Cities in the Central Political/Military
Network Since CE 1200:
Size Hierarchy and Domination
Christopher Chase-Dunn
and
Alice Willard
Sociology
Johns
Hopkins University
Baltimore,
MD. 21218 USA
Venice
Abstract:
Cities
have long grown, flourished and declined in a larger context in which
interactions with other cities have been important. Sometimes cities have co-evolved in networks of complementary
interaction while in other cases cities competed and conflicted with one
another such that the success of one meant the failure of others. We study the changing city-size hierarchy of
the Central Political/Military Network in order to examine the causes and
consequences of changes in the relative sizes of cities. Do changes in the city size distribution of
the system reflect a cycle of the concentration and deconcentration of
political and/or economic power? What does the changing city size distribution
of the Central Political/Military Network tell us about the kinds of power that
have been most important, and how the nature of power may have changed with the
emerging predominance of capitalism?
What are the implications of these findings for our understanding of
contemporary world cities and the future shape of settlement systems on Earth?
An earlier version of this paper was
presented at the Conference on World Cities in a World-System, Center for
Innovative Technology, Sterling, VA.
April 1 to 3, 1993. Organized by
Paul Knox and Peter Taylor, Center For Urban and Regional Studies, Virginia
Polytechnic Institute, Blacksburg, VA.
24060-0113.
Published in Comparative
Civilizations Review,
30:104-32 (Spring) 1994.
The comparative study of
civilizations requires us to study cities and the networks of human interaction
between city and countryside, one city and other cities, and the relationships
between citified regions and regions in which people live in villages or are
nomadic. One aspect of city systems long used by archaeologists to make
inferences about the degree of centralization and hierarchy in a system is the
city size hierarchy -- the relative distribution of the sizes of cities in a
region. In this paper we use data on the population sizes of cities to study
the rate of urban growth and the city size distribution in Europe and the Near
East since 1200 CE.
Recent phenomena in the modern
world-system have caused specialists in urbanization to conceptualize the
notion of "world cities " (e.g. Friedmann, 1986). But the study of
contemporary world cities needs to consider a comparative framework that spans
both broad spatial expanses and deep temporal ones. In order to know what is
new we need to know what is old: in order to interpret and explain contemporary
trends we need to understand how and why change has occurred in the past. The contemporary global political economy,
with its core world cities and semiperipheral megacities, is only the most
recent formation in which large cities have played central roles in the hierarchical
and horizontal links among societies that are parts of larger
world-systems. Earlier regional systems
also had their world cities. These
performed central economic and political/military roles for the systems of
which they were a part. The role of
villages, towns, cities and settlement systems in the evolution of
world-systems has been outlined elsewhere (Chase-Dunn, 1992).
When we use a telescope we see
different things than when we look with the naked eye or with a
microscope. Here we focus our gaze on
the last eight hundred years and on the intersocietal network that eventually
became the global system in which we now live -- the Central Political/Military
Network.
This study replicates an earlier
study using a somewhat different unit of regional analysis. Earlier work (Chase-Dunn, 1985) bounded the
modern world-system following the principles and prescriptions of the Fernand
Braudel Center at SUNY-Binghamton. In
this paper we will utilize a different principle for specifying the spatial
boundaries of world-systems. This changes
the focus of analysis to some extent, and those who have studied regional
systems know that the way in which the subject is bounded is a fundamental decision
that affects everything else.
The approach to spatially bounding
world-systems proposed by Immanuel Wallerstein has been criticized by many
world-system scholars. Jane Schneider (1991) was the first to point out that
luxury goods trade often has important and systemic effects on the regions that
are so linked. Wallerstein argued that "preciosity" trade was
exogenous to world-systems. Other have argued that using mode of production as
a feature for spatially bounding world-systems is mistaken (Chase-Dunn,1989;
Terlouw,1992). Wallerstein argues that the Ottoman empire was separate from the
modern world-system because it was not capitalist despite the extensive trade
and political-military interaction that the Ottomans had with Europe.
We adopt an approach to spatially
bounding world-systems that emphasizes all-important interactional interconnections. World-systems are networks of
interconnectedness in which the interactions condition the reproduction and the
transformation of the social structures that are connected (Chase-Dunn and
Hall, 1993). Connections must have
regularized and systemic consequences.
But all such connections do not have the same spatial
characteristics. We note that in many
world-systems bulk goods networks are small, while political-military networks
are larger and networks of the exchange of prestige goods are larger yet ( see
Figure 1). We follow the work of David
Wilkinson (1987, 1992) in studying the city-systems of regularized
political-military interaction networks composed of states and empires, but we
also pay attention to the larger networks of luxury trade (called oikumenes by
Wilkinson) as potentially important networks of systemic interaction.
