Pre-1500

What is a city? Undoubtedly medieval citizens would have argued that swearing the communal oath was an important feature of urban life. From early days, the western European city was a ‘conjuratio’, ‘commune’ or ‘Schwurvereinigung’, meaning that the citizens had collectively sworn an oath of brotherhood or conviviality. In a special issue of Histoire Urbaine (2014, 1, no. 39, entitled: ‘Les serments dans les villes du bas moyen âge’, edited by Laurence Bucholzer and Frédérique Lachaud), several authors stress that oath-swearing was at the heart of urban life. Communities were bound together in the eleventh and twelfth centuries by an oath, ruling the city by common consent among themselves, without interference from a lord, the bishop, the king or the emperor. As a result, the communal oath was an important element with which to define a city, and this remained true during the later Middle Ages. For instance, Diane Chamboduc de Saint Pulgent's essay on fourteenth-century Lucca demonstrates how oaths were used by authorities to consolidate the cohesion of the urban community and to bring together various urban groups. Her paper deals with the use of the oath in the political reconstruction of Lucca after 1369, which marks the end of the domination of Lucca by neighbouring Pisa, and the rediscovery of its political autonomy after a half-century of foreign control. Convincingly, she shows that the oath, and the ceremony of its swearing, also had an individual importance, by assessing its significance for the personal trajectories of those who took the oath (‘Le serment. Un instrument au service de la reconstruction politique de Lucques à la fin du XIV^e siècle’, 29–43). Laure Gevertz develops this idea further by studying the internal use of oaths within a city. Her focus on the role oaths played in the development and organization of trade guilds in London in the late Middle Ages shows the importance they had for the maintenance of ties between such guilds and city officials (‘Les pratiques juratoires des corps de métier londoniens à la fin du moyen âge’, 45–61). While the oath was an effective instrument for creating genuine solidarity and cohesion within a group of tradesmen and guildsmen, she argues that it was also a means for creating internal rules that everyone, without exception, swore to uphold. However, this practice had to be reconciled and combined with the various signs of allegiance that united the inhabitants of the city and had to be integrated into the city's legal order in order to assert its legitimacy. Thus, the oath was more than a simple ritual marking adherence; it engaged the honour and respectability of the person taking it. Far from being a mere pragmatic symbol lacking real effect, it acted as a genuine sign of recognition, helping define the identity and place of individuals within the city and the various communities that they belonged to. Oaths were therefore essential in the lives of citizens.

Oaths of mutual aid were of course very important in battles and revolts. In his discussion of London, Ian Stone shows that oaths were a crucial element of political alliances. The purpose of his article (‘The rebel barons of 1264 and the commune of London: an oath of mutual aid’, English Historical R., 129 (2014), 1–18) is to reveal a hitherto unknown copy of an agreement between the Montfortian barons and the citizens of London that was made in March 1264, just six weeks before the battle of Lewes. In this battle, Simon de Montfort led his baronial army to an emphatic victory, capturing King Henry III. Stone uncovers new evidence, such as the oath of the rebel alliance (which included not only the mayor, but also the commune of London), and adds a note detailing how this oath was to be sworn in the wards of London by all those aged 12 and over. Through detailed study of the oath's unique witness list, Stone seeks to shed new light on the motivations and sympathies of many leading rebels of the day. Lastly, the article discusses what can be learnt about the attitudes of a chronicler describing the events. Therefore, its conclusions can easily be compared with those made by Cornelia Hess in ‘Nigra crux, mala crux: a comparative perspective on urban conflict in Gdansk in 1411 and 1416’, Urban History, 41 (2014), 565–81. Studying the fifteenth-century Hanseatic town of Gdansk, Hess also demonstrates that chroniclers reporting on medieval conflict were not concerned about giving a clear overview of the facts. Chronicles, describing political turmoil in thirteenth-century London or fifteenth-century Gdansk, were primarily written to convince their audience of the meaning of a certain event. The comparison Hess makes with narratives on revolts in fifteenth-century Hamburg and Ghent also leads her to argue that these conflicts played a significant role in urban self-definition.

Two articles concerned with political conflict give a more elaborate insight into the social and political rationale of urban rebels: Patrick Lantscher's ‘Revolts and the political order of cities in the late Middle Ages’ and Jesus Solorzano Telechea's article ‘The politics of the urban commons in northern Atlantic Spain in the later Middle Ages’ (published respectively in Past and Present, 225 (2014), 3–46, and in Urban History, 41 (2014), 183–203). Both authors argue that revolts were an intrinsic part of a political order in which conflict, in all its various guises, was not the subversion but the essence of politics. In his comparative analysis of social upheaval in Tournai and Florence, Lantschner argues that rebels were not engaged in anarchical violence. On the contrary, the collective actions of insurgents, often rendered legitimate in the context of internal and external fragmentation, were necessarily bound up with the logic of the existing political structures, which, to varying degrees, they hoped to modify. Revolts were therefore intensifications of existing processes of negotiation (albeit not always leading to results) that were ordinarily taking place around the multiple nodes and layers of both cities’ political structure. Lively examples from the Ciompi revolt in fourteenth-century Florence and from the numerous guild revolts in late medieval Tournai demonstrate that these were extraordinary moments which disrupted daily life, but simultaneously they represented only one among several modes of conflict that were rooted in the political culture of late medieval cities. Solorzano's description of the political activities of the commons (Comuneros) in towns of northern Atlantic Spain in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries elaborates on these insights. He studies several successful urban petitions in towns like Santander and San Vicente de la Barquera (Cantabria) which resulted in municipal reforms. Remarkably, the crown of Castile supported the uprisings of the commons with the aim of downsizing the political power of the wealthy families which had governed these cities for decades. The royal intervention was considered to be justified because it helped to sustain peace and order in the tumultuous towns, just as artisans in Tournai could also claim to be defending justice in similar ways. This action shows the importance of ideology, for both the commons (and the supporting king) in Cantabria, as the rebels of Florence and Tournai argued that they wanted to remedy the ‘bad governance’ of their rulers. Of course, Solorzano concludes, even after the victory of the commons in the Cantabrian towns, the hereditary nobility did not completely disappear, although the noble houses were forced to accept that urban identity was based not only on the noble ideals of antiquity, honour and privileges but also on arguments about the ‘common good’ and equity.

Another article which focuses on the political history of towns, and the relationship with royal authority, is Vincent Challet's ‘Les entrées dans la ville: genèse et développement d’un rite urbain (Montpellier, XIVe–XVe siècles)’, Revue Historique, 670 (2014), 267–93. His analysis of the urban chronicle of Montpellier known as the ‘Petit Thalamus’ shows that it kept alive the memory of about 30 urban entries of French and Navarrese kings between 1204 and 1423. The detailed study of such narratives composed under the close supervision of the urban governors themselves (the ‘consuls’) highlights the flexibility of the ritual as well as the possibility of variations from an absolute model that had been designed for the entry of Pope Urban V in 1367. These ceremonies lauded the princes and bishops who visited the city, but not without cause. Challet's study allows us to understand how such a ritual could be used by the town authorities to reinforce their own power over the community. Clearly, urban elites used the entry to put not only the princely visitor on a stage, but also to highlight their own achievements. The narrative of the ceremonies therefore stressed the local power of the consuls in order to spread memories about their ‘good government’. Though the tradition of entries clearly faded away in later times, Challet demonstrates that their importance cannot be underestimated if one wants to understand more fully the political history of late medieval Montpellier in particular and other Mediterranean towns in general.

