Eighteenth-century England was not merely ‘polite and commercial’; it was also notoriously competitive. This article argues that competition and contrast were not confined to weighing up the comparative status and achievements of individuals but were also fundamental to the development of civic consciousness and identity. Contemporaries developed a wide, comparative frame of reference which encouraged a heightened sense of competition with rival urban centres. However, this process also encouraged elements within urban society to define themselves in opposition to rival ‘communities’ within their own walls.

In European towns of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the sounds people heard were very different from those of today. Yet the difference goes much deeper: whereas today we try to escape city noise, for the inhabitants of early modern towns sound served as a crucial source of information. It formed a semiotic system, conveying news, helping people to locate themselves in time and in space, and making them part of an ‘auditory community’. Sound helped to construct identity and to structure relationships. The evolution of this information system reflects changes in social and political organization and in attitudes towards time and urban space.

This article argues that cultural capital in the Victorian town contributed to spatial as well as social differentiation, helping to bolster the power of civic elites and the image and identity of the town. Evidence drawn from north Staffordshire Pottery towns demonstrates how the value of cultural capital reflected the scale, timing and geography of investment, and its ability to represent and communicate the taste and judgment of the civic elite to those of neighbouring towns. In the hothouse of local rivalry that led up to the creation of the borough of Stoke-on-Trent, investment in cultural capital took on extra significance as each town strove for political ascendancy in the nascent conurbation.

This paper explores how the system of meat supply influenced the topographical development of two marginal districts of sixteenth-century Istanbul. Through the combination of information contained in various historical sources, the paper reconstructs the economic links between some of their ‘dependent’ establishments such as slaughterhouses, tanning workshops, candle- and soapmakers. Throughout, it is argued that decisions about the location of these establishments were closely related to social, economic and probably technological factors of the era.

By 1974, northern England had become one of Europe's most urbanized areas, though it had very few towns in 1500. However, the dense population of the industrial regions lived in towns which were unusually crowded together and which had not developed conventional hierarchical structures. No dominant northern metropolis ever emerged, and this unusual urban system displayed intense rivalry at all levels. Was this coincidental, or can it help explain the region's nineteenth-century dynamism?

This article reviews an unusual and subtle form of place promotion, that contained in the series of British post-war reconstruction plans produced up to c. 1952. These were not explicitly designed as place-promotional literature, and we suggest that they should be seen as subverse promotion of towns and cities, as well as vehicles for civic boosterism. Evidence of this is discussed with respect to the production of these plans, for example in the commissioning of eminent and expensive consultants; in the texts of plans; and in the often striking and colourful imagery used.

The criticisms of the early nineteenth-century metropolitan water supply by contemporary interest groups have been largely accepted by present day historians. This article argues that these criticisms were undeserved. It is argued that the London water companies provided an adequate amount of water; charged reasonable prices, given their large capital investments; and that, although the quality of water may have been poor compared to modern standards, it was far purer than sometimes supposed.

Were England's old shire towns marginalized from the process of economic change during the period of the classical Industrial Revolution? A number of contributors to The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, Vol. II make this claim, others emphasize the continued relevance of these towns in the emerging industrial age. With few investigations undertaken into the county towns of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, detailed case study analysis is needed. Using trade directories to profile Chelmsford's business community, this article presents evidence of a dynamic and prosperous urban economy.

This article concentrates on the Kurdish quarter of Damascus and investigates the relationship between communal/ethnic identity, spatial organization and the socio-political structures of the city. It challenges the notion of quarter as an ‘ethnic cluster’ by examining historical processes of integration of the Kurdish community in the body politic of Damascus. In the colonial period the emergence of new arenas of public action for the Kurdish community are analysed with reference to the emergence of new ideas of class and community.

The creation of a colonial police force in Tanganyika after the First World War and its elaboration over the next four decades is described, as are its role in the attempted assertion of urban order and its relations with the Dar es Salaam public. The force was a central component in the colonial state's efforts to assert control over the urban arena. Lacking both resources and legitimacy it was only partially effective in this regard, with intermittent enforcement of colonial legislation being the norm. More concerted efforts to supervise the urban African population at a time of rapid urban growth in the post-Second World War period led to a deterioration in – already poor – police-public relations, which served further to undermine colonial authority.

This article discusses the relationship between company towns and peripheral cities by looking at the evolution of two Chilean towns between 1917 and the 1940s. It argues that the construction and the regulations of company towns created acute social conflicts and economic contradictions in urban settlements located in the periphery. It also analyses how the periphery both challenged the hegemonic dreams of planned communities and became a safety valve to release tensions from the camps.

The collapse of the Liberal party was arguably the most dramatic feature of British urban politics in the modern period. Many have argued that a major reason for the party's rapid decline was the defection of its suburban support to the Conservatives. By drawing on examples from Manchester, it is argued here that this process was not universal or inescapable. Liberal ideology could still have a strong appeal to the social and educational aspirations of the suburban middle class and their desire for a more genuinely meritocratic society.

