A positive shock to a society’s supply of human capital can come from exogenous and unanticipated immigration. One such case arose from Louis XIV’s precipitous revocation of the Edict of Nantes, which forced French Calvinists – Huguenots – to convert or to flee. Many fled to the Protestant regions of Germany, where – owing to the Huguenots’ renowned expertise and entrepreneurship – they contributed greatly to subsequent economic development. Only some of Germany’s many Protestant cities, however, welcomed the refugees. Analysis of sixty cities’ attitudes contradicts the idea that powerful guilds opposed, or that pre-existing human capital favored, the admission of the Huguenots. Rather, a city was likelier to welcome them the closer it lay to a major trade route, or the more of its population it had lost in the Thirty Years’ War. Territorial rulers almost unanimously welcomed the Huguenots and often compelled reluctant cities to admit them. Animated by the ideas of Seckendorff, rulers saw in the Huguenots both a welcome influx of human capital and a way to undermine the craft guilds, which Seckendorff regarded as a major impediment to economic growth.

This chapter opens by considering the vexed relationship between Romantic poetic practices that were increasingly interested in the powers and perceptions of individuals and the Romantic period’s burgeoning metropolitan profusion. The first sections explore the ambivalent or outright negative attitudes towards cities and their populations expressed by poets such as William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey and considers how distancing perspectives are employed in writings by Walter Scott and Letitia Landon. The later parts of the essay consider alternative versions of the urban sublime, touching on topographical and statistical representations by Thomas Malton and Patrick Colquhoun; celebrations of multiplicity by Pierce Egan and William Hazlitt; readings against the grain by Charles Baudelaire, Thomas De Quincey and Charles Lamb; and considerations of ruination by John Martin, Anna Laetitia Barbauld and Mary Shelley.

Early modern Europe was a mobile society, but migration has primarily been described in terms of men seeking work, as labourers, apprentices, journeymen, soldiers or sailors. Long-distance migration was primarily male, but the much more common shorter-distance migration from countryside to town or from town to town was predominantly female. Men came to cities and often left again; women moved to cities and stayed. In most cities in Western Europe by 1700 women outnumbered men. This imbalance most likely resulted from women immigrating or men emigrating. Women, like men, moved primarily at younger ages and overwhelmingly in search of work. Women moving to towns are commonly associated with domestic service, but we show that only around half of all female immigrants worked as servants, and even these worked mostly for artisanal and trading households, assisting in the household business. The other half worked in institutions such as hospitals, as labourers in transport and as apprentices and journeywomen in manufacturing and the rapidly growing retail opportunities. We survey existing findings on female migration and the economic significance of marriage and lay out the territory for future research, challenging current theories on migration and showing the impact of gender.

Volume 2 of The Cambridge History of Global Migrations presents an authoritative overview of the various continuities and changes in migration and globalization from the 1800s to the present day. Despite revolutionary changes in communication technologies, the growing accessibility of long-distance travel, and globalization across major economies, the rise of nation-states empowered immigration regulation and bureaucratic capacities for enforcement that curtailed migration. One major theme worldwide across the post-1800 centuries was the differentiation between “skilled” and “unskilled” workers, often considered through a racialized lens; it emerged as the primary divide between greater rights of immigration and citizenship for the former, and confinement to temporary or unauthorized migrant status for the latter. Through thirty-one chapters, this volume further evaluates the long global history of migration; and it shows that despite the increased disciplinary systems, the primacy of migration remains and continues to shape political, economic, and social landscapes around the world.

Switzerland genuinely pushes for stronger climate policies in international negotiations and during the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change Conferences of the Parties (UNFCCC). In contrast, when it comes to domestic regulation it tends to wait for, and align itself with, the positions of the European Union (EU). In fact, rather than a climate ‘pusher’, Switzerland is more accurately described as a ‘follower’ of the EU on climate matters. This chapter takes this observation as a starting point, aiming to unpack the advantages and disadvantages offered by the Swiss federal structure in both enabling and hindering effective and sustainable climate governance. We show that the fragmented nature of the Swiss polity, with its 26 constituent units (cantons) and some 2,000 municipal polities with each more or less autonomy in key policy areas, is not in itself an obstacle. However, tackling the complexity arising from such a multilevel structure is time consuming, at best. We find that the high degree of decentralisation has facilitated locally tailored solutions and policy innovation in particular regarding climate adaption, but inter-jurisdictional coordination and learning is limited and subnational policies do not compensate for an absence of ambitious climate mitigation policy at the national level.

Being exposed to nature (trees, plants and green space) has demonstrable positive effects on our physical health, our behaviour (including crime) and our wellbeing. Quantifying this can improve the design of our lifestyle and our cities. For instance, people with longer commutes experience less wellbeing. However house price differences underestimate the wellbeing effect of green space and other aspects of the environment (like air pollution and noise).

The quantity and quality of housing has a relatively small effect on wellbeing. This is partly because people compare their houses with those of their neighbours. But being in arrears on your mortgage of rent has a really negative effect.

