World Cities in History

by Leon

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.

346 pages, Paperback

Published December 19, 2024

Reviews

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Good book. It explores ten different cities throughout history and what made them so important. To be honest, I'm so impressed by the scope of the research that the author did to cover so much ground and literally thousands of years. My main takeaways were: world cities generally cultivated extensive regional connections because they had to in order to sustain themselves; quality of life in cities was generally worse than outside them, especially if you were a woman (a common theme was that women were often segregated and isolated) or not wealthy; people didn't live very long in cities; cities encouraged, coerced, and forced movement of people to them and from them to other places so they could function and grow; there was huge dependence on slaves and outsiders to build, maintain, and grow the city and economy, thereby cities were quite diverse; there was huge dependence on women to sustain and grow the population through childbirth; cities were often located in places that facilitate access to the wider region (e.g., waterways) and/or had a means to have a further reach (e.g., camels); and, much like today, cities were quite stratified and segregated by class and/or origin/ethnicity.