Review of Tadashi Nakano, Tatsuyuki Karasawa and Ichirō Michishige (eds), 18 Seiki no Igirisu Toshikūkan o Saguru: Toshi “Runesansu” ron Saikō (Exploring Urban Space in Eighteenth-Century England: A Reappraisal of the Urban Renaissance Debate)

Abstract

Since 1989, Peter Borsay’s The English Urban Renaissance: Culture and Society in the Provincial Town, 1660–1770 has been influential in the study of modern British urban history. Inspired by his work, Tadashi Nakano, Ichiro Michishige and Tatsuyuki Karasawa, leading Japanese historians working in this field, in 2004 organized a study group to reappraise British urban history in the ‘long’ eighteenth century. They chose to focus on this era rather than the period of industrialization, the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which has tended to attract considerably more attention from British and Japanese scholars interested in the modern urban history of Britain.

This is a translation of a book review that originally appeared in Shakai Keizai Shigaku 79(2) (August 2013), pp. 145–147.