Vol. 18, March 2020.
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. | | Making the Modern Slum: The Power of Capital in Colonial Mumbai
by Sheetal Chhabria, Connecticut College, USA
(University of Washington Press, 2019)
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Bombay was beset by crises such as famine and plague. Yet, rather than halting the flow of capital, these crises served to secure it. Sheetal Chhabria locates the origins of Bombay’s now infamous “slum problem” in the broader histories of colonialism and capitalism. She not only challenges assumptions about colonial urbanization and cities in the global south, but also provides a new analytical approach to urban history. Making the Modern Slum shows how the wellbeing of the city–rather than of its people–became an increasingly urgent goal of government, positioning agrarian distress, famished migrants, and the laboring poor as threats to be contained or excluded. [more] | | | | Contours of the Illiberal State: Governing Circulation in the Smart Economy
edited by Boris Vormann and Christian Lammert
(University of Chicago Press, 2019)
The post-Cold War era was marked by the emergence of unprecedented new networks of international private trade, cooperation, and circulation of goods that promised to render the state nearly obsolete—at least in theory. The essays collected in this book dissect the notions of this so-called “smart economy,” revealing the crucial role that government interventions still play in facilitating the production and the global flow of goods. Drawing from such diverse fields as political science, urban sociology, and cultural studies, Contours of the Illiberal State takes a broad interdisciplinary look at how nations became active market enablers. [more] | | | | "Marx and Manchester: The Evolution of the Socialist Internationalist Free Trade Tradition, c.1846-1946"
by Marc-William Palen, University of Exeter, UK.
The International History Review, February 2020
Socialism is commonly assumed to be antithetical to free trade. This article challenges this misconception by exploring the widespread socialist internationalist support for free trade across the century before the Cold War. The socialist internationalist free-trade tradition evolved alongside and drew inspiration from the Manchester School of economic liberalism. As with any intellectual tradition, socialist internationalist support for free trade was not static. Turn-of-the-century Marxist theorists of imperialism reformulated Marx and Engels’s mid-nineteenth-century free-trade endorsement. [Access the article here] | | | "Is Settler Colonial History Urban History?"
On the Global Urban History website this month, Efrat Gilad (Graduate Institute, Geneva) asks whether the urban history of settler colonialism is being forgotten. As he writes, "part of the issue has to do with terminology. As Michael Goebel noted, the fact that most settlers went to cities “sits uncomfortably with the imagery conjured up by the term ‘settler’.” Indeed, as “settler” is an extension of “colonizer,” derived from the Latin “farmer” or “cultivator,” the imagery of rurality has restricted our ability to conceptualize settlerism beyond smallholders. The conventional focus on frontiers and pioneers has drawn us to the edges. So has the emphasis on land and labor. But scores of urban settlers point to a history from the middle: of metropolises and middle classes. And those metropolises, as recently illustrated on this blog, even in their configuration are inherently settler colonial. If we consistently find the settler-city at the heart of settler colonial systems, was the city in fact the belly of the beast?"[more]
| Related Networks and Events
| | Leventhal Map & Education Center
Public Research Fellows in History and Geography, 2020-21
The Leventhal Map & Education Center at the Boston Public Library is pleased to announce a call for Public Research Fellows in History and Geography for the 2020–2021 academic year. The Public Research Fellows programs is a pilot initiative of the LMEC, and it is designed to support scholars whose work advances the following two goals: productive research in the LMEC collections, and a public agenda for communication and engagement.
In 2020–2021, the LMEC seeks proposals for fellows in the following two thematic clusters:
• Culture, design, and politics of public open space
• Atlantic geographies of the Revolutionary period
[more]
| | | | "Urban Culture in Theory and Action"
University of Copenhagen Summer School, August 2020
During this summer school in the heart of Copenhagen, students from across the world get an opportunity to move from analysing problems in urban societies to creating possible solutions and identifying potentials in urban space by formulating and planning research-based projects.
Organized in collaboration with Strøm music festival and other partners in Copenhagen, the summer school combines academic theory with the experiences and know-how of seasoned practitioners to help the students formulate, plan and execute cultural or social projects in urban space. The aim of the course is thus to give students the tools for translating their academic skills and knowledge into concrete projects for change in cities.
[more] | | | |