Urbanisation ann talbot

Ann Talbot Urbanisation
Large Scale Urbanisation in Eurasia: a
Graphic Essay
Ann Talbot
Abstract
A recent Nature article by Meredith Reba et al. has performed a valuable
service in spatialising the data provided in Tertius Chandler’s Four Thousand
Years of Urban Growth, and George Modelski’s World Cities -3000 to 2000.
The purpose of this essay is to explore the large scale urbanisation data for
Eurasia in graphical form. Beginning with the urban revolution of the third
millennium BCE the essay traces the development of large cities through to
1600 CE. The essay demonstrates that large scale urbanisation only began in
northern and western Europe under the influence of the Roman Empire and
was soon in retreat. Large cities did not appear in Europe again until the Is-
lamic Empire extended into Spain. While large scale urbanisation continued
elsewhere, urban centres in Europe were overwhelmingly small. When large
scale urbanisation finally took off in Europe it was as part of a more general
upsurge in urbanisation across Eurasia. Even as late as 1600 CE northern
and western Europe lagged behind the eastern end of the Eurasian continent
in terms of large scale urbanisation.
Keywords: urbanisation, Eurasia, population, city, demographics.
1

Introduction
A recent article in Nature 1
has performed a valuable service in spatialis-
ing the data provided in Tertius Chandler’s Four Thousand Years of Urban
Growth,2
and George Modelski’s World Cities -3000 to 2000.3
The purpose
of this essay is to explore in graphical form their data for Eurasia. Now that
UN estimates put the urban population at more than 50% of the global total
4
and a recent OECD study suggests an even higher figure 5
the city has in-
creasingly become the lens through which we see current human development
and project future trends. Chandler and Modelski’s data make it possible
to investigate whether urban growth can offer insights into earlier periods of
history. The essay will focus on large scale urbanisation. Eurasia is a geo-
graphical concept but it is not a developed historical concept. For historical
purposes it has been more usual to think of the Eurasian landmass as being
divided into Asia and Europe, East and West, with minimal contact between
the two extremes. This traditional perspective is increasingly challenged by
new research which shows population movements and technology transfer
1
Meredith Reba, Femke Reitsma, and Karen C. Seto, “Spatializing 6,000 years of global
urbanization from 3700 BC to AD 2000,” Scientific Data volume 3, Article number 160034
(2016).
2
Tertius Chandler, Four Thousand Years of Urban Growth (Lampeter: Edward Mellen
Press, 1987).
3
George Modelski, World Cities -3000 to 2000 (Washington, DC: Faros, 2000, 2003).
4
United Nations, World Urbanization Prospects (2018 revision) https://population.
un.org/wup/Publications/Files/WUP2018-KeyFacts.pdf [consulted 2019/02/05]
5
Lewis Dijkstra, et al., “Applying the Degree of Urbanisation to the Globe: A New
Harmonised Definition Reveals a Different Picture of Global Urbanisation,” Prepared for
the 16th Conference of the International Association of Official Statisticians (IAOS) OECD
Headquarters, Paris, France, 19-21 September 2018.
2

across Eurasia.6
China’s trade policies have begun to focus the attention of
historians, political scientists and economists on Eurasia, highlighting con-
nections which have long been relegated to a secondary status.7
We are at
a point in history and global affairs when it may be useful to attempt to
achieve an understanding of what Eurasia is and what it has been. This es-
say presents a graphical approach to the spatial data for pre-industrial cities
in Eurasia in the hope of offering a potentially new perspective on Eurasia
as a historical entity.
Large Scale Urbanisation
A new phenomenon emerged 5000 years ago - the large city. Uruk in
southern Iraq or Sumer was the first city known to reached a population of
80,000.8
Smaller cities had existed earlier and continued to exist alongside
Uruk but no city had previously reached this size. By 3200 BCE it covered
100 hectares. The isolation of Uruk probably means that it grew at the
expense of other cities. Its influence was felt as far away as Syria, Iran and
6
The following references are a selection of recent publications which provide a more
extensive bibliography: David W. Anthony, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language (Prince-
ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007); Peter de Barros Damgaard, et al. “The First
Horse Herders and the Impact of Early Bronze Age Expansion into Asia,” Science 29 Jun
2018: Vol. 360, Issue 6396; Spengler, Robert N et al. “Arboreal crops on the medieval
Silk Road: Archaeobotanical studies at Tashbulak” PloS one vol.13,8 e0201409. 14 Aug.
2018, doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0201409.
7
Peter Frankopan, The Silk Roads: a New History of the World (London: Blooms-
bury, 2015); Bruno Ma¸cães, The Dawn of Eurasia: On the Trail of the New World Order
(London: Allen Lane, 2018).
8
It should be stressed that all these figures are estimates. Measuring cities, even modern
ones, is fraught with difficulties. The advantage of taking a high threshold figure is that
it allows for errors while ensuring that a city falls into a broad category of large scale
urbanisation.
3

Egypt. Archaeologists have described Uruk’s role in early urbanisation as
nothing short of “startling.”9
The process of large scale urbanisation had
begun. Gordon Childe called this process the Urban Revolution (see Text
Box 1).
Figure 1: Uruk population approx. 80,000 (from Modelski)
Urbanisation on this scale was a remarkable achievement. Food had to
be produced and brought into the city every day. Fuel to cook it had to
be found. Water had to be provided. Human waste had to be disposed
of safely. The spread of disease had to be minimised. Exchange between
specialists had to be managed. Disputes had to be resolved and a reasonable
level of social peace maintained. Such a large number of people cannot live
side by side without a high degree of social organisation, a complex division
of labour, and a large productive capacity. All these transactions have to
9
Marc van der Meiroop, The Ancient Mesopotamian City (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997)
p. 38.
4

be carried out on a daily basis making the city itself a continuous process.
The success or failure of a city depends in large part on the success or failure
of that process. If the process fails the social relations on which the city
is based break down. Sustaining a large urban population is a precarious
achievement. That was certainly the case for early cities which could not
sustain large populations over long periods of time. The population of Uruk
fell from its peak within a century but other cities in southern Iraq were on
the same trajectory towards large scale urbanisation. Girsu rose brieﬂy to
the same level and Ur surpassed it in 2100 BCE.
Figure 2: Ur population approx. 100,000
In the course of the second millennium new centres of large scale ur-
banisation began to emerge and large populations were sustained for longer
periods.10
From this point on, the maps will use the threshold ﬁgure of
10
The Indus Valley cities are not included in these maps because their populations
appear to be under 100,000. This may be misleading. At least one of those sites - Harappa
5

