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This book reveals the extraordinary contribution which horses, cattle, sheep, pigs and dogs made to London, the world’s first modern metropolis, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as well as the huge challenges which they posed. By the early 1800s, an estimated 31,000 horses were at work in and around the city, while a similar number of sheep and cattle were driven through its streets every week. No other settlement in Europe or North America had ever accommodated so many large four-legged animals, or felt their influence so profoundly. Following in their hoof- and paw-prints, this book offers a panoramic new perspective on Georgian London, challenging orthodox assumptions about its role in the agricultural, consumer and industrial revolutions, as well as reappraising key aspects of the city’s culture, social relations and physical development. In doing so, it argues for non-human animal agency and its integration into social and urban history. Moving away from the philosophical, fictional and humanitarian sources which have dominated English animal studies, this book focuses on evidence of tangible, dung-bespattered interactions between real people and animals drawn from legal, parish, commercial, newspaper and private records. As a result, it offers new insights into the lived experiences of Georgian Londoners, as well as the character and everyday workings of their city.
This book seeks to challenge the notion of the supremacy of the brain as the key organ of the Enlightenment. It is done by focusing on the workings of the bowels and viscera that so obsessed writers and thinkers during the long eighteenth-century. These inner organs and the digestive process acted as counterpoints to politeness and other modes of refined sociability, drawing attention to the deeper workings of the self. The book complicates the idea that discourses and representations of digestion and bowels are confined to so-called consumption culture of the long eighteenth century, in which dysfunctional bowels are categorised as a symptom of excess. It offers an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural perspective on entrails and digestion by addressing urban history, visual studies, literature, medical history, religious history, and material culture in England, France, and Germany. The book explores the metaphorical and symbolic connections between the entrails of the body and the bowels of the city or the labyrinthine tunnels of the mine. It then illustrates the materiality of digestion by focusing on its by-products and their satirical or epistemological manifestations. The book expounds further on the burlesque motif of the innards as it is used to subvert areas of more serious knowledge, from medical treatises to epic literature or visual representation. Finally, it focuses on drawings, engravings and caricatures which used the bowels, viscera and entrails to articulate political protest, Revolutionary tensions and subversion through scatological aesthetics, or to expose those invisible organs.
This book is the first collection of translated sources on towns in medieval England between 1100 and 1500. Drawing on a variety of written evidence for the significan and dynamic period, it provides an overview of English medieval urban history. Readers are invited to consider the challenges and opportunities presented by a wide range of sources. The merchant, for example, is seen from different angles - as an economic agent, as a religious patron and in Chaucer's fictional depiction. The prominence of London and the other major cities is reflected in the selection, but due attention is also given to a number of small market towns. Occasions of conflict are represented, as are examples of groups and societies which both contributed to and helped to contain the tensions within urban society. Changing indicators of wealth and poverty are considered, together with evidence for more complex questions concerning the quality of life in the medieval town. The book moves between the experience of urban life and contemporary perceptions of it - from domestic furnishings to legends of civic origins and plays in which townspeople enacted their own history.
This book brings together studies of cultural institutions in Manchester from 1850 to the present day, giving an unprecedented account of the city’s cultural evolution. These bring to light the remarkable range of Manchester’s contribution to modern cultural life, including the role of art education, popular theatre, religion, pleasure gardens, clubs and societies. The chapters show the resilience and creativity of Manchester’s cultural institutions since 1850, challenging any simple narrative of urban decline following the erosion of Lancashire’s industrial base, at the same time illustrating the range of activities across the social classes. The essays are organized chronologically. They consider the role of calico printers in the rise of art education in Britain; the origins and early years of the Belle Vue Zoological Gardens; the formation of the Manchester Dante Society in 1906; the importance of theatre architecture in the social life of the city; the place of religion in early twentieth-century Manchester, in the case of its Methodist Mission; the cosmopolitan nature of the Manchester International Club, founded in 1937; cultural participation in contemporary Manchester; and questions of culture and class in the case of a contemporary theatre group.
