This introduction to the ‘Survey and Speculation’ special issue ‘Empire and Cities’ outlines how this collection came about, summarizes the six contributions and draws general conclusions.

This survey challenges conventional perceptions of colonial suburbs in the early modern Indian Ocean world in general, and those under the rule of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in particular. Recent urban research advocates re-evaluating suburbs as intricate and diverse spaces, yet this shift has had limited impact on historical studies of early modern colonialism. The survey highlights the importance of recognizing suburban regions in eighteenth-century settlements such as Cape Town, Cochin, Colombo or Batavia, where significant population growth resulted from inter-Asian and internal migration. These areas fostered ethnic and cultural diversity, disrupting normative ideas of segregation. By shifting the analytical focus from the core to the periphery and exploring colonial histories from an outside-in perspective, the contribution emphasizes the potential of a more horizontal approach to sub/urbanity for understanding early modern colonial societies, encouraging scholars to delve into the intersection of ‘the imperial’ and ‘the urban’.

The city of Sapporo, founded in 1869 by the Japanese government as a colonial headquarters in Hokkaido, developed as part of a global wave of settler-colonial urbanism. Like counterparts in North America and Australia, Sapporo facilitated economic, environmental and political transformations across Hokkaido that led to the displacement of Indigenous Ainu society by a soon overwhelming number of ethnically Japanese settlers. However, several historical factors distinguish Sapporo’s settler-colonial urbanism from its peers, including the long history of relations between the Ainu and Japanese; the heavy role of the Japanese state in Sapporo; and the lack of mass relocations of the Ainu to reservations far from their traditional homes.

The modern history of Tianjin, a northern port city in China, offers an intriguing urban case for scholars interested in comparative colonial practices. From the 1860s to the 1940s, Tianjin was home to up to nine foreign concessions and a sequence of different Chinese municipalities. While much scholarship on colonial history has focused on the interactive dynamics between the colonizer and the colonized, Tianjin’s colonial past draws attention to the multiplicity, multilateralism and multilayered trajectories at the heart of the colonial experiences of both imperialist powers and the Chinese. At the heart of this short survey are some reflections on the multi-imperial dimensions of the city of Tianjin. It also explains how the multi-imperial dimensions operated in Tianjin in its treaty-port incarnation and offers some considerations of how the Tianjin case contributes to broader historiographical conversations germane to the imperial–global–urban complex.

This survey introduces the reader to the history of international zones. It argues that they offer striking insights into peacekeeping during the transition from a world of formal empires to one dominated by sovereign states. While the study of international zones is not new, there has been little examination of internationalization in practice. The survey suggests some of the benefits of adopting this approach and findings it might unearth.

This survey reflects on the intersections of global and urban history through brief reflections on the Round Table Conference which took place over three sessions in London between 1930 and 1932. Uniting Indian representatives and the British government in London to solve political stalemate in South Asia, the conference provides a dramatic event through which to explore the enfolding of the British empire into the imperial capital. But the conference was also indebted to international and global connections and comparisons which intersected in the intimate spaces of diplomatic networking in the capital.

This exploratory text proposes a US imperial ‘research perspective’ on post-war post-colonial cities – cities that the United States did not colonially occupy, i.e. not cities like Manila, 1898–1946. US imperial actors and interests helped shape such cities, and in turn were shaped by their people and structures. Importantly, the US case seems to strengthen the general recent view, also regarding formal empires, that it makes little sense to posit the existence of an imperial city type, and more sense to use ‘the imperial urban’ as a research perspective.

Handshaking has a long multi-cultural history. This article focuses upon its diffusion in Britain 1700–1850. Two networks boosted the handshaking salutation. One was a mercantile network, extending across Europe’s urban/commercial regions. The other featured ‘middling sort’ Quaker men and women, who shook hands on principle. Gradually, the salutation became widely diffused – and acquired a range of egalitarian meanings. Handshaking was not an elite practice which ‘trickled down’ to the masses. Instead, it spread by social negotiation both ‘upwards’ and ‘downwards’ from middle-class society. Traditional hierarchy was yielding to an urbanizing and internationalizing world – with multiple individual options.

While our knowledge of the entanglements of cities and religions is growing, the ‘other’ of religion and its impact on the city has not received the same level of attention in research so far. This article explores how this lacuna could start to be filled. Its focus is on the history of modern cremation that unfolded with strong secularist leanings during the long nineteenth century. I will look into the history of the first European crematories that were built in Milan and Gotha, the construction of the first cremation furnaces and the infrastructures necessary to make them work. My hypothesis is that what I call ‘worldview technologies’ and related infrastructures changed the faces of cities and were in turn influenced by these cities’ histories and self-images.

The survey examines the past, present and future of the urban history field in Britain, mixing memories and reflections. I trace the global turn of that field and the challenges it brings. One argument concerns the impact of a global scale on the methods and the explanatory frameworks used. A second concern is the role of economic history and economic frameworks of analysis in the writing of urban history, and I advocate their continued relevance.

This survey reflects on a creative workshop which the authors ran for the ‘The State of Urban History: Past, Present, Future’ conference (July 2023). ‘Making manifestos for urban history’ was an experiment to encourage small group work and co-operative outputs in a conference setting, allowing for an atypical ‘many-to-many’ model of participation. During the session, five groups each produced a manifesto poster addressing issues that they thought were important for the future of urban history. The survey sets out the form the workshop followed, considers those who were involved and comments on how successful the workshop was in fostering conference community and active learning. Feedback recorded at the end of the session indicated that it was indeed successful in both these areas. Overall, the workshop demonstrated that when urban historians work together across generations and continents, they produce work of real value, which is resilient and sustainable.