With over half the world’s population now living in cities, urbanization is one of the defining features of the contemporary world, and urban history – the study of the processes and consequences of urbanization – is one of the most dynamic fields of modern and contemporary history. But the dynamism of urban history is not confined to the modern era and the study of urban societies in the less recent past equally represents a highly fertile field of scholarship.
This collection will provide an expert overview of the field of urban history and a representative synthesis of past and current scholarship in urban history. The articles selected will explore key debates and conceptual issues in urban history from a global perspective highlighting the benefits of comparative historical research and of interdisciplinary approaches drawn from the humanities and social sciences . The recent expansion of global history and transnational perspectives in historical research is particularly suited to the study of urban history, given the importance of cities as nodal points in the networks of global exchange and communication and this volume. The collection will also adopt a deliberately broad chronological span from antiquity to the twentieth century in order to facilitate diachronic comparisons and to emphasize the continuities, as well as discontinuities in urban history. The volumes differ from the several ‘urban studies’ readers that are already available on the market in that the long term historical perspective is central to their conception. They will address theories of urbanization and methodological and conceptual issues of urban history, including questions of definition, as well as covering wider thematic issues that are representative of the different disciplinary approaches that have influenced urban history and which reflect the wider questions that urban historians have, historically, sought to address.