This book covers the entire span from the emergence of cities in pre-historic times to the processes of urbanization in modern India. While one historian takes up conceptual and another historiographical issues, 14 contributors from different disciplines address themselves to urban patterns, demography, morphology, economy, social life, and politics in a single centre or a major region of the subcontinent. Some of the articles contain important implications for the problem of de-urbanization, particularly during the 18th and 19th centuries in the context of the decline of the Mughal empire and the rise of the British. \n