Chapter 2 explores the complex dynamics of Colombia’s post-1850 import trade. It traces how foreign objects – textiles, machetes, toiletries, food, and chinaware, among many other goods – circulated throughout the national geography: the routes they traveled and the places they visited. The chapter also explores the many places in which peasants, bogas, formerly enslaved people, and small landholders came together to give meaning to the multiple and diverse spaces of exchange.

Chapter 7 describes the generative, or bottom-up, forces that were part of urban life. These are organized in terms of households, crafts and occupations, neighborhoods, and quality of life.

This chapter considers how Britain’s developmental, retail-oriented models of planning played out in individual cities across the 1940s and 1950s. It shows that many councils viewed planning as a tool of proactive economic management and enthusiastically bent their powers to the task of promoting valuable new retail development. These activities coincided with a spectacular shops boom in most cities as large retail chains reaped the benefits of full employment and rising wages to embark on major programmes of shop-building and expansion. Councils and retail chains worked in tandem to erect huge new stores all over the country and refit urban centres for the affluent age. At times urban authorities even played the part of commercial developer themselves by putting up shops and collecting business rents. I relate these practices to councils’ energetic pre-war activities in the field of municipal enterprise and show that post-war planning powers offered a new outlet for these long-standing traditions of civic entrepreneurship. The chapter also shows how central government promoted the nascent commercial property sector in British redevelopment from the 1950s.

Chapter 1 presents a social and spatial reconstruction of the Royal Exchange, at the heart of London’s trade, as a place of women’s work. An apprentice imprisoned for debt shows how young women moved through the shops of the Exchange, working, shopping and using and losing credit. As the Exchange recovered after the Fire, women moved into at least half of its small shops; they also lived close by, often sharing lodgings, and made networks of patronage and credit through and outside the City companies. As apprentices, mistresses, shopkeepers and outworkers, women were central to the sewing industry which made early modern fashion.

Chapter 6 looks at the long afterlife of apprenticeship, examining women’s claims to become free and the ways in which they met, and did not meet, the demands of City custom. As with indentures, the paperwork of petitions shows marriage undercutting women’s entitlements; a maze of customary rights blocked women from enjoying the freedom unconditionally. At the same time, in practice the City accepted humble petitions, took fees and granted ‘small shops’ to women who could prove their connections to companies. Women’s place in the City was significant and rooted in tradition and daily practice, but contingent.