Pre-1500

This review begins with a subject that is familiar to all urban historians of the Middle Ages. Citizenship was one of the most ubiquitous forms of social and political organization in medieval towns. Yet, as Pierre Racine points out, in ‘La citoyenneté en Italie au Moyen Âge’, Le Moyen Âge, 115 (2009), 87–108, it is perhaps surprising that there have been so few studies devoted specifically to the right of citizenship in the Italian cities of the communal period. Racine's discussion is focused upon the period between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries, that is, from the formation of the communes to the emergence of princely states in northern and central Italy, when many of the city-states disappeared. If citizenship was in some ways a burden which entailed liability to taxation and the fulfilment of military service, it was fundamentally a privilege. Thus, the thirteenth-century communal governments of cities such as Piacenza appointed officials charged with investigating cases of ‘false citizens’. Citizenship was acquired largely on the basis of more or less permanent residence and the ownership of a house in the city and it allowed the citizen to participate in the popular assembly, where the important questions concerning the election of officials and the problems of daily life were debated and decided. In emphasizing the emotional attachment which citizens felt towards their urban patria, Racine addresses the cultural as well as juridical meaning of citizenship.

One of two articles which illuminate the different aspects of the civic ethos to which citizens were expected to subscribe is Trevor Dean's ‘Fornicating with nuns in fifteenth-century Bologna’, J. of Medieval History, 34 (2008), 374–82. Dean considers the evidence from the records of Bologna's court of the podestà relating to the prosecution of laymen accused of entering the city's nunneries. What emerges clearly from this study is the contrast between legal theory and legal practice. Fifteenth-century Italian cities increasingly made sexual relations with nuns an offence punishable by death, but despite official censure, the reality, as Dean shows from the cases of a Bolognese spicer and mercer, was that the death penalty was not always imposed. Although the spicer confessed his crime, witnesses testified to his moral character and presented him as a good Christian, a respectable neighbour, a solid and dependable citizen, who held office in his craft and in the commune, and a hardworking and trustworthy craftsman, whose personal credit with those in his trade was secure. Together, these elements ‘were the proofs and constituents of male civic reputation’ (377). In ‘Learning to be a man: public schooling and apprenticeship in late medieval Manosque’, J. of Medieval History, 35 (2009), 113–35, Steven Bednarski and Andrée Courtemanche explore further the gendered nature of urban, bourgeois identity through the prism of lay education in this medium-sized Provençal town. Education took the form of public schooling, provided by teachers hired by the town council, and apprenticeship in a craft. In both classroom and workshop education was firmly in the hands of the laity. It was also an experience from which females were wholly absent. Education reflected the needs of the urban economy and so, alongside the rudiments of the Christian faith, boys first learned basic literacy designed to help them in their chosen craft and then the skills and, more importantly, the values of the master craftsman. These values amounted to ‘a particular type of urban masculine identity’ (134), grounded in a specific mode of urban living which valorized financial and social independence, the primacy of paternal authority and the importance of respect and obedience.

The pupils and apprentices of Manosque were those expected to enter a profession or a trade, precisely the stratum of urban society which occupies centre stage in Francine Michaud's ‘Le pauvre transformé: les hommes, les femmes et la charité à Marseille, du XIII^e siècle jusqu'à la Peste noire’, Rev. Historique, 650 (2009), 243–90. Marseille was a vibrant port city of perhaps 20,000 inhabitants in the thirteenth century. It was also home to an extraordinarily wide range of mendicant houses, all of which were devoted to the ideal of voluntary poverty. Michaud's interest lies in the relationship between wealth and poverty and the changing attitudes of this commercial society towards the destitute. She presents a statistical analysis of charitable practices recorded in over 400 wills from lay testators in the city of Marseille between the mid-thirteenth and mid-fourteenth centuries. Her argument is that lay provision for the poor declined sharply in the context of inflation, depopulation and famine from the end of the thirteenth century. The laity, notably merchants, shopkeepers and artisans, were increasingly discerning in their choice of whom to support, acting prudently to ensure that the poor were those genuinely in need and deserving of assistance. No longer simply pauperes Christi, the poor were those cast in their image: honest, respectable and virtuous. The moral decency of these poor reflected and enhanced the memory and reputation of the urban bourgeoisie.

If there is debate about the extent to which this cultural shift in perceptions of the poor was a result of the Black Death, this disease certainly transformed the pattern of late medieval urban slaveholding in southern Europe, as Jeffrey Fynn-Paul shows in ‘Tartars in Spain: Renaissance slavery in the Catalan city of Manresa, c. 1408’, J. of Medieval History, 34 (2008), 347–59. Here, as in other towns in Spain and Italy, wealthy urban householders responded to the arrival of the Black Death, notably the second outbreak of plague in the early 1360s, by importing slaves from the Black Sea region. The decision was borne of calculated, rational, pragmatic economic concerns. When the population fell, as was noted by the civic authorities in Manresa in 1363, there was a labour shortage, the consequence of which was a doubling of wages in nominal terms. Slaves from eastern Europe were imported because, apart from the large initial outlay, they were economically attractive as a cheap source of labour. Alongside a detailed tax survey of the town of Manresa from 1408, which lists slaves among the property of urban householders, Fynn-Paul uses a slave census from 1431 to estimate that in this period, characterized by a worsening labour shortage, perhaps ‘one in twenty of the city's households held at least one slave’ (353).

Bednarski and Courtemanche's emphasis upon urban literacy mentioned above is corroborated by Catherine Cubitt in ‘“As the lawbook teaches”: reeves, lawbooks and urban life in the anonymous Old English Legend of the Seven Sleepers’, English Historical Rev., 124 (2009), 1021–49. Cubitt uses a literary source to throw new light on the dynamism and precocity of English urban life in the period before the Norman Conquest. The Legend of the Seven Sleepers was a late antique story of seven noble young men whose Christian faith led them to seek shelter in a cave to escape persecution by the third-century Roman emperor, Decius. Four hundred years later, the seven youths waken from their sleep, and when one of them tries to purchase some bread in the town market, the antiquity of his coins results in his arrest and interrogation before a town official. Cubitt shows convincingly how the narrative was not only translated into the vernacular in the late tenth to early eleventh centuries, but also adapted to the late Anglo-Saxon urban world in which the translator lived. This was a world, Cubitt argues, of a distinctive topography of city walls and market places, and of a particular set of urban values, informed partly by the existence of a highly commercialized and monetarized economy and partly by pragmatic literacy. The article is aimed squarely at legal historians of the Anglo-Saxon period, a field dominated by the late Patrick Wormald, to whom written law in this period was essentially symbolic rather than practical in intent. If Cubitt's evocation of a cultural milieu in which townspeople were sufficiently aware of the power of the written word to expect their town reeves to exercise justice ‘in accordance with written royal law’ (1046) is therefore controversial, it is also, for an urban historian at least, a revelation.

A similarly interdisciplinary approach is found in Günter Prinzing's ‘Das mittelalterliche Mainz und Byzanz: Historisch-politische, kirchen- und kulturgeschichtliche Aspekte’, Archiv für Kulturgeschichte, 91 (2009), 45–77. Mainz was one of the most important cities of the Holy Roman Empire since it was, from the time of Archbishop Willigis (975–1011), the seat of the imperial archchancellors. The article is in many ways pioneering and its premise – that scholars from different disciplines, namely history, medieval Latin, archaeology, art history, codicology and numismatology, need to work together in order to explore more fully the influence of Byzantium upon the Latin Middle Ages – is surely right. However, the contacts between Mainz and Constantinople turn out to be less solid and the connections more episodic and personal than the title of the article might encourage readers to believe: a few diplomatic missions from the Byzantine imperial court to the imperial palace of Ingelheim within the region of Mainz and some imperial delegations to Constantinople involving citizens and merchants of the German city; two golden chasubles of Byzantine origin which once belonged to Archbishop Willigis; a gold coin of Emperor Romanos III Argyros (1028–34) found in Mainz in 1904; pilgrimage involving high-ranking ecclesiastical figures, probably the most famous of whom was the fifteenth-century dean of Mainz cathedral, Bernhard von Breydenbach, whose journey to the Holy Land was punctuated by visits to various places in the Byzantine world; and a couple of Latin translations of Greek manuscripts once in the possession of religious houses in Mainz.

