The intersection between the urban environment and modern journalism has long been understood in all its meaningfulness. Cities were the stage for politics, where the main public figures had their base and where institutions provided a window through which to follow debates. This Cambridge Elements examines urban imaginaries during the expansion of international news between the late 19th and the early 20th centuries, when everyday information about faraway places found its way into newspapers all over the world. Building on the premise that news carried an unprecedented power to shape representations of the world, it follows this development as it made its way to regular readers beyond the dominant information poles, in the great port-cities of the South American Atlantic. Based on five case studies of typical turn-of-the-century foreign news, Lila Caimari shows how current events opened windows onto distant cities, feeding a new world horizon. 

Analysis of a novel source of data about early nineteenth-century Bombay, with a novel methodology, makes an important contribution to debates about inter-religious contact in South Asia. Bombay’s register of sales deeds, which lists the names of buyers, sellers, and neighbors, also permits identification of their religious affiliations when supplemented with archival information about the bureaucratic practices affecting property transactions. Findings suggest that property transactions within religious groups comprised most of the sales (60 percent). Contemporary petitions show that residents sometimes appealed to the state to prevent the sale of property to people who did not share their religion. This article illustrates how religion and urban space intersected in early nineteenth-century colonial Bombay.