The Rise of the English Town, 1650–1850. By Christopher Chalklin. [New Studies in Social and Economic History, no. 43.] Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. vii, 102. $39.50, cloth; $11.95, paper

The study of British cities and towns has advanced enormously in recent years. Once largely confined to the analysis of the great Victorian Cities—work inspired by the brilliant leadership of the late H. J. Dyos at Leicester—research has now extended to encompass the early and late Middle Ages, the early modern period, and also most recently the twentieth century. Not just metropolitan and industrial centers are being investigated, but the whole spectrum of the urban system: regional capitals, the myriad of market towns, ports, and, beginning in the eighteenth century, the new leisure and service towns. If the old urban studies were largely engineered by historians and sociologists, the new history of British contribution is attracting a galaxy of contributions from archaeologists, cultural geographers, literary scholars, art historians, musicologists, and museologists. Testifying to some of the wealth and diversity is the recent Cambridge Urban History of Britain (edited by D. Palliser et al. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), which in three volumes and with 80 or so contributors covers the period from the fourth century to the Second World War.