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 critiques a non-reflexive use of the ‘post-industrial’ among urban historians. It investigates the genealogy of the term, tracing the notion back to period after the Second World War. The concept expressed a belief that the dynamo of science and industry would produce a planned society centred on wealth and leisure. In this utopian vision, the economy was to be transformed by computers and machines, while society was to change through a radical process of tertiarisation. However, during the economic crisis of the 1970s, many of these initial ideas were appropriated against a much gloomier background, retaining the idea that job losses in Western societies caused by industrial relocation could be solved by a growing demand for non-moveable human services. Moreover, investing in ICT, knowledge and creativity were to be the pillars on which future urban societies had to be built. The chapter questions how this post-industrial imaginary became the focus of political-ideological recuperation in Europe from the 1980s onwards. It questions the urban drivers and unequal outcomes of this process of urban transformation.

This chapter recounts the major events from Operation Barbarossa, the codename for the invasion of the Soviet Union beginning on 22 June 1941. It looks briefly at the German operational planning and then the invasion itself. It considers how German operations sought to implement the strategic plan to defeat the Soviet Union in a summer campaign. Much of the discussion focuses on the panzer groups in the battles of Minsk, Smolensk, Kiev, and Moscow. It looks at the problems they encountered as well as the strategic disagreements in the German High Command. Key personalities like Franz Halder, Heinz Guderian, Hermann Hoth, Fedor von Bock, as well as Adolf Hitler are discussed. The final section discusses the Soviet winter offensive, which began in December 1941, and the subsequent German retreat from Moscow.

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 argues that Soviet crimes at times of war were both widespread and complex in their origin, goals, logic, and trajectory. It distinguishes and explains several forms of Soviet criminality during its defensive war against Germany in 1941–1945: crimes against humanity and war crimes, both perpetrated by agents of the state and often in accordance with explicitly formulated state policy; troop crimes, not guided by state policy but often understood to be in its fulfilment by the perpetrators; and a variety of violent and criminal behaviour emanating from small group bonding, both within the military and outside of it. The chapter explains their origins and charts the reasons why there was so much silence about the criminality of the Soviet war effort after victory.

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.

How to foreground Africa and Africans in the processes and logics of European urbanisation and modernisation? Building on recent scholarship on (de)coloniality, the chapter explores how understanding Europe from Africa may transform dominant narratives of urban industrial modernity. The chapter discusses how racial capitalism and colonial dynamics shaped urban modernisation projects, thus seeing European ports from the perspective of the enslaved, Haussmann’s Paris from the perspective of Algiers, and Prussia’s rural planning from the settler colonial politics of Southern Africa. It further explores how the infrastructures of empire, from railways to dams and highways, shaped processes of Europeanisation and rearticulated colonial relations of power in Africa under the rubric of development. Finally, the chapter examines anti-colonial struggles in the imperial metropolises of Paris, London and Berlin since the 1930s and how they shaped changing projects of decolonisation, both in Africa and Europe.

This chapter provides keys to reading the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and, later, the post-industrial and digital trends in Southern Europe, with some data on urbanisation and industrialisation, focusing on Iberia and Italy. This approach is explained with reference to the first emergence of industrialisation (the context of ‘delay’) and to the recent emergence of the ‘slow cities’. An overview of the development of three urban areas – Barcelona, Porto and Turin – creates a specific analytical framework and promotes a comparative perspective. The chapter proposes to rethink the approach to industrialisation as a generalised turning point in terms of change and all-round urban modernisation, consequently, considering aspects of ‘delay’ with respect to different dynamics. It identifies a ‘southernisation’ of Mediterranean Europe that created cultural as well as economic patterns as a form of marginalisation. The emergence of cultural heritage related to cities and towns redefines the role of Southern Europe in the new networks of European cities. The chapter looks for other rhythms and meanings of development connected to the awareness matured in the post-industrial world and the need for a paradigm shift in urban history. To this end, it offers entry points on breaks and continuities, aspects of change and historiographic interpretations.

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.

