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Global Urban History Project

Date: 2/3/2020
Subject: Noteworthy in Global Urban History
From: Global Urban History Project



Vol. 17, February 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.

Books
Trading Spaces. The Colonial Marketplace and the Foundations of American Capitalism
by Emma Hart, University of St Andrews, UK
(University of Chicago Press, 2019)
 
When we talk about the economy, “the market” is often just an abstraction. While the exchange of goods was historically tied to a particular place, capitalism has gradually eroded this connection to create our current global trading systems. In Trading Spaces, Emma Hart argues that Britain’s colonization of North America was a key moment in the market’s shift from place to idea, with major consequences for the character of the American economy. Hart’s book takes in the shops, auction sites, wharves, taverns, fairs, and homes of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America—places where new mechanisms and conventions of trade arose as Europeans re-created or adapted continental methods to new surroundings. [more]

Articles
"Towards a History of Rights in the City at Night: Making and breaking the nightly curfew in 19th century Rio de Janeiro"
by Amy Chazkel, Columbia University, USA.
Comparative Studies in Society and History, January 2020
  

During much of the nineteenth century, Rio de Janeiro, the Brazilian capital, was under a selective curfew that made it a crime to be in the city's public spaces after dark. The curfew bent normal rules and attenuated supposedly universal rights, overtly discriminating between people on the basis of class and race. Rules that legally defined the nighttime did not come from any national statute, or from newly independent Brazil's liberal Constitution (1824) or its Criminal Code (1830). Instead, Rio's nocturnal sociolegal world was the product of police edicts, on-the-ground policing practice, and city ordinances. In other words, this is a phenomenon of urban governance that allows, and indeed forces us to look beyond the nineteenth-century nation-state to understand the exercise of power at a local level. 

[Access the article here]
"Town and Country: Connecting Late Medieval Castillan Urban Experience with 16th Century Colonization of the Americas"
by M. Asenjo-Gonzalez, D. Alonso Garcia & S. Perrone.
Bulletin for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies, January 2020
  

Urban government and the foundation of new towns are fundamental to understanding Castilian expansion from the eleventh-century conquest of Toledo to the sixteenth-century conquest of Tenochtitlan. The economic, social, religious and military connections between town and territory relied on a broad framework of institutions and laws as well as monarchical intervention. The result in Castile was the emergence of an original urban model of secular construction and proven political success to ensure control of territory and to govern heterogeneous populations. This Castilian model influenced the America’s urban systems, given its proven ability to control and defend territories.  [Access the article here]


GUHP-Sponsored Call for Papers

The American Historical Association conference program committee has reached out to us requesting proposals for panels and presentations on the topic of inequality and the urban built environment. They are interested in non-conventional panels, such as a roundtable, and creative session formats [https://www.historians.org/annual-meeting/proposals/creative-session-formats]. It would be wonderful to have at least one panel on the early modern or pre-modern periods (or one in each), as well as one or more panels on the modern/contemporary era.

 

Note please that the deadline to submit proposals is fast approaching, February 15, 2020. Those who are interested in participating can contact Mariana Dantas <dantas@ohio.edu> by Friday, February 7. She will help to coordinate the organization of the panels and submission of the proposals. Please send her:

- the title of your proposal; 

- a 250-word abstract;

- your affiliation; 

- and indicate which panel format(s) you might be interested in.

 

The next meeting of the American Historical Association will be in Seattle from January 7 to 10, 2021. Participants are required to register for the conference and, if they are U.S.-based, must also be members of the AHA. 

 

We look forward to hearing from you!

Teaching Resources
Historic Cities Maps
 
This site is a joint project of the Historic Cities Center of the Department of Geography, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Jewish National and University Library.

The site is intended to contain maps, literature, documents, books and other relevant material concerning the past, present and future of historic cities and to facilitate the location of similar content on the web.

Its curators would like the site to be a meeting place for the lovers of historic cities and to function as a virtual archive, which will constantly develop and grow.
[more]

Related Networks and Events
Center for the History of Global Development
Visiting Fellowships, Shanghai 2020
 
The Center for the History of Global Development at Shanghai University invites applications for fellowships for visiting scholars working on projects related to the history of policies, concepts, practices or debates related to development on local, national, regional or global levels. The Center of the History of Global Development welcome applications from researchers who are taking innovative and interdisciplinary approaches to the topic. [more]
Call for Papers: 12th Spring History Symposium
Hong Kong University, May 21-22, 2020
 
The symposium offers a platform for postgraduate students in Hong Kong and abroad to share their current research, to cultivate collaboration, and to meet peers and colleagues from other institutions. As Hong Kong experiences its most serious political unrest since 1997, and as uncertainty and upheaval take hold globally, historical research gains a renewed sense of urgency. We invite colleagues to present their work whilst considering how historians can meet the challenges of our current historical moment.[more]