Immigration adaptation and race relations in the United States began receiving a great deal of scholarly attention early in the twentieth century, primarily in response to the arrival of large numbers of newcomers from eastern and southern Europe. The pre-eminent theory has been sociologist Robert Park's (1950) ‘race relations’ cycle, which posits that immigrants and racial minorities initially clashed with natives over cultural values and norms, but over time, adapt and are eventually absorbed into the mainstream society. This four-part cycle of contact, competition, accommodation and assimilation, according to Park, is ‘progressive and irreversible’. Unlike European Americans, however, the Chinese American experience in the United States has never been a consistent trajectory toward progressive and irreversible acceptance and assimilation.

Producing and consuming studies of consumption has become a minor industry in its own right amongst the current generation of historians and it has moved significantly beyond the pioneering histories of shopping which we associate with Alison Adburgham and others. Instead, it has moved into the broader realms of cultural formation, both in wider terms of social change and in the context of regional and local identities, as well as international comparisons. So it comes as little surprise to find a batch of current studies which deal with the present complexities of scholarly approaches in distinctive but overlapping ways. In this development British historians have made significant pioneering contributions but it becomes apparent from some of the present offerings that initiatives may have moved elsewhere. That is hardly a cause for national mourning but at least some parts of the works reviewed here, written abroad, show an awareness of British developments which is too rarely reciprocated in studies originating on this side of the Channel and North Sea (or ‘German Ocean’ as more appropriate in view of the insularity which produces them). Perhaps the appalling inability to read European languages now so common amongst both under- and postgraduate students is also more widespread amongst academic historians than we have realized or are prepared to admit. It is also very likely that the situation is being exacerbated by the short termism of the Research Assessment Exercise's demands for a frequency of output which militates against the extended period necessary for sophisticated comparisons – so much of its classification of ‘international excellence’ seems more to do with single-focused rather than real international studies. Yet there is much on offer in Europe in particular which cries out for more systematic comparative analysis and some of the work reviewed here offers a good starting point.

It is now several years since José Luis Oyón presented an overview of recent trends in Spanish urban history, and this article seeks to communicate a sense of developments in the field since the mid-1990s, dealing with publications covering the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: ‘contemporary’ rather than ‘modern’ history, in Spanish terminology. The question of what constitutes ‘urban history’ in Spain remains problematic, in the absence of a ‘Dyos phenomenon’, a distinctive urban history teaching enterprise and a sustained and successful dedicated journal. Four annual issues of Historia Urbana, a ‘review of the history of ideas and of urban transformations’, appeared in the mid-1990s, but the final one dates from 1997, and most of the articles presented general theoretical perspectives or articles based on research in countries other than Spain. As Beascoechea and Novo have recently remarked, it seemed in the early 1990s that urban history (or, as they put it, ‘the history of the city’) was becoming established as a recognized discipline in Spain, but subsequent developments have failed to match the expectations that were aroused. Their themed urban history issue of Historia Contemporánea, produced in 2002, is aimed at regaining the lost momentum. Meanwhile, librarians still do not respond to ‘historia urbana’ as a category, seeking to redefine it as ‘urbanismo’, a narrower concept focused on town planning and urban design.

In France, as in the Anglo-Saxon world, social history has undergone a sea change in recent years with the growth of interest in issues of culture and representation, with the result that historians have come to ask rather different questions about cities and their social fabric. The change was not, of course, achieved overnight: since the 1930s the Annalistes have been opening up new approaches to the analysis of power and status, while in the development of micro-history Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie's Montaillou occupies an honoured place. In this the lingering influence of a Marxist model has played an important part. For decades Marxist theory provided the key which opened up issues of social power and class division, the methodology which led to a widespread study of urban structures and social dominance. And though in some hands it might be criticized for leading to an over-arching concern with the urban economy and the growth of the industrial city, the same Marxist perspective also encouraged studies of such questions as the identity of urban elites, the extent of social mobility within cities and the development of suburbs. More recently French historians have been among the most innovative in exploring the culture of urban life in a variety of different contexts, whether – and here I shall simply cite representative examples – by the study of individual professions (Christophe Charle), of dress and public appearance (Daniel Roche), or of the appropriation of urban space (Bernard Lepetit). The three books under review here all, in their different ways, contribute to our understanding of that urban culture and of the changes which it has undergone. Yannec Le Marec takes up Charle's arguments through a micro-history of the professional development of lawyers and doctors in the south Breton city of Nantes during the nineteenth century. Natacha Coquery, looking at the eighteenth century, explains the representation of social power implicit in the transfer of sumptuous Paris hôtels from private use to that of government ministries and their fast-multiplying staff. And Claude Petitfrère presents an edited collection of papers, emanating from a conference organized by the highly influential Centre d'histoire de la ville moderne et contemporaine in his own university at Tours, which illuminates across time and place the ways in which an urban patriciate was first constructed, then reproduced and represented to contemporaries. Taken together the three volumes go far to illustrate current developments in historiography and offer an overview of the present state of urban social history in France.

For as historians are compelled to grind out their specified quota of specialized articles and inaccessible monographs, which are at best read only by a handful of professional colleagues, and are at worst almost completely ignored, this makes them less and less able to fulfil that essential public function which remains their real and abiding justification: satisfying the interest and furthering the comprehension of that broader, non-professional audience memorably described by Hugh Trevor-Roper as ‘the laity’ (David Cannadine, 1999).