Pre-1500

Studying the identity of towns is difficult because so many different elements have to be taken into account in such an enquiry. A city is a juridical entity, a centre of economic production, a cultural hub and a locus of political power. Therefore, research on the distinctive characteristics of towns or cities should focus on each of these aspects, as is shown by several articles which were published last year on the medieval history of European and Mediterranean towns. A first series of papers demonstrates that scholarship on urban identity cannot ignore the perception townsmen had of themselves. In a special issue of Histoire Urbaine (35 (2012/13)), entitled ‘Les mots de l’identité. La ville, le pouvoir et l’écrit en Europe aux derniers siècles du Moyen Âge’, edited by Elisabeth Crouzet-Pavan and Elodie Lecuppre-Desjardin, several authors consider the discourse citizens used to describe themselves. References to urban freedom or liberties are recurrent in these contributions because the volume states that liberties formed the core of local identities. However, there was more to liberty than just privileges, as is shown by several papers in the volume. ‘Liberty’ could also refer to a political community with a right to what is now called self-determination, and the freedom of the arbitrary dealings of others. Thierry Dutour, for instance, demonstrates that cities in France presented themselves as loyal, but privileged communities when they addressed letters to the French king (‘Dire l’identité des “communautéz de ville”. L’exemple de quelques villes de la langue d’oïl (XIIIe–XVe siècles)’). In these documents, townsmen saw their rights of self-government as the main constitutive element of their identity. They considered liberties to be a collective value. Dutour concludes that kings and territorial lords never questioned the fact that towns were privileged communities, although they occasionally did try to violate some of these freedoms. Also within cities, elites used privileges to define themselves against fellow citizens, as Joseph Morsel shows in the same issue with a paper on late medieval Nuremberg (‘Sociogenèse d’un patriciat. La culture de l’écrit et la construction du social à Nuremberg vers 1500’). He demonstrates that the patricians of Nuremberg identified themselves with urban privileges in chronicles which were composed by wealthy merchants in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Their ‘family histories’ (Geslechtbücher) propagated the promulgation of an urban privilege as a highlight in the family's history. The claim which the Nuremberg Geslechten put on the city's privileges in particular, but also on its entire archives in general, lead Morsel to conclude that historians have to be careful in using such chronicles and administrative documents when studying urban identities. For elites have constantly rewritten the history of towns to strengthen their power vis-à-vis less powerful fellow citizens. Moreover, they have selected the documents which are preserved in the urban archives. Therefore, Morsel warns us to be well aware of the fact that a study of the identity of a town should include research on the social and political foundations of its governors.

Two articles on towns in what is now France and Belgium show that not only the self-representation of elites towards subordinated groups and higher authorities on the one hand, but also towards the governors of adjacent towns on the other, is a crucial element in the study of urban identity. In ‘Par-delà la muraille. La conscience politique urbaine dans les anciens Pays-Bas bourguignons à l’épreuve de la politique extérieure’, Revue Historique, 666 (2013), 259–88, Elodie Lecuppre-Desjardin analyses the political networks which urban elites maintained with other cities. Thanks to a long tradition of political representation and to a culture of negotiation inherent to their economic activities, cities like Lille, Douai, Tournai and Ghent have sought since the twelfth century to impose themselves on the ‘international’ diplomatic sphere. Located in a strategic region, where French feudal authority was in conflict with economic interests vital to trade with English towns, these cities built their identity on the relationship with other towns, bishops and lords. Lecuppre-Desjardin's study of (among others) the fifteenth-century letters which were sent by cities to ‘foreign powers’ shows that negotiations with the latter were of excellent use for cities seeking to distinguish themselves from neighbouring cities. Laura Crombie adds that not only diplomatic activities but also inter-urban festive networks were an important mode of self-definition for cities. Studying the archery and crossbow competitions in late medieval Tournai and its neighbours, she illustrates how festive networks were important vehicles through which cities displayed their economic and political identity. Furthermore, archery and crossbow guilds appeared across northern Europe in the early fourteenth century as defensive associations but also as prestigious socio-devotional groups; festive bonds which crossed urban boundaries (first documented in 1328) grew along with economic ones in the following decades. Their rise and fall, Crombie argues, is revealing of civic priorities and of the opportunities offered at cultural events to win civic honour and to contribute to the identity of a town (‘French and Flemish urban festive networks: archery and crossbow competitions attended and hosted by Tournai in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries’, French History, 27 (2013), 157–75).

Three studies on social struggle and factional conflicts in late medieval towns explain that the older interpretative framework of antagonism between city and state can serve as an obstacle in understanding urban politics. Though the work on state formation has been enormously productive in encouraging medievalists to study urban revolts and factional divisions, the range of political activities in cities on the one hand and the number of social mechanisms to pacify urban society on the other was considerably wider than historians on state formation have assumed. Christian Liddy and Jelle Haemers, for instance, outline that growing state power or increasing royal interventions could heighten tensions in cities, but that they did not cause conflict. Liddy and Haemers’ comparative study of fifteenth-century petitions of crafts guilds in York and Bruges suggests that rebellion can be explained by the internal contradictions inherent in urban political culture. The unrest in both cities arose precisely from the practices and values of civic government, such as the concept of citizenship upon which the city's rulers were dependent in order to govern effectively, but which simultaneously encouraged craftsmen to see themselves as equal members of a single community. Therefore, rebellious artisans argued that civic rulers should be accountable for their deeds and that public money should not be squandered. In short, both historians claim that exogenous factors, such as state formation and economic decline, are less responsible for the outburst of anger than the political ideas which citizens had about what they saw as the ‘correct’ government of cities (‘Popular politics in the late medieval city: York and Bruges’, English Historical R., 128 (2013), 771–805).

Similarly, Frederik Buylaert and Katherine Jansen downplay the role of state formation in the analysis of factionalism. In ‘Gestion de vengeances et conflits privés au sein de l’élite gantoise à la fin du Moyen Âge’, Revue du Nord, 397 (2012), 803–25, Buylaert demonstrates that factional conflicts in late medieval Ghent became rare during the late Middle Ages. But he argues that this was not caused by the rise of the state and its presumed establishment of a rule of law. Instead, the reshaping of conflict management in the Ghent elite was closely interlinked with a reshaping of the social and political structure of the urban community. In this new setting, conflicts and feuds were settled by pre-existing mechanisms of conflict resolution. Bulyaert's evidence shows that the intermediation of relatives often led to a structural peace settlement between families, without the intervention from the court of the count of Flanders. Likewise, Katherine Jansen demonstrates that the popolo of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Florence used similar peace instruments to restore the social order after a crime or an act of violence that disturbed communal tranquillity. In ‘“Pro bono pacis”: crime, conflict and dispute resolution. The evidence of notarial peace contracts in late medieval Florence’, Speculum, 88 (2013), 427–56, she argues that the protagonists in the majority of Florentine peace settlements were, more often than not, not magnates of aristrocatric lineage, but members of the popolo – ranging from humble paupers, servants and shoemakers to the rich popolo grasso. Peace was a social necessity in towns; their raison d’être was to maintain public order, control violence, foster civic harmony and promote peace and security. Paying particular attention to the so-called ‘kiss of peace’, Jansen convincingly argues that peace instruments continued to survive in an age in which the city-state and its courts were consolidating their power – moving from the accusatorial system of justice, which was geared more toward settlement, to the inquisitorial system, which favoured penalties and sentences. Existing as a complement to the courts system, the ‘kiss of peace’ memorialized justice from another era in which disputants, rather than investigating judges, took the lead in settling conflict. Therefore, the article also shows that chroniclers have passed down to us not portraits of everyday peacemaking as it existed on the streets of Florence, but the exceptional spectacle, featuring grandees and cardinal-peacemakers, which has obscured our view of what was typical practice.