Prinzing's admission that he has only scratched the surface of the subject should lead to further research on the urban context of relations between the western and eastern Roman empires. In the meantime, Byzantium features more extensively in Glaire D. Anderson's ‘Islamic spaces and diplomacy in Constantinople (tenth to thirteenth centuries C.E.)’, Medieval Encounters, 15 (2009), 86–113. Anderson, an architectural historian, provides a study of the presence of Muslim communities in the Christian city of Constantinople from the perspective of material culture. Her focus is the nature and location of the city's three ‘mosques’, to whose existence there are only fleeting references in various Byzantine and Islamic texts of the period. To this reader at least, the official accommodation of Muslims within Constantinople is particularly illuminating, but the broader issue – which should engage the attention of those interested in the built environment of the medieval city – is the way in which buildings and structures could be adapted and change their meaning over time. According to Anderson, the Dar al-Balat, a complex located within the imperial precinct and originally used as a prison for high-ranking Muslim prisoners of war, who were placed there under the emperor's protection to await ransom and exchange, became the ‘mosque of Constantinople’, whose wider religious and monumental significance in the late twelfth century was acknowledged when it was mentioned in a Muslim pilgrimage guide. Anderson's article is enterprising since the built spaces in which she is interested no longer exist. The same problem confronts Wilhelm Störmer in ‘Zur politischen Bedeutung und zur topographischen Lage der Pfalz Karls des Großen in Regensburg’, Mitteilungen des Instituts für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung, 117 (2009), 1–11. Chronicles reveal that the city of Regensburg, which was already a regional capital for the Agilolfinger dukes of Bavaria before 788, when Charlemagne removed the last duke in a show trial and assumed control of the duchy, was a site of major military and political importance to the Carolingian king. His itinerary shows the meaning he attached to the city: he came to Regensburg in 788, the year of his ‘conquest’ of Bavaria, and summoned the local magnates to an assembly where homage was performed; he visited again in 791 and 792–93 and used the city as his base of operations against the Avars, and it was during the summer of 792 that Charlemagne's son, Pippin the Hunchback, was convicted at an imperial assembly of plotting to murder his own father in the Bavarian capital. Despite this literary evidence, the precise location of Charlemagne's palace in Regensburg is not known. Störmer focuses upon the hitherto largely unexcavated area around the Porta Praetoria, the northern gate of the second-century Roman legionary fortress, where the first cathedral and the bishop's residence were located. For more definitive answers, urban historians will have to wait for the publication of the Bavarian volume of the German palace research (Pfalzenforschung) project.

The broad subject of medieval urban topography features in another three studies, although the first, Katalin Szende's ‘“Sag mir, wo die Spitäler sind . . .”: Zur Topographie europäischer Spitäler’, Mitteilungen des Instituts für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung, 117 (2009), 137–46, does not take the form of a substantive article. It draws explicitly upon the recent publication of a volume also published by the Institute of Austrian Historical Research, Europäisches Spitalwesen. Institutionelle Fürsorge in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit, edited by Martin Scheutz (Vienna, 2008), to which Szende herself contributed an essay. It is mentioned here because Szende's central theme is the topography of hospitals within the European town. Her examples are mainly from central and eastern Europe (Poland, Bohemia, Moravia and Hungary), where hospitals were almost exclusively an urban phenomenon and the waves of hospital foundation were linked very closely to the process of urban development and the growth of urban identity. Szende's plea for further research in this area will strike a chord with historians of medieval English hospitals. The second article in which the urban landscape receives attention is James A. Galloway's ‘Storm flooding, coastal defence and land use around the Thames estuary and tidal river c. 1250–1450’, J. of Medieval History, 35 (2009), 171–88. Galloway's discussion is largely about the impact of late medieval climate change, which caused an increase in the severity of tidal surges in south-east England through the Thames estuary into the capital. The mayor of London had authority over the tidal river, and London itself was potentially at serious risk from flooding because of the reclamation of marshland in the suburbs, the extension of the waterfront into the Thames and the construction of London Bridge. Erected around 1200, the bridge was 270 metres long and consisted of twenty arches which were propped up by piers set into artificial islands. The bridge thus ‘significantly impeded the flow of water and caused a regular increase in relative river level at every high tide’ (182). The actual evidence of flooding in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, however, remains uncertain, and Galloway speculates that the abandonment of riverside defences further down river, near the mouth of the estuary, may inadvertently have protected the city from the worst effects of the storm surges. In ‘Text, visualization and politics: London, 1150–1250’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 18 (2008), 69–99, Derek Keene demonstrates how the geography and landscape of the city inspired the deluge of literary descriptions of London which appeared in the late twelfth century, notably that of William fitz Stephen. These written accounts in turn shaped visual representations of London, such as the city's early thirteenth-century common seal, and helped to provide for Londoners ‘a widely shared community of ideas about London and its physical, cultural, social, historical, mythological and political identity’ (98). These ideas were articulated most fully in a composite volume of national laws and city customs compiled in the capital in the first two decades of the thirteenth century. Above all, they reveal a strong awareness of London's pre-eminence within the kingdom predicated upon the city's political and commercial power.

The two issues of politics and trade were at the root of the conflict between the Merchant Adventurers of York and London in the fifteenth century, as Anne F. Sutton explains in ‘The Merchant Adventurers of England: the place of the Adventurers of York and the North in the late Middle Ages’, Northern History, 46 (2009), 219–29. Sutton's article is a short but extremely informative institutional study of the relationship between the York branch of the Merchant Adventurers and the increasingly London-dominated national company. The Company of Merchant Adventurers, which consisted of English merchants who travelled to the Low Countries to export English woollen cloth, only existed as a corporate entity overseas, notably at the great fairs of Brabant, where merchants gathered in assemblies presided over by a governor. In York, the rise of the cloth trade in the fifteenth century strengthened the collective identity of the city's cloth merchants based around the mercers’ fraternity of the Holy Trinity. They had their own guildhall and, in 1430, received a royal charter of incorporation as the ‘men of the mystery of mercery in the city of York’. However, mounting resentment towards the influence of the London mercers in the affairs of the company overseas was another aspect of the well-documented economic tensions between the capital and England's ‘second city’ in a period of contraction.

Sutton's study is also one of several articles on the subject of urban conflict. Two accounts of urban faction in the Low Countries appeared this year. In ‘Parties and factions in the late Middle Ages: the case of the Hoeken and Kabeljauwen in The Hague (1483–1515)’, J. of Medieval History, 35 (2009), 97–111, Serge ter Braake explores the networks of the two groupings known as the ‘Hoeken’ (Hooks) and ‘Kabeljauwen’ (Codfish), whose periodic clashes overshadowed political life in the county of Holland between the mid-fourteenth and the late fifteenth centuries. In ‘Factionalism and state power in the Flemish revolt (1482–1492)’, J. of Social History, 42 (2009), 1009–39, Jelle Haemers provides a case study of the factional struggle which erupted in violence in Bruges during the minority of the count of Flanders, Philip the Fair. The factions involved here were the ‘Monetans’, who endorsed the regency of Archduke Maximilian of Austria, and the ‘Philippins’, consisting of the urban elites of Ghent, Bruges and Ypres, who preferred the existence of a regency council to govern the county of Flanders in Philip's name. The methodology employed by the two authors is the same: both favour network analysis in order to ask questions about the way in which particular political groupings functioned and the nature and density of the ties which bound members together. Ter Braake shows the continuing political influence of the networks of the Kabeljauwen after the end of violence in the 1480s, but there are problems with his approach. His starting point, like that of Haemers, is that ‘parties’ and ‘factions’ are defined by the pursuit of political power. What distinguishes them is the level at which political power is sought. Thus, for ter Braake, parties operate at the level of ‘a kingdom, duchy, county or another more or less stable political unit’ (101), whereas factions function at a local level, such as in a city. When the focus is a town like The Hague, which was an urban community in its own right with municipal offices but which was also the centre of ducal government, how is it possible to differentiate between faction and party? A much more convincing argument is set out by Haemers, who combines social theory and empirical research to good effect. He defines faction as a ‘cluster of social capital’ (1012) in order to explain how the fragility of the state structure in Flanders, particularly the quasi-ducal regime of Archduke Maximilian in the 1480s, provided opportunities for a faction in the city of Bruges to assume power. Local networks in Bruges configured around the distribution of ducal patronage were no match for factions built around the more durable ties of marriage and kinship, a shared interest in international trade and a common political ideology (corporatism). Haemers concludes that, if the ‘weakness of the central state apparatus stimulated factional struggle. . .factional conflict would not have taken place without the presence of a cohesive alternative political body in town’ (1028). In fourteenth-century Bologna, as Shona Kelly Wray demonstrates in ‘Instruments of concord: making peace and settling disputes through a notary in the city and contado of late medieval Bologna’, J. of Social History, 42 (2009), 733–60, this kind of factional feuding was negotiated and resolved through the many different types of notarial instruments available to the inhabitants of the city and the surrounding countryside. The main point of Wray's article, however, is that the vast majority of these notarial contracts – certainly those formulated under the terms of the instrumentum pacis et concordie to reconcile parties after violence – were made to deal with the quotidian problems of personal assault involving the citizens of Bologna. The instruments of peace were drawn up by notaries, often after the issue of a sentence of banishment by the court of the podestà. In the pax the victims of crime gave their formal consent to the cancellation of the sentence and their agreement not to pursue any further the case against the offending parties. Wray makes the compelling argument that these notarial acts were the product of a particular urban view of justice, in which an intense desire for peace and stability within the urban communities of neighbourhood and parish overrode the formal censure of the law.

