In recent decades there has been increasing historical interest in various aspects of local urban politics, resulting in a much better understanding of the recruitment and socio-economic characteristics of municipal leadership and the exercise of power at a local level. However, much less is known about the highly important offices and office-holders standing at the ceremonial, political and executive head of towns and cities. Through a comparative analysis of mayoralty since1800, this volume explores the characteristics of the office in relation to such issues as the constitutional position of mayors, their ceremonial and executive roles, their representational status in relation to local, regional and central authority, and their public visibility, which at various times has been used to highlight or blur issues of race, gender, politics or religion within a community. Drawing on examples from contrasting national contexts in Eastern and Western Europe, and North America, and with contributions from both historians and political scientists, this book will be welcomed as an important step in providing a much fuller international picture of the development and nature of urban governance.

The First World War was above all a war of logistics. Whilst the conflict will forever be remembered for the mud and slaughter of the Western Front, it was a war won on the factory floor as much as the battlefield. Examining the war from an industrial perspective, Arming the Western Front examines how the British between 1900 and 1920 set about mobilising economic and human resources to meet the challenge of 'industrial war'. Beginning with an assessment of the run up to war, the book examines Edwardian business-state relations in terms of armament supply. It then outlines events during the first year of the war, taking a critical view of competing constructs of the war and considering how these influenced decision makers in both the private and public domains. This sets the framework for an examination of the response of business firms to the demand for 'shells more shells', and their varying ability to innovate and manage changing methods of production and organisation. The outcome, a central theme of the book, was a complex and evolving trade-off between the quantity and quality of munitions supply, an issue that became particularly acute during the Battle of the Somme in 1916. This deepened the economic and political tensions between the military, the Ministry of Munitions, and private engineering contractors as the pressure to increase output accelerated markedly in the search for victory on the western front. The Great War created a dual army, one in the field, the other at home producing munitions, and the final section of the book examines the tensions between the two as the country strove for final victory and faced the challenges of the transition to the peace time economy.

This title was first published in 2002: This volume focuses on the Roman provinces of Syria and Arabia, above all the lands now within Lebanon, Syria and Jordan. The first articles look at questions of geography, cartography and toponymy, particularly in Strabo, Pliny and Ptolemy. The following sections are concerned with settlement patterns and urban development in the region. In the Roman and early Byzantine periods, the inland areas underwent a gradual transformation, from a semi-sedentary, lightly populated and predominantly rural region, to one of large cities and a network of prosperous, socially sophisticated villages, linked by a network of roads. That change is documented by a wealth of epigraphy from both the urban communities and their outlying settlements (the subject of several articles). By the 4th century, too, Christianity had become the dominant religion and remained such until the arrival of Islam.

Sehrengiz is an Ottoman genre of poetry written in honor of various cities and provincial towns of the Ottoman Empire from the early sixteenth century to the early eighteenth century. This book examines the urban culture of Ottoman Istanbul through Sehrengiz, as the Ottoman space culture and traditions have been shaped by a constant struggle between conflicting groups practicing political and religious attitudes at odds. By examining real and imaginary gardens, landscapes and urban spaces and associated ritualized traditions, the book questions the formation of Ottoman space culture in relation to practices of orthodox and heterodox Islamic practices and imperial politics. The study proposes that Azehrengiz was a subtext for secret rituals, performed in city spaces, carrying dissident ideals of Melami mysticism; following after the ideals of the thirteenth century Sufi philosopher Ibn al-'Arabi who proposed a theory of 'creative imagination' and a three-tiered definition of space, the ideal, the real and the intermediary (barzakh). In these rituals, marginal groups of guilds emphasized the autonomy of individual self, and suggested a novel proposition that the city shall become an intermediary space for reconciling the orthodox and heterodox worlds. In the early eighteenth century, liminal expressions of these marginal groups gave rise to new urban rituals, this time adopted by the Ottoman court society and by affluent city dwellers and expressed in the poetry of NedA (R)m. The author traces how a tradition that had its roots in the early sixteenth century as a marginal protest movement evolved until the early eighteenth century as a movement of urban space reform.

