Connections between Catalonia and Argentina in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are being researched at the moment by an increasing number of scholars. There are approaches from the history of art (Montserrat Galí and others), social and political history (Stephen Jacobson) and cultural history (Marcela Lucci). The volume reviewed here aims at merging the history of science and intellectual exchanges with urban history. The chapters that form it accomplish this objective in differing ways. Globally conceived, this is an informative, insightful and readable volume with an especially attractive variety of case-studies: from transnational anarchist networks to anatomical wax displays, medical healers and prostitution laws. Werner's and Zimmermann's histoire croisée, which does not compare different geographical realities, but rather highlights the mutually constitutive impact of developments carried out at different local, regional and global levels, has a notable presence in the book. Thematically, the volume is divided into three parts: the first deals with the influx of Catalan intellectuals in Argentina's capital cities; the second explores more explicit cases of transnational ideological and scientific transfers across the Atlantic; and the third is devoted to the development of medical and hygienic cultures in both Barcelona and Buenos Aires (with solid and insightful examples, but a weaker cross-national approach).

Migration from Spain to Argentina increased after the political turmoil of the six revolutionary years (1868–74) and continued throughout the Restoration period well into the twentieth century (Xosé Manoel Núñez Seixas has published several historiographical reviews on this subject). It is fascinating to learn of the impact in Buenos Aires of the execution of the Catalan pedagogue Francesc Ferrer i Guàrdia (1859–1909) thanks to the piece by Margarita Pierini. Ferrer was unfairly sentenced to death after social unrest during the Tragic Week in Barcelona. There were several modern schools inspired by Ferrer's principles in Buenos Aires, and the progressive Argentinean press read his shooting as an attack to progress and enlightenment. In turn, Saúl Luis Casas offers an overview of the associative activity of Catalan expatriates in Buenos Aires, with a glimpse of the potential for research of Ressorgiment (1916–72), the longest-lived American magazine published in Catalan.

Gustavo Vallejo tells us about Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, president of Argentina between 1868 and 1874. He visited Spain in 1846, but even before the journey he was convinced that Barcelona's modernity, level of industrialization and civic life showed Argentina the way to escape the idleness, economic backwardness and despotic rule materialized in Madrid's urban layout. Funnily enough, a few decades later Barcelona's elites would consider Cerdà’s reticular plan of extension as an echo of ‘corny America’, unable to represent Catalonia's singularity. It is also interesting to note (even if this is not explicitly stated in the book) that Catalan-led political and social activity focused on the historical city of Buenos Aires, while the newly built capital of La Plata became a node for scientific and museum exchanges with the other side of the Atlantic. In this regard, María José Betancor's chapter does a great job in detailing the transnational networks that enabled the development of both the Museo Canario in Las Palmas and the Museo de La Plata. These were hybrid exchanges in which amateur and professional research went hand-in-hand with dubious commercial interests and personal histories of escape. Anarchist exchanges across the Atlantic, brilliantly discussed by Álvaro Girón, were also multifaceted in nature. Constantly expelled from Europe and America (and then back to Europe again), anarchist theorists benefited from those unwanted travels, building an informal but ever-expanding network of ‘libertarian’ cities in which texts and ideas were translated, appropriated and reimagined.

Medical and hygienical practices also had an imprint in Barcelona's and Buenos Aires’ urban fabric. José Pardo-Tomás and Alfons Zarzoso discuss the place of wax anatomic figures in both medical schools and itinerant museums of wonders, which occupied neighbouring but changing locations in Barcelona's Raval. In turn, Diego Armus brings to light the agency of tuberculosis patients in Buenos Aires before the consolidation of institutionalized medicine in the 1940s. Challenging Foucault's view of the city as a space of control of the modern self, Armus argues that it rather enabled the co-existence of a multiple and often hybrid breadth of health agents ranging from healers and herbalists to domestic guidebooks and commercial drugs. Finally, Marisa Adriana Miranda explores public hygienic policies towards prostitution in both Buenos Aires and Barcelona, and argues that the fight against venereal diseases systematically excluded the well-being of sexual workers and their descendants, as it pre-eminently aimed at securing the health and moral wellness of married men and their legitimate families.

At times, the chapters may seem more descriptive than problematizing, and there might have been more room to discuss how these scientific and intellectual developments actually changed the urban fabric of Barcelona and Buenos Aires. In any case, this is an interesting contribution that will appeal to a variety of audiences, while signposting attractive locations for future research.