Figure 1: Two
Political-Military Networks inside a Prestige Goods Network.
Following Wilkinson, we call the intersocietal system which engulfed all
others and which became the global political economy in which we now live the
"Central World-System."
World-systems are often nested networks of interaction as illustrated in
Figure 1. The whole system exists at the level of the largest prestige good
network. In this paper we will use the political/military subsystem as the unit
of analysis for our study of city systems. We contend that the
political/military network (PMN) is the most sensible territorial unit for
studying city size distributions because it is the unit within which states
directly vie with one another for power. This new unit of analysis -- the
Central PMN -- is posited to be a more appropriate specification for studying
the emergence of European dominance in the modern world-system than the boundaries
proposed by the Braudel Center and used in the earlier study (Chase-Dunn,
1995a).
The Central PMN (called Central
Civilization by Wilkinson) emerged with the coupling of the Mesopotamian and
Egyptian PMNs in about 1500 BCE. The Mesopotamian and Egyptian systems had been
linked in to a single network of prestige goods exchange for at least since
2500 BCE and probably much earlier. The Central PMN expanded, eventually
engulfing all other systems, incorporating India and Spanish America in the
sixteenth century and the Far Eastern and Japanese systems in the nineteenth
century.[1]
The PMN approach to bounding city
systems leads to somewhat different conclusions about the history of large
scale interaction in the last 800 years from that of the Braudel Center scholars.
From our point of view Europe was never a separate system, at least since its
incorporation in to the Mediterranean-centered prestige goods network in the
Bronze Age (Kristiansen, 1991). The
European story is one of a penetrated and peripheral region that eventually
developed a new form of organization that enabled it to dominate all of the
Central World-System. The Roman power
that brought Europe in to the Central political-military network was itself an
upstart semiperipheral marcher state that conquered the old Near Eastern core
region. After the fall of Rome the
center of power moved back toward the Near East where it had long been and
Europe was left to stew in its feudal juices.
The rise of Islam further isolated Europe from the long distance trade
and brought an even deeper devolution of political power and a parallel
economic involution.
The recovery of Europe enabled a new
mode of production, capitalism, to become the predominant logic of accumulation
in a regional subsystem, and this subsystem eventually rose to transform the
whole of the Central System to capitalism.
But capitalism did not begin in Europe; it only became predominant in
that regional subsystem. Markets,
money, merchants, the production of commodities, and wage labor were institutions
which were invented and spread within the tributary states and empires, and
which grew in the interstices between the empires of the Afroeurasian oikumene. The first capitalist states on earth, states
run by people whose main method of gathering wealth was through the trading of
commodities and the production of commodities for sale, were the capitalist city-states
operating in the interstices between tributary empires. The Phoenician city-states are an obvious
example, but a much earlier case may have been Dilmun (now Bahrain) linking the
early Mesopotamian states with the urbanized states of the Indus River
valley.
These semiperipheral capitalist
city-states were not the main players in the systems in which they lived. The main players were tributary states and
empires that gathered wealth by taxation and tribute. But the semiperipheral capitalist city-states performed the
important role of carrying on trade between tributary states the linking of
dispersed peripheral regions into larger trade networks. They were the protagonists of
commodification (Chase-Dunn, 1992).
At the same time, the tributary
empires were themselves becoming more sophisticated regarding their ability to
exploit market trade without extinguishing it.
The Persian emperor, Darius, understood the wisdom of allowing the
merchants within the empire a certain degree of autonomy in order maximize his
own revenues from taxing their trade.
Imperial monopolization was good for obtaining a quick return, but in
the long run a percentage of a larger pie was preferable. The Roman and Chinese empires were among the
most commercialized tributary empires, and the later Islamic and Ottoman
empires also had extensive commodification without yet abandoning their primary
orientation toward the logic of accumulation through political-military
control.
In Sung and Ming dynasty China
capitalists and capitalism posed significant challenges to the power of the
Mandarins, but the logic of empire was able to meet these challenges and to maintain
and reproduce a strong centralized state apparatus. The steppe-nomad and northern woodsmen dynasties that conquered
China also reproduced the logic of bureaucratic empire (Barfield, 1989). The overall picture here is one in which the
institutional bases of capitalism -- money, commodified goods, commodified
labor and commodified land -- emerged slowly, unevenly, and in spurts and
retreats as the territorial size of empires expanded from the third millennium
BC on. This was uneven development in a
number of meanings. There were
locations in which capitalists actually held state power -- the autonomous
semiperipheral capitalist city-states.
