This short essay sets the context for the special section on communities, courts and Scottish towns. Scottish burgh records generally, and Aberdeen's UNESCO recognized collection in particular, are considered in light of their legal character. The changing features of pre-modern political society between the fifteenth century and the early nineteenth century are introduced as a shared problem for investigation, and an ancien régime framework is examined as a comparative tool in this field. A vital concern of these articles is with the construction and sometimes contested use of vocabularies of law and authority, privileges and liberties, and ideas of urban ‘community’. Courts at the municipal level, and in the world beyond the burgh, are appreciated as legal and governmental fora. The ambition of this special section is to prompt European comparisons, and encourage greater dialogue with and consideration of Scottish urban records in future research.

The political culture of Scotland's late medieval towns has been neglected in recent scholarship. This article seeks to provoke discussion through an analysis of communitarian language and its use by urban elites in the fifteenth century. The Scottish urban community, as elsewhere, could be positioned as a location, a legal construct and a group of people. This provided the burgh council with a variety of political tools which could be employed – consciously or otherwise – in order to legitimize its authority.

A striking feature of the history of the Scots burgh in this period, and of bodies within it, was their readiness to resort to legal redress in the Court of Session, Scotland's leading civil court. The law was a regular and often intrusive presence in burgh life, a means by which burghs, guildries and trades incorporations defended their privileges. This article will explore this propensity in relation to what it can tell us both about urban identity and the constitution of urban community in this period, but it will also begin to examine the role which the law may have played in the re-constitution and re-shaping of urban community. In other words, it will consider the law and judgments made in the Court of Session as active forces in a wider process of governance. We know relatively little, in fact, about this dimension of urban governance, but the surviving record is a rich one and demands much more systematic examination.

This article explores the understudied riots which occurred in Aberdeen in mid-October 1785. It charts the climate of politicization that characterized the burgh's civic life in the immediate aftermath of the American Revolution and before the outbreak of the equivalent process in France. In doing so, it challenges interpretations of the socially exclusive nature of the Scottish reform movement, the dynamics of continuity and change between this phenomenon and later political ‘radicalism’ and the role of Aberdeen as a ‘provincial’ metropolis in the Age of Revolution.

The importance of energy, in particular coal, is the subject of ongoing debate amongst economic historians who examine its relationship to the timing and nature of British industrialization. Yet attention to the case of London during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries shows that heavy coal consumption did not require industrial production, nor was heavy industrial coal demand dependent on steam engines. Rather, through the first sustained attempt to quantify industry's proportion of London's demand for mined coal, this article argues that the early modern world's leading coal market was driven primarily by domestic rather than industrial consumption, but that many industrial facilities nevertheless consumed fuel on scales often associated with later industrialization.

Civic ritual and pageantry have been mainstays of urban culture since the Middle Ages, but it has been suggested that they entered a period of decline from the 1870s onwards. This article suggests that instead, local authorities reformed and revised their use of civic ceremony, celebration and commemoration, in order to keep pace with contemporary culture and to maintain public interest. The towns of Darlington and Middlesbrough are considered to highlight the use of recreational and sensory-rich ritual in the urban setting. It is suggested that historians should therefore adopt a broader methodology and broaden their definition of what constituted civic ritual in the twentieth century.

This article examines public health spending, health outcomes and political complexion in London's 28 Metropolitan Borough Councils (MBCs) in the inter-war period. It describes the place of the MBCs in the governance of the capital and demonstrates the variety of experience across the different boroughs in terms of wealth, politics and mortality. Searching for potential causes of differences in outcomes, it discovers some positive statistical relationships between the extent of Labour party presence on the councils, local spending and health outcomes. Our tentative conclusion is that local democratic processes could lead to distinctive and beneficial public health policies, albeit within the context of other local and structural determining factors.

This article examines the impact of post-war urban renewal on industry and economic activity in Manchester and Leeds. It demonstrates that local redevelopment plans contained important economic underpinnings which have been largely overlooked in the literature, and particularly highlights expansive plans for industrial reorganization and relocation. The article also shows that, in practice, urban renewal had a destabilizing and destructive impact on established industrial activities and exacerbated the inner-city problems of unemployment and disinvestment which preoccupied policy-makers by the 1970s. The article argues that post-war planning practices need to be integrated into wider histories of deindustrialization in British cities.

Federally funded ‘urban rehabilitation’ began with the Housing Act of 1954 in the United States. Baltimore's Harlem Park was selected to pilot this experimental programme; a logical choice seeing how the pilot largely built on a programme dating from the prehistory of legislated urban rehabilitation that originated in Baltimore. This article lays bare the history of this programme, known as the ‘Baltimore Plan’, which offered empirical evidence that substantiated the potential of participatory urban planning. Beyond transferring upon minority communities a level of control over housing that black communities had seldom possessed before, the Baltimore Plan also constituted in an alternative to public housing.

The aim of this article is to take stock of nineteenth-century transnational urban history. After a short introduction to transnational history, general urban histories are analysed with respect to the ways in which transnational perspectives are incorporated into the narratives. Specific contributions to urban history in a transnational perspective are analysed. Approaches to urban planning history that focus on transnational linkages and international organization are discussed. Approaches to urban history within enlarged geographical scales that go beyond the nation-state framework, with a particular focus on cities as nodes in translocal networks, are analysed. The article concludes with a critical discussion of nineteenth-century transnational urban history.

Half a century on from Ivor Noel Hume's reference to archaeology as the ‘handmaiden to history’, historical-period archaeology has come quite a way. From disparate origins, in anthropological approaches to material and rescue archaeology in North America, and industrial and buildings archaeology in Britain and Europe, the sub-discipline has coalesced into a structured approach to the recent past. Hume's comment is often misinterpreted as a critique of archaeology's supposed inferiority to history, yet his comment actually refers to the potential for archaeological material to inform historical narratives, fill in gaps and populate the histories of non-literate peoples with a material culture. Unfortunately, overlap between the two disciplines is still in relatively short supply. In light of the recent material turn in the humanities, however, as well as an increased interest amongst historians and geographers in engaging with material culture, archaeological approaches to artifacts, sites and built heritage are in a strong position to inform methods for examining the historical material environment. Collaboration is now not only necessary, but timely, and this review of theses is an attempt to further that potential for co-operation amongst those who study the past. The doctoral theses reviewed here explore changes and developments in the modern city from a material perspective, evidencing both the breadth of approaches and the potential for research in the arts and archaeological sciences to stimulate new studies across different disciplines.