Cities, States and Intergovernmental Relations: Comparing the US and the UK.

In this paper I compare how the United States and the United Kingdom have historically attempted to integrate cities into their political structures, and I argue that we would do better to interpret the American polity as part of an Anglo-American cultural-political family than as a unique entity. From an urban point of view the American polity is largely descended from British precedents. There are marked similarities across the two countries in the varieties of self-government town residents adopted, the philosophical rationales for integrating pre-capitalist institutions into the bourgeois state, and the amount and kind of formal autonomy that cities in both countries possess. This is true despite the difference between American federalism and the unitary structure of British government. Differences in institutional structure are less important than one might think, and American exceptionalism amounts to less than meets the eye. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]