The fifteen essays in this book explore the influence of imperialism in a range of urban centres, including London, Paris, Rome, Vienna, Marseilles, Glasgow and Seville. The first part on "imperial landscapes" is devoted to large-scale architectural schemes and monuments, including the Queen Victoria Memorial in London and the Vittoriano in Rome. In the second part, the focus is on imperial display throughout the city, from spectacular exhibitions and ceremonies, to more private displays of empire in suburban gardens. The final part considers the changing cultural and political identities in the imperial city, looking particularly at nationalism, masculinity and anti-imperialism.

Chinese Imperial City Planning is the first synthesis of what is known from textual and archaeological evidence about every Chinese imperial capital, from earliest times to the present. It explains the fundamental architectural principles and visual characteristics of imperial planning in China and shows how these features are related to the Chinese idea of rulership. The volume also reconstructs the 3,500-year-old history of imperial planning using sources such as resident descriptions, travel accounts, official Chinese court records, and the most recent archaeological and scholarly studies. The extensive documentation provides students with a standard source of reference from which to embark on further research on Chinese urban planning.

This book examines cities of the Jiangnan region of south-central China between the twelfth and nineteenth centuries, an area considered to be the model of a successfully developing regional economy. The six studies focus on the urban centers of Suzhou, Hangzhou, Yangzhou, and Shanghai. Emphasizing the regional focus, the authors explore the interconnections and sequential relationships between these major cities and analyze common themes such as the development of handicraft industry, transport and commerce, class structure, ethnic diversity and internal immigration, and the social and political pressures generated by developments in manufacturing, taxes, and government politics. The book provides a valuable resource on commercial development and internal economic and social development in pre-modern China, particularly on specific regional development and the historical role of traditional Chinese cities.

This book explores the various ways imperial rule constituted and shaped the cities of Eastern Europe until the First World War in the Tsarist, Habsburg, and Ottoman empires. In these three empires, the cities served as hubs of imperial rule: their institutions and infrastructures enabled the diffusion of power within the empires while they also served as the stages where the empire was displayed in monumental architecture and public rituals. To this day, many cities possess a distinctively imperial legacy in the form of material remnants, groups of inhabitants, or memories that shape the perceptions of in- and outsiders. The contributions to this volume address in detail the imperial entanglements of a dozen cities from a long-term perspective reaching back to the eighteenth century. They analyze the imperial capitals as well as smaller cities in the periphery. All of them are "imperial cities" in the sense that they possess traces of imperial rule. By comparing the three empires of Eastern Europe this volume seeks to establish commonalities in this particular geography and highlight trans-imperial exchanges and entanglements. This volume is essential reading to students and scholars alike interested in imperial and colonial history, urban history and European history.

Imperial expositions held in fin-de-siècle London, Paris and Berlin were knots in a world wide web. Conceptualizing expositions as meta-media, Fleeting Cities constitutes a transnational and transdisciplinary investigation into how modernity was created and displayed, consumed and disputed in the European metropolis around 1900.

In this compelling narrative of capitalist development and revolutionary response, Jessica M. Kim reexamines the rise of Los Angeles from a small town to a global city against the backdrop of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, Gilded Age economics, and American empire. It is a far-reaching transnational history, chronicling how Los Angeles boosters transformed the borderlands through urban and imperial capitalism at the end of the nineteenth century and how the Mexican Revolution redefined those same capitalist networks into the twentieth. Kim draws on archives in the United States and Mexico to argue that financial networks emerging from Los Angeles drove economic transformations in the borderlands, reshaped social relations across wide swaths of territory, and deployed racial hierarchies to advance investment projects across the border. However, the Mexican Revolution, with its implicit critique of imperialism, disrupted the networks of investment and exploitation that had structured the borderlands for sixty years, and reconfigured transnational systems of infrastructure and trade. Kim provides the first history to connect Los Angeles's urban expansionism with more continental and global currents, and what results is a rich account of real and imagined geographies of city, race, and empire.

Roman Emperor Constantine raised Christianity from a minority religion to imperial status, but his religious orientation was by no means unambiguous. In Constantine and the Cities, Noel Lenski demonstrates how the emperor and his subjects used the instruments of government in a struggle for authority over the religion of the empire.

This comprehensive history of the Museum of London traces the ways that the relationship between Britain and its imperial past has changed over the course of three decades, providing a holistic approach to galleries’ shifts from Victorian nostalgia to equitable representations. At its 1976 opening, the Museum of London differed from other museums in its treatment of empire and colonialism as central to its galleries. In response to the public’s evolving social and political attitudes, the museum’s 1993–1994 ‘The Peopling of London’ exhibition marked a new approach in creating inclusive displays, which explore the impact of immigration and multiculturalism on British history. Through photos, planning documents, and archival research, this book analyses museums’ role in enacting change in the public’s understanding of history, and this book is the first to critically engage with the Museum of London’s theme of empire, particularly in consideration of recent exhibitions. Legacies of an Imperial City is a useful resource for academics and researchers of postcolonial history and museum studies, as well as any student of urban history.

Drawing on a wealth of primary and secondary sources, this book explores how far imperial culture penetrated antipodean city institutions. It argues that far from imperial saturation, the city 'Down Under' was remarkably untouched by the Empire.

“Succeeds in explaining how and why a war-ravaged city suffering acute shortages invested its scant resources in protecting and reconstructing monuments.” —Slavonic and East European Review Saving Stalin’s Imperial City is the history of the successes and failures in historic preservation and of Leningraders’ determination to honor the memory of the terrible siege the city had endured during World War II. The book stresses the counterintuitive nature of Stalinist policies, which allocated scarce wartime resources to save historic monuments of the tsarist and imperial past even as the very existence of the Soviet state was being threatened, and again after the war, when housing, hospitals, and schools needed to be rebuilt. Postwar Leningrad was at the forefront of a concerted restoration effort, fueled by commemorations that glorified the city’s wartime experience, encouraged civic pride, and mobilized residents to rebuild their hometown. For Leningrad, the restoration of monuments and commemorations of the siege were intimately intertwined, served similar purposes, and were mutually reinforcing. “A most welcome addition to the historiography of Europe’s bombed cities and their reconstruction after World War II.” —Journal of Modern History