Vol. 65, April 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.
| GUHP2 Berlin Conference Registration NOW OPEN
Registration for our upcoming conference, "GUHP2 Berlin: Stretching the Limits of Global Urban History," is now open! You can view our preliminary conference program here.
Register Here
Note that in order to register you may need to Join or Renew your membership to GUHP.
For those wishing to book a room near the conference venue in Berlin well in advance, here is a good link to start your research.
| | Architecture, Empire, and Trade: The United Africa Company
By Iain Jackson, Ewan Harrison, Michele Tenzon, Rixt Woudstra, Claire Tunstall
(Bloomsbury, 2025)
This open access book tells a new and untold history of the architecture of West Africa in the colonial era, as revealed for the first time through the archives of the United Africa Company (UAC). From the imperial Royal Niger Company's charter in the 1890s through to its suave African department stores of the 1960s, the UAC – a British company firmly embedded in the economies of colonialism, extraction, and exploitation – became the largest commercial firm in West Africa, involved in almost every commercial enterprise and sector, and responsible for procuring architecture, infrastructure, and city real-estate across a vast region. Based on unprecedented access to the UAC archives, this book pieces together a new architectural history of West Africa from the high colonial period through to independence...[more]
| | | | The Business of Transition: Jewish and Greek Merchants of Salonica from Ottoman to Greek Rule
By Paris Papamichos Chronakis
(Stanford University Press, 2024)
The Business of Transition examines how the cosmopolitan bourgeoisie of the Eastern Mediterranean navigated the transition from empire to nation-state in the early twentieth century. In this social and cultural history, Paris Papamichos Chronakis shows how the Jewish and Greek merchants of Salonica (present-day Thessaloniki) skillfully managed the tumultuous shift from Ottoman to Greek rule amidst revolution and war, rising ethnic tensions, and heightened class conflict. Bringing their once powerful voices back into the historical narrative, he traces their entangled trajectories as businessmen, community members, and civic leaders to illustrate how the self-reinvention of a Jewish-led bourgeoisie made a city Greek...[more]
| | | | Unruly Heritage: Archaeologies of the Anthropocene
Edited by Bjørnar Julius Olsen, Stein Farstadvoll, Geneviève Godin
(Bloomsbury, 2025)
Heritage is almost univocally conceived of as valuable and good, something we care for and preserve for ourselves and future generations. Although traditionally associated with the unique and monumental, heritage has over the last decades been broadened in response to claims to incorporate more diverse and globally representative legacies. While such claims are of course welcome, they do not embrace the bulging unruly and obnoxious legacies that now haunt us; legacies that have become so conspicuously manifest that they are claimed as diagnostic of a new epoch, the Anthropocene...[more] | | |  | | The Many Booms in Hong Kong’s Past—And the First Ever Hong Kong History Boom
By Jeffrey Wasserstrom
The American Historical Review (March 2025)
Unsettling Exiles is the second book—and second impressive book at that—by Angelina Chin. I am used to describing her as an up-and-coming specialist to watch if you are interested in the study of the history of gender and labor in China and Hong Kong. I now need to start modifying this, adding migration history as one of her specialties and bringing in Taiwan and Macau as additional places she writes about insightfully. In her new book, Chin, a member of Pomona College’s history department, makes a compelling case for the value of Cold War historians combining discussion of Hong Kong, her native city, with discussion of parts of the Chinese mainland close to it and Macau and Taiwan as well. Through creative use of oral histories and documents, she succeeds in casting all the places that interest her in a novel light. She does this by focusing on and bringing to life the experiences of members of marginalized groups who moved between and had trouble gaining footholds in Hong Kong and nearby locales...[more]
| | |  | | The Colonial City: Empire, Authenticity, and Urban Imagination at the 1906 Marseille Colonial Exposition
By Katherine Taylor Smith
Journal of Urban History (May 2025)
This article examines the significance of the 1906 French Colonial Exposition in Marseille by situating it in its local, urban context. Rather than promoting solely national or imperial interests, local Marseille elites such as Jules Charles-Roux and Edouard Heckel sought to use the Colonial Exposition to demonstrate the central role played by their city in French trade and industry. To assert Marseille’s unique value, they emphasized the “authenticity” of the exposition, particularly by making reference to Marseille’s identification as “the colonial city” in France. By accentuating Marseille’s coloniality and its pivotal position in colonial networks, the organizers of the Exposition hoped to demonstrate the city’s national and imperial relevance to Paris and the rest of the nation. These conclusions reveal the important insights to be gained by relocating exhibitions in urban history...[more]