Elite studies are also the focus of three other articles on Mediterranean cities. First, Peter Hoppenbrouwers studies the military power and the social position of the noble families of Todi, an Umbrian hilltop town whose communal regime reached its apogee in the decades around 1300. Todi's communal army was basically composed of conscripts, with two traditional divisions: an infantry, in which commoners served, and a cavalry, which was reserved for knights from the nobility. On closer inspection, this standard set-up had two complications. First, a distinction was made between the cavallata or public obligation, imposed on wealthy citizens, to maintain warhorses, and the militia, the practice of cavalry service in the communal army. Those citizens liable to the cavallata were not only classified as noblemen but also as sergentes. Hoppenbrouwers’ detailed research into fiscal records shows that the noble sergentes (who provided the cavalry with light horsemen) were more a social class than an occupational group of policemen and infantry sergeants, as has been argued in the historiography of medieval Todi. Therefore, the nobility, as the exclusive supplier of trained and fully equipped cavalrymen, were able to retain a pivotal position in the communal army of Todi in the fourteenth century (‘An Italian city-state geared for war: urban knights and the cavallata of Todi’, J. of Medieval History, 39 (2013), 240–53). Secondly, Mathieu Eychenne's paper discusses the late medieval elite of the Egyptian town of Fustat-Misr (on the east bank of the Nile, today absorbed by Cairo). The aim of his study is to reconstruct the story of the family of the Banu Hinna in the Mamluk period (1250–1517). Focusing on this Coptic family, which converted to Islam between the twelfth and the thirteenth centuries, he brings to light the prosperity of the administrators’ dynasties of this period, related to their investment in urban infrastructure. The economic wealth of the Banu Hinna made it possible for them to pay for the creation of luxurious commercial and religious buildings in the city centre. It made of Banu Hinna a wealthy town in which both Christians and Jews, as well as Muslims, could trade under ideal circumstances. Furthermore, quarters in the periphery of the town were built with the private wealth of these wealthy aristocrats, who had considerably more power and money at their disposal than urban nobles on the other side of the Mediterranean (‘Les Banu Hinna à Fustat-Misr. Pouvoir et implantation urbaine d’une famille de notables à l’époque Mamelouke’, Médiévales, 64 (2013), 91–112). Thirdly, Francisco Apellaniz also studies local elites in late medieval Egypt, though he focuses on their connection with Venetian merchants on the one side, and the lower-rank merchants who negotiated with them on the other. His study of a particular local trading network – that of the merchants in Alexandria from 1418 to 1420 – attempts to assess the role of such lower-rank participants as Jews, Greeks, colonial subjects and foreigners within the exclusive commercial networks of Venice. Therefore, the article adopts a network approach, using notary records from the casebook of Vittore Bonfantin, a Venetian trading with Alexandria. The examination of his social ties concludes that even when patricians became dominant in a particular sector, they had to rely on the lower-class groups to co-ordinate and complete transactions and to keep their networks functioning. Moreover, the language of the ‘foreigners’ and colonial subjects, their business acumen and their knowledge of local markets targeted by Venetian noblemen enabled them to integrate into an otherwise-exclusive business milieu. Therefore, both sides took advantage of the successful Venetian commercial model (‘Venetian trading networks in the medieval Mediterranean’, J. of Interdisciplinary History, 44 (2013), 151–79).

This leads us to the economic history of late medieval towns. Evidently, inns were a regular feature of the urban economy and a key part of internal trade, providing communal and private facilities for travellers, their horses and the storage of their goods. John Hare's systematic study of inns and innkeepers in central southern England between 1350 and 1600 puts their role in trade in a wider perspective (‘Inns, innkeepers and the society of later medieval England, 1350–1600’, J. of Medieval History, 39 (2013), 477–97). Expanding trade in the later Middle Ages required some means of providing support for travellers. Previously, this was probably provided for in the hospitality of the great merchant houses, as at Winchester, where the shift to public inns occurred in the fourteenth century. Hare's wider study shows that most of the inns of 1600 were probably already in existence by 1379 and that there was a regular pattern of inn provision and a professional body of innkeepers. The latter were generally wealthy and were very much part of the urban groups who dominated the government of small towns or, as in the greater city of Salisbury, came from among influential figures of the second tier of importance. Hare concludes that a group of men was emerging here who did not fit into traditional structures as merchant or craftsmen. They would, however, play a vital role in the booming economy of late medieval towns.

Thibaut Jacobs shows us that guild hospitals were also an important locus of economic and social action in the late medieval town. Research on four guild hospitals in fourteenth-century Brussels sheds new light on their economic and financial activities (‘Des hôpitaux de métiers à Bruxelles? Nouvelles perspectives sur la charité et la bienfaisance en milieu urbain à la fin du Moyen Âge’, Revue Belge de Philologie et d’Histoire, 91 (2013), 215–54). Importantly, the function of these establishments cannot be restricted to the accommodation of the poor (which were relatively few in number). They were gathering places for trade communities still under formation; places of protest for those social classes expressing numerous demands; houses of charity offering both hospitality and credit; and last, but not least, financial centres managing large amounts of goods, rents and credits. The hospitals had extensive property and rents at their disposal which were given to them by craftsmen who were relatively wealthy. They reinvested these in the local economy by supplying short-term credit to needy craftsmen. Therefore, these hospitals contributed to the expression of charity and civic solidarity as well as to the development of common values and the economic power of the craftsmen involved.

Urban wages are central in William Caferro's ‘Petrarch's war: Florentine wages and the Black Death’, Speculum, 88 (2013), 144–65. His analysis of the day-to-day management of the Florentine war against the Ghibelline Ubaldini clan in the middle of the fourteenth century demonstrates that a variety of Florentine employees did not see an immediate boost to their money wages after the plague, and that wage patterns did not correspondent to current models. Therefore, Caferro's paper reads as a plea for a better contextualization of wage data which have to be understood in their own terms. For instance, he argues that notions of honour and social distinction which were embedded in military service should also be included in wage analyses. And if indeed historians contextualize wages, they must consider the possibility that soldiers, like other government employees, had access to additional sources of revenue. In addition, Caferro concludes that the Black Death disrupted the whole mechanism of public finance in Florence, including the assignment of tax farms, an important means of streamlining the system and assuring the type of quick turnover of funds needed during war. As in the modern world, public jobs were the first to feel the effects of economic change. In Florence, the first notice of Ubaldini misdeeds in 1349 coincides directly with city council legislation complaining that the state had no money to pay stipendiaries and saw ‘little hope for improvement in the future’.

