing in the direction of a whole ream of civic discourse’. Bishop's and Robinson's work suggests that making too obvious, equivocal or subversive public or ceremonial pronouncements about London would have been dangerous, especially where large popular crowds might become agitated and various competing interests including the mayor, city aldermen, foreign ambassadors, the court, the guilds had to be accommodated. Referencing cities as utopia or Troy managed to embrace and reconcile seemingly contradictory and incompatible themes and meanings and to suggest alternative ways of viewing and understanding the city. The New Troy became a ‘stand in’ which drew attention to certain parts of civic discourse seldom overtly referenced in the pageant and civic literature. Both Bishop and Robinson conclude that referencing shared ideals of distant imagined cities in the distant past or future enabled metropolitan civic society to present radical alternatives to present realities.

Enlightenment ideals of urban sociability and improvement were equally inspired by classical antiquity and could also serve to assuage political differences. B. Harris, ‘The enlightenment, towns and urban society in Scotland, c. 1760–1820’, English Historical Rev., 126 (2011), 1097–136, uses a sample of some 20 towns of different size and character scattered around the country to explore the role and place of enlightenment in late Georgian provincial Scottish urban society. Harris uses a variety of evidence including library subscription lists, private book collections and the business records of a bookseller to assess the degree to which there was an urban dynamic behind the spread of Scottish enlightenment values and culture. He also seeks to determine how this might be defined and measured and to ‘map more extensively than hitherto the social and geographical boundaries of enlightenment culture in urban Scotland’ including the extent to which this impacted upon – and involved – the labouring classes. Harris defines enlightenment as a ‘distinct, but not uniform, body of ideas communicated primarily through published books and periodicals’ flourishing between 1730 and 1800, a ‘process’ that ‘linked’ but was not equivalent to ‘changing patterns of cultural transmission and the pursuit of improvement’, and additionally ‘a set of values and practices potentially inscribed in the changing nature of townscapes and urban society’. Whilst accepting that Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen led the way, Harris argues that particularly after 1760 ‘a process of intellectual diffusion and absorption gathered pace’ driven by cultural and environmental change and economic growth. Enlightenment ideas conveyed through books and periodicals ‘clearly infiltrated the upper crust of provincial urban society’ whilst coteries established subscription libraries, formed book collections and sometimes intellectual associations, especially in larger towns. The extent to which this elite and male-dominated culture was more widely dispersed is harder to determine. Much depends upon definitions of enlightenment but Harris argues that the evidence of print culture and the diffusion of tutors suggest a ‘highly literate and intellectually curious disposition of Scottish urban dwellers’ and an ‘intellectually curious appetite for knowledge amongst artisans and lesser tradesmen’. He argues that the familiar urban transformation of improved streets, changing townscapes, new institutions (such as charitable and medical associations) and increased regulation alongside ‘long-standing traditions of urban identity and sociability’ provided the ‘context for ‘enlightenment values and attitudes’ to ‘gain purchase . . . by a growing number of people’. Harris also questions what he believes are the common assumptions of recent Georgian urban historiography of an ‘almost symbiotic relationship between commerce, enlightenment, and politeness’, suggesting that ‘however illuminating’ this might be for England ‘such a model has very limited validity for Scottish towns’. The ‘values of enlightenment and politeness took root most easily’ in rapidly developing towns where they segued with ‘the values of commerce and religion, and older forms or urban identity’.

