This introduction to the ‘Survey and Speculation’ special issue ‘Empire and Cities’ outlines how this collection came about, summarizes the six contributions and draws general conclusions.

Using York during the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries as a case-study, this article discusses a pivotal aspect of the development of civic administrative literacy: the inception of record-keeping. Previous historians have failed to note the evident advancement in York’s civic administrative literacy during the late thirteenth century, and they have usually dated the earliest surviving urban records to the mid-fourteenth century. By comparing different classes of civic and ecclesiastical records, this article reveals that York’s civic administration was in fact engaged in archival preservation from the late thirteenth century. In addition, by examining evidence that appears sporadically in royal archives, this article argues that the commencement of York’s urban archive was significantly influenced by the policies and archival activities of the royal government. Overall, this article aims to contribute to the literature on the early history of civic administrative literacy.

Although many towns repaired, restored or destroyed the ruins of Civil War sieges, there are a number of towns, villages and hamlets which still clearly bear marks of the conflict. By focusing on Colchester, this article will highlight how sites affected by the wars remained and survived in the local consciousness throughout the following centuries. This article traces the uses of such sites in the urban landscape in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to assess the long-term impact of the war on towns in the British Isles. By examining Colchester in 1648, the article will show how political parties, parishes, tourists and businesses all derived value from the sites of the siege centuries after it had ended.

This survey challenges conventional perceptions of colonial suburbs in the early modern Indian Ocean world in general, and those under the rule of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in particular. Recent urban research advocates re-evaluating suburbs as intricate and diverse spaces, yet this shift has had limited impact on historical studies of early modern colonialism. The survey highlights the importance of recognizing suburban regions in eighteenth-century settlements such as Cape Town, Cochin, Colombo or Batavia, where significant population growth resulted from inter-Asian and internal migration. These areas fostered ethnic and cultural diversity, disrupting normative ideas of segregation. By shifting the analytical focus from the core to the periphery and exploring colonial histories from an outside-in perspective, the contribution emphasizes the potential of a more horizontal approach to sub/urbanity for understanding early modern colonial societies, encouraging scholars to delve into the intersection of ‘the imperial’ and ‘the urban’.

This special issue draws on new research conducted by the PUblic REnaissance: Urban Cultures of Public Space between Early Modern Europe and the Present project, funded by the Humanities in the European Research Area (see: www.hiddencities.eu). The project considers how public spaces, from street corners to major city squares, were shaped by the everyday activities of ordinary city dwellers between 1450 and 1700. We have focused on the urban fabric, and the ways in which meanings are attached to specific sites in the city (and objects in museum collections) that are often overlooked – the material culture of public space. Our themes are familiar to urban historians – sociability, the circulation of knowledge, information or gossip, authority and its contestation – although by moving between textual sources, maps, the built fabric and museum artefacts, our interdisciplinary and cross-Europe approach is structured around material objects in the early modern period.

The city of Sapporo, founded in 1869 by the Japanese government as a colonial headquarters in Hokkaido, developed as part of a global wave of settler-colonial urbanism. Like counterparts in North America and Australia, Sapporo facilitated economic, environmental and political transformations across Hokkaido that led to the displacement of Indigenous Ainu society by a soon overwhelming number of ethnically Japanese settlers. However, several historical factors distinguish Sapporo’s settler-colonial urbanism from its peers, including the long history of relations between the Ainu and Japanese; the heavy role of the Japanese state in Sapporo; and the lack of mass relocations of the Ainu to reservations far from their traditional homes.

As a vernacular dwelling form, the historical hutong districts in Beijing have represented local people’s traditional ways of living and thinking. However, in recent decades, such urban memories have dissipated as the old cityscape has gradually been overwritten by modernist, international-style designs. To ensure that locality and identity are not forgotten, this article examines the potential role of fiction films as a form of digital ‘lieux de mémoire’ (sites of memory), which not only archives but also evokes nostalgia for memories lost in urban transition. This interdisciplinary study rereads the extensive modernist transformation of Beijing’s historical hutong area through the lens of film (1940s–2010s), and thus brings a humanized, historical insight into this vernacular cityscape by focusing on reviving and strengthening the fading urban qualities.

This article will address the transfer of religious knowledge in two north-western European cities from a spatial perspective. Our starting point will be the thesis that immobile knowledge in closed places of knowledge (lieux de savoir) does not exist: (religious) knowledge only becomes functional in the dynamic encounter with users and it is disseminated through social networks. This approach, which involves the movement from closed spaces to processes and practices, also entails a questioning of outdoor and indoor spaces; of private and public spaces. The article will take its start from several case-studies of indoor public spaces, the transmission of religious knowledge and social networks, based on documentation from Deventer in the northern Low Countries and Amiens on the border of the southern Low Countries and France.

The modern history of Tianjin, a northern port city in China, offers an intriguing urban case for scholars interested in comparative colonial practices. From the 1860s to the 1940s, Tianjin was home to up to nine foreign concessions and a sequence of different Chinese municipalities. While much scholarship on colonial history has focused on the interactive dynamics between the colonizer and the colonized, Tianjin’s colonial past draws attention to the multiplicity, multilateralism and multilayered trajectories at the heart of the colonial experiences of both imperialist powers and the Chinese. At the heart of this short survey are some reflections on the multi-imperial dimensions of the city of Tianjin. It also explains how the multi-imperial dimensions operated in Tianjin in its treaty-port incarnation and offers some considerations of how the Tianjin case contributes to broader historiographical conversations germane to the imperial–global–urban complex.