Another article on late medieval Florence discusses the social identity of female citizens. Based on an analysis of how their identities were recorded in legal and familial documents, Tovah Bender argues that fifteenth-century Florentine women were primarily and permanently linked to their natal families. Regardless of age, marital status or the circumstances under which they appear in the documents, Florentine women were overwhelmingly identified by notaries, and by family members as the daughters of their fathers. Clearly, marriage did not interrupt or reduce the importance of the natal family in the social representation of women. Though Bender's study also shows that with marriage, women became adult members of society. However, she does not scrutinize the changes in the economic wealth of the 400 brides mentioned in the sources into detail; rather, she simply concludes that marriage not only changed the women's social position but that it also increased their presence in the historical record (‘Their fathers’ daughters: women's social identities in fifteenth-century Florence’, J. of Family History, 38 (2013), 371–86). Anne Sutton's article on coeval marriage patterns in London, by contrast, does study the social and economic consequences of medieval marriage. Examples culled from the 181 aldermen who ruled London in the fifteenth century illustrate that marriage was profitable not only for women, but also for men. A wealthy marriage could propel a man up the civic hierarchy, and it was the best source of capital with which to trade. The richest catch was a widow, with or without children, for London custom protected the estates of both. Therefore, it was greatly in the interest of all ambitious citizens to protect the wealthy widow, whose husbands had been their acquaintances and whose estates might one day become their own. In return, after the marriage, the widow was assured of her leading position in the elite networks of the town. The evidence shows that some of the wealthiest widows were mayoresses more than once (‘Serious money: the benefits of marriage in London, 1400–1499’, London J., 38 (2013), 1–17).

1500–1800

Gender and racial tensions in colonial cities are discussed this year in several articles in a special issue of the William and Mary Quarterly entitled ‘Centering families in Atlantic histories’ (70, 2 (2013)), as well as in a later issue of the same journal. Articles show different ways of handling the liminal cultures of colonial cities. Although Ann Laura Stoler's work has primarily been done on a later period, authors use Stoler's argument that sexual matters were foundational to European colonial projects as a point of departure to investigate the relations between body, sexuality and identity in the Atlantic world. Connected with this is an interest in the political potency of social classification. To colonists and native population alike, the early modern Atlantic trade upset and reordered gendered cultures, adding race to an already malleable social order. Subsequently, classifying themselves and others and stabilizing social order became some of the colonists’ most important concerns. As these articles show, the bodies of early modern colonists and native peoples were vulnerable and ordering race, gender and class was an intimate affair.

At the Danish fort Christiansborg near the town of Osu (now Accra) colonists attempted to create some sense of order in the eighteenth century, we learn in a contribution by Pernille Ipsen (‘“The Christened mulatress”: Euro-African families in a slave-trading town’, ibid., 371–98). This was an order strictly on gendered and racial grounds in which Euro-African (Ga-Danish) families formed a specific part of the population. As the slave trade, and Danish presence, expanded over the century, so did the fort and the town of Osu. The populations of both interacted with each other, Danish colonists would spend time in town in their leisure hours, and people from Osu were employed at the fort as ‘mulatto soldiers’ or ‘fort slaves’. Marrying European men meant getting access to dependable trade for Ga women but these marriages did have other advantages as well. They were not all that dissimilar to traditional Ga marriages; in neither case did husband and wife live or eat together and children were kept away from the husband. Ga women and their Euro-African children also enjoyed privileges in the colony that were not available to everyone. Alongside work at the fort, children were offered schooling although christening was a prerequisite for this. There were economic benefits in trade in European goods which were much in demand on the coast. The slave trade was among the lucrative enterprises that Euro-African families profited from, despite being under threat to be sold as slaves as well. In an increasingly politically volatile region under the pressures of the slave trade, Euro-African marriages offered a privileged position in the racialized social hierarchy. Patriarchal ideology in its colonial guise formed a strict social hierarchy when it was combined with newly established British rule in late eighteenth-century Montreal. Nancy Christie traces the interconnections between a gendered social order and colonial dominion in ‘“He is the master of his house”: families and political authority in counterrevolutionary Montreal’ (pp. 341–70). The nexus God-king-fathers and masters-children and apprentices was enforced in court cases and legislation in attempts to sustain colonial rule in an ethnically and socially unstable society. British colonial rule in Quebec was deliberately driven to secure a system of social hierarchy while abolishing slavery and counterweighting French civil law. Ideals of family governance were also a means of hindering democratic ideologies from revolutionary America and France to take hold. Patriarchal ideology also formed the basis for resistance to British rule; rival forms of masculinity such as duelling and physical, youthful manliness became associated with French-Canadian insubordination.

An extreme case of upsetting and restoring colonial social order is scrutinized in Sophie White's ‘Massacre, Mardi Gras, and torture in early New Orleans’ (William and Mary Quarterly, 70, 3 (2013), pp. 497–538). In vivid and chilling detail, White examines the significance of clothing, nakedness and role reversal as markers of savagery and Frenchness during Mardi Gras in 1730. White's work is based on the clerk for the Company of the Indies in Louisiana, Marc-Antoine Caillot’s, description of Mardi Gras in his ‘Relation du voyage de la Louisiane ou Nouvelle France’, a travelogue of his two years in Louisiana. His narrative linked a series of events symbolically: the Natchez uprising in 1729 in which the French settlement at Fort Rosalie was attacked and settlers were captured, killed and tortured; his own participation in a masquerade on Fat Monday 1730 on the outskirts of New Orleans; and the public torture and killing of a captive Natchez woman just outside the city after Easter the same year. The symbolic links were formed partly by comingling the descriptions of torture with metaphors of food preparation which culminated in an act of feasting on the tortured woman's flesh. More significantly, however, White shows how Caillot's narrative is focused on dress and undress and on the different forms of transformation that this entails. The settlers who had been taken captive in 1729 spoke of how they had been stripped completely naked – as opposed to the more common definition of nakedness among Europeans as retaining a shift or a shirt – and their captors had taken on European clothes. French commentators underlined how Natchez people had been eager to obtain their dress, so much so that they kept a tailor among the settlers alive so that he and French seamstresses could adjust, repair and sew French clothing for the Natchez. In captivity, French men, women and children were bared and thereby also stripped of their Frenchness and civility, whereas the sauvage, as the French called the Natchez, acquired the French manner. Captive settlers were, however, put through greater trials than losing their clothing. Narratives spoke of how some had been scalped and tortured, their flesh cut from their bodies and consumed by their captors, some were force-fed their own genitals. Consuming human flesh was a symbol of the act of enslavement among some Indian nations but these stories also conformed to tropes of what happened to Europeans in captivity in the New World. Caillot's narrative expressed the frightening consequences of settlers themselves becoming sauvage through undress and eating.