Urban credit is at stake in the article of Elizabeth Hardman, ‘Regulating interpersonal debt in the bishop's court of Carpentras: litigation, litigators and the court, 1486 and 1487’, J. of Medieval History, 40 (2014), 478–98. As Hardman says, the majority of medieval Europeans were indebted at some point in their lives and took out loans. The economic activities of both urbanites and peasants, as well as court members, depended on credit, which was a crucial economic lubricant throughout medieval society. Hardman's evidence shows that credit relationships crossed social and religious divides in the city of Carpentras and the Comtat Venaissin (a papal state east of Avignon). Using notarial records, she explains who sued whom at the bishop's court at Carpentras, why they did so and how the court managed people and their disputes over debt. In 1486 and 1487, creditors pursued 240 suits over unpaid loans (about three-quarters of the court's business). Litigants spanned the social spectrum and included both Christians and Jews, suggesting that both communities regularly traded together (though the rights of Jews were often vigorously tested in some decades of the fifteenth century). The verdicts of the local ecclesiastical judges can hardly be called spectacular, because they clearly pacified minor conflicts.

Borrowing on a larger scale is studied in the articles of Adrian Bell, Chris Brooks and Tony Moore (‘The credit relationship between Henry III and the merchants of Douai and Ypres, 1247–70’, Economic History R., 67 (2014), 123–45), and of G. Fouquet, ‘Geldgeschäfte im Auftrag des Römischen Königs. Eberhard Windeck, Brügge, Lübeck und König Sigmund (1415–1417)’, Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung, 41 (2014), 374–99. While Fouquet focuses on the fifteenth-century court of the Holy Empire, Bell, Brooks and Moore analysed thirteenth-century royal accounts of King Henry III of England. However, both papers clearly have an interest for urban historians because they study the local, urban context of royal moneylenders. For instance, in 1416 during a tour of western Europe Sigismund, King of the Romans since 1411, had to pawn precious gifts from the English King Henry V at the Bruges money market to cover his travel expenses. Fouquet's analysis of an exceptional source (the notes of Sigismund's biographer Eberhard Windeck) demonstrates that Italian merchants residing in Bruges lent money to the king, who could not pay his debts without their help. As a result, the article contains many details on the daily working of urban trade and banking practices. Furthermore, this instance of royal creation of credit by pawn displays the king's influence on the ongoing crisis of communal leadership within the Hanseatic city of Lübeck, as well as the largely fiscal nature of royal policies towards an imperial city's commune. Clearly, the political crisis in Lübeck at the beginning of the fifteenth century led King Sigismund to rely on the pawn market and the credit of foreign merchants. Sigismund, the English king and his courtiers largely depended on credit when managing daily affairs. However, this study does not concentrate on ‘formal loans’, as many publications on governmental credit do. It investigates a different class of sovereign liability, namely payments owed to trade creditors for goods provided to the king on credit. In modern accounting terms, these could be classed as ‘accounts payable’ of the crown. It turns out that Flemish citizens, mainly originating from Douai and Ypres, were among the most important creditors of the king – although the Yprois were less involved after 1255. Clearly, the urban creditors were traders in cloth because Flemish merchants were major exporters of finished cloth (and other goods) to England, selling their wares at the cycle of fairs held in eastern towns of the isle. The article includes discussion of royal borrowing (and debts), but also reveals the importance of continental townsmen for the English economy and public funding. Though the authors ignore the existing historiography on Flemish merchants and their creditworthiness, they show that the merchants from Douai had been significantly more successful than the Yprois in collecting the debts owed to them. Even after the collapse in the king's repayment performance in the 1260s, the Douaissiens continued to trade in England. Obviously, the decline of the Ypres economy in the thirteenth century can be related to this conclusion.

Peacemaking is also dealt with in Samantha Sagui, ‘The hue and cry in medieval English towns’, Historical Research, 87 (2014), 179–93, and in James Palmer, ‘Piety and social distinction in late medieval Roman peacemaking’, Speculum, 89 (2014), 974–1004. Sagui's paper scrutinizes evidence from Norwich about the ‘hue and cry’, a legal institution which allowed victims of a crime to summon their neighbours to pursue suspected criminals. One of the most remarkable conclusions of her article is that the ‘hue and cry’ (one of the oldest and most communally based systems of policing in England) became increasingly feminized over the course of the fourteenth century. Actually, it turns out that the number of women accused of unjustly raising the hue in any given year remained roughly consistent across Norwich's surviving rolls, while there was a marked decline in the number of men who levied it unjustly. This pattern suggests that the real change was in men's use of the hue, which might have been caused by increasing opportunities for men to participate directly in peacekeeping through mid-level office-holding. Women, however, continued to rely on this mechanism to protect their interests. This feminization, in turn, may have increased distrust of the hue and encouraged the elite to intensify their oversight of it. While the hue and cry played a significant role in maintaining peace in Norwich, James Palmer's study shows that ‘arbitrage’ was important for citizens of Rome. For the settlement of minor conflicts, Roman citizens could rely on an arbiter (arbiter), an established figure in Roman law who followed standard legal procedure exactly as a judge would but was chosen by the concerned parties rather than acting as a public official. A public ritual for a select group of Romans concluded the settlement, throughout which we see and hear the language of confession, justly imposed penance, mercy inspired by communal caritas and the evocation of familial bonds. The analysis of 37 such rituals, produced between 1348 and the 1420s, demonstrates that the language used rendered the resolution of each conflict intelligible to the community by appropriating and redeploying, rather than merely reflecting, the ideas of mainstream theology and liturgy. Palmer also shows that the reason for engaging in this peacemaking was the generation of distinction for a Roman elite corresponding to the commune's most powerful citizens. Finally, Palmer argues, these rituals had the cumulative long-term effect, invisible in individual instances, of rendering a subset of that powerful group, one corresponding to the rulers of the commune during this period, distinct even from their fellows and providing them with valuable propaganda that legitimated their power.

A remarkable contribution to the history of urban culture is Christian Jaser's ‘Agonale ökonomien. Städtische Sportkulturen des 15. Jahrhunderts am Beispiel der Florentiner Palio-Pferderennen’, published in the Historische Zeitschrift (no. 298 (2014), 593–624). It focuses on the Florentine palio (horse races) in honour of San Giovanni, the city's patron saint. Out of the series of annual horse races that many cities of northern and central Italy had organized since the thirteenth century, the palio was important during the Quattrocento because the race was tightly interwoven with the spatial, social and economic fabric of the city. Moreover, as a stage for political and dynastic competition its significance spread well beyond the city boundaries. In contrast to previous studies concentrating on festive and representational aspects, Jaser's contribution highlights the sporting competition of performance and prestige as the core of this race. Its competitive patterns are analysed in three different fields. These are first, the spatial arrangement of the race-course and its civic semantics; second, the relationship between noble and civic patrons and their racehorses, which were objects of a ‘transcultural trade’ and of a policy requiring huge investments; third, the performance of the racehorses that created a specified memory culture which, through betting, could be transformed into monetary profits and losses. In sum, this interesting article reveals some key points of fifteenth-century urban culture, as well as the guidelines for a redefined history of pre-modern sport.

