Vol. 63, February 2025
Have you published something new in Global Urban History? Are you hosting a conference, workshop, or event? We'd like our members to know!
GUHP is a member-supported organization.
| New Elements in Global Urban History
|  | | Elements in Global Urban History: Africa in Urban History
By Ambe J. Njoh
(Cambridge University Press, 2025)
This Element in Global Urban History seeks to promote understanding of the urban history of Africa. It does so by undertaking four main tasks. Firstly, it employs race, ethnicity, class, and conflict theory as conceptual frameworks to analyze the spatial structures, social, and political-economic dynamics of African cities from global, comparative, and transnational perspectives. Secondly, it proposes a new typology of the continent's cities. Thirdly, it identifies and draws into focus an important but oft-ignored part of Africa's urban history, namely Indigenous cities. It focuses more intensely on the few that still exist to date. Fourthly, it employs conflict, functional, and symbolic interactionist theories as well as elements of the race ideology to explain the articulation of racism, ethnicity, and classism in the continent's urban space. This is done mainly but not exclusively from historical perspectives...[more]
| | |  | | Elements in Global Urban History: The City Beautiful and the Globalization of Urban Planning
By Ian Morley
(Cambridge University Press, 2025)
During the past one hundred or so years, urbanists have composed grand narratives regarding the development of urban design and the international dissemination of planning models. Yet, building upon this historiography, whilst the transnational dimension of modern city planning has centred itself upon the diffusion of the British garden city, far less attention has been put upon the global reach of the American City Beautiful. Owing to the ethnocentricity of American planning history literature, thus, the chronicle of the City Beautiful has anchored itself, literally and figuratively, to the North American continent. Yet, in truth, grand American-inspired plans were implemented throughout the world; indeed, they were carried out long after the City Beautiful's popularity had waned in North America, and they were executed under a variety of cultural and political conditions...[more]
| | |  | | The Capital Market of Manila and the Pacific Trade, 1668-1838: Institutions and Trade During the First Globalization
By Juan José Rivas Moreno
(Palgrave, 2024)
Economic history has always emphasized the importance of long-distance trade in the emergence of modern financial markets, yet almost nothing is known about the Manila trade. This book offers the first reconstruction of the capital market of Manila using new archival sources that have never been used in the economic history of Pacific trade. The book explains how trade between Asia and Spanish America across the Pacific, which lasted for 250 years (1571 – 1815) was financed from the city of Manila.The book analyses the political economy and institutional structures of the Manila capital market in the context of the global silver trade, as well as addressing key similarities and differences with European trade routes and differing approaches to colonialism and commerce in Asian waters. It traces how the Manila capital market emerged in a bottom-up process with a redistributive aspect that tied the interests of citizens with the fortunes of trade, using institutions familiar to the public like legacy funds, brotherhoods and lay religious orders to pool liquidity, originate working capital, and internalise the risk of loss at sea...[more]
| | | | Modernism in Africa: The Architecture of Angola, Ghana, Mozambique, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda
Edited by: Docomomo International
(Birkhauser, 2025)
Many African countries are home to extraordinary architecture that is virtually unknown. There are interpretations of Art Deco, International Style, Brutalism as well as of African vernacular architecture. Climate-responsive buildings with a fluidity of interior and exterior spaces play a large role. While many of these 20th century architects were of European origin, they were deeply influenced by their surroundings and found original, site-specific expressions, often in collaboration with African architects. A focus of the construction activities were educational buildings which played an important role for these young nations that mostly gained their independence in the 1960s. While some of the documented buildings have been restored, others are still awaiting reconstruction...[more]
| | |  | Book-Launch: Gunpoint Capitalism, Enforcing Industrial Order in Karachi
Room Pierre Hassner (S1), second floor, 28 rue des Saints-Pères - 75007 Paris
February 20, 2025
