This article focuses on Jaipur city, capital of the Kachhawa Rajput state of Jaipur in the Rajputana region of north-western India (present-day Rajasthan). It seeks to braid the narrative of modernity in Jaipur with the tripartite networks of capital, knowledge and infrastructure that were contemporaneous to different phases of the city's transformation. Through a genealogical analysis of Jaipur's modernity from the eighteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, the article will present three distinct periods of its urbanization.

From the nineteenth century onwards, municipal authorities vested increasing amounts of power in experts, those who could provide specialist knowledge on areas outside the remit of local councillors. This, though, was attached with risk, as municipal resources could be wasted. This article takes the example of the Ure Valley waterworks project, a scheme developed by Leeds Corporation at the start of the twentieth century. What was deemed a necessary and straightforward project to alleviate future water shortages became embroiled in engineering difficulties and financial issues which resulted in only one of the five planned reservoirs being built. This case-study shines a light on the inner workings of local government, as well as the confluence between politics, economics and the urban–rural hinterland environment.

To this point, nineteenth-century Bombay – including its urban development, economy and population – has most often been analysed in relation to the city's position within British imperial, and overseas maritime, networks. In contrast, this article calls into question established scholarly definitions of ‘colonial’ and ‘princely’ spaces in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century India, through an in-depth examination of Bombay's socio-economic ties with wider Indian networks. It focuses on connections that stretched across colonial borders and into the princely states, suggesting that both the city's economy and its business elite were rooted in cross-border Indian capital networks. It further highlights the contributions of Indian princes, their states and populations to the development of urban culture in Bombay.

Dublin at the turn of the nineteenth century had limited permanent employment opportunities compared to Belfast, and for poor families financial instability manifested in limited life expectancy. This article focuses on young adult cohorts in Dublin city. By cross-referencing names and addresses from death records with census, court and prison records, it casts new light on the lives of the city's most disadvantaged people. It applies a digital humanities framework and uses historical Geographical Information Systems to explore patterns in cause of death, and to reveal more about household income, casual labour, women's work and community networks. We contend that the cautions about the occlusion of commercial sex work in historical data should be extended to the lowest strata of the working classes more generally and that it is only through granular analyses that the fine lines between poverty and destitution can emerge.

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 explores how political division manifested itself in the electricity systems of West and East Berlin and analyses the strategies of both throughout the 40 years of the Cold War. It reveals how the goal of full energy independence propagated by both West and East proved illusory for material, geopolitical, institutional, economic and environmental reasons. Apart from vestiges of past interdependence, pressures to collaborate gained impetus from the 1970s onwards. The Berlin experience, the article concludes, generates lessons for navigating socio-technical in-/interdependencies over electricity infrastructures in geopolitically contested contexts by highlighting the material politics of urban energy history.

This article examines the nature of sociability, communication and the ‘practical public sphere’ of Hamburg's early coffeehouses (1677–1714) and provides insight into the ‘social life’ of these coffeehouse spaces during the ‘early’ Enlightenment. Using licensing records, administrative sources and supplications, it shows how novelty, popularity, political partisanship and fashionability were characteristic of these early coffeehouses, creating a fluid and capricious dynamic of custom and communication that stressed established notions of honourable sociabilities and communication in urban public spaces. It argues that these destabilizing social and communication practices led to social stratification and a redefinition of ‘honourable’ burgherly behaviour in the normative public sphere. Strategies to govern the coffeehouses sought thus to bind these spaces and their actors to this newly articulated ‘normative’ burgherly public sphere.

Despite a long settlement history, empirical investigations of the role of path dependency in the long-term evolution of human populations are scarce in Europe, and especially in the Mediterranean countries. Using spatially explicit econometric techniques, our study discusses the empirical evidence stemming from a quantitative analysis of the spatial distribution of population growth rates in 115 districts of metropolitan Athens (Greece) over one century, distinguishing path dependency from the impact of other socio-economic forces on long-term urban expansion. The empirical findings of this study clarify how path-dependent regulation of population growth was heterogeneous over time and space, and depends on the specific stage of the city life cycle. After an initial period when path-independent population expansion reflected the inherent impact of exogenous shocks, path-dependent growth was associated with compact urbanization governed by agglomeration and scale advantages. Path-dependent growth was less intense during suburbanization, when the population spread over larger areas.

This article suggests that the post-colonial viewpoint could be valuable in understanding Beijing during the colonial crisis between 1900 and 1928. Through the examination of urban space in the Legation Quarter, it pays attention to the emerging special types and forms, as well as the mechanisms behind them, and explains the transposition of a foreign modern cityscape to the local context. The Europeanized district in Beijing was a symbol of Western civilization and the uneven power dynamics in the city, and was regarded as both a spatial model and a competitor for the Chinese government's attempts to create a modern capital.

Republican Shanghai was a renowned art capital. This article is based on a large-scale digital mapping project of the residential locations of 1,349 Shanghai artists. We analysed the transformative spatial distribution patterns of artists in relation to the city's social and urban conditions, and developed an artists’ habitation approach to elucidating the issues of Republican-period Shanghai urban and art history from the perspective of Chinese cosmopolitanism. We mapped areas of high artist concentration and identified a higher percentage of artists residing in the concessions (compared with the Shanghai general population) and the incremental convergence of art clusters in the concessions. We argue that the concessions provided a favourable environment for cultural diversity and the ungovernable, elite spirit of the literati tradition. The mainstream Shanghai art practices, known as haipai, were modern, as they were rooted in the urban modernity of the concessions and embodied Chinese cosmopolitanism.

This article studies how people, especially the business community, in the southern Chinese city of Canton, responded to the government's fund-raising campaigns in the early phase of the War of Resistance against Japan (1937–45). It challenges the conventional views that the whole city of Canton had wholeheartedly united together in the face of their encroaching enemy, and that people from all walks of life displayed a high degree of patriotism with their self-denying participation in the city's war efforts. Despite the common concern about the threat of looming attack on Canton by the Japanese, this commonality, however, did not help cement the populace into a nationalistic whole with great solidarity, as the state and its publicists hoped. This article also reveals the problem with interpreting socio-political events in this turbulent time through the narrow lens of Chinese nationalism.

The article is a critical investigation of the role played by the Palermo left-wing newspaper L'Ora in uncovering the Sicilian Mafia's urban affairs and property speculation during the sack of Palermo in the 1960s. It pays particular attention to L'Ora's complex narrative concerning the urban Mafia and the many obstacles that the newspaper encountered in its attempt to defend the city. The article aims to explain L'Ora's account of the Mafia as an intersection of violent crime, politics and business. This study uses investigative series and archival sources to explain the emergence of ‘antimafia’ as both concept and political practice in the urban history of Palermo.