Category Archives: Article

Analyzing the Palimpsestic Petroleumscape of Rotterdam

By Carola Hein, Delft University of Technology Petroleum – its extraction, refining, transformation, and consumption – has shaped our built environment in visible and invisible interconnected ways around the world over the last 150 years. Industrial structures, buildings, monuments, urban … Continue reading

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Sex Work Regulation and the Colonial Order in Late Nineteenth-Century Cairo

By Francesca Biancani, University of Bologna In modern cities, flows of people, capital, and desires intermingled and structured a new spatial order. Straight streets, airy boulevards, agreeable parks, coffee houses, and taverns constituted the backdrop of a new type of … Continue reading

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The Paris Commune in Global Urban History

By Quentin Deluermoz, Université Paris 13 Translated from the French by Cecilia Terrero Fernández Although the Paris Commune is considered a major event in the history of the modern world – just think about how the Russian and Chinese revolutions … Continue reading

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African Urban History and Global History – a Comment

Liora Bigon, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem Reflecting on Africa’s urban past in the context of African history and as part of a global phenomenon is a challenging mission situated at the intersection of three subfields of research: African history, … Continue reading

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Reflections on “Global Urban History” at the Second Global History Student Conference

Philipp Kandler, Freie Universität Berlin, and Thomas Lindner, Max Planck Institute for Human Development The global history of cities is en vogue at the moment. Increasing numbers of historians interested in global history turn to cities as spaces of connectedness … Continue reading

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Japan’s Urban Colonial Past and the Problem of Commemoration

Emer O’Dwyer, Oberlin College In January of this year, Miura Hideyuki, a journalist for the Asahi shinbun, was awarded the Kaikō Ken Memorial Nonfiction Prize for his work of reportage, Five-Colored Rainbow (Goshiki no niji, Shūeisha, 2015). In it, Miura … Continue reading

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Claims of Modernity: The Building of the Ottoman Imperial Bank in Istanbul

Fabian Steininger, Max Planck Institute for Human Development In May 1892, the Ottoman state bank (Bank-ı Osmanī-i Şahane) moved into its newly built headquarters in the Voyvoda Caddesi in Istanbul’s Karaköy district. The bank had been founded almost twenty years … Continue reading

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Mapping as Process: Food Access in Nineteenth-Century New York

Gergely Baics, Barnard College, Columbia University Geographic information system (GIS) has changed social science and humanities research through spatial analysis. It has reinvigorated the spatial turn, which has swept many fields in the past decades, improving their empirical foundations, methodological … Continue reading

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From Lancashire to the World: The Manchester Ship Canal and Globalization

Harry Stopes, University College London “The ship, prophetic feature of the City Arms, will be no longer a prophecy of what is to be; it will be the symbol of what is, the Port of Manchester, with that other feature … Continue reading

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Paris Everywhere? The Challenge of Eurocentrism in Global Urban History

Joseph Ben Prestel, Freie Universität Berlin Urban history is becoming increasingly global. Recent trends in historiography, such as transnational and global history, have inspired scholars of urban history who show a renewed interest in questions of comparison and connections. This … Continue reading

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