Page 293 - Encyclopedia Of World History Vol V

2070 berkshire encyclopedia of world history

The harbor of Hong
Kong, a major trading
and commercial city.

Carthage (but within a century
put a new city in its place) and
conquered Alexandria, to
become the imperial capital of
this new Greco-Roman world.
It grew to huge proportions, to
become the world’s most pop-
ulous city, its citizens, untaxed,
living off free bread, slave
labor, and other spoils of
empire. The sack of Rome in
410 CE marked the start of the
collapse of Western Rome and
the definitive onset, in this part
of the world, of the second Dark Age. would be founded, among them Fustat, and later Cairo,
Which was the city whose population was the first to al Kufah, and Basrah, as well as Baghdad and Rayy (later
attain 1 million? The estimates for Alexandria, at about to become the seed of Tehran), together with Kairouan
100 BCE, tend to put it in the 500,000 range, but some and Cordova (as a capital) in the West. By 900 CE, the
scholars claim that it might have reached 1 million Muslim world had the densest urban network; it was a
between 200 and 100 BCE, which would make it first. But principal precinct of the world system on the eve of the
the more conservative guess would probably point to modern era.
Rome, which at the turn of the new millennium likely Each of the four regional processes in Eurasia in the
reached that figure, and held on to it, and exceeded it for classical era had its own developmental trajectory, but
some two or three centuries.The next city to reach “mil- these processes were not isolated phenomena but were
lionaire” status was Tang era Changan, at between 700 entangled in several ways, though seldom in a complete
and 800 CE. fashion.They can be seen as a world city system with two
Early in the classical era, powerful West Asian empires, chief lines of communication: the overland Silk Roads,
in particular the Assyrian and the Persian, pressed upon via Central Asia, and the maritime Spice Roads, via the
the Mediterranean world, probably pushing the Phoeni- Indian Ocean. Both in effect bound East Asia to the
cians out to sea and impressing the Greek world. But the Mediterranean.The world cities basically formed one sys-
collapse of the Persian realm diminished the vitality of tem, with routes that served as links among the cities.
that region and reduced its urban potential, and it was These were not just trade routes but also the paths taken
not until the Muslim conquests of the seventh century by new ideas and social innovations such as Buddhism.
that new political and urban space opened up to become The one area of significant urban development that
what we now call the “Muslim world.” Arab cavalry stands apart was in the Americas, between 400 and 800
armies overthrew the Sassanian Empire and overran CE in particular, when we find cities seemingly meeting
large portions of the Eastern Roman Empire based in our criteria in Mexico (Teotihuacan), in the Mayan lands
Constantinople. (Tical, Caracol), and possibly even in Peru, a conceivable
Urbanization became one of the hallmarks of the nucleus of a regional city system. But the system was
Muslim world. Many cities would be conquered, such as short-lived and largely collapsed after 800. Anthropolo-
Alexandria and Antioch, others would be destroyed, gist David Webster questions the urban character of the
such as the Sassanian capital, Ctesiphon, and yet others Mayan cities in particular, and suggests that they were