Joyce, Patrick. The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City. London: Verso, 2003. Pp. 276. Illustrations, photographs, maps Legg, Stephen. Spaces of Colonialism: Delhi’s Urban Governmentalities. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007. Pp. 254. Maps Otter, Chris. The Victorian Eye: A Political History of Light and Vision in Britain, 1800–1910. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Pp. 382. Illustrations, photographs

Governmentality has certainly arrived as a key scholarly concept, but it has made sporadic, limited inroads among urban historians. Yet from its earliest formulations by Michel Foucault, in the context of his lectures to the Collège de France in 1978 and 1979, “the city” has been the most important location for governmentality, both as history and as a topic of study. Foucault himself used the writing of early-modern and modern urban planners and political philosophers writing about city states to trace the genealogy of a new “rationality of government,” a “governmentality” in the Western world. The explosion in governmentality studies over the last twenty years has transported and refined Foucault’s initial concept in several distinct and unique ways. One of the things, however, that cuts through all this heterogeneity is the city. As Foucault insisted from his first lecture on the topic, the city has functioned historically as more than a laboratory for governmentality; modern governmentality was produced and reproduced through the city. Patrick Joyce, Stephen Legg, and Chris Otter have read deeply inside the governmentality literature and each opens up fresh ways for urban historians to think about the relatively old historiographical question of how cities are made and governed. They do so by asking a series of straightforward questions: How were cities governed? Who governed? What and who were governed? What technologies were deployed? And perhaps most importantly, What rationalities made these forms and practices of rule possible? The concern for each of these scholars is with the ordering of the city, of the putting into place of place. Their focus is on how political power is not merely inscribed upon the city’s residents and structures, but also on how such power is affected through the constant making and remaking of social and physical urban landscapes. While the oldest of the three books, Rule of Freedom, still rewards reading, of the three it is the best introduction for how urban historians might not only “use” governmentality but also, more importantly, study it and contribute to its theorization. Joyce draws most heavily (but not entirely) on the local histories and archives associated with Manchester and London during the nineteenth century. He is especially interested in what he calls a “sociocultural history of governmentality” (6) and thus he concerns himself with those things that affected the social life of the city: mobility, infrastructure, institutions, and the performative elements of social relations. Indeed, this last element is perhaps Joyce’s most impressive contribution. When detailing the different ways people came to know the city and govern it, or in providing examples of how people inhabited the city and conducted themselves in its public spaces, Joyce calls attention to the practices involved, the roles assumed, the performances affected. What remains novel in all this is that Joyce sees both human and non-human performances: What streetlights, sewers, and public transit did, he insists, exerted an influence over the (re)making of what he calls the “liberal city” just as did a burgeoning middle class of politicians, experts, and bureaucrats, not to mention all those people, from all walks of life, who filled the streets and its spaces. What was this liberal city? Joyce and his former student Chris Otter emphasize that the liberal city in Victorian Britain was one in which freedom was taken very seriously. The freedom to move, from home, to work, to clubs, to church, to market, to parks, had to be not only provided for but also protected. The correctness of all this had to be taught, especially to those who were deemed ignorant of freedom’s benefits, including children, but …