Women, of course, also formed their own business, culture and support circles in early modern towns and some studies try, in different ways, to circumvent the male-dominated social networks and sources of the period to understand these. V. De Lucca, ‘Strategies of women patrons of music and theatre in Rome: Maria Mancini Colonna, Queen Christina of Sweden, and women of their circles’, Renaissance Studies, 25 (2011), 374–92, explores how and why women such as Maria Mancini Colonna, Queen Christina and their associates invested so much into supporting music, theatre and other public entertainment. De Lucca argues that insufficient weight has been placed upon the importance of this patronage because beyond the bald facts of donation values, much of the source material is, of course, male dominated, such as Roman chronicles, private memoirs and correspondence. She contends that if historians can look beyond this, they will uncover the ways in which patronage offered women opportunities to express themselves, respond to detractors and even sometimes to accomplish political objectives, demonstrating thereby the extent to which women strove to ‘produce, inspire, influence, and commission music, theatrical entertainment, and cultural activities’. S.T. Strocchia, ‘The nun apothecaries of Renaissance Florence: marketing medicines in the convent’, Renaissance Studies, 25 (2011), 627–47, shows how a different class of women could prosper in the changing medical and political landscape. Partly through various social welfare initiatives after 1500, relatively light regulation and some Medici protection, convent pharmacies grew in importance, expanding their products and clientele whilst improving their business practices and training methods. According to Strocchia, these female-run apothecary shops shed light on several important issues for historians of Renaissance medicine and society: they demonstrate the nature and extent of female medical agency; how specialized knowledge could be transmitted by women beyond universities and guilds; and how this continued alongside efforts by guild and state authorities to regulate such practices. By producing and marketing drugs to the public, Renaissance religious women augmented the medical resources available to them in Italian urban society and acquired significant lay public roles. S. Lipscomb, ‘Crossing boundaries: women's gossip, insults and violence in sixteenth-century France’, French History, 25 (2011), 408–26, utilizes the evidence derived from legal case registers from the consistory courts of southern France to uncover the extent to which Languedocian women mutually policed each other, using managed confrontations, gossip, sexual insults and even physical intimidation to enforce their own collective morality. She concludes that both men and women engaged in physical violence towards (and between) each other, that women were quite often in court for such behaviour and that gossip was a female-centred activity which, whilst it served as a medium for hostility and control, also provided women with a ‘distinctive’ urban social role in the region.

D.I. Callaghan, ‘The black presence in the West Midlands, 1650–1918’, Midland History, 36 (2011), 180–94, also seeks to circumvent white male-dominated cultures and sources by re-discovering historical black individuals. Callaghan summarizes the results of a ‘History Detectives’ project undertaken by the Sparkbrook Caribbean and African Women's Development Initiative, which researched the history of the West Midland black population from the seventeenth century using sources such as parish records, estate papers and newspapers. For their earlier period up to 1809, the authors discovered 66 such individuals living in the region, emphasizing that any non-white European with dark skin was regarded as a black or negro. Prior to the abolition of slavery, there were a variety of black experiences: a slave sale was recorded at Lichfield as late as 1771 whilst simultaneously the Albert family (who were black) lived a ‘quiet life in Kidderminster, apparently embraced by their local community’. Many blacks, of course, began as domestic servants (but not all), the most famous in the region probably being Francis Barber, Dr Samuel Johnson's freed servant who ran a school near Lichfield. Generally, the authors conclude that the paucity of slaves recorded in the region by the later eighteenth century demonstrates the extent to which the internal British trade had become culturally unsupported, with the 1770s as a watershed. Blacks increasingly found themselves more individually isolated, ‘seeking a living in the more anonymous and less hospitable environs’ of growing cities such as Birmingham. More information about how this occurred and the opportunities presented to blacks by urban living is in D. Rabin, ‘“In a country of liberty?” Slavery, villeinage and the making of whiteness in the Somerset case (1772)’, History Workshop J., 72 (2011), 5–29. Rabin examines the case of James Somerset, emphasizing the ambiguous legal status of slavery and growing tensions between the demands of property and liberty, especially through the exploitation of the category of villeinage by anti-slavery campaigners. Whilst the Somerset case seemed to re-affirm the status of slavery within the British economy, it also underscored legal contradictions. As Callaghan's West Midland study also suggests, the discharging of Somerset by Chief Justice Mansfield helped to foster a growing legal separation between colonial slavery and domestic freedom, thereby ultimately providing relief for freed slaves within the British Isles. Rabin argues that whilst there were only around 5,000 blacks living in the whole of the English provinces, mainly concentrated in Liverpool and Bristol, Georgian London, with its 10,000–15,000 black residents and racial diversity, provided a haven for Somerset. Many were ‘young, male and transient’, working as sailors, soldiers, footmen, coachmen, street vendors, whilst others appear in the criminal records as pimps, prostitutes, robbers and beggars. Whilst there was resistance to the colonial being imported into everyday life, especially in the provinces, rather than being socially segregated, these studies demonstrate how blacks moved together in close proximity to whites, especially in London and the larger ports, socializing, intermarrying and mixing in churches, public houses, charities and other organizations.