This volume critically challenges the current creative city debate from a historical perspective. In the last two decades, urban studies has been engulfed by a creative city narrative in which concepts like the creative economy, the creative class or creative industries proclaim the status of the city as the primary site of human creativity and innovation. So far, however, nobody has challenged the core premise underlying this narrative, asking why we automatically have to look at cities as being the agents of change and innovation. What processes have been at work historically before the predominance of cities in nurturing creativity and innovation was established? In order to tackle this question, the editors of this volume have collected case studies ranging from Renaissance Firenze and sixteenth-century Antwerp to early modern Naples, Amsterdam, Bologna, Paris, to industrializing Sheffield and nineteenth-and twentieth century cities covering Scandinavian port towns, Venice, and London, up to the French techno-industrial city Grenoble. Jointly, these case studies show that a creative city is not an objective or ontological reality, but rather a complex and heterogenic "assemblage," in which material, infrastructural and spatial elements become historically entangled with power-laden discourses, narratives and imaginaries about the city and urban actor groups.

This title was first published in 2002: Since the invention of printing in the mid-fifteenth century the production, distribution and consumption of printed matter have been the principal means through which new ideas and representations have been spread. In recent times cultural historians have taken a growing interest in the previously somewhat isolated field of book history, shifting the study of printing and publishing into the centre of historical concern. This study of print and printing culture has naturally led historians to a concern with its urban context. The urban environment was fundamental to the development of printing from the outset, since it was in towns that the necessary combination of technical and entrepreneurial competencies were located, and where a growing demand for printed texts was to be found. Print permeated the urban experience at every level, and formed the chief means by which its ideas, values and beliefs were exported to the rest of society. In this way print promoted the broader urbanisation of society, by spreading urban attitudes and ideas beyond the limits of the city. It is with the urban cultural environment that this volume is primarily concerned, underlining the centrality of printing and publishing to the understanding of urban culture. Focusing particularly on post 1800 France and Germany, it considers a wide range of printed matter and engages with a number of recurrent historical issues, such as the role of printing in urban economies, the construction of metropolitan identities and the testing of moral boundaries.

Drawing on a body of research covering primarily Europe and the Americas, but stretching also to Asia and Africa, from the mid-eighteenth century to the present, this book explores the methodological and heuristic implications of studying cities in relation to one another. Moving fluidly between comparative and transnational methods, as well as across regional and national lines, the contributors to this volume demonstrate the necessity of this broader view in assessing not just the fundamentals of urban life, the way cities are occupied and organised on a daily basis, but also the urban mindscape, the way cities are imagined and represented. In doing so the volume provides valuable insights into the advantages and limitations of using multiple cities to form historical inquiries.

This is a coherent and integrated set of essays around the theme of governance addressing a wide range of questions on the organisation and legitimation of authority. At the heart of the book is a set of topics which have long attracted the attention of urbanists and urban historians all over the world: the growth and reform of urban local government, local-centre relationships, public health and pollution, local government finance, the nature of local social elites and of participation in local government. Approaching these topics through the concept of governance not only raises a series of new questions but also extends the scope of enquiry for the historian seeking to understand towns and cities all over the world in a period of rapid change. Questions of governance must be central to a variety of enquiries into the nature of the urban place. There are questions about the setting of agendas, about when a localised or neighbourhood issue becomes a big city or even national political issue, about what makes a 'problem'. Public health and related matters form a central part of the 'issues' especially for the British; in North America fire and the development of urban real estate have dominated; in India the security of the colonial government had a prominent place. The historical dynamic of these essays follows the change from the chartered governments of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries towards the representative regimes of the nineteenth and twentieth. However, such historical change is not regarded as inevitable, and the effects of bureaucratic growth, regulatory regimes, the legitimating role of rational and scientific knowledge as well as the innovatory use of ritual and space are all dealt with at length.

Gibbins' Industrial History of England gives a thorough outline of England's economic and industrial history from the Romans to the early 20th Century. As well as considering the economic and industrial aspects of English life, this study also presents social, political and military aspects of different time periods to give a fuller picture of how England's industry progressed through the years. Originally published in 1890, this text has been reprinted several times with this edition published in 1912. This title will be of interest to students of British and industrial history.

