Vol. 29, March 2021.
Have you published something new in Global Urban History?
We'd like our members to know. Contact Ayan Meer with details.
GUHP is now a member-supported organization. To join or renew your membership, visit our Homepage. |  | Special Announcement
GUHP Emerging:
Four Symposia Spotlighting The New Generation of Global Urban Historians
On April 23, 24, and on May 7 and 8th 2021, participants in this year’s inaugural GUHP Mentorship Program will present their work at four symposia each consisting of a series of 8-minute pre-recorded presentations followed by an hour or so of discussion. These events will occur at different times during these two pairs of Fridays and Saturdays to accommodate participants (and audiences!) who live in many time zones.
Note these days in your calendar now. More information on times, participants, titles, moderators, and registration will be posted within the month. If you are not a GUHP member yet, please join up now to become eligible for registration. Our free-of-cost option is still available, though GUHP, like all organizations in the period could use extra help from all of its members!
Do not miss this chance to hear from the rising generation of global urban historians. See you at the end of next month for this exciting series of events!
| | Controversial Heritage and Divided Memories from the 19th Through the 20th Centuries: Multiethnic Cities in the Mediterranean World.
edited by Marco Folin & Heleni Porfyriou
(Routledge, 2021)
What is the role of cultural heritage in multi-ethnic societies, where cultural memory is often polarized by antagonistic identity traditions? Is it possible for monuments that are generally considered as a symbol of national unity to become emblems of the conflictual histories still undermining divided societies? Taking as a starting point the cosmopolitanism that blossomed across the Mediterranean in the age of empires, this book addresses the issue of heritage exploring the concepts of memory, culture, monuments and their uses, in different case studies ranging from 19th-century Salonica, Port Said, the Palestinian region under Ottoman rule, up to the recent post-war reconstructions of Beirut and Sarajevo.[more] | | |  | | Imperial Mecca. Ottoman Arabia and the Indian Ocean Hajj
by Michael Christopher Low, Iowa State University (USA)
(Columbia University Press, 2020)
With the advent of the steamship, repeated outbreaks of cholera marked oceanic pilgrimages to Mecca as a dangerous form of travel and a vehicle for the globalization of epidemic diseases. European officials also feared that lengthy sojourns in Arabia might expose their Muslim subjects to radicalizing influences from anticolonial dissidents. European colonial empires’ newfound ability to set the terms of hajj travel not only affected the lives of millions of pilgrims but also dramatically challenged the Ottoman Empire, the world’s only remaining Muslim imperial power. Michael Christopher Low analyzes the late Ottoman hajj and Hijaz region as transimperial spaces, reshaped by the competing forces of Istanbul’s project of frontier modernization and the extraterritorial reach of British India’s steamship empire in the Indian Ocean and Red Sea. [more] | | | | "Urban Space as a Factor of Production: Accounting for the Success of Small Factories in Postwar Tokyo"
by Benjamin Bansal
Social Science Japan Journal, Summer 2020
This paper demonstrates that small manufacturing firms in postwar Tokyo were exceptionally successful. Not only were they more productive than their national peers, they were also remarkably competitive vis-à-vis large factories in Tokyo. Small factories compensated for higher labor costs by being more efficient users of urban space. They thrived thanks to Tokyo’s particular urban form, which included a preference for mixed use and often blurred the boundaries between living and workplace. Small factories also benefited from being embedded in the relatively egalitarian structure of postwar Tokyo, as the city avoided spatial stratification despite megacity growth.
[Access the article here] | | |  | "Mapping the Mercantilist World Economy"
Thematic Maps by Eric Ross (Al Akhawayn University, Morocco)
Our current globalized capitalist world economy was built on Mercantilist foundations, put in place in the first phase of global European expansion, the second phase being that of the formal European empires of the industrial age. In the case of the “New World” in the Americas, Europe’s Mercantilists were creating entirely new trade networks and hinterlands. In the Old World of Afro-Eurasia however, Europe was rearranging the existing, much older, world economy it had been part of since the Middle Ages (see Andre Gunder Frank’s Re-Orient and Jim Blaut’s The Colonizer’s Model of the World). Long before Europe ventured across the world’s oceans in the 15th-16th century it was already enmeshed in long-distance trade (Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony). Eric Ross maps the Afro-Eurasian trade routes of the mid-14th century, a time when Atlantic Europe was a periphery, at the northeastern extremity of a system of overlapping trade networks which extended as far as Japan, Indonesia, Zimbabwe and Mali. Together, these trade relations created a single world economy. [Access the maps here]
| Related Networks and Events
| | DCNtR
Decolonizing Collections - Networking towards Relationality
This blog is aimed at decentering the debate on colonial and ethnographic collections, archives, and museums. Its goal is to rethink colonial knowledges and dominant epistemic practices in an attempt to undo them. We seek to destabilize center-periphery divisions by providing a platform for diverse voices from various backgrounds, provincializing taken-for-granted assumptions in museums and by reaching out to new publics. DCNtR invite indigenous stakeholders, local experts, postcolonial activists, artists, museum practitioners, and scholars from different disciplines and regions to contribute. [more]
| | | | Summer School: "What is European History in the 21st Century?"
European University Institute (online), 14-16 September 2021.
In the nearly half century since the EUI History Department was established, the contours of European history have shifted away from nation-based or comparative approaches. The department now defines itself a center for the study of Trans-national, Global and comparative history. All of these approaches are implicitly about creating a new history of Europe, but have they accomplished this goal? What is the outlook for the future of this project? Application deadline: April 30, 2021. [more] | | | |