100,000 in order to maintain consistency in the sample.11
Figure 3: Yinxu
Yin or Yinxu near Anyang in Henan province was the ﬁrst Chinese city
with a population of more than 100,000. The city is associated with the Shang
dynasty. Yin remained a large city until 1035 BCE when the dynasty fell.
An earlier city may have existed at Erligang in Zhengzhou also in Henan but
its size and signiﬁcance is less well understood.12
These cities were based on
a highly productive system of agriculture growing millet, barley and wheat.
- was used as a quarry for railway ballast under British rule. The area covered by the
whole Harappan civilisation is now known to be more extensive than once thought and
larger sites than those originally discovered await excavation. [Herman Kulke and Dietmar
Rothermund, A History of India (London: Routledge, 2004) p. 28]. Natural forces may
have destroyed the evidence of other cities. A large part of Kaveripoompattinam, a major
Indian port described in Roman records, has been swept into the sea. Some of the earliest
cities in China lie buried under metres of silt.
11
Modelski uses a lower threshold of 10,000 up to and including 1000 BCE and a thresh-
old of 100,000 from 900 BCE up to 1000 CE.
12
Harold M. Tanner, China: a History (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2010). Yin eventually
covered an area of 30 square kilometres [Sarah Allan, ed., The Formation of Chinese
Civilization: an Archaeological Perspective (Newhaven: Yale University Press, 2005)].
6

The cities were surrounded by a network of agricultural villages. While the
agricultural technology remained essentially Neolithic, and employed no ir-
rigation, it was centrally organised. Writing gave the elite the means to
adminster production and extract a surplus from the farmers. Both Erli-
gang and Yinxu have extensive palace and ceremonial structures on central
platforms, rammed earth walls and elaborate tombs for the elite.13
Figure 4: Pi-Ramesses, Thebes and Yinxu
By 1200 BCE Egypt emerged as another centre of early large scale urban-
isation. Pi Ramesses or Avaris the capital of the 19th dynasty and Thebes
or Waset near Luxor both reached populations of more than 100,000 by this
date. Excavations in Egypt have tended to concentrate on tombs and other
monumental structures and as a result its cities are less well understood
than elsewhere but both these cities were inhabited from an early date. Pi
13
Paul Wheatley, Pivot of the Four Quarters: a Preliminary Enquiry into the Origins
and Character of the Ancient Chinese City (Chicago: Aldine, 1971).
7

Ramesses survived the death of Ramesses II and was only abandoned when
its branch of the Nile became silted. Thebes remained a large city for cen-
turies. It was a city known and admired by the Greeks from the time of
Homer and exercised a immense inﬂuence on their culture. Plotting Egyp-
tian cities on these maps is not an attempt to deny that they are African, but
a recognition of their role in networks that extended into the Mediterranean
and Levant as well as Africa.
Figure 5: Babylon, Memphis and Thebes
By 1000 BCE Babylon was probably the largest city in the world. Baby-
lon was a highly stable example of large scale urbanisation. Between 600-400
BCE its population is estimated to have reached 200,000 and it maintained
a large population for more than 500 years. In Egypt, Memphis was only
slightly smaller than Thebes which became the capital of a reuniﬁed Egypt.
Two large cities in a single political unit was in itself a remarkable achieve-
ment. Yin was eclipsed with the defeat of the Shang dynasty by the Zhou
8

and it was some centuries before another Chinese city reached that size.
Figure 6: Linzi, Luoyang, Babylon, Nineveh, Memphis and Thebes
By the middle of the ﬁrst millennium the cities of Linzi and Luoyang ap-
peared in China and large scale urbanisation was spreading from its original
heartland in southern Iraq into the north when Sennacherib made Nineveh
his capital. Linzi in Shandong 14
was the capital of the state of Qi. Luoyang
15
may have been the site of an early Xia capital but under the Zhou dynasty
it became a major city.
14
Linzi had a walled area of 4.5 by 4 kilometres and had a network of sewers and water
supply channels [Sarah Allan (2005) pp. 214-5].
15
Luoyang was one of the capitals of the Western Zhou. It could be compared to other
cities that were the capitals of empires such as Rome [Walter Scheidel, Rome and China:
Comparative Perspectives on Ancient World Empires (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2009)]. The diﬀerence was that Luoyang was not alone.
9

Childe and the Urban Revolution
• Dense population
• Division of labour included non-food producers
• Surplus paid to a deity or king
• Monumental building
• An elite of civil, military and religious leaders
• Record systems
• Writing, mathematics, sciences
• Sophisticated forms of artistic expression
• Importation of raw materials from outside
• Specialist resident crafts people
V. Gordon Childe, “The Urban Revolution,” The Town Plan-
ning Review, Vol. 21, No. 1 (Apr., 1950), pp. 3-17.
10

Delayed Development in Europe16
Figure 7: Carthage
By 600 BCE the first large city appeared in the western Mediterranean. It
was Carthage in Africa founded as a colony by the Phoenicians. Urbanisation
was now a planetary phenomenon. Large cities were forming in Mesoamerica
but there were no large cities in northern or western Europe. Even the
northern shores of the Mediterranean had no large cities. Greece and Italy
came late to large scale urbanisation. Europe lagged behind the rest of the
world.
16
Europe was transformed by the introduction of agriculture and other new technologies
between 4500 and 2800 BCE. A great diversity of cultures emerged with different kinds
of settlements, even some fortifications, but no cities. During the second millenium BCE
settlements developed on Crete and some of the other Aegean islands which are usually
referred to as palaces rather than cities. The Mycenaean palaces of mainland Greece had
massive defensive walls. There were probably settlements attached to them and some
are associated with later classical Greek cities, but all were quite small. [Barry Cunliffe,
Europe Between the Oceans 9000 BC - AD 1000 (New Haven and London: Yale University
Press, 2008).]
11