On 11 September 2012, over 250 workers of Ali Enterprises, which produced jeans for the German discount retailer KiK, perished in a fire in their Karachi factory. Was this an accident or an arson attack? Straight away, the tragedy gave rise to contradictory interpretations. While some blamed the exploitative logics of fast fashion, others suspected foul play by the political parties preying on the city and its business class. Taking as a starting point the controversy caused by this disaster, Gunpoint Capitalism plunges us into the murky waters of globalisation. Exploring the back alleys of Pakistan’s industrial capital city, it shows how the manufacturing economy makes order out of disorder, and profit out of conflict–to the detriment of workers. In Karachi, as elsewhere, petty criminals and ex-servicemen prove to be formidable enforcers of economic order. A comparison with Europe, the United States and Latin America confirms the central place of such henchmen in the dynamics of capitalism. These shock troops of anti-unionism are now participating in the dismantling of the social state....[more] | | |  | | Popular Planners: Newspaper Writers, Neighborhood Activists, and the Struggles against Housing Demolition in Lagos, Nigeria, 1951-1956
By Titilola Halimat Somotan
Journal of Urban History (March 2025)
As Nigeria prepared for independence in the 1950s, British planners and Nigerian politicians sought to improve Nigeria’s international image by dismantling what they called the “slums” of Central Lagos. This article examines how a loose coalition of residents—including female traders, homeowners, and tenants—challenged the idea that Central Lagos was a slum and pushed for alternative planning proposals that would suit residents’ interests. I propose “popular planners” to describe the residents who drew on their lived experiences and knowledge of colonial planning laws to critique building demolition and demand the Development Board amend its slum clearance plan. Their competing visions, articulated in newspapers, during street demonstrations, and in petitions, demonstrate everyday people’s investment in transforming the city’s future during the end of colonial rule and their opposition to exclusionary planning processes that continue to shape urban policies in Nigeria...[more]
| | | | Diyarbakır: Contested City in Turkey’s Kurdish heartland
By William Gourlay
The Metropole Blog (January 2025)
If you present a map of Turkey to a traveler and ask them to pinpoint key cities, chances are they will immediately identify İstanbul, the great metropolis on the Bosphorus. Some would also be able to highlight Ankara, the capital, but beyond that choices may be limited. Few cities in Turkey’s Anatolian interior catch the eye. In the popular imagination, İstanbul and Ankara, sitting in Turkey’s western portion, are quintessentially Turkish cities, but further east things become more complicated. Diyarbakır, a city of 1.8 million that straddles the River Tigris in southeastern Anatolia, is a case in point. It boasts a history stretching back millennia, yet it is little known and it resides in Turkey’s periphery both geographically–-it is a short distance from the Syrian and Iraqi borders-–and politically-–it has a majority Kurdish population...[more]
| | |  | | The multi-imperial dimensions in treaty-port Tianjin and its historiographical significance
By Taoyu Yang
Urban History (December 2024)
The modern history of Tianjin, a northern port city in China, offers an intriguing urban case for scholars interested in comparative colonial practices. From the 1860s to the 1940s, Tianjin was home to up to nine foreign concessions and a sequence of different Chinese municipalities. While much scholarship on colonial history has focused on the interactive dynamics between the colonizer and the colonized, Tianjin’s colonial past draws attention to the multiplicity, multilateralism and multilayered trajectories at the heart of the colonial experiences of both imperialist powers and the Chinese. At the heart of this short survey are some reflections on the multi-imperial dimensions of the city of Tianjin. It also explains how the multi-imperial dimensions operated in Tianjin in its treaty-port incarnation and offers some considerations of how the Tianjin case contributes to broader historiographical conversations germane to the imperial–global–urban complex...[more] | | |  | | Journal of Global History development editing workshop
Online
June 1 2025
As part of efforts to make the field of global history more truly ‘global’, the Journal of Global History is hosting an online development workshop to help prospective authors through the submission process. The workshop is open to scholars working in the field of global history: for whom English is not a first language; who study or work at universities outside of North America and Western Europe at institutions where editing support is not readily available; whose initial submissions and evidence base indicate a clear fit with JGH’s mission statement. Accepted applicants will submit a full manuscript draft, which will go to our development editing team at Les Plumes Rouges for a first round of review and recommendations. An edited draft will then be read by one of the journal’s editors and a member of the JGH editorial board, who also will provide mentorship during the submission process. At the next stage, articles will either go through JGH’s normal peer review channels or undergo another round of edits with Les Plumes Rouges...[more]
| | | International Seminar on 'Recent Trends in Indian Historiography'
Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar Marathwada University, Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar and Online
February 27-March 1, 2025
