Summary articles Comparative Urban History
Introduction
Charles Tilly, What Good is Urban History? (1996)
Urban Institutions in the Christian, Islamic and East Asian Worlds in the Middle Ages
Jeff Fynn-Paul, Let’s talk about class: towards an institutionalist typology of class relations in the cities
of pre-modern Europe (1200-1800) (2014)
Janet Abu-Lughod, The Islamic City – Historic Myth, Islamic Essence and Contemporary Relevance
(1987)
Creel, The Beginnings of Bureaucracy in China: the Origin of the Hsien (1964)
Migration and Membership Regimes
Lucassen, Population and Migration (2012)
Civil Societies: Early Modern Urban Communities
Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk en Griet Vermeesch, Changes in urban provisions for the poor in the
northern and southern Low Countries, 1500-1800 (2009)
Craft Guilds in Comparative Perspective
Catharina Lis en Hugo Soly, Craft guilds in comparative perspective: the Northern and Southern
Netherlands, a survey (2006)
Access to Justice in Comparative Perspective
Nathalie Zemon Davis, Judges, Masters, Diviners: Slaves’ Experience of Criminal Justice in Colonial
Suriname (2011)
Martin Dinges, The Uses of Justice as a Form of Social Control in Early Modern Europe (2004)
Introduction
Charles Tilly, What Good is Urban History? (1996)
Five sentences that sum up Tilly’s message:
1. Urban historians have the opportunity to be the most important interpreters of the way that global
social processes articulate with small-scale social life.
2. These historians have turned unseeing eyes to the challenge.
3. They need not remain forever blind.
4. The work of these historians doesn’t respond to exhortation: only concrete examples will move
them to new forms of investigation.
5. Someone will have to just do it.
This article will elaborate these five sentences. Urban historians can move toward a central position in his-
tory by taking two steps: 1) boldly addressing history’s central questions, rather than sticking to urban his-
tory’s conventional problems. 2) adopting a reflective historicism.
1) The role of social history (according to Tilly and Olivier Zunz): connect everyday experience to large
structures of historical analysis and major changes of the past. Tilly wants to add the importance of urban
history in this role. Treating urban history as ultimate social history gives the means of addressing central
historical questions (e.g. How and why did capitalism come to be the dominant form of economic organiza-
tion in western countries?), or address problems at a national scale (e.g. Did the Civil War pit fundamentally
incompatible ways of life against each other?) cities offer privileged sites for study of the interaction
between large social processes and routines of local life Urban historians: superior access to the sites
and know more about the bases of variation in these regards from one time and place to another. Crucial:
This kind of questions fall within the purview of urban history.
In the past when urban historians have asked such questions effectively, nonspecialists have taken no-
tice.
Today’s urban historians are not articulating such questions forcefully, they are being cautious.
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, Urban historians should move to the boldest edge of social history.
Not all urban history falls into social history: architecture, urban government, writings about cities contrib-
ute to urban history, but stand adjacent to social history (than inside it). Much urban history deals directly
with connections between global and social process (urbanization, trade, epidemics, state formation, etc.)
and the lives of individuals, households, shops and neighborhoods:
Cities constitute major sites and junctions for them (e.g. expansion manufacturing countryside con-
nections with urban market and merchants).
Urban history deals a lot with the impact of global processes on small-scale life or the impact of small-
scale life on global processes.*
* Lewis Mumford’s challenge: trace relations among large shifts in economic organization, alterations of
urban geography and changes in the quality of social life. Still a lot of historians don’t agree with his ideas
(‘sentimentalist who neglected details and realities of urban history’, ‘arrogant and inconsistent tastes’),
some take over his challenge. Although he has two features that set him off as a great urban historian:
His insistence of the close connection between internal lives of cities and composition of power and
production within which they lay.
His forming of a theory in which the relative concentrations of state power and commercial productive
activity stamped the character of urban life.
He demonstrates the feasibility of forming theories that cross city boundaries to provide coherent ac-
counts of life on the small scale and the large.
The short lived ‘new urban history’ collapsed (according to Eric Monkkonen) because its they failed to de-
velop a more effective way of summarizing its results, avoided reflection on the more general significance
of its main findings and turned away from the enterprise rather than countering the criticism it generated.
According to Tilly this statement misses the decline’s more general causes: it corresponded to a wide disil-
lusionment. Various populisms of the 60’s had great hopes for systematic history form below gave way to
more cynical, discouraged and elitist interpretations of popular experience. People started to lose interest
because no one figured out how to get a firm grip on city-to-city and year-to-year variation. And its greatest
impact arrived in the idea of confronting American mobility myths with hard evidence. When this couldn’t
be found, historians started to search elsewhere for keys to social change. And publishers lost interest in
printing more or less the same studies.
Urban collective biography hasn’t entirely disappeared, still important in studies of immigration, ethnicity,
occupational history and political mobilization. Some are applying it to the study of conflicts. No good sim-
ilar method has appeared to replace the local mobility study. According to Tilly this isn’t that bad because
this study rests on a series of misconceptions, that… (just a few examples):
Occupations form neat hierarchies.
They determine their holders’ life chances.
Explanations of lifetime and intergenerational movement from occupation to occupation rest chiefly
on individual characteristics.
The current study of social mobility neglects three fundamental features of social inequality:
1. Few inequalities compound into uniform hierarchies most are fragmentary and inconsistent.
Rather a web than a ladder.
2. Inequalities between two social units vary from one setting to another as a function of resources
available to each party in that setting and relations with third parties activated by presence in that
setting.
3. Any particular actor’s power, influence and control over resources decline with time and distance.
Often is one more powerful, rich, etc. on his home territory, but weak elsewhere.
Most of all, prevailing conceptions of social mobility neglected the exercise of power of ethnic groups and
power of political authorities identification of the fundamental problem: treatment of each city as a
sample case from a national frame. This blinds analysts to relations between processes generating or sus-
taining inequality in any particular city and regional, national or international flows of capital, labor and
political power urban history connects with general history through just such interactions.
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