The preservation of the harmonia civitatis and the necessity of peaceful cohabitation are also emphasized by Jörg Rogge in ‘Reformieren und Regulieren: Semantik und Praxis von Reformen in Spätmittelalterlichen Städten’, Historisches Jahrbuch, 128 (2008), 7–23. In exploring the ideas and practices of social and political reform and regulation in German cities at the end of the Middle Ages, Rogge focuses upon the didactic texts of a range of writers – clerics, laymen and jurists – all of whom had a degree of practical engagement with the governance of the cities in which they lived and all of whom produced work, both in verse and prose, designed principally for the benefit of town councillors. If all of these writers acknowledged the need for reform to ensure the maintenance of civic concord, there was disagreement about its meaning. To Johannes Rothe, the Eisenach cleric, notary and chronicler, and the Brunswick tax official, judge and chronicler, Hermann Bote, the well-being of the urban community was dependent first and foremost upon the moral integrity of the members of civic government, and reform, therefore, was only conceived in terms of the improvement of the morality and conduct of those who bore political power within the city. In contrast, Johann Oldendorp (1480–1567), an educated jurist and chief magistrate of Rostock, was of the view that reform could involve changes to the city's laws and, more significantly, to the urban constitution. Oldendorp's reform ideas were very much in keeping with contemporary practice, which saw the adaptation and codification of existing customary urban law, for example at Frankfurt in 1509, and the fundamental overhaul of the tax system, legal system and the rules concerning election to civic office, such as at Freiburg im Breisgau in 1476. These are examples of what Kurt Andermann, in ‘Mit furderung des gemeynen nutz: Die Badner Stadtordnung von 1507’, Zeitschrift für die Geschichte des Oberrheins, 156 (2008), 167–78, calls the ‘frenzy of regulation’ (Regulierungswut), partly inspired by the increasing reception of Roman law, which characterized the history of German cities in this period (173). Andermann's article is about one particular example of urban constitutional reform, which was engineered in the interests not only of the urban community but of the lord of the town: the forty-two articles of by-laws (Stadtordnung), covering fifteen sides of parchment, which were granted by Margrave Christoph of Baden to the town of Baden in 1507. Baden was a fairly unremarkable seigneurial town in the Middle Ages, and although it was described explicitly as a city (Stadt) from the late thirteenth century, it had none of the urban privileges associated with this status. This situation changed only in the early sixteenth century, by which time the margraves of Baden had made the town their permanent seat of power: the citizens were given exemption from direct taxation and labour services imposed by the lord, as well as confirmation of their possession of common lands and revenue. In this sense, the statutes were indeed for the ‘promotion of the common good’ (furderung des gemeynen nutz), in the wording of the preface to the document. And yet, as Andermann reveals, behind the rhetoric of urban freedom and community, the margrave made sure that he and his successors would profit from the common good of the citizens. Changes to the town's legal and constitutional structure were expected to make Baden more attractive to skilled immigrants. This newly enlarged urban population was to pay the long series of indirect taxes, levied on all the necessities of daily life, which were carefully recorded in the 1507 by-laws.

The 1507 charter did not concede communal autonomy in the modern sense. James Lee makes a similar point about the meaning of urban charters in ‘Urban policy and urban political culture: Henry VII and his towns’, Historical Research, 82 (2009), 493–510. Lee concentrates upon the ‘constitutional development’ of the major urban provincial centres of York, Bristol and Exeter, and uses the evidence of charters granted by the king to conclude that the period between the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries witnessed the emergence of a ‘distinctively oligarchic urban political culture’ (507), which both addressed Henry VII's overriding need for loyalty and consolidated the power of civic rulers. This was a profound shift towards urban oligarchy in the sense that the role of the commons in the election of the leading civic officials was dramatically reduced; extensive legal, political and administrative power, derived from the crown, was further concentrated in the hands of a small group of men; and civic rulers were able to control information and deploy propaganda to justify their rule to their urban ‘subjects’. More satisfying than this curiously one-sided picture of a passive and inert urban public are two articles by Helen Carrel on the notion of ‘publicity’ in English urban political life. In ‘Disputing legal privilege: civic relations with the church in late medieval England’, J. of Medieval History, 35 (2009), 279–96, Carrel turns not to charters per se, but to the myriad ways in which provincial town governments ‘sought to bolster civic authority’ between the mid-fourteenth and late fifteenth centuries (279). Threats to their position came from the existence of rival corporate bodies within the town, especially religious institutions whose financial, territorial and jurisdictional privileges frequently clashed directly with those claimed by civic authorities. Carrel provides a fascinating account, building upon earlier work by Gervase Rosser in particular, of the extent to which such disputes compelled urban rulers to make their authority public through the commissioning of civic records and custumals testifying to the longevity of the town's corporate history and designed to appeal to a wide public audience through the use of civic ritual such as ridings of the city boundaries, which reinforced their legal authority territorially. Carrel's choice of vocabulary is especially interesting: town leaders were engaged in ‘public relations exercises’ (288); they ‘advertised’ their disputes with ecclesiastical franchises in order to ‘gain crowd support’ (282); and they worked to maintain ‘popularity’ (295). In highlighting the fragile position of those who enjoyed political power, Carrel presents a different conception of the character of urban political culture from that of Lee. In ‘The ideology of punishment in late medieval English towns’, Social History, 34 (2009), 301–20, Carrel uses similar language to show how the choice of public punishments, imposed in provincial borough courts, reflected the desire of civic government to ‘project’ its ‘leadership to the wider population of the town’ (302) and to prove to the urban inhabitants that it was serious about its commitment to rule for the common good. Carrel's two articles should find a receptive audience among historians of late medieval and early modern German cities, where the concepts of ‘public opinion’, ‘publicity’ and, most of all, the ‘public sphere’ (Öffentlichkeit) have received considerable attention in recent years.

In 1405 the city of Paris constituted an urban public, whose support John the Fearless, duke of Burgundy, actively canvassed in his feud with the duke of Orleans. Christine de Pizan responded to this period of escalating military and political tension in and around the French capital by writing the Book of the Body Politic, an example of the genre of princely advice literature known as ‘mirrors for princes’. In ‘The political significance of Christine de Pizan's third estate in the Livre du corps de policie’, J. of Medieval History, 35 (2009), 385–98, the French literary scholar, Tracy Adams, locates Christine de Pizan's discussion of the ‘universal people’, the third estate in the society of orders, firmly within the context of early fifteenth-century Paris. Anxious about the threat of urban revolt, de Pizan identified the ‘universal people’ with the different sections of Parisian society: the clergy were the sometimes unruly members of the university, who were now encouraged to forge an alliance with the ruling citizens and wealthy merchants of the city to ensure that the artisans and labourers did not rebel. Paris was, therefore, a highly variegated ‘public’, of whose constituent parts Christine de Pizan was well aware. In arguing for a Parisian as well as a royal and aristocratic audience for the text, Adams provides some exciting ideas about the possible dissemination of political ideas within an urban milieu and about the place of towns within the wider polity. Although some of those who have contributed to the field might not see their work in this light, this year's publications as a whole reveal the flourishing state of urban political history.

