The descriptions of small towns in John Leland's Itinerary provide valuable evidence about their economic functions and fortunes in a period often categorized as one of urban decline. Leland described markets, ports, industries, buildings and transport links. He identified examples of small towns expanding, through new commercial and industrial opportunities, notably cloth manufacture, as well as others in decline, and suggested that investment by entrepreneurs and benefactors had enabled some small towns to prosper. These experiences reflected both the particular functions of individual towns and their role in wider regional economies.

This article examines the problem of illicit labour from the perspective of transformations in the (local) distribution channels. Rather than large masters circumventing the guilds’ rules regarding labour market entry or large merchants shifting from a Kauf to a Verlag system, early modern manufacturing guilds in Antwerp confronted mercers and wholesalers who entered into production without being masters. In response, the guilds extended their rules, so that their regulations actually matured in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Rather than (labour market) deregulation and proto-industrialization, the issue was the disappearance of the straightforward link between production and retailing, tied together by mastership.

Based on how notions of civil society and civic virtue were defined in Enlightenment Scotland, this article assesses how far these ideals shaped police development in Scottish towns, c. 1780–1833. It argues that both concepts provided a framework for the development of ‘police’ as a broad mechanism of urban government. Collectively, civil society and civic virtue offered a wide-ranging, intellectual backdrop presupposing ideas on police, improvement and polite society, with the new police model bearing a striking resemblance to how these ideals were imagined and constructed at the time.

This article addresses the morphological and functional implications of the railway as an urban boundary, by studying seven towns in Romania, connected by the First Transylvanian Railway (1868–70). The research highlights similarities and differences as to the initial railway insertion, the subsequent growth patterns and the differentiation appearing between areas adjoining the railway tracks. The article argues that although a ‘wrong side of the track’ did not emerge everywhere, the segregation and lack of urban amenities affecting the areas which could be thus labelled is rooted in the failure to render the railway barrier permeable and to generate complementarity rather than subordination between the two sides of the track.

In the Wilhelmine era (1871–1918) the Krupp steel company developed into Germany's largest industrial establishment and most famous armaments manufacturer. While the firm further cultivated its reputation as ‘Cannon Kings’, it claimed to be a leader in an entirely different area: the provision of housing. Extensively marketed through company publications, displays at international exhibitions and its Besucherpolitik (visitor policy), Krupp's housing developments in Essen generated considerable domestic and international interest. During a period when the housing question increasingly entered the political realm, high-profile individuals such as Kurt Eisner, Hannes Meyer and Alfred von Tirpitz all passionately expressed their views on Krupp's housing developments. This article assesses their historically neglected first-hand observations against the quantitative and qualitative housing achievements of the steel giant.

This article evaluates the inherent ambiguity of the landmark Park Hill housing estate in Sheffield, England. Incorporating Foucault's theories on governmentality and biopolitics, this article explores how techniques of power and control radically affected the way this building was both used and viewed. It shows how conflicting discourses about human needs and desires influenced the way that subjects were housed, managed and regulated in Sheffield during the supposedly homogeneous welfare-state years.

This article argues that historians have largely neglected the dimension of Chinese–Russian interaction, which was central to the development of Harbin from the emergence of this city in 1898 as an outpost of imperial Russia in Manchuria (north-east China). It goes on to propose a new approach to Harbin history, which, integrating its ‘Russian’ and ‘Chinese’ histories during the period prior to the Japanese occupation of Manchuria in 1932, would also place it in a wider comparative context. This comparative approach is illustrated in the article by a consideration of the issue of ethnically segregated living quarters.

This review begins with a subject that is familiar to all urban historians of the Middle Ages. Citizenship was one of the most ubiquitous forms of social and political organization in medieval towns. Yet, as Pierre Racine points out, in ‘La citoyenneté en Italie au Moyen Âge’, Le Moyen Âge, 115 (2009), 87–108, it is perhaps surprising that there have been so few studies devoted specifically to the right of citizenship in the Italian cities of the communal period. Racine's discussion is focused upon the period between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries, that is, from the formation of the communes to the emergence of princely states in northern and central Italy, when many of the city-states disappeared. If citizenship was in some ways a burden which entailed liability to taxation and the fulfilment of military service, it was fundamentally a privilege. Thus, the thirteenth-century communal governments of cities such as Piacenza appointed officials charged with investigating cases of ‘false citizens’. Citizenship was acquired largely on the basis of more or less permanent residence and the ownership of a house in the city and it allowed the citizen to participate in the popular assembly, where the important questions concerning the election of officials and the problems of daily life were debated and decided. In emphasizing the emotional attachment which citizens felt towards their urban patria, Racine addresses the cultural as well as juridical meaning of citizenship.