Water was essential to the commerce, sustenance and cleansing of medieval London and its inhabitants. The paper reviews technologies of supply, access and control, and the uses and risks associated with water during the city's formative period. It surveys the pleasures of water around the city, the paradoxes they involved, and the public supply as an expression of a growing civic culture. It emphasizes the interaction between natural environment, technology and institutions as a fruitful theme for medieval urban history.

‘This city has a circular form, and such a marvellous roundness is the sign of its perfection. A trench of surprising beauty and breadth surrounds this city and contains, not a swamp or a putrid pool, but living water from fountains stocked with fish and crayfish.’ For friar Bonvesin de la Riva at the end of the thirteenth century, as for most of his successors, glorifying Milan consisted of singing the praises of its running water. Abundant, regular, gushing water was everywhere; it was ‘marvellous to drink, clear, healthy, within reach of the hand’.This praise is evidently for the geographical situation of Milan, which brought it harmony and wealth. But it is also for the Milanese themselves, who brought running water from the rivers to the Lombard capital. Milan, after all, was naturally ‘Medio-Amnium’, at an equal distance from the two rivers (the Ticino and the Adda) that flowed around it. At the end of the Middle Ages, it was at the centre of the most immense system of navigable rivers in Europe, and it owed this condition to three centuries of effort during which the communal power, but also private initiatives, had dug the canals and connected the streams. Water became the vital element in the economy, and the development of Milan multiplied the concurrent, sometimes rival uses of it. How could stagnant water from trenches be reconciled with that of the navigable rivers? How could it be ensured that the water that irrigated the garden would also supply the needs of the paper mill? There were many economic contradictions that could be resolved only by an equitable and measured sharing of the water. At the same time, the growing strength of the seigniorial and territorial state sought to appropriate the management of the water to itself. If the prince succeeded in guaranteeing a supply of clean water, which flowed constantly for the good of the whole community, he would have found the best way not only of participating in the development of his city but also of ensuring that his own power was retained.

Recent reviews of South African urban history have highlighted its neglect of rural urbanization and the role of the state and capital in urban development. Natural resource frontiers offer a uniquely unobstructed view of rural urbanization under the aegis of capital and the state. The process has been well documented for South Africa's mineral revolution, but other resource frontiers have been completely ignored. The latter developed in the long shadow cast by mining and the urban metropoles, with their centripetal pull on labour and the state, making the company town an archetypal urban form on the rural periphery.

Despite the transformation of English cities by the growth of suburbs in the inter-war years, there is a dearth of reliable information about the processes, and especially the firms, that brought these suburbs into existence. Contrary to accepted wisdom – and paradoxically, in view of the scorn heaped upon suburbs by the architectural literati – architects are shown to have been heavily involved in the preparation of building applications for the construction of suburban houses. In spite of the unprecedented amount of house building in the inter-war period, the geographical spheres of influence of both builders and architects were highly localized. However, unlike in the nineteenth century, there is little evidence of speculative building having been undertaken by people whose livelihood was not primarily derived from house building or house selling.

This article explores the failure of urban renewal in Bombay city during the first quarter of the twentieth century. It shows how colonial rule structured a class-driven process of uneven urban ‘improvements’ that actually exacerbated the problems of congestion, bad housing and environmental blight. In this process, the new forces of modernity were selectively appropriated to accentuate the differentiation in built forms and urban spaces. Finally, through implicit comparisons with contemporary developments in Europe, it reveals the limitations of urban regeneration in a laissez-faire colonial capitalist environment where the search for quick returns by competing economic actors precluded the adoption of long-term policies and interventionist strategies necessary to create the good city life.

The appearance of the three substantial volumes that comprise this heroic enterprise under the banner of Cambridge University Press (only the first two being discussed here) marks a defining moment in the development of urban history since Jim Dyos launched the Urban History Group nearly forty years ago. How pleased he would have been with this collaborative realization of a long-standing dream that more than one of us discussed with him well before 1977! Characteristically, however, it was from then that the torch was carried forward by Dyos' energetic and energizing heir to the urban history mantle, Peter Clark. For him, as General Editor, these volumes mark the fulfilment of a personal odyssey that stretches from a time when he and Paul Slack were framing collections or overviews on English Tudor and Stuart towns some three decades ago, through to his more recent work on small towns and provincial societies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. To have masterminded and driven forward this immense project spanning urban development since the Roman period to 1950 in the island of Britain, as well as editing the 1540–1840 volume and contributing extensively to it, thus represents a highpoint in a remarkable career in this field. Additionally Peter Clark was shrewd enough to enlist the skilled and dependable editorial aid of David Palliser for the medieval volume and of Martin Daunton for the modern, and to gather around him an Advisory Committee containing many of the more influential figures in the recent development of urban history not only in England but also in Scotland and Wales. Let us hope that detailed notes of their strategic discussions have been preserved for posterity.

It is a work of modern scholarship: on time, comprehensive and rather expensive! But there are 944 pages of this third and final volume of The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, which could make it value for money. And indeed, like the preceding volumes in the series, it has amassed a galaxy of authors, twenty-eight to be exact not including Martin Daunton who, as editor, has also contributed a weighty introduction and an epilogue. The whole project gives strong affirmation that urban history has a present and a future, a product of the renaissance in urban studies in Britain over the past decade. The renaissance has been a European phenomenon, as witnessed by the founding of the European Urban History Association, also over the last decade, and the new groups of urban historians in Germany and Scandinavia, in France and Holland and even more recently in Italy and elsewhere. What the Cambridge Urban History vol. III sets out to do is to provide a British perspective on the historical process of urbanization from 1840–1950. In the process, claims are made that urban history can offer a framework for addressing many questions in the field of economic and social history, not exclusively, but often with an insight lacking in more general approaches.

The history of Latin America has been dominated by ideas of order and progress. Unfortunately those ideas have not always been of regional origin. In the colonial era the conquest and conversion of the native peoples was seen as progress by the Europeans. The imposition of order was aided greatly by urbanization sometimes symbolically on the ruins of Indian cities such as at Cuzco and Mexico City. Cities became the point of cultural and economic articulation between the barbaric hinterland and the civilization of Europe. Freedom from the Spanish yoke gained in the Independence wars was similarly seen as progress, at least by the ultimately victorious creole ‘patriots’. It was here, however, that notions of national identity, modernization and economic success became intertwined to produce the conflicts which still inflame the region today. The paramount question has remained: whose order and concept of progress should be imposed?

The object of this survey is to provide a broad overview of the types of research being undertaken in the field of urban history by doctoral students in Great Britain and North America. The survey employs a wide interpretation of ‘urban history’ which includes both the history of, and history in, urban areas. Providing brief summaries of a selection of abstracts published in the Aslib Index to Theses (covering Britain and Ireland) and Dissertations Abstracts International (for North America) of theses completed in 1999 and 2000, it attempts to highlight the novel directions in which current research is being taken. As noted last year, access to thesis abstracts has been greatly improved by the development of on-line services, including the electronic version of Index to Theses available at http://www.theses.com and Dissertations Abstracts International which can be accessed through Proquest at http://wwwlib.umi.com/dissertations. The thirty-four dissertations, drawn fairly evenly from candidates in British and North American institutions, cover a broad range of topics, with the time-span ranging from the early medieval world to the post-Second World War era, though it is worth noting the absence of studies addressing ancient history in this survey. As has been the trend in recent years, the bulk of the dissertations on both sides of the Atlantic focus on the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century, with particular concentrations around the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, though there is an enduring interest in the early modern period in England.