Rosemary Wakeman's original survey text comprehensively explores modern European urban history from 1815 to the present day. It provides a journey to cities and towns across the continent, in search of the patterns of development that have shaped the urban landscape as indelibly European. The focus is on the built environment, the social and cultural transformations that mark the patterns of continuity and change, and the transition to modern urban society. Including over 60 images that serve to illuminate the analysis, the book examines whether there is a European city, and if so, what are its characteristics? Wakeman offers an interdisciplinary approach that incorporates concepts from cultural and postcolonial studies, as well as urban geography, and provides full coverage of urban society not only in western Europe, but also in eastern and southern Europe, using various cities and city types to inform the discussion. The book provides detailed coverage of the often-neglected urbanization post-1945 which allows us to more clearly understand the modernizing arc Europe has followed over the last two centuries.

In the mid-1780s Bentham drafted his first sustained discussions of political economy and public finance for Projet Matiere (itself part of Projet d'un corps de loix complet). Those discussions are now lost, but the corresponding marginal contents open this volume, followed by three closely related appendices. The volume continues with Defence of Usury, first published 1787, which was well received, quickly translated, and established some reputation for Bentham in political economy. In 1790, whilst preparing a second edition, Bentham drafted the raft of additional materials included here in five appendices. At the same time he began Manual of Political Economy, an introductory handbook which he never finished, while the surviving text appears here, supplemented by seven appendices. In March 1793 Bentham reacted to press reports of the Irish Budget by composing A Protest against Law Taxes, a trenchant critique of the taxation of legal proceedings, and the denial of justice to the poor, which was printed in 1793, published in 1795, and extended in 1816, and which completes the volume.