Conversely, the Natchez woman captured and brought to New Orleans was ritually stripped before being tortured to death by her captors. She was exposed to the fire torture that her husband had deemed appropriate for French captives previously. As she underwent the procedure, onlookers impaled her as if she were a piece of meat. A French soldier cut a piece of her burnt genitalia from her body and ate it, and thus came to mirror and exceed stories of what the Natchez did to Europeans. It is not by accident then, White argues, that Caillot inserted his own experience at role reversal into his account of these gruesome events. Caillot took part in a Mardi Gras masquerade and convinced a wedding party of his femininity, dressed as a shepherdess. So believable and coquettish was his appearance that the party flirted with him and would not be convinced he was a boy. Unmasked, his identity revealed, Caillot could easily take part in the heterosexual wooing of one of the female guests. His own gender cross-dressing was conceivable, manageable and reversible. Metamorphosis and stripping was one thing, and masking and unmasking quite another.

The physical limits of early modern cities – their gates, walls, borders and districts – also feature prominently in articles. Although few authors would profess themselves to the ‘spatial turn’, and theoretical readings on space and place are rare, evidently the physical and imagined parameters of city life are of interest to historians of the early modern period. Early modern cities are refreshingly discussed in terms of their actual urbanity, rather than functioning as mere backdrops for various historical events. Common among these articles is also the underscoring of the limited capacity of police and authorities to supervise the mobility of inhabitants and travellers alike. Daniel Jütte's ‘Entering a city: on a lost early modern practice’ (Urban History, first view, 1–24) is a case in point. Although less concerned with the experience of entering than with the gates’ symbolic representation, Jütte examines the function and meaning of city walls and gates. Walls marked the city as a distinct area of security, order and law in which city-dwellers might enjoy privileges outsiders did not. They were sites of inspection and identification, distinguished with statues and decorations, and the early modern period in Europe saw more city gates than ever before – ideally a city should have 12 like St John's heavenly Jerusalem. But gates and walls not only had military significance, Jütte points out, they also were markers of a city's honour and self-image and were worthy of learned debate and reflection on their function and what they might symbolize. An important part of using gates to create representations of the city was to individualize them and through naming and decoration mark the desirable diversity of a city in its links to patron saints, neighbourhoods or where an outbound road might lead. Gates in early modern cities also indicated boundaries for new reasons, brought on by confessionalization and a rising bureaucracy and were guarded accordingly. If we turn from the symbolic representation of city gates to the practices of using them, it would seem that the experience of entering was dependent on who was guarding the city. While travellers were regularly scrutinized and asked of their identity and business in the city and tolls and excises had to be paid. Any foreign element in the city must be monitored; after entering, a traveller must expect to be able to prove he or she had entered legitimately in order to get lodgings. Of course, it was only in administrators’ dreams that scrutiny of people and the paying of taxes ran smoothly and the gates displayed the prowess of the city as intended. Brawls and skirmishes between guards and travellers were common and bystanders, beggars and children tended to congregate at the gates, for alms or entertainment.

City walls were sometimes scaled by unwelcome visitors and walls crumbled due to lack of repair, but a greater threat to the walls was the rising state. As the independence of cities was threatened by the demands of state formation, city fortification became problematic. Rather, it was state borders that needed defending. So did Louis XIII's complete destruction of La Rochelle in 1628 mark a triumphalist crescendo to state victory over civic liberties and public space. In the seventeenth century, the state made ever more incursions, not only in civic legislation, but also in urban space, through citadels, fortifications, military parade grounds. Cities were transformed into spaces suitable for royal ritual and procession, squares widened, streets straightened and plans laid out in order to enhance the grandness of rulers. Civic spaces like public squares, guild houses, town halls and city gates all over Europe and its colonies were recast in order to mirror and complement monarchical power over cities. This largely violent process is elegantly elucidated by Peter Arnade in ‘Carthage or Jerusalem? Princely violence and the spatial transformation of the medieval into the early modern city’ (J. of Urban History, 39 (2013), 726–48). Contested civic spaces were increasingly under pressure from dynastic rulers, intent on managing their lands with military means. Princes were not satisfied with victories against cities, cities must be humiliated. In a parallel to the cities’ attempts at displaying their honour and grandeur by ways of their walls and gates (‘key urban signifiers’ in the words of Arnade, p. 729), gates were destroyed and walls torn down when cities were conquered in conflicts like the Dutch Revolt and the Thirty Years War. The infamous destructions of Carthage and Jerusalem formed the daunting examples princes strove to emulate when Tenochtitlan and Tunis were razed in 1521 and 1536 respectively – triumphs that also brought forth commissioned art and verse celebrating these victories. The emperor responsible for these accomplishments was also answerable for the sacking of Rome in 1527. In this instance, however, defender of the faith Charles V was less pleased that his military campaign against the city was compared to Carthage, and the destruction of the city was duly satirized. Rome was spared the performances and commemorations of civic submission that other less symbolic cities were subject to.

City borders were not always as clearly demarcated as with city walls, creating liminal places where transgressive and otherwise repulsive behaviour could be tolerated. This is for instance the type of place where the torture and cannibalism occurred in New Orleans. Remaining outside strict demarcated urban boundaries was, however, desirable and indeed a privilege to some groups. Italian Jews in the northern city-states were enclosed in ghettos and their actions monitored by various authorities. Outside enclosures was also a place to be. Katherine Aron-Beller uncovers the ranges of action and social inclusion afforded to Jews outside ghettos, living in towns and the countryside in the duchy of Modena (‘Outside the ghetto: Jews and Christians in the duchy of Modena’, J. of Early Modern History, 17 (2013), 245–71). Although restricted and monitored by the inquisition, the ‘non-ghetto experience’ did afford greater social ties between Jews and Christians, living as they did next door to one another, and also leading to a greater understanding of each other's existence. The interaction was not without its tensions, with subcultures of mockery and imitation. Ghettoization began with renewed strength in Italy in 1555. The less strict ghettoization in the duchy did not mean that Jews were left unencumbered, they still were a group over which state power was to be exercised and order established, but there were some concessions. Apart from the Modena ghetto, they were permitted to live in small towns and rural communities as long as they contributed to the economy. Using inquisitorial records from the seventeenth century, Aron-Beller traces proceedings against Jews for crimes such as hiring Christian servants who had slept or eaten on Jewish premises or failed to take communion while in Jewish employ. Other crimes were fraternizing with Christians or owning prohibited books. Outside the ghetto, Jews hired Christian servants more often than within it. Aron-Beller also shows how the inquisition was concerned with issues of visibility and reverence; Jews must show reverence to the Holy Sacrament while passing through town, and avoided doing so by hiding. Services in synagogues were censured for taking place in locales with excessively large windows, so that Christians might be influenced while passing by. A degree of social integration for Jews came at the price of negotiating the rules of a distinctively Christian environment.