1500–1800

Three articles address the causes and consequences of English economic growth in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with urban dimensions and implications. In ‘Trading options before Black-Scholes: a study of the market in late seventeenth-century London’, Economic History Rev., 62 (2009), 8–30, A. Murphy employs information derived from the ledgers of broker Charles Blunt to explore the foundations of the 1690s metropolitan stock market growth. He concludes that Blunt's business helps to demonstrate how the city grew into the dominant financial centre of Europe through a multitude of risk-assessed investment strategies supported by wealthy merchants and a competitive public culture centred upon banks, coffee houses and business networks. Additional reasons for economic growth are emphasized in D. Bogart, ‘Turnpike trusts and property income: new evidence on the effects of transport improvements and legislation in eighteenth-century England’, Economic History Rev., 62 (2009), 128–52. For Bogart, it was turnpike trusts, created by acts of parliament and financed through numerous local and national initiatives, which helped to ensure British commercial expansion. He reveals that turnpikes had a considerable impact upon local and national economies, raising revenue for investors and landowners, facilitating improved cultural and commercial communications and boosting yields from land rents and ultimately the national economy. Finally, in ‘Material progress and the challenge of affluence in seventeenth-century England’, Economic History Rev., 62 (2009), 576–603, P. Slack examines how recognition and celebration of material progress grew in the period, despite moral and political concerns about the pernicious consequences of the spread of luxury and affluence. Inspired by the celebration of progress and improvement in agriculture and not retarded by unresolved moral condemnation and debates, national material advance came to be regarded as a special English achievement to be celebrated in the face of international threats, especially from the French.

The factors behind urban economic growth are also addressed in B.A. Szelenyi, ‘The new burgher revolution in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century partitioned Hungary’, Social History, 34 (2009), 232–49. Szelenyi contends that the contributions of historians specializing in northern and western countries such as Alexander Cowan, Jan De Vries, Christopher Friedrichs and Mack Walker have ‘remarkably enhanced our understanding of. . .urban life in Europe’. However, he claims that in contrast ‘unfortunately, far less attention’ has been given to East Central European urban affairs which he attributes to the ‘inaccurate view that towns in East Central Europe stopped developing in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’ due to the domination of the nobility. In the case of Hungary this economic, political and cultural decline has, of course, been additionally attributed to the partial Ottoman conquest during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Szelenyi challenges this urban decline thesis by arguing that in fact Hungarian towns experienced profound changes, new laws being introduced to redefine the concept of private property helping to contribute to greater social mobility. He argues that the Reformation hastened the increase of literacy, establishing printing presses, spreading ideas and helped to create a new educated class, whilst enterprising burghers enriched by the war economy created new markets and developed commercial and mining interests. Although they remained overwhelmingly small and much more research is required, far from being excluded due to their proximity to the Ottoman frontier, towns within the partitioned Hungarian state therefore participated in pan-European economic, political and cultural changes.

The long-term development of capital markets and their varied impact upon economic growth between the eastern European and eastern Asian worlds is examined in two articles. In ‘Changes in factor markets in the Ottoman Empire, 1500–1800’, Continuity and Change, 24 (2009), 107–36, S. Pamuk explores the development of Ottoman economic institutions in the early modern era in the context of broader social structural, economic and political changes, also drawing some comparisons with nineteenth-century society. He argues that markets and producers such as merchants had limited power and faced a considerable challenge from state ownership of land and urban guilds which tended to put a break on the growth of the private sector. It is striking that where challenges occurred within the Ottoman economy, these usually emanated from towns in some form or other. Most of the moneylenders – which included Islamic as well as Christian and Jewish individuals – were located in the towns, which played a crucial role in economic change and encouraged changes to state borrowing. The sale of urban lands was tolerated and challenged state land control whilst town guilds emerge as major players in local urban government, regulating labour, controlling markets and ensuring supplies for government and military. By comparison, according to P. Boomgaard in ‘Labour, land and capital markets in early-modern southeast Asia from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century’, Continuity and Change, 24 (2009), 55–78, in most of this part of the globe, factor markets did not really exist until the nineteenth century. Taking a long time frame of four centuries, Boomgaard argues that whilst factor markets existed in some more developed areas of south-east Asia, in the more remote and rural areas there was little market in land, no institutional framework and no interest from absolutist rulers. However, in towns in Java and the Red River Delta, and areas where western colonies were established, the rates of capital were cheaper, labour could be more readily hired and land bought and sold as a commodity.

Even in established towns within the more highly urbanized regions of northern and western Europe however, economic growth was not inevitable. In ‘Club goods and inefficient institutions: why Danzig and Lubeck failed in the early-modern period’, Economic History Rev., 62 (2009), 604–28, E. Lindberg tries to explain why two major medieval centres declined in economic importance and became marginalized in European trading networks. Dominated by influential guilds, Danzig (modern-day Gdansk) and Lubeck were outshone by rising northern and western European trading towns such as Amsterdam and Hamburg, which dominated commercial networks rather than nation states per se. Instead of the privileges accorded to merchants and regulated by the guilds facilitating economic growth, Lindberg maintains that they resulted in what he calls ‘club goods’ which benefited small coteries rather than the wider urban and hinterland citizenry. According to Lindberg, club goods originating from feudal and ecclesiastical controls occupied a middle position between private and public goods. In contrast to Lubeck and Danzig, at Hamburg and Amsterdam there were many fewer guild restrictions (such as lengthy periods of apprenticeship), and a rapidly expanding urban population; Hamburg became a leading north European financial and mercantile centre with a large-scale economic structure which even rivalled the position of Amsterdam at the centre of the Dutch empire. Assessment of differential rates of growth and social change partly depends, of course, upon the production of reliable quantifiable data. The problems of calculating early modern populations are evident in J.S. Moore, ‘The mid-Tudor population crisis in midland England, 1548–1563’, Midland History, 34 (2009), 44–57, which examines some of the main sources for determining regional demographic history. Deciding that subsidy assessments and muster rolls are too fragmentary, Moore shows that as many midland parish registers do not begin until the 1550s, other sources are required to determine the extent of this population depreciation. He concludes that chantry certificates from 1546–48 and ecclesiastical census data from 1563 serve the purpose, compares his results with data from other regions and strives to eliminate recording errors, concluding that the region did indeed suffer markedly from the same kind of population decline prevalent in other areas of mid-Tudor England.

Two studies emphasize the importance of military campaigns in the formation of early modern national identities in relatively urbanized northern European states. In ‘Scots, Britons and Europeans: Scottish military service, c. 1739–1783’, Historical Research, 82 (2009), 114–30, S. Conway examines Scottish and Irish military campaigns, contending that whilst these did help to forge national identities, soldiers saw themselves as part of a much wider European fraternity of military men. In ‘War and garrison towns in the Dutch Republic: the cases of Gorinchem and Doesburg (c. 1570 – c. 1660)’, Urban History, 36 (2009), 3–23, G. Vermeesch explores various aspects of soldiery during the Dutch revolt against Spanish rule. She examines how money was raised through taxation for military campaigns (using taxation records and the timing of payments), the rules surrounding the billeting of troops and how they were organized and the management and construction of fortifications. The main focus is two garrison towns, Gorinchem and Doesburg, which according to Vermeesch demonstrate that the stationing of soldiers, the conduct of the war and Dutch systems of funding and managing warfare caused far less social unrest and opposition than in other contemporary European states. She argues that this was a result of the Dutch political system which allowed greater autonomy to local urban government; it is striking that despite this, the Dutch were still able to co-ordinate an effective campaign against the more powerful and centralized Spanish state. Vermeesch concludes that it was ‘essentially urban dynamics’ which shaped the new Dutch state and created such a great power ‘in the field of European politics’ which had some similarities with the English and French experience, but significant differences. A different view of the impact of warfare upon local communities is evident in G. Aaron, ‘Finance, localism and military representation in the army of the earl of Essex (June–December 1642)’, Historical J., 52 (2009), 879–98. According to Aaron, work on the ‘county community’ during the English Civil War, and tensions between centre and periphery, has focused exclusively upon forms of political and cultural representation. However, local communities also sought to achieve agency within the wider war effort by lobbying for military representation. In return for financial contributions, supporters expected recompense from the units they raised, usually by influencing officer nomination. The difficulties faced by the earl of Essex's army during 1642 as loyalties disintegrated due to lack of sympathy with national objectives reveal the problems that confounding such expectations could engender and demonstrates, as the Dutch appreciated, the importance of localism in driving early modern military structures.