Periyar's writings on women were at the heart of his commitment to a radical concept of freedom. Periyar is known most not only for his atheism and radical critique of religion (Manoharan, 2022a) but also for his commitment and contribution to anti-caste thought and politics (Manoharan, 2020; 2022b). However, crucial, perhaps even central, to Periyar's politics of Self-Respect was his approach to the women's question. In this chapter, we discuss how Periyar's approach to the women's question was grounded not only in a rights-based discourse, but also in a freedom-based discourse; not just freedom from patriarchy, but also sexual freedom in a radically libertarian sense. More importantly, Periyar argued that freedom for women took priority over freedom from colonialism, and challenged patriarchal tendencies within Indian nationalism.

Scholars engaged with feminist politics have looked at the critical importance given to the women's question and gender in the Self-Respect Movement (SRM). In their readings on gender politics in India, Anandhi and Velayuthan (2010) highlight the ‘limitations in theory itself in dealing with diversities and subalternity’ and argue that in a scenario where gender intersects with caste and class, the theory and methods used ‘should generate knowledge from the margins’. While feminist scholars such as Uma Chakravarti (2018) and Sharmila Rege (2013) have discussed the intersections of caste and patriarchy, others who have studied the Periyarist politics of gender—Anandhi (1991), Geetha (1998), and Hodges (2005)—have meticulously captured what we very broadly call Self-Respect perspectives and made important contributions to the study of women’s politics of and from the margins of Tamil Nadu.

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.

In January 1945, the German Army in Poland braced itself for an inevitable massive attack. Enjoying overwhelming superiority in numbers and weapons, and with logistics and communications greatly improved by the Lend Lease program, the Red Army had learned how to outperform the Wehrmacht. The Soviets struck across Poland in mid-January. Two weeks later, they were deep inside Germany; East Prussia was cut off from the rest of the country. The top Soviet generals planned to take Berlin by mid-February, but Stalin postponed their march to the Reich’s capital, rerouting their efforts to what he perceived as a flank threat from northern Germany. The elimination of this treat delayed the offensive towards Berlin until mid-April. The Germans exploited this pause to strengthen their fortifications. When the march to the ‘beast’s lair’ finally resumed, bitter fights at the Seelow Heights and then in Berlin’s streets resulted in grave casualties. During the entire war on the Eastern Front, the Red Army lost at least four times as many soldiers as the Wehrmacht. As for Soviet civilians, crimes of both the Nazi and the Soviet regimes made comparable contributions to their death toll.

How does culture interact with cities – their growth, their beauties, their imaginaries – in recent times (mid-nineteenth century to the present)? How do writers represent cities in both narrative and poetic texts? How do visual artists depict them in paintings, drawings and photography? And what happens when cities are presented by both text and image at the same time?

Beyond representation, cities are also a playground for artists, a stage and a place to challenge the urban imaginary. The city is a dream topic and a dream place for illustrated books, magazines and hybrid works of art such as movies and performance, but also for street art. It is also a proper character of both visual and textual representations. What if it is considered as an intermedial object per se?

This chapter emphasises the imaginary dimension of the city, showing in particular how the city has been considered by writers and artists as the paragon of modernity since the mid-nineteenth century. Each of its five sections focuses on one issue of the urban experience in art and literature and on a particular genre of art.

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 text analyses four key movements. First, it delves into the simultaneous emergence of a new modern and colonial identity in Europe and the exploration and domination processes in America. Next, it examines diverse theoretical perspectives on cultural exchanges. The third movement scrutinises European professionals’ approaches to Latin America, considering both the European context and the distinct characteristics of Latin American countries. Lastly, the focus shifts to urbanists Agache and Brünner, revealing their active role – activating contracts, public debates, incentives to professional training, and institutionalisation – in shaping the exchanges between the two continents. Their influence, while instrumental in constructing Latin American urbanism, tended to favour elites, homogenising and hegemonising future perspectives and marginalising broader social contexts. The call for decolonising urbanism urges a re-evaluation of its history, acknowledging and incorporating the diverse and historically grounded identities suppressed in the past.