Marion Pluskota is similarly concerned with delimitations of the city in ‘Genesis of a red-light district: prostitution in Nantes between 1750 and 1810’ (Urban History, first view, 1–20), but rather than looking at its most ostentatious and obvious representations, she focuses on how everyday use of the city's spaces, in this case Nantes, formed a red-light district in the late eighteenth century. In contrast to other cities, in Nantes a red-light district was not formed by the state in a conscious effort to regulate prostitution and control venereal disease. In the late eighteenth century, according to the census, prostitutes in Nantes were scattered about and were mobile. There was no division between place of work and where they lived, as would become the case in the twentieth century, which led prostitutes' lodgings to be easily accessible to customers. Customers were found at the port and at places of entertainment. Pluskota suggests that red-light districts were formed by prostitutes themselves by appropriating urban space in which they had the greatest financial gains to be made and where lodgings were cheap. It was a century after the creating of these districts that they were termed quartier réservé. Police and city authorities had limited means of controlling these practices. Arnade and Pluskota both use Henri Lefebvre's The Production of Space as a theoretical starting point, but in rather different ways. Arnade points to how Lefebvre gives space causative power and historicity and discusses how space tethers communal values that were the source of much conflict between princes and cities. Pluskota, on the other hand, is interested in how space is appropriated by subaltern groups and how mobility played an integral part in diverting attempts at regulation by authorities.

The eighteenth-century city was something quite different compared to the walled medieval cities studied by Jütte, Arnade and Aron-Beller. Göran Rydén (‘Viewing and walking: Swedish visitors to eighteenth-century London’, J. of Urban History, 39 (2013), 255–74) discusses how ideas of urbanity and perceptions brought from the homeland shaped Swedish visitor's descriptions of London. He argues for the significance of understanding the visitors’ perspective in their approach to the city; they might be trying to form a general overview of the city, or they might be more interested in understanding what city life was all about by walking the streets. It was wealth, trade, conviviality and politeness that characterized an ideal eighteenth-century city, according to Swedish academics and state officials, and they found this in abundance in London. They compared the prices and qualities of prized traded goods, particularly iron, with those on offer in London. They sought information on business and industry and did so by walking long distances across the city, inspecting water-pumping works and natural history collections. In the backgrounds of their reports on the city are London's labouring classes, described as an industrious mob. They also made time for visits to coffee houses and pleasure gardens, these sites of conviviality and – essentially to these visitors – business. No surprise perhaps that politeness is a prominent theme also in Lawrence E. Klein's ‘Hierarchy and the techniques of the mediator: Edmund Rack in Bath, 1775–87’ (Cultural and Social History, 10 (2013), 489–510). Klein focuses closely on the social techniques applied by Edmund Rack, a retired shopkeeper and minor man of letters intent on taking part in polite society in Bath with his social superiors. His humble origins were a distinct disadvantage, but he used them to his favour, always acting modestly and indirectly in order to achieve what he wanted. Rack was a very successful navigator of this social world, acting as a broker between people above and below his own station while identifying charitable cases for financial support or in establishing improvement societies. Above all, tact was his hallmark, when he could take on different roles depending on what the situation and company required: agent, subordinate or animator. By mastering the art of self-presentation among those above him, Rack could wield considerable influence, at once pleased and modest about his achievements. Civility is not discussed directly in the article, but seems to function as an equalizing, harmonious force facilitating refinement and improvement to all: ‘values bridged social groups, norms that encouraged mutual contact, practices that brought diverse people to the same place’ (p. 492). In Klein's account, Rack becomes an exemplum of demeanour. We are at a loss to know whether he had any qualms about how to act when confronted with those below him. Side by side with the struggling servants of Laura Gowing's ‘“The manner of submission”: gender and demeanour in seventeenth-century London’ (Cultural and Social History, 10 (2013), 25–41), Edmund Rack's story seems an idyll. Indeed, submission was not so easy to navigate when violence and powerlessness are figured into the picture. Both authors point to the importance of embodying a social status and its gestures and attitudes. These ideas are in part taken from Erving Goffman and Pierre Bourdieu respectively. Klein's approach leans more toward conscious self-presentation whereas Gowing points to the importance of training the body to instinctively stand straight, hold hands in the correct position and cast down one's eyes in order not to attract a master's or mistress's wrath.

In a less delicate analysis, Jeffrey R. Watt imparts Enlightenment scepticism and medical professionalization to John Calvin and his colleagues in the Geneva Consistory in the second half of the sixteenth century (‘Calvin's Geneva confronts magic and witchcraft: the evidence from the Consistory’, J. of Early Modern History, 17 (2013), 215–44). Watt essentially supports Max Weber's position that Calvinism contributed to the disenchantment of the world while looking at how cases of superstition and heresy were treated in the Consistory. Calvin and his colleagues were mainly interested in rooting out Catholic religious practices, and sentenced parishioners to exclusion from communion and sometimes jail. While disenchantment theories have been questioned of late, Watt utilizes a traditional distinction between magic and superstition on the one hand, and rational reflection on the other, attributing superstition to rural dwellers in particular. Magic and witchcraft is perhaps less confronted than downplayed by the Consistory in Watt's account, while he considers other religious practices to be lacking in spiritual power. Prayer is curiously regarded as a practice that does not attempt to manipulate the supernatural in order to restore a person's health. When ‘pastors ministered to the sick in Geneva, . . . they had nothing to offer . . . than prayers and consolation’ (p. 243), unlike the religious powers of healers and Catholics.

