In European towns of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the sounds people heard were very different from those of today. Yet the difference goes much deeper: whereas today we try to escape city noise, for the inhabitants of early modern towns sound served as a crucial source of information. It formed a semiotic system, conveying news, helping people to locate themselves in time and in space, and making them part of an ‘auditory community’. Sound helped to construct identity and to structure relationships. The evolution of this information system reflects changes in social and political organization and in attitudes towards time and urban space.

This paper explores how the system of meat supply influenced the topographical development of two marginal districts of sixteenth-century Istanbul. Through the combination of information contained in various historical sources, the paper reconstructs the economic links between some of their ‘dependent’ establishments such as slaughterhouses, tanning workshops, candle- and soapmakers. Throughout, it is argued that decisions about the location of these establishments were closely related to social, economic and probably technological factors of the era.

Were England's old shire towns marginalized from the process of economic change during the period of the classical Industrial Revolution? A number of contributors to The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, Vol. II make this claim, others emphasize the continued relevance of these towns in the emerging industrial age. With few investigations undertaken into the county towns of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, detailed case study analysis is needed. Using trade directories to profile Chelmsford's business community, this article presents evidence of a dynamic and prosperous urban economy.

The creation of a colonial police force in Tanganyika after the First World War and its elaboration over the next four decades is described, as are its role in the attempted assertion of urban order and its relations with the Dar es Salaam public. The force was a central component in the colonial state's efforts to assert control over the urban arena. Lacking both resources and legitimacy it was only partially effective in this regard, with intermittent enforcement of colonial legislation being the norm. More concerted efforts to supervise the urban African population at a time of rapid urban growth in the post-Second World War period led to a deterioration in – already poor – police-public relations, which served further to undermine colonial authority.

Producing and consuming studies of consumption has become a minor industry in its own right amongst the current generation of historians and it has moved significantly beyond the pioneering histories of shopping which we associate with Alison Adburgham and others. Instead, it has moved into the broader realms of cultural formation, both in wider terms of social change and in the context of regional and local identities, as well as international comparisons. So it comes as little surprise to find a batch of current studies which deal with the present complexities of scholarly approaches in distinctive but overlapping ways. In this development British historians have made significant pioneering contributions but it becomes apparent from some of the present offerings that initiatives may have moved elsewhere. That is hardly a cause for national mourning but at least some parts of the works reviewed here, written abroad, show an awareness of British developments which is too rarely reciprocated in studies originating on this side of the Channel and North Sea (or ‘German Ocean’ as more appropriate in view of the insularity which produces them). Perhaps the appalling inability to read European languages now so common amongst both under- and postgraduate students is also more widespread amongst academic historians than we have realized or are prepared to admit. It is also very likely that the situation is being exacerbated by the short termism of the Research Assessment Exercise's demands for a frequency of output which militates against the extended period necessary for sophisticated comparisons – so much of its classification of ‘international excellence’ seems more to do with single-focused rather than real international studies. Yet there is much on offer in Europe in particular which cries out for more systematic comparative analysis and some of the work reviewed here offers a good starting point.

In France, as in the Anglo-Saxon world, social history has undergone a sea change in recent years with the growth of interest in issues of culture and representation, with the result that historians have come to ask rather different questions about cities and their social fabric. The change was not, of course, achieved overnight: since the 1930s the Annalistes have been opening up new approaches to the analysis of power and status, while in the development of micro-history Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie's Montaillou occupies an honoured place. In this the lingering influence of a Marxist model has played an important part. For decades Marxist theory provided the key which opened up issues of social power and class division, the methodology which led to a widespread study of urban structures and social dominance. And though in some hands it might be criticized for leading to an over-arching concern with the urban economy and the growth of the industrial city, the same Marxist perspective also encouraged studies of such questions as the identity of urban elites, the extent of social mobility within cities and the development of suburbs. More recently French historians have been among the most innovative in exploring the culture of urban life in a variety of different contexts, whether – and here I shall simply cite representative examples – by the study of individual professions (Christophe Charle), of dress and public appearance (Daniel Roche), or of the appropriation of urban space (Bernard Lepetit). The three books under review here all, in their different ways, contribute to our understanding of that urban culture and of the changes which it has undergone. Yannec Le Marec takes up Charle's arguments through a micro-history of the professional development of lawyers and doctors in the south Breton city of Nantes during the nineteenth century. Natacha Coquery, looking at the eighteenth century, explains the representation of social power implicit in the transfer of sumptuous Paris hôtels from private use to that of government ministries and their fast-multiplying staff. And Claude Petitfrère presents an edited collection of papers, emanating from a conference organized by the highly influential Centre d'histoire de la ville moderne et contemporaine in his own university at Tours, which illuminates across time and place the ways in which an urban patriciate was first constructed, then reproduced and represented to contemporaries. Taken together the three volumes go far to illustrate current developments in historiography and offer an overview of the present state of urban social history in France.