This is an urban age. The concept of “world cities” and the cross-border networks that animate them inspired a wave of interdisciplinary research. Megaregions like New York, Lagos, Mexico City, and Mumbai captivate the world by their scale and reach. Obscured by this shock of the new are the untold stories of past city networks and their political upheavals.
My book, World Cities in History: Urban Networks From Ancient Mesopotamia to the Dutch Empire, recasts the past five millennia for readers seeking to understand the urban present. Not simply a history of cities, World Cities in History aims to offer the first fully rendered case studies of past urban networks at their zeniths, periods resembling our own.
The book poses key questions for each case: How did city networks overcome ecological scarcity? How did the leading cities interact with other places? What materials and ideas flowed between cities? How did being in an urban network change the look and feel of daily life?
Different ideas flowed from place to place based on the value systems of the times, but there are uncanny resemblances between world cities past and present. Then as now, the leading cities saw spiraling inequality during so-called golden ages, and were theaters of resistance.
These cities were usually not located in the most abundant environments. Far from self-sustaining, they needed empires to pull in resources from other places. Think lapis lazuli adorning the overclasses of the Fertile Crescent, or seaborne grain feeding ancient Rome.
Across the ten urban networks explored in the book, we find that nothing about world city building was neutral. The Babylonian captives were literally forced to live in that city, whose walls were just as necessary to retain human capital as to repel invaders. The ancient Greeks populated cities through synoikism, enforced mergers between smaller settlements. In China, the cellular design of the Han capital of Chang’an represents an attempt to promote the flow of people and goods while vigilantly controlling and monitoring them.
Intensifying concentrations of knowledge enforced social orders. Cuneiform tablets—the first information storage—assigned control over land, property, and even people. The first true city, Uruk, managed a far-flung network that produced goods out of materials imported from peripheral zones. Later, in the bureaucracy-obsessed city of Ur, the death of one sheep was recorded on three separate clay tablets. Chinese bone inscriptions and early Minoan script similarly managed merchandise and people (writing poetry and prose came last).
Across cases, we learn that world cities grew at the expense of rural hinterlands, echoing today’s era of corporate land grabs and debt farming in the Global South. Medieval Italian city-states had exploited contados, spheres of influence with tightly controlled peasantries. Alexandria’s Hellenistic splendor depended on police state tactics around the fertile Nile. To produce grain and olives for the city, Egyptians sowed state-provided seeds, facing prosecution if they planted anything else. They toiled under surveillance, while long papyrus scrolls detailed arcane taxes and penalties on their holdings. Lest peasants give up and touch off food shortages, tax collectors were specially trained to offer words of encouragement to boost their morale.
Sometimes the exploited masses did pick up and leave. The Greeks called this type of dissent anachôrêsis, and did what they could to forbid it. As with modern world cities, resistance to harsh inequalities were in the political DNA. In Athens, reformers eased debts, limited slavery, and curtailed predatory landholders. Its experiments in democracy were exported to other city-states, or imposed upon them. The brothers Gracchi and Julius Caesar preached land distribution as Rome grew to epic proportions (all three were assassinated, not coincidently).
As radical ideas flowed, so did urban planning and architectural styles, usually calculated to mollify the masses or reinforce the status quo. The pyramids of Teotihuacan and Tikal in Mesoamerica proved the authorities had the power to erect mountains. The stead doric columns of the Parthenon convey a conservative nod to stability over social change.
Urban networks also bred familiarity. Nearly every sizeable city in the Roman Empire had a bathhouse, the ultimate public common of the period. Over time, Hellenic cities adopted the rational street grids extolled by the planner Hippodamus. The talud-tablero styled step-pyramids of Teotihuacan inspired the mega-constructions of the far away Mayans. In short, the oft-bemoaned international styles homogenizing modern skylines are hardly a new problem.
World cities studies emphasize financial flows, citing the resurgence of cities as capitalist enterprises in a distinct post-Cold War era. In contrast, World Cities in History explores periods before capital accumulation and corporate location strategies drove city building.
The hulking temples at Tikal were religious, not commercial. Its poorly understood sacboeb—elevated causeways—seem to have sacred processional functions as well as transport uses. Chang’an strictly limited the influence of its merchant bourgeoise in favor of its palace-dwelling nobility. Its market activities were tightly regulated. By the Tang period, Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism flowed through the Silk Roads along with luxury items.
What we learn from a diverse array of cases is that power arrangements are fluid in the ebb and flow of time. Urban networks flourished under the guises of city-states, urban leagues, and territorial empires. Tiny Lübeck dominated Baltic commerce as the leading city in the medieval Hanseatic League, using naval prowess to coerce nations into favorable trading terms. Venice churned out ships faster than most land powers, acquiring an overseas empire. Though political scientists sometimes argue that the world has been on an evolutionary path towards modern nation-states, cities have repeatedly resurfaced as autonomous forces in geopolitics.
World Cities in History proceeds chronologically. Early cities had limited geographic horizons. Herodotus posited that giant ants harvested gold from India, which Pliny the Elder still believed a half-millennium later. The book’s final case, the Dutch Empire, plied global shipping routes linking every inhabited continent. Yet it partook in the ancient practice of coerced settlement, and tried punishing deserting sailors and slaves—a latter day anachôrêsis.
These so-called golden ages took immense energy to sustain, and were perishable. Urban networks underwent long hiatuses, sometimes disappearing entirely. Mesopotamia went centuries without cities. In the Greek “dark age,” settlements diminished and writing was forgotten (Homer was illiterate). Rome depopulated as its empire faded, probably improving conditions for the peasants under its yoke. Great Mayan cities returned to the forests.
These cities constantly fought to sustain themselves with resources from elsewhere, until they couldn’t. We are living in an urban age that is as reversible as past eras, stalked by global heating and the prospects of nuclear catastrophe and future pandemics.
That reality informs my choice of book cover, Thomas Cole’s The Consummation of Empire, depicting a nondescript classical city at its pinnacle. It is one in a series of panels painted during the 1830s, which ends with the city destroyed and finally abandoned. In the final frame, the environment it once conquered has returned, covering the ancient ruins in greenery.
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