Price : American Port Towns	125

terestingly, there is no evidence that Bennassar ever read Sombart,
but valuable ideas have lives of their own.)
gin English-speaking countries, London, Dublin, and Edinburgh
could all be apprnarriprl in rhp Sombartian mode, but thus tar Save
not been. There is a vast literature on each, including good studies
of architecture and urban design, but, at the synthetic level, even
the best modern work seems merely impressionistic. The literature
on the smaller towns of England is rich but uneven. The older
antiquarian literature fills libraries, but there is little to compare to
the modern, French studies (ranging from Roupnel's older study of
Dijon6 to the more recent well-known studies of Beauvais,7 Lyons,
and Amiens8) in which the economic and social lives of the com-
munity are integrated with imagination, erudition, and quantita-
tive precision. Perhaps the best-studied English town in this sense
is Exeter, which has attracted modern work of considerable sophis-
tication.9 Like Beauvais and Amiens, Exeter has the advantage of
being small enough to be handled by a single scholar. For the
greater towns of France, cooperative studies now seem to be flour-
ishing. For Marseilles, we have a narrowly commercial series;10 for
Bordeaux a less detailed but more broadly conceived series that
attempts to cover (if not necessarily to integrate) economic, social,
political, and demographic history.11 For Paris, as for London,
there are still only the antiquarian literature and the modem im-
pressionistic studies. For both, the monographic work (surely a
collective project) has yet to be done. /

6. Gascon Roupnel, La vills et la campagne au XVIIe siecle: Etude sur les populations du
pays dijonnais, new ed. (Paris 1955).

7. Pierre Coubert, Beauvais et le Beauvaisis de 1600 a 1730, 2 vols. (Paris, 1960).

8. Pierre Devon, Amiens capitate provinciate, etude sur la societe urbaine au l ?e siecle (Paris,

1967); Maurice Garden, Lyon et les Lyonnais au XVlUe siecle (Paris, 1970).

9. W. G. Hoskins, Industry, Trade and People in Exeter, i6SS-iSoo (Manchester, 1935);
Wallace T. MacCaflfrey, Exeter, 1540-1640 (Cambridge, 1958); W. B. Stephens, Seven-
teenth-century Exeter (Exeter, 1958); Robert Newton, Victorian Exeter, 1837-1914 (Leicester,

1968).

10. HistoireducommercedeMarseille, ed. GasconRambert, 6-f- vols. (Marseilles, 1949- ^.
For a good example of current quantitative approaches to the study of port towns, cf.
Pierre Dardel, \ravires et marchandises dans les ports de Rouen et du Havre (Paris, 1963).

11. Charles Higounet, ed., Histoire de Bordeaux, planned in 7 vols. (Bordeaux, 1962- ).
See in particular vol. IV: Robert Boutruche, ed., Bordeaux de 1453 a 1715 (1966); and vol.
V: Francois-Georges Pariset, ed., Bordeaux au XVlUe siecle (1968).