| | |  | | Flows and Fixes: Water, Disease and Housing in Bangalore, 1860–1915
By Aditya Ramesh
Urban History (February 2025)
Using the city of Bangalore as a specific instance, this article puts together the framework of metabolic cities and techno-spheres to show how ecology and infrastructure constituted colonial cities. Divided between the colonial cantonment governed by the British and the petah or native market town/village governed by the Mysore prince, colonial medics were concerned by numerous diseases affecting the city. Attempts to control the flows of water from the cantonment to the native town proved futile. Amidst famine like conditions from the 1870s, chronic water shortages affected the city. In the 1890s, the plague struck Bangalore. The plague affected the barracks, streets, neighbourhoods and homes. Together, the diseases and water shortages led to new piped water schemes drawn from outside the city and wholesale changes in housing. The article moves beyond the framework of ‘sanitary cities’, at the confluence of colonialism, the body, fixed infrastructures and micro and macro ecological phenomena...[more] | | |  | | Wretched Waters: Making Modernity and the Southern North Sea
UCL, London
May 28, 2025
This talk by Dr Sam Grinsell will explore what it means to put particular sites at the heart of global histories of the environment. Histories of modernity have often centred the nation or the empire. When they have turned to transnational matters these have often been studied at oceanic or global scales. This project, instead, starts from a smaller transnational body of water: the southern North Sea, and its Dutch, English and Flemish coasts. It traces how histories of slavery, docks, fishing, migration and infrastructure reshaped the southern North Sea in the long nineteenth century, and the marks left behind in the cities and landscapes of the region today. This talk will explore what it means to put particular sites at the heart of global histories of the environment, and argue for a more transdisciplinary approach to history that can think simultaneously about processes of making historical space and contemporary experience of space. This will focus on three key moments in North Sea history: the creation of urban docklands in the early nineteenth century, the industrialisation of sea fishing in the mid nineteenth century, and migration from Europe to North America around the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Contemporary images of North Sea landscapes will frame the historical discussion...[more]
| | |  | Past Imperfect podcast: Rosemary Wakeman on the Interwar Worlds of Bombay, London, and Shanghai
Episode 18 of Past Imperfect features Dr. Rosemary Wakeman, Professor of History at Fordham University and author of The Worlds of Victor Sassoon: Bombay, London, Shanghai, 1918–1941. Victor Sassoon (1881-1961) called three cities home: Bombay, London, and Shanghai. These three cities, as Rosemary Wakeman explains, best epitomised capitalism and globalisation in the 1920s and 1930s. In The Worlds of Victor Sassoon, Wakeman uses the life and fortunes of the Baghdadi Jewish businessman to tell a much larger story of cosmopolitanism and global cities. Bombay, London, and Shanghai resembled one another more than their own countries: they became international hubs of finance, technology, media, and the leisure economy. This was a world of horse races and aviation, real estate speculation and the movie industry, and art deco architecture and investment banking. Victor Sassoon stood at the centre of a much broader transformation of global capitalism, one which sprouted the roots of today’s economy...[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: 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: Urban-Religious Worldmaking in Africa
Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study, South Africa
September 16-20, 2025
This interdisciplinary conference explores the making of urban and religious worlds in and beyond the African continent, demonstrating the importance of African cities for analysing global dynamics of urban-religious transformation. We use Stephan Lanz’s (2016) term urban-religious to emphasise the mutually constitutive relationship between urban and religious spheres—that is, how they are deeply intertwined with and shaped by one another. The notion of worlds captures the multiple ways in which urban-religious life is configured and envisioned. There is no singular model or enactment of the urban-religious; people live and move through multiple, overlapping urban-religious worlds. Worldmaking underscores the ongoing, unfinished character of these worlds: they are continuously made and remade—not only by planners, developers, and state actors, but also through infrastructures, ecosystems, technologies, desires, and memories. This processual framing foregrounds how ordinary residents actively participate in urban-religious worldmaking through everyday practices...[more]