Post-1800

After several years under the cloud of global financial crisis, rising unemployment, especially among the young, and anti-capitalism protests on the streets of major capitals, perhaps it was to be expected that the investigation of urban economies and the problem of poverty and social injustice would emerge as themes engaging urban historians of the modern period in 2011. Three articles on the subject, all focusing on British urban regions, make use of survey data to probe questions of economic conditions and inequality in towns. Ian Gazeley, Andrew Newell and Peter Scott's contribution to the European Rev. of Economic History, 15 (2011), 127–51, poses the question, ‘Why was urban overcrowding much more severe in Scotland than in the rest of the British Isles?’ Using evidence from the 1904 household expenditure survey, the authors argue that household overcrowding in Scotland was not due to higher levels of poverty than elsewhere in the British Isles, but rather to a propensity among the Scots to prioritize spending on food over expenditure on housing, compounded by local tax laws which exacerbated overcrowding problems. Donna Loftus’ ‘Investigating work in late nineteenth-century London’, History Workshop J., 71 (2011), 173–93, uses survey data gathered by Charles Booth and his researchers for the Industry Series, the second of his investigations into life and labour in London. It was the small master, active in the manufacturing trades of the East End, who emerged from this survey as ‘both a cause and effect of irregularity of employment’ (p. 176), a problem which the earlier Poverty Series had revealed as lying at the root of much hardship in the Metropolis. Elizabeth Peretz, meanwhile, offers a research note on ‘The forgotten survey: social service in the Oxford District, 1935–40’, Twentieth Century British History 22 (2011), 103–13. Unlike the nineteenth-century surveys undertaken by Booth and his contemporaries, the emphasis of this investigation, designed by social studies experts based at Barnett House and conducted by Oxford academics, was more on industrial and regional planning work. Its analysis of the workings of urban services and infrastructures in the Oxford area was intended to be more widely applicable to other towns and cities in the south of England but, while it gathered significant data, the outbreak of World War II before the publication of the concluding volume consigned the survey to relative obscurity.

Unlike Peretz's ‘Forgotten survey’, decennial data gathered from population censuses continues to provide urban historians with plentiful evidence for the analysis of towns and cities. Robert Gant's very detailed account of the mid-Wales market town of Brecon, ‘Brecon in 1901: a census perspective on the county town’, Brycheiniog, 42 (2011), 43–70, is based on census enumerators' returns for 1901 combined with supplementary information from trade directories of the period. Though he offers few new conclusions on the nature of urbanization in Brecon, the article provides a useful case-study of what can be achieved with the use of data from the census household schedules and some of the key statistical material is presented in high-quality graphs and figures. Though invaluable as a tool for mapping and analysing the residential and occupational characteristics of urban communities, census data has little use in the investigation of more elusive questions such as those posed by the authors of a group of articles on sentimentalities in the J. of Victorian Culture, 16, 2 (2011). Of particular interest to urban historians might be the contribution by Julie-Marie Strange on sentimentality and homelessness in late Victorian and Edwardian cities (pp. 242–58). ‘Tramp: sentiment and the homeless man in the late-Victorian and Edwardian City’, focuses on the work in Liverpool of the League of Welldoers and, in particular, its founder, Herbert Lee Jackson Jones, Strange shows how vagrancy relief in late nineteenth-century Liverpool and the charitable appeals for the relief of tramps and vagrants used sentimental images to prompt a response. It was a successful strategy and one which became central to appeals by later philanthropic organizations.

A different perspective on the philanthropic impulse in Victorian and Edwardian Britain emerges from Martin Stilwell's survey of the early housing projects of the London County Council (LCC) from its formation in 1889 to World War I, ‘Housing the workers: early London county council housing, 1889–1914’, Local Historian, 41 (2011), 308–20. He argues that their ‘forward thinking and philanthropic’ approach to the provision of housing provides an important reminder of the quality of council housing in the pre-war era. A period of slum clearance preceded the building schemes, the aim of which was to provide high-quality homes for workers. In order to keep rents low, the LCC opted to build five-storey blocks of two- and three-roomed dwellings in preference to ‘cottage’ housing which made less cost-effective use of land. Many of the architects employed were influenced by the Arts and Crafts movement and their designs made a visual statement on the streetscapes. The schemes were concentrated in Westminster, Holborn, Clerkenwell and Southwark. He conducts an in-depth case-tudy of the Churchway scheme near Euston which illustrated the difficulties the LCC had to overcome in negotiations with landlords. In all,the LCC carried out 42 working-class housing schemes in the pre-war period. Though they made little overall impact on the housing problem, and were often not profitable, they did raise standards for new housing.

