Volume I offers a broad perspective on urban culture in the ancient European world. It begins with chronological overviews which paint in broad brushstrokes a picture that serves as a frame for the thematic chapters in the rest of the volume. Positioning ancient Europe within its wider context, it touches on Asia and Africa as regions that informed and were later influenced by urban development in Europe, with particular emphasis on the Mediterranean basin. Topics range from formal characteristics (including public space), water provision, waste disposal, urban maintenance, spaces for the dead, and border spaces; to ways of thinking about, visualising, and remembering cities in antiquity; to conflict within and between cities, economics, mobility and globalisation, intersectional urban experiences, slavery, political participation, and religion.

Urban historians have become increasingly attentive to the various flows of peoples, resources and ideas that connected and at times disconnected urban spaces worldwide. This chapter on the history of urban revolutions, rebellions and riots draws on these debates. It aims to make sense of the way in which local occurrences of violence and discontent turned into events of national or transnational significance in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe. As globally entangled sites of capitalist accumulation, knowledge production and migration, European cities played a pre-eminent role in the diffusion of protests and the emergence of new forms of insurgent citizenship. In order to explore this role, the chapter highlights four ‘transnational circuits’ that impacted on urban repertoires of contention: 1) activist networks, 2) mass media, 3) the circulation of expert knowledge, and 4) (post-)colonial migration. Attending to the way that different political conflicts were or were not embedded in such transnational circuits, it points to similarities and simultaneities, as well as differences and disconnections between urban agencies in Europe and beyond.

This chapter presents eleven buildings that are connected to important aspects of urban life between 1850 and the present, a period that is characterised by enormous energy wealth based on fossil fuels. These include icons of urban culture, such as the Crystal Palace in London, the Paris Opera House and the Bilbao Guggenheim as well as structures for housing, transport and industrial production, including a Glasgow tenement, a Moscow panel block, London’s St Pancras railway station and the Turbine Factory in Berlin. The chapter will discuss the impact of these buildings: as models for architectural design; as catalysers for urban plans and the politics behind them; and as symbols for radically different forms of modern urban life during nineteenth-century industrialisation, mid-twentieth-century modernisation, and late twentieth-century urban regeneration.

Food has been central to many critical public health issues in European cities. Although the steady increase in the quantity and variety of food in the late nineteenth century had a positive impact on urban health, many old food-related health concerns persisted and new ones emerged. Market forces alone seemed unable to bring about the necessary changes, and therefore cities were gradually vested with new powers to ensure that enough nutritious and safe food would be available. This chapter looks at the emergence and development of municipal infrastructure for urban food security, as well as its subsequent partial dismantling. It first focuses on municipal actions to inspect and monitor the quality and safety of food sold in cities. Then it explores the changing role of municipalities in the retail and processing of foodstuffs by looking at municipal market halls and slaughterhouses. A key theme pervading the whole chapter is the movement of reform ideas across Europe and the ways in which these transnational ideas intersected with national and local politics.

Volume I offers a broad perspective on urban culture in the ancient European world. It begins with chronological overviews which paint in broad brushstrokes a picture that serves as a frame for the thematic chapters in the rest of the volume. Positioning ancient Europe within its wider context, it touches on Asia and Africa as regions that informed and were later influenced by urban development in Europe, with particular emphasis on the Mediterranean basin. Topics range from formal characteristics (including public space), water provision, waste disposal, urban maintenance, spaces for the dead, and border spaces; to ways of thinking about, visualising, and remembering cities in antiquity; to conflict within and between cities, economics, mobility and globalisation, intersectional urban experiences, slavery, political participation, and religion.

Volume I offers a broad perspective on urban culture in the ancient European world. It begins with chronological overviews which paint in broad brushstrokes a picture that serves as a frame for the thematic chapters in the rest of the volume. Positioning ancient Europe within its wider context, it touches on Asia and Africa as regions that informed and were later influenced by urban development in Europe, with particular emphasis on the Mediterranean basin. Topics range from formal characteristics (including public space), water provision, waste disposal, urban maintenance, spaces for the dead, and border spaces; to ways of thinking about, visualising, and remembering cities in antiquity; to conflict within and between cities, economics, mobility and globalisation, intersectional urban experiences, slavery, political participation, and religion.

