From the early 1960s until his sudden and unexpected death in August 1978, Jim Dyos was the chief inspiration, proselytizer and ambassador of urban history in Britain. Through many personal contacts and friendships in various parts of the world, he gave to all those connected with his chosen pursuit the sense of belonging to a great international family. It was entirely in keeping with his ambitions that he had been planning a major international conference to chart the progress made since the earlier agenda for urban history was set out at Leicester in 1966, and to highlight those methodological issues which should be confronted if urban historians are to sustain an innovative role into the 1980s. This conference will still take place with the help of a committee which had been working with him, the intention being to publish a volume based on the proceedings as the most fitting tribute to his memory. Nevertheless, it seemed right to begin this issue of the Yearbook with a short appreciation of the way Jim Dyos contributed to the study and enjoyment of urban history through his own teaching, research and writings.

The importance of landowners' influence on the timing, scale and type of development in many large nineteenth-century towns is a platitude of urban history. But the power which it gave a large, aristocratic, urban landowner to influence local affairs – political, cultural, religious and philanthropic – has received much less attention. Most historians would agree with Ralph Nevill that during the nineteenth century ‘the political influence of the English land-owning class must in any case have disappeared with the development of the great towns and the increase in population’. But while that change has been described and investigated as it occurred at Westminster and in the country-side, the actual shift in the balance of power in the towns – from those who owned and managed urban estates to those who lived on them as leasehold tenants – has received much less attention. The purpose of this article is to review the literature at present available on the subject, and to offer some suggestions as to the directions in which future research might proceed.

The inter-war years represented a turning point in Greek urban history as a capitalist mode of production rose to dominance. Yet despite its European location, Greece should be seen as forming part of a capitalist periphery: for a long period of its history, from the late nineteenth century to the mid-1960s, structural features of its economy and social development differed in important respects from those of most other European countries, and in regard to urban development, the history of Athens – the capital city of Greece – provided a pattern that was the reverse of the European experience. The basis of this article, in fact, is the claim that developments affecting inter-war Athens had features in common with a Latin American pattern of ‘peripheral’ urbanization. Amongst the features that will be illustrated in this review of Greek urbanization – based on a study of the history of Athens – will be economic ‘dualism’, the polarization of social classes, and at greater length, the nature of ‘popular’ land allocation.

In recent years, the idea that Britain and its northern American colonies were part of a single ‘British Atlantic world’ has provided historians of both the Old World and the New with a novel perspective from which to explore their subjects during the long eighteenth century. With a case study of Charleston, South Carolina, this essay extends British categories of analysis across the Atlantic to uncover the origins of an American middle class. Emphasis is placed on the simultaneous consideration of all arenas of identity formation, with a view to demonstrating that examining either the cultural sphere or the economic one cannot bring a genuine understanding of the coherence of this eighteenth-century middling sort. Investigating the emergence of this social group in the widest possible sense, I show how the economic experience of these middling people forged common values which then found their expression in the cultural and political sphere. Since this middle sort achieved such coherence before 1776 I suggest that we must move away from accounts that depict colonial society as a place of binary opposites and occupational groupings, for such models cannot convey the complexity of the British Atlantic urban society that took shape during this era.

This paper analyses connections between culture and architecture, and between political ideology and capital planning in a region of China. It poses two crucial questions: first, what were the contrasting architectural expressions between imperial palaces in Shenyang? Second, what were the underlying planning concepts of Shenyang, and what urban design models were used to realize that concept? This study shows that the development of Manchurian architecture and planning had been a result of cultural confluence and political governance.

Immigration adaptation and race relations in the United States began receiving a great deal of scholarly attention early in the twentieth century, primarily in response to the arrival of large numbers of newcomers from eastern and southern Europe. The pre-eminent theory has been sociologist Robert Park's (1950) ‘race relations’ cycle, which posits that immigrants and racial minorities initially clashed with natives over cultural values and norms, but over time, adapt and are eventually absorbed into the mainstream society. This four-part cycle of contact, competition, accommodation and assimilation, according to Park, is ‘progressive and irreversible’. Unlike European Americans, however, the Chinese American experience in the United States has never been a consistent trajectory toward progressive and irreversible acceptance and assimilation.

