In the Middle Ages, Islamic Iberia was home to one of the largest urban networks in Europe, while Sicily saw the exponential growth of cities like Palermo and Syracuse after the Arab conquest in the ninth century. Islamic cities in Iberia and Sicily were not only landmarks of an unprecedented and early economic expansion, they also bear witness to a number of institutional characteristics and forms of urban planning that need to be considered by new and more inclusive historical approaches. In the tenth century, Umayyad Córdoba was by far the most populated city in western Europe, while the Fāṭimid rulers of Sicily embarked on a conscious policy of urbanising the island. During the Naṣrid period (1238-1492), Granada was booming. In many Castilian cities, such as Burgos, Avila, Segovia and Valladolid, flourishing Muslim communities were established during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

This chapter tests the claims made by proponents of replacement and superdiversity in Europe in the last 170 years. During this period, not only migrations changed, but also the opportunity structure of cities, which find themselves tossed between the nation state ideal of cultural homogeneity and globalisation. Three approaches are applied: 1) comparative (both in time and space); 2) a distinction between central place and network cities; and 3) a much broader (cross-cultural) definition of ‘migration’, including internal, return and circular moves. An overview of the major shifts in migration and mobility patterns to and from European cities leads to a reconsideration of the idea of mobility transition. Although the composition of urban populations changed drastically, cities have managed to adapt to this transition. Migrations and mobilities created a fertile soil for changes and innovations that produced new forms of liveability and resilience. There are also dark sides, including segregation and discrimination, underclass formation, criminality and gentrification that pushes out less wealthy citizens. The ‘superdiversity’ frame should be handled with care, as it tends to underestimate the homogenising force of integration through urban institutions. Accordingly, what social scientists termed the high ‘liquid’ mobility had characterised cities since the Middle Ages.

Chapter 5 excavates the debates leftist and socialist thinkers in Ghana had about the brand of socialism they were building and its relationship to religion, morality, Black freedom, and precolonial African history. The chapter argues that debates surrounding how to define and historicize socialism in the African context were not simply intellectual exercises and disputes over labeling rights but central to reclaiming Africans and African history within global history. It was a deliberate critique of white supremacist paradigms that situated ideas, histories, and societies emanating from Africa as operating outside the continuum and space of human history. By rethinking and (re)historicizing histories of exploitation and violence in Africa, socialists in Ghana were simultaneously decolonizing and rescuing socialism from itself. The chapter demonstrates that socialism then was more than a fashionable lexicon or moniker to curry favor with certain geopolitical groups. Instead, it also offered a tangible way, a theoretical analytic, for Africans to revisit, debate, and offer a critical appraisal of African historiography and societies and Africa’s place in world history. Not only were the socialist theorists in Ghana domesticating socialism, they were remaking it globally. They were Marxist-Socialist worldmakers.

This chapter explores the dynamic interplay between the United States and Russia during the American Civil War and its aftermath, highlighting how mutual reforms and geopolitical interests shaped their relationship. As Russia aligned with the Union, both nations undertook significant transformations: the emancipation of serfs in Russia (1861) and the abolition of slavery in the United States (1865). These parallel reforms fostered camaraderie, leading to diplomatic engagement, including the sale of Alaska in 1867, personal travels, and cultural exchanges, such as Grand Duke Alexis’ visit and Russian participation in the 1876 Centennial Exhibition. Key figures in both countries nurtured these ties, while military cooperation during the Russo-Turkish War further solidified their friendship. However, emerging contradictions in perceptions, particularly regarding race and social justice, highlighted the complexities of their relationship. By reconciling narratives of self-interest and solidarity, this chapter elucidates how state interests and identity discourses influenced interpretations of Russian and American actions, shaping their evolving bilateral relations.

