Celebrating 1000 Elements: Elements in Global Urban History

Cambridge Elements in Global Urban History reinterprets the history of the world’s cities by combining the approaches of urban and global history. Authored by established and emerging scholars whose work represents the most exciting new directions in urban history, each Element is grounded in empirical research on particular cities, but uses global, comparative, and/or transnational approaches to emphasize interconnections of people, places, ideas, and events.

The series is roughly organized into three conceptual strands. Approaches Elements provide insight into the latest theoretical and methodological developments in the field. Topics Elements address topical areas of common interest to historians who work on disparate time periods and/or regions. Conduits Elements reflect on how particular geographies during a specific period of time contributed to the shared histories of cities.

When we enthusiastically announced Cambridge Elements in Global Urban History on the Global Urban History blog in June 2019 and began commissioning volumes in the series for publication in 2020, we – like the rest of the world – did not anticipate the coming global pandemic and were unprepared for the impact it would have on academic publishing. Authors from whom we had commissioned volumes found themselves facing new teaching challenges, unexpectedly homeschooling their children and, in a few instances, changing institutions. Recruiting new authors became more difficult for all the same reasons. These pressures have begun to ease and we have resumed commissioning new Elements. We consider ourselves fortunate to work with an exceptional group of scholars who are committed to developing global urban history as a field and who see the innovative Elements series as an important way to do so. Elements’ concise length, modest price point, and quick turnaround time from submission to publication, together with a flexible format that allows authors to include more maps, photos, and interactive features than do traditional publishing platforms, makes the series an attractive venue for scholars committed to disseminating their research as widely and as accessibly as possible.

Since 2021, we have published five Elements in Global Urban History, and five more are slated to appear this year. Of the initial five Elements in the series, one falls into the Approaches strand, three into the Topics strand, and one into the Conduits strand.

Richard Harris’s How Cities Matter, the Element that launched the series, urges historians to engage more fully with urban theory in creating a synthetic understanding of global urban history. Alexia Yates’ Real Estate and Global Urban History situates modern cities as propertied spaces existing at the nexus of national and international legal, political, and economic networks. Lila Caimari’s Cities and News examines urban imaginaries during the expansion of international news at the turn of the twentieth century. Kristin Stapleton’s The Modern City in Asia explores how urban modernity was received, transformed, and contested in Asia over the past 150 years. Antonio Carbone’s timely Epidemic Cities, our most recent Element, explores how 19th and 20th century epidemics affected cities and exposed the unevenness engendered by global interconnections.

Several of our authors will be participating in a roundtable discussion of the series, their work, and its impact at the World History Association conference in June 2023, and we invite you to join us for the conversation!

Leave a reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *