In 1700 London was already the biggest city in Europe; by 1800 it had become the largest in the world. It was home to both the most magnificent and the most squalid lives. In his new book, Jerry White does justice to both extremes  though his main focus is on the violence, disharmony and divisions of city life, from the routine abuse of women by their husbands to the Gordon Riots of 1780, which in a week destroyed 10 times more property than was damaged in Paris during the entire course of the French revolution.

He has produced a vast and impressive synthesis. Given the quantity of modern scholarship on 18th-century subjects, the wonder is not that White sometimes slips or misses things, but that he has managed to produce such a readable and well-judged overview of so many different themes. The book's five sections survey the capital's buildings, types of inhabitant, range of occupations, kinds of culture, and types of "power"  from the law to religion.

Its main achievement lies in the kaleidoscope of personal experiences  high and low, male and female  that it brings before our eyes. White excels at juxtaposing famous lives with those of obscure Londoners. Side by side with Robert Adam, Henry Fielding, and Eliza Haywood, we encounter countless men and women whose stories, unknown even to specialists, he has industriously truffled out from printed and manuscript sources.

To illustrate relations between servants and their employers, for example, we meet the successful fencing master Domenico Angelo, having returned to London unexpectedly one evening in 1763, indignantly writing to his wife about the shambles he has found at home (White preserves his gloriously Italianate spellings, which I have simplified): "I find my poor Little Sophie in Mr Vernon's room sitting on a chair, Paris and Mr Vernon fast asleep upon the bed. My dear Girl as soon as she saw me she screamed aloud 'my dear Papa', waked the two pigs, and the sweet soul was pleased to come into my arms." Elsewhere, we are transported inside the head of the Cambridge student George Cumberland in 1774, reluctantly embarking in the stagecoach for London: "I mounted the ladder of the Coach as slowly as a Criminal does the Ladder at Tyburn, with this difference  he because his Journey is so short, I because my Journey was so long, dreading fat Arses & Sick Stomachs "

Relations between the sexes are a central theme  not least the promiscuity of men in every class, and the often startling ways in which it was condoned and facilitated by women. "Mr Thrale told me he had an ailment," recorded the brewer's wife and bluestocking Hester Thrale in 1776, "& shewed me a Testicle swelled to an immense size": he'd caught the pox from one of his endless affairs. So what did she do? "I am preparing Pultices", she wrote, "and fomenting the elegant Ailment every Night & Morning for an hour together on my Knees". That is not a picture often sketched of the indefatigable hostess and benefactor of Dr Johnson.

The same unflinching treatment is in evidence throughout: if you've ever wondered what it was like to die in the pillory, to suffer from advanced syphilis, to be robbed by a highwayman or to make your living from pick-pocketing, then this is the book for you.

White is especially good on the sheer filth and discomfort of city life. In the summer of 1708 the plague of flies was so dense that dead insects fell like snow in the streets, deep enough to leave footprints in. Bed bugs were such a ubiquitous nuisance that even the king had his own "Bug-Doctor", a Mr Bridges of Hatton Garden. Most of the raw sewage produced by the capital's million inhabitants went into the Thames  which also provided much of the population's drinking water. Small wonder that life expectancy in London was much lower than anywhere else in the country. A shockingly high proportion of children died young: in most years, infants made up between 40% and 50% of all London burials.

Sometimes the book's exhaustiveness can be overwhelming. The first two chapters will be heavy going for readers who don't necessarily want a street-by-street, square-by-square survey of the expansion of every part of the metropolis in this period. Roy Porter's London: A Social History covers many of the same themes at a snappier pace and also gives a better sense of where the 18th century fits in London's overall history, from the Romans to the present.

