Introduction: meat and the nineteenth-century city

The articles gathered in this special section explore the complex and layered relationship between meat and the nineteenth-century city. For urban historians interested in food provisioning, meat represents a critical juncture because no other food item was so deeply and, in so many ways, tied to urban modernity. This introduction outlines five central themes of the urban meat nexus: city and country relations, geography and urban space, technology and infrastructure, government and regulation, and changing nutritional standards. The four articles speak to these larger issues in specific and novel ways. They advance the existing scholarship by opening up new questions and approaches, focusing on hitherto understudied locations, while also collectively covering the entire spectrum of meat provisioning from supply hinterlands to urban consumption.