Download ANCIENT TO MODERN

ANCIENT TO MODERN
EUROPEAN URBAN HISTORIOGRAPHY
1.
Introduction and basic concepts
In this seminar we will be addressing some of the basic conceptual issues underlying the
study of urban history: what is a town and what do we mean by urbanity? There is a rich
variety of terms which are used in discussing urban communities but their precise meanings
are often left unexplored. By contrast, some terms such as ‘city’ or ‘town’ are so ubiquitous
that their meaning is often ambiguous. Sociologists such as Weber attempted to tackle the
challenge of thinking systematically about the terminology of urban description as we shall
see in this reading. We will also be considering the origins of urban society from Antiquity
onwards and some of the broader patterns of urban growth and decline.
Readings
Fraser, D. and Sutcliffe, A., The Pursuit of Urban History (1983), introduction and essays by
Lampard, Checkland and Pahl
Hohenberg, P.M. and Lees, L.H., The Making of Urban Europe 1000-1994 (Harvard, 1995)
introduction and chapter 1.
Weber, M., The City (various editions) chapter 1.
For a consideration of issues of definition and conceptualisation relating to the modern (post1800) British city see
Gunn, S. ‘Urbanization’ in Williams, C. ed., Companion to Nineteenth-Century Britain
(2004)
Morris, R.J. and Rodger, R., eds., The Victorian City: A Reader (1993), chapter 1
Video: ‘The Ancient City’
2.
Networks and Urban Systems
The earliest works of urban history concentrated on telling the history of individual towns and
it is from this tradition that the genre of ‘urban biography’ has developed: that is, the work of
urban history that focuses on analysing and explaining the growth, development or decline of
the single town. Indeed a large number of the works on the extended bibliography for this
course do precisely that. But towns can never be studied simply in isolation. They have to be
seen as part of a wider urban network and in relation to their hinterlands. This seminar on
networks, systems and typologies will provide a corrective to the ‘urban biographical’ mode
of thought. Central place theory, the Pirenne ‘thesis’ and its critique, and other models of
urban networks or systems are an important part of the urban historian’s theoretical and
analytical tool kit. We shall also be discussing typologies of cities and the importance of
functional specialization in developing urban systems over time.
Readings
Bairoch, Paul, Cities and Economic Development from the Dawn of History to the Present
(Chicago, 1991) chapter 9.
Hohenberg and Lees, Making of Urban Europe, chapter 2
Morley, N., ‘Cities in context: urban systems in Roman Italy’ in Parker, H. (ed.), Roman
Urbanism. Beyond the Consumer City (1997).
Lee, Robert, ‘The socio-economic and demographic characteristics of port cities: a typology
for comparative analysis?’, Urban History, 25 (1998).
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The concept of ‘urban biography’ is used in two review articles in Urban History:
David Reeder, 'The industrial city in Britain : urban biography in the modern style'. Urban
History, 25:3 (1998), 368-78.
R.J. Morris, 'Urban biography : Scotland, 1700-2000' Urban History, 29:2 (2002), 276-83
Video: ‘The European Urban System and Counter-urbanization’
3.
Economy
The economic function of a town will influence virtually any aspect of urban society, culture
or politics and the economic context is necessarily implicit in almost every aspect of urban
history. This seminar will cover material production within the city and its hinterland, and the
interrelationship in terms of exchange of raw materials, labour and products to and from the
city and hinterland. We will also examine the structures of production within the city, the
social organisation of labour, the regulations of market and quality control.
Readings
Bairoch, Cities and Economic Development, chapter 8.
Hohenberg and Lees, The Making of Urban Europe, chapter 4.
Reeder, D. and Rodger, R., ‘Industrialisation and the city economy’, in Daunton, Martin (ed.)
Cambridge Urban History of Britain, vol. III (2000), 553-92.
4.
Power
Power over what? What needs to be controlled? In what does power originate? These are
some fundamental questions which need to be addressed in the historical study of any society,
not least a highly complex urbanized society. A discussion of power will lead naturally to
the analysis of government, administration and politics; the processes, institutions and
buildings through which power was expressed and mediated; the contests and struggles
through which it was resisted.
Readings
Reynolds, S., ‘Municipal government’ in the medieval reader.
Cowan, A., ‘Urban elites in early modern Europe: an endangered species?’, Historical
Research, 64 (1991).
OR Archer, I., ‘Politics and government’ in Peter Clark (ed.) The Cambridge Urban History
of Britain, vol. II (2000).
Smith, J.B., ‘Urban elites c. 1830-1930 and urban history’, Urban History, 27 (2000).
Joyce, P. The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City (2003) chapter 1
For a useful introduction to the various definitions and understandings of the concept of
power see
Lukes, S. Power: A Radical View (second edition, 2004)
5.