There was also an oscillation within the tributary states between
periods in which private capital accumulation by wealthy families became
relatively more important versus periods in which state-controlled
accumulation was more emphasized (Ekholm and Friedman, 1985; Frank and Gills 1993). These were not capitalist systems, but
capitalism was emerging in the interstices of the tributary modes of
accumulation.
The irony of Europe was that
capitalism was able to become the predominant logic of accumulation there
precisely because states were weak. It
was the strong imperial states of the Near East and China that prevented the
emergent predominance of capitalism in those areas. The semiperipheral status of Europe allowed it to evolve a new
institutional mix in which market forces and the political power of capitalists
was greater than ever before. The
capitalist city states of Europe -- Venice, Genoa, Florence and Antwerp -- were
closer together and had a proportionally greater influence on trade and the
political interactions among continental states than earlier capitalist city
states had. The operation of protection
rent (Lane, 1979) as a regulator of state action became increasingly important
in a system in which the most powerful states were increasingly coming under
the control of capital.
Cycles of Political
Centralization
All hierarchical intersocietal
systems go through sequences of centralization and decentralization of
economic, political and social power.
Like states, chiefdoms emerged in sets in which chiefly polities
interacted and competed with one another, and these "interchiefdom
systems" exhibited a pattern of rise and fall in which the territorial and
population size of the largest chiefdoms rose and then declined (Sahlins
1972:144-48 ; Mann,1986:Chapter 2; Friedman and Rowlands, 1977). The dynamics of this sequence in systems
composed of chiefdoms, in which power was organized around hierarchical kinship
relations, differed in important ways from the dynamics of rise and fall,
political centralization and decentralization, which operated in systems
composed of true states.[2]
The cycle of the rise and fall of
states occurs in all known interstate systems.
In some the competition among states takes the form of the rise and fall
of hegemonic core powers, a process that we know well in the modern world-system. In others, and more frequently, the cycle of
political centralization/decentralization takes the form of the alternation
between interstate systems (in which there are a number of competing states
within a core region -- these are called "states systems" by
Wilkinson) and world-empires in which a single state succeeds in unifying an
entire core area by means of conquest (called universal empires or world states
by Wilkinson). Wilkinson (1992b:54)
provides us with periodizations of states systems and world-states for eleven
state-based "civilizations" defined as interactive networks of
polities that are fighting and/or cooperating with each other in which there
are cities of at least ten thousand people.
In addition to the cycle of the rise
and fall of polities, there is a long run trend toward the increasing size of
polities and the decreasing number of autonomous polities on Earth (Carneiro 1978). Rein Taagepera's (1978a,1978b,1979) studies
of changes in the territorial size of the largest empires on Earth over the
past four thousand years demonstrate the cycles of political centralization and
decentralization discussed above. The
combination of the long-term trend of increasing size of polities with the
medium term process of political centralization/decentralization is illustrated
in Figure 1. Taagepera's studies show
that the size of largest empire on Earth oscillated up and down for long
periods and then jumped up in rapid rises that correspond to the wide conquests
by semiperipheral marcher states that created empires across whole core
regions. Well-known examples are the
Akkadian Empire, the Assyrian Empire, the Alexandrian conquests and the Roman
Empire. Figure 2 is a simplified and
idealized model based on Taagepera's studies of the territorial size of the
largest states and empires and Carneiro's (1978) discussion of the long-term
evolutionary trend from many small polities to few large ones.
Figure 2: Rise and
Fall and Increasing Size of Polities
In this paper we will examine the
relationship between the processes of political centralization/decentralization
and changes in the relative population sizes of cities located within a single
interacting political/military network -- the Central World-System. In an earlier paper (Chase-Dunn and Willard,
1993) we have compared the pattern of changes in the Central system with those
of the Far Eastern and Indic systems.
The simplest hypothesis is that city systems will become more
hierarchical -- that is the largest cities will be much larger than other
cities in the same network -- when political/military power is more
centralized. This is based on the idea
that political power is an important component of the ability of large cities
to gather the resources necessary to sustain large populations.
The phenomenon of urban primacy --
the concentration of population in a very large central city with only much
smaller cities in the same region -- has been extensively studied in national
societies in the modern world-system (e.g.
Chase-Dunn,1985b; Lyman, 1992).
It is well-known that France has a very primate city-size distribution,
as do most peripheral and semiperipheral countries in the modern
world-system. Many contemporary urban
and regional planners see urban primacy as a problem and they have constructed
and tried to implement policies for encouraging the growth of small and
middle-sized cities (rather than further increasing the size of the largest
city in a country).