Climate change is a classic public good problem, since CO2 emitted anywhere affects people living everywhere. Every country has an incentive to free ride on the costs incurred by others. Only international agreement can overcome this problem. Climate change is also a clear threat to the wellbeing of future generations. The wellbeing approach invites us to value the wellbeing of future generations as much as we value our own (subject only to a very small discount rate).

This chapter reviews the literature on the origins of cities and states. We argue that purely agricultural societies are unlikely to have cities because population dispersal reduces travel costs for farmers and herders. But incentives for agglomeration could arise from the productivity of urban manufacturing, the need for collective defense, or cultural factors. We supplement our study of Mesopotamia with archaeological data on state formation in Egypt, the Indus Valley, China, Mesoamerica, and the Andes. All of these cases had highly productive food technologies, pre-existing stratification, and close links with urbanization. Based on our models in Chapters 6, 8, and 10, we suggest three pathways to a state. In the “property rights hypothesis,” improving food technology and long-run population growth lead to the creation of elite property rights over the best sites, a shrinking commons, and falling commoner wages. This eventually triggers urban manufacturing and city-state formation. In the “elite warfare hypothesis,” warfare among elites over land rents causes defensive agglomeration in cities and territorial expansion by successful elites. In the “environmental shift hypothesis,” commoner populations migrate toward refuge sites (often river valleys) controlled by local elites, again leading to falling commoner wages, urbanization, and state formation.

Chapter 7 examines what causes pandemics – and how to avoid the next one.

From Tanganyika’s independence in 1961 to the collapse of the Portuguese empire in 1974, Dar es Salaam was an epicentre of revolution in Africa. The representatives of anticolonial liberation movements set up offices in the city, attracting the interest of the Cold War powers, who sought to expand their influence in the Third World. Meanwhile, the Tanzanian government sought to translate independence into meaningful decolonisation through an ambitious project to build a socialist state. This chapter explains how the lens of the city reveals the connections between the dynamics of the Cold War, decolonisation, and socialist state-making in Tanzania. It locates this approach among new approaches to the history of the Cold War, decolonisation, and global cities. Scattered across continents, the postcolonial archive offers the potential for exploring the revolutionary dynamics which intersected in Dar es Salaam.

This chapter reads three examples of what is now frequently labelled climate fiction and argues that rather than addressing climate change in the manner commonly assumed by criticism, such works frequently wish to evade it. Clade by James Bradley (2015) draws on the domestic novel and therapeutic fiction, and their concern with the personal, pairing these with climate events to become an anaemic version of the nineteenth-century historical novel. The End We Start From by Megan Hunter (2017) replaces climate events with myth so as to scale up the personal to the planetary scale of the Anthropocene. These genre combinations convert the punctum of apocalypse into something more durable and suggest a cultural structure of feeling chiefly concerned with a fantasy subjugation of climate change to a continuation of the affluent lifestyle of the Global North. A reading of All Rivers Run Free by Natasha Carthew (2018) confirms the link between climate events and myth as replacements for the planetary forces that are truly frightening to the domestic near future: history, and other people.

This volume explores how the circulation of goods, people, and ideas permeated every aspect of the continent’s cultural production at the turn of the century. We are interested not only in understanding how literature and the arts confronted the unprecedented penetration of global capital in Latin America, but also in exploring the ways in which rapidly transforming technological and labor conditions contributed to forging new intellectual networks, creating original discourses, exploring innovative forms of knowledge, and reimagining the material and immaterial worlds. This volume shows the new directions in turn-of-the-century scholarship that developed over the last two decades by investigating how the experience of capitalism produced an array of works that deal with primitive accumulation, transnational crossings, and an emerging technological and material reality in diverse geographies and a variety of cultural forms. The various contributions provide a novel understanding of the period as they discuss the ways in which particular commodities, intellectual networks, popular uprisings, materialities, and nonmetropolitan locations redefined cultural production at a time when the place of Latin America in global affairs was significantly transformed.

An intense debate has arisen among scholars concerning the financial sustainability of the grain funds that Greek and Roman cities used to cope with the instabilities of the grain market. In this paper, we apply a Monte Carlo simulation to model their financial dynamics. Due to the uncertainties pertaining to the scope of such funds (targeting urban dwellers only or including rural residents), our model takes into account two scenarios: ‘optimistic’ (urban only) and ‘pessimistic’ (both urban and rural). The analysis reaches several important findings: (1) For both scenarios, we witness a considerable rate of funds collapsing in their first 10 years of operation. After 10 years, however, the probability of failure displays very little change, as if there was a threshold over which the funds had accumulated enough capital to withstand shortages. (2) As expected, the survival rates are significantly higher for the optimistic scenario. (3) The withdrawals seem to have the most dramatic impact on the dynamic of the fund. Overall, while the grain funds do not appear to be sustainable in the urban-rural scenario, they show clear signs of sustainability in the urban-only scenario. The results invite reconsideration of the widespread view that grain funds were an inefficient and precarious response to food crisis.