Other aspects of London's built environment are explored by Hilda Kean in a thought-provoking study of ‘Traces and representations: animal pasts in London's present, London J., 36 (2011), 54–71. She examines the emergence in London, from the late nineteenth century onwards, of sites where dead animals could be mourned and commemorated, as well as tracking down evidence of animal life in the city in the past. From water troughs to stabling sites, the development of zoos, pet graveyards and later, after World War I, animal representations in memorial architecture, Kean argues that ‘The presence of animals in London led to the formation of the metropolis itself’ (p. 55). A very different assessment of animals in an urban environment is offered by Catherine McNeur, in her study of ‘The “swinish multitude”: controversies over hogs in Antebellum New York City’, J. of Urban History, 37 (2011), 639–60. Here, the early nineteenth-century conflicts between hog owners, who defended their right to keep their live animals on the streets, and city aldermen, who introduced legislation to combat the practice, helped redefine notions of public space and its uses in the city.

The introduction of measures to control the keeping of animals in urban areas was just one facet of public health management which featured prominently in journal articles in 2011. Water and sanitation issues occupy a number of authors interested in exploring issues of urban governance. Awadhendra Sharan provides an insight into water management in Delhi in ‘From source to sink: “official” and “improved” water in Delhi, 1868–1856’, Indian Economic and Social History Rev., 48 (2011), 425–62. Sanitary inspections in the nineteenth century raised questions over the purity of Delhi's water supply and a new waterworks system was inaugurated by the British municipal authorities in the late nineteenth century, but this was soon deemed inadequate for the fast-growing city. Outbreaks of typhoid and enteric fever continued to raise concerns over pollution and purity levels. Although water became the focus of much improvement rhetoric, the goal of a universal water supply for a modern colonial city proved elusive, and ‘what emerged in the wake of a century's efforts at improvement was a city and a capital, adjacent in space but destined towards different futures’ (p. 458). A further example of the difficulties of achieving a universal supply can be found in Liu Haiyan's article on ‘Water supply and the reconstruction of urban space in early twentieth-century Tianjin’, Urban History, 38 (2011), 391–412. This analysis of the coming not only of tap water, but of new ideas of health and hygiene, is part of a special issue on ‘China's urban turn’, which Liu Haiyan guest edits with Toby Lincoln. Alongside other contributions, including a study of prostitution in early twentieth-century Suzhou by Peter Carroll (pp. 413–36), and an examination of the transformation of Shanghai's racecourse into a people's park and people's square, by Xiong Yuezhi (pp. 475–490), the study of water provision in a Chinese urban context raises different issues to those encountered in western cities. In particular, the political partitioning of the city into different settlement zones gave rise to several concurrently operating water supply systems, bringing a variety of service to the residents of the districts.

Debates over water supply in London in the mid-nineteenth century are addressed by Joseph Hillier, ‘The rise of constant water in nineteenth-century London’, London J., 36 (Mar. 2011), 37–53. He finds that the piping of a constant supply to households in the city was not universally accepted as the best system until after the passing of the 1871 Water Act. Before then, the merits of an intermittent service, delivered at set times to users, were championed by company engineers, and Hillier argues against viewing the eventual preference for constant water as inevitable. This was, in his view, a manufactured ideal which emerged in the context of evolving attitudes to poverty and social responsibility. Vanessa Taylor and Frank Trentmann take the exploration of this period of water management a step further in their examination of ‘Liquid politics: water and the politics of everyday life in the modern city’, Past and Present, 211 (2011), 199–241. Rather than studying debates over water supply in urban Britain from the perspective of public health or municipalization, they argue that it provides an opportunity for a study of the linkages between private and public life. Using evidence from London, Sheffield and other British cities in the late nineteenth century, the authors trace the connections between private bathing and toileting habits and the development and management of water supplies. They argue that there was a two-way exchange between everyday practices and external technologies. As well as illuminating ‘a neglected part of urban history’, they argue that this also has much broader implications for how we view the relationship between politics and everyday life.

