The article focuses on an historical relationship between the political institution of chieftaincy and civic pride in Ibadan, a Yoruba city in south-western Nigeria. It examines this relationship against the scholarly model of ‘Yoruba urbanism’ and argues that this model is empirically and conceptually flawed. Drawing on oral and documentary historical sources, the article explores how a ‘civic Ibadan’ was made through practices of settlement, civil disorder and external warfare during the pre-colonial period. The analysis adds to recent debates about the concept of ‘historical materialism’ in the urban past.

Recent analysis of the public-private dichotomy in the eighteenth century has portrayed the London household as the locus of architectural innovation as elites distanced themselves from their domestic servants, so implicating it in a fundamental component of modernity, the ‘growth of privacy’. The master-servant divide allegedly widened over the course of the eighteenth century, trickling down from the nobility to the middling sorts. But the testimony of domestic servants demonstrates that much architectural innovation (like back stairs and servant bells) can be found in London houses well before the orthodox model allows, and their cultural transmission is by no means simply one of trickle-down. Continuity and complexity, rather than paradigmatic shift, are much more apparent, bringing into question the use of probate inventory or architectural evidence alone in charting cultural change.

Struggles over the symbolic ownership of Bristol's open spaces were often influenced by association with conflicts between mercantile elites and ‘the people’ over the definition and nature of civic identity. Shifting political and cultural readings of Brandon Hill and Queen Square are here identified and contrasted, offering a fresh interpretation of controversies over ‘improvement’ and gentrification via the fluid appropriation of these sites for the representation of radicalism, citizenship, liberty, respectability or commercialism.

Under what circumstances did Canadian municipalities, charged with ensuring the existence of services which encouraged the development of real property, come to be involved in the field of culture and leisure? By examining the process through which the Municipal Library and the Botanical Garden were established in Montreal, this article attempts to answer this question. Because these projects constituted precedents in relation to the usual areas of Canadian municipal intervention, they provoked vigorous debate. Each in their own way, the projects served to call into question the definition of public culture and the democratization of knowledge. They also raised the equally contentious issue of the role of municipal government in the fields of leisure and culture.

One of the most difficult concepts in both contemporary and academic accounts of the Second World War is that of civilian morale. This paper uses evidence from the Mass-Observation Archive to argue that understanding fluctuations in morale can only be understood through an exploration of working-class culture during the 1930s and 1940s. The paper examines difficulties of defining ‘morale’ and goes on to argue that the pattern of bombing in urban centres and the continuity of working-class institutions helped shape and maintain morale during the critical period of 1940–41

The three books under review represent the origins and promise of a relatively new field of study, urban environmental history. Joel Tarr's collection of previously published essays retraces the intellectual odyssey of its single most important pioneer. Concerned about contemporary pollution problems, he has spent a quarter of a century exploring the frontiers of scholarship on the relationship between cities and their technologies. In contrast, monographs by R. Bruce Stephenson and Andrew Hurley are typical of current trends to build on this foundation, enriching and broadening its parameters from a wide variety of perspectives. Here the insights of town planning and social history illuminate case studies of St Petersburg, Florida, and Gary, Indiana, respectively. Other recent works draw heavily upon the sciences, especially medicine and public health. Reversing decades of academic fragmentation – knowing more and more about less and less – the study of the urban environment is encouraging creative applications of cross-disciplinary and comparative approaches.

In ‘Shanghailanders: the formation and identity of the British settler community in Shanghai 1843–1937’, Past and Present, 159 (1998), 161–211, Robert Bickers portrays the collective experiences and self-images of an idiosyncratic enclave of ex-patriates who preferred to be known as permanent residents rather than ‘temporary sojourners in a foreign land’. Tracing longue durée relationships between the International Settlement and Shanghai Municipal Council, Bickers has unearthed highly pertinent demographic data. By 1935 the British community numbered approximately 10,000. Between approximately 1850 and 1900 half of the total comprised unmarried males, a figure that fell to 17 per cent by the mid-1930s. Drawing on Saidian conceptualizations of otherness, Bickers probes ethnic and sexual as well as political and cultural boundaries and stereotypes. He suggests that ‘in lieu of the city-state denied them by the diplomats [Shanghailanders] . . . declaimed about their “republic”, which they “imagined” – in Benedict Anderson's term – as meritocratic, egalitarian and democratic’. As communists and nationalists confronted one another in the final battle for the heart and soul of a deeply divided land, the ex-patriate community clung desperately to a collective cultural ethos. But, within three years of Mao Zedong's triumph in 1949, the British Chamber of Commerce had been forced to dissolve itself. By 1953 a number of Shanghailanders had been denied exit visas for more than three years and in 1957 the last British firm was forced to close its doors. A few isolated individuals – quasi-prisoners or converts to the Maoist cause – lived out a shadowy existence in China's greatest industrial and maritime city. Now the settler mentalité ‘survived [only] . . . in the imagination’.

Why 1500? Why 1800? Why does Urban History's review of periodical literature use this definition of the early modern? Does urban history have a periodization of its own? The reluctance of historians to stray before and after 1800 is a major theme of C.R. Friedrichs's review of early modern German urban history, ‘But are we any closer to home? Early modern German urban history since German Home Towns’, Central European History, 30 (1998), 163–86, and I wondered about these issues while reading some of the articles published this year which did not stop and surrender their historical passports at 1500.

Survey the world . . . from Ireland to Japan: the medieval town is everywhere. Whether in Europe or Africa, India, the Slav lands or the Far East, no self-respecting country now lacks its examples of civic life during the first fifteen centuries of the Christian era. As a broad cultural phenomenon, the rediscovery of urbanism in this historical period is both ensnaring and liberating at the same time. The snare is the difficulty of knowing when a proposed comparison – whether made between continents, or within a much smaller area – is not the mere imposition upon unfamiliar evidence of a model imported from elsewhere. After years of European insistence on the otherness of the east, it would be ironic if all non-European cultures were now to become absorbed in a single historical framework, constructed upon part of the experience of post-Roman western Europe. And Europe itself, as perhaps does not need to be stressed these days, is bound by no ‘natural’ unity of experience. On the other hand, a genuinely comparative urban history is liberating. It opens the possibility of deeper knowledge of a particular local society, through research which registers real comparisons yet which is at the same time open to surprise. As Bloch taught, there is more to be learned from distinguishing differences in past cultures than from accumulating similarities. Yet neither of these projects, and in particular the first, can profitably be pursued for long on a narrowly insular front.