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.

While later medieval England enjoyed an increasingly sophisticated array of governmental institutions that helped kings to rule, kingship itself remained a fundamentally personal and personality-driven enterprise. Consequently, space was needed where the ‘personal side’ of politics could take place and where each monarch’s domestic needs could be met. It was the royal court and household that provided space for both of these things. Despite the importance of each, defining them, and their relationship to one another, is not easy. The royal court (not to be confused with the courts of law, discussed in Chapter 6) has proven particularly problematic to historians because it lacked a clear structure or boundaries.

This chapter examines the relationship between the king and his ‘ordinary’ subjects and asks whether such a thing as ‘public opinion’ evolved over the period to play a role in politics. For medieval historians, ‘the public’ used to be synonymous with the nobility and gentry. They were the section of the population that had some formal role in governance and had time outside of the demands of labour to devote to political questions. However, recent scholarship has emphasised that most if not all people in later medieval England had access to texts, could hear them read aloud and discuss their contents. This has led to a reappraisal of the later medieval public, towards an expansionist view that includes people below the ranks of the gentry as politically aware and engaged.

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.

Using the library of eighteenth-century attorney and legal historian Frances Hargrave as a starting point, this chapter considers the place of law, property, and state formation in the causes and results of the American Revolution. Focusing on three related themes to the place of laws in independence – the influence and break from English legal culture, the pluralism of legal practice within North America, and the place of legal institutions in either maintaining or changing the status quo – this chapter considers how both different forms of property and the different individuals and communities involved with it played a central role in the creation of an independent United States. The governments that emerged from the Revolution each relied heavily on these varied legal threads.

This chapter has several major themes. It begins by documenting how historians are rethinking the origins of the United States, emphasizing its contingent nature as a union of sovereign states rather than a nation, and the roots of that novel confederation in the complexities of the British imperial system. In that context, it then traces the fluidity and contingency of rights available to the citizens of the United States after the Revolution. Finally, it examines how, following the victory of the Jeffersonian coalition in 1800, those rights became structured and limited along racial lines, creating a “patchwork nation” of distinct racial orders.

This chapter explores the ways in which British imperial reforms were part of broader imperial rivalries and interconnections; the racial, gender, and political limits of Enlightenment reforms; the perceptions and bargaining that shaped reforms; and the relationship between reform and Revolution. It questions teleological approaches that cast British imperial reforms in the 1760s and 1770s as having led to Revolution in the thirteen colonies. In a global and Enlightenment context, British reformers did not pursue particularly radical reforms until the Intolerable Acts of 1774. These Acts were reactionary punishments intended to reform colonial thinking and behavior. They foreclosed the previously vital bargaining process between the imperial government and the colonists, and the colonists saw dire parallels with the monopolistic and tyrannical East India Company. The government’s attempt to use non-negotiable punishment to reform colonial thinking and behavior, rather than reforms to imperial tax and trade policies, most directly stimulated Revolution.

Between June 1774 and June 1775, radical factions in the thirteen colonies launched an armed uprising that arguably did more than the Declaration of Independence to wrest the colonies from Great Britain. Ordinary people pushed their leaders to take bold new steps, and the rebels developed tools of popular mobilization that turned resistance into armed insurgency. They formed new political bodies such as the Continental Congress and hundreds of local committees, while drawing on longstanding community institutions. There were plenty of uncertain or hostile people in America who were unready to consider independence, and so local crowds menaced Loyalists and sometimes perpetrated shocking acts of violence. These crucial months of insurgency were peppered by tense “alarms” that mobilized the population. These incidents culminated in the Battles of Lexington and Concord and Bunker Hill, releasing the violence that characterized the Revolutionary era.