London, Paris and New York in the eighteenth century, as today,
were places where political authority, commerce and money, art and
intellectual life intersected. They straddled an Atlantic world
where ships powered by nothing more than wind, currents and human
muscle criss-crossed the sea, carrying with them goods, ideas and
above all people: men and women, bewigged aristocrats and lawyers,
rough-handed craftworkers, quill-wielding bluestockings and doughty
fishwives. But the cities were also home to dangerous criminals,
corrupt politicians - and slaves. Rebel Cities explores the stormy
debate about the nature of cities in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries: were they places of enlightenment, sparkling wells of
progress and civilisation, or were they dens of vice, degeneracy
and disorder? Against a backdrop of accelerating urban expansion
and revolution in both Europe and North America, revolutionary
burghers of these extraordinary cities expended ink, paint, breath
and, sometimes, blood in their struggle to understand, control and
master the urban world. Drawing on hundreds of letters, travelogues
and eye-witness accounts, Mike Rapport vividly evokes the sights,
sounds and smells of these cities, masterfully weaving their
history with the politics of revolution. When New Yorkers and
Parisians experienced their revolution, when their cities went to
war, and when Londoners engaged in political protest, they
underwent the whole torrent and exhilaration of human emotions.
Determining the character of the cities through their inhabitants,
as well as their architecture, topography and the events that
shaped them, this magnificent book evokes what it was like for all
parts of society to live in London, Paris and New York in one of
the most transformative periods in the history of civilisation.
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