Urban History, 32, 2 (2005) C  2005 Cambridge University Press Printed in the United Kingdom doi:10.1017/S0963926805003007 The internationalization of fire protection: in pursuit of municipal networks in Edwardian Birmingham SHANE EWEN ∗ School of History and Classics, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, EH8 9JY abstract: Through a case study of Birmingham fire brigade, this article examines the plethora of international networking activities undertaken during the late Victorian and early Edwardian period. Birmingham fire brigade, under the control of Alfred Tozer, led British municipal participation in early international fire networks, attending international congresses and exhibitions in Berlin and London, and also visiting continental cities to inspect fire brigades and their appliances. Locating the study firmly within historical debates concerning the embryonic international municipal movement, this article demonstrates that municipal institutions participated in networking activities as part of a policy learning and knowledge-transfer process. Pierre-Yves Saunier has recently argued that between 1900 and 1960 European municipalities created, maintained and modified ‘a series of linkages – formal and informal, permanent or ephemeral’, in order to circulate information and expertise internationally. These ‘municipal connections’, which consisted of a ‘network of individual exchanges, visits, [and] writings’, reinforced municipal authority during a period increasingly identified as heralding the erosion of municipal powers by an encroaching national and supra-national state system. 1 They were also facilitated by the expansion of professional groups within municipal administration and improvements in cross-national communications. 2 Locating ‘municipal connections’ firmly within contemporary debates about European federalism, globalization and the new world order, Saunier throws down the gauntlet to urban historians who have neglected this important dimension of twentieth-century municipal administration. ∗ This research has been funded by an ESRC Research Studentship and Postdoctoral Fellowship. The author thanks the editors and the referees for their constructive comments. 1 P.-Y. Saunier, ‘Taking up the bet on connections: a municipal contribution’, Contemporary European History, 11 (2002), 507–27. 2 A. Sutcliffe, Towards the Planned City: Germany, Britain, the United States and France 1780–1914 (Oxford, 1981), 163–6.