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Abstract
The survey examines the past, present and future of the urban history field in Britain, mixing memories and reflections. I trace the global turn of that field and the challenges it brings. One argument concerns the impact of a global scale on the methods and the explanatory frameworks used. A second concern is the role of economic history and economic frameworks of analysis in the writing of urban history, and I advocate their continued relevance.

Social historians formed an important part of the Social Science History Association from its early days, and they widened its intellectual space beyond initial emphases on political history and quantitative methods. Lee Benson and other faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, as well as Charles and Louise Tilly, were particularly influential in attracting a broad mix of scholars to the group. The openness of the association and its interdisciplinarity appealed to younger scholars, and those interested in the "new urban history" were early recruits. A growing number of women, many of whom were social historians, participated in the first conventions and newly organized networks.

ABSTRACT:British colonial administrators had two strategies for governing towns in Malaya during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They used Sanitary Boards to improve public health and to control populations indirectly, and they relied on police forces for direct forms of discipline. Both strategies reveal the overall weakness of the British colonial regime in that region.

Urban history is a rapidly expanding, flourishing field in Europe. Nevertheless, urban scholars would do well to re-examine the paradigms within which they have been working as the field today lacks central questions and general interpretive models. Moreover, the common focus on urban biography or upon one region within a single nation-state has become increasingly outmoded, given the international scale of economic processes and migration flows. More attention to topics treated within a European-wide or even international context is needed. In addition, urban history as currently defined is tilted towards social and economic concerns to the neglect of the political arena.

The problem of social conflict is central to the historiography of nineteenth-century cities. Since Friedrich Engels wrote his powerful indictment of social relations in English industrial towns, urban historians have told and retold tales of dramatic struggles between workers and their middle-class employers. Whether seen from a Marxist or non-Marxist perspective, the standard books on social life in industrial towns abound with strikes, demonstrations, confrontations, and other more subtle signs of conflict. A. Temple Patterson and Malcolm Thomis depict the often tumultuous responses of Leicester and Nottingham framework knitters to their economic decline. Accounts of urban Chartism regularly link workers' economic and social demands to strong middle-class disapproval and disavowal within a local context. Books on the 1830s and 1840s are particularly rich in incidents of confrontation, but the growing literature on the late nineteenth century also emphasizes this theme. Gareth Stedman Jones places middle-class misconceptions and fears at the centre of his analysis of casual labour in London, and Robert Grey's discussion of Edinburgh artisans assumes the reality of class conflict as a determinant of urban social relations. Nevertheless our understanding of divisions among urban social groups and of the relationships of one group to another remains primitive and unsatisfactory.

Frontmatter -- Preface, 1995 -- Preface to the First Edition -- Contents -- INTRODUCTION. Urbanization in Perspective -- PART ONE. The Preindustrial Age: Eleventh to Fourteenth Centuries -- Intoduction -- CHAPTER 1. The Structures and Functions of Medieval Towns -- CHAPTER 2. Systems of Early Cities -- CHAPTER 3. The Demography of Preindustrial Cities -- PART TWO. A Protoindustrial .Age: Fourteenth to Eighteenth Centuries -- Introduction -- CHAPTER 4. Cities in the Early Modern European Economy -- CHAPTER 5. Beyond Baroque Urbanism -- PART THREE. The Industrial Age: Eighteenth to Twentieth Centuries -- Introduction -- CHAPTER 6. Industrialization and the Cities -- CHAPTER 7. Urban Growth and Urban Systems -- CHAPTER 8. The Human Consequences of Industrial Urbanization -- CHAPTER 9. The Evolution and Control of Urban Space -- CHAPTER 10. Europe's Cities in the Twentieth Century -- APPENDIX A. A Cyclical Model of an Economy -- APPENDIX B. Size Distributions and the Rank-Size Rule -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index

Europe became a land of cities during the last millennium. The story told in this book begins with North Sea and Mediterranean traders sailing away from Dorestad and Amalfi, and with warrior kings building castles to fortify their conquests. It tells of the dynamism of textile towns in Flanders and Ireland. While London and Hamburg flourished by reaching out to the world and once vibrant Spanish cities slid into somnlence, a Russian urban network slowly grew to rival that of the West. Later as the tide of industrialization swept over Europe, the most intense urban striving and then settled back into the merchant cities and baroque capitals of an earlier era. By tracing the large-scale precesses of social, economic, and political change within cities, as well as the evolving relationships between town and country and between city and city, the authors present an original synthsis of European urbanization within a global context. They divide their study into three time periods, making the early modern era much more than a mere transition from preindustrial to industrial economies. Through both general analyzes and incisive case studies, Hohenberg and Lees show how cities originated and what conditioned their early development and later growth. How did urban activity respond to demographic and techological changes? Did the social consequences of urban life begin degradation or inspire integration and cultural renewal? New analytical tools suggested by a systems view of urban relations yield a vivid dual picture of cities both as elements in a regional and national heirarchy of central places and also as junctions in a transnational network for the exchange of goods, information, and influence. A lucid text is supplemented by numerous maps, illustrations, figures, and tables, and by substantial bibliography. Both a general and a scholarly audience will find this book engrossing reading. Table of Contents: Introduction: Urdanization in Perspective PART I: The Preindustrial Age: eleventh to Fourteenth Centuries 1. Structure and Functions of Medieval Towns 2. Systems of Early Cities 3. The Demography of Preindustrial Cities PART II: The Industrial Age: Fourteenth to Eighteenth Centuries 4. Cities in the Early Modern European Economy 5. Beyond Baroque Urbanism PART III: The Industrial Age: Eighteenth to Twentieth Centuries 6. Industrial and the Cities 7. Urban Growth and Urban Systems 8. The Human Consequences of Industrial Urbanization 9. The Evolution and Control of Urban Space 10. Europe's Cities in the Twentieth Century Appendix A: A Cyclical Model of an Economy Appendix B: Size Distributions and the Ranks-Size Rule Notes Bibliography Index Reviews of this book: A readable and ambitious introduction to the long history of European urbanization.--Economic History ReviewReviews of this book: A trailblazing history of the transformation of Europe.--John Barkham ReviewsReviews of this book: A marvelously compendious account of a millennium of urban development, which accomplishes that most difficult of assignments, to design a work that will safely introduce the newcomer to the subject and at the same time stimulate professional colleagues to review positions.--Urban Studies.