1500–1800

Particularity, rather than overview, characterizes many of the articles on early modern cities. Whether this is because the ‘relevance’ of London and Paris (the subject of many of the case-studies) is assumed to be self-explanatory, or whether it is because of a methodological shift towards analysis of the everyday, will not be discussed here. There are, however, examples where particularity and contextualization go hand in hand and these articles prove to be some of the most stimulating. Sebouh D. Aslanian's illuminating work on the Armenian book trade in port cities all over the world brings together globalization with diaspora identities (‘Port cities and printers: reflections on early modern global Armenian print culture’, Book History, 17 (2014), 51–93). Armenian print formed a significant part of book culture in early modern port cities, thanks to the large group of ‘port-Armenians’. These were long-distance merchants involved in the global trade of silk, spices, South Asian textiles and precious stones. They resided in the great port cities of the time such as Amsterdam, Constantinople, Venice, Livorno, Marseille, Saint Petersburg, Astrakhan, Madras, Bombay, Calcutta, Singapore and Canton. In many of these places, they also established Armenian printing presses and functioned as cultural patrons for the Armenian clerical elite, printing religious works and Armenian history. Great port cities offered access to paper manufacturers, font casters, engravers and press operators. Armenian, unlike Arabic, was relatively easy to transform into printable fonts and the first press was established in Venice in 1512. Books were transported to Constantinople for its Armenian inhabitants or to Smyrna (Izmir) to be shipped further on caravan routes further towards the Armenian heartland. Aslanian underlines Amsterdam's role as an information hub in the seventeenth century through its 40 printing houses that catered for multiple languages, among them Armenian and Hebrew. It was here that the first Armenian Bible was printed in 1666. Aslanian also shows how the Armenian diaspora in important port cities were connected to one another in networks of capital, merchants, printers, books and new technologies. The book trade was never the main source of income for port-Armenians, not in the least because of low population numbers and even lower literacy rates. Still, the use of print kept the scattered Armenian diaspora connected and informed of one another's existence throughout the early modern period globalized world. At the other end of the scale from Aslanian's efforts to place Armenian book trade in the context of early modern globalization and diaspora printing, we find the particularity of William Noblett's ‘Cheese, stolen paper, and the London book trade, 1750–99’ (Eighteenth-Century Life, 38 (2014), 100–10). Here, paper is important because it was used in London, the relevance of which is self-evident. Noblett certainly gives a vivid glimpse into the everyday use of paper in the second half of the eighteenth century as he relates a number of cases of stolen print being used as wrapping paper for cheese, pork and candles. Noblett, however, goes no further than to lament the loss of precious and unique print.

The specific role of port cities in the early modern world is further featured in articles that highlight chiefly the difficulties of administrating the sea trade and all the people involved in it. Trust and social networks only went so far in a rapidly expanding trade which became ever more specialized and commercialized. Different cities chose different routes between regulation and state control, or free trade. Livorno proved a test case for how to establish a free port. Corey Tazzara traces the processes of negotiation that created Livorno's privileged role in early modern discussions of the advantages and draw-backs of free ports (‘Managing free trade in early modern Europe: institutions, information, and the free port of Livorno’, J. of Modern History, 86 (2014), 493–529). Established in 1591, the free port was famous for its tolerance and sense of liberty, flourishing foreign communities (among them Armenian traders in print) and by the late seventeenth century, its simple customs procedures. The city has previously been discussed in terms of centralizing states and international competition. Tazzara looks at the practices involved in the free port's bureaucratic procedures and finds that it was open to all comers, but that it also was far from simple to navigate the market's bureaucracy. Tazzara describes the free port as a work in progress where a significant amount of negotiation was required by merchants in order to make full use of the free port's amenities such as immunity from debts contracted from outside the state and the right to store goods in the port and to re-export them duty-free. Supplications, bribes and social networking were integral parts in free trade. Pre-approval of a supplication of exemption from different duties became compulsory for a successful application, as were personal recommendations from officials. Brokers not only negotiated sales, but also conveyed information about supplications. Tazzara therefore concludes that the city's policies were reactive and were formed by supplications from merchants seeking exemptions from the rules that prevailed, and that the freedom of the port depended on qualified negotiation of its bureaucratic mores.

Amsterdam's position as a node within early modern trade is accentuated in articles that discuss relations between seafarers and those providing services for them in the city and also show a transition from systems built on interpersonal relationships towards bureaucratization. Maarten Hell looks at the Amsterdam inns and finds innkeepers did much more than provide food and shelter for travellers. They offered meeting spaces, but also storage and transport services, credit and mediated between foreign and indigenous traders (‘Trade, transport, and storage in Amsterdam inns (1450–1800)’, J. of Urban History, 40 (2014), 742–61). Individual inns were generally associated with different traders, often catering to specific nationalities and many innkeepers were migrants to Amsterdam themselves. By the eighteenth century, coffeehouses superseded many of the social functions of the inns, and by the early nineteenth century, the economic aspects were overtaken by specialized institutions such as restaurants, auction-houses and transport companies. Establishment of trust and the importance of mediators are also explored in Christiaan van Bochove on credit (‘Seafarers and shopkeepers: credit in eighteenth-century Amsterdam’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 48 (2014), 67–88). Here, in contrast to Livorno's policies of negotiation between traders and city authorities, and the anonymity of commercial paper in newly established Annapolis (Paul D. Musselwhite, ‘Annapolis aflame: Richard Clarke's conspiracy and the imperial urban vision in Maryland, 1704–8’, William and Mary Quarterly, 71 (2014), 361–400), municipal governments all over the Dutch Republic established water bailiffs for maintaining order in the ports. They investigated and prosecuted crimes, resolved conflicts and settled estates of seafarers who had died abroad. For individual seafarers on trans-Atlantic and European routes, these bailiffs were indispensable as they provided an entrée into the credit market. The bailiffs were in a position to enforce loan payments and this enabled them to withhold loan payments from salaries. This meant that seafarers could get credit from shopkeepers in the city on the basis of future earnings and that shopkeepers could receive loan payments proportionally from the bailiff. The greater commercialization of urban society is also evident in Jeremy Boulton's work on burial practices in eighteenth-century London (‘Traffic in corpses and the commodification of burial in Georgian London’, Continuity and Change, 29 (2014), 181–208). Commercialization, or commodification, as he terms it, is something that historical demographers have tended to neglect, according to Boulton, and this has skewed findings on mortality in the city. In such a large and crowded city as London, burial space was at a premium and there was therefore a market for affordable and suitable burial grounds. Local burial practices show that burial fees played an important role in where bodies were buried and contributed to a considerable ebb and flow of corpses from one parish to another. While a substantial portion of the dead was buried within their own home parish, the establishment of new burial grounds with favourable fees, Boulton shows, immediately affected where people were buried. A rise in fees for stranger burials led to corpses being moved elsewhere.