Settlement Size
Hierarchies
What do we mean by city size
hierarchy? All human settlements
interact with other settlements. The
size of individual settlements can be studied as they grow or decrease, and the
relative size of settlements can also be studied. This means looking at the distribution of
settlement sizes within a region. Some
regions contain settlement systems that are very hierarchical in the sense that
there is a single very large settlement that is surrounded by much smaller
settlements. Such settlement systems
are called "primate" because there is a single center that is much
larger than any other settlement.
Geographers have developed theories which suggest that a
"normal" settlement size hierarchy will correspond to the rank-size
rule in which the second largest settlement is half the size of the
largest, the third largest is one-third the size of the largest, the fourth
largest is one-fourth the size of the largest and so on. The rank-size rule is also called the
"log normal" rule because the distribution of settlement sizes
approximates a straight line when the settlement sizes are logarithmically
transformed. Some settlement systems
are "flat" in the sense that the towns or cities or villages of which
they are composed are all about the same size.
So we can discuss different settlement systems as primate, rank-size or
flat depending upon the relative size of the settlements of which they are
composed. The size hierarchy aspect
allows us to compare very different kinds of settlement systems to one another
because we are looking at the relative, rather than the absolute, sizes of settlements. Thus a system composed of villages can be
just as hierarchical as a system composed of great cities if one village is
much larger than the others. The SPI reflects the relative degree of inequality
of settlement sizes amongst a group of settlements or cities.
In order to make such relative
comparisons a statistic called the Standardized Primacy Index was developed by
Walters (1985). The Standardized
Primacy Index (SPI) takes a value of zero when a settlement size distribution
corresponds to the rank-size rule. It
takes on negative values when the distribution is less hierarchical (flatter)
than the rank-size rule and positive values when the distribution is more
hierarchical than the rank-size rule (primacy). Though the measures of urban populations are subject to error,
and to greater error as we go back in time, the degree of error is reduced when
we calculate the SPI. The SPIs we
calculate in Table 1 below are based on the largest five cities within the
Central Political/Military Network at each point in time for which we have data
from Chandler (1987).
Our data on the
population sizes of cities is taken from Tertius Chandler's Four Thousand
Years of Urban Growth (Chandler, 1987).
We recognize that the population estimates in Chandler are often in
error according to other sources and we applaud the recent efforts of other
scholars to replace Chandler's data set with a better one. In the mean time we can point out that the
SPI is fairly insensitive to errors in population estimates because it focusses
on the relative size of cities rather than their absolute sizes. For the most recent year (1988) we use
population estimates of the world's largest metropolitan areas from Camp
(1990).
Power and City Size
Distributions
Why should a city system have a
steeper city size distribution when there is a greater degree of concentration
of power? The simple answer is that large settlements and especially large
cities require greater concentrations of resources to support their large
populations. This is why population
size has itself been suggested as an indicator of power (Taagepera, 1978a:
111). But these resources may be
obtainable locally and the settlement size hierarchy may simply correspond to
the distribution of ecologically determined resources. In a desert environment populations cluster
near oases. It is not the political or
economic power of the central settlement over surrounding areas which produces a
centralized settlement system but rather the ecological distribution of necessary
or desirable resources. In many
systems, however, we have reason to believe that relations of power, domination
and exploitation do affect the distribution of human populations in space. Many large cities are as large as they are
because they are able to draw upon far-flung regions for food and raw
materials. If a city is able to use
political/military power or economic power to acquire resources from
surrounding cities it will be able to support a larger population than the
dominated cities can, and this should produce a hierarchical city size
distribution.
Of course the effect can also go the
other way. Some cities can dominate
others because they have larger populations. Great population size makes possible the assembly of large armies
or navies, and this may be an important factor creating or reinforcing steep
city size distributions. The striking
difference between the contemporary world-system and earlier regional systems
is what we can describe as the declining significance of size. Certainly size was never the only important
component of power. Some virtually
city-less states (e.g. the Mongol
empire) were able to dominate urbanized civilizations for periods of time. But the correlation between city size and
power was much stronger in earlier world-systems than it is in our own. We need to address why this change has
occurred.
Our earlier paper (Chase-Dunn and
Willard, 1993) examined the extent to which changes in the degree of hierarchy
in city size distributions corresponded or do not correspond with changes in
the degree of political centralization since 2000 BCE in several different
world-systems. We observed that, on the
average, all the political/military networks studied had city size distributions
that were significantly flatter than the rank size rule. This contrasts with studies of city size
distributions within modern national societies. These show average
distributions that are much closer to the rank-size rule (Chase-Dunn, 1985b). The fact that political/military networks
composed of many states have flatter distributions than single national
societies supports the notion that city size hierarchies reflect relative
distributions of power.
Political/military networks are generally larger and more politically
multicentric than single nation-states are.