Studies of protests and risings illuminate the forces of disorder and order in early modern societies, including two articles which focus upon troubles engendered by religious reforms and enclosure. In ‘New light on the commotion time of 1549: the Oxfordshire rising’, Historical Research, 82 (2009), 655–76, K. Halliday analyses how a force of several hundred armed Oxfordshire commoners rose in the summer of 1549, marching from south-east to north-west of the county, without any gentry instigation. In fact the commoners targeted country parks as they passed, only subsiding when they reached Chipping Norton where, of course, they were much less likely to face open military challenge. A fear had grown that church goods were to be taken by the government commissioners under the recent parish-based Edwardian reforms, and Halliday suggests that the fact that they went to Chipping Norton, the most important local urban administrative centre, rather than London distinguishes them from the kind of hostility that had greeted Henry VIII's monastic appropriations and the Pilgrimage of Grace. In ‘Imagining insurrection in seventeenth-century England: representations of the midland rising of 1607’, History Worksop J., 66 (2009), 21–61, S. Hindle explores discourses surrounding hunger, protest, punishment and paternalism in connection with the episode which centred upon Leicestershire, Northamptonshire and Warwickshire hostility to enclosure. Hindle argues that a depiction of a rebellion triggered by corn shortages in Shakespeare's Coriolanus, first performed in 1608, represents an attempt to dramatize an insurrection similar to the midland rising. This illuminates the arguments of the King James I and his representatives (including Francis Bacon), the rebel leader John Reynolds and clergyman Robert Wilkinson, who Hindle argues were inspired by a shared stock of biblically inspired and informed idioms, whatever their political differences.

Resistance to the king and his favourites could also, of course, occur from county nobility and gentry, as A. Wall demonstrates in ‘The great purge of 1625: the late Murraine amongst the gentlemen of the peace’, Historical Research, 82 (2009), 677–93. Wall suggests that this purge was much more important than has previously been supposed, arguing that between 30 and 40 per cent of JPs seem to have been dismissed because they had dared to oppose King Charles I and the duke of Buckingham. Social and political problems could also be prevented by recognition from elites of commoner's rights and privileges as T. Demoor reveals in ‘Avoiding tragedies: a Flemish common and its commoners under the pressure of social and economic change during the eighteenth century’, Economic History Rev., 62 (2009), 1–22. Demoor argues that despite the wide application of the metaphor of ‘the tragedy of the commons’, there is little historical literature that points to the weaknesses of its historical basis. There is, however, sufficient qualitative and quantitative evidence to prove that commons were well regulated and organized in order to achieve a sustainable management, which also frequently respected the needs and wishes of its commoners. Focusing on accounts books and other archival resources, this case study of a common in Flanders during the eighteenth century demonstrates how efficiently and effectively commons could be utilized as part of the local economy; book-keeping and other archival sources suggest that greater emphasis needs to be placed on the co-operative, efficient and sustainable elements of commons rather than simply their part in social conflict and tension.

In ‘Plebeian cultures in early modern England: thirty-five years after E. P. Thompson’, Social History, 34 (2009), 472–6, M. Hailwood and B. Waddell offer a summary of changes in the subject three and a half decades after Thompson published his pioneering ‘Patrician society, plebeian culture’, in the light of a conference at Warwick University in February 2009. Although the panels on conceptual paradigms for early modern social relations, the economic lives of early modern plebeians and plebeian responses to power and authority in the period did not explicitly adopt an urban dimension, such an approach would clearly shed light upon the issues discussed. For instance, analyses of wages and social relations and economy and place, custom and memory in relation to conflicts over fuel rights from an urban instead of a rural perspective would help to uncover different kinds of relations between social groups whilst helping to divide up Thompson's ‘catch-all’ Marxist-inspired concepts of plebeian and patrician. Emphasis upon the relatively concentrated spaces of towns and urban institutions would also help shift the focus away from too much attention to riots in relation to food and common rights and towards other geographically sensitive analyses of social tensions, protests and popular politics. Early modern Colchester, for instance, seemed to witness substantial unrest in almost every generation between the mid-sixteenth to the middle of the eighteenth centuries.

Sixteenth-century religious politics feature in two articles which, whilst their focus is not primarily urban, illustrate the growing importance of towns as centres for religious reform and the dissemination of religious ideas and practises. In ‘England's reconciliation with Rome: a news event in early modern Europe’, Historical Research, 82 (2009), C. Streckfuss challenges the traditional historiography of Mary Tudor's religious policies which he contends has been distorted through dependency upon hostile accounts and Protestant propaganda. By showing that the impact of Mary's decision to return to the Roman fold resonated throughout Catholic Europe, he reveals how networks of Catholic propaganda disseminated and celebrated English affairs. In the different climate of her successor Elizabeth's reign, as P. Collinson shows in ‘The politics of religion and the religion of politics in Elizabethan England’, Historical Research, 82 (2009), 74–92, despite her avowed attempts to reconcile her Catholic and Protestant subjects, the religious practices defined by the Act of Uniformity and Book of Common Prayer were ordained as compulsory. Religion and politics were inextricably intertwined, church and state being analogously structured, and despite considerable resistance, even ostensibly voluntary and private acts of worship were the subject of government interference.

The importance of urban communities in driving early modern religious reforms – and as places of resistance to these – is also evident in J. Gregory, ‘“For all sorts and conditions of men”: the social life of the Book of Common Prayer during the long eighteenth century: or, bringing the history of religion and social history together’, Social History, 34 (2009), 29–54; M.E. Gabriella, ‘Tales of immoral friars: morality and religion in an early sixteenth-century Hungarian town’, Social History, 34 (2009); D. Postles, ‘Religion and uncertainty in four midland urban centres, c. 1529–1546’, Midland History, 34 (2009), 22–43; and J. Gregory, ‘Introduction: transforming the age of reason into an age of faiths: or, putting religions and beliefs (back) into the eighteenth century’, J. for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 32 (2009), 289–305. In his study of midland urban religion, Postles argues that local and regional urban studies focused on confessional and devotional practices can help to reveal the degree to which Catholicism retained its force and vitality in the wake of various somewhat contradictory Henrician policies. Responding to revisionist emphasis on the continuing power of Catholicism and post-revisionist challenges to this, Postles concludes that the local picture is mixed, illuminating geographical differences and how royal religious initiatives interfaced with local urban experiences. With regard to the eighteenth century, in both his papers on the Book of Common Prayer and broader religious experiences, Gregory argues that the importance of religious beliefs and practices needs to be re-appraised in the face of a historiography that has tended to identify internal organization and hierarchy with modernity, secularization and corruption and to emphasize their role in church and society as a whole rather than piety. With and without the Anglican Church there was a tremendous variety of religious experiences which impacted upon many aspects of the economy, society and culture, including many forms of dissent, Evangelicalism and Wesleyanism. Such an emphasis breaks down the traditional polarity between secularization and modernity on the one hand and religion and tradition on the other, highlighting the vitality of lay experiences and pressure for change from below.

Oppressive aspects of justice administration and punishment are examined in J. White, ‘Pain and degradation in Georgian London: life in the Marshalsea Prison’, History Workshop J., 68 (2009), 69–98. White illuminates the misery of the experience of prisoners incarcerated in one of the most notorious metropolitan jails in which systems of corruption operated through favoured, powerful and wealthy criminals openly bribing turnkeys and constables. One of his most striking conclusions is that Georgian attempts to reform the prisons including Oglethorpe's Gaols Committee of 1729–30, which was celebrated at the time, actually did little to improve the lot of most prisoners forced to experience the full misery and brutality of Georgian justice and punishment. The system of bribery and corruption continued largely unabated and various acts intended to ameliorate the condition of debtors made little impact because of the dependency upon bribery, corruption and petty placement within the prison system. He suggests that this helps to explain why the Gordon rioters were so eager to attack the notorious London jails in 1780, including torching Newgate, the Fleet, the Kings Bench, the Borough Clink, the Southwark New Gaol and the Surrey Bridewell; they would also have demolished Marshalsea were it not for military intervention. He concludes that the gaol system continued to exist in this form until the reform campaigns of Howard and others towards the end of the eighteenth century, a ‘necklace of pain at the heart of Georgian London’ that ‘continued to cast its gloomy shadow over London life’. The extent to which early modern English government could intervene is evident in M. Dorey, ‘Controlling corruption: regulating meat consumption as a preventative to plague in seventeenth-century London’, Urban History, 36 (2009), 24–41.