There are echoes of this idea of the everyday activities of urban dwellers as inter-connected with the development of political and regulatory structures in Peter Scholliers and Patricia Van den Eeckhout's article on the establishment of a food safety laboratory in Brussels in a special issue of the J. of Social History on social memory and historical justice, 44, 4 (Summer 2011), 1,139–1,155. ‘Hearing the consumer? The laboratory, the public and the construction of food safety in Brussels’ is a case-study of negotiation between local government and the inhabitants, who had previously sought the help of local pharmacies in testing food which they suspected of poor quality or adulteration. Proposed by the mayor in 1856, the new laboratory also sought to involve the public in its activities, thereby helping legitimize the new scheme for food safety. Through tracing the operation of the lab, the authors argue that there was a shift from viewing the Brussels inhabitants as common people who needed the help of the scheme, to seeing them as consumers with their own awareness of food safety issues.

The development of quality control mechanisms was part of the maturing of retail and consumer culture in Europe's major cities in the late nineteenth century, but the other side of this picture, and one which forms the subject of William M. Meier's article in the J. of British Studies, 50 (2011), 410–33, was the development of more deviant behaviour based on a desire for high-quality goods. In ‘Going on the hoist: women, work and shoplifting in London, ca. 1890–1940’, Meier probes a variety of crimes and their association with the rise of consumerism in London at the turn of the twentieth century. Beginning with a case-study of a spectacular hoist by members of a notorious gang of female working-class shoplifters, the ‘Forty Thieves’, who operated in the draperies and department stores of the West End of London, Meier uncovers ‘a spectrum of criminal activity ranging from middle-class “kleptomania” to opportunistic, working-class thievery to expert hoisting’ (p. 431). The use of the word ‘hoist’ in the title indicates a skilled, specialized approach to theft which came to characterize the activities of some female shoplifters in the metropolis in this period. The motive for undertaking these different types of theft were as different as the women who undertook them. The wider significance of the article is in its identification of the study period as ‘a crucial stage in the evolution of crime in modern Britain’ (p. 433), as consumerism, women's work and gender identities were all evolving.

Elsewhere, the emergence of children as consumers had an impact on the clothing industry in the Yorkshire town of Leeds in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Katrina Honeyman's article ‘Suits for the boys: the Leeds multiple tailors and the making of boys’ wear, 1890–1940’, Textile History, 42 (2011), 50–68, traces the development of boys’ suit making as part of the wider men's tailoring industry in the early part of the twentieth century. She argues that there was a convergence of styles of men's and boys’ clothing over her study period, and from the point of view of urban historians, her attention to this previously neglected element of the clothing industry in the north of England adds a new dimension to our understanding of the economy in this important centre of textile production. Honeyman's article is one of a number of revealing studies of children and their place in the urban economy which appear in the periodical literature in 2011. In the J. of Social History, 44 (2011), 837–59, Abosede George provides a study of girl hawkers in Lagos in the late colonial, or development, era. In 1943, a new Children and Young Person's Ordinance was introduced by the colonial authorities which prohibited street trading by children under 14, and imposed tight restrictions on the location, time and supervision of trade by girl hawkers of over 14 years of age. The new law aroused opposition among Lagosians who contested this approach to delivering welfare for the young and who believed that street hawking had economic and individual developmental value. It also led to a huge increase in the number of children arrested and brought before the city magistrates. But the debate sparked over the legislation is used here to probe wider questions about the nature of the child and about the control of urban labour in the late colonial period.

Louise A. Jackson and Angela Bartie undertake an analysis of the regulation of juveniles in the mid-1940s, albeit in the very different urban settings of Manchester and Dundee, The Economic History Rev., 64 (1911), 88–113. The title of their article, ‘Children of the city’ is taken from a 1944 Ministry of Information film about the link between urban life and juvenile crime, a subject which Bartie also tackled in the context of Glasgow in an article for Contemporary British History in 2010. Here, the authors carry out an analysis of the goods stolen by juveniles in Dundee and Manchester who were convicted of theft in the 1940s and 1950s, as well as examining geographical and economic trends which impacted on the activities of these children. They argue that attempts to re-educate youths in the use of urban space and in their attitudes towards play and property were key aims of the juvenile justice system in the post-war period. Similar themes are addressed in a different context by Scarlett Aldebot-Green in her study of ‘Changelings: transformative perceptions of San Jose's street children, 1965–1981’, J. of Urban History, 37 (2011), 479–96. Using evidence from La Nación, the premier Costa Rican newspaper, she identifies a shift in attitude towards children's use of the streets from the mid-1960s, when the model of children as school-attending rather than street-working began to gain ground. By the early 1980s, she argues, notions of acceptable children's behaviour had become so well defined that those who did not attend school, who worked on the streets and who played outside designated urban spaces, had come to be viewed as deviant.

