Page 290 - Encyclopedia Of World History Vol V

world cities in history—overview 2067

productive capacity. For instance, has been Tertius Chandler’s Four
the capitals of powerful or strategi- Thousand Years of Urban Growth
cally important states and the mili- (1987), a product of decades of
tary garrisons they might harbor research that brought together a mass
will be politically important, and of material on cities between 2250
religious centers will attract interest BCE and 1975 CE. Complementing
and visitors from afar. There have and extending that work has been
also been cities noted for their cul- George Modelski’s World Cities:
tural assets and the excellence of the –3000 to 2000 (2003), which pro-
learning they afford. Large cities vides fuller coverage for the first four
have often been multifunctional; millennia but deals more lightly with
large populations, in turn, provide the data from 1000 CE onward; it
This portion of a large Japan-
fertile soil for innovative enterprises. also reports on world trends in
ese print shows people using
It is hard to find a single, dominant urbanization.
a variety of transportation
world city over the past several mil-
modes.
lennia, but we can identify sets of The Ancient
urban centers and examine their World
form and composition and the connections among The first city system emerged in Southern Mesopotamia
them (for example, were they imperial or nonimperial?). in the fourth millennium BCE in what archeologist Vere
In the present survey, world cities will be identified pri- Gordon Childe dubbed the “Urban Revolution.” This
marily by size, because in a survey of this scale, both spa- group of urban settlements centered on Uruk, clearly a
tial and temporal, it’s not practicable to make an major cult center; Uruk was probably also a focus of polit-
empirical, detailed, and documented assessment of world ical activities and was almost certainly the center of
system position. For the ancient era (about 3000 to regional exchanges whose reach extended from Iran in
1000 BCE) we will examine cities with settlements whose the east, to the upper Euphrates in the north, and to Egypt
population may be estimated (for instance, on the basis in the west. By 3000 BCE we find here (and nowhere else)
of archaeologists’ site reports) to be in excess of ten thou- some half-dozen units that satisfy our criteria for an
sand; the population of most such cities are in the range incipient world city system. Uruk is at that time the
of ten thousand to 100,000. For the classical era (1000 largest among them and the largest city in the world at
BCE to 1000 CE), we will look at urban centers with pop- that time, with a population possibly reaching forty thou-
ulations of 100,000 or more, most typically in the range sand. And this is just one reason for calling it the first
of 100,000 to 1 million. For the modern era (since world city, because we also know, from archaeological
1000 CE) we focus principally on cities with populations and literary evidence, that Uruk was also the likely locus
in the 1 to 10 million range. of the invention of writing and of calendars, innovations
This overview draws its empirical data from two quan- that proved to be of epochal significance.
titative censuses of urban growth and contextualizes that This was the Uruk nucleus of an emerging system of
data for several eras and regions. Until quite recently the world cities. The first basic trend we can identify is the
prevailing view held that a statistical description of urban- emergence, by the mid-third millennium BCE, of a viable
ization prior to about 1800 was an impossibility. How- and productive center in Sumer, the heartland of cities,
ever, new sources have opened up—for instance, in then organized in the form of some two dozen auton-
archaeology and social and economic history—that make omous city-states. An increasingly costly competition for
that task less difficult.The pioneering effort in this regard regional leadership animated those states (for example,