Issues of gender and relationships between the sexes in public and private places in are explored in a series of papers. K. Colleran, ‘Scampanata at the widows’ windows: a case-study of sound and ritual insult in cinquecento Florence’, Urban History, 36 (2009), 359–78; B. Capp, ‘Bigamous marriage in early-modern England’, Historical J., 52 (2009), 537–56; and W. Johnston, ‘Prophecy, patriarchy, and violence in the early-modern household: the revelations of Anne Wentworth’, J. of Family History, 34 (2009), 344–68, all examine different ways in which men abused women and the urban-centred legal and institutional frameworks that strove to regulate and sometimes punish such behaviour. Johnston shows how the apostate Baptist prophet Anne Wentworth articulated a series of revelations to King Charles II and others and published a series of pamphlets asserting her gender role and status within the home against forceful and sometimes violent efforts on the part of her husband and others to silence her. In ‘“The reckoning”: disorderly women, informing constables and the Westminster justices, 1727–33’, Social History, 34 (2009), 409–27, H. Shore reveals how women whose behaviour transcended the norms in early Georgian society were policed and punished. Colleran uses the story of Piero, a serial flirt, punished for noisy, lewd behaviour outside a widow's residence in Florence in 1553, to reveal various ‘sonic strategies of ritual insult and abuse’ used by early modern urbanites. Deliberately using literary devices to step outside of ‘academic prose conventions. . .to make serious historiographical arguments’, the study also interrogates relationships between aurality and spatiality in late Renaissance Florence. Colleran likens Piero's behaviour to ‘house-scorning’, concluding that the story demonstrates how the walls of the Orbatello enclosed district ‘were constructed as social barriers’ as much as being physical boundaries. Similarly, the ‘liminal space of the gate and the street could be appropriated, contested and gendered through words, gestures and sounds’. The abuse of women by men, and occasionally men by women, is also evident in Capp's study of bigamy in late Tudor and Stuart England which reveals that whilst most cases in the ecclesiastical and secular court records involved scheming and sometimes unlucky males, a few were serial offenders. As bigamy moved from being only a religious offence into being a problem for the civil courts, many women were caught out by male offenders, and faced considerable struggles restoring their reputations within local communities and dealing with their own feelings of guilt and shame.

Changing perceptions and experiences of the eighteenth-century home and gender relations are the subject of V. Alayrac-Fielding ‘“Frailty, thy name is China”: women, chinoiserie and the threat of low culture in eighteenth-century England’, Women's History Rev., 18 (2009), 659–68; V.B. Conger, ‘“There is graite odds between a man's being at home and a broad”: Deborah Read Franklin and the eighteenth-century home’, Gender and History, 21 (2009), 592–607; and K. Harvey, ‘Men making home: masculinity and domesticity in eighteenth-century Britain’, Gender and History, 21 (2009), 520–40. Alayrac-Fielding shows how encouraged by the activities of the East India Company, the market for Indian goods increased and reached a height by the mid-eighteenth century. She contends that the prevalence of exotic Chinese goods helped to encourage the feminization of the home as these came to be regarded as the height of taste and fashion. A different aspect of the female presence within domestic life is the subject of Conger's analysis of the experiences of Benjamin Franklin's wife when he was away during his long absences in England between the 1750s and 1770s. During these Deborah Read Franklin became the public persona of the Franklin household. Utilizing the correspondence between the Franklins, Conger contends that Deborah was both an active and a passive participant in gender norms who responded closely and carefully to her husband's detailed instructions but was also prepared actively to organize the defence of the house against stamp act rioters in 1765. Rather than dealing with an absent male, Harvey strives to put men back into the Georgian household from which she argues they have been too readily excluded, arguing that within the home public and private worlds were conflated rather than separated.

Finally, two articles illuminate different aspects of healthcare in Georgian society. In ‘Health care in the Georgian household of Sir William and Lady Hannah East’, Historical Research, 82 (2009), 694–714, J.R. Michael examines one late Georgian family's experience of medicine. Michael utilizes accounts of symptoms and treatment experienced by Sir William East, baronet, and his wife Lady Hannah East in her personal journal between 1791 and 1792. Hannah East's problems and her husband's struggle with gout reveal much about the kind of treatments advocated by physicians and the way that these were regarded by Georgians on the receiving end. In ‘Medical advertising and trust in late Georgian England’, Urban History, 36 (2009), 359–78, on the other hand, Hannah Barker examines cultures of trust in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century English towns. Medical products were some of the first to be standardized and nationally marked, and focusing on the promotion of medicine through newspaper advertisements in Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds and Sheffield, she considers the role of such promotions in forming Roy Porter's medical marketplace. The problems faced by advertisers are evident in one for Jesuit's Drops from the Leeds Intelligencer of 1820, which, after claiming that these were perfect for ‘Stranguary, gleets, and weakness of the kidneys or the bladder’, urged that purchasers needed to take care because of the many ‘unsafe and dangerous counterfeits’ being foisted upon the public. She concludes that their efficacy derived from an appeal to trust amongst all social groups rather than merely the elite or wealthy middling sort in the form of personal testimonials. She associates the changes in medical advertising with other aspects of the Georgian consumer revolution, including the appearance of new kinds of shops with characteristic windows and other means of the marketing and promotion of goods. Rather than an appeal to external authorities or status, the personal testimonials were embedded within more traditional forms of reputation secured through friends, family and business connections within local urban communities. Similarly, whilst Hannah and William East were able to take advantage of the ministrations of physicians, support from personal relationships between the spouses, within their family and from servants and neighbours was equally important. Given the differences between Michael's and Barker's subject matter and approaches, it is striking that despite the emphasis upon the novel ways of marketing medicine in modern society, both conclude that such personal networks and relationships within local communities remained crucial.

Post-1800

It is appropriate and perhaps not coincidental that in 2009, the year in which Berlin celebrated the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the wall which bisected the city for twenty-eight years and symbolized the division of Cold War Europe, histories of the urbanization of Berlin in the modern period feature significantly in the periodical literature. Studies of the city range from Carolyn Loeb's survey of public sculpture in the Berlin's urban landscape, J. of Urban History, 35, 6 (2009), 853–78, to Moritz Föllmer's examination of ‘Suicide and crisis in Weimar Berlin’, Central European History, 42, 2 (2009), 195–221. Loeb's article examines the subject, siting and composition of a number of public sculptures put up in the city since 1987, the year which marked the city's 750th anniversary and prompted a new phase of public artwork designed to reflect the history and identity of Berlin. She suggests that the landmark events of the late 1980s in Berlin and the early years of German reunification created a momentum for the production of public sculpture designed to symbolize new beginnings as well as to reflect past events. A very different image of Berlin emerges from the pages of Föllmer's article on suicide in the Weimar period. In Germany as a whole, the suicide rate rose by 11.9 per cent between 1929 and 1932. Föllmer uses a series of case studies to examine the circumstances surrounding suicides in Berlin and concludes that they cannot be understood in any general sense as a response to ‘crisis’. Berlin was a heterogeneous place where suicides occurred in a range of diverse circumstances. Although it had a reputation as a place where alternative lifestyles could flourish, many of the suicides studied in this article reveal a city where people struggled often unsuccessfully to fulfil their lifestyle aspirations. Föllmer's study tells us much about how the inhabitants of Berlin found it difficult to reconcile their expectations of life with the realities and limitations of their environment.

Other German cities also feature in the periodical literature. The July number of German History, 27, 3 (2009), is a special issue on the history and historiography of sport in Germany and contains a selection of articles studying the role of sport in German society and culture from the early modern period through to the twentieth century. David Imhoof's contribution on sports in Göttingen in the Weimar and Nazi eras (374–94) has an overtly urban dimension. The university town supported a broad range of sports clubs which had their origins in the culture of middle-class and elite voluntary associations. The town was not heavily industrialized and developed fewer workers’ sports clubs in the inter-war period than did other parts of Germany. Imhoof examines the control over sports clubs exercised by the civic authorities in the town and the development in their membership and activities during the Third Reich. The urban case-study approach to this subject is important, he argues, because ‘local conditions shaped Germans’ experiences of broad developments and centralized dictates’ (394). Imhoof's article demonstrates the potential value of closer dialogue between sports history and urban history and the point is reinforced by John Chi-Kit Wong in a study of professional hockey and urban development in early twentieth-century Vancouver, Urban History Rev., 38, 1 (2009), 3–14. Wong investigates the building of the Vancouver Arena as a base for the city's professional hockey club in 1911. A product of private enterprise, Wong shows that in this period in Vancouver's history, sport was not part of the urban planning agenda of municipal leaders and that individual sports promoters did not seek public subsidy for what they viewed as a business venture.