We found a high degree of
correspondence between changes over time in city size distributions and changes
in the distribution of political power within political/military networks
(Chase-Dunn and Willard, 1993). The
periods designated by Wilkinson (1992,1993) as those in which there were
"universal states" in political/military networks all exhibited
relatively more hierarchical city size distributions. The temporal and spatial focus we are studying here, the Central
political/military network from CE 1200 to 1988, is one in which there were no
"universal states" that dominated the entire core region of the
system. The last world state in the
Central political/military network was the Roman Empire. But this system has continued
to go through cycles of political centralization and decentralization even in
the absences of universal states. This cycle has been called the rise and fall
of hegemonic core powers in the modern world-system. the broad similarities of
this sequence of rise and fall with the earlier pattern of empire-formation and
disintegration are important, but the differences are also central to the
argument that the modern capitalist world-system operates according to a
qualitatively different logic from the previously dominant logic of the
tributary modes of accumulation.
A serendipitous finding reported in
Chase-Dunn and Willard (1993) is that the SPIs and urban growth sequences for
the Central and Far Eastern political/military networks are fairly closely synchronized
from 430 BC to 1825 AD, when the Central pol/mil net (PMN) incorporated the Far
Eastern. We concluded that the dynamics
of the Eurasian prestige goods network the formation and disintegration of
steppe nomad empires accounts for the synchronicities of urban growth and
changes in the city-size distributions in the Central and Far Easter PMNs.
Table 1 shows the SPIs (index of
flatness or hierarchy in the city-size distribution) and the total populations
of the three largest cities at each point in time for which we have data from
Chandler (1987). The city populations we used for both the SPI and the total
urban populations are available for inspection in Chase-Dunn and Willard (1993:
Appendix). Negative SPIs indicate a city-size distribution that is flatter than
the lognormal rule. Note that all the SPIs in Table 1 are negative, indicating
that the city-size distribution of the Central PMN never became primate or more
hierarchical than the lognormal rule. There is, however, significant variation in
the degree of hierarchy versus flatness over time.
In 1200 CE the
city-size distribution was quite flat with an SPI of -2.44. This is the
flattest point in all the years from 1200 to 1988. By 1300 the SPI had move to -0.04, a nearly lognormal distribution,
indicating a significant shift toward a much more hierarchical city-size
distribution over that 100-year period.
The Central PMN since
1200 CE
Our earlier paper (Chase-Dunn and
Willard, 1993) examined the Central PMN from 1360 BCE (just after the coupling
of the Mesopotamian and Egyptian PMNs) until 1988 CE and compares it with other
regional world-systems. Here we will
focus on the more recent period from 1200 until 1988 CE and will focus only on
the Central PMN. The purpose is to focus on the PMN that contains the emerging
European hegemony and to show how the city-system of this unit of analysis
changed over time. This constitutes a replication of Chase-Dunn (1985a) with a
new unit of analysis -- the larger political/military network of which the
Wallersteinian "modern world-system" was a part. Figure 3 graphs the SPIs in Table 1, showing
the changes in the SPI for the Central PMN between 1200 and 1988 CE. The
overall pattern since 1200 is a rise from flatness to near log-normality,
small-fluctuations until a descent back to flatness between 1600 and 1750,
another rise to log-normality after 1750, another descent to flatness after
1900, and another short rise peaking in 1950 and then a move back toward
flatness.
Figure
4 graphs the urban population figures from Table 1. These are the sums of the
populations of the three largest cities for each time point. This shows the
general trend for cities to become larger and also some variations in the
growth rate that are interesting. We exclude populations after 1825 because the
rate of increase after that is so great that it masks the interesting
variations in growth rate that are visible in Figure 4. Comparison between
Figures 3 and 4 shows the relationship between urban growth of the largest
cities and changes in the relative distribution of city-sizes. There is no
general relationship between the two aspects of city system development, except
for a possible relationship between the declines in both in the 17th and 18th
centuries. This implies that changes in the relative distribution of power are
largely independent of changes in the rate of growth as indicated by the
increasing size of cities.
Let us now take a closer look at
these broad trends. In 1200 CE the city size distribution of the Central
PMN was quite flat (SPI = -2.44) and the urban population had fallen a bit from
what it had been in 1150. The urban
population was still well below the level it had in 1000 CE. The two largest cities in 1200 were Fez (in
Morocco) and Cairo with 200,000 each, followed by Constantinople, Palermo and
Marrakesh. Saladin ended the Fatimid
rule of Egypt in 1171 and established the Ayyubid dynasty. Seville was the sixth and Paris was the
seventh largest. Venice was fourteenth.
In 1250 we find the city size
distribution jumping up to a hierarchy with an SPI of -0.283. The largest city was now Cairo with 300,000,
swollen by the power of the Ayyubid dynasty.
