Tag Archives: Politics

A New Governor Arrives in Batavia: Public Ceremony in a Colonial City

Posted on 20. April 2020 by Global Urban History

By Mikko Toivanen, University of Edinburgh How can historians relate urban spaces to the lives of city dwellers? Does it matter if the city is located in a colonial setting? Brenda Yeoh has argued that an excessive focus on abstract … Continue reading →

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No Escape

Posted on 7. August 2019 by Global Urban History

By Guy Ortolano, New York University I went urban to escape the global. Supranational histories – imperial, international, transnational, global, world – have become the default frames within which scholarship proceeds. At their best, these approaches shatter the complacencies of … Continue reading →

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An Unlikely Environmentalism: Mexico City’s Urban Ecological Thought in the Age of Development

Posted on 11. September 2018 by Global Urban History

By Matthew Vitz, University of California San Diego Considering Mexico City epitomized environmental catastrophe for much of the 1980s and 1990s, one would not expect it to have been a bastion of innovative urban ecological thinking during the middle of … Continue reading →

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Dakar, Senegal: Cosmopolitan Interwar City

Posted on 24. August 2018 by Global Urban History

By Kathleen Keller, Gustavus Adolphus College One of largest cities in West Africa, Dakar, Senegal sits at the western-most tip of the continent. Now home to a population of over two million people, Dakar of today is the capital of … Continue reading →

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Reading the City from the Streets

Posted on 31. July 2018 by Global Urban History

Kenda Mutongi. Matatu: A History of Popular Transportation in Nairobi. Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press, 2017. 350 pp., US$ 30.00 (paper). Reviewed by Norman Aselmeyer, European University Institute In Nairobi, it is a hopeless task to guard oneself against … Continue reading →

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The Urban and the Powerful: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Global Urban History

Posted on 1. September 2017 by Global Urban History

Göran Therborn, Cities of Power: The Urban, The National, The Popular, The Global, London, Verso, 2017, 408 pp. $35/£20/$47 CAN. Reviewed by Gemma Masson, University of Birmingham The recent growth in popularity of global history has caused many scholars to … Continue reading →

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A Conference on Chinese Cities in World History

Posted on 4. July 2017 by Global Urban History

By Daniel Knorr, University of Chicago The “global turn” in historical studies is a recent phenomenon, but global comparisons have long been foundational in the study of Chinese cities. Max Weber framed this comparison as decisively negative in The City, … Continue reading →

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Global Ottoman: The Cairo-Istanbul Axis

Posted on 13. February 2017 by Global Urban History

By Adam Mestyan, Duke University On a Sunday at the end of January 1863 groups of sheikhs, notables, merchants, consuls, and soldiers gathered in the Citadel of Cairo. They came to witness a crucial event: the reading aloud of the … Continue reading →

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Infrastructural Statecraft and the Rise of Just-in-Time Urbanism

Posted on 9. January 2017 by Global Urban History

By Boris Vormann, Freie Universität Berlin Containerization has led international trade to triple since the mid-1970s. This massive expansion and deepening of exchange networks would have been unthinkable without the construction of material transportation infrastructures in the world’s metropolitan agglomerations. … Continue reading →

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Liberal Cities? What Recent Elections Mean for Global Urban History

Posted on 29. December 2016 by Global Urban History

By Michael Goebel, Freie Universität Berlin The agitated politics of 2016 have led intellectuals the world over to ponder the “end of the Anglo-American order,” the “bankruptcy of the post-war world order,” and the death of “liberalism.” That this death … Continue reading →

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