Papal patronage has often been limited to the question of whether this or that pope loved art. Yet, the pontiff was only one of several actors involved in the realization of artistic projects symbolizing the Church’s cultural, religious, and political power. Papal patronage, in the sense of conflating the roles of initiator, commissioner, and financial backer, only came into its own after 800. At the same time, a long-lasting debate, rooted in the Classical discourse on luxuria and magnificentia, focused on the legitimacy of spending Church money on material beauty. This was resolved around 1500 when papal patronage became framed as magnificentia and charity, in line with the concept of “evergetism,” or collective service to society. This led to an active papal policy to use the arts, in conjunction with Counter Reformation visual propaganda, to strengthen the Faith, with an important impact on artistic developments primarily during the early modern period.

The introduction describes some of the key features and the wide range of actors and activities that characterise the workings of a long-distance bus station in Accra, Ghana’s capital. It then presents two meanings of hustle that capture the station’s workings: as a noun, describing crowded, hectic, and potentially confusing situations; and as a verb, denoting precarious yet venturesome economic activities. Building on the ambivalences evoked by the different uses and perspectives of the term, it situates the significance of this study in relation to scholarly discussions of transport work, the ‘informal economy’, (auto)mobility, infrastructure, and urban social life. It then outlines the diversity of functions and types of Ghanaian bus stations, and concludes with a reflection on methodology, highlighting the value of a single-sited ethnographic approach to urban complexity and trans-local mobility, and an itinerary of the book’s chapters.

The last major chapter of the book reflects on the question of ‘happiness’ as discussed by Popper, Hayek, and Neurath, but also presents a case study of how Neurath not only theorized on such matters but also sought to make a practical difference by collaboration in planning projects. He became a consultant for the redevelopment of Bilston, a small town blighted by the legacy of the Industrial Revolution. In discussion with town councillors and architects, he steered plans by taking into account the needs of residents, seeking to represent those whose voice was generally not heard. This finally led to Neurath being interviewed in the mainstream media, marking acceptance and respect for Neurath in British culture. He did not want to use his broad learning to set himself apart as an intellectual but instead to articulate the needs of ordinary people.

Chapter 8 shows that Palladio’s design for the unbuilt wings would have reinforced the villa’s hybrid character through their allusions to a range of urban and rural building types. Their evocation of the ancient triumphal arch would have made a bold claim for Pisani hegemony in Montagnana.

Identified by Immanuel Wallerstein as the first true hegemon, the Dutch Empire dominated maritime commerce in the seventeenth century. Amsterdam emerged as the world’s alpha city, the site of the first true global multinational corporations. In tandem with corporate activities including the founding of New York City, Cape Town, and Jakarta, Amsterdam established the first modern stock market. It also solidified the North–South power imbalance. European powers extracted the labor and raw materials of far-flung colonies, refining them at higher value. The under-populated Dutch Empire relied on forced migration and slave labor to produce valuable goods such as sugar, tobacco, and spices. This chapter traces the emergence of a city network in the Low Countries that prefigured its independence from Spain, and the construction of its own imperial network. The Dutch city network expanded globally, establishing critical nodes in West Africa, the Americas, the Caribbean, and Asia to manage the flow of resources and labor. Amsterdam’s place at the top of the world city hierarchy led to rising inequality, prefiguring modern urban “command centers.”

Russell opens the book with a plea for a new approach to the comparative study of ancient cities. Past scholars – with Rykwert as the foremost example – have pointed to claims in ancient Chinese and Roman literary materials that link cities with the cosmos. They have, furthermore, used these claims to argue that, in both ancient Rome and China, the idea of the city as a microcosmos is what led to what we might call ‘placemaking’, the process by which abstract space is made meaningful to humans. Rather than disproving these claims, Russell shows the limited reach of the literary materials. First, whatever the texts claim, real cities are never scaled-down models of the cosmos: whereas the texts may seek to imbue features of the human landscape with symbolic meaning, these are most often later ascriptions, explaining features of the city that have arisen for much more concrete, mundane reasons. Second, starting from the observation that both ancient China and ancient Rome are civilisations that take great pride in their past traditions, Russell shows how the theories that associate cities with cosmological ideas are, in fact, classicising constructions of a fairly late date (last two centuries BCE), part of a growing body of technical literature, that itself was spurred into being by the cultural and intellectual changes that attended Chinese unification and Roman imperial expansion. Thus, the similarities between Roman and Chinese cities turn out to hinge on highly abstract and relatively marginal concepts of space. By showing this, Russell frees up the field for a historical investigation of cities, not as spaces but as concrete, complex places with multiple and constantly evolving social meanings. This mode of investigation gets fully underway in subsequent chapters of the book.