Several articles bear witness to the increasing globalization of trade by looking at exotic wares in their new locations, such as opium in Leiden, lemons in Stockholm and coffee in Dehli. While not new to Europe, it was only in the sixteenth century that opium's properties as a drug became an issue for humanist physicians at the University of Leiden, as discussed by Saskia Klerk (‘The trouble with opium. Taste, reason and experience in late Galenic pharmacology with special regard to the University of Leiden (1575–1625)’, Early Science and Medicine, 19 (2014), 287–316). When these physicians revisited classical sources and particularly Galen's insistence on experience and reason in each investigation of simple drugs, they encountered discrepancies between the taste of the materia medica and its therapeutic effects. Despite these discrepancies, however, they stayed loyal to Galen's theories and continued to insist that taste, reason and therapeutic experience should be used to investigate a drug's properties. However, by exposing problems in Galen's epistemology, prevailing ideas about matter were exposed to criticism, indeed undermining the distinction between manifest and occult qualities. Trade in lemons and citrus fruits in Stockholm led Erik Lindberg and Sofia Ling to trace a guild-like organization among female traders in the eighteenth century (‘“Spanska” citroner till salu. Om kvinnors handlingsutrymme på fruktmarknaden i 1700-talets Stockholm’, Historisk tidskrift (Stockholm), 134 (2014), 3–30). Lemons, particularly popular in different punches, were luxury goods, each piece of fruit sold at a price that corresponded to the day wages for a labourer. Eighteenth-century Mughal poet Shāh ‘Hātim’ did not esteem coffee for its exoticism or novelty in an Urdu ode to the drink; instead, it was described through its properties of social exclusion. Walter Hakala (‘A sultan in the realm of passion: coffee in eighteenth-century Delhi’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 47 (2014), 371–88) painstakingly takes the poem apart in order to uncover how coffee was incorporated into daily life, thereby straddling the rift between the vernacular and cosmopolitanism, elevating the human actions and material objects with which individuals engaged in the everyday into the ‘language of poetry’. Coffee enjoyed a short period of popularity in Delhi in the first half of the eighteenth century, and was consumed by Indian elites. In Hātim's invocation, coffee is indeed an index of social exclusivity, refinement and connoisseurship, but also of South Asian Islamic traditions of hospitality.

Another key theme in this year's publications is political rumour and gossip in urban settings in turbulent political situations (Piia Einonen, ‘The politics of talk: rumour and gossip in Stockholm during the struggle for succession (c. 1592–1607)’, Scandia, 80 (2014), 9–35; Noah C. Shusterman, ‘All of his power lies in the distaff: Robespierre, women and the French Revolution’, Past and Present, 223 (2014), 129–60; Colin Jones, ‘The overthrow of Maximilien Robespierre and the “indifference” of the people’, American Historical R., 119 (2014), 689–713). As has been related in previous reviews, the significance of the people and the spread of information have enjoyed a rise in interest. Information flows, publicity and the relationship between oral and written media can be seen as part of a wave of research trying to grapple with communicative practices of the public sphere in early modern cities. Jürgen Habermas’ spirit no longer looms large over these studies; instead, they tend towards in-depth analysis of the myriad of actions and utterances that make up political life. Still, there is much to discuss in relation to the role of the people, who the people actually were at any given moment or how to view information flows – and not least how historians are to reach what the people actually were speaking and thinking of.

One example of these turbulent times is in Stockholm during the succession crisis at the end of the fifteenth century. Piia Einonen uncovers rumour and gossip about the rivals to the throne, King Sigismund and his uncle duke Karl, neither of whom spent long periods of time in the capital. Foreigners coming to the city reported news of developments outside the city such as the rumour of the king's death and burial feast. During this period of rivalry, Stockholm's inhabitants were more interested in news about high politics than the usual everyday gossip about their neighbours, according to Einonen. Einonen, however, downplays the importance of news and information in the city by terming it rumour and gossip throughout, thereby diminishing the value and impact of popular participation and taking on the perspective of city authorities who attempted to stamp it out.

Paul Musselwhite in ‘Annapolis aflame’ takes the ‘disgruntled conversations’ (p. 362) about the newly established imperial city of Annapolis in Maryland as a starting point to discuss how the new city and its burgeoning commercial centre was at the heart of the transformation of the British empire at the turn of the eighteenth century. At the centre of this dissatisfaction lay the fundamental change in planter society that was brought on by the establishment of new cities. Surely the decline in tobacco prices, increased stratification of planter society and the transition from servant to slave labour contributed to dissatisfaction. But emerging cracks in the social order altered the role of the city fundamentally as a new social order was consciously cultivated in which tenuous social ties stood against mercantilist and imperial interests. Musselwhite takes conversations quite seriously with a fine tuned approach to the dissonances between plotting, rumour, idle talk and fear mongering surrounding the case of planter Richard Clarke. Clarke had been involved in several court cases in the early 1700s and was indicted for forgery, debt, extortion and assault. From the time when the state house in Annapolis burned down and important documents relating to Clarke's case were rumoured to have been destroyed, Clarke came to be seen as the arch enemy of the Maryland governor and elite power. Despite his close reading of sources, Musselwhite has difficulties in pinpointing exactly what threat Clarke posed. The strength of the article lies in his careful placing of talk and rumour in the context of social structures and current events. Clarke did take part in smuggling individuals out of the colony and threatened to leave himself. Annapolis political elites, however, entertained talk of him posing more concrete threats to the city, either of burning the whole city down or attacking it from a ship and blowing it up. After Clarke's execution, Annapolis emerged as a city where rural elites and British officials held authority. Whiteness became a unifying denominator and fears were transferred to the increasing slave population in the surrounding countryside.

The significance of the people of Paris for the French Revolution have been underlined many times before, not in the least by Albert Soboul. This is the starting point for both Colin Jones and Noah C. Shusterman to explore aspects of popular political participation in relation to Maximilien Robespierre. Shusterman's exposé of women's participation in support of Robespierre uses the records of the Jacobin club and the references in the minutes to vocal support from the galleries. This evidence, and other contemporary commentary, show how Robespierre thrived on the attention and support from the galleries at the Jacobin club, and how this support was translated into political influence in the transition into the Terror. Robespierre used this support deliberately from the days of the Constituent Assembly, and honed his own politics and persona to appeal especially to female listeners. Shusterman relates both voices in support of women's support of Robespierre, and those that found it was effeminate, but does not say much about how to value their political influence in relation to other political agents. Unfortunately, however, Shusterman neglects to differentiate between women in politics and gendered politics. Curiously overlooking some basic tenets of gender theory, that patriarchy is not upheld by men alone but that women throughout history have constructed their identities in accordance with traditional values of proper womanhood, Shusterman expects historians interested in gender as a social construct to interest themselves only in modern feminist issues. And because the examples from the Revolution seldom pass his modernist muster, neither do gender historians. Shusterman's conclusion that not so much women's but popular political participation in general were repressed is precisely what has been argued many times before. Anna Clark, Kathleen Wilson and Isobel Hull have all shown that in neighbouring countries these two exclusions of the lower orders and women from politics went hand in hand. While Shusterman's case is interesting and warrants investigation, it seems there is a case for looking beyond the female portion of the galleries at the Jacobin club. Shusterman presents a series of empirical findings which clearly would have lent themselves to a much more sophisticated and wide-ranging analysis regarding women's politics, gendered politics and their influence on the revolution.