Figure 8: Rome, Syracuse and Rajgir
By 500 BCE Syracuse and Rome finally joined the ranks of large cities.
Meanwhile in China, large cities had multiplied. Linzi and Luoyang had been
joined by Qufu, Kaifeng, Handan, and Shangqi. Qufu17
was the birthplace
of Confucius in 551 BCE and the capital of the state of Lu centred in Shan-
dong province. China was divided and remained so until the Qin unified the
warring states in 221 BCE. But its cities flourished as iron tools were intro-
duced into agriculture, administration became more professional and trade
grew despite a near constant state of warfare. The iconic cities on which the
study of European history are based and which are thought of as the source
of much European culture were slow to attain large population levels and
some never did. Meanwhile in India18
the city of Rajgir emerged as a major
17
Qufu had an outer walled area of 3.7 by 2.7 kilometres [Sarah Allan (2005) p. 213.]
18
Eratosthenes, mathematician and librarian of Alexandria, described the Indians and
Persians as city dwellers. [Josef Wiesehöfer, Ancient Persia, Azizeh Azodi, trans. (New
York: I.B. Tauris, 1996) p. 78.]
12

centre. The capital of the kingdom of Magadha, it was associated with the
development of both Jainism and Buddhism19
.
Figure 9: Athens
Athens only emerged as a large city by 400 BCE. The hegemonic role
Athens played within a network of Greek city-states and its access to silver
from the Laurion mines helped to propel it to large city status. Defeat in
the Peloponnesian War, largely because of a disastrous attack on Syracuse,
ruined Athens. The city never recovered. No other ancient city in mainland
Greece ever reached a comparable population level in this period. That is
not to say that no Greek city did but they were colonies such as Syracuse,
Ionian Greek cities in Asia like Ephesus, or Alexander the Great’s new city
of Alexandria in Egypt. Large scale urbanisation was a rare and unstable
19
From 500 BCE what is sometimes referred to as the “Second Urbanisation” began on
the Indian subcontinent. [Burton Stein, A History of India (Oxford: Blackwell, 2010) p.
58.]
13

phenomenon in Europe during the ﬁrst millennium BCE.20
Figure 10: The eclipse of Athens
By 300 BCE Athens was no longer among the large cities. Ultimately it
was defeated by Phillip II of Macedon at the Battle of Chaeronea in 338 BCE.
Phillip treated Athens respectfully, as did his son and successor Alexander the
Great, but Athens never recovered. Alexandria, founded in 331 BCE, rapidly
became a large city taking over from Memphis as the capital of Egypt and
from Tyre as a centre of trade. Meanwhile in the western Mediterranean the
scene was set for a struggle that would decide the fate of Rome, Syracuse
and Carthage. It ended with the defeat of Carthage and Syracuse. Carthage
was razed to the ground and its inhabitants enslaved in 146 BCE.
Asia was by far the wealthiest area of Eurasia. Taxila, now in Pakistan,
20
The study of Greece’s neighbour, Persia, has suﬀered from a sense that the Persians
were “decadent” because Ancient Greek writers generally depicted the Persian Achaemenid
Empire in negative terms [John Curtis and Nigel Tallis, eds. The Forgotten Empire: the
World of Ancient Persia (London: British Museum, 2005) p. 9.]
14

appears on the map for the ﬁrst time. It had emerged as an important trading
city in the Achaemenid Empire and continued through successive empires for
the next 800 years.
The Rise of Rome
Figure 11: The rise of Rome
Rome emerged as the dominant city in the western Mediterranean. By
1CE it was the only city in this region with a population over 100,000. The
scale of its dominance was unprecedented. Its population may have been as
high as 800,000.21
There was no breathing space for any rival. Rome’s mili-
tary dominance and economic weight kept other cities small. Rome extended
its empire into Asia. Wealth ﬂowed into the city wrecking its republican form
of government but putting it on track to become not just the largest city in
21
Rome’s success can be seen as not just a result of its military might, but also its
control of the Egyptian grain supply. [Frankopan (2016) p. 13.]
15

the western Mediterranean but the largest city in the world with a population
of approximately 1.2 million by 200 CE.
Figure 12: Large scale urbanisation in western Europe
By 300 CE the picture was changing as large scale towns emerged in west-
ern Europe. Rome needed cities to govern its empire. Military occupation
was expensive and it was a great deal cheaper to encourage the local elite
to live in towns enjoying the luxuries of the Roman way life than it was to
maintain a large military force in a province. Emerita Augusta, or M´erida,
in Spain was founded in 25 BCE as a colony of military veterans. It became
the capital of the Roman province of Lusitania. In northern Italy, Milan
was founded by the Celtic Insubres and conquered by the Romans in 222
BCE. By the third century CE it was large enough for the Emperor Diocle-
tian to make it the centre of the western half of the Roman Empire. It was
more practical than Rome because it sat on the main east-west route and
had good communication with the Balkans where an increasing amount of
16

Roman military activity was focused.
China was divided into three kingdoms following the fall of the Han dy-
nasty. Unity was brieﬂy restored in 280 CE but only until 317 CE. This was a
period of chaos in which highly militarised and unstable kingdoms fought for
dominance.22
But it was also a period of creative disunity that saw techno-
logical and cultural developments which found expression as new dynasties
emerged.23
Luoyang survived its sack in 311 CE. Population increasingly
shifted to Nanjing, which became the capital of the Jin dynasty.
City Networks
Figure 13: The Mediterrean city network shifts from Alexandria to Rome
As large cities cease to be a rare phenomenon it can be helpful to visualise
them as networks centred on an economically or politically dominant city.
22
Tanner (2010) p. 148.
23
Tanner (2010) p. 167.
17

