At the outset of his 1903 story, “The Adventure of the Norwood Builder,” Arthur Conan Doyle has his great detective Sherlock Holmes lament the recent passing of his arch nemesis, Professor Moriarity. “London has become a singularly uninteresting city” in the absence of his rival, Holmes avers, since Moriarity's position as criminal mastermind meant that all of the capital's chaos “could be worked into one connected whole” (The Return of Sherlock Holmes [New York, 2005], 829). This statement is a decidedly modern view of urban life. Rather than simply being a built environment that exists as a matter of course, Holmes's city has become an inordinately complex problem that stands sorely in need of solution. The story of how European cities became problems and the solutions they generated is at the heart of Lees and Lees's wide-ranging and richly informed survey, which attempts to show the move “from often appalling challenges to adaptive responses of varying adequacy” (6) in the seminal period of European urbanization. As the book is part of Cambridge's New Approaches to European History series, aimed at undergraduates and readers in search of big-picture stories, it does not produce much by way of original research on primary sources, but its value as a comparative overview is such that students of any aspect of modern Europe will find it worthwhile.
The Lees begin in 1750 to present an image of the calm before the storm. This is not to say that they claim that European cities were static before 1750, only that urban expansion and change “was sufficiently slow to be contained within existing structures” (39) until that point, at least outside of the partially exceptional case of England. After providing an overview of what European cities were like at noon in the eighteenth century, the Lees move through three sections on the disruptions that followed, highlighting the incredible (and incredibly fast) changes that occurred over the next century: industrialization and mass migration, first and foremost, and the pollution, disease, crime, and political unrest they brought with them. We get the head-shaking numbers, of course—70 percent overall population growth in Europe from 1750–1850, a doubling of the percentage of people who lived in communities of 10,000 or more, 20,000 people moving into London per year—and we learn about declining life expectancies in Glasgow, antiliberal riots in Brussels, and child abandonment in Lyon. The second half of the book shows how European cities managed, in the face of such unprecedented difficulties, to make themselves tolerable places to live. In many cases, urban improvement was driven by the same process as urban growth—industrialization and technological development, which enabled better access to clean water, increased sanitation, and smoother, faster transportation. Similarly, more people meant more forms of expression, which led to a diversification of culture that could enrich the lives of city dwellers. The Lees also document the combination of private philanthropy, organized volunteerism, and growing urban and national bureaucracy that worked to make cities more habitable, as well as the way cities celebrated their achievements in this regard through exhibitions and grand public buildings and spaces. Wisely, the Lees also include a chapter on European urbanization in the context of empire, which connected cities as far-flung as Amsterdam and Jakarta (then Batavia) in networks of commercial, cultural, and demographic exchange.
The greatest strength of the Lees's book is that it is truly and capaciously European, with Vienna, Reims, Munich, Rome, Prague, Venice, Lille, Brussels, Leiden, Stockholm, Madrid, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, Paris, Nuremberg, and London, among others, all making an appearance in the first chapter alone. Indeed, at times the range of cities borders on the overwhelming (raise your hand if you can identify both Druisburg and Bochum on an unlabeled map), but since the Lees's ambition is to link the history of European urbanization with the history of industrialization, liberalization, emerging statism, and empire—in other words, to place cities squarely at the center of modern European history as a whole—this wide net is both necessary and productive. To cite only one example, many readers of this journal will be familiar with the British material that comes in for discussion, but it is revealing to think about the 1829 Metropolitan Police Act in the context of the near quadrupling of the relative strength of the police force in Saint-Étienne around the same time, a development that, despite its numerical impressiveness, meant that London still had three times as many police officers per person as Saint-Étienne (115). The book is full of similarly intriguing comparative nuggets, and although the Lees are telling a large story about European commonality, those nuggets are inducements to further research by readers more interested in teasing out differences and peculiarities. Because of this European approach, readers looking to gain much in-depth knowledge about any particular city are best off elsewhere, and the Lees helpfully provide a bibliography of book-length sources specific to many of the cities they mention.
The breadth of knowledge on display makes criticism seem almost impertinent, but there are some potential sources of frustration. For one, there is almost no discussion of the way cities interacted with their surrounding rural environments beyond sheer absorption; in the wake of works like William Cronon's Nature's Metropolis (New York, 1992), it is difficult to defend an overview of urban development that lacks attention to environmental processes. A second troublesome point is that as European as the Lees's approach is, they have little to say about how cities might have participated in the creation of European identity or European institutions. It might be claimed that such institutions and such an identity are the products of the postwar period, but this only begs the question since the Lees take us to the precipice of 1914 and give no indication of what role cities played in Europe's tumble over the edge of the twentieth century. Such complaints aside, readers are not likely to find another book that gives such a clear and broadly informed account of the emergence of urban Europe.