Volume 34, 2 (2009) of the London J. is another sport special issue which has much to offer the urban historian. In his editorial remarks (79–80) guest editor Matthew Taylor suggests that British historians have been slower to link urban history and sporting history than their North American counterparts. The articles in this collection use the context of London as host city for the 2012 Olympic Games to explore the impact of the sporting ‘mega-event’ on its host environment. Articles examining the circumstances surrounding the planning and staging of the 1908, 1948 and 2012 London Olympics reveal that the urban legacy of the event is about much more than just improved infrastructures and facilities. John Gold and Margaret Gold's contribution, ‘Future indefinite? London 2012, the spectre of retrenchment and the challenge of Olympic sports legacy’, 179–96, considers the conflicting demands on the London Olympic Committee to organize a value-for-money games while at the same time enhancing the status of the host city on the global stage. They review the promised regeneration benefits of the Lea Valley district which were trumpeted in the initial Olympic bid document, against the realities of providing the long-term finance to support any sustained legacy. Overall this collection presents the ‘Olympic effect’ as a decidedly mixed blessing for any host city and one which carried with it considerable burdens as well as potential status enhancement in the eyes of the outside world.

The outsiders’ perspective is also central to Gavin Daly's study of Lisbon, History, 94, 4 (2009), 461–82. He reconstructs impressions of Lisbon from personal accounts, letters and memoirs written by British soldiers arriving during the early nineteenth-century Peninsular War. As the article title, ‘A dirty, indolent, priest-ridden city’, indicates, their writings give a generally negative impression of the city, but rather than accepting these responses at face-value, Daly seeks to provide a cultural explanation for them. Although the soldiers’ accounts provide a fascinating first-hand impression of early nineteenth-century Lisbon, he cautions that their critical comments may have been intended as much to assert their own cultural superiority as to reflect the realities of the place in which they found themselves. Lisbon, he asserts, symbolized what they regarded as Portuguese backwardness in ‘all the arts, science, and the comforts of life’ (482) and was used to reinforce their belief in British, and thereby their own, superiority in these spheres.

While Daly's article has much to tell us about cultural distinctions in an urban environment, other contributions to the periodical literature in 2009 deal with evidence of class distinctions in urban society. Nick Hayes, in his study of housing in the provincial English city of Nottingham in the first half of the twentieth century, Urban History, 36, 1 (2009), 113–40, questions whether the home can be used as a reliable indicator of class status in this period. His research shows that the level of income spent on housing depended in part on a person's position in the social hierarchy, with lower-middle-class residents often spending proportionally more on their dwelling as an indicator status than people of higher social position. Martin Gustavsson, Orsi Husz and Johan Söderberg are also interested in the identification of social class groups in their study of Stockholm in the twentieth century, Scandinavian Economic History Rev., 57, 1 (2009), 88–105. Their study of the wealthy in the Swedish capital from 1915 to 1965 is based on data from the Stockholm Directory of Wealth, which recorded all households paying wealth tax – some 4 per cent of the total households in the city throughout their study period. They acknowledge that the identification of a bourgeoisie based purely on income is not without its problems, and read alongside Nick Hayes's study on Nottingham, the difficulty of using any single indicator to denote status is revealed. Hayes’ research suggests that domestic property values provide potentially more useful markers of social class than other commonly used status indicators such as wealth at death, but for Gustavsson, Husz and Söderberg, the availability of a single wealth indicator allows them to track changes in wealth levels over time. They conclude that there was ‘a striking decline in overall mean wealth (58 per cent between 1914 and 1963), with the most dramatic changes between 1928 and 1963’ (105), although the social status of the wealthiest Stockholmers in the same period remained fairly constant.

Similar to the Stockholm study, at least in its deployment of the sources and methods of economic history in a study of urbanization, is Robert Lewis’ article on Chicago and its printing industry in the 1880–1950 period, Economic History Rev., 62, 2 (2009), 366–87. Using this case study, Lewis explores the concept of the ‘industrial district’ in North American cities and suggests that, although the idea of industrial districts is less developed in North America than in Europe, American cities such as Chicago, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh did develop regions which operated in a similar way to European industrial districts, with manufacturing taking place in the specified area, supported by capital, labour, knowledge networks and inter-dependent firms also located there. The study of such areas, he contends, allows historians to ‘delineate the relationship between space, place, and economy’ (367), linkages which are crucial to the appreciation of processes of urbanization in industrialized areas.

Attempts to plan and control the urban landscape form the focus of several articles dealing with urban history in the twentieth century. Planning Perspectives, as usual, carries much of interest to the historian of urbanization in the modern period with contributions, for example, from Peter J. Larkham on post-war planning in Chichester, Planning Perspectives, 24, 1 (2009), 51–71, and Noah Rubin's appraisal of Patrick Geddes in volume 24, 3 (2009), 349–66. But readers with an appetite for these studies would also do well to consider the offerings of a number of other journals. In particular, the fruits of Simon Pepper and Peter Richmond's AHRC-funded research on the early history of high-rise housing in Britain appears in the London J., 34, 1 (2009), 33–54. Their study focuses on the plans for the redevelopment of slum housing in Stepney in the 1920s and 1930s, and the debates and proposals which eventually led to the building of the six-storey John Scurr House in the deprived East London borough. Attitudes towards high-rise accommodation were heavily influenced by the favoured garden-suburb ideals of the period and met with considerable resistance from across the political spectrum as well as from potential residents, despite the creative attempts of architects to produce designs which borrowed from cottage architecture and attempted to minimize the impression of the buildings’ height.

In a very different setting, Michael Mann and Samiksha Sehrawat describe the process of urban afforestation in Delhi from the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Modern Asian Studies, 43, 2 (2009), 543–70. The development of urban forests have, they argue, been overlooked both by environmental and urban historians, yet in Delhi, the greening of the prominent ridge, flanking the city on its western side, was integral to the vision pursued by successive generations of colonial officials and planners. In particular, when the decision was taken to transfer the capital to Delhi in 1911, plans for the greening of the ridge intensified, influenced by the principles of English landscape gardening and conceived with the benefit of the white population most prominently in mind. In the course of their analysis the authors make some comparative references to urban afforestation schemes in Canberra, Australia, and Christchurch, New Zealand, and the provision of a reference section, listing the main primary and secondary sources, in addition to the article's footnotes, makes this a useful resource for the study of urban afforestation schemes.

The relationship between Britain and India, viewed from an urban perspective, also features in Sandip Hazareesingh's comparative study of the ports of Glasgow and Bombay in the period 1850–80, J. of Global History, 4, 1 (2009), 7–31. The article forms part of a special issue on ‘Commodities, empires and global history’ and began life as one of a series of papers presented at an international workshop on ‘Commodities of Empire’, run jointly by London Metropolitan University and the Open University. Hazareesingh's contribution on the development of Glasgow and Bombay as modern, global ports rejects the usual model of imperial centre and colonial periphery by which much of the economic and industrial development of the period is understood, and suggests instead that the spatial changes in the two port cities were ‘more or less simultaneous’ (9). By tracing the trading and commercial interests of a number of key firms and merchants, he demonstrates the interconnectedness of the two ports, while acknowledging that the process of port modernization was a more contested phenomenon in Bombay than in Glasgow.

Hazareesingh's article deals with many of the same issues raised by the guest editors and contributors to the special issue of Urban History on ‘Transnational urbanism in the Americas’, Urban History, 36, 2 (2009). Philip Ethington and Janice Reiff, in their introduction to the volume, explain how the concept for the special issue evolved from discussions among members of the journal's North American editorial board and subsequently through a panel convened at the European Urban History conference in Lyon in 2008. The articles and their accompanying multi-media companion encourage readers to confront questions of balance between local, regional and global in cities, and to think about what descriptors like ‘global’ and ‘transnational’ actually mean when applied by urban theorists.

The five issues of J. of Urban History for 2009 also offer some interesting clusters of articles dealing with common themes. The March volume, 35, 3 (2009), is a special issue on the theme of urban renewal. The focus of the contributions is the renewal of American cities after World War II when, according to guest editors Eric Avila and Mark Rose, ‘sweeping, top-down interventions on the landscape of American cities’ were attempted (344). As each of the article contributions reveals, race as a key factor influencing the re-shaping of American cities in the post-war period and the way in which different racial groups were affected by urban renewal strategies is a unifying theme running through the papers. In the July issue, J. of Urban History, 35, 5 (2009), a clutch of articles are grouped together in a ‘special section’ dealing with the impact and aftermath of hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and more generally in post-Civil Rights America. As Joe Trotter and Johanna Fernandez, the authors of the opening essay, 607–13, point out, comments on the hurricane and the subsequent relief operation have emanated from academic and public quarters in the years since the disaster, yet rarely have they attempted to interpret the event in a historical context, a lacuna which this collection attempts to redress.