Peter Taylor24
has identified nine pre-industrial city networks. Most of them
were in south-east Asia and before 1800 most of them were focused on China.
The first Mediterranean city network he identifies dates to 200-100 BCE. The
largest city in it was Alexandria in Egypt with a population of approximately
1 million. Between 200-300 CE the centre of the network shifted westwards
to Rome. The network was centred on Rome but the largest cities in it were
in still in Asia and Africa. Despite the spectacular rise of Rome large scale
urbanisation at the western end of Eurasia was an outlier of a process that
was heavily weighted towards the eastern end of the continent.
Retreat of Large Scale Urbanisation from Western
Europe
Large scale urbanisation was a tenuous achievement in northern and west-
ern Europe. By 400 CE only Mérida in Spain and Capua continued to be
large cities alongside Rome. The brief wave of large scale urbanisation was
already retreating from northern and western Europe as barbarian invasions
carved independent kingdoms out of the Roman Empire. Rome itself was
declining in size. Political changes played a part in that decline. Rome was
poorly placed to defend borders on the Danube and the Euphrates. In 330
CE Emperor Constantine established a new capital at Byzantium, which he
24
Peter J. Taylor, “Historical world city networks,” in International Handbook of Glob-
alization and World Cities, eds., Ben Derudder et al., (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2012)
pp. 9-21.
18

named Constantinople. It grew rapidly to overshadow Rome and remained
a large city into the modern period under successive rulers.25
Figure 14: Rise of Byzantium
Rome survived the shock of its sack by the Visigoths in 410. By 500 CE
it could still be counted as a large city but its population was shrinking. The
barbarian invasions alone did not account for the decline. There had been
a long period of acculturation as peoples from beyond the borders adopted
Christianity, developed their own urban culture, settled in the empire and
even rose to the top of the military hierarchy.26
The aim of the invading
barbarians was to enjoy the wealth of the empire not to destroy it. Climate
25
The choice of “Rise of Byzantium” as caption is quite deliberate. Byzantium or Con-
stantinople is more often thought of as a city doomed to stagnation and decline from the
beginning. [Fiona Harrer, “Writing Histories of the Byzantine Empire: the Historiogra-
phy of the Byzantine Empire,” in Liz James, ed., A Companion to Byzantium (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2010) p. 10].
26
see: Leilia Craco Ruggini, “Rome and the Barbarians in Late Antiquity,” in Rome
and the Barbarians: the Birth of a New World, Jean-Jacques Aillagon, ed. (Milan: Skira
editore, 2008) pp. 204-215.
19

Figure 15: Gradual Decline of Rome
change may have played a part in forcing them to migrate in the ﬁrst place
and in reducing crop yields in the Empire. But all parts of urbanised Eurasia
were aﬀected by both climate change and barbarian invasions. Not all of them
saw such a disastrous decline in the urban population. Some other process
was at work in the case of the western Roman Empire. The ancient historian
G.E.M. de Ste Croix points to increasing levels of exploitation over several
centuries. He concludes it was “the combination of unlimited economic power
in the hands of the propertied class, their emperor and his administration
which ultimately brought about the disintegration of the Roman Empire.”27
Wealth “drained to the top” particularly in the western Empire where the
old senatorial class made the most of their privileges.
27
G.E.M. de Ste Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World (London: Duck-
worth, 1981) p. 497.
20

Figure 16: Deurbanisation of western Europe
By 600 CE Rome’s population had fallen below 100,000 and it disappears
from our maps. Western Europe went into a severe economic decline after the
collapse of Rome. Historians may prefer to avoid the term “the Dark Ages”
but urban life largely disappeared. Even in Italy, the most urbanised area of
the Western Roman Empire, towns declined after 550 CE as warfare sapped
the economy. Archaeological excavations of the early medieval layers of Ital-
ian cities reveal an extremely simple material culture. In some cases city
blocks became ﬁelds while still preserving the Roman street plan.28
There
were few monumental buildings or paved streets, sewage systems and ur-
ban cleaning were abandoned. Surveying the archaeological evidence, Chris
Wickham concludes that Italian cities were poorer than cities in the rest
of the Mediterranean. Early medieval cities in Italy, he writes were “cities
28
Chris Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean 400-
800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) p. 646.
21

of mud and poor wooden buildings”. Yet contemporaries still wrote about
them as though their imperial splendour continued to exist.29
By 1000 CE
the ruling elite in Europe were poorer than they had been in the fourth cen-
tury.30
The economy was more rural, more localised and more self-sufficient.
Western Europe was characterised by an economy of “gift and pillage”.31
It
seemed a changeless society locked in its backwardness.32
Meanwhile Ctesiphon in what is now Iraq was a city of perhaps half
a million.33
Constantinople the capital of the eastern Roman Empire was
larger still, probably 600,000.34
Luoyang in China had a population of half
a million and Xi’an just below that. The weight of urbanisation had shifted
decisively eastwards.35
29
Wickham (2005) p. 655.
30
Steven A. Epstein, An Economic and Social History of Late Medieval Europe 1000-
1500(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) p. 11.
31
George Duby, The Early Growth of the European Economy: Warriors and Peasants
from the Seventh to the Twelfth Century, trans. H.B. Clarke (London: Weidenfeld and
Nicholson, 1974).
32
Epstein (2009) p. 216.
33
Ctesiphon occupied a strategic trading position on the Tigris. It was part of the
Parthian (247 BCE - 224 CE) and Sasanian Empires (224 CE - 651 CE). A significant
number of satellite cities developed around it. [Ehsan Yashater, ed., Cambridge History of
Iran, Vol. 3(2) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983) p. 758]. After the collapse
of the Roman and Han Empires, the Sasanians became the superpower of central Asia.
[Xinriu Liu, The Silk Road in World History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) p.
68].
34
Constantinople lost its grain supply when Egypt was conquered first by the Sasanians
and then by the Arabs. The population of the city declined in consequence. [Peter Sarris,
“Economics, Trade and ‘Feudalism’,” in Liz James (2010) p. 35].
35
There is some suggestion of deurbanisation in India between 500 to 1200 CE paralleling
the situation in Europe, but the evidence for this is thin. [Burton Stein (2010) p. 108].
22