Volume II charts European urbanism between 700 and 1850, the millennium during which Europe became the world’s most urbanised region. Featuring thirty-six chapters from leading scholars working on all the major linguistic areas of Europe, the volume offers a state-of-the-art survey that explores and explains this transformation, how similar or different such processes were across Europe, and how far it is possible to discern traits that characterise European urbanism in this period. The first half of the volume offers overviews on the urban history of Mediterranean Europe, Atlantic and North Sea Europe, Central and Eastern Europe, and European urbanisms around the world. The second half explores major themes, from the conceptualisation of cities and their material fabric to continuities and changes in the social, political, economic, religious and cultural histories of cities and towns.

This chapter explores why African queer fiction and theory is decontextualized and discussed as if it is devoid of a history and proposes a historicization and decolonization of its creativity, criticism, and theory. It foregrounds three questions: What is the theoretical texture of African queer theory and how does it appear in continental discursive practices? Who are the leading writers and critics of African queer fiction, and what are the recurrent leitmotifs in their fiction? How have the representations and/or criticism of African queer fiction evolved over the last sixty years? The answers to the foregoing questions affirm the evolution of depictions of African nonnormative sexualities in African literature from queer denialism to sexual rights activism that contests a singular African heterosexuality. The chapter concludes that African queer experiences in fiction and film have progressed from being deployed as metaphors of pathology, Western corruption, and imperial hypocrisy to humanized “coming-out” narratives in continental sexuality debates.

Volume I offers a broad perspective on urban culture in the ancient European world. It begins with chronological overviews which paint in broad brushstrokes a picture that serves as a frame for the thematic chapters in the rest of the volume. Positioning ancient Europe within its wider context, it touches on Asia and Africa as regions that informed and were later influenced by urban development in Europe, with particular emphasis on the Mediterranean basin. Topics range from formal characteristics (including public space), water provision, waste disposal, urban maintenance, spaces for the dead, and border spaces; to ways of thinking about, visualising, and remembering cities in antiquity; to conflict within and between cities, economics, mobility and globalisation, intersectional urban experiences, slavery, political participation, and religion.

This chapter examines the evolution of US–Russia relations from 1901 to the crisis in 1903–1905, when Russia and the United States found themselves in geopolitical conflict in the Far East, the “tariff war” fueled tensions in economic interaction, ideology came to impact official Russia–US relations, and large numbers of Americans mobilized in an anti-Russian campaign following a brutal pogrom (riot) in 1903 in Kishinev. This event, as well as the American “crusade” for a free Russia that peaked during the Russian revolution of 1905–1907, stoked the existing geopolitical and ideological crisis. The chapter demonstrates that the explanation for both the Russian Empire’s and the United States’ ambitions in the Far East can be found in the interaction of their foreign and domestic policies and explores the new frame of mutual perceptions established under conditions of conflict and visualized in political cartoons. During the first crisis both countries’ earlier multiplicities of images of the Other came to be replaced by dichotomous visions of processes across the Atlantic and the desire to use the image of the Other as a “dark twin” for their own political purposes.

Volume I offers a broad perspective on urban culture in the ancient European world. It begins with chronological overviews which paint in broad brushstrokes a picture that serves as a frame for the thematic chapters in the rest of the volume. Positioning ancient Europe within its wider context, it touches on Asia and Africa as regions that informed and were later influenced by urban development in Europe, with particular emphasis on the Mediterranean basin. Topics range from formal characteristics (including public space), water provision, waste disposal, urban maintenance, spaces for the dead, and border spaces; to ways of thinking about, visualising, and remembering cities in antiquity; to conflict within and between cities, economics, mobility and globalisation, intersectional urban experiences, slavery, political participation, and religion.