Why 1500? Why 1800? Why does Urban History's review of periodical literature use this definition of the early modern? Does urban history have a periodization of its own? The reluctance of historians to stray before and after 1800 is a major theme of C.R. Friedrichs's review of early modern German urban history, ‘But are we any closer to home? Early modern German urban history since German Home Towns’, Central European History, 30 (1998), 163–86, and I wondered about these issues while reading some of the articles published this year which did not stop and surrender their historical passports at 1500.

This article explores ways in which material changes engendered by World War I influenced ideas about Cape Town and its people. For the city's middle classes, these conditions – including a rise in the cost of living, increased urbanization, the growth of factory work for women and the notable presence of soldiers in the city – heightened the sense that Cape Town was a place of increased moral corruption. In particular, females were portrayed as pivotal to the upholding of the moral and racial integrity of the city, nation and empire. Yet the perceived race and class of different Capetonian women influenced the expectations (and accordant condemnations) of their behaviour. This linked to white middle-class anxieties about miscegenation and urban order. As such, discourses around female behaviour during the war represented a nexus between issues of health, race and morality within the South African urban context.

This article examines the relationship between the processes of urban renovation in European capitals and the internationalization of musical theatre productions, using the example of theatres constructed in Paris and Rome at the end of the nineteenth century. Due to the limited availability of governmental and municipal funding, the more popular theatres in both capitals came to provide an important space for musical productions on an avant-garde level, with international repertoires and casts.

Urban renewal in the British Isles in the long eighteenth century was based on new municipal powers made possible by parliament. Focusing on Jamaica between 1770 and 1805, which passed legislation for the ‘policing’ – in the broader Scottish sense – of its towns, demonstrates that it was a global phenomenon common to the whole British Atlantic. However, the solutions it produced were also specific to local circumstances. Jamaican elites feared invasion, revolt and the dissolution of the slave society. Their police acts reflected these concerns, and demonstrate the alternative pathway that urban modernity took in this part of the British Atlantic.

The use of the pesthouse in early modern England has received limited attention by scholars, in particular, how it was used in London. The study of the pesthouse tells us about the nature of parochial government in the capital, the early development of public health policies and the relationship between national and civic authorities and the suburban parishes, where plague was a long-term problem and intersected forcefully with poverty. This article explores how suburban parishes used the pesthouse in their repertoire of response to plague between c. 1600 and 1650, which is situated in the context of experiments with the pesthouse in England's provincial towns and cities. The article considers the development of the City of London's pesthouse in St Giles Cripplegate, its limited use by suburban parishes under the City's jurisdiction, and the establishment of a local pesthouse by some suburban parishes beyond the jurisdiction of 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.

During most of the late medieval period, the Flemish city of Bruges acted as the main commercial hub of north-western Europe. In the course of the fifteenth century, however, Bruges lost much of its allure as an economic metropolis. One of the most urgent challenges the urban authorities were facing was the navigability of the waterways in and around the city. While the city government made structural investments to remedy the problems, written sources constantly emphasized how important it was that Bruges remained accessible from the sea. During the same period, the earliest preserved maps of the city and its environment emerged. Drawing on the work of Henri Lefebvre, this article argues that these visual representations were informed by the same commercial ideology. Despite, or exactly because of, the city's decreasing maritime accessibility, they conceived Bruges as a place that could easily be reached by trading ships and where merchants could trade in the best possible circumstances.

Nineteenth-century Glasgow was widely imagined and presented as the proud ‘Second City of the Empire’. This article investigates the implications of this identification with the empire by analysing Glasgow's great town hall, built 1883–89, as the main manifestation of the city's civic pride. It shows how the building's architectural style, sculpture and inauguration ceremonies created a specific image of ‘imperial’ Glasgow which emphasized loyalty to Union and empire. Instead of undermining each other, the layered political allegiances of civic pride, nationalism, unionism and imperialism were mutually reinforcing, shaping the town hall still in use today.