Figure 17: Large scale urbanisation in Asia and Africa
By 700 CE Xi’an had hit the million mark. Guangzhou was a city of
some 200,000 people, Kaifeng 100,000, as was Suzhou, and Chengdu reached
a similar size. Luoyang continued at half a million. Constantinople suffered
from the loss of Syria to Arab conquest and its population fell below half a
million but other cities such as Basra and Damascus grew under Arab control.
Alexandria was repeatedly fought over and suffered a decline in population
but Cairo, or Al Fustat, thrived.
Of the three societies that emerged from the Roman Empire the kingdoms
of western Europe were overshadowed in every respect by the Eastern Roman
Empire and the Islamic Empire. The Arab and Byzantine36
empires remained
complex, urban civilisations with a sophisticated technological and scientific
culture, effective systems of administration and productive agriculture. Their
36
Constantinople began to recover as the Abbasid Caliphate offered greater stability in
the region. [Peter Sarris in Liz James (2010) p. 38]. The city continued to grow until it
was sacked by the Christian crusaders in 1204 CE [Peter Sarris in Liz James (2010, p. 53].
23

cities were densely populated centres of trade using both high value and small
denomination coins. For the cities of Sogdiana in central Asia the 5th to the
8th centuries CE were something of a golden age.37
Communities of Arab
merchants were established in Chinese port cities by the 7th century.38
Figure 18: Large Islamic cities in Europe
As Charlemagne declared himself the new Roman emperor in 800 CE
there were still no large cities in the area he ruled which included most of
France and part of Germany. It was the Arabs who created the ﬁrst large
city in western Europe since the fall of the Roman Empire with C´ordoba.
New cities were founded such as Baghdad, the Abbasid capital in 762 CE.
37
Liu (2010) p. 69. The cities of the Silk Road were rooted in the local economy with
connections to both pastoral nomads and settled farmers. Chinese travellers commented
on the intensively farmed agricultural land and the large number of cities. [Christopher
I. Beckwith, Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Asia from the Bronze Age to
the Present (Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009) p. 77].
38
Alain George, “Direct Sea Trade between Early Islamic Iraq and Tang China: from
the Exchange of Goods to the Transmission of Ideas,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society,
vol. 25, Issue 4, October 2015, pp. 579-624.
24

The scholar and historian Al-Tabari wrote of Baghdad, “This is the Tigris;
here is no distance between us and China. Everything on the sea can come
to us ...”.39
And indeed it did. Chinese ceramics from the 9th century have
been excavated at the Gulf port of Siraf suggesting the possible presence of
Chinese merchants.40
Figure 19: Europe under developed and backward
By 900 CE large scale urbanisation had continued in the Byzantine and
Islamic empires. Baghdad reached a population of almost a million. In Spain,
C´ordoba continued to thrive. Constantinople recovered to some degree.41
Its
population increased and so did that of Thessaloniki in northern Greece. But
39
David Whitehouse, “Abbasid Maritime Trade: the Age of Expansion,” in Mikasa no
Miya Takahito, Cultural and Economic Relations between East and West: Sea Routes
(Wiesbaden: Harassowitz, 1988) pp. 62-70.
40
Richard Hodges and David Whitehouse, Mohammed, Charlemagne and the Origins of
Europe (London: Duckworth, 1983).
41
During the 10th century CE Constaninople, having survived its crisis, reached the
height of its powers. [Timothy E. Gregory, A History of Byzantium (Oxford: Blackwell,
2005)].
25

large cities were still absent from the rest of Europe as the Viking raids took
their toll.
There is no evidence that the Arab conquest put a stop to trade in the
Mediterranean as Henri Pirenne once suggested.42
Silver dirhems have been
found in Europe, indicating that trade continued with the Arab world. The
problem was that Europeans had a limited range of products to contribute
to the flow of commodities. Travellers from the Moslem world who ventured
into northern and western Europe report an under developed economy whose
main exports were slaves, silver and raw materials. It was perfectly clear
where power and wealth lay in the early medieval world. When Offa the
late 8th century king of the Mercians wanted to proclaim his authority by
minting a gold coin it was an Arabic dinar he copied. This very Christian
king had it stamped with an inscription that read, “There is no God but
Allah, the One, Without Equal, and Muhammad is the Apostle of Allah”.43
At 1000 CE our two data sources, Modelski and Chandler, overlap.44
Their estimates of city sizes differ in some respects. Chandler’s tend to be
more conservative. Venice stands out as the most notable case where they
disagree. Modelski offers a higher population estimate for Venice putting it
at 100,000 and making it the first non-Islamic large city in Europe for 500
years. Venice was an eastward facing city. It was still technically part of
42
Henri Pirenne, Mohammed and Charlemagne (London: George Allen and Unwin,
1940).
43
British Museum 1913,1213.1
44
Chandler uses a lower threshold of 40,000 for the world and less in Europe but for the
sake of consistency the maps maintain the 100,000 figure.
26

Figure 20: Rise of Venice?
the Byzantine Empire and its citizens had the right to trade freely within
the empire which might account for its exceptional growth. But C´ordoba
remained the largest western city at 450,000. Most large cities were in the
east. Baghdad now had a population of one and a half million. Constantino-
ple had regained a population of about 600,000. Modelski and Chandler
both estimate Kaifeng in China at just under half a million.45
Modelski adds
Chengdu, Dali and Suzhou to the list.
45
Kaifeng was near the junction of the Grand Canal and the Yellow River, giving it
access to nearly 50,000 kilometres of inland waterway. [John King Fairbank and Merle
Goldman, China a New History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1998) p. 89].
27

City Longevity: the Asiatic City and the European
City
Figure 21: Cities with a population of 100,000 or more for at least 500 years.
28

Weber and the City
The European City
• The European city was the
paradigmatic case of urbanisa-
tion.
• It had a distinct type of prop-
erty which was always alien-
able, inheritable and unencum-
bered by feudal dues.
• No caste or lineage groups
existed in the European city.
Its inhabitants were individual
burghers with distinct rights
who made up a fraternity with
its own religious rituals and
saints.
• It was possible for a serf to go
from bondage to freedom be-
cause the city was governed by
the principle of Stadtluft macht
frei.
The Oriental City
• The oriental or Asian city was
“directly under the cudgels”
of the prince’s military body-
guards.
• It lacked autonomy, municipal
organizations and a privileged
burgher estate.
• The commune was absent alto-
gether.
• Jews remained part of this
alien, oriental city even within
the European city and could
never be part of the commu-
nity.
29