The Department of History and Ancient Indian Culture, Archaeology, and Liberal Arts in collaboration with the Department of Mahatma Phule and Ambedkar Thought is organizing a hybrid international seminar on Recent Trends in the Indian Historiography: Themes and Debates...[more]
| | |  | International Summer School Towards Inclusive Global Histories
Växjö, Sweden
7-9 September 2025
The summer school will focus on three novel research fields within global history: Global Diplomacy, gender, and environmental questions. By framing approaches that emphasize different voices and alternative archives in terms of “global histories” in the plural, we aim to promote the inclusion of a broad range of voices, perspectives, and orientations within the field, while forcefully rejecting the possibility of insisting on a single, dominating story or grand narrative of global history. The summer school will offer plenary sessions by leading experts in the field and allow for hands-on methodological conversations among all participating scholars. Early career scholars will be encouraged to reflect on key methodological questions along the lines of the summer school themes with scholars from around the world. We invite contributions consisting of projects based on original research and empirically grounded PhD thesis work in progress. We encourage theoretical, methodological, ethical, and historiographical reflections on how to make global history more inclusive. Although the main language of the summer school will be English, individual presentations and panels in other languages can be accommodated...[more]
| | | Calls for Papers & Proposals | CFP: Urban History Group Conference 2025: The Urban Commons: Rights and Citizenship in the City from the Medieval to the Modern
University of Leicester, UK
September 4-5, 2025
This year’s Urban History Group Conference invites individual and panel submissions from scholars and practitioners at all stages of their careers who study the urban past in any period. The 2025 conference represents a particularly exciting moment as the former Pre-Modern Towns Group conference is now incorporated with the Urban History Group. The conference has two elements: the Main Theme – which this year looks at the history of urban commons and public space – and a New Researchers strand that welcomes papers from ECRs on any aspect of urban history...[more]
Submission deadline: February 24, 2025
|
CfP: Colonial and Post-Colonial Landscapes Congress: Architecture, Colonialism and Labour
The Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (Lisbon, Portugal)
February 11-13, 2026
The third edition of the Colonial and Post-Colonial Landscapes Congress will take place in Lisbon, Portugal, at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, from 11 to 13 February 2026. The conference will intersect the topics of Architecture, Colonialism and Labour. Although a common topic in colonial historiography, the influence of large-scale labour on the production of the built environment —including the design, construction, and maintenance of infrastructure, buildings and landscapes—has not been fully explored in the context of colonial architecture. The issue has significant implications not only for the description of past societies, but also for understanding and supporting contemporary communities with a colonial past and their relationship to the production of space. Linking architecture and labour in these contexts offers a promising avenue for addressing some of the challenges encountered by postcolonial societies. These include the relationship with "Western" construction technologies and materials, the scarcity of traditional building systems and their undervalued insights into climate adaptation and sustainable solutions, and persistent racial and gender inequalities in public works labour environments...[more]
Submission deadline: February 28, 2025
|
Becoming Local? Forgotten Lineages of Displaced Communities across the Indian Ocean World, 1650-1850
Leiden, Netherlands
December 10-11, 2025
On December 10-11, the Forgotten Lineages research project featuring GUHP fellow Dries Lyna will organize the two-day conference Becoming Local? Forgotten Lineages of Displaced Communities across the Indian Ocean World, 1650-1850 in Leiden. Confirmed keynote speakers are Jennifer Gaynor (University at Buffalo SUNY) and Sue Peabody (Washington State University), with Michael Laffan (Princeton University) as one of the discussants. The conference will advocate the urgency of uncovering the genealogy of racialized social categories, what purposes they served at given times, and how displaced descent permeated the making and shaping of racialized groups in colonial and imperial cities across the Indian Ocean. The call for papers can be found here, and abstracts should be sent to forgottenlineages@hum.leidenuniv.nl before 31 March 2025....[more]
Submission deadline: March 31, 2025
| CfP: EAUH 2026 – City Networks in Europe and Beyond
Barcelona, Spain
September 2-5, 2026
