European urbanism in the Americas cannot be extricated from the diverse processes of conquest and colonisation that agents of Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, English and French imperial expansion executed over land, water, peoples and natural and mineral resources. European urbanisms in the New World were neither manifested uniformly across the entire continent nor a product of a social consensus among Europeans of what a city was and what it was supposed to look like. Desire and ability to direct urban settlement were also unequally distributed; best endowed with both were the Spanish monarchs. Among both Hispanics and Indians, they deployed the municipality as an ‘instrument of colonisation’. Sometimes subsuming indigenous urban centers, new towns and cities were laid out with straight streets arranged in orthogonal patterns around preferably symmetrical main squares where secular, ecclesiastical and commercial functions were housed and exercised. Urban geometry and hierarchy assisted in the systematisation of rule.

European and North American cities and city-dwellers maintained intense connections over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Often linkages reveal themselves biographically or architecturally, and occasionally through congruent developments in urban policy. Even the most hackneyed contrasts between the archetypal ‘European’ versus ‘North American’ city belie a strong set of mutual influences born of the many enduring, influential transatlantic conversations. This chapter will explore three major clusters of common concern and agitation: class, gender and race. An aestheticised approach to the imposition of order on the volatile industrial cityscape was picked up from Second Empire Paris and transposed to North American cities, above all the US capital in Washington DC, by the turn of the twentieth century. Activist urban women formed networks and borrowed strategies between the great port cities of the United States and the United Kingdom, with particular intensity from the 1880s to the 1930s. Finally, as patterns of segregation proliferated in cities across the Atlantic world in the twentieth century, Germany and the United States provide comparisons of mutual influence: rooted in discrimination at the bottom of often brutal economic systems, rationalised by Darwinian social ‘scientific’ thinkers, and reinforced by policies from the top of evolving political orders.

This chapter offers a survey of cities in Asia formed by European-based state or company rule, that is, subjected to power structures originating, more or less directly, from Europe, during the period from 1500 to 1800. Some cities that hosted European trading posts while remaining under Asian sovereignty, or cities with merchant communities only loosely attached to European-based power structures, are included tangentially. The combined surveying of Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, English, Danish and French power bases in the region runs counter to a long-established tradition of studying them within separate ‘national’ traditions. In this sense, the epithet ‘European’ stakes a claim for methodological renewal. At the same time, however, doubts persist about the pertinence of designating composite gateway conurbations as ‘European’ in the face of their profound intertwinements with Asian societies.

Capital cities comprised the most expansive, creative, fast-moving, globally powerful and politically explosive of all European urban communities cities during 1850–2000. This chapter examines the forces shaping their development including the role of the State, their growing economic and demographic primacy, and their multifaceted imperial and global connections. It argues that that not only did many individual cities have their own specific trajectories but also regional variations across Europe were equally significant. Furthermore, while capital city development owed much to the impact of the modern state, their powerful predominance in many spheres generated major opportunities to thrive and innovate, as well as facing them with difficult social, political, governmental and other challenges.

In the early 1980s, relations between the superpowers deteriorated from severely strained to acutely confrontational, and fears of nuclear war gripped people in both countries. Yet by 1989 relations improved so much that most informed observers believed the Cold War was ending. This chapter goes beyond conventional explanations of the transformation that have focused on the policies of President Ronald Reagan and General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev. It demonstrates that citizen activists also played important roles. In the early 1980s, a very popular nuclear freeze movement compelled the Reagan administration to change its harsh rhetoric and to show greater interest in negotiations with the Soviet Union. Then, large-scale exchanges of Soviet and American citizens, which both Reagan and Gorbachev came to support, challenged demonic stereotypes and humanized the supposed enemies. The chapter also describes how American and Soviet films reflected and contributed to the dramatic changes, from the nightmarish depiction of a communist invasion of the United States in Red Dawn (1984) to the dramatization of a partnership between Soviet and American police officers in Red Heat (1988).

The lands of East Central Europe experienced three major transformations: Christianisation and the formation of a new political framework in the tenth-eleventh centuries; the profound social and structural changes of the thirteenth century; and the emergence of early modern states in the seventeenth century. Each of these engendered distinct steps in urbanisation. Many steps of these developments followed similar (although usually earlier) processes in Western and North-Western Europe, but with certain limitations. The constitutional status of cities and towns in diets was more precarious. Certain forms of communal governance were lacking, such as the institutionalised participation of guilds in municipal government or the role of neighbourhoods as local units of social solidarity and self-defence. Quantitative estimates show a low-density urban network and small sizes of towns.

The German home front was a vital part of the war Nazi-Germany waged. Skilfully deploying the country’s workers, its women, and its youth organizations, the regime would come to subject most of its economy to the war effort. The Wehrmacht’s campaign into the Soviet Union would permanently alter the way Germany structured its economy. The home front benefitted tremendously from the Nazi conquest of the East, and before long hundreds of thousands of slave labourers were forcibly drafted into its factories and its agriculture. As the war went on, the regime also increasingly deployed concentration camp inmates in the war effort and also used the threat of violence or imprisonment to coerce it own population. Determined to prevent a repeat of the ‘stab in the back’ of 1918, the home front was treated with increasing suspicion, while Allied bombing raids and the introduction of ever stricter rations put further strain on Germany’s citizens. Notwithstanding, resistance was rare, and the home front remained largely intact until the very end of the war: the vast majority of Germans only laid down their tools once Allied forces arrived.

The Introduction explains the ‘theses and documents’ mode of proceeding, provides a quick overview of the period covered historiography, including recent work by political scientists, explains the economic underpinnings of the religious systems analysed, and introduces the concept of ‘deep structure’.

The topic of ‘consumption and entrepreneurship in the city’ needs an ‘intra-city’ approach, which concentrates on the changes in the urban environment and the mutual effects of city governance and business actors. The chapter thematises the past 150 years using three time periods and three cities: first presenting the main characteristics of the era and then connecting it with the history of the city and its entrepreneurship. The period before the First World War was the age of industrialisation and the spread of factory production; the relationship between city and business is presented via Budapest, a newly born national capital, and the steam-mill industry. The inter-war period was a short but economically diverse and turbulent era, which was permeated by the influence of politics. In the case of Łódź, which rapidly grew earlier thanks to its textile industry, this was the era when the effects of the industry in the city came under the control of the city government. Finally, after the Second World War came the age of consumer society, with de-industrialisation. Sheffield’s centuries-old industrial history was no longer enough security for the future, but thanks to the city administration and urban entrepreneurship, there was no question of decline.