European cities were atypical of the general pattern of Eurasian urbanisa-
tion but the hegemonic position they achieved in the course of the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries at the centre of global empires has ensured that they
have remained the dominant model for studies of urbanisation. Even in the
twenty-first century large cities in less developed countries are often thought
of as examples of over-urbanisation or in some fundamental way dysfunctional
examples of urbanisation in contrast to smaller European-style cities.46
This preconception can be traced back to an image of the oriental city as
a princely camp from which the prince might, at any moment, pick up his
traps and depart in the night unannounced. The oriental city, according to
this view, is vulnerable and fleeting, a floating city of mirage and wonder that
drifts unanchored to economic reality, quite distinct from the workaday world
of the European city. As Figure 21 shows Asian cities did not conform to
this model. They were often long-lived and maintained large populations over
many centuries. They could not have achieved this without robust economic
and social processes.
Perhaps one city conformed to this pattern. It was Agra, the capital
of Aurangzeb, ruler of Mughal India. During the last 26 years of his reign
Aurangzeb was on an almost continual military campaign in the Deccan and
took his court with him in a kind of mobile capital numbering perhaps half
46
French scholars developed a similar model to Weber’s. They contrasted the Arab
cities they encountered in the Levant, Maghreb and Egypt with the surviving remains
of classical Greek and Roman cities. They concluded that whereas the Ancient city was
ordered, the Islamic city was a disordered, anarchic non-city. [Youssef M. Choueri, A
Companion to the History of the Middle East (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005) p. 213].
30

a million people. Chandler omits Agra from his database in 1700 because it
does not conform to his idea of what a city should be. But this situation was
exceptional and existed for a limited period. Agra is included in the map for
1600.47
The concept of the oriental city as a princely camp is often associated
with the name of Karl Marx, but for him it was a philosophical commonplace,
part of the language he inherited from Hegel and he never developed it in the
systematic way that Max Weber did. Weber was writing in a very diﬀerent
context. He wrote “The City”48
between 1911-13 when Germany had gone
in the space of half a century from being a disparate patchwork of states
with tiny cities to a uniﬁed industrial empire that was already establishing
itself as a colonial power in Asia. For Weber, the contrast between European
and oriental cities became an organising principle to explain the immense
transformation that he and his contemporaries had experienced. Something
must have made the micro-cities of Germany into the global power they had
become at the beginning of the twentieth century. It was, he argued, or
hoped, their democratic instincts. He was, of course, not responsible for the
uses to which the concepts he developed would be used in subsequent decades.
Rome was an exception to the general pattern of European urbanisation. It
was a large European city that survived for a thousand years. It was with
some reason that Rome was seen as the “Eternal City”.
47
Chandler (1987) p. 9.
48
Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, Guenther
Roth and Claus Wittich eds. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978).
31

Medieval to Early Modern Cities
Figure 22: Large cities emerge in Europe
By 1200 CE we are relying solely on Chandler’s data. Now for the first
time Paris appears in the list of large cities along with Palermo in Sicily.
Recently conquered by the Normans, Palermo had a significant Islamic pop-
ulation. The experience of Paris was exceptional but it illustrates some of
the problems faced by all European cities. It had suffered badly from Viking
attacks in the ninth century. As the city’s defences were established the pop-
ulation rose, reaching 65,000 by 1150 and more than 100,000 by 1200. It
was the first successful example of large scale urbanisation in northwestern
Europe. Yet the global weight of urbanisation was still in China and south-
eastern Asia. Bagan in Burma, Angkor in Cambodia, Kyoto and Kamakura
in Japan all feature on the map.
32

Patricia Crone has written about what she calls “the oddity of Europe”.49
She considers Europe odd because it lacked the “cities, trade, regular taxa-
tion, standing armies, legal codes, bureaucracies, absolutist kings and other
commonplace appurtenances of civilized societies.” It had, she suggests, failed
as a pre-industrial society. The “unwashed, vermin-infested, badly clothed,
badly housed, illiterate and half-studied barons and clerics who held sway
in medieval Europe were barely distinguishable from the serfs they ruled:
even thirteenth-century crusaders of the most sophisticated variety struck
polished Muslim gentlemen as appallingly crude.”
Figure 23: Growth of Paris
A hundred years later in 1300 CE the Muslim cities of Spain have disap-
peared from the large city map. They had suﬀered from civil wars among
themselves and come under increasing pressure from neighbouring Christian
kingdoms. C´ordoba fell to the Reconquista in 1236 CE. Granada remained a
49
Patricia Crone, Pre-Industrial Societies (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989) p. 148.
33

semi-independent kingdom for longer and an important centre of trade but
not quite large enough to figure in these distribution maps. Paris was now
the largest city in Europe with a population of 228,000. Despite the increased
urbanisation of Europe, China remained a global centre of large scale urbani-
sation. Beijing, the Yuan Dynasty capital since 1271 CE, emerged as a major
city although Hangzhou may have been larger, reflecting a shift in population
to the south of China. Guangzhou and Xi’an both had large populations.50
Figure 24: Weight of large scale urbanisation still outside Europe
Coming forward 300 years to 1600 CE the map is beginning to look more
50
It is possible that Chandler’s figures for Chinese cities in the 12th-13th centuries
are too low. The population of Kaifeng may have been as high as 1 million during the
Northern Song Dynasty and Hangzhou may have reached 2 million during the Southern
Song Dynasty. [Harold M. Tanner, China: a History (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2010) p.
220]. It is possible that as much as 5% of the Chinese population was urban by the mid
Song period. [Frederick W. Mote, Imperial China 900-1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1999) p. 164]. John King Fairbank concludes that the three centuries
of the Song dynasty (960-1279 CE) put China ahead of the rest of the world in terms of
“technological invention, material production, political philosophy, government and elite
culture”[Fairbank (1998) p. 88]. Large scale urbanisation could be added to that list.
34

