This article explores the significance of mobility in the everyday structures of political life through a case study of political space in mid-eighteenth-century Stockholm. Analytical in approach, the study focuses on political action in public space, in its spatial negotiations of inclusion and exclusion, and investigates three particular places: the city itself, the central square Riddarhustorget and the city's wine shops. It shows that temporary political density and geographical proximity during meetings of the Estates of the Realm, when a large influx of people upset the corporate social division of the city, gave the lower orders the opportunity to cross thresholds into elite places. In addition, mobility between sites and the use of many places, rather than the mastering of one particular site, was a means for these orders to take part in political life. Results show that a unified ‘public sphere’ was not a prerequisite for extra-parliamentary politics. Instead, participation was made possible by moving between places, and learning how to navigate many different social and political boundaries.

This article deals with the importance of religion as a factor influencing the inclusion and exclusion of foreigners from – and inside – the guilds in eighteenth-century Strasbourg. We consider the different notions of the étranger as socially constructed and circumstantial. Together with factors such as social status, family ties, gender, systems of patronage, wealth, language and the citizenship rights of a town, religious and denominational boundaries constituted a major factor for influencing the inclusion and exclusion of foreigners in the early modern society. The construction and preservation of such boundaries are explored here through the examples of the carpenters' and the shipmen's guild found in the eighteenth-century multiconfessional city of Strasbourg.

This article forms a contribution to the ongoing debate about the nature of an English urban renaissance. We draw on Schwarz's designation of residential leisure towns to explore the spread of leisure and luxury through a broad range of towns. Our analysis reveals that leisure facilities and luxury service and retail provision were widespread, but that residential leisure towns appear as qualitatively different places, the status of which was contingent upon social profile and cultural-economy, rather than demographic, political or socio-economic make up. We conclude by arguing that urban typologies based on specialization should be tempered with older-established and more subjective categorizations based on the status of the town.

The ‘Labour and the Poor’ investigations of the Morning Chronicle newspaper, which charted social conditions in towns outside London in 1849–51, subjected Irish migrants in Britain to a hostile journalistic gaze. In the case of the iron-manufacturing town of Merthyr Tydfil in south Wales, the minority Irish ethnic identity was defined by observers in terms of exclusion from an emerging mass commodity culture and in opposition to the native working class. This early investigative journalism deployed some conventions of the contemporary novel that were familiar to its mainly middle-class readership to root social identities in material conditions.

This article examines the ambivalent relationship that San Francisco and Darwin developed with Asia during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. On the one hand they presented themselves as gateways that facilitated trade with Asia. On the other hand they acted as sentinels that protected Europeans from Asian immigration. This quirky behaviour is encapsulated in the quarantine regulations that were applied in both ports to Asian commodities and people. The two case studies suggest a broader paradox in the history of port cities. Their prosperity and vitality rested upon the free flow of goods and people, but those flows generated enormous frictions.

A small group of urban historians met informally at the annual conference of the Economic History Society in 1962. In 1963, H.J. (Jim) Dyos, very much in charge of the enterprise, began circulating a subscription newsletter. The early issues of the Urban History Newsletter (the ancestor of this journal) reveal the slow and hesitant way in which the Urban History Group formed, growing rapidly in membership but reluctant to develop into a formal society and determined against the establishment of a conventional journal. There were after-dinner talks in 1966 and 1967 but only in April 1968 was a full-day meeting established in a pattern still followed 40 years on. This light-hearted account is based on Dyos' ‘editorials’ in the Newsletter and personal memories of the man himself.