World Cities in History
Urban Networks from Ancient Mesopotamia to the Dutch Empire

In vivid detail, Joshua Leon demonstrates how world cities and urban networks have shaped life over 6,000 years of urbanization.

Joshua K. Leon (Author)

9781009444972, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 19 December 2024

346 pages
23.5 x 15.9 x 2.5 cm, 0.65 kg

Leon's study forms an interesting challenge to triumphalist narratives of (western) cities as engines of progress. Harking back to a tradition of comparative-historical urban scholarship associated with V. Gordon Childe, with its stress on cities as elite powerhouses exploiting rural hinterlands, but also incorporating the insights of sociologists studying modern global cities' dystopian dimensions, the author undertakes an invigorating comparative grand tour of 'world cities' over the past five thousand years which is sure to spark much debate. Arjan Zuiderhoek, Ghent University

Joshua K. Leon explores 6,000 years of urban networks and the politics that drove them, from Uruk in the fourth millennium BCE to Amsterdam's seventeenth-century 'golden age.' He provides a fresh, interdisciplinary reading of significant periods in history, showing how global networks have shaped everyday life. Alongside grand architecture, art and literature, these extraordinary places also innovated ways to exert control over far-flung hinterlands, the labor of their citizens, and rigid class, race and gender divides. Asking what it meant for ordinary people to live in Athens, Rome, Chang'an, or Baghdad - those who built and fed these cities, not just their rulers - he offers one of the few fully rendered applications of world cities theory to historical cases. The result is not only vividly detailed and accessible, but an intriguing and theoretically original contribution to urban history.

1. Introduction
2. Origins of urbanization: Mesopotamia
3. Agora and Emporia: the Greek city-states
4. Alexandria, alpha city
5. City networks in the Roman Empire
6. Tale of two Chang'ans: urban power in Han and Tang China
7. City-state civilizations: Mesoamerica's urban revolution
8. Baghdad: crossroads of the universe
9. Italian communes and the rise of Venice
10. Profit and power: the Hanseatic Network
11. Urban power in the Dutch Empire
12. Reflections: dangers ahead.

Subject Areas: General & world history [HBG]