Abstract
This collection of studies, which results from a scholarly collaboration that began in 2006, combines research on transport history, urban history, and network analysis from a long-term perspective. The book examines gateways, hinterlands, and cities from the Middle Ages to the late twentieth century, presenting eleven case studies from Italy, France, the British Isles, Russia, and the Baltics to provide evidence of the historical evolution of urban network systems in Western Europe. This study builds upon the idea, developed by Jan De Vries in the 1980s and subsequently refined by demographers and urban historians, that trade routes link cities to each other and define how ‘urbanization and de/urbanization processes […] developed’ (p. 5). The volume complements this research trajectory by providing empirical examples from various historical regions to emphasise the interdependencies between cities, actors, and their surrounding spaces.
Why did certain cities thrive and other did not? Social and economic historians, such as Fernand Braudel and Immanuel Wallerstein, attempted to answer this question in the second half of the twentieth century by identifying a combination of geographical determinants and human-related factors that shaped social and economic hierarchies of space. Although the book does not explicitly reference these historians, the Urban Logistic Network focuses on the role of transportation networks and trade routes to understanding the hierarchical relationships between cities, hinterlands, and peripheries that influenced urbanization processes throughout European history. The book accomplishes this examination by first exploring the main protagonists of the urban logistic network. The nodes (cities and gateways) and links (railways, waterways, and trade flows) are integrated into a hierarchical network that includes a broader landscape of hinterlands and peripheries. This is not a static model, however. The book also provides a variety of insightful examples that show how human actors inhabited and exploited these physically constructed and geographically determined spatial settings.
The book is divided into four sections, each devoted to a specific combination of trade and transportation flows. The first part (chapter 2) shows the dynamism between logistic and urban systems by using the case study of the city of Gothenburg, understood as a system of gateways that shaped trade and urbanization processes from the Middle Ages to our times. This case study shows how urban networks – and their shapes – changed over time. The various forms and models characterising urban logistic networks are the core of section two (chapters 3–6). For example, the case of the wine trade in Bordeaux in the late Middle Ages (chapter 3) insightfully shows the social and economic impact of a dendritic shape – a series of distribution corridors in the form of waterways converging into a single destination point such as a port city. One of Bordeaux's many forms of control over the hinterland was the way it harvested grapes and distributed wine. In fact, wine production – and its trade network – played such a dominant role that it transformed a polycentric system of waterways and harvesting areas into a unified geographical region. A combination of various shapes of urban logistic networks and how they changed overtime is at the centre of the analysis of Northern Italy, to which section III (chapters 7–9) is dedicated.
Perhaps the most interesting discussion proposed in this book pertains to the agents (or users) of the urban logistic network, which are covered in the final section of the volume (section IV, chapters 10–12). The analysis starts from the premise that examining transport and trade across history provides the opportunity to consider actors at the centre of urban logistic networks. Chapter 10 demonstrates the usefulness of this approach by exploring the eighteenth-century flaxseed trade between the Baltic coast and Brittany. The author illustrates how Hanseatic merchants of the city port of Lübeck established a trade monopoly that connected the Baltic suppliers and the Breton buyers through the use of gateways and city networks of two distant marketplaces.
The volume successfully accomplishes its programmatic objective of ‘operating as a comprehensive and useful toolkit for researchers to use in their study of urban networks’ (p. 3). In the book, the reader will find a diverse set of case studies from across (Western) Europe, along with a well-crafted methodology that draws connections between cities, transport routes, markets, and agents. While urban spaces, gateways, and trade routes are undoubtedly the book's protagonists, the presence of bottom-up examples of actors utilising and shaping such connections shows how the combination of structural and agential factors can (and must) be considered at the centre of urban logistic networks.
While the book effectively makes strong arguments through the comparison and discussion of agency, it could have benefited from a clearer outlook on future research. For example, the volume could have included some concluding remarks (there's no conclusion at the end). Such a chapter could have outlined the similarities and differences of urban logistics networks across the world, particularly with regards to the pivotal role played by the interconnection between gateways, agents, and marginalised actors (such as slaves and women) in shaping the logistics of capitalist production and circulation in the Americas and the Indian Ocean. Nevertheless, the book still offers an interesting set of case studies, and future researchers stand to gain much from its comparative perspective.