This chapter traces the transformation of some of Gothenburg’s theatres from private enterprises into municipality- and state-run affairs, highlighting the often-conflictual negotiation processes inherent to the making of welfare cities. The making of some of Gothenburg’s theatres into public institutions reveals the different – and sometimes conflicting – claims of turn-of-the-century urban welfarism: public funding was to guarantee that ‘good’ theatre became an economically affordable and thereby a socially integrating institution while at the same time conforming to a certain moral and artistic standard. The chapter uncovers the different forms of urban actorship involved in transforming theatre into a public infrastructure and draws the entanglements between private initiatives, municipal decision-making, state support and the – relatively weak – involvement of Gothenburg’s popular movements. By un-packing the entangled components of emerging urban welfarism, the chapter unravels the welfare city as having its origin and catalyst not only in considerations of ‘the common good’ but just as much in private interests.

In the late nineteenth century, with the expansion of their harbours and the growth of transatlantic mobility, the port cities of Antwerp and Rotterdam became home to economically important and large migrant communities. In a context marked by the often-claimed rise of the nation state, when national legislation concerning nationality and citizenship was shifting, local authorities and citizens played an important but still underestimated role when it came to enforcing the naturalisation of foreign nationals. Applications for naturalisation in both Antwerp and Rotterdam were firmly rooted in the local context, and economic performance was key to the police commissar’s support of an applicant’s case towards the national authorities. By comparatively analysing individual applications for naturalisation in Antwerp and Rotterdam, this paper argues that the close relationship between the nation-state and the mechanisms of legal inclusion and exclusion on which it rested, has to be relativised.

This article explores the ways episcopal milieus on the north-eastern peripheries of Europe created and renewed their identities and symbols of episcopal authority by domesticating their immigrant saints during the high Middle Ages. By comparing the examples of holy bishops arriving to Poland and Sweden (St Adalbert, St Sigfrid, St Henry), it studies the episcopal mythopoesis, that is, the creation of foundational myths and mythologies as well as their adaptation to specific local needs and changing historical circumstances. The article further probes to what extent these mythopoetic efforts were original or imitative in comparison to the Western European episcopal centres and other peripheries. How similarly or differently did the bishops in the "old" and "young" Europe respond to the question: What beginnings do we need today? And what role did the appropriation, commodification, and domestication of holy bishops' images and body parts play in building the institutional identities of bishoprics?