World cities: -3000 to 2000
FAROS2000, Washington, DC, (2003)Abstract
What is a world city?
We can think of this earth as covered by a network of cities, a network that over the millennia past has become increasingly dense. The principal nodes in that network are called here the world cities, those that in each of the three eras of world history - ancient, classical, and modern - were the most populous - and therefore, at first blush - the most important in their time.
In the ancient world, we call world cities those urban sites whose population could be rated at 10,000+; in the classical era, they were places of 100,00+ inhabitants, and in the modern world, since about 1000, we inventory all 'millionaire' cities.
Shown at 100-year intervals, 'World Cities:-3000 to 2000' lists all such places comprehensively, backed by a variety of sources, and with a full bibliography. An appendix discusses some specialized topics, such as the armies of the Trojan war, or the first official census of China's population. An index makes it easy to find every one of the 500 or so cities that are surveyed. Viewed as a whole, this is the basis for charting the course of the world-wide process of urbanization over the long period of five millennia.
Table of contents:
I. What is a world city?
II. Inventory of world cities
1. The ancient world: emergence;
2. The classical world: regional consolidation
3. The modern world: selection
III. Urbanization and world system evolution
IV. Data and annotations
1. Ancient world cities
2. Classical world cities
3. Modern world cities
V. Appendices
References
Index of world cities
World Cities as hardware of World History
Chapter two, titled 'An inventory of world cities' has comprehesive tables showing population estimates (hence hints of relative importance) of the world cities. But it can also be read as a conscise account of world history from one particular viewpoint or, more precisely, of the evolution of the organization of the human species on a world-wide scale from the perspective of 'tangible' data about major urbanization.
This is the story of the origins of cities, and of urban civilization, in the Fertile Crescent, and its gradual spread in the ancient world. In the classical world we see (in addition to the Americas) the four regions of the 'old world' (East Asia, South Asia, the Mediterranean, and West Asia- each forming its own urban networks, and for the modern world, we observe at first the importance of Asian cities in the big-city league, then the emergence of Europe, and finally the astonishing rapidity of major urbanization in the 20th century, something that cannot be fully appreciated without the background of the 5000 years of urban history that is so succintly reported here.
Such a firmly structured presentation of the data also makes it possible to test propositions about the long-term trajectory of world history. Such a test supports an evolutionary interpretation.