Second was Fez with 200,000 and then Paris with 160,000. These were followed by Marrakesh and
Constantinople. Constantinople had been
taken by the army of the Fourth Crusade in 1204 and had declined from 150,000
to 100,000. The overall urban
population was continuing to grow but it had still not yet reached its former
peak in 1000 AD.
In 1300 we find a rather an
even steeper hierarchy which closely approximates the rank size rule (SPI = -0.04). The overall urban population had grown again. Cairo was still in first place but now had a
much larger population of 400,000. The
Mamluks had taken over Egypt during the 1250s and successfully stopped the
Mongol conquest of Syria and Palestine (Abu-Lughod, 1989:148). Paris was second and had grown to
228,000. Then we have Fez with 150,000
(its population down despite the founding of the new city in 1276), Tabriz with
125,000 and Venice with 110,000.
Tabriz, in what is now northwestern Iran, was the capital of the huge
Mongol state headed by Ghazan Khan in 1295.
In 1300 Constantinople had fallen to seventh place, having been sacked
again in 1261 by Michael VIII who restored the Byzantine Empire. Venice, now in fifth place, was at the
highest rank it would attain, although it matched this again in 1550 AD.
Fernand Braudel's (1984) picture of
a world-economy in which capitalist city states such as Venice and Genoa were
at the pinnacle of the whole system defines that system in a way that downplays
the importance of the land-based tributary states, which were still the most
powerful actors and had the largest cities.
Venice was a prototypical semiperipheral capitalist city state operating
within the interstices of a tributary system still dominated by larger states
and empires, and Braudel's work affirms this.
The fact that capitalist states later became the most powerful central
actors should not distort our understanding of these older systems. In
1350 the SPI had gotten just a bit less steep but was still close to the
rank size rule. Cairo was still the
largest city but had dropped to 350,000.
The Black Death had struck Cairo in 1348. Paris was still second with 215,000, down slightly. Fez was third, then Sarai and Tabriz. Sarai, near present-day Volgograd, was the capital
of the Tatar "Golden Horde."
The overall urban population had declined a bit since 1300 but was still
higher than it had been in 1250.
In 1400 the SPI had fallen a
bit flatter to -0.295. Cairo was still
the largest city and had grown to 360,000.
Paris was still second and had grown to 280,000. Tabriz was now third with 150,000, up by
50,000 since 1350 despite its capture by Tamerlane. Fourth place with 130,000 was held by Samarkand, Tamerlane's
capital. Fez was fifth with
125,000. The overall urban population
had grown.
In 1450 Cairo was still first
with 380,000. Tabriz was now second
with 200,000. Granada was third with
165,000. It was the flourishing center
of Moorish civilization in Spain but was soon to fall to the
conquistadors. Paris had declined to
fourth with 150,000, down abruptly from 1400.
It had been occupied by the English from 1419-1436 and had suffered
famine and the Black Death. The fifth
was Bursa (in northwest Turkey) now grown to 130,000 despite its having been
sacked by Tamerlane in 1402. The SPI
(-0.13) had become more hierarchical once again. Thus begins the long sixteenth century in which European
aristocracies opted for agrarian capitalism when their seignorial revenues were
challenged. Paul Volker reportedly said
of Africa that it was not even a blip on his radar screen. From the perspective of the largest cities
in the Central system, the same could be said of Europe in the fifteenth
century.
In 1500 we find that the SPI
(-0.26) had fallen a bit flatter again, but not by much. Cairo had grown to 400,000 and Tabriz to
250,000. Constantinople was third with
200,000 despite the fact that it had been depopulated when it fell to the
Ottoman Turks in 1453. It recovered
quickly as the capital of the Ottoman Empire.
Paris was fourth with 185,000.
Fifth place was held by Fez.
Urban population had grown once again, nearly attaining the level it had
in 1000 AD.
In 1550 the SPI once again
nearly approximated the rank size rule at -0.026. Constantinople, now capital of the Ottoman Empire, was once again
the largest city with a population of 660,000, returning to its rank in 1100
AD. Cairo was now second with 360,000,
down 40,000 since 1500. Paris was
growing again with 210,000. Naples was
in fourth place with 209,000 and Venice was fifth with 171,000. Urban growth reached its highest point since
900 AD. This was a system-level city
size hierarchy in which the hegemonic power was the Ottoman Empire. Lisbon, allegedly the sixteenth century city
with "global reach" according to Modelski and Thompson (1988), was
the twentieth city in the Central system.
