This article examines three important aspects of how the Dutch Republic organized warfare during the Dutch Revolt. The regulations for the billeting of soldiers, the building of fortifications and the collection of direct taxes are analysed in two garrison towns, namely, Gorinchem and Doesburg. The billeting of soldiers and the collection of taxes usually caused troubles in neighbouring countries. In comparison to more centralized neighbouring countries, the Dutch polity's decentralized nature, in which cities held positions of strong power, entailed better arrangements for billeting and higher tax compliance. Yet this decentralized nature did not hamper the emergence of central administrative bodies for co-ordinating and organizing the building of fortifications. The Dutch account of organizing warfare challenges existing views about the role of cities in state building within a context of protracted warfare.

Seventeenth-century medical theory saw epidemic diseases like the plague as being caused by stinking miasmas resulting from putrefying matter polluting the air. The butchers' trade was singled out in London as a major polluter, implicated in both the regulatory literature and popular images as corrupting both the physical and moral health of the City and its citizens. Controlling the food trades, especially the butchers', was therefore an essential part of containing environmental pollution and preventing disease.

Examination of writings about British cities that appeared in Germany between the mid-1830s and 1914 runs counter to emphasis either on German anti-urbanism or on growing hostility among Germans to their neighbours across the North Sea. Although it takes into account strong disparagement of flaws and failings that had, in the view of critics, resulted from the chaotic nature of urban growth in Britain, it points to increasing recognition – particularly after mid-century – of efforts to ameliorate conditions about which critics had complained. Much of what was singled out for commendation involved voluntary efforts by men and women who sought to improve working-class life via philanthropic uplift. During the 1850s and 1860s, the conservative social reformer Victor Aimé Huber sang the praises of the co-operative movement, both from an economic and from a moral standpoint. Later on, other observers, such as the liberal economist Gerhart Schulze-Gävernitz, lauded the most famous of the British settlement houses, Toynbee Hall in East London, on account of the activities it promoted in the area of adult education. Favourable commentary on municipal government rounded out a picture of the urban scene as a sphere in which local forces exemplified a spirit of civic-mindedness that ought to inspire admiration rather than enmity.

During the Franco-Prussian War, Paris was besieged by the Prussians from the middle of September 1870 until the end of January 1871. During most of the period, the main means of transportation – railways, roads, telegraph, bridges, etc. – were cut off by the Prussians. This article shows that, given the elimination of the main means of diffusion of news, some novel strategies were used to preserve a democratic distribution of information. An analysis of the content of four illustrated periodicals – The Illustrated London News and The Graphic in London and L'Illustration and Le Monde Illustré in Paris – shows that innovative methods involving such things as the balloon and the carrier pigeon were used to circulate news inside and outside the fortifications of Paris and beyond the surrounding Prussian army. The article also demonstrates that while this distribution had a different form from that occurring in normal situations, it did not prevent the papers from reaching a balance among the various issues related to the war and covered by their content.

Barcelona was the capital city of European anarchism during the inter-war years. The aim of this article is to discover the sociological and territorial features of the radicalized CNT (the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo), the anarchist union, which generated the summer 1936 revolution. By looking at the role of urban space as a variable in the collective processes of the working class the article argues that the unskilled recent immigrant worker and the neighbourhoods where this working-class figure was dominant were the key protagonists of revolutionary radicalism.

The multifarious ‘objective’ indicators used to place individuals by class (for example, occupation, wealth, income), or proxies thereof, capture only a part of who we are. More important is our ‘style of life’: our tastes, how we spend what we earn and how this interplays socially to include or exclude us from ‘society’. Of these the most significant cultural site was an individual's house and home, against which, using local property tax records, we can place a defined numeric value. This article analyses class in relation to housing and property values in Nottingham in the first half of the twentieth century.