Marc Matera, Black London: The Imperial Metropolis and Decolonization in the Twentieth Century, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015, 414 pp., $29.95 / £22.95, ISBN: 9780520284302
Kennetta Hammond Perry, London is the Place for Me: Black Britons, Citizenship and the Politics of Race, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016, 336 pp., $49.95 / £22.95, ISBN: 9780190240202
Reviewed by Michael Goebel, Freie Universität Berlin
If there is a specific date on which Britain became “postcolonial,” many would opt for June 22, 1948. On that day, a former Nazi naval vessel that the war’s outcome had Anglicized, now sailing by the name Empire Windrush, docked at Tilbury on the Thames Estuary. It carried around 500 West Indian labor migrants, who in the popular imagination represented the vanguard of larger numbers to come. Among them was a 26-year-old Trinidadian orphan who in London achieved world fame as the “grand master of calypso.” As the young man’s stage name, Lord Kitchener, testified, a good part of this generation of colonial immigrants was infatuated with the British Empire. “My residence is Hampton Court, so London, that’s the place for me,” he hummed in one of his most celebrated songs, first recorded in 1951.
European Jewry, population exchange and Sovietization. In 1914 Lviv (Polish: Lwów) was a predominantly Polish and Jewish city with a growing and increasingly confident Ukrainian minority and the provincial capital of the Habsburg crownland known as the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria. In 2014 Lviv had been an overwhelmingly Ukrainian city for decades and many of its inhabitants were among those demonstrating for a European orientation of their country on Kyiv’s square of independence. Lviv is often construed as the hotbed of an exclusive Ukrainian ethnic nationalism alien to Ukrainians in the East and ultimately incompatible with their own Soviet past. Not least against this background Tarik Cyril Amar’s study is an important reminder of how much more complex Lviv’s past really is. Lviv’s transformation during the first half of the twentieth century is also the subject of Christoph Mick’s book 
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 tools and analytical process. Historians, especially those working within the field of urban history, have looked to GIS to incorporate new resources and methods to raise new questions or revisit old ones. Further, given the considerable data demands of certain projects, GIS mapping has made historical research more accessible, collaborative and open-ended. Some of the most fruitful collaborations occur when the public is directly invited to help produce and make use of historical GIS data, as is the case with the New York Public Library’s several creative initiatives (
In 1903, the American business journalist Edwin Lefèvre predicted that ‘[t]he history of the bull speculation in cotton of 1903 will never be fully written, because, though the men who influenced it are very interesting, their operations are interwoven with bloodless statistics and tiresome technicalities’ (p. 1). It is, indeed, hard to imagine a history of futures trading entirely devoid of statistics and technicalities. In recent years, however, historians have begun rising to the challenge of writing histories of futures markets that, far from being dry and bloodless, successfully integrate the story of their nature and development into broader legal, economic, political, and cultural contexts. The Cotton Kings, by Bruce E. Baker and Barbara Hahn, which explicitly sets out to prove Lefèvre wrong, is a welcome addition to this small but growing field. Relying on a large amount of primary source material (mostly newspapers and government reports), the authors of this well-researched book reconstruct the history of the market in cotton futures in New Orleans and New York at the turn of the twentieth century. Baker and Hahn narrate their story by combining approaches of ‘business history, southern history, social history, political history, [and] environmental history’ (p. 146). Urban historians will appreciate the occasional foray into the history of New Orleans (New York history, by contrast, is dealt short shrift); overall, though, the immediate physical and material environment of cotton speculation is not the book’s main focus of interest. Transnational and global aspects are acknowledged in the form of brief but incisive sketches of Liverpool’s role in the worldwide cotton trade.
Global Urban History 