The Seventeenth Conference of the European Association for Urban History (EAUH) will be held in Barcelona from Wednesday 2 September to Saturday 5 September 2026. The central theme of the conference is ‘City Networks in Europe and Beyond’, although it covers all themes, periods and regions within urban history. City networks have been of as much strategic significance in the past as they are in the present. Although the history of Europe is often identified with states and nations, it is largely the history of its networked cities. This is clearly evident in Barcelona, a major medieval centre in the Mediterranean, which also took the lead in the great leap forward of the industrial age, with crucial links to other cities, and that regained this role in post-Franco period. Cities and interurban links have contributed as much or more than states to the shaping of Europe and its reach beyond the continent, particularly in terms of colonial relations. The concept of network has become widespread in many disciplines and can create meaningful relationships between the past and the present of Europe and the wider world...[more]
Submission deadline: April 15, 2025
| CfP: The Roots and Routes of Black Power
Special Issue
The Journal of African American History is planning a 2026 special issue titled “The Roots and Routes of Black Power.” During the past few decades, the field has proliferated with scholars fundamentally reshaping the temporal, leader- ship, and ideological bounds of the movement and its key players. Students and newcomers to the traditional Black Power period (1960s–1980s) now have a wealth of books, articles, archival repositories, and digital sites to help them understand the period and its impact like never before. However, as the field has matured, it has shifted shape and in some instances splintered, leaving lingering questions about the current and future states of the field...[more]
Submission deadline: July 1, 2025 | Fellowships, Grants, & Awards |  | | Visiting Fellowships for Scholars from the Global South
The Centre for Research in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (CRASSH) at the University of Cambridge
The Centre for Research in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (CRASSH) at the University of Cambridge is inviting applications for funded Visiting Fellowships for scholars from the Global South. The purpose of these Fellowships is to provide opportunities for scholars working at higher education institutions in the Global South to exchange ideas with other researchers based at CRASSH and elsewhere in the University of Cambridge and to draw benefit from access to the University’s collections and resources. It is hoped that these visits will lead on to future collaborations and exchanges. For 2026, CRASSH will partner with the Department of History and Philosophy of Science. Applications are invited from scholars whose research is connected to the theme of science, politics and justice. This invites projects that study the ethics, politics and history of scientific, medical and technical knowledge-making and the multiple ways in which science has been leveraged by various groups in pursuit of justice. This may include proposals that focus on the participation of scientific and medical experts and activists in projects of anticolonialism, antiracism, climate and environmental justice, disarmament, gender equity, indigenous rights, reproductive rights, the repatriation of heritage and ancestors, or scientific and medical literacy...[more]
Application deadline: February 24, 2025
| | |  | | Center for Research on Global Catholicism Fellows Seminar
Center for Research on Global Catholicism at Saint Louis University
The Center for Research on Global Catholicism at Saint Louis University is pleased to announce the launch of its second cycle of the Seminar Fellowship Program in 2025-2027 on the theme of “Global Catholicism in Local Spaces.” Successful applicants will be engaged in research projects related to the polycentric features of global Catholicism and their manifestations in local physical spaces. Inspired by the insights of the “spatial turn,” lines of inquiry should focus on the multi-layering of Catholicism with local cultures in distinct physical settings. The CRGC invites applicants at any academic rank, including ABDs, from any humanities or social science discipline to apply.
The Seminar will consist of eight fellows: four from academic departments at Saint Louis University; four from any university or academic institution (research library, museum, archives, etc.) in the United States or around the world. Six of the eight fellowships are reserved for scholars holding a PhD with active research and publishing agendas. The two remaining fellowships are reserved for advanced PhD students...[more]
Application deadline: March 1, 2025
| | | | BHC Kaufman Fellowship Application Deadline
Business History Conference
The Henry Kaufman Financial History Fellowship Program supports research by emerging scholars in financial history, broadly conceived. Fellowships include monetary awards as well as support from the BHC community of scholars, which for decades has prioritized engagement with graduate students and early career researchers. The program is endowed by a generous gift from renowned economist Dr. Henry Kaufman (Henry & Elaine Kaufman Foundation, Inc). The program offers three kinds of awards: Research fellowships, Dissertation fellowships, and Post-Doctoral fellowships. To be eligible, applicants must be enrolled in or graduates of an accredited doctoral program....[more]
Application deadline: March 1, 2025 | | | |