From the middle of the nineteenth century, most European cities experienced a period of unrivalled growth and development that forever changed not only their physical characteristics, but also their social foundations. As the great industrial cites were forced to face the new and unprecedented challenges of rapid urbanisation and increased population, they had to rethink many of the concepts on which previous city institutions had been based. One of the most fundamental of these was the role of house ownership, and the rights and responsibilities it offered. Exploring the social and political meanings attributed to property - specifically home ownership - this study looks at how these changed during the course of the modern city building process between 1860 and 1920. Focussing on two northern European capital cities, Berlin and Stockholm, it provides a symmetrical investigation that helps illuminate the competing factors that shaped the shifting nature of cityscapes and urban social structures.

"The past decades witnessed a powerful return of struggles against what economic historian Karl Polanyi termed the commodification of social life. This book explores how organized workers in two metropolises of the late nineteenth century responded to the commodification of labor. In doing so, it reveals a striking continuity in collective opposition against the unfettered power of free markets. Drawing on contemporary feminist revisions of Polanyian thought, this book illustrates the ambiguous potential of movements for social protection"--Back cover.

How did typhus come to be viewed as a "Jewish disease" and what was the connection between the anti-typhus measures during the First World War and the Nazi gas chambers and other genocidal medical practices in the Second World War? This powerful book provides valuable new insight into the history of German medicine in its reaction to the international fight against typhus and the perceived threat of epidemics from the East in the early part of this century. Paul Weindling examines how German bacteriology became increasingly racialized, and how it sought to eradicate the disease by the eradication of the perceived carriers. Delousing became a key feature of Nazi preventive medicine during the Holocaust, and gassing a favored means of eliminating typhus.