In this comprehensive study, Nicholas Papayanis explores the history of public transportation in Paris, placing it in the context of the city's urban and social development from the seventeenth century through the nineteenth. Regarding the idea of circulation as key to the definition of the modern city, Papayanis integrates an examination of this concept with a sharp focus on the organization and structure of public transit in the French capital.

In Horse-Drawn Cabs and Omnibuses in Paris, he is especially concerned with the relationships between public transit and both the nineteenth century's epochal urban reforms and seminal developments in state power and business practices.

Papayanis holds that arrangements in urban transit shed light on innumerable aspects of city life. Attitudes of class and gender reveal themselves in the practical restrictions on who used public vehicles. A reinforcement of the existing social divisions of spaces becomes clear. Urban transit is, in addition, a lens through which it is possible to survey the phenomenon of order and disorder in the streets and the evolution of residence and work patterns.

By examining the operation and internal structure of early cab and omnibus firms and the French government's creation during the Second Empire of two privately owned monopolies to operate cabs and omnibuses, Papayanis arrives at arresting conclusions about the French entrepreneurial spirit, the emergence in horse-drawn transit firms of early modern management structures, and the central role of the state in arranging a market for private firms.

Capitalism, he suggests, created an urban transit network in its own image.