From the early second millennium AD more hierarchically organised societies marked by the rise of southern Africa’s first states developed in the north of southern Africa, culminating in Great Zimbabwe and its successors. This chapter outlines the processes involved, including the roles played by hunter-gatherer communities (for example at K2 and Mapungubwe) and the histories of farming societies on their periphery (notably those of Zimbabwe’s Nyanga Highlands). Much of this research is new and the past two decades have also seen challenges emerge to the importance previously accorded Indian Ocean trade in accounting for the emergence of social complexity, to the historical relationships between major centres (K2, Mapungubwe, Great Zimbabwe, Khami), and to understandings of the internal organisation, chronology, size, and functioning of those sites. Discussing these debates – particularly those relating to the settlement organisation of Great Zimbabwe and other stone-walled sites and the social implications of this – involves considering how far political action should be understood in terms of Indigenous, rather than Western, concepts.

Cities are contact zones characterised by conviviality of cultures. They have been described as the ideal setting for multilingual utopias, where institutional spaces emerge that cultivate multilingualism. In the context of globalisation and super-diversity, cities can redefine themselves as post-national spaces. Neoliberalism embraces diversity for its profitablity value; it is opposed by notions of the right to the city and local citizenship. Critical social and sociolinguistic theory embraces definitions of identity, community and language that recognise the dynamics of multiple components in individuals' repertoires of features and networks of practice. Traditional notions of identity, belonging, commuity and language give way to an appreciation of the fluidity of forms of belonging and networking practice. Diasporas are understood as translocal networks of practice with multiple expressions of belonging. Manchester as an early industrial city offers an interesting setting to observe the evolution of diaspora communities and their alignment with fluid language practices.

This chapter introduces key structures and developments in the cities of late antique southern Gaul as relevant as contexts for the development of popular culture at this time, with reference to archaeological as well as literary evidence. While Arles and Marseille come under particular focus, other smaller urban centres including Aix and Narbonne are also considered. The general built urban environment is discussed first, then the occupations, social status and identities of the cities’ inhabitants. Next, the impact of the church upon the late ancient city, social and political as well as topographical, comes into focus. Urban social relations are examined before the final section looks at the transformation of performance and leisure in late antiquity.

The transition from one culture of governance to another explains the character and timing of changes in the nature, location and scale of English executions from 1660 to 1900. Traditional landed elites adhered both to a “Bloody Code,” whose enforcement against common criminals could be regularly adjusted through consultations between trial judges and themselves, and to the occasional use of prolongedly agonizing execution rituals against traitors. The men who dominated England’s uniquely extensive and steadily expanding urban realms, and embraced new cultures of desacralization, feeling and reason, increasingly viewed the purposes, numerical extent and staging of executions differently. As the numbers and power of urbane people grew, first the extent and finally the practices of execution were adjusted accordingly. The many paradoxes of “feeling”, however, ensured their continued commitment to execution for murder, and some measure of hypocrisy in their views of executions and the people who attended them.

Volume 1 of The Cambridge History of Global Migrations documents the lives and experiences of everyday people through the lens of human movement and mobility from 1400 to 1800. Focusing on the most important typologies of preindustrial global migrations, this volume reveals how these movements transformed global paths of mobility, the impacts of which we still see in societies today. Case studies include those that arose from the demand for free, forced, and unfree labor, long- and short-distance trade, rural/urban displacement, religious mobility, and the rise of the number of refugees worldwide. With thirty chapters from leading experts in the field, this authoritative volume is an essential and detailed study of how migration shaped the nature of global human interactions before the age of modern globalization.