Each summer, a “perpetual fair” plagued eighteenth-century London, a city in transition overrun by a burgeoning population. City officials attempted to control disorderly urban amusement according to their own gendered understandings of order and morality. Frequently derided as locations of dangerous femininity disrupting masculine commerce, fairs withstood regulation attempts. Fairs were important in the lives of ordinary Londoners as sites of women’s work, sociability, and local and national identity formation. Rarely studied as vital to London’s modernization, urban fairs are a microcosm of London’s transforming society demonstrating how metropolitan changes were popularly contested. This study contributes to our understanding of popular culture and modernization in Britain during the formative years of its global empire. Drawing on legal records, popular literature, visual representations, and newspapers, this study places official discourse regarding urban amusement into the context of broader cultural understandings of gender and social hierarchies, commerce, public morality, and the urban environment. Entertainments, such as theatre, waxwork displays, and “monsters” are examined as cultural representations that disseminated ideas about “Britishness” and empire to a diverse audience. Such entertainment is often overlooked in works focused on elite culture or exhibits in the later era of World’s Fairs. This book demonstrates a thriving world of exhibition in the eighteenth century, which is a vital component to understanding later expositions. Examples drawn from literary and visual culture make this an engaging study for scholars and students of late Stuart and early Georgian Britain, urban and gender history, World’s Fairs, and cultural studies.
This book is a history of nineteenth-century Dublin through human–animal relationships. The book offers a unique perspective on ordinary life in the Irish metropolis during a century of significant change and reform. The book argues that the exploitation of animals formed a key component of urban change, from municipal reform to class formation to the expansion of public health and policing. The book uses a social history approach but draws on a range of new and underused sources including archives of the humane society and the Zoological Society, popular songs, visual ephemera and diaries. The book moves chronologically from 1830 to 1900 with each chapter focused on specific animals and their relationship to urban changes. The first chapter examines the impact of Catholic emancipation and rising Catholic nationalism on the Zoological Society and the humane movement. The second chapter looks at how the Great Famine drove reformers to try to clearly separate the urban poor from animals. The third chapter considers the impact of the expanding cattle trade on the geography, infrastructure and living conditions of the city. The fourth chapter looks at how middle-class ideas about the control of animals entered the legal code and changed where and how pigs and dogs were kept in the city. The fifth and final chapter compares ideas of the city as modern or declining and how contrasting visions were associated with particular animals. The book will interest anyone fascinated by the history of cities, the history of Dublin or the history of Ireland.
European cities: modernity, race and colonialism is a multidisciplinary collection of scholarly studies that sets out to rethink urban Europe from a race-conscious perspective, reflexively and critically aware of colonial entanglements and what came to be known as ‘‘modernity’’. The twelve original contributions engage various combinations of urban studies, postcolonial, decolonial and race critical theories. The results are empirical and theoretical analyses critically centring on the multiple ways in which race partakes in the production of urban space in the twenty-first-century former metropole. European cities across the East–West divide get in this way decentred and detached from dominant Eurocentric analyses and (self-)representations; viewed from global and historical perspectives, their aura of alleged ‘‘modernity’’ leaves the proscenium to offer the reader an opportunity to start imagining and understanding urban living and politics otherwise. After decades of rigorous critical race scholarship on various global urban regions, European cities is a comprehensive attempt to squarely centre race in analyses of urban Europe. The book may appeal to all students and learners both within and outside academia; scholars; activists; journalists; and policy makers interested in urban life, governance, planning, racism, Europe and colonialism.
somewhat patronising way, always refer to as ‘the provinces’. Moreover, Leeds was and is an important Jewish community in its own right, the third largest in the country, and in the mid-twentieth century was the city with the highest Jewish percentage (always said to be 5%). Developments in urban history have moved the subject away from a narrow emphasis on physical development and urban social problems (slums and suburbs) to encompass a broader cultural approach which makes this book particularly relevant. Urban historians have long contended that the study of cities
, the process of fragmentation has continued as separate disciplines have developed with ever greater specialisation. Family history, urban history, landscape studies, and place-name analysis, all turned into specialist subjects with their own methodologies and outlets. Consequently some of the key issues which were once the province of the local historian are now disciplines in themselves, with more, or sometimes less good relations with the original subject. In this chapter we look particularly at the way the study of the family has become a separate area of
overview of current research in political, economic and cultural urban history, but, as remarked by Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, ‘the authors overlook French-language publications despite the fact that this is one of the areas where French-speaking historians have done the most work’. 20 However, it is especially during the last two or three decades that a bridge has indeed been built between the anglophone