In 1575 things had not
changed much. The SPI was just a bit
flatter. Constantinople had grown to
680,000, but Cairo had lost population to 275,000. Paris had grown just a bit, as had Naples. The Indic system was now united with Central
and the fifth largest city was Agra (eventual home of the Taj Mahal) with
200,000. It was established by Akbar as
the Moghul capital in 1566. Total urban
population had lost a bit since 1550.
The Hapsburg bid to unite the European core into an empire state had
been resisted by France in alliance with the Ottomans
(Zolberg,1981:263-5). The fact that the
Ottomans were crucial players in this critical conjuncture belies the effort to
consider them as exogenous to the developing modern world-system.
In 1600 Constantinople was at
700,000. The second largest city was
Agra with 500,000. Paris was still
third with 245,000. Naples was fourth
with 224,000. And Cairo had dropped to
fifth with 200,000. The SPI had become
a bit more flat and was headed toward even more flatness. The urban population had grown rapidly and
was now into its permanent geometric ascent.
In 1650 Constantinople was
still first but it had not grown since 1600.
Agra was gone. The Moghul
capital had moved to Delhi in 1658, possibly affecting Chandler's estimate for
Agra in 1650. Paris was second with
455,000, up abruptly in fifty years.
London was third with 410,000, having more than doubled in size since
1600. Fourth place was held by Lahore
(Pakistan) with 360,000 and fifth was Isfahan (Safavid Iran) with 350,000. The SPI (-0.6150) had dropped toward
flatness, but was on its way to much greater flatness. Amsterdam, now at the peak of its golden age
as the world city of the seventeenth century Dutch hegemony in Europe, was at
the eleventh rank in the city size distribution of the Central system. Even
when we look only at Europe (Chase-Dunn, 1985:278), Amsterdam was never higher
than fourth in the city size hierarchy.
This supports that notion that the Dutch state's hegemony was
intermediate between the semiperipheral capitalist city-states and the
full-blown core capitalist hegemony of the British. Formerly capitalist states
had been semiperipheral city-states in the interstices between tributary
empires such as the Phoenician cities or Venice. Like these, the Dutch were
specialists in intercontinental trade and in naval power, but they were closer
to being a core nation-state and more important in the interstate system than
any earlier capitalist state had been.
Even so, in the seventeenth century Amsterdam was only a town compared
to Constantinople.
In 1700 we find that
Constantinople was still first but with the same 700,000 it had in 1600. Second place was now held by London with
550,000. Paris, now third, had
continued to grow, with a population of 530,000. Ahmedabad now held fourth place in northwest Indian Gujarat with
380,000, augmented by a British trading post there in 1619. Fifth was Isfahan with 350,000. Sixth place was held by Amsterdam with
210,000. The SPI was now at a rather
flat point (-1.093). The rise of London
was the first time in world history that the world city of a capitalist state
moved toward the first position.
In 1750 London was the
largest city with a population of 676,000.
Constantinople was now second with 625,000, down from its former
700,000. Paris was third with 556,000
and Naples was fourth with 310,000.
Fifth place was held by Amsterdam with 219,000. This is Amsterdam's highest place ever in
the city size hierarchy. Many have
suggested a comparison between Venice and Amsterdam, both the centers of
international trade in their day (e.g. Burke, 1974). Like Amsterdam, Venice attained its highest rank in the city size
hierarchy (fifth) well after its own hegemony in international trade had passed
(in 1550). This was also true of
Lisbon, which now attained the sixth rank.
According to Modelski and Thompson (1988: Chapter 7) Portugal had been
the "global leader" of the sixteenth century because it held the
greatest naval power among the European states and controlled intercontinental
trade. It is interesting that Lisbon
only rose to the top tier of the city size hierarchy in the middle of the
seventeenth century, after hegemony had passed to the Dutch.
The SPI in 1750 was now at its
flattest point in this cycle at -1.196.
The flatness was due to the rapid rise of the Western European capitals
to the size attained by the cities of the Near East and the very slow growth of
Constantinople. The multicentric
geopolitical structure of the Central PMN accounts for its difference in this
period from the more constant size hierarchy that existed in the Far Eastern
PMN. In Western Europe the two great
powers, Britain and France, were leaders of coalitions of European core states
about to engage in a military struggle for control over territories in North
America and India, the Seven Years War (1756-63).
By 1800 a new city size
hierarchy was beginning to emerge but the distribution was still rather flat.
The SPI was -0.468. London had grown to
861,000. The second city was Constantinople,
still the capital of the Ottoman Empire.
It had continued to fall in population and was now 570,000. Paris was still in third place but had
decreased slightly to 547,000. Naples
had 430,000 and Moscow was now fifth with 248,000. The Napoleonic wars were about to begin. The tale of two cities, of which we know so
much, leaves out Constantinople. This
was still a major player despite its being classified by Immanuel Wallerstein
as outside the modern world-system because of its non-capitalist mode of
production.