recognisable at what can be thought of as the beginning of the modern era.51
Northwestern Europe was now much more heavily urbanised. Paris and
Naples were the largest cities with populations of several hundred thousand
and London was rapidly catching up with them. Large cities were no longer
unusual. Rome, Seville, Prague, Milan and Lisbon all had populations of
over 100,000.
Some stagnation can be discerned in the Middle East where its cities
had ceased to control major global trade routes. But even so, Istanbul had
a population of 700,000, three times the size of Paris. Further east cities
had continued to grow. In Japan, Kyoto and Osaka were both larger than
Paris. Large cities existed in the Indian subcontinent including Agra with a
population of half a million.52
China still dominated the world for the sheer
scale and number of its large cities despite the shift in world trade routes.
The demand for its products sucked New World silver into its economy.
Beijing was almost three times the size of Paris, Hangzhou a comparable size.
Nanjing was a little larger than London and Guangzhou a little smaller. The
51
The modernity of the map should not be overestimated. Jan de Vries has shown that
European urbanisation stalled in the mid-seventeenth century and did not recover until
1750. By then the centre of gravity was shifting northwards away from the Mediterranean.
[Jan de Vries European Urbanization 1500-1800 (London: Methuen, 1984)].
52
One of the most striking features of the Vijayanagara Empire of southern India for
European and Muslim visitors was the vitality of its urban life. [Tapan Raychaudhuri
and Irfan Habib, eds. Cambridge Economic History of India, Vol.1: c.1200-c.1750 (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982) pp. 121-2; Robert Sewell, A Forgotten Empire:
Vijayanagar (Springer, 2010) p. 37]. The Mughal Empire was more urbanised than
Britain in the late 16th century. The 15th to the 18th centuries can be called the golden
age of Mughal urbanisation [Tapan Raychaudhuri and Irfan Habib (1982) pp. 170 and
467].
35

next rank of cities, Suzhou, Chengdu and Xi’an were all large by European
standards. Europe was catching up with the rest of the world but still lagged
behind in terms of large scale urbanisation.53
More Detailed Consideration of Smaller European
Cities
Despite the growth in European urbanisation very few cities reached the
100,000 population threshold in the medieval period. Towns with fewer than
2,000 inhabitants made up over 90 percent of all urban communities in north-
ern and western Europe even as late as 1500.54
Jan de Vries identified only
154 European cities with a population of more than 10,000 in 1500 and only
4 with a population of 100,000.55
Yet between 3-4000 settlements were con-
sidered to be cities.
Studying European cities in detail requires a change of focus and a differ-
ent data set. Chandler takes his European population thresholds lower than
those he uses for the rest of the world. His lowest figure is about 10,000 with
a few individual cases falling below that level. His data can be supplemented
with that of Paul Bairoch.56
Bairoch produced a database for European
53
R. Bin Wong, China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European
Experience (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997) has stressed that before 1800 industrial
production did not make up a large proportion of the economy anywhere in the world
and has suggested that there was a fundamentally similar trajectory right across Eurasia
involving increased craft and cash crop production.
54
Peter Clark, European Cities and Towns 400-2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2009) p. 7.
55
Jan de Vries (1984) p. 28.
56
Paul Bairoch, Jean Batou and Pierre Chèvre, La population des villes européennes
36

Figure 25: Growth of European cities to 1600 CE. Note that Chandler con-
siders cities of population 10,000 and even below for Europe only. Bairoch
takes cities to include cases of populations as small as 1,000. The numbers
under each data point are the number of cities in the sample.
cities between 900-1850 CE with populations as low as 1,000.
Chandler’s figures show a major drop in total city population between
1000 CE and 1100 CE. This should probably be regarded as an artefact of
the data. The sample size is small and according to Chandler the population
of Córdoba alone dropped from 450,000 to 60,000. Bairoch omits 1100 CE
entirely and his figures for Córdoba rise from 160,000 in 1000 CE to 450,000
in 1200 CE.
In both cases a definite growth in urbanisation can be seen from 1200
CE, levelling off somewhat in the fourteenth century in the case of Chandler’s
800-1850 (Geneve: Droz, 1988); available online at https://github.com/JakeRuss/
bairoch-1988
37

data, falling sharply in Bairoch’s figures, but then rapidly accelerating in both
cases from 1500 CE. Bairoch’s figures show a dip in both sample size and
total population in the period of the fourteenth century crisis when bubonic
plague could be expected to impact on the figures. His sample is weighted
towards smaller cities suggesting that they suffered higher mortality rates
than the larger cities which feature in Chandler’s data.
It should be stressed that these are extremely small settlements. To
grasp the scale of what we are talking about we should bear in mind that
most high schools are bigger than most medieval and early modern European
cities and most universities are bigger than the 10,000 which de Vries takes
as a practical statistical threshold. It is difficult to imagine how such a
small unit could function in any real sense as a city. Viewed from a Eurasian
perspective these tiny settlements can hardly be considered cities at all. They
might be regarded as micro-cities or proto-cities except for their socio-legal
status. Two features characterise medieval European cities. Firstly, they
had a distinct legal status that marked their inhabitants off from the rural
population who were subject to feudal obligations. Secondly, they contained
a cathedral, a monastery or other major Christian religious institution. Such
an institution was not a secondary feature. The Church took on city-like
features as Europe deurbanised in the post-Roman period.
It is reasonable to suppose, as Childe did, that cities ought to have mar-
kets or fairs but in medieval Europe monasteries had them too. The same
can be said of literacy, another mark of urban life for Childe, which was
38

minimally present in early medieval European towns but more often present
in monasteries.
When Rome was sacked in 410 CE Augustine exhorted Christians to put
their faith in the City of God rather than the City of Man. The Church acted
as the earthly representative of this heavenly city. Its main mission might be
spiritual but there was no reason not to try to keep the aqueducts or trade
flowing. The city-like role of the Church presupposed the previous existence
of actual cities. Their hybrid nature marks a particular point, rather a low
one, in the city process. Medieval monasteries and the aspirations of their
abbots are unthinkable without an initial urban revolution and the history
of city development in the ancient Mediterranean. The collapse of Rome had
left a city shaped hole in the European consciousness.
City Growth in Europe and Eurasia Compared
No direct comparison can be made between Europe’s micro-cities and
cities in the rest of Eurasia. The data simply does not exist. The lowest
global threshold that Chandler provides is 40,000. When those figures are
compared for Europe and the rest of Eurasia the same growth profile can be
observed even though there are so few European cities of this size. There
was a marked growth spurt in European urbanisation after 1500 but this
was not unique to Europe. Europe was following the trend of urbanisation
in Eurasia as a whole. European cities make up about 20% of the total
Eurasian urbanisation throughout the period 1200-1600 CE. There is no sign
39