The identification of safe and civilized urban spaces, free from deviant forms of behaviour, was not just a growing demand of city dwellers. It was also a prerequisite for cities with aspirations to establish themselves as desirable destinations for visitors. In some towns, the commercial potential of tourism was exploited through the staging of festivals in suitable urban public spaces. Miha Kizorog's study of the small Slovenian town of Tolmin in the J. of Tourism and Cultural Change, 9 (2011), 298–319, provides one contemporary case-study of how this was achieved. Distinguishing between festivals organized by external groups, and those staged by local associations, Kizorog finds that the former were aimed principally at commercial profit while the latter were geared towards the promotion of local identity. Based on the author's own experience of festival organizing in the town, as well as on interviews conducted with other festival organizers, he demonstrates how Tomlin's tourism trade grew from its role as a venue for popular music festivals, since 2000. After building up a reputation for staging small music festivals, Tolmin became the location for international reggae and metal festivals which gave it an elevated sense of importance over neighbouring places. Locals, argues Kizorog, are ‘thus able to imagine themselves as subjects of a place that is more than just a local place – through a festival it becomes a place of exchange, a place outsiders appreciate and are enthusiastic about’ (p. 300). On a rather different scale to the Tolmin music festivals were the ‘mega events’ of the twentieth century which form the subject of a group of articles comprising a special research feature in Planning Perspectives, 24, 4 (2011). Gaia Caramellino, Alessandro De Magistris and Federico Deambrosis provide an introduction to this themed section in which they argue for a long-term perspective on the impact of events such as international exhibitions, World Fairs and Olympic Games. In ‘Reconceptualizing mega events and urban transformations in the twentieth century’ (pp. 617–20), they argue that the implications of these events for urban planning cannot be properly understood if they are considered only as one-off events. The other contributions to the special section, particularly that of Bilsel and Zelef on Istanbul (pp. 621–34), respond to this plea for the long perspective, viewing mega events in the city from 1937 to the twenty-first century.

For the historian interested in urban identities rather than in planning issues, however, the study of a single cultural event can offer some revealing insights into how cities defined and represented their distinctive characteristics. Todd Courtenay's article on ‘The 1911 International Exposition in Rome: architecture, archaeology, and national identity’, in the J. of Historical Geography, 37 (2011), 440–59, deals with the role of the young Italian capital in the promotion of patriotic, national symbols and sentiments on the occasion of the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Italian state. The article is as much about Rome's transformation from papal city to modern European capital as it is about the international exposition. Rome had to be both modern and forward looking and, at the same time, have an awareness of its ancient past. The organizers framed the 1911 exposition in national terms. ‘At its core, the event was intended to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the 27 March 1861 proclamation of Rome as the capital of Italy’, but there was also an international dimension. ‘Similar to other World's Fairs of the late nineteenth century, it provided a time and space for promotional displays and friendly international competition, a landscape of contrast that would highlight the superiority of the host nation’ (p. 441). Rome was presented as a showcase of national architecture, a centre of science and technology and guardian of the country's archaeological treasures. Illustrated with contemporary photographic images, the article gives an insight into the contradictions and contrasts in this portrayal of the capital. Sarah Britton's study of the 1938 Glasgow Empire Exhibition, Cultural and Social History, 8 (2011), 213–32, following on from her 2010 article on anti-imperialism in inter-war exhibitions in History Workshop J., deals with similar themes of national representation to those explored by Courtenay in Rome. The organizers of the Glasgow event strove to present an image of a modern, urban nation, represented through the presentation of exhibits dedicated to modern industry, displayed in architecturally modernist buildings. But in the hall dedicated to Scottish history, they fell back on representations of rural, Highland life as ‘the most obvious markers of cultural distinctiveness’ (p. 227). Britton reminds us of the importance of the process of cultural production in shaping representations and demonstrates the enduring strength of romanticized notions of a rural past, even in the modern, urban context of inter-war Glasgow.

