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.

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 brief for this chapter is to consider kingship in the abstract, that is both how late medieval people theorised kingship but also their assumptions, prejudices and expectations about what a king could and should do. The difficulty with this task is that, although these two domains overlap, they are distinct. The hard, theoretical categories of professional thinkers are different from the unspoken assumptions that a time-travelling anthropologist might uncover. The English took their political theory from different ages and places, occasionally adapting it to fit local conditions. This might seem surprising, since the period was rocked by momentous developments in the powers of kings and what their subjects expected them to do. Established ideas can prove surprisingly resilient despite their inapplicability to changed circumstances.

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.

Ideologue, reformer, feminist, firebrand secessionist: these are some of the many things E. V. Ramasamy Periyar has been called. If there is one strand of Periyar's thought that runs through all these titles and the politics that informed them, it would be his clarion call for self-respect. Not one to stop at dismantling the hegemonic power structures that he saw around him in India, Periyar was committed to the cause of reform in and for the Tamil diaspora as well. His views on nationhood thus ‘constantly violated the certitude about boundaries, identities, agents of change, and went beyond the territoriality of the nation’ (Pandian, 1993, p. 2282). Periyar emphasized that foreign settlement could enable the regeneration of Tamil society abroad, unfettered by India's oppressive traditions. Moreover, he saw the diaspora as an important source of financial support for the Dravidian movement. To this end, Self-Respect literature often asserted that Tamil people everywhere were bound by obligations of mutual assistance and reciprocity (Alagirisamy, 2016). Periyar visited British Malaya and Singapore twice in his lifetime: once in 1929–1930 and again in 1954–1955. Both visits were pivotal in aiding the development of a settled Tamil political consciousness in Singapore.

Scholars of the Indian Ocean world continue to trace the comings and goings of sojourners and settlers, privileging the ocean itself as a key agent of change (Moorthy and Jamal, 2010; Amrith, 2013; Menon et al., 2022). Yet, settlement also brought with it a sea-change in the lived presents and anticipated futures of migrant communities that aspired to citizenship.

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.

The popular focus on Periyar and Dravidian—as a person leading his loyal people—may invite placing nationalism's assertion, rather than critique, at the heart of political thought in twentieth-century Tamil-speaking South India. ‘Nationalism’ names the intuition that ‘France [is] for the French, England for the English … and so forth’ (Shaw, 2013) or, more generally, ‘nationalism is a theory of political legitimacy … requir[ing] that ethnic boundaries should not cut across political ones’, insisting on ‘congruence of state and nation’, and refusing ‘ethnic divergence between rulers and ruled’ (Gellner, 1983, pp. 1, 134). Much turns on ‘ethnic’. Considerations include whether ‘ethnic’ is ‘racial’ or ‘historically constituted’ (Lenin and Stalin, 1970, pp. 66–68) and nationalism's ‘inherent contradictoriness’, both because its ‘rational and progressive’ promises of modernity are often premised on ‘traditional and conservative’ gestures to the past and because its anti-colonial articulation usually adopts the very imperial ‘representational structure … nationalist thought seeks to repudiate’ (Chatterjee, 1986, pp. 22, 38). So, when the August 1944 creation of the Dravidar Kazhagam (DK) was heralded with ‘Long live Periyar, Dravida Nadu for the Dravidian, let the Dravidar Kazhagam flourish’1—entrenching an ‘ethnic’ idiom for Tamil-speaking South India's politics—an invitation for ‘a chapter on Periyar and nationalism’ encourages the interrogation of a twinned presumption of coherence: not simply of ‘Dravidian’ as a people loyal, but of ‘Periyar’ as a person leading.

The roster of industrial cities includes not only single-industry towns but also ports, capitals, suburban factory districts and regional clusters of manufacturing centres. Over time, technological changes turned all modern cities into industrialised cities. This chapter follows the spread of urban industrial production across Europe and into overseas empires and examines its impact on local environments. It then traces the planning efforts of state governments and architects to combat pollution and to redesign manufacturing towns. De-industrialisation in the second half of the twentieth century added unemployment and emigration to the challenges of industrial cities, which had to substitute new functions for manufacturing jobs. Multi-functional cities with well-educated workforces have found this transition easier than smaller, more specialised manufacturing towns.

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.

In an era steeped in national stereotypes that bled into slanders and hatred, the English were notorious in later medieval Europe for three things: drunkenness, bearing a tail and killing their kings. But it is with the implications of another alleged propensity – for waging wars of conquest that sought to turn neighbours into subjects – that this chapter is largely concerned. By the later Middle Ages, the bellicose reputation of England’s kings reverberated across Christendom. Jean Froissart (d. c. 1405), the chronicler of chivalry who visited the court of Edward III, noted that, because of their great conquests, the English were ‘always more inclined to war than peace’.

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.

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.