Volume III uncovers the radical transformations of European cities from 1850 to the twenty-first century. The volume explores how modern developments in urban environments, socio-cultural dynamics, the relation between work and leisure, and governance have transformed urban life. It highlights these complex processes across different regions, showcasing the latest scholarship and current challenges in the field. The first half provides an overview on the urban development of European regions in the West, North, Centre, East-Southeast and South, and the interconnectedness of European urbanism with the Americas and Africa. The second half explores major themes in European urban history, from the conceptualisation of cities, their built fabric and environment, to the continuities, rhythms and changes in their social, political, economic and cultural histories. Using transborder, transregional and transdisciplinary approaches to discern traits that characterise modern and contemporary European urbanism, the volume invites readers to reconsider major paradigms of European urban history.

This chapter traces the development of modern urban history scholarship across the twentieth century, its roots being found in several interdisciplinary fields interested in the shape and growth of urban areas and the changing experience of urban life over time. Urban history’s institutionalisation and internationalisation is then examined, which started in the 1960s and 1970s before gathering momentum in the following decades with the spread of teaching and exchange programmes at European level and the end of the Cold War. At its core, the objective of these programmes and initiatives was to map the history of urbanisation and the growth of towns and cities using a comparative methodology, both within nation states and, increasingly, using a transnational approach to compare across borders. Finally, the chapter considers several recent ‘turns’ within modern and contemporary urban history since the 1990s – cultural, spatial and environmental to name a few – to illustrate emerging and emergent themes prevalent across the subfield. Yet, notwithstanding the fact that these ‘turns’ reflect the changeable nature of wider historical scholarship, urban historians remain fundamentally interested in the people, places and processes that constitute our frame of reference.

One of the most honoured figures in the state of Tamil Nadu, arguably home to the highest number of temples in India, is an atheist who profaned the gods. E. V. Ramasamy (1879–1973), popularly called ‘Periyar’ (the Great One), was a rationalist and radical social reformer. A household name in the region and the central figure of the Dravidian movement, he is best known for his polemics against religion, fervent propagation of atheism, support for proportional representation for backward and scheduled castes, and demand for political autonomy for south Indian states. His opposition to the caste system and the oppression of women are exemplified in his writings and speeches spanning over five decades. One of the first things that Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) leader M. K. Stalin did on assuming office as chief minister of Tamil Nadu in 2021 was to declare Periyar's birth anniversary (17 September) as ‘Social Justice Day’—underscoring his reputation as a crusader for social justice.

In 2018, statues of Periyar were vandalized across Tamil Nadu, reportedly by Hindu right-wing activists. His statues outside temples, bearing the inscription ‘There is no god, there is no god, there is no god at all. He who invented god is a fool. He who propagates god is a scoundrel. He who worships god is a barbarian’ have been an eyesore for the Hindu right, and its leaders have been promising to have them removed.

The early development of the indulgence system reinforced the papacy’s hierarchical position without significantly bringing it money or power over others.

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.

Infrastructure planning and engineering more specifically are often considered as external influences that either independently or unintentionally influence the process of urbanisation. This chapter advances an alternative perspective on relations between infrastructure planning and urbanisation. Instead of interpreting technological systems as objective, monolithic, standardised engineered structures hovering above the urban landscape, it follows the interdependencies between infrastructure planning and urbanisation. Infrastructure is approached as a spatial planning instrument intentionally steering spatial development to accommodate socio-economic and political agendas. In doing so, infrastructure is considered as a driving force of urbanisation and it is posited that a history of infrastructure planning sheds light on fundamental socio-spatial developments in urban history.

First, the turn to infrastructure in Urban History and Urban Studies is discussed, proposing infrastructure planning as a key entry into understanding nineteenth- and twentieth-century urbanisation processes. In the second part, the history of urbanisation in Europe is portrayed through an infrastructural lens and there is a discussion of urban development in relation to network planning, its expansions and implosions. The chapter concludes with a reflection on the promise of infrastructure networks for research and how the liaison of Urban History with other fields, and Urban Studies more specifically, could open up novel research paths.

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.

Starting with a genealogical survey, the chapter charts how semantics shape epistemologies and explores how positionality, imagery, and the politics of referencing determine the meanings associated with certain concepts. Based on a deep reading of Murakami’s source compilations and translations, the chapter demonstrates how he forged an image of early modern gaikō by emphasizing specific events and actors and by singling out diplomatic documents. It traces how Murakami Naojirō, as the protagonist of the book, played an essential role in shaping the notion of narratives about Japan’s engagement with the outside world during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Through concrete terminological examples it also engages with the misconceptions and silences created through translational processes.