The J. of Urban History also continues to offer some useful review essays, or survey pieces designed to provide readers with an overview of recent publications on particular urban themes. The review essay by Alberte Martínez and Jesús Mirás, 35, 2 (2009), 298–305, is one such example, assessing a number of recent publications dealing with the impact of transport on the Spanish cities of Valencia, Alicante, Bilbao and Granada. The emergent picture of urban transport in modern Spain reveals, predictably, the impact of tram and bus networks on the suburban spread of the cities, but also some stark differences in usage. The socially elite use of trams in most Spanish cities, for instance, contrasted with the picture in Bilbao where the development of early tram services linking residential, leisure and industrial areas of the city resulted in a more inclusive patronage of the tram system. It perhaps also helps explain why Bilbao became something of a leader in tramway development with the first electrified line, opened in 1907, and the first Spanish city to install trolley buses in 1940. For readers unable to access the full texts in Spanish, this is a welcome overview of how public transport systems developed to suit different urban environments in modern Spain.

It is private rather than public transport which occupies the attention of Bill Luckin and David Sheen in Cultural and Social History, 6, 2 (2009), 211–30. Their article proposes a new chronology for the history of motor transportation in twentieth-century Britain. The 1920–70 period was, they contend, an ‘early modern’ phase in the history of automobility when the needs of the motorist were championed ahead of those of the pedestrian and high accident rates were the norm. Their illustrative case study is the so-called ‘tragedy of the streets’ in Manchester from 1939 to 1943 when a combination of blackout conditions and the rise of heavy military vehicles on the streets contributed to a spiralling of road traffic deaths to well over 100 per year. The study provides some revealing insights into the priorities of local government authorities in British cities where aerial bombardment was a constant fear, and the disruptive effect that this had on urban life in the period. Manchester is also the focus for Giacomo Bottá's study of ‘The city that was creative and did not know’, in European J. of Cultural Studies, 12, 3 (2009), 349–65. The article forms part of a special issue on ‘Rocking nations: music and identity construction in transcultural contexts’. Covering the period 1976–97, Bottá examines the mushrooming interest in popular music in the wake of the Sex Pistol's legendary appearances at the city's Free Trade Hall in 1976. The most successful Manchester bands of the period, including Joy Division, The Smiths and the Fall, all used the landscape of the city in their album artwork and promotional material, yet the city itself was slow to capitalize on the thriving popular music culture in its plans for tourism and regeneration, defining urban culture more narrowly in terms of classical music, opera, theatre and ballet. Not until the late 1980s and early 1990s, when a new generation of Manchester bands was achieving international recognition, did this attitude towards cultural creativity in Manchester begin to change.

The towns of the midlands and the north of England continue to provide fertile territory for British urban historians, on the evidence of journal articles published in 2009. Apart from Manchester, the town of Lancaster is the focus for a study of ‘Domestic servants and their urban employers’ by Siân Pooley in Economic History Rev., 62, 2 (2009), 405–29. The study throws some light on the economy of the town where there were few alternatives to domestic service for women looking to enter the workforce, and also on social relations. The thrust of the study, which is based on analysis of occupational data in the 1881 and 1891 censuses, is that there was often relatively little difference in social status between servants and their employers. Pooley stops short of suggesting that the Lancaster patterns might be replicated elsewhere, pointing out that traditions of service were ‘strongly enmeshed in particular localities’ (426), but the study provides a useful domestic perspective on the complexity of urban employment patterns.

In Midland History, 34, 1 (2009), 77–97, Sarah Boote Powell focuses on electoral politics to examine the impact of the legislative reforms of the 1830s on Coventry corporation. Town government in early nineteenth-century Coventry had a reputation for corruption and Powell concludes that the 1832 Reform Act did little to change this. The influence of the town's closed corporation over election results was maintained through its selective method of distributing charity monies. Not until the municipal reform of 1835 was any significant change brought about to this state of affairs. Midland History's Maney stablemate, Northern History, also carries a number of articles of interest to urban historians in 2009. In volume 46, 1, 75–91, Robb Robinson assesses the fortunes of the harbours at Bridlington, Scarborough and Whitby, on the north-east coast of England. In a study which demonstrates the impact of industrialization on the relative status of towns in the region, he shows how, as the interior industrialized, the rise of new ports on the Tyne, Tees and Humber had the effect of marginalizing the role of these traditional harbours. In the same volume, James Jackson Walsh's posthumously published study of the university movement in the north of England, 113–31, provides a different perspective on the status and ambitions of northern towns in the second half of the nineteenth century. He traces the events which led to the foundation of new universities in Leeds, Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield and Birmingham. The study reveals the importance of earlier, voluntary institutions of learning, in the shape of Mechanics’ Institutes, in stimulating interest in higher levels of adult education in these centres, and also of the role of gentry supporters in lending their patronage as well as financial contributions to these fledgling institutions. The article thus usefully outlines some of the characteristics and conditions which enabled some towns and cities to out-manoeuvre others in becoming provincial university centres by the end of the nineteenth century.

The urban history of modern Wales also continues to develop in 2009. In Brycheiniog (the journal of the Brecknock Society and Museum Friends), 40 (2009), 37–55, Robert Gant presents a study of the market town of Crickhowell in the second half of the nineteenth century. Using a detailed analysis of data from census enumerators’ books, along with trade directories and topographical writings, Gant paints a picture of Crickhowell as a town which retained its functions as a market centre for the surrounding agricultural population throughout the period. We learn, however, that it was by-passed by the railway-building phase in the 1860s and there is a sense that there is much that this article leaves unsaid about how Crickhowell fared in comparison to other urban centres in Monmouthshire during these crucial decades of demographic, urban and industrial development. In a brief editorial, Brynach Parri, who has recently taken over at the helm of Brycheiniog, gives notice of the plan to include this periodical, along with all historical and denominational titles in Wales, in the National Library of Wales’ digitization project, an initiative which aims to extend online access and promises to increase the readership of Welsh county history periodicals such as this.

In Welsh History Rev., 24, 3 (2009), two articles present the fruits of further, recent research on Welsh towns. Julie Light's study of ‘The middle classes and urban elites in south Wales’, 29–55, draws on research conducted for her 2003 Ph.D. thesis on the same theme to present a comparative account of middle-class town dwellers in Pontypool, Bridgend and Penarth in the second half of the nineteenth century. The article has a strong historiographical thrust, and seeks to explain why the middle classes of urban Wales have attracted relatively little attention from historians, especially compared to their counterparts in England. Light sees the dearth of research on the Welsh middle classes as part of a wider neglect of the history of Wales’ relatively small urban centres. In the same issue of Welsh History Rev., Ian Morley undertakes an examination of the development of the Cathays civic precinct by Cardiff corporation (56–81). The planning and building of the neo-classical quarter in the district of Cathays in the first decade of the twentieth century was, he contends, ‘the nearest that Britain ever came to producing a scheme like those manifested under the City Beautiful Banner in America’ (59). This achievement was brought about in part thanks to Cardiff's rapid demographic growth in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, a period when the rate of growth of the other commercial and industrial metropolises in nineteenth-century Britain had slowed. In the same period, the rise of Welsh national consciousness drove the ambition of Cardiff's urban leaders to reflect the wealth of their expanding coal port in buildings befitting an aspirant capital city. Morley's portrait of Cathays has much to offer, not only as a case study in urban history but also as a contribution to the architectural and design history of late Victorian and Edwardian Britain.

Cardiff's early twentieth-century coming of age contrasts starkly with the portrait of post-World War II Berlin in Monica Black's article in German History, 27, 1 (2009), 6–31. She explores trends relating to the treatment of the dead and their commemoration in Berlin in the immediate post-war period as a way of understanding life the city. The attempt by the municipal authorities to enforce the removal of makeshift wooden crosses as grave-markers in the Charlottenburg cemetery in 1948, and the trend away from cremation of the dead, both revealed the extent to which the recent memory of the war shaped the culture of dealing with the dead in the city. But changing attitudes are traced forward into the 1950s when the shadow cast by the war began to diminish and practices in dealing with the dead in East and West Berlin began to diverge. This article is part of a special silver jubilee edition of German History. The celebration of twenty-five years of publication is marked with a silver cover in place of the usual red, and an editorial by the founder editors, Richard J. Evans and Mary Fulbrook who provide a number of brief but fascinating comments on some of the major shifts in historiography, communication and production technology and how these shaped the journal. The first issue of German History pre-dated the fall of the Berlin wall by five years, but the marking of 2009, both by Berliners, and by the members of the German History Society, as an anniversary year provides a useful reminder of the value of anniversaries as opportunities for reflection.