The difficulties of constructing new identities were even more pronounced in cities where a radical political change necessitated a more thorough and systematic rethink of cultural signifiers. In Maoz Azaryahu's examination of ‘The politics of commemorative street renaming: Berlin 1945–1948’, J. of Historical Geography, 37 (2011), 483–92, this issue is explored through an examination of approaches to street nomenclature in the former German capital in the years immediately following the Nazi defeat. Viewed as ‘symptomatic of periods of regime change’, the renaming of streets in Berlin after the fall of the Third Reich aimed to ‘rid the former German capital of street names that were not in tune with the democratic ideals of the emergent “anti-fascist” Germany’ (p. 483). The first phase of communist-influenced street renaming up to 1946 failed to complete a comprehensive renaming and caused confusion and frustration among map makers and urban services. But a second phase, from November 1946 to June 1948, saw a democratically elected city government set up a commission which oversaw the publication of an official list of name changes. It is this window on the practical difficulties, posed by a task as fundamental as street naming in a city with a new political order, that provides the main point of interest for urban historians here.

More noticeable than the number of studies based on European capitals like Berlin is the proliferation in the periodical literature for 2011 of contributions to urban history in its imperial contexts. Joseph Hardwick locates his article on ‘Vestry politics and a reform “public” in Calcutta, 1813–36’, Historical Research, 84 (2011), 87–108, as part of a historiographical globalizing of Britain's age of reform. He finds, in the case of a dispute over the membership of the vestry of St John's Anglican Church in Calcutta in the second decade of the nineteenth century, the voicing of debates over the nature of the public and the idea of representation which have been more commonly associated with petitions from expatriate Britons to the imperial authorities. Although the St John's vestry dispute was confined to Calcutta's European population, Hardwick argues that it raised general questions about ‘whether there was a public in Calcutta that was capable of possessing the rights and representational institutions commonly associated with the publics of Enlightenment Europe’ (p. 95). Elsewhere, Ulrike Stark offers a case-study of a voluntary association in colonial India, in ‘Associational culture and civic engagement in colonial Lucknow: the Jalsah-e Tahzib’, Indian Economic and Social History Rev., 48 (2011), 1–33. The significance of the Jalsah was that it was the first voluntary association in Lucknow which began life as a literary-cultural society, but evolved into a body with a political voice. Its membership was drawn from across the Hindu and Muslim sections of the professional classes, and the author underlines the importance of this in demonstrating the hybrid nature of Indian associational culture.

A similar case is made by Lynn Hollen Lees in her examination of ‘Urban civil society: the context of empire’, Historical Research, 84 (2011), 135–47. First delivered as a plenary lecture at the Anglo-American Conference of Historians on ‘Cities’ in 2009, this study focuses on the concept of civil society in the context of British-ruled Malayan towns in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Lees uses the examples of royal celebrations and voluntary associations in these towns to show that civil society in British Malaya was not a reflection of the divide between the colonizer and the colonized, but was multicultural and diverse. Lees makes a compelling case for seeing cities and towns in the crown colonies as ‘sites of growing public spheres and lively, multi-cultural civil societies’ (p. 137). Further findings from Lees’ research on colonial Malaya are presented in an article on ‘Discipline and delegation: colonial authority in Malayan towns, 1880–1930’, Urban History, 38 (2011), 48–64, in which she explores the use of the twin strategies of sanitary inspection and policing to discipline and control the urban populations of the colony. Overall, she argues that these strategies met with limited success because of the weakness of the British presence in Malaya and the necessity to negotiate and moderate objectives in the face of local resistance. The message that urban history in its colonial contexts is a burgeoning field is further underlined by a review essay in Social History, 36 (2011), 482–97. Eric Lewis Beverley's ‘Colonial urbanism and South Asian cities’ surveys several new studies of Lahore, Bombay and Delhi. He uses this new literature to examine to extent to which there was a coherent set of ideas characterizing colonial urbanism, and concludes that influences promoting control and autonomy played out simultaneously in the cities as colonial states sought to extend their discipline while colonizers negotiated over uses of urban space. Beverley argues that segregation in cities during the colonial period was ‘a key antecedent for forms of class segregation’ in the neighbourhoods and suburbs of post-colonial South Asian cities. The books reviewed amount, in his view, to ‘perhaps, the first wave of a major emerging field in the historiography of the region’ and, judging by the wealth of recent research appearing in article form, further waves are soon to follow.