The catalyst for this book is the fact that noted sociologist Charles Tilly, upon his death in 2008, left one completed chapter of an unfinished manuscript entitled "Cities, States, and Trust Networks," examining the relationships between cities and nation-states over the sweep of history, and in particular the role of trust networks in mediating this relationship.  Though this was the catalyst, the book serves a broader purpose: to survey recent frontier work on cities, nation-states, and the relations between the two in historical and contemporary perspective. Essays in the book will address four main themes: city-state relations, trust networks and commitment, democracy and inequality, and the importance of historical legacies in shaping state structures, practices, and capacities.  They will be global in scope, with research on the United States, Latin America, Europe, Asia, and Africa; a number of the pieces will be comparative.  They will also be interdisciplinary, including works of geography, history, political science, sociology, urban planning. The book addresses several confluent needs of readers.  One is to simply update themes addressed in earlier edited work such as Bringing the State Back In (1985).  A second is to bring together current thinking about cities on the one hand and nation-states on the other, literatures that are often segregated from each other.  A third is to perform those two purposes in a way that is global in scope and combines both historical and current analyses, to pull together insights from the full range of human experience.

Michael Hanagan is Adjunct Professor of History at Vassar College.  He has taught at Vanderbilt University, Columbia University and the New School for Social Research.  His books include: The Logic of Solidarity: Artisans and Industrial Workers in Three French Towns (1980), Nascent Proletarians: Class Formation in Post-Revolutionary France, 18400-1880 (1989), Confrontation, Class Consciousness and the Labor  Process (1986), Proletarians and Protest: Studies in Class Formation (1986), Expanding Rights, Reconfiguring States (2000),  and Challenging Authority: The Historical Study of  Contentious Politics. (1999). Global Connections: Politics, Exchange, and Social Life: A World History, (forthcoming),  He  is currently completing (with Miriam Cohen) a manuscript on the rise of the welfare state in England, France, and the U.S., 1870-1950. Chris Tilly is Professor of Urban Planning at UCLA and Director of the UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment. His research focuses on the determinants of job quality, particularly in lower-level jobs, as well as social movements and urban and regional development.  His books include Half a Job: Bad and Good Part-Time-Jobs in a Changing Labor Market (1996), Work Under Capitalism (1998), Stories Employers Tell: Race, Skill, and Hiring in America (2001), Urban Inequality: Evidence from Four Cities (2001), and The Gloves-Off Economy: Labor Standards at the Bottom of America's Labor Market (2008).  Tilly's most recent work is comparative, building on field research on retail jobs in the United States and Mexico and collaboration with researchers in a number of European countries.