This innovative work in comparative urban history explores why outstanding achievements in material and intellectual culture in early modern Europe tended to cluster in certain maritime cities. Patrick O'Brien and his co-editors have assembled a team of eighteen distinguished historians from Belgium, the Netherlands, Britain and North America, who have collaborated to make detailed comparisons of economic, architectural, artistic, publishing and scientific achievements in three renowned mercantile and imperial cities during their golden ages: Antwerp (c. 1492–1585), Amsterdam (c. 1585–1659) and London (c. 1660–1730). The book examines growth and fluctuations in the fortunes of all three cities in the context of broader trends in the growing urbanization of Europe's populations, cultures, societies and economies. The study is located in the histories of politics, warfare and culture in early modern Europe and offers fascinating insights to scholars and students of economic, social and cultural history.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521594080
Number of pages: 376
Weight: 767 g
Dimensions: 234 x 159 x 24 mm
"...[an] useful and interesting book of essays that are, in their own right, uniformly knowledgeable, clearly written and eminently readable. There is a great deal here to admire and savor..." Bryn Mawr Review of Comparative Literature
"All of the essays are...useful to general audiences, as well as to specialists in the sub-field of early modern urban history." Journal of Interdisciplinary History
"...a superb overview of current work on early modern cultural history." Christopher P. Heuer, Historians of Netherlandish Art
"This is a good book where the individual chapters all manifest high quality scholarship and the overall realization is successful." American Historical Review
"This collection of essays presents some of the best current scholarship on each of the three cities during the early modern period, and is crucial reading for both specialists and for those interested in a comparative urban history in a more general sense." Sixteenth Century Journal
"...well thought-out and finely executed volume...this is an unusually rich and thought-provoking collection of essays, and will doubtless prove of interest to an exceptionally wide range of readers." Renaissance Quarterly
"This highly informative, well prepared, and coherent collection is recommended to all students of early modern business history. May it open up a new field of comparative golden-age studies." Business History Review
"[O'Brien] poses basic questions with refreshing openness, advances ideas but does not proscribe answers. His introduction is noteworthy for setting context and spinning ideas instead of merely summarizing papers...The authors of the fifteen essays are all experts who deliver important chapters." Journal of Modern History
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