Flows and fixes: water, disease and housing in Bangalore, 1860–1915

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.

Liminal urbanity: Wars, connections and material culture in early modern Helsingborg

In the 1600s, Helsingborg was a small market town with great importance as a transport and trade connection between Scandinavia and the rest of Europe. Caught in the middle between two empires, Denmark and Sweden, the lives of Helsingborg residents were affected by wars, plagues and political disturbances. This thesis investigates the status of Helsingborg as a contested periphery town in relation to Helsingör on the other side of Öresund and in a wider southern Scandinavian context. Analysis of archaeological finds from six post-medieval sites in town centre, with primary focus on ceramics, examines how the material culture reflects urban consumption patterns, global trade connections and political changes. The results of the study demonstrate that Helsingborg in the 1600s was closely connected by trade and personal relationships to Helsingör.

Souls under Siege

This book explores how the inhabitants of southern France made sense of the ravages of successive waves of plague, the depredations of mercenary warfare, and the violence of royal succession during the fourteenth century. Many people, the book finds, understood both plague and war as the symptoms of spiritual sicknesses caused by excessive sin, and they sought cures in confession. The book draws on a rich evidentiary base of sixty-eight narrative testimonials from the canonization inquest for Countess Delphine de Puimichel, which was held in the market town of Apt in 1363. Each witness in the proceedings had lived through the outbreaks of plague in 1348 and 1361, as well as the violence inflicted by mercenaries unemployed during truces in the Hundred Years’ War. Consequently, their testimonies unexpectedly reveal the importance of faith and the role of affect in the healing of body and soul alike. Faced with an unprecedented cascade of crises, the inhabitants of Provence relied on saints and healers, their worldview connecting earthly disease and disaster to the struggle for their eternal souls. The book illustrates how medieval people approached sickness and uncertainty by using a variety of remedies, making clear that “healing” had multiple overlapping meanings in this historical moment.

RURAL WORKERS AND THE ROLE OF THE RURAL IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH FOOD RIOTING

No form of English popular protest has been subject to such close scholarly analysis as the eighteenth-century food riot, a response not just to the understanding that food riots comprised two out of every three crowd actions but also to the influence of E. P. Thompson's seminal paper ‘The moral economy of the English crowd’. If the food riot is now understood as an event of considerable complexity, one assertion remains unchallenged: that riots remained a tradition of the towns, with agrarian society all but unaffected by food rioting. This article offers a new interpretation in which the rural is not just the backdrop to food protests but instead a locus and focus of collective actions over the marketing of provisions, with agricultural workers taking centre stage. It is shown that agricultural workers often took the lead in market town riots as well as well as in instigating riots in the countryside. Further, such episodes of collective protest were neither rare nor unusual but instead formed an integral part of the food rioting repertoire. It is also shown that rural industrial workers – notoriously active in market town riots – were often joined or even led by agricultural workers in their protests.

To Enlist the Enthusiasm of the Young

This chapter highlights retrospective accounts and contemporary sources that attest to and lament the phenomenon of the abandonment of tradition due to the inroads of secular ideologies. It recounts Ben-Zion Gold’s encounter with newer religious institutions and initiatives that contributed to him remaining traditional. It also looks at contemporary sources that noted the pain of parents confronted with open flouting of religious norms within the four walls of their own homes. The chapter analyzes interminable debates on the shtetl or the Jewish market town in the face of modernity encroaching upon its traditional lifestyle. It talks about the perception of the shtetl’s imminent disappearance that led one writer to compose a ’travelogue’ of a visit to a typical shtetl so that future generations might know how Jews lived once upon a time.

Palynological evidence for pre-agricultural reindeer grazing and the later settlement history of the Lycksele region, northern Sweden

Analyses of high-resolution pollen data, coprophilous fungal spores, microscopic charcoal and sedimentology, combined with radiocarbon dating, allow the assessment of the impact of Sami and Nordic land use in the region surrounding the winter market town of Lycksele in northern Sweden. Such winter markets were established by the Crown during the seventeenth century AD to control the semi-nomadic movements of the Sami who traded here with Finnish settlers and were also taxed and educated. Little is known about Sami and Nordic co-existence beyond these market places, mainly due to a lack of archaeological evidence relating to Sami activity. Vegetation and land-use changes in the region between ~ AD 250 and 1825 reveal no signal for pre-seventeenth century agricultural activity, but the coprophilous fungal spore records suggest the increased regional presence of grazing herbivores (possibly reindeer) between ~ AD 800 and 1100. Sami activity in the parish of Lycksele has been suggested by rich metal finds dated to ~ AD 1000–1350 and they may have been attracted by an abundance of reindeer.

The vowesses, the anchoresses and the aldermen's wives: Lady Margaret Beaufort and the devout society of late medieval Stamford

This article investigates a devout society centring on the household of Margaret Beaufort (d. 1509) at Collyweston in Northamptonshire and St Katherine's guild in the neighbouring market town of Stamford in Lincolnshire. The discussion unveils Margaret Beaufort's place at the heart of a vibrant devotional community, whose members, among them a core group of lay and religious townswomen, were united by their geography and shared devotional interests. Ultimately, this article sheds new light on the overlapping spiritual networks of an important market town and the household of a highly influential noblewoman, whilst also demonstrating how Margaret's sponsorship of the society informed her self-fashioning as a pious matriarch of the house of Tudor.

Irbit. A market town on the Nitsa

The article presents the results of the study of the geocultural potential of the Ural town of Irbit. In 2021 the town on the Nitsa is going to celebrate its 390th birthday. The long-standing combination of non-resident traders' activities and the solidarity of the local corporation gave a big boost to the development of urban architecture, art and theatre. Today, Irbit needs creative scenarios for realization of the city’s geocultural branding strategy. The ideas of Ch. Landry and D. N. Zamyatin are used in the analysis.

Tenement Size and Social Structure: Reflections on Chepstow in 1901

This interdisciplinary study focuses on tenement (house) size, as recorded in the census in 1901, to explore demographic and social contrasts in Chepstow, an historic market town and river port in south-east Monmouthshire. For three contrasting enumeration districts, it contextualises this measure of housing status against the characteristics of the built environment, and applies the technique of house repopulation to derive spatial patterns of social difference and inequality from residents' age, household formation, net lifetime migration, and employment circumstances in the stagnating local economy. The study re-scales the investigative methods used by urban historians in city-wide studies of urban ecology and demonstrates how tenement size, a crude but under-utilised measure of housing stock, can support micro-scale studies of social differentiation in small but regionally significant towns. Equally as important, it provides an insight into the case-specific processes and particular outcomes of urbanisation during the nineteenth century in rural Monmouthshire.