The city of London began as a Roman settlement along the River Thames and grew into Europe’s first urban area of a million inhabitants. London was unique within Britain, and in many ways in Europe, yet it was deeply intertwined with the provinces and other cities. The city’s location on a great river meant that goods, people, and ideas flowed into and out of the city for centuries, to or from the countryside as well as far-flung areas of the globe. London has exerted enormous influence over the other towns and cities of England and Great Britain, and has similarly been shaped by in-migration from these places and from abroad. London began to rebound to its pre-plague population levels by 1500 and proceeded to grow rapidly. The works included here talk variously of London, including its suburbs, and a metropolis, to describe its inexorable expansion across former fields and to the borders of neighbors. As it grew, its significance in the economy of the world, in its connections to empire and trade, became predominant and its merchants and investors carved a new place for themselves in British society. The city was not just important in economic terms to England, Britain, and eventually a global empire—it attracted and nourished intellectuals and artists, playwrights and writers, scientists and natural historians, and provided the setting for the display of status, consumption of new goods, and the development of fresh tastes. Positioned next to the political center of Westminster, it housed and provided a public stage for parliamentarians, political protesters, members of court, and the monarchy. At the same time, London provided opportunity to poor and un- or underemployed men and women to work, even if in professions or criminal activities outside or on the edges of social and moral norms of the period. For those who struggled, there was charity and beneficence, and punishment and forced work or separation from families. The focus on social and economic history that shaped historical writing of the 1960s into the 1980s elevated local history but influenced the questions asked of the metropolitan center. The last several decades have brought a resurgence of interest in the history of London, in the important religious, cultural, economic, social, and political developments that marked its transformation over a few hundred years.
World City?