The town of Mirny, which was established in 1955 in the Arctic region of Yakutia, was not only the first Soviet settlement constructed near the newly explored diamond mine; it was also one of the first industrial towns in the Soviet Arctic to be constructed from scratch in the post-World War II period, as it was never part of the Gulag legacy. Focusing on the case of Mirny, this article elucidates the new principles behind the perception of urban space in the Soviet Arctic in the 1960s. Close analysis of the first years of the town’s construction illuminates the formation of a new conception of a socialist Arctic town at that period – a town open for migration flows, with a developed public and social sphere, that was celebrated as a ‘town of youth’ or a ‘town of the future’, and yet was also a town where extreme environmental conditions had a greater influence on the life of its inhabitants than did official state directives and regulations.

In Renaissance Italy, the political power of authorities found one of its expressions in material symbols of sovereignty. The placing of inscriptions, sculptures and columns and the commissioning of frescoes in streets, piazzas and public spaces, for example, were essential ways of communicating political or spiritual authority to the populace. Sometimes perceived as representations of a top-down form of communication, in the urban context these same material emblems of power became political objects through which to express dissent, as in the case of public loggias, speaking statues or graffiti on walls and civic palaces. Presenting case-studies from various cities in northern Italy, this article investigates the dialectics between the people and the authorities in the urban fabric, especially in everyday life. Combining a spatial and a material approach to politics, this article reveals the dynamic and relational nature of political public spaces.

In an attempt to counteract the silence of Exeter’s late sixteenth-century cartographic representation and to explore further the idea of urban social relations expressed in auditory terms, this article investigates the issues involved in the ringing of Exeter’s civic bells, some of which may reflect a fractious relationship between two sources of authority within the city walls. It sets out some of the challenges to recreating this city’s broader sonic identity and outlines the results of initial attempts to do so.

This survey introduces the reader to the history of international zones. It argues that they offer striking insights into peacekeeping during the transition from a world of formal empires to one dominated by sovereign states. While the study of international zones is not new, there has been little examination of internationalization in practice. The survey suggests some of the benefits of adopting this approach and findings it might unearth.

This article examines the mechanics of Niederlech (a law that obliged merchants travelling between Germany and Italy to spend the night in the city, change wagons and pay a small sum of money) and German–Italian mobility in early modern Gemona. It argues that the fragility of Venetian institutions and a lack of German–Italian border controls set the scene for criminal activities, especially contraband, in which Gemona innkeepers appear to have played a significant part. It will also show that this illegal trafficking led to a new ruling class forming, a key factor in the city’s reorganization of social hierarchies.

Situated on the tip of a mountainous peninsula jutting out into the Atlantic Ocean off the west coast of Africa, the city of Freetown, Sierra Leone, receives an extraordinarily high rainfall, heavily concentrated in the few months of the rainy season. Working from this extreme wetness and inspired by recent work in the oceanic humanities, this article reads Freetown’s colonial era newspaper archive for water. It argues that the heavy rain of the West African Monsoon was an important agent in shaping the decaying streetscape of the city, and a broader imaginary of decline, at the turn of the twentieth century. Using vivid descriptions of wetness, nature and disease, African editors, correspondents and letter-writers evoked a sodden modernity to push the colonial government to maintain and improve the city’s street infrastructure and at once to forge an elite urban public in opposition to migrants from the urban hinterland.

Focusing on seventeenth-century Madrid, this article explores the interplay between urban public space and a specific type of written defamatory statements, the carteles de desafío or letters of challenge, with the aim of examining the implications of this interaction. Letters of challenge were primarily conceived as a communication tool between the participants in duels and challenges. Displayed in public spaces, they could take on new meanings and even replace the combat itself, while at the same time perpetuating the values of a male honour culture that encouraged the use of violence among large sectors of society to settle disputes.

This survey reflects on the intersections of global and urban history through brief reflections on the Round Table Conference which took place over three sessions in London between 1930 and 1932. Uniting Indian representatives and the British government in London to solve political stalemate in South Asia, the conference provides a dramatic event through which to explore the enfolding of the British empire into the imperial capital. But the conference was also indebted to international and global connections and comparisons which intersected in the intimate spaces of diplomatic networking in the capital.

The main question of this special issue is how international traders were able to manage their activities and conflicts successfully when they regularly had to cross legal boundaries and were operating in different and overlapping jurisdictions in northern Europe in the period c. 1350–1600. The contributions in this issue approach this central question from a range of perspectives. This introduction identifies these perspectives, as well as common themes and findings, and indicates why it is particularly pertinent to discuss the topic of crossing legal boundaries in the context of urban history. It also discusses relevant historiographical debates and key concepts of urban jurisdiction and jurisdictional boundaries in late medieval northern European towns.

This article investigates the transformation of the body of a female child murderer as she passed through specific spatial configurations in the urban setting of the seventeenth-century capital of Denmark–Norway. By using the case of Gertrud Nielsdatter, we explore the significance of public urban spaces in the bodily and material transformation of a woman from a condemned sinner to an object of scientific wonder. This transformation was facilitated by practices in diverse public spaces – controlled or influenced by government, city, church, as well as academic authorities and stakeholders – such as the city court, the place of execution, the university and, not least, the book shops across Europe selling books containing the print representing internal organs of Gertrud Nielsdatter. The case demonstrates how the physical body of an ordinary – yet outlawed – Copenhagener was repeatedly transformed in interaction with public spaces and the material culture of buildings, fixtures and fittings.