In our introduction to this Special Issue on early modern cities and globalization, we explore the current place of cities before 1850 in global urban history and address the promise of a greater focus on their role. We argue that the interplay between the large scale and the small scale in the imperial global city is an essential dialogical force in the formation of each city's relationship to the wider early modern world. Furthermore, early modern global urban history can help explain the creation of spaces that facilitated connections between distant, global locations, as well as illuminate the emergence of networks of exchange between city communities around the globe. Yet, it also reveals the tense, messy negotiation of the meaning of these urban spaces, as well as the incredibly diverse communities they harboured.

Through a case-study of one significant courtyard house owned by the Drapers’ Company and known as ‘The Erber’, this article argues that mercantile livery companies supported London's growing centrality within an expanding network of trade through the use and development of corporate properties. The micro-history at the heart of this article reveals that the ‘everyday’ built environment of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century London was shaped not just by the city elite. Also relevant to that process were the different sorts of tenants of the Drapers’ Company, who benefited from the expansion at all levels of London's mercantile activity. The trickle-down effects of global mercantilism affected spaces small and large. The investigation of the Erber highlights the domestic implications of global commercial expansion.

This article will argue that the history of East India Company Bombay – like that of many foreign British enterprises, and like many other ‘global’ cities and indeed colonies generally – is best understood as the product of contradictions and contingencies. Bombay was never easy to define geographically and its identity as an ‘English’ settlement was precarious. It could not insulate itself militarily from the powerful polities nearby; nor could it always rely on the loyalty of its subjects, whether English or of other ethnicities. It was a city constructed out of crisis and tragedy, trial and error, a history that the story about a European dynastic ‘dowry’ obscures, and which Company representatives worked hard to conceal.

César Falliet's trans-imperial biography sheds light on the dynamics of belonging in early modern Manila, a city that was both a cosmopolitan centre of trade and a stronghold of Spanish colonial power. Falliet's integration into Manila's social world depended on his ability to convince elites that he was Catholic, loyal to the Spanish king and useful to his empire; attributes that he proved by fighting Islamic and Protestant pirates. These credentials were ultimately tested in five theatres: Manila, Batavia, India, the Americas and the Sulu Zone. Manila's inter-Asian and transpacific ties profoundly shaped foreigners’ lives in the city.

This article has two principal aims. The first is to assess the usefulness of ‘glocalization’ as a concept in the study of early modern global cities, using human–animal interactions as a test case. The second is to explore the reciprocal influence that human–animal interactions and the development of global cities had on each other. Exploration of these two issues interrogates the frequently contradictory, often ambiguous and always contested nature of the early modern global city itself.

In the late eighteenth century, Montevideo evolved from a small colonial town dependent on Buenos Aires into the main Atlantic port in the region. Networks connecting Montevideo to Luso-Brazilian merchants turned Montevideo into a hub for trans-imperial trade. Between 1778 and 1810, thousands of Spanish and foreign ships entered the port of Montevideo. As a result, although economically dependent on Buenos Aires’ commercial community, Montevideo merchants and authorities managed to use their privileged port, newly created institutions and trans-imperial networks to advance the city's commercial and political role within the estuary. The emergence of Montevideo as an Atlantic port city with global connections was not an isolated event, but a part of a broader process of growing global trade and political transformation.

Studying the Ottoman subjects in eighteenth-century Vienna helps to understand better the process of integration of the different districts of the city in a fast-changing context, especially around its Danube port area. Despite the withdrawal of the Ottoman empire from central Europe after 1683, Ottomans were fully a part of the history of Vienna and their presence has to be explored within the specific urban dynamics of a city: the reconfiguration of its economic sectors and social places, the tensions at play between the socio-economic groups by which a city was made and the evolution of its urban planning. Focusing on the Ottoman merchants operating in Vienna allows us to identify and to analyse the workings of the port area of the fourth largest city in Europe and to explore the social spaces of Viennese markets, streets, courtyards and coffeehouses.

While the Victorian ideal of the public park is well understood, we know less of how local governors sought to realize this ideal in practice. This article is concerned with park-making as a process – contingent, unstable, open – rather than with parks as outcomes – determined, settled, closed. It details how local governors bounded, designed and regulated park spaces to differentiate them as ‘spaces apart’ within the city, and how this programme of spatial governance was obstructed, frustrated and diverted by political, environmental and social forces. The article also uses this historical analysis to provide a new perspective on the future prospects of urban parks today.

Urban expansion in the early twentieth century had a profound impact on India's urban land economies. Historians argue that in this period, urban India went through an increasing marketization of land and that improvement trusts had a significant hand in accelerating land speculation. In the case of Bombay, we still understand little of the relationship between the activities of the Bombay Improvement Trust and rising land values. The article examines key legal disputes around compensation for land acquired by the Trust for public purpose before and after World War I. Such cases show how the Trust and the judiciary shaped changing expectations around what comprised ‘market value’ and consequently became deeply involved in Bombay's land economy. Where officials had earlier resisted valuations that they believed encouraged speculation, after the 1920s the resolution of disputes incorporated future value as a legitimate and necessary part of the economy.