"Mining in a Medieval Landscape" explores the history and archaeology of the late medieval royal silver mines at Bere Ferrers in Devon's Tamar Valley and examines their significance for mining history as a whole. Comparing their impact on the landscape with that of less intensive, traditional mining industries, this authoritative volume analyzes maps and documents together in light of recent archaeological field surveys, allowing the mining landscape to be reconstructed in remarkable detail.

From the moment governments began making money from levying duty on imported goods, a smuggling trade developed to avoid paying such taxes. Whilst the popular image of historic smuggling remains a romantic one, this book makes clear that the illicit trade could be a large-scale and systematic business that relied on the connivance of well-connected merchants. Taking the port of Bristol as a case study, the book provides the most sophisticated historical study ever undertaken of the smugglers' trade, in England or abroad. Following on from the author's prize-winning article in Economic History Review, the volume employs the business accounts of sixteenth-century merchants to reconstruct their illicit operations. It presents a detailed analysis of the merchants' illegal businesses, assessing how individual merchants, and Bristol's commercial class, were able to protect their contraband trade. More fundamentally, it examines how and why the illicit trade developed, why the Crown was unable to suppress it, and the role smuggling played within Bristol's wider economy. Through an investigation of these matters the study explores a world that has long attracted popular interest, but which has always been assumed to be immune to serious historical investigation. The book offers a pioneering study, demonstrating that a detailed examination of a particular time and place, based on a close and integrated reading of both official and private records, can make it possible for historians to investigate illicit economies to a greater degree than has previously been believed possible.

Based on a wide variety of government and civic records, this book traces the evolution of the changing nature of city status, particularly through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Beginning with an explanation of how city status first became connected to cathedrals in the medieval period, the book explores how during the nineteenth century, links evolved between Anglican diocesan sub-divisions and city creation. It then shows how in a few years, between 1888 and 1907, the traditional interpretation of a city was overturned as the most major British industrial and commercial towns received city status and lord mayoralties. The second half of the book concentrates on city status during the twentieth century, and particularly the politicisation of the process and the linking of grants to royal occasions. The study concludes by looking at the city status competitions of 2000 and 2002 in relation to the previous two hundred years of city history.

Dickens's relationship to cities is part of his modernity and his enduring fascination. How he thought about, grasped and conceptualised the rapidly expanding and anonymous urban scene are all fascinating aspects of a critical debate which, starting virtually from Dickens's own time, has become more and more active and questioning of the significance of that new thing, the unknown and unknowable, city. Although Dickens was influenced by several European and American cities, the most significant city for Dickens was London, the city he knew as a boy in the 1820s and which developed in his lifetime to become the finance and imperial capital of the nineteenth-century. His sense of London as monumental and fashionable, modern and anachronistic, has generated a large number of writings and critical approaches: Marxist, sociological, psychoanalytic and deconstructive. Dickens looks at the city from several aspects: as a place bringing together poverty and riches; as the place of the new and of chance and coincidence, and of secret lives exposed by the special figure of the detective. Another crucial area of study is the relationship of the city to women, and women's place in the city, as well as the way Dickens's London matches up with other visual representations. This anthology of criticism surveys the field and is a major contribution to the study of cities, city culture, modernity and Dickens. It brings together key previously published articles and essays and features a comprehensive bibliography of work which scholars can continue to explore.

Many European towns have experienced loss of population, degradation of physical structure and profound economic change at least once since the height of the Roman Empire. This volume is an examination of the various causes of these changes, the results which flowed from them and the reasons why some urban centres survived, revived and eventually flourished again while others failed and died. The contributors bring to bear the techniques of history and archaeology, the perspectives of economics, agronomy, medicine, architecture and planning, geography and law, to the study. The result is a synthesis which connects the Decline of the Roman Empire to the effects of the Black Death and the economic transformation of Renaissance Florence.