Planning as a discipline developed in response to some of the challenges that occurred following the Industrial Revolution: health, hygiene or housing. A key field of intervention for the new discipline was infrastructure development for transport and communication in line with evolving technologies. Globalisation and the exchange of commodities around the world led to ever more extensive projects. The shared needs of infrastructural planning went hand in hand with the sharing of ideas and concepts of planning and their exchange around the world. This article explores four examples of European planning and their key actors in four distinct periods through the lens of the global infrastructural turn: the age of rail (1850s to 1910s), the age of motorisation (1910s to 1950s), the age of flight (1950s to 1980s), and the age of increasing digital communication (1980s to 2000s). Understanding the embedded role of infrastructure in planning practice can help promote a system approach much needed to address contemporary challenges in the design of urban spaces.

The first papal attempt to launch a crusade was well before the eleventh century papal revolution.

The introduction explains how the Eastern Amazon was shaped in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; this means appreciating the diverse spaces and peoples of the Amazon and how they define one another. The introduction shows how this approach re-centres the Amazon as part of a continental space and elucidates its role in continental history by analysing the historical agency of the people who inhabited the region. Sections make the theoretical and methodological justification for analytically joining up the spaces and territories that are historically considered separate. It discusses the use of a spatial history approach, and how this perspective contributes to a new understanding of the Amazon, and presents a revisionist and historically anthropological framing of the argument along definitions of keywords used in the book.

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.

The 1059 ‘Reform’ programme failed to understand society but succeeded in changing it.

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.

Grounded by close attention to literary renderings of Algeria’s national epic, this chapter examines the historical entanglement of novelistic and nationalist projects in the wake of the decolonizing movements that founded independent nation-states across the African continent in the mid twentieth century. It begins by reconsidering Frantz Fanon’s diagnostic phenomenology of postcolonial nationalisms across and beyond the continent, articulated in two essays concerning national consciousness in The Wretched of the Earth (1961), alongside the novelistic experimentation of Kateb Yacine. To further explore some implications of Fanon’s claim that revolution is above all an aesthetic project, the chapter unfolds by surveying texts by Assia Djebar, Yamina Mechakra, Abdelwahab Meddeb, and Mahmoudan Hawad to elucidate the ways in which African writers have theorized, anticipated, eluded, and unsettled both nationalist narrative imperatives and Eurocentric interpretive protocols concerning this paradigmatic literary form of modernity.

In the summer of 1943, instead of a far-reaching offensive on the Eastern Front, the Germans planned only a limited attack at Kursk, which was nevertheless intended to decisively weaken the Red Army. Hitler then wanted to move the most powerful units to the west in order to repel the expected Allied invasion. However, the Soviets turned the front salient around the city of Kursk into a fortress and amassed huge reserves there. After repulsing the German attack, these were to launch an offensive of their own and advance to the borders of the German Reich in 1943. When the German attack began on 5 July 1943, it did not lead to a short and victorious annihilating strike, as Hitler had hoped, but instead initiated the largest battle of the Second World War. It lasted 50 days, led to the clash of around 3.5 million soldiers, 13,000 tanks and self-propelled guns, as well as 8,000 aircraft, and ended with a decisive Soviet victory. Although the Red Army was unable to achieve its strategic objectives in 1943 due to its huge losses, the Wehrmacht was so weakened after the Battle of Kursk that it never regained the initiative on the Eastern Front.

Premised on the assumption that Afropolitan immobilities are as central to Afropolitanism as the forms of liquid flows and circulations that scholarship on Afropolitanism tends to focalize, this chapter uses modes of spatial and digital immobility in the production of Afropolitan subjectivities to read mainly anglophone Afropolitan literatures. Drawing on Taiye Selasi’s Ghana Must Go, with occasional references to Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah and Teju Cole’s Open City, the essay lingers on how the mobilities of Afropolitan cultural productions are intimately connected to symbolic and concrete geographies of stasis and technologies of nonmovement. Although Afropolitanism is often discussed as exhibiting affinities with the earlier Pan-Africanism, its ontological poetics similarly connects to digital cosmopolitanism, the condition of digital connectivity that centers the multiple roots and routes of global subjects whose cosmopolitanism is often entangled with forms of immobility and the quotidian use of digital social networks.