Poverty is less well represented in this year's articles, but it forms the framework for studies into the increasing importance of securing sustenance in early modern cities. Whatever their social status, early modern city dwellers had the right to nourishment and its procurement was an issue for the city as a whole. In the case of late eighteenth-century New York City, city authorities strove to secure that all inhabitants had a plentiful supply, not only of nourishment, but actually of red meat. Around 1800, levels of consumption were comparable to the Great Depression (Gergely Baics, ‘Is access to food a public good? Meat provisioning in early New York City, 1790–1820’, J. of Urban History, 39 (2013), 643–68). Eivind Engebretsen uses appeals for alms in Paris in the mid-seventeenth century to discuss hunger as a cultural phenomenon, asking how select texts discussed the characteristics, causes and solutions to hunger (‘The Catholic Counter-Reformation and the idea of hunger. A close reading of two appeals for alms from the Paris area in the year 1662’, Social History, 38 (2013), 477–96). Engebretsen performs an elegant rhetorical analysis of these texts, highlighting the convergence of suffering people and a suffering body politic. Hunger, he shows, was shown primarily not by giving examples of lack of food, but by showing how people were forced to eat unsuitable or shameful foodstuffs. What was deemed suitable was relative. For those used to finer foods, having to eat labourer fare was cast as worse than a labourer not having any food at all. Hunger was problematic not merely because people died from starvation. The deterrent examples in the texts point to hunger's subversive effects, overturning the social order as in the example above, but also the natural order. Dead bodies found with animal fodder or grass in their mouths illustrated the fact that cooked food constituted humanity and hunger transcended the boundaries of civilization. Civilization was also threatened by the desperate or animal behaviour of the starving – fathers killing their wives and children for bread, children sucking the bones of the dead in cemeteries. But hunger in these cases was a force so strong that human civility could not counteract it, those perpetrating these crimes were guiltless victims of their condition. Interestingly, however, gendered boundaries could not be overturned by hunger; instead, they were aggravated in images of dead mothers suckling dead babies and of murderous fathers. Hunger, then, according to the applications for alms, with the exception of gender, affected the cosmological order as a whole. Engelbretsen's work on starving Parisians and White's on cannibalistic French settlers in New Orleans both underscore the transgressive properties of what people eat in early modern societies. They both also show that while the distinctions of social hierarchy could be completely overturned, and the lines between civility and savagery, human and animal, were blurred and malleable, the gender order remained curiously stable.

Post-1800

For anyone who, like me, spent too much time in the 1980s watching the long-running Australian soap opera, Neighbours, help is at hand. The best place to start re-educating oneself about the characteristics of the modern Australian suburb is a thought-provoking article by Graeme Davison, exploring ‘The suburban idea and its enemies’, J. of Urban History, 39 (2013), 829–47. Davison examines attitudes towards suburban development, principally in Australia, but with wide-ranging comparisons to other societies. Commentators as diverse as Charles Dickens, Clough William Ellis and Germaine Greer provide some interesting insights into anti-urban sentiments which, Davison argues, actually shared much in common with the escapist mentalities of suburbs’ Victorian promoters. He finds echoes of the ideological drivers of ‘Evangelicalism, sanitarianism, romanticism and class segregation’, paramount in the promotion of Victorian suburbs, in the ‘self-righteous and condescending’ voices opposed to suburban spread in contemporary Australia (p. 843). Davison acknowledges the concerns of some suburban critics, notably those worried about the environmental footprint of sprawling residential neighbourhoods, but he suggests that they remain a practical residential form, the uniform appearance of which belies a diversity of experience for their inhabitants.

London's modern suburbs and, in particular, the role of religious institutions in them, is the focus for Claire Dwyer, David Gilbert and Bindi Shah's study of ‘Faith and suburbia’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 38 (2013), 403–19. Like Davison, these authors are keen to explore the complexity and diversity of suburbs. In particular, they suggest that urban geographers need to take more heed of recent research on religion in the city which has begun to reveal the intricate nature of the relationship between spirituality and suburban development. This article provides a case-study of three suburban spiritual institutions: the church of St Thomas the Apostle, in Hanwell; the West London Islamic Centre in West Ealing; and the Shikharbandhi Jain Temple in Potters Bar. What these studies reveal, according to the authors, is a variable pattern of suburban faith with some institutions serving very localized groups, and others more diverse, commuting congregations. They categorize this variety as ‘semi-detached faith’, ‘ethnoburb faith’ and ‘edge-city faith’, but note too that these are overlapping forms. The study presents an interesting example of how consideration of the built environment, mobility, ethnicity and belief can be combined to produce new interpretations of the urban spaces.

Many of the ideas behind the development of Victorian suburbs: the attractions of space, fresh air and escape from urban congestion, also drove the parks movement of the same era. Carole O’Reilly takes the examination of park promotion into the Edwardian period in her study of Manchester's Heaton Park, ‘From “the people” to “the citizen”: the emergence of the Edwardian municipal park in Manchester, 1902–1912’, Urban History, 40 (2013), 136–55. In this era, she argues, the idea of parks as spaces where the urban populace could be improved and rejuvenated gave way to a greater sense of contest between different users. Heaton Park was a 650 acre space developed by Manchester City Council from 1902. Its size meant that many of the behavioural controls imposed on park visitors in the Victorian era were impractical. It became a venue for a diverse range of activities, from political demonstrations to musical entertainments and other forms of recreation and, in turn, became a contested site precisely because large sections of a diverse populace felt entitled to use it. Tension between the use of open spaces for recreational and political purposes is also a theme explored by Chang-tai Hung in ‘A political park: the working people's cultural palace in Beijing’, J. of Contemporary History, 48 (2013), 556–77. Originally developed by the government in 1950s as a space for recreational activities for Beijing residents, the park was appropriated by the Chinese Communist Party as a venue for political campaigning. These two studies provide important evidence of the allure of urban open spaces for political groups keen to communicate their message to a mass audience.

Swansea's Singleton Park, where W.E. Gladstone addressed a huge audience, purportedly the biggest political gathering in Welsh history in its day, was still in the hands of its industrialist owners, the Vivian family, at the time of the visit of the Grand Old Man of British politics to that town in 1887. Neil Evans and Mike Benbough-Jackson's study of ‘Ritual, symbol and politics: Gladstone, Swansea and Wales in 1887’, Welsh History R., 26 (2013), 454–81, explores the Welsh tour undertaken that year by the former prime minister to draw attention to the issue of Irish Home Rule. The tour wound its way from Hawarden in Flintshire to Swansea in June 1887, culminating in the mass rally at Singleton Park. The grounds of the Vivian estate were thrown open for the occasion, for an inclusive gathering of something like 60,000 who were enthused, less by the political message of the visit than by Gladstone's willingness to acknowledge their Welsh identity, and keen to share in the civic fillip Swansea received by the honour of being the main focus and final destination of his journey through Wales. In the same issue of Welsh History R., a politically focused study of another nineteenth-century Welsh town is provided by the Labour peer and former MP, Ted Rowlands. His study of ‘The making of the Merthyr Tydfil constituency’, 26 (2013), 423–53, offers a reinterpretation of how parliamentary representation was achieved in the seat which he subsequently held in parliament from 1972 to 2001. Rowlands challenges the traditional assumption that Merthyr was granted the status of a parliamentary borough in 1832 as an outcome of the bitter riots of the previous year. Instead, he argues that the creation of the Merthyr seat came about thanks to sustained petitioning by the public. He examines the history of reform meetings in the town from 1830 onwards and concludes that ‘A town with a renowned history of radicalism owed its first civic achievement – parliamentary representation – rather less to its radicals and rather more to its counter-revolutionaries’ (p. 423).