This chapter examines the complex evolution of US–Russian relations during the mid-19th century, highlighting a unique period marked by diplomatic engagement and technological collaboration. In the years preceding the American Civil War, both nations experienced mutual support, particularly as Russia backed the Union during the Civil War. While the popular “common foe” narrative attributes this friendship primarily to shared opposition to Great Britain, a more nuanced perspective reveals the significance of diplomatic interactions and technological exchanges in shaping their partnership. Key figures such as Alexander Bodisco and Thomas H. Seymour fostered goodwill, while Russia’s efforts to modernize its military infrastructure through American expertise solidified practical cooperation. The chapter further explores how territorial expansion in the United States aligned with Russia’s ambitions, and how debates over slavery and serfdom prompted comparative reflections on governance. Despite ideological differences, practical needs and mutual interests facilitated rapprochement, culminating in strengthened ties during the Civil War and setting the stage for future interactions.

The boundaries between humans and animals have been redrawn in modern Europe. This is especially true for the development of human–animal relations in cities since the onset of urbanisation around the middle of the nineteenth century. Although cities in the wide spectrum of European urban spaces differed significantly with respect to animal inhabitants and to the formation of so-called co-habitations of humans and animals, nevertheless the changes in human–animal relations took place under common overarching tendencies, which this contribution will pursue from the perspective of an Animate History. The central elements of a new order of human–animal relations developed not in the countryside, but in cities. Cities have always been multispecies spaces, both historically and in the present. The working assumption for this chapter is that the interaction of people, animals and the built environment creates new living worlds.

Lay patronage of churches was consistent with the principles of the eleventh- and twelfth-century ‘reform’ movements.

The ten years between Joseph Stalin’s death and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy brought both dangerous crises and fitful steps toward an easing of superpower tensions. While this chapter describes the confrontations in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Berlin, Cuba, and elsewhere, it also emphasizes four breakthroughs toward coexistence and cooperation: the Geneva summit of 1955; the agreement on cultural exchanges in 1958; Nikita Khrushchev’s tour of the United States in 1959; and the conclusion of a partial test ban treaty in 1963. Such progress was delayed and complicated both by domestic political dynamics and by international rivalries in an era of accelerating decolonization and the fraying of the Sino-Soviet alliance. Yet perhaps most remarkable was how far top political leaders, journalists, scientists, musicians, dancers, and others were able to go to transcend ideological tensions and negative stereotypes through dialogue, negotiation, travel, and cultural exchange.

In Chapter 6, I examine George Schuyler’s 1928 serial “Chocolate Baby: A Story of Ambition, Deception, and Success,” which first appeared in the popular white-owned Black newspaper supplement the Illustrated Feature Section. In “Chocolate Baby,” Schuyler crafts his protagonist Martha Hastings as a sexually assertive version of the New Negro Woman modeled after increasingly popular light-skinned chorus girls. Schuyler, who had married a prominent white woman, depicts his New Negro male protagonist invoking the Mann Act against Martha’s “handsome and crafty” seducer, Gordon Johnson. Also known as the White-Slave Traffic Act of 1910, the Mann Act banned the interstate transportation of women “for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose.” Rather than protecting all women regardless of skin color, the Act had been deployed to police consensual relationships between Black men and white women – most famously in the prosecution of boxer Jack Johnson. In a startling reversal of his cautionary tale, Schuyler turns from his warning about the sexual vulnerability and commodification of Black women whose passions hold sway, to arguably the most politically charged issue in the history of race relations, his endorsement of decriminalizing sexual unions between Black men and white women.

Papal canon law from Late Antiquity was interpreted for a Carolingian ruler by a papal letter presenting an ideology of lay elites uncontaminated by ideas of sacral kingship.

This chapter offers a global urban historian’s reflection on the story, typically designed to shock, that marginalised often high-rise urban residential neighbourhoods in contemporary Western Europe that have become American-style ‘ghettos’. This ‘ghost story’ is contextualised by noting that the shock word ‘ghetto’ has haunted the history of ‘global urban Europe’ for centuries, notably in European imperialist practices of segregated racial space-making on all continents. Since 1945, practices of marginalised urban space-making in Europe and the United States, though differing in important respects, all responded to larger, world-encompassing stimuli that both societies themselves helped set in motion; the story of the European ghetto emerged from parallels and divergences that ensued. In the process, ‘ghetto’ became a multivalent political word that at once ignited racist forces, prompted states to reform their social democratic housing policies in ambiguous ways under the slogan ‘anti-ghetto’ and, most hopefully, became a unifying refrain for resistance politics in neighbourhoods deemed ‘ghettos’ themselves.