The history of Latin America has been dominated by ideas of order and progress. Unfortunately those ideas have not always been of regional origin. In the colonial era the conquest and conversion of the native peoples was seen as progress by the Europeans. The imposition of order was aided greatly by urbanization sometimes symbolically on the ruins of Indian cities such as at Cuzco and Mexico City. Cities became the point of cultural and economic articulation between the barbaric hinterland and the civilization of Europe. Freedom from the Spanish yoke gained in the Independence wars was similarly seen as progress, at least by the ultimately victorious creole ‘patriots’. It was here, however, that notions of national identity, modernization and economic success became intertwined to produce the conflicts which still inflame the region today. The paramount question has remained: whose order and concept of progress should be imposed?

The object of this survey is to provide a broad overview of the types of research being undertaken in the field of urban history by doctoral students in Great Britain and North America. The survey employs a wide interpretation of ‘urban history’ which includes both the history of, and history in, urban areas. Providing brief summaries of a selection of abstracts published in the Aslib Index to Theses (covering Britain and Ireland) and Dissertations Abstracts International (for North America) of theses completed in 1999 and 2000, it attempts to highlight the novel directions in which current research is being taken. As noted last year, access to thesis abstracts has been greatly improved by the development of on-line services, including the electronic version of Index to Theses available at http://www.theses.com and Dissertations Abstracts International which can be accessed through Proquest at http://wwwlib.umi.com/dissertations. The thirty-four dissertations, drawn fairly evenly from candidates in British and North American institutions, cover a broad range of topics, with the time-span ranging from the early medieval world to the post-Second World War era, though it is worth noting the absence of studies addressing ancient history in this survey. As has been the trend in recent years, the bulk of the dissertations on both sides of the Atlantic focus on the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century, with particular concentrations around the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, though there is an enduring interest in the early modern period in England.