Colin Jones, on the other hand, uses detailed reports from 9 Thermidor year II (27 July 1794) – the day of Robespierre's downfall – to show that Soboul and others were wrong in explaining Robespierre's fall from grace in terms of the disillusionment and apathy of the people of Paris. Jones uses reports from each of Paris's 48 sections, to each local commander of the National Guard and the presidents of each sectional and revolutionary committee. The result is a myriad of eye-witness accounts of what was going on in the streets of Paris on the day that Robespierre was deposed. Jones thereby is able to recreate events in the manner that contemporaries experienced them and to investigate how information and rumour travelled throughout the city. He sees how news moved at different speeds depending on the city's topography and built environment – the Seine was a considerable obstacle to transmission – and can trace the number of people in all sections of the city at different parts of the day. The result is a fascinating account of popular political engagement and excitement, rather than disenchantment. Troops had gathered outside of the Maison Commune where the Commune was meeting, but Jones shows that the crowd dispersed due to the lack of information and confusion as to why they had been assembled in the first place, not because they were tiring of politics. Considerable fraternization was going on between National Guardsmen, members of sectional assemblies and others in the streets and as far as it is possible to discern, people in the streets were from all different social classes. The night time assembly of the crowd in support of the Convention against the Commune (and Robespierre) also accounts for its largely masculine composition and the female supporters of Robespierre that Shusterman discusses would have been vastly outnumbered. Like Shusterman, Jones pushes the time of the Revolution's ‘depopularization’ forward, but in an altogether more compelling account of the everyday commotion of revolution and the many forces that were active at once.

Another marked interest in this year's batch of articles is in marriage and the roles of women within marriage in the eighteenth century. As several articles point out, men had significant use for a wife not only for emotional but also financial and practical support within the privileged state of marriage. It is striking that articles tend to highlight the positive aspects of entering into marriage: the fun of marriage celebrations, the rise in social status with its increased scope of action and the advantages of two bread-winners. This is in noticeable contrast to previous research that has focused on financial or moral pressures to enter into marriage and its not uncommon breakdown. Wives can no longer be viewed as passive figures within the domestic domain who did not contribute to the household through paid work. Taken together, the view of marriage is unfamiliarly optimistic. Clandestine marriage has a particularly poor reputation, although as Gill Newton demonstrates, the term might be quite inappropriate because it implies that marriage took place under suspicious circumstances (‘Clandestine marriage in early modern London: when, where and why?’, Continuity and Change, 29 (2014), 151–80). In her study of these marriages in London, Newton can show that far from being suspicious, clandestine marriages, i.e. marriages entered into outside the local parish church and without the public announcement of banns in the weeks running up to the marriage, were entered by choice. And there were many clergy willing to conduct wedding ceremonies and to collect the marriage fees connected with them. Complicated administrative boundaries left extra-parochial pockets open where services could be performed. One of the main reasons seems to have been an increasing interest in keeping weddings private or at least outside the purview of the local community. Clandestine weddings to a large degree took place at sites that offered not only a vicar, but also entertainments, food and drink. The Fleet prison was one such place that in addition to the amenities mentioned above also included a coffee room and even sports facilities. Clandestine marriage, therefore, during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, took place in a commercial environment that stood as an attractive alternative to local neighbourhood supervision and perhaps the risk of unwanted intervention. It can also be seen as an emulation of the upper classes as marriage licence fees went down in relation to wages. Newton relates how clandestine marriages tended to be more popular among younger couples, but this was not because couples were too young or desperate to marry. Instead, clandestine marriage centres tended to attract those in the prime years of marriage. Neither were brides pregnant to a greater extent than brides married in parish churches, or those married elsewhere in England. In fact, it seems as though clandestine marriages largely took place where they did because husband and wife wanted it so. Having entered marriage in eighteenth-century London, there were of course no guarantees that marriages would last. Jennine Hurl-Eamon assesses the statement that men enlisted in order to escape their wives and finds the reasons for enlistment far more complicated (‘Did soldiers really enlist to desert their wives? Revisiting the martial character of marital desertion in eighteenth-century London’, J. of British Studies, 53 (2014), 356–77). Married men, she finds, might just as well have enlisted to fulfil their marital duties of supporting their family. For poor families, enlistment was not a form of desertion, but an important source of income to complement other sources. Enlistments might also be expected to be of different durations, and sometimes separation might be considered tolerable for spouses for the good of a family as a whole. Tearful partings at troop embarkations and attempts to reunite after enlistment give witness to the fact that marriage was not simply a financial agreement, or something men took the opportunity to escape as soon as they could.

Lindberg and Ling find that women engaged in the lemon trade in eighteenth-century Stockholm, contrary to previous assumptions, were socially well established and either married or widows. Marriage did not diminish their responsibilities as bread-winners together with their husbands. Fruit-vendors had considerable agency over their own subsistence and trade – some were even purveyors to the court. They regarded trade as a privilege and were anxious to carry on their profession in a fair, peaceful way in the gap that was left between traditional guilds in the city. Maria Ågren's depiction of marriage in eighteenth-century Örebro in central Sweden is similarly less emotionally laden, but it joins Hurl-Eamon and Lindberg and Ling in underscoring the significance of many bread-winners within a household among the urban middling and lower sorts. Using extensive court records, Ågren pursues the issue of who actually did work, and with what (‘Emissaries, allies, accomplices and enemies: married women's work in eighteenth-century urban Sweden’, Urban History, 41 (2014), 394–414). She widens the view from the marriage itself to the household, containing servants, children and perhaps other generations, in order also to uncover who had authority to commission work within the household. Married women of the middling sorts appear as directors of labour, sending maid servants on errands that involved carrying and waiting, paying excise and infringements on the excise and customs. Even middling households needed the incomes of the wife, and so married women also directed activities outside their own households and people not directly under their domestic power. They had other people sell their wares and employed women from other households who also needed to supplement their incomes to do things middling wives did not have time for, or preferred not to do, such as baking or laundry. Married women therefore took part in an exchange of services to secure their incomes, and they did so on often uneven terms crossing household boundaries. The person performing the task was often hired on a short term or even ad hoc basis, thereby lacking any support that would befall a servant. Like Amsterdam seafarers or merchants in Livorno, married women in Swedish provincial towns were all dependent on mediators in order to secure income and to do their work well. But their work involved countless trades and had not reached the specialization of larger cities in Europe.