Space
Towns are not just a haphazard arrangement of buildings and the use of space is a crucial
means of expressing social distinctions, whether of hierarchy or class, public or private,
secular or profane. Space, its use and regulation, and the deliberate manipulation of space
through urban planning, are thus essential concepts in the study of urban history. Space can
be considered both passively, as expressive of an ideology or a social reality, but can also be
active, determining patterns of behaviour or patterns of physical growth. A central theme in
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discussions of space in the urban context has been the division between public and private
space – a theme which is particularly prominent in studies of housing and housing policy.
Readings
Keene, D., ‘The medieval urban landscape’ in Waller, P. (ed), The English Urban Landscape
(Oxford, 2000)
Benevolo, L., ‘Planning the city’ from the early modern reader.
Gunn, S., ‘The spatial turn’ in Gunn, S. and Morris, R.J. eds., Identities in Space: Contested
Terrains in the Western City Since 1850 (2001),
Pooley, C., Housing Strategies in Europe 1880-1930 (Leicester, 1992), 325-48.
Hohenberg and Lees, The Making of Urban Europe, chapter 9.
6.
Community and Identity
We all know we belong to communities, but what are they, what do they mean to us, how and
where do they exist? The notion of a community has a social reality in networks of trade,
religion and kinship; but it also has a powerful ideological and rhetorical value. The
‘common weal’, the ‘communitas’, the ‘public good’ are concepts which have always been
exploited for religious and political purposes, seen most obviously in the godly civic
communities of the Reformation era. How is a sense of community identity developed and
expressed? Who is included and how and why are others excluded?
Readings
Hilton, R., ‘How urban society was imagined’ from the medieval reader.
Roper, L. ‘The common man, the common good, common women: gender and meaning in the
German Reformation commune’, Social History, 12 (1987).
Gunn, S., The Public Culture of the Victorian Middle Class (London, 2000) chapter 7.
Rodger, R. and Colls, R. eds., Cities of Ideas (2004), introduction and individual chapters by
Rodger and Colls.
7.
The Environment
The town or city is an artificial construct, but every aspect of urban life is mediated by the
natural environment in which the city finds itself, from the location and physical structure to
the vulnerability of urban societies to disease and environmental disaster. Urban societies
have always had to struggle to regulate and manage this environment and urban civilization in
its turn has had a far-reaching impact on nature itself. The antithetical contrast between city
and nature, the ‘binary opposition’, has always been one of the most significant themes
through which the city and urban society have been conceptualised through history.
Readings
Brimblecombe, P. The Big Smoke. A history of air pollution in London since medieval times
(London, 1987) chapters 4 and 5.
Bernhardt, C. (ed.), Environmental Problems in Europe in the Nineteenth and Twentieth
Centuries (New York 2001), pp. 121-42.
Slack, Paul, ‘The response to plague in early modern England: public policies and their
consequences’ in John Walter and Roger Schofield (eds), Famine, Disease and the Social
Order in Early Modern Society (London, 1989).
8.
Representations
Civilization and civility have the same root as ‘civitas’, being the Latin for city; ‘polite’
comes from polis, the Greek for city. ‘Sodomy’ however comes from the name of the Old
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Testament city of Sodom, which along with Gomorrah, brought down the wrath of God for its
corruption. The identification of urban society with both these themes -- civilization and
culture, or immorality and misery -- is so strong, that the city has frequently been used in a
figurative sense in Western art and literature. Representations of the city have therefore a
broad cultural resonance far beyond the study of urban history per se. Furthermore, the
‘cultural construction’ of the city has affected less subjective representations of towns and
urban society as well, whether maps, townscape or topographical literature. Urban imagery,
both written and visual, is the interface between the city and societies, where we can discover
much about historical conceptualisations of the town and urban society.
Readings
Arscott, Caroline, ‘The representation of the city in the visual arts’ in Daunton. M.J. (ed.),
Cambridge Urban History of Britain, vol. III (Cambridge, 2000) 811-32.
Lees, A., Cities Perceived (Manchester, 1985), chapter 2.
Sweet, Rosemary, ‘Topographies of politeness’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society
(2000)
Walkowitz, J., City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late Victorian
London (1992), introduction and chapter 1.
Williams, Raymond, The Country and the City (various editions), chapters 14,15 and 19.
Video : ‘Progress to Modernity: Images of the City’ – this video is particularly useful and you
are strongly advised to set aside the time to watch it.
9.
Cities, City States and States
The earliest states were the city states of classical antiquity and since that time the growth of
towns is pivotal to the growth of the state; dynastic states in the medieval period subjugated
territories by asserting their control of urban centres and founding new ones. In the rise of
capital cities we see the full complexity of the reciprocal relationship between the growth of a
nation state and metropolitan expansion. The relationship between the centre and (urban)
locality is a key to the history of state formation itself.
Readings
Clark, P. and Lepetit, B., ‘Capital cities’ from the early modern reader.
Braunfels, W., Urban Design in Western Europe. Regime and Architecture, 900-1900
(London, 1988), chapter 7.
Tilly, C., and Blockmans, W., Cities and the Rise of States in Europe1000-1800 (Oxford,
1994), chapter 11.
Keene, D., ‘Metropolitan comparisons: London as a city-state’, Historical Research, 77: 198
(2004), 459-80
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