Submission deadline: April 30, 2025
| CFP: XII AISU CONGRESS – THE CROSSROAD CITY Relations and Exchanges, Intersections and Crossing Points in Urban Realities: "Sounds of the City: The Urban History of Popular Music 1930-2000"
Palermo
September 10-13, 2025
Since the 1930s popular music – jazz, rhythm and blues, pop, electronica and more – has been increasingly identified with the city. But a specifically urban history of modern popular music is yet to be written. How might this task be achieved and what might it involve? In this session we invite consideration of the relationship between urban spaces and musical forms as they were elaborated across Europe, the West and the global south through the mid- and late 20th century. We are interested in the types of cultural exchange that music enabled between different urban regions and parts of the world. And we wish to explore how music reshaped the temporality and activity of cities through opening up the night-time economy and contributing to the creative industries...[more]
Submission deadline: May 3, 2025
|
Special Issue: Artificial Intelligence and the Sustainability of African Cities
Urban Planning
Urban Planning welcomes articles for the thematic issue "Artificial Intelligence and the Sustainability of African Cities", edited by Catarina Fontes (Technical University of Munich), Mennatullah Hendawy (Technical University of Munich), and Sónia Semedo (University of Cabo Verde). Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly shaping the trajectories of cities worldwide. In Africa, rapid urbanization presents both challenges and opportunities for the adoption of AI to address current issues and needs. AI has the potential to make African cities more sustainable and to support urban development with applications spanning across all types of urban infrastructure and public services delivery. This includes, for instance, transportation, water supply and distribution, sanitation and waste management, energy and telecommunications, security and housing, healthcare, food systems, education, cultural activities, and community engagement. However, the global adoption of AI is also impacting African cities by creating significant pressure on local economies, political systems, and natural and cultural landscapes, namely through the increasing demand for resources and data. Therefore, cities are facing critical challenges when it comes to balancing the dual goals of leveraging AI for sustainability and ensuring that AI systems themselves are sustainable, equitable, and culturally appropriate...[more]
Submission deadline: June 15, 2025
| Special Issue: The Roots and Routes of Black Power
The Journal of African American History
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
|
Special Issue: “Mobile cultures and the Anthropocene”
The Journal of Transport History
Research on mobility has shown considerable interest in promoting an interdisciplinary approach to history in order to renew knowledge of transport. Among the issues brought to light by these perspectives, the question of the environment is central. Because transport affects the territories we inhabit, because it reflects the way societies are nurtured by technology, the mobilisation of history and its long-term perspectives shed light on the footprints our mobility patterns have left on the Earth. Their material impact, which is reflected in the interweaving of the technical, social and entrepreneurial infrastructures they have constituted over the long term; the change in representations - of movement, space and ways of life - that they have initiated...[more]
Submission deadline: July 15, 2025 | Fellowships, Grants, & Awards |  | | The Urban History Association Awards 2025
The Urban History Association
The Urban History Association is now accepting submissions for our 2025 awards cycle! We are thrilled to introduce a new prize this year: The Lizabeth Cohen Prize for the Best Book on Cities and Political Power ($500 prize). The prize will honor an outstanding work of history that engages with questions related to cities, their governance, and other political factors that have shaped their development. We continue to offer prizes in the following categories: Kenneth Jackson Award for Best Book in North American Urban History (excluding Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean) ($1,000 prize); Best Book in Urban History (excluding the U.S., Canada, and Europe) ($1,000 prize); Joe William Trotter, Jr. Prize for Best First Book in Urban History ($500 prize); Lynn Hollen Lees Prize for Best Book in European Urban History ($500 prize);Arnold Hirsch Award for Best Article in Urban History published in a Scholarly Journal ($500 prize);Michael Katz Award for Best Dissertation in Urban History ($500 prize)...[more]
Application deadline: May 12, 2025 | | | |