Post-1800

Urban history has taken a ‘spectral turn’ in 2014 courtesy of a ghostly reinterpretation of the naval town of Portsmouth by Karl Bell, in ‘Civic spirits: ghost lore and civic narratives in nineteenth-century Portsmouth’, Cultural and Social History, 11 (2014), 51–68. The author suggests that an alternative to the official memorialization of Portsmouth's role in nineteenth-century naval history can be found by examining how ghosts and ghost stories shaped memories and communal understanding of urban space. In a town dominated by sailors who were renowned for their superstitions, and made up of a mix of smaller communities, swallowed up by urban growth, Bell argues that ‘urban ghost lore’ continued to define the way people referred to different parts of the town, long after streets had been renamed and open spaces built over. Many of the town's popular ghostly tales featured the victims of drunken brawls or short-lived love affairs and as such, Bell sees them as ‘exposing the town's sordid underbelly that a civic culture attempted to eclipse’ (p. 59). Rather than invoking fright, orally transmitted ghost stories could provide continuity and stability in the face of a changing urban environment.

The question of how best historians can understand the way in which people identify and associate themselves with urban space is addressed elsewhere in the periodical literature. A fascinating account of how public engagement initiatives and oral history can generate new historical understandings of how people perceive the transformation of urban space, is provided by Laura Balderstone, Graeme Milne and Rachel Mulhearn in their study of ‘Memory and place on the Liverpool waterfront in the mid-twentieth century’, Urban History, 41 (2014), 478–96. Based on an AHRC-funded research project, the article offers new perspectives on site-based memory. Unlike memory projects conducted with Holocaust survivors, for whom formal monuments and memorials provide the main spatial references, this study of Liverpool's docklands reveals a detailed range of continued associations with buildings and even derelict and bomb-damaged sites for decades after the end of World War II. Participants in their workshops and drop-in events provided details of the rich environment of dockside cafes and pubs which, as the authors point out, could not have been reconstructed through the patchy survival of written records. Their findings also provide a new perspective on the process of deindustrialization which, as they point out, has often failed to incorporate the experience of dockside economies without a specific manufacturing base. Yet, important parallels can be drawn between the experience of dock closures in Liverpool in the 1970s and the subsequent loss of population from previously populous dockside wards in the city, and the phenomenon of de-industrialization in centres of heavy industry and manufacture in the post-war period.

The issue of site-based memory is also central to Iván Villarmea Álvarez's study of ‘Cinema as testimony and discourse for history: film cityscapes in autobiographical documentaries’, Revue LISA, 12 (2014), 1–20. The author takes three documentary films as his case-studies: Michael Moore's Roger and Me (1989), set in the American city of Flint, Terence Davies’ Of Time and the City (2008), based in Liverpool, and Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg (2007). In each of these cases, the film-maker adopts a personal perspective to portray the late twentieth-century urban experience and, in particular, to explain the decline of an industrial city by revealing his own connections with the changing cityscapes. As Álvarez explains, these three films exemplify ‘the subjective turn and the spatial turn that documentary film genre has undergone since the 1980s’ (p. 3), and together they provide a useful demonstration of the potential of the film documentary to provide historical interpretations of urban change. There is also a strong, personal dimension to Malcolm James’ study of ‘Whiteness and loss in outer East London: tracing the collective memories of diaspora space’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 37 (2014), 652–67. The author spent two years as a youth worker in Newham, East London, and used the experience to examine the memories of young people and youth workers of the area of the white working class. London's East End, James explains, has been mythologized as a bastion of white, working-class resilience, exemplified in the stoicism of the Blitz through to the rise of nationalist, far-right politics. Yet, his study of the memories of his subject-group in Newham reveals a more complex and ambivalent attitude towards whiteness. Youth workers from a range of white and ethnic backgrounds all recounted the same sense of loss of community in their area since the 1960s and related this to the recent history of immigration, thus challenging the simple correlation between whiteness and the loss of communal identity in the locality.

Sarah E. Hackett explores the experience of urban immigration more directly in ‘From rags to restaurants: self-determination, entrepreneurship and integration amongst Muslim immigrants in Newcastle upon Tyne in comparative perspective, 1960s–1990s’, Twentieth Century British History, 25 (2014), 132–54. Her study deploys a combination of census data, oral testimony and survey evidence to trace changing patterns of employment among Newcastle's Muslim residents. The study reveals that for many immigrants a period of employment alongside white British workers in the transport and manufacturing sectors was used to accumulate funds for business start-up, suggesting that economic independence was more important than occupational integration for this section of the community. The comparative context is provided with reference to the German city of Bremen where many Muslim immigrants arrived as guest workers and where the establishment of ethnic businesses was not as significant as in Newcastle. She concludes that place exerted a greater influence than religion on the economic patterns exhibited by Muslim migrants. The geographical mobility of labour which resulted in the presence of these migrants groups in the workforce was just one feature of economic globalization which, as Jim Tomlinson points out, has been an influential force in shaping British society since the mid-nineteenth century. In his article on ‘The political economy of globalization: the genesis of Dundee's two “united fronts” in the 1930s’, Historical J., 57 (2014), 225–45, he examines the responses to international trading pressures in the east coast Scottish city which was home to the jute industry and arguably ‘the most globalized city in Britain’ (p. 227). He finds sharply divergent responses to the crisis between the labour movement on the one hand and the employers and political leaders on the other, and concludes that the Dundee case reveals the degree of interplay between national and local influences in determining the response to globalization of industrial cities.

Elsewhere, the theme of suburbs looms large in the periodical literature this year. Laura Balderstone, ‘Semi-detatched Britain? Reviewing suburban engagement in twentieth-century society’, Urban History, 41 (2014), 141–60, for example, adopts social science methodology to carry out a study of suburbanization in Leicester. Using questionnaire responses from clubs and associations based in the town, she maps the residential addresses of members to show that, far from detaching themselves from urban life, suburb dwellers played an active part in the associational culture of the town in the post-war period. The study provides an important corrective to the idea of suburbanization as a diluting influence on urban associational life and highlights the need for similar studies of other suburbs in the post-war era. Balderstone's article is one of three dealing with the subject of suburbs in this issue of Urban History. Michael Heller's ‘Suburbia, marketing and stakeholders: developing Ilford, Essex, 1880–1914’, Urban History, 41 (2014), 62–80, adopts a very different approach, applying ‘stakeholder theory’ to the study of the suburb of Ilford, to enable an analysis of the wide range of interest groups affected by its development. Heller uses census returns to build up a social profile of the suburb and finds that it housed a significant proportion of lower white-collar employees. The emerging picture of the suburb as an area which developed to serve the housing needs of the growing number of clerks employed in London by the end of the nineteenth century underlines the notion that suburbs were diverse and varied. The stakeholders of Heller's title included local developers who targeted their houses at clerks, offering the chance of home ownership which was still a relative rarity in pre-1914 Britain; the Great Eastern Railway, which benefited in increased revenues from the development of suburbs along its lines; and the Ilford Urban District Council, many of whose members were closely associated with the local property market. The development of suburbs in a similar period but a very different setting is the subject of James Moore's article, ‘Making Cairo modern? Innovation, urban form and the development of suburbia, c. 1880–1922’, Urban History, 41 (2014), 81–104. His examination of the development of suburbs in Cairo in the early twentieth century questions the idea of suburbs as enclaves of modernity. Much of their architecture was traditional and the introduction of modern urban infrastructure and utilities in Cairo pre-dated their development. Like Heller's study, Moore's research also serves as an important reminder of the diversity of suburban developments. Cairo's suburbs varied significantly in their economic characteristics and their ethnic composition.