In the decades following the 1997 Asian economic crisis, South Korea sought segyehwa (globalization). Evidence of this is no more evident than in the country's capital, Seoul, where urban development has been central to making the city a global hub and not just the centre of the national economy. However, recent development projects differ from those of the past in that they no longer focus solely on economic efficiency, but on the deployment of a new urban aesthetics. As Jieheerah Yun reveals in Globalizing Seoul: The City's Cultural and Urban Change, the pursuit of globalization and the rebranding of Seoul's image from hard industrial city to soft cultural city have shaped the urban development of the city. Following a brief urban history of Seoul, she focuses on two key themes. In the first, how globalization has contributed to refashioning Korean traditions, she analyzes the policies and actions to preserve Korean folk houses and pre-industrial street layouts, looking in detail at the Bukchon and Insadong areas of the city. Her second theme is an examination of migration and the generation of new minority neighbourhoods amidst the segyehwa policies and the state's efforts to build a multicultural society. In detailed case studies of the redevelopment of Dongdaemun Market as part of rebranding Seoul as the 'world design capital' and of the Itaewon area as both a Special Tourist Zone and a Global Cultural Zone, she shows how multi-ethnic neighbourhoods are threatened by lack of consideration for economic justice and housing provision.

The Muspratt family form a fascinating dynasty in the history of British commerce and manufacturing. Associated principally with the development of the chemical industry in Liverpool - James Muspratt (1793-1884) was the first person to make alkali on a large scale using the Leblanc Process - the three generations of the family also contributed to wider Victorian and Edwardian culture through their interests in politics, education (founding the Liverpool College of Chemistry in 1848), art, literature and theatre. This is the first study to present the history of the Muspratts as a family group and to consider the entrepreneurial spirit they brought to chemical manufacture in Britain and to their many other ventures.

The only survey of the urban, commercial and industrial history of the period between the Norman conquest and the Black Death.

The world of work is tightly entwined with the world of things. Hot metal illuminates connections between design, material culture and labour between the 1960s and the 1980s, when the traditional crafts of hot-metal typesetting and letterpress were finally made obsolete with the introduction of computerised technologies. This multidisciplinary history provides an evocative rendering of design culture by exploring an intriguing case: a doggedly traditional Government Printing Office in Australia. It explores the struggles experienced by printers as they engaged in technological retraining, shortly before facing factory closure. Topics explored include spatial memory within oral history, gender-labour tensions, the rise of neoliberalism and the secret making of objects 'on the side'. This book will appeal to researchers in design and social history, labour history, material culture and gender studies. It is an accessible, richly argued text that will benefit students seeking to learn about the nature and erosion of blue-collar work and the history of printing as a craft. -- .

This book brings together twelve outstanding articles by eminent historians to throw light on the evolution of medieval towns and the lives of their inhabitants. The essays span the period from the dramatic urban expansion of the thirteenth century to the crises in the fifteenth century as a result of plague, population decline and changes in the economy. Throughout the breadth of current debates surrounding the history of urban society is fully explored.

A provocative survey of new research in the history of urban public health, Body and City links the approaches of demographic and medical history with the methodologies of urban history and historical geography. It challenges older methodologies, offering new insights into the significance of cultural history, which has largely been overlooked by previous histories of public health. This book explores important issues and experiences in the public health arena in diverse European settings from the Middle Ages to the early 20th century.

This seminal book reveals how black labour was exploited in twentieth-century South Africa, the human costs of which are still largely hidden from history. It was the people of southern Mozambique, bent double beneath the historical loads of forced labour and slavery, then sold off en masse as contracted labourers, who paid the highest price for South African gold. An iniquitous intercolonial agreement for the exploitation of ultra-cheap black labour was only made possible through nightly use of the steam locomotive on the transnational railway linking Johannesburg and Lourenco Marques. These night trains left deep scars in the urban and rural cultures of black communities, whether in the form of popular songs or a belief in nocturnal witches' trains that captured and conveyed zombie workers to the region's most unpopular places of employment. By tracing the journeys undertaken by black migrants, Charles van Onselen powerfully reconstructs how racial thinking, expressed logistically, reflected the evolving systems of segregation and apartheid. On the night trains, the last stop was always hell.