Questions of public health and urban sanitation are also posed in the periodical literature this year. Christopher Hamlin's extensive survey of Victorian nuisance inspections from the 1840s, ‘Nuisances and community in mid-Victorian England: the attractions of inspection’, Social History, 38 (2013), 346–79, comprises an extensive survey of over 40 different towns, ranging from mining communities to resorts, with the aim of finding out about the work of their nuisance inspectors. Hamlin is cautious about attributing too much to them in terms of improvements to public health and the urban environment, but he does suggest that, cumulatively, their work of identifying and rectifying problems of sanitation and cleanliness at the level of individual homes and work premises gradually changed the mindset of contemporaries to one of acceptance and conformity to a set of cleanliness norms. Part of the culture of toleration towards nuisance inspection in England was its association with disease prevention, and Christopher Cowell's study of ‘The Hong Kong fever of 1843: collective trauma and the reconfiguring of colonial space’, Modern Asian Studies, 47 (2013), 329–64, provides a case-study of the far-reaching urban consequences of an unchecked epidemic. In this case, his focus is the outbreak of malaria which decimated the European population based in and around the city of Victoria in 1843. Some half a century before medical knowledge had attributed the spread of the disease to mosquitos, it was miasma theory which held sway in Hong Kong and, consequently, urban developments in the period after the outbreak prioritized elevated building land where air could circulate more freely and a subsequent re-ordering of the population along ethnic lines with the Chinese population relegated to the lower quarters, perceived as less healthy and thus less desirable.

The impact of a different kind of trauma on urban space is the subject of Jeremy Bryson's study of ‘Smoke space: material and imagined nature in the smelter city of Anaconda, Montana’, J. of Historical Geography, 40 (2013), 16–23. Bryson details the damaging effects of the sulphurous emissions from the Anaconda copper smelter, the world's largest in the 1880s, on the city of Anaconda and the surrounding Deer Lodge Valley. His account of the legal case brought by a group of local farmers against the smelter company in 1906 is strikingly reminiscent of the copper smoke trials in Britain almost a century earlier, but the main thrust of this article is the ongoing legacy of the pollution on the urban environment, even after the smelter had ceased production in 1980. The toxic landscape left behind hindered many efforts at economic redevelopment of the area, but did not deter the re-landscaping of the site of the former Upper Works into an 18-hole golf course. Similar concerns over smoke pollution and its potential damage to a built-up urban area feature in Stephen Heathorn's study of ‘Aesthetic politics and heritage nostalgia: electrical generating superstations in the London Cityscape since 1927’, London J., 38 (2013), 125–50. Fears over the possible impact of smoke from coal burned at the proposed electrical superstation at Battersea, on the surrounding cityscape, loomed large in the agitation against the siting of the new power station in the 1920s. Unlike the copper smoke protests in Anaconda, however, the concerns were less for human health or for the agricultural products of the region, but for the monuments, historic sites and green spaces of the city. In part, public opinion was won round by the appointment of renowned architect, Sir Giles Scott, who designed an appealing structure which became a recognizable landmark rather than a blot on the landscape. Such was the extent to which Battersea, and the later power station at Bankside, achieved this acceptance that they each became the focus for heritage planning and urban regeneration initiatives long after their lifespan as electricity generating superstations had ceased.

London's sphere of influence over patterns of wealth holding in late Victorian Britain occupies the attention of David R. Green and Alastair Owens in their study of ‘Geographies of wealth: real estate and personal property ownership in England and Wales, 1870–1902’, Economic History R., 66 (2013), 848–72. There is much of interest to urban historians in this article, not just in its findings but also in the way in which the authors draw on the wider literature on wealthy urban elites as a context for their study. In a data rich survey of personal and property wealth, based on scrutiny of records of real estate, death duty and government securities, the authors reveal patterns of real estate ownership permeating almost all rungs of the wealth ladder. They also demonstrate significant differences in patterns of wealth holding in different urban places. Investment in government securities, for example, was much more common among those living within a 50 mile radius of London than those further afield, while for real estate, the reverse was true. Geographical variations in wealth holding, they suggest, were subtle and complex.

Some interesting comparative urban studies feature in the periodical literature for 2013. Timothy Scott Brown's study of ‘The sixties in the city: avant-gardes and urban rebels in New York, London and West Berlin’, J. of Social History, 46 (2013), 817–42, attempts to shift attention away from student protest, which he argues has dominated much scholarship on the sixties. Instead, he examines the anarchist movements of the period and the way in which they were influenced by avant-garde art forms in the different urban settings explored in the study. In Berlin, for example, the ‘Hash Rebels’ grew out of the local Blues scene. Among their activities was a campaign of squatting in abandoned buildings as a means of staking a claim over part of the cityscape. The London anarchist group, King Mob, similarly targeted urban space, staging a campaign in June 1968 to pull down fences around some of the city's public squares. Although these groups were very wedded to specific locations in their respective cities, Timothy Scott Brown argues that they were not just local radical groups with their own agendas, but people who perceived themselves as part of a much broader, global movement.

The comparative approach used by Brown features in several other articles on urban history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Nile Green's analysis of ‘Maritime worlds and global history: comparing the Mediterranean and India Ocean through Barcelona and Bombay’, History Compass, 11 (2013), 513–23, is part of a cluster of essays on ‘Indian Ocean worlds as method’. He argues that the two port cities of Barcelona and Bombay in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, despite forming part of distinct Mediterranean and Indian Ocean Worlds, were each connected to global processes of industrialization, urbanism and cultural technologies. Barcelona and Bombay, he points out, each operated in a context of colonial networks which shaped their trading and communication links. His study is designed to test the ‘maritime worlds’ model of analysis, but it is equally useful as a way of illuminating the combination of influences which shaped port city development in the modern period. Elizabeth A. Harvey also adopts a comparative approach in her study of ‘“Layered networks”: imperial philanthropy in Birmingham and Sydney, 1860–1914’, J. of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 41 (2013), 120–42. The point of Harvey's piece is to take the study of philanthropy out of its more usual, national framework of analysis better to reveal how philanthropic networks operated. Both new centres of urban growth in the nineteenth century, Birmingham and Sydney, each spawned a range of philanthropic institutions to support poor and marginalized sections of their populations, including orphans, prostitutes and unmarried mothers. The ‘layered networks’ of her title are the overlapping spheres of imperial, metropolitan, regional and local connections within which these organizations operated. This way of viewing philanthropic activity, she suggests, is appropriate not just to the study of Birmingham and Sydney, but potentially provides a way of understanding philanthropic work in urban settings more broadly.