The rise of clerks and other white-collar workers in London, which drove demand for the development of suburbs like Ilford, also fuelled the consumer boom in the sports retail sector in the city. Geraldine Biddle-Perry's ‘The rise of “The world's largest sport and athletic outfitter”: a study of Gamage's of Holborn, 1878–1913’, Sport in History, 34 (2014), 295–317, examines the transformation of a small hosiers in Holborn, into a specialist retailer of cycling equipment and other sporting goods. One of several articles dealing with the development of sport in an urban setting, published in the journal Sport in History, Biddle-Perry shows how Gamage's catered for the masses, rather than for a sporting elite, tracing the firm's expansion through the increasing sales revenues accrued and the expansion of its premises into neighbouring retail spaces in the 1890s. With some 1.5 million cyclists on British roads by the 1890s, many of them men, there was a huge opportunity for entrepreneurs like Gamage to supply a new consumer demand. The shop was located on a main thoroughfare passed by thousands of male office workers every day on their way to work. It also equipped growing numbers of local sports clubs with its own branded sporting equipment. The study of Gamage's offers broader insights into the development of urban retail and, in particular, the evolution of the department store in the late Victorian and Edwardian years. Elsewhere, there are studies of local and regional sports clubs and competitions which throw light on their specific urban localities. Keith Gregson and Mike Huggins analyse ‘Ashbrooke Whit Sports, Sunderland and its records: a case study of amateurism in late Victorian and Edwardian athletic and cycling competition’, Sport in History, 31 (2014), 994–1011, with a view to widening the historical lens from its more usual focus on the most famous clubs and fixtures in the calendar. In contrast, Gary James and Dave Day's ‘The emergence of an Association Football culture in Manchester 1840–1884’, Sport in History, 34 (2014), 49–74, make extensive use of the local press to trace the origins of the game in one of Britain's most iconic footballing cities. Their findings provide as many insights into the nature of mid-Victorian Manchester as they do into the evolution of association football. Manchester's rapid nineteenth-century population growth and the introduction of half-day working on Saturdays created demand for organized leisure but, rather than developing along entirely class-segregated lines, the emerging structure of clubs and fixtures came about thanks to the efforts of individuals from a wide range of social backgrounds. In their scrutiny of the city's earliest three clubs, they find examples of a bookkeeper, a gas-rental collector in prominent organizational positions and identified the earliest club, Hulme Athenaeum, as one which aimed to attract participation from working men, many of whom later moved into other clubs. It was a pattern that reflected the city's complex social structure and, the authors conclude, it emphasizes the place-specific nature of sporting development in the Victorian era.

Other aspects of the lives of ordinary Mancunians are uncovered by Michael Nevell who employs archaeological sources to conduct a survey of workers’ housing in Manchester after 1800, in ‘Legislation and reality: the archaeological evidence for sanitation and housing quality in urban workers’ housing in the Ancoats area of Manchester between 1800 and 1950’, Industrial Archaeology R., 36 (2014), 48–74. As Manchester's first industrial suburb, Ancoats played a key part in housing the town's growing population of textile workers, but much of the original housing stock was demolished in the mid-twentieth century to make way for new homes and commercial units. New planning and policy guidelines introduced in 1990 precipitated a period of archaeological work funded by the developers of city centre sites with the result that new evidence of the quality of worker housing constructed in some of Britain's most important industrial cities is now available to historians. Archaeological evidence of room dimensions, the remains of internal features like fireplaces and staircases and drainage and privy facilities are all used by Nevell to assess the quality of the dwellings. He finds that few of the original houses, dating from the first half of the nineteenth century, were altered significantly prior to their demolition. In one sense, this suggests a lack of investment in updating the housing stock, but Nevell argues that there is little archaeological evidence to support the qualitative accounts of contemporaries who criticized the standard of the dwellings.

While archaeological evidence provides some important insights into the living conditions experienced by residents of working-class suburbs, a very different range of sources is scrutinized by Melissa Bellanta and Simon Sleight to investigate their appearance and behaviour. In ‘The leary larrikin: street style in colonial Australia’, Cultural and Social History, 11 (2014), 263–83, the authors explore the emergence of a distinctive ‘look’ among a section of the urban youth in Australia. A product of the post-gold rush baby boom of the 1850s, the ‘leary larrikins’ of their title were streetwise youths who ‘specialized in a showy insolence in the public spaces of the larger cities’ (p. 263). Focusing primarily on their clothes, but also on their hairstyles, nicknames and demeanour, the authors uncover the key elements of the larrikin ‘style’ through analysis of photographs, newspaper reports, police descriptions and other contemporary accounts. Their decorative scarves, wide-brimmed hats, bell-bottomed trousers and heeled boots distinguished them from more respectable contemporaries for whom clothing choices were more sober and under-stated. Rather than attempting to read the signs and messages larrikins were trying to convey through their attire, the authors acknowledge that their approach owes more to material culture as they attempt to explain the look and conduct of the larrikin as a product of the poor urban environments in which they lived. Of particular interest to urban historians in this study is the way in which Bellanta and Sleight link the larrikin to the local markets in Sydney and Melbourne where cheap fashion accessories could be acquired to perfect their look, as well as the boot factories where many of them worked. With much of their evidence drawn from hostile accounts by police or critical newspaper reporters, we are reminded of the sometimes violent and threatening presence these youths posed on the streets of some of Australia's largest cities, but the striking photographs and written descriptions also featured in the article offer a glimpse of an early form of youth culture.

Several articles of interest to urban historians also appear in the Women's History R. in 2014. Esther Breitenbach and Valerie Wright consider ‘Women as active citizens: Glasgow and Edinburgh, c. 1918–1939’, 23, 401–20, and find that women were active in a range of associations in Scotland's two largest cities in the inter-war period. From temperance groups to women's guilds, Christian associations and equal citizenship societies, their activity levels were high, and they also enjoyed growing representation on the cities’ councils, with a total of 15 women serving on Edinburgh Town Council in the inter-war period, for example. Their study provides important evidence of the role women played in urban life in the inter-war period and, as the authors point out, it also confirms the views of Pat Thane and others that the achievement of partial female enfranchisement in 1918 did not lower levels of political participation among urban women. Urban Scotland is also the setting for Jim Hinks’ study of ‘The representation of “baby farmers” in the Scottish city, 1867–1908’, Women's History R., 23 (2014), 560–76. He argues that there was a strong spatial dimension to the ways in which ‘baby-farmers’ were portrayed. The term itself, Hinks argues, did not necessarily carry criminal connotations and could be applied to people involved in general child-minding activities in return for money, but in its more negative guises it was associated with high illegitimacy rates, urban overcrowding and even infant murder. The Scottish press, according to Hinks, were more discriminating in their reporting of commercial child-rearing practices than, for example, the British Medical J., which was uniform in its condemnation. In Scotland, he finds a general acceptance of the practice as a feature of urban life, although a harder line was adopted by the Glasgow-based North British Daily Mail, which linked criminal forms of ‘baby-farming’ much more explicitly with urban degradation.

