Urban History

This article discusses the emergence of urban history as a subdiscipline in Western Europe and North America from its eighteenth-century origins and considers some of the methodological and theoretical approaches that have informed urban historical studies, ranging from the medieval to the contemporary periods. It considers the emergence of new paradigms of urban history in the rapidly urbanizing societies of South and East Asia and the implications for traditional urban historical scholarship. Finally, it provides an overview of the institutional and associational presence of urban history as a discipline.