The late nineteenth century witnessed unprecedented levels of urban growth as migration swelled the population of European cities to new heights. The resulting problems of overcrowding and inadequate civic utilities prompted the governing elites to look for new planning solutions to address the needs of an increasingly urbanised society. At the same time young people were also increasingly recognised as being adversely affected, both politically and morally, by the on-going process of urbanization. Church groups, civic authorities, middle-class reformers and political movements all tried to steer youth toward their own concept of respectable behaviour, concepts that often tended to share many similarities in their paternalistic emphasis upon social discipline. This volume directly addresses the confluence of these issues, the point at which the city government, youth and public space meet and the resulting problems and tensions that were often created. Whether it be the corruption of the rural youth flooding into the cities at the beginning of the twentieth century, battles between Hitler Youth and working-class gangs in Nazi Germany, hooliganism in 1950s Hungary or the appropriation of, or withdrawal from, public spaces by youths in more recent times, all the chapters in this book explore ways in which authorities and adult groups have sought to control young people, both directly and indirectly. Drawing on a broad selection of methods and disciplines, a wide variety of case studies from across Europe are used to investigate the interactions between youth and authority, and show how these adapted and changed over time and in different countries. By taking a fresh look at these issues within a comparative framework, this volume furthers our understanding of modern European society during the twentieth century.

The Later Medieval City, 1300-1500, the second part of David Nicholas's ambitious two-volume study of cities and city life in the Middle Ages, fully lives up to its splendid precursor, The Growth of the Medieval City. (Like that volume it is fully self-sufficient, though many readers will want to use the two as a continuum.) This book covers a much shorter period than the first. That traced the rise of the medieval European city system from late Antiquity to the early fourteenth century; this offers a portrait of the fully developed late medieval city in all its richness and complexity. David Nicholas begins with the economic and demographic realignments of the last two medieval centuries. These fostered urban growth, raising living standards and increasing demand for a growing range of urban manufactures. The hunger for imports and a shortage of coin led to sophisticated credit mechanisms that could only function through large cities. But, if these changes brought new opportunities to the wealthy, they also created a growing problem of urban poverty: violence became endemic in the later medieval city. Moreover, although more rebellions were sparked by taxes than by class conflict, class divisions were deepening. Most cities came to be governed by councils chosen from guild-members, and most guilds were dominated by merchants. The landowning elite that had dominated the early medieval cities of the first volume still retained its prestige, but its wealth was outstripped by the richer merchants; while craftsmen, who had little political influence, were further disadvantaged as access to the guilds became more restricted. The later medieval cities developed permanent bureaucracies providing a huge range of public services, and they were paid for by sophisticated systems of taxation and public borrowing. The survival of their fuller, richer records allow us not only to apply a more statistical approach, but also to get much closer, to the splendours and squalors of everyday city-life than was possible in the earlier volume. The book concludes with a set of vibrant chapters on women and children and religious minorities in the city, on education and culture, and on the tenor of ordinary urban existence. Like its predecessor, this book is massively, and vividly, documented. Its approach is interdisciplinary and comparative, and its examples and case studies are drawn from across Europe: from France, England, Germany, the Low Countries, Iberia and Italy, with briefer reviews of the urban experience elsewhere from Baltic to Balkans. The result is the most wide-ranging and up-to-date study of its multifaceted subject. It is a formidable achievement.

The nineteenth century witnessed a flowering of museums in towns and cities across Britain. As well as providing a focus for collections of artifacts and a place of educational recreation, this work argues that municipal museums had a further, social role. In a situation of rapid urban growth, allied to social and cultural changes on a scale hitherto unknown, it was inevitable that traditional class and social hierarchies would come under enormous pressure. As a result, urban elites began to look to new methods of controlling and defining the urban environment. One such manifestation of this was the growth of the public museum. In earlier centuries museums were the preserve of learned and respectable minority, yet by the end of the nineteenth century one of the principal rationales of museums was the education, or 'improvement', of the working classes. In the control of museums too there was a corresponding shift away from private aristocratic leadership, toward a middle-class civic directorship and a growing professional body of curators. This work is in part a study of the creation of professional authority and autonomy by museum curators. More importantly though, it is about the stablization of middle-class identities by the end of the nineteenth century around new hierarchies of cultural capital. Public museums were an important factor in constructing the identity and authority of certain groups with access to, and control over, them. By examining urban identities through the cultural lens of the municipal museum, we are able to reconsider and better understand the subtleties of nineteenth-century urban society.