Cities Built Around Chance: Gambling vice and urban regulation

Where crowds gathered, games of chance followed: in taverns, streets, clubs, fairs, casinos, and private rooms. Authorities alternately prohibited, licensed, taxed, and exploited gambling, turning a popular pastime into a recurring problem of urban governance. This history traces the relationship among play, money, class, crime, and public order across changing cities. It examines lotteries, betting houses, gaming tables, reform campaigns, and municipal revenue without reducing participants to either victims or villains. Readers see how debates over chance exposed deeper tensions about leisure, morality, policing, and who was allowed to profit from risk.