Of course, comparison across the journal literature is also possible thanks to a proliferation of articles on similar themes in different publications. Two interesting studies of housing policy in inter-war Britain, for example, invite the reader to make their own comparisons. Philip Broxholme's ‘Back to the future? The Tory party, paternalism, and housing policy in Nottingham 1919–1932’, Midland History, 38 (2013), 99–118, investigates the motivations behind the interventionist council housing policy adopted by the Conservative-dominated administration in Nottingham between the wars. He finds that there was a strong paternalistic tradition among the town's Tories, stretching back to the nineteenth century which, in the inter-war period, began to express itself in the promotion of welfare reform policies. These were by no means espoused by the entire Conservative party in the town. In fact, a strong group of traditionalists posed a clear voice of opposition in council meetings. But the more paternalistic Tories allied themselves with Labour and Liberal progressives to support ambitious house-building schemes. This pattern was at odds with the more familiar association of the Conservative party nationally as non-interventionist. Broxholme's piece makes for interesting reading alongside the article by James Smyth and Douglas Robertson on ‘Local elites and social control: building council houses in Stirling between the wars’, Urban History, 40 (2013), 336–54. Unlike the Nottingham example, where paternalistic instincts shaped councillors’ approach to house building, in Stirling, self-interest played an important part in determining responses, according to Smyth and Robertson. Many of the town's councillors, they point out, were private landlords whose involvement in council housing schemes had to be carefully balanced with protection of their own interests. Like Broxenholme, the authors agree that the council housing schemes of the era should not be equated with Labour politics. Stirling was an Independent council during their study period and for decades to follow. The article traces the development of three inter-war housing schemes in the town, two of which were council developments, at Riverside, Raploch, and the third, a private scheme at Randolph Road. The small businessmen on Stirling's council, they argue, brought their own interests to bear on these schemes, rather than simply adopting the national house-building drive promoted by central government. In a sense, then, this article is as revealing a study of inter-war town council activity as it is about housing solutions.

Further insights into the Scottish urban experience can be found elsewhere in the periodical literature for 2013. Richard Rodger and Rebecca Madgin's study, ‘Inspiring capital? Deconstructing myths and reconstructing urban environments, Edinburgh, 1860–2010’, Urban History, 40 (2013), 507–29, examines how councillors and planners consciously promoted an image of Edinburgh as a non-industrial city. As the authors show, there was some sound economic basis for this. Employment in the financial, retail and professional sectors was an important feature of the occupational structure of the city over successive decades, but overall, employment in manufacturing was dominant. Engineering, ship-building and metal-working factories all prospered in the city but these realities did not sit easily with Edinburgh's image as an historic centre, and so were down-played in publicity literature and marketing campaigns. As Rodger and Madgin go on to show, however, this perception of the city also influenced planning policies after 1945 with the result that insufficient land was allocated for industrial development. Their study demonstrates the potential for apparently harmless myths about urban identity to become harmful realities by diverting resources away from areas of real need.

As in 2012, a growing interest in the post-1945 period is evident among urban historians this year. In Social History, 38 (2013), 220–37, Simon Gunn's study of ‘People and the car: the expansion of automobility in urban Britain, c. 1955–70’, seeks to apply a more historical approach to the sociological accounts of car ownership and its impact on Britain in the post-war period. Scrutinizing, in particular, levels of car ownership and the impact of cars on urban social life, Gunn suggests that a motor revolution was evident in Britain between the mid-1950s and the mid-1960s. This consisted not just of an increase in car ownership, which trebled over the period, but also of rising levels of employment in the car industry and mushrooming government spending on road infrastructure projects. At the same time, changing attitudes towards public transport saw the closing of passenger railway lines and the abandonment of trams in some of the country's major cities. Using a range of contemporary reports and social surveys, Gunn analyses the gender, class and regional differences in patterns of car ownership and how the car began to impact on housing provision, with growing demand for garages, but he also attempts to address the more elusive question of how people used cars. Whilst car ownership had the potential to extend peoples’ mobility horizon beyond the range of the bicycle or foot, it did not revolutionize their range of movement. Instead, cars tended to reinforce existing patterns of mobility. People may have used cars instead of buses, but they made the same journeys and moved within, rather than beyond, their established networks of home, neighbourhood and community. Gunn's article raises a note of caution against seeing the car as too transformative, favouring a more incremental, varied picture of its impact on urban life.

In a very different context, Thomas Borén and Craig Young are also interested in understanding the nature of mobility. Their study of ‘The migration dynamics of the “creative class”: evidence from a study of artists in Stockholm, Sweden’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 103 (2013), 195–210, is concerned with examining the decision-making processes behind mobility decisions, as a way of investigating the ‘creative city’. The Stockholm artists who form the focus of this study are a relatively diverse group, encompassing photographers, film makers, musicians, dancers, painters and writers. They argue that for these people, it was not a sense of Stockholm's openness or tolerance that drew them to the city, but rather responses to particular work-related opportunities such as grants or short-term projects. For those at a later life-cycle stage, the influence of kinship and friendship ties became more important to their decision. Moreover, on arrival in Stockholm, these migrants tended to reside in the city's suburbs rather than in its more vibrant centre, thus challenging the idea that they were drawn to the particular cultural attractions of the city. The authors argue that their findings raise question marks about the usefulness of urban policies aimed at making cities attractive destinations for the creative. Given the tendency of migrants to respond to a much more personal and practical range of mobility stimuli, these are probably futile.

Aspects of the creative city are explored at length in a special issue of Urban History, 40, 4 (2013), on ‘Music and the city’. The articles in this issue cover the full spectrum of urban musical life, from dance hall to opera. A decade on from a pioneering special issue on music and urban history in the same journal, guest editor Markian Prokopovich reflects that the subject of music has yet to become a serious research focus for many urban historians. A number of contributions to this volume, however, attempt to redress this. Notable among them is Jan Hein Furnée’s, ‘“Le bon public de la Haye”. Local governance and the audience in the French opera in The Hague, 1820–1890’, Urban History, 40 (2013), 625–45. In his study period, tensions between fashionable elites and middle-class manufacturers, shopkeepers and artisans played out in the leisure spaces of the city, but Furnée argues that the city's Théâtre Français was a more socially cohesive entertainment space where audiences of diverse class backgrounds gathered to enjoy the repertoire. Using subscription and admissions records, for the theatre he finds that some 22–38 per cent of subscribers were members of the Dutch nobility, a reflection of the high subscription rates. At the other end of the spectrum, though, prices for single tickets and seating space for the lower ranks were made more accessible. The middle classes, too, were encouraged to attend thanks to the promotion of special Sunday performances which commenced after church services. These different social groups were accommodated in a range of seating types, from spacious boxes to seats in the stalls. The Hague's local authorities who ran the theatre thereby succeeded in creating, as well as responding to, demand for musical entertainment.

Music was not an aspect of urban life much explored by E.P. Hennock (1926–2012), whose work features in an essay of appreciation by Paul Laxton at the end of this special issue, Urban History, 40 (2013), 726–9. Reading this short account of the life and career of this German-born, Cambridge History graduate, though, it is difficult not to be struck by how many other research issues and questions, still being pursued by contemporary urban historians, were tackled by him throughout his fruitful career. Indeed, many of the themes and approaches evident in the periodical literature for 2013 – comparative history, municipal government, wealth and welfare – featured in his research in the 1960s and 1970s. A contemporary of H.J. Dyos and Asa Briggs, Hennock's recent death seems to cut a link with that pioneering generation of urban historians, but judging by recent published research, his influence on the discipline looks set to continue for some time yet.