Some recent writing on urban history appears to be sounding a note of caution about concepts which are fundamental to the subject: the nature and role of towns. Statements about towns in general, we are warned, are not likely to be very valuable. Indeed to treat towns as ‘a self-contained unit of analysis’ may be misleading. Particular towns should be studied within the wider contexts which are relevant to them. They will then be seen as ‘fields of action integral to some larger world and within which the interactions and contradictions of that larger world are displayed with special clarity’. If ‘the dualistic tendencies implicit in the idea of the separation of town and country’ are abandoned, ‘the issue of the role of towns tends to lose significance and to be replaced by a concern to understand towns as sites in which the history of larger social systems … is partially but crucially worked out’.