White is the author of two previous volumes, on the history of London in the 20th and the 19th centuries. His evident love for the city lifts the prose, but it also limits his vision (as does his having approached the subject backwards, chronologically speaking). So overwhelmed is he by the desire to describe every facet of 18th-century London in detail that he rarely pauses to consider what was new or different about it all, or how it compared to life elsewhere. That can be misleading. The mockery of boorish citizens, for example, was a feature of London's drama long before 1700. The 18th-century explosion of social clubs and freemasonry was a much more general English (and indeed European) phenomenon than is implied here. The extraordinary sexual freedom that he chronicles was new and unprecedented. And though the Scottish enlightenment is mentioned in passing, there is no index entry for the English variety, or any explicit discussion of London's central role in it.

All the same, one of my favourite facts in the book is a comparative one. There were, he tells us, far more wooden-legged men in 18th-century London than in any other city in Europe. It's the kind of telling detail that sticks in the mind, that conjures up an entire lost world, and that Jerry White uses time and again to animate his wonderful panorama.

 Faramerz Dabhoiwala's The Origins of Sex is published by Allen Lane.

Britain and London are virtually synonymous in the eyes of the world. The eve of the Olympics is a good time to go back to the century that saw the making of Britannia and the London we walk and live in today. Jerry White's history of 18th-century London is the culmination of two previous volumes about London in the 19th and 20th centuries. This new book finds him inspired by the city that Daniel Defoe identified as "this great and monstrous Thing called London".

In 1700, it was divided, in separations that linger, into three: the City (London), the court (Westminster and St James's) and south of the river (Southwark). The essayist Joseph Addison, in 1712, looked on it as "an aggregate of various nations distinguished from each other by their respective customs, manners an interests". In 1700, its population numbered about half a million, swelling to approximately 750,000 by 1750 and roughly a million by 1800. By contrast, England's second city, Bristol, had scarcely 30,000 inhabitants.

London was not just staggeringly larger than anywhere else, it was also a vivid new metropolis, much of it in soft pink brick. The Great Fire of 1666 had left more than half of the old city in smouldering ruins. After the union with Scotland, the capital became the outward sign of British prosperity and self-confidence. And the people most attracted to it, for its teeming opportunities, were the Scots.

Georgian London became a Scottish city. Its main architect, James Gibbs, was Scottish. So was the circle that formed around the young George III. That great Londoner, Samuel Johnson, loved to goad the Scots, but his amanuensis, James Boswell, was one himself, and so were five of the six assistants on his famous Dictionary. Scots in the capital often attracted hostility. When officers in highland dress appeared at Covent Garden, the upper gallery yelled: "No Scots! No Scots!" and pelted them with apples.

In other ways, Britannia's London was more extreme but not so different from our own: prey to rioting, seething with sex and violence. Visitors to London, appalled by the atmosphere, also noted what one described as "the vast number of harlots" roaming the streets by night. London was the sex capital of Europe, but hardly uplifting. "She was ugly and lean," wrote James Boswell of one encounter in the park, "and her breath smelt of spirits. I never asked her name. When it was done, she slunk off."

White's account is not exactly new. Much of this book reads like an animated Hogarth cartoon. But he has uncovered a wealth of evidence to sustain a portrait of a society revelling in money and pleasure in ways that recall the excesses of the 1980s.

Contemporaries saw the city as a marketplace for every kind of trade. In the mixing of vice and fashion, there were remarkable social consequences at work, too. White argues persuasively that historians have paid insufficient attention to the role of prostitution in the rise of democracy. It's a pleasing picture that while the women of the town flirtatiously dissolved the bonds of deference, London became a democratic crucible.

But there was a dark side. "Crime and criminals," says White, "knew no bounds of rank in 18th-century London." Suicide was common, executions a public spectacle. Violent property crime rose. In 1780, with the outbreak of the Gordon riots, London seemed on the brink of civil war.

In early June, the mob attacked 10 Downing Street and then moved on to batter the city's prisons, destroying Newgate. It has been calculated that these riots destroyed 10 times more property than was destroyed in Paris during the entire French revolution.

The repression of the 1790s was the response of an establishment reasserting state control. The French revolution and the wars that followed loosened the city's devotion to popular democracy and brought merchants and courtiers from the east and west ends into a loyal alliance behind the throne. London had become the world capital it remains today.