We begin with the origin of the city/countryside dialectic and review the historical literature on the nature of the city. We then introduce the contradictions between urban and rural, acknowledging the important concept of the metabolic rift, followed by Lefebvre’s conceptualization of the “right to the city.” Finally, the analytical framing of popular rural social movements is discussed in the rural/urban contradictory framing.

The introduction presents Rogers as a figure straddling major divides in American history. He was a Cherokee Indian seeking suceess in a WASP society, and a cowboy from the rural republic of the nineteenth century who becomes a wildly popular humorist, writer, and movie star in the urban society of the twentieth century. In particular, it frames him as a historical figure reflecting four important shifts in this era: the end of the frontier, the development of a consumer culture of abundance and personality, the emergence of modern celebrity, and the sharpening of a populist ethos in culture and politics. Finally, it frames Rogers as a historical mediator who helped Americans ease their way from one historical era to another.

This chapter addresses the myth that rural America is a relic of history and that rural contributions to society are no longer as critical as they once were. This chapter argues that rural America is the current and future site of essential national amenities and services. These underappreciated rural amenities include agricultural land and clean energy production, as well as rural regions’ status as the national safety net for a society that will need to migrate inland from the coasts where much of the population is concentrated today. The chapter makes the case that agricultural land, clean energy production, and rural infrastructure should be treated as commons resources, stewarded for our society’s collective benefit. Reconceptualizing rural America as a commons helps provide broad normative guidance for the challenging governance task of reconciling local entitlement to rural resources alongside regional and national entitlement to them. The chapter proposes five principles that would help better govern rural America as a more resilient commons, including recognizing more rural work as work in the public interest, building capacity to avoid boom–bust cycles, democratizing rural resources, pursuing racial justice as central to resilience, and recognizing that investing in rural infrastructure benefits society as a whole.

The Conclusion first summarizes the study’s findings. It then presents the study’s policy implications that might help inform local actors’ decisions on interventions related to police–citizen cooperation in communities with criminal groups. Additional research questions are also proposed. In particular, how the study’s findings might relate to contexts experiencing political violence such as civil war or insurgency remains an avenue for future research. The final section highlights that populations are projected to grow fastest in countries with strong criminal groups and weak state institutions for fighting those groups. This trend increases the urgency to understand vacuums of justice and how they might be filled.

In the Afro-Atlantic city of Lagos, Africans birthed sexualities in slavery and colonialism. Sex undergirded the politics of emancipation, imperial subjecthood, urbanization, and social differentiation. Africans navigated sexual politics as an afterlife of slavery, living a spectrum of gendered unfreedoms ranging from the persistence of slavery to reinventions of Atlantic slavery’s hierarchies under the guise of abolition. Where old slaving and neo-imperial African and European elites exploited African bodies for labour, sex, and power, discourses about the potency and danger of sexed bodies, including slaves, redeemed and adopted children, ‘wives’, soldiers, ‘prostitutes’, ‘delinquent youth’, domesticated and politically marginalized women, and ‘sexually perverse’ subjects, constituted the polysemic production of sexualities. Sexual politics drove British imperial compromises over abolition as well as colonialist conceptions of male bodies capable of wage labour, sports, and political leadership, as distinct from female bodies best suited for social and biological reproduction. Local resistance entailed age- and gender-distinctive conceptions of bodily autonomy to repudiate elite theft of bodily potency and escape the surveillance state. In Lagos the state policed Black youth mobility, criminalized ‘carnal knowledge against the order of nature’, and used military violence to restrain nonconformist sexuality because it asserted power through sex governance.

Urban and rural Chinese followed two different paths to improve their standards of living. Privileged by their household registration status, urban residents were able to enjoy windfalls from rising property prices that were largely unavailable to rural migrants. They also benefited from cheap services provided by rural migrants and government policies discriminating against rural migrants. Rural migrants were discriminated against because of their social status and relied on their own labor made cheap by the institutional arrangements.

This chapter revisits the three critical historical conditions that made China’s age of abundance possible: the Chinese population, the history of the Cultural Revolution, and the leader Deng Xiaoping. It sets China’s economic prosperity within a historical perspective and argues that such a chapter is not repeatable and cannot be sustained. The chapter lists four headwinds as China moves out of its age of abundance: unfinished urbanization, rising incomes and wealth inequality, population aging, and the return of the state’s omnipresent control.