More familiar territory for urban historians is the theme of water, and several articles deal with aspects of its supply, regulation and control in the urban environment. Shane Ewen's study of ‘Sheffield's Great Flood of 1864: engineering failure and the municipalisation of water’, Environment and History, 20 (2014), 177–20, takes as its subject the Dale Dyke Reservoir disaster of March 1864, when the town of Sheffield and a number of its surrounding villages were flooded after the reservoir burst its banks, resulting in the loss of 250 lives. This incident provides insight into Victorian engineering, disaster response and debates over municipalization and the author concludes that rather than seeing disasters as catalysts for political and social change in the urban environment, they need to be viewed as part of longer-term developments and complex interrelated factors which shaped the nature of regulation and control in each locality. In a second study, in which he places the Sheffield disaster alongside another Yorkshire flood in 1852, Ewen delves further into the contested nature of expertise. ‘Socio-technological disasters and engineering expertise in Victorian Britain: the Holmfirth and Sheffield floods of 1852 and 1864’, J. of Historical Geography, 46 (2014), 13–25, brings together historical and sociological approaches to examine how the two reservoir disasters changed attitudes to professional expertise. The ‘internal’ engineering experts, involved in constructing the reservoirs, and the ‘external’ experts brought in to assess the technical failures that led to the two disasters, revealed the contested nature of the ‘expert’ knowledge which was employed by urban leaders in the Victorian period. Despite their faith in knowledge and science, disasters such as those at Sheffield and Holmfirth revealed to the Victorians that many of their urban engineering projects were fundamentally experimental, and that technological expertise was in its infancy.

Several other articles explore how water supplies were modernized in different urban settings. Joseph Hillier's study, ‘Implementation without control: the role of the private water companies in establishing constant water in nineteenth-century London’, Urban History, 41 (2014), 228–64, deals with the changing relationship between commercial water suppliers and domestic users as London moved towards the provision of constant piped water to its residents in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. While in 1874 only 10 per cent of houses in London had constant water, this proportion had increased to 95 per cent by 1901. Constant supply replaced an earlier system whereby water was provided intermittently, at specified times of the week, and was promoted as an important modernization likely to deliver health benefits to the population. Like Ewen, Hillier points to technical shortcomings, which in this case challenged the ability of the water companies to furnish an uninterrupted supply. But he also explores the consequences for the household user for whom constant water provision was not necessarily liberating. It reduced their ability and need to monitor and regulate their own usage, while at the same time increasing their reliance on the capacity of the companies to maintain the constant supply. The domestic user is also at the centre of Manel Guardia, Maribel Rosselló and Sergi Garriga's ‘Barcelona's water supply, 1867–1967: the transition to a modern system’, Urban History, 41 (2014), 415–34. The authors examine a century of evolution in water policies and provision, beginning with the provision of clean water wells and latrines in some of Barcelona's mid-nineteenth-century residential quarters. Domestic demand for water, particularly for bathing, was slower to emerge than in Britain and the United States but, by the early years of the twentieth century, Barcelona citizens were beginning to acquire bath tubs, wash stands and bidets, creating a new demand for water in the private home. Water consumption rates doubled from 1910 to 1943 creating pressures on resources until the late 1960s when significant new supplies were sourced from the Ter River.

Water provision was not the only aspect of urban infrastructure and service provision which required city leaders to grapple with issues of modernization and technological change. In ‘Mobility and modernity in the urban transport systems of colonial Manila and Singapore’, J. of Social History, 47 (2014), 855–77, Michael D. Pante reassesses the relationship between ‘Western technologies’ and colonial Asian society. Examining the introduction of street cars, trolley buses and then motor cars, Pante charts an expanding transport sector, with motor cars increasing from 842 to 3,506 in Singapore from 1915 to 1920. By the 1920s, the streets of both cities were teeming with rickshaws, motorized vehicles and pedestrians as different modes of transport jostled for space and primacy. The British and American colonial states favoured motorized forms of conveyance and, as a result, more traditional forms of carriage, such as the rickshaw, were increasingly subject to limiting regulation by the municipal authorities. They and their native operators became ‘symbols of un-modernity and relics of an exotic past’ (p. 867). But despite predictions of their demise, the rickshaws continued to provide a cheap and reliable transport option for residents in both cities, and Pante concludes that this represented a level of resistance to the versions of modernity which the colonial authorities attempted to impose.

Similar issues of native and colonial participation in the shaping of the urban landscape and environment are addressed by Elizabeth Howard Moore and Navanath Osiri in ‘Urban forms and civic space in nineteenth- to early twentieth-century Bangkok and Rangoon’, J. of Urban History, 40 (2014), 158–77. The two cities varied considerably in their experience of modern urban development. In Bangkok, successive kings, who had travelled extensively in Europe, led the development of civic space. In contrast, in Rangoon, the British imposed an urban plan in the second half of the nineteenth century. A close look at how these developments played out in practice allows the authors to reveal a more complex picture. In Rangoon, for example, although new civic spaces were created and administered by the British, the city plan created unofficial spaces, such as the wide walkways built to cover the new drainage canals which were appropriated for business and social interaction by local Burmese, Indian and Chinese traders. In both cities, urban planning was centrally organized and imposed with top-down authority but, like the rickshaw drivers in Manila and Singapore, the local populace and their social traditions continued to shape and define the use of urban space.

The propensity of urban dwellers to make their own uses of the urban environment is also a theme in Michael Barke's study, ‘The North East Coast Exhibition of 1929: entrenchment or modernity?’ Northern History, 51 (2014), 153–76. Held against the backdrop of inter-war depression in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, this event was the largest visitor spectacle ever to be held in the city, but despite its place in popular memory, it has not figured in histories of the town or region. Barke suggests that this may have been because of its temporary status, but like other international exhibitions and trade fairs of its day it provided an opportunity for ‘place promotion’ and offers historians some important insights into how the city viewed itself, and how it wished to be seen by the outside world. Originally proposed by the Newcastle and Gateshead Chamber of Commerce as a means of stimulating the struggling economy of the north-east region by advertising its businesses and products to new potential customers, its lavish displays had a rather different attraction for locals and residents of the wider region. Housed in pavilions erected on an extensive site on the Town Moor, the exhibition included modern attractions which excited public interest, including Malcolm Campbell's Bluebird racing car and the S6 seaplane. It featured indoor and outdoor musical entertainments, restaurants and various athletic displays from Highland games to sheepdog trials. As the author notes, much of this had little to do with economic stimulus for the manufactures and industries of the region, but it meant that the exhibition could be used by visiting people as a form of escapism from the harsh realities of inter-war life. Not quantifiable in economic terms, but perhaps more valuable in shaping peoples’ perceptions of urban living, the audience experience of the North East Coast exhibition, like Portsmouth's nineteenth-century ghost stories, lived long in the memory and passed from generation to generation as a means of defining the relationship between people and urban space.