Vol. 30, April 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. | | An Urban History of China
by Toby Lincoln, University of Leicester, UK.
(Cambridge University Press, 2021)
In this accessible new study, Toby Lincoln offers the first history of Chinese cities from their origins to the present. Despite being an agricultural society for thousands of years, China had an imperial urban civilization. Over the last century, this urban civilization has been transformed into the world's largest modern urban society. Throughout their long history, Chinese cities have been shaped by interactions with those around the world, and the story of urban China is a crucial part of the history of how the world has become an urban society. Exploring the global connections of Chinese cities, the urban system, urban governance, and daily life alongside introductions to major historical debates and extracts from primary sources, this is essential reading for all those interested in China and in urban history.[more] | | | | Making Identity on the Swahili Coast: Urban Life, Community, Belonging in Bagamoyo
by Steven Fabian, State University of New York, USA
(Columbia University Press, 2019)
Situated at a crossroads of trade in the late 19th century, the thriving caravan and port town of Bagamoyo, Tanzania is one of many diverse communities on the East African coast which has been characterized as 'Swahili'. Steven Fabian combines extensive archival sources from African and European archives alongside fieldwork in Bagamoyo to move beyond the category of 'Swahili' as it has been traditionally understood. Revealing how townspeople - Africans, Arabs, Indians, and Europeans alike - created a local vocabulary which referenced aspects of everyday town life and bound them together as members of a shared community, this first extensive examination of Bagamoyo's history uses a new lens of historical analysis to emphasize the importance of place in creating local, urban identities. [more] | | | | "A Life Lived Across Continents. The Global Microhistory of an Armenian Agent of the Compagnie des Indes Orientales, 1666-1688"
by Sebouh David Aslanian, UCLA, USA.
Annales, March 2021.
In 1666, French finance minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert hired Martin di Marcara Avachinz, an Armenian merchant who had lived in Iran and India, as an agent for his newly established Compagnie des Indes orientales. In 1669, shortly after he had secured an edict from the sultan Of Golconda to set up a French trading center in Masulipatam, he was arrested, tortured, and sent to France. This article provides a close reading of the legal briefs or factums produced during the sensational trial that followed Marcara’s release.
[Access the article here] | | | | "Global Urban History: An Invitation to Dialogue"
by Mariana L.R. Dantas, João Júlio Gomes dos Santos Júnior, and Carl H. Nightingale.
Esboços, Spring 2021
The nine articles collected in this volume examine the trajectory of cities along the 20th century. Issues common to the research area of urban history -urbanization, the management and use of urban spaces, access to housing, and the consumption of art and entertainment - are approached in a perspective attentive to the flow of ideas, practices and products. On the other hand, varied global processes, from the emergence of international trade in art to the impact of the economy of soy, are examined and anchored in studies of specific cities. Together, the selected works reveal cities as sometimes the product of globalizing forces, sometimes as agents and promoters of globalizing trends.
[Access the issue here]
| | | | "A Sacred Duty: Nationalist and Anti-Imperial Activisms in Buenos Aires, 1916-1930"
by Steven Hyland, Wingate University, USA
Journal of Urban History, May 2019
Buenos Aires emerged a critical hub of radical political activism between 1916 and 1930 at a time when the influence of anarchist activists waned and organized labor often worked with the Radical Civic Union presidents. Whether based in or passing through this city, activists and exiles, partisans, and pretenders pursued various strategies to achieve revolutionary change, raise funds for causes, assure sovereignty, control the public narrative, and network with like-minded individuals and groups. These agitators created webs of associations throughout the Atlantic world in the process.
[Access the article here] | | | | "The Global, the Urban, and the Revolution in 1970s Iran"
by Rasmus Christian Elling (University of Copenhagen, Denmark)
The Iranian Revolution, most historians argue, was an urban phenomenon in which mass demonstrations in major cities led to the spectacular downfall of the shah in 1979. In addition to Ayatollah Khomeini’s politicized Shiite-Islamic discourse, it is further argued, popular revolutionary resolve was prefigured specifically by Marxist urban guerrillas. But what was urban about these guerrillas?
| | | Historical Maps of Indian Towns and Cities
by Ian Poyntz
| Related Networks and Events
| | CfP -- "Doing the Global Intellectual History of Social Movements"
19-21 August 2021, Berlin.
This workshop aims to link global intellectual history with the history of social movements. Recent publications have tackled common diffusionist understandings of the relationship between “intellectuals” and social movements. This workshop, supported by the Global Intellectual History Graduate School in Berlin, seeks to bring together scholars from different parts of the world to engage in a broader discussion about how to research and write global intellectual histories of social movements. Deadline: May 28, 2021 [more]
| | | Send us your caption, the best ones will be published in next month's Noteworthy
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