This chapter concentrates on the two critical phases of China’s economic boom, both based on initiatives from the grassroots of society. The first phase was the rural labor force moving into non-farming jobs, with the rise of rural industries (township and village enterprises), and the second was rural-to-urban migration, with rural migrants working on manufacturing production lines and in construction in cities. It demonstrates that China’s economic boom was largely a bottom-up process, led by initiatives of the population, in particular the rural population, who made up to 80 percent of the total population at the start of this process.

This chapter analyses the demographic dynamics in Iberia between 1500 and 1800, in a regional and European perspective, comparing the pattern of population growth, demographic distribution, urbanization and socio-professional composition of the population of the Iberian Peninsula with that of the rest of Europe in the same period. The first section reconstructs the trajectory of the total population for both Iberian countries in order to set the national trends, and to compare these trends of growth with other European countries. It also focus on population distribution across regions and highlight regional differences. Attention is paid to the prevailing “demographic system in both Iberian kingdoms, and to the available data on emigration especially towards the colonial areas. The second section offers an overview of Iberian urbanization between 1500 and 1800. The analysis of the urban dynamic takes into account not only the percentage of the total population living in urban areas (the urbanization rate), but also the morphology of the urban structure. Finally, the third section shows an overall picture of the socio-professional composition of the population in both countries.

This chapter presents the evolution of the main demographic variables: population growth and its sources, occupational structure, territorial distribution, and educational levels. Each of these four variables are taken separately to provide a long-run, quantitative description and an analysis based on bibliography. The overall image resulting from overlaps and interactions between the variables suggests three distinct “structural periods”. The first period, which covers most of the nineteenth century, featured remarkably stable structures. In contrast, the second period, from around 1890 to 1980, was an era of major transformations, such as the demographic transition, de-agrarianization, urbanization and mass literacy. After 1980 a third period is found in which demographic change has shifted to a different path involving low population growth, tertiarization, new trends in population geography, and longer schooling periods. The new challenges associated with this last period call for active public policies.

Chapter 3 provides a critical reconstitution of pre-revolutionary military performance environments. First is a description of the development and operations of the Théâtre de la Marine in Brest, the only public theater that was built and financed by France’s war administration and where Joseph Patrat’s manipulated version of Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s Le Déserteur made its metropolitan French debut. The chapter’s second part focuses on the Comédie (Theater) in Cap-Français (now Cap-Haïtien), the largest and most frequented theater in the colonial Caribbean. In addition to describing the military, racial, and gendered features of theatrical life in Saint-Domingue, this chapter connects Cap-Français’ Comédie, which was built in 1764 and which catered in part to the city’s large soldier population, to a network of military-infused theaters in French provincial cities such as Metz, Besançon, Lille, Perpignan, and Brest.

During the Tokugawa period, commoners developed increasingly sophisticated methods of challenging what they perceived as unjust government policies or unethical behavior by the wealthy. Popular movements coalesced around petitions that stated grievances. They typically took the form of mass demonstrations that required preparation, organization, and leadership. Even urban food riots had a logic to them. In many cases, they erupted after women had called on merchants to feed the poor, and they followed a code for conduct that cautioned against stealing. In the early nineteenth century, farmers created village leagues that employed representatives to manage issues with regional implications and make their case for commercial policies. In some instances, they argued that all human beings are equal, an argument made unsuccessfully by outcaste villagers. Villagers commemorated popular movements in chronicles and tales, mixing fact and fiction in the interests of a good story, and they remembered their fallen leaders in memorial services.

Recent work on execution emphasizes broad similarities in the character and causes of changing practices across the western world, as well as the strength of resistance to reform in England before the 1830s. In fact, five features gave rise to a distinctive path of change in England following the Restoration of 1660. First, the variable scale of enforcement from one place to another contained the potential excesses of England’s “Bloody Code.” They were additionally contained, secondly, by the “early” advent of constitutional monarchy, which made parliament – and new urban elites – partners in making and enforcing the laws. England’s “urbane” peoples derived particular strength, thirdly and fourthly, from the unique extent of urbanization in England and the vigorous public sphere to which it gave rise. Finally, the experience of London, by 1750 the largest European city, compelled changing practices which gave those people ascendancy in public political culture by the 1830s.