Figure 26: Growth of urbanisation follows a similar pattern in Europe and
the rest of Eurasia
of a divergence between Europe and Eurasia in this period. Rather the period
of divergence is earlier and consists of Europe failing to urbanise in line with
the rest of Eurasia. From 1200 onwards Europe was following the general
Eurasian urban growth pattern but on a smaller scale.
Scaling and Comparing City Growth
When all of Chandler’s data above the 40,000 population threshold is
mapped the growth of urbanisation in Europe can be clearly seen. But what
is also evident is that by 1300 CE there is a similar growth of smaller cities
alongside the larger ones in China, India,57
central Asia and western Asia.
57
The growth of Indian cities before the British conquest is often underestimated, be-
cause India has been seen as a timeless society in the grip of an intolerant autocracy
40

Figure 27: Growth of small cities taking place accross Eurasia
Cities with populations of 40,000-60,000 are scattered along the Mediter-
ranean coast of Africa and occur in sub-Saharan Africa. Europe was not alone
in this trend towards greater urbanisation. It was a general phenomenon.
By 1600 CE much larger cities have appeared in sub-Saharan African
as they have in Europe. Less urbanised areas of the world were urbanising.
Meanwhile the distribution of cities of all sizes in India, China and Japan has
become too dense to be meaningful at this scale. The urban landscape was
intensifying in south-east Asia as very large cities and smaller cities formed
interlocking networks. Europe had not yet reached that level of urbanisa-
tion. A few large cities still tend to dominate the distribution for Europe.
which led to inevitable decline, when the reality was that from the 13th century onwards
India experienced considerable economic growth and urbanisation [Barbara D. Metcalf
and Thomas R. Metcalf, A Concise History of India (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2001) p. 3].
41

Figure 28: Intensiﬁcation of urbanisation as economy globalises
If the smaller European cities that Bairoch and Chandler include in their
databases were mapped Europe would look more urbanised but similar data
is not available for the great centres of urbanisation in Asia. If we could map
small urban centres across Eurasia it is likely that in some areas at least we
would see a similar pattern of growth to that seen in Europe. Certainly, parts
of China, such as a the lower Yangzi valley, would show a growth of smaller
urban centres as well as large cities as the area became increasingly commer-
cialised.58
There is a sense in which the trend towards greater urbanisation
in Europe and the rest of Eurasia were driven by the same globalising inﬂu-
ences. The advantage of seeing European urbanisation in this wider context
58
Billy K. L. So, The Economy of Lower Yangzi Delta in Late Imperial China: Con-
necting Money, Markets and Institutions (London: Routledge, 2013); Kenneth Pomeranz,
The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the Making of the Modern World Economy
(Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 2000).
42

is that the pattern of urbanisation we observe there, while no less remark-
able given the preceding centuries of backwardness and under-development,
becomes more understandable. Europe was not urbanising in isolation. The
growth of urbanisation in Europe was a response to global conditions.
Conclusion
Europe was slow to urbanise. It did not take part in the urban revolution
that Gordon Childe described.59
Large scale urbanisation in Europe was a
secondary development that was predicated on the development of large cities
in Asia and Africa which gradually drew European cities into their networks.
Ultimately Rome came to dominate one of those networks. Rome sponsored
the development of cities in the rest of Europe but that process was somewhat
fragile. The barbarian invasions alone do not account for the decline of cities
in Europe. The only large cities in Europe during the post-Roman period
were Islamic cities that remained connected to wider networks. Cities in the
Christian kingdoms were so small they would not have been regarded as cities
elsewhere.
The strange history of the European city makes it a poor model for cities
generally but it has become the basis of a universal model that stresses the
importance of small scale cities and characterises large cities as inherently
ﬂawed. The long term pattern of large scale urbanisation across Eurasia does
not support that position. Large non-European cities were successful over
59
Vere Gordon Childe, Man Makes Himself (London: Watts and Co., 1936).
43

many centuries. European cities needed to be granted privileges that sepa-
rated them from the surrounding feudal countryside if they were to survive.
Using the arcane socio-political structure that resulted from this peculiar ne-
cessity as the basis for a model of urbanisation is inappropriate for the rest
of the world. Europe is not necessarily a bad place to study urbanisation.
The challenges that European cities faced were so great that it might be
considered an excellent opportunity to understand the factors that can hold
back the development of large cities. The problem comes when the European
city is converted into a paradigm of what a city should be.
Europe is not usually viewed as a Eurasian backwater. Its cities are sel-
dom seen as the poorer cousins of the great cities at the eastern end of a
single landmass. Africa is habitually regarded as a continent that failed to
develop. Yet mapping the pattern of large scale urbanisation shakes up our
preconceptions. It is Europe that begins to look like the part of the world
where development was problematical. It was the mid-eighteenth century
before Europe was on a path to secure large scale urbanisation. When Euro-
pean urbanisation ﬁnally began to accelerate it was in a context of increasing
urbanisation at all scales across Eurasia. The picture that emerges from tak-
ing a Eurasian perspective is that Europe did not so much pull itself up by
its own bootstraps as it was bootstrapped by the growth in the Eurasian
economy.
44

Acknowledgements
World map adapted from: Strebe, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.
org/w/index.php?curid=16115307
All plots created by GNU Octave, text in LaTeX, running under Ubuntu.
45

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