In 1825 the SPI had moved
further toward hierarchy at -0.148.
London's population was now 1,335,000.
This was a very big city, but it was still smaller than Peking. The second largest city in the Central
world-system was now Paris with 855,000.
Constantinople was third with 675,000, up considerably from 1800. St. Petersburg now held the fourth position
with 438,000. Fifth was Naples with
350,000. The British hegemony was well
under way and was reflected in the city size hierarchy of the Central
world-system. This was the true arrival
of a system in which capitalists politically dominated the largest city. The logic of capitalist accumulation had been
predominant since at least the seventeenth century in the European subsystem,
but now it was becoming predominant in the entire Central PMN.
In 1850 the SPI dropped
temporarily back toward flatness because the Far Eastern and Central PMNs
merged (SPI = -0.335). London continued
to shoot up and now had a population of 2,320,000. It was the megacity of the Earth. Peking, the second largest city in the Central (now nearly
global) system, also continued to grow, but not nearly as fast as London. It had a population of 1,648,000. Paris had also grown and was now at
1,314,000. Canton was now in fourth
place with 875,000 and New York was fifth with 645,000. The amazing thing about the 1850 city size
distribution is that the drop toward flatness was not greater. Two massive urbanized city systems combined
into one, and yet the rapid growth of London still resulted in a size hierarchy
of cities.
By 1875 the hierarchy had
moved nearly to the rank size rule (-0.039).
This was its most hierarchical peak since 1550 CE and a point to which
it has not returned in subsequent years.
London now had a population of 4,241,000 and Paris was second with
2,250,000. New York had moved up to
third with 1,900,000. Berlin was fourth
and Vienna was fifth. Peking had
dropped to sixth place from second, and now had a population of 900,000. This was the true arrival of global European
hegemony. All of the five largest
cities on Earth were European except New York, a formerly semiperipheral
outpost of European civilization, was rising to the peak. It was also the high point of British
hegemony within the core of the modern world-system.
In 1900 London was still growing mightily and it now had a
population of 6,480,000, but a new challenger was coming up quickly. New York was second with a population of
4,242,000. The SPI had begun to flatten
once again and was at -0.222. Paris was
third with 3,330,000 and Berlin was fourth with 2,707,000. Another upstart city, Chicago, was fifth
with 1,717,000.
In 1914 the SPI was flatter
still. London was still first and had
continued to grow with a population of 7,419,000, but New York was now nearly
as large with 6,700,000. Paris had four
million. Tokyo and Berlin were tied for
fourth place with 3,500,000. Tokyo, a
new non-European world city was moving up in the hierarchy.
In 1925 New York was first
but just barely. It had 7,774,000 while
London had 7,742,000. The SPI was now
very flat at -1.506, flatter than it had been in 1750. This flat point corresponds to the
transition between the British and American hegemony in the world-system. Tokyo was now third with 5,300,000 and Paris
was fourth with 4,800,000. Berlin was
fifth with 4,013,000. The Ottoman
sultan was deposed in Constantinople in 1922 and by 1925 the city was the
thirty-ninth largest in the world.
In 1950 the city size
distribution was again moving back toward hierarchy but the SPI was still only
-.503. This was the high point of the
population peak for New York (now 12,463,000) and also the peak of the golden
age of U.S. hegemony. London was still second largest with
8,860,000. Tokyo was still third with
seven million. Paris was fourth with
5,900,000 and Shanghai was now fifth with 5,406,000. World War II had just led to the consolidation of the hegemony of
the United States. Berlin was now the
twelfth largest city on Earth with 3,707,000, down from fifth place in
1925. Tokyo, despite having lost the
war, had grown from 5,300,000 in 1925 to seven million in 1950.
In 1970 Tokyo had become the
largest city on Earth with 20,450,000.
The SPI had once again begun to flatten along with the declining
hegemony of the United States. It was
now -.849. New York was second with
17,252,000. It had grown since 1950 but
not nearly at the rate of Tokyo.
Another Japanese city, Osaka, was now in third place with twelve
million. London was fourth with
10,875,000. Moscow was in fifth place
with 9,800,000. Paris had dropped to
seventh place from fourth and Mexico City was in sixth place with nine million.
In the last year for which we have
data, 1988, the SPI had become even flatter (-0.94). Greater Tokyo was still the largest with
28,700,000. Mexico City was now second
with 19,400,000. New York was third
with 17,400,000 and Sao Paulo was fourth with 17,200,000. Fifth place was held by Greater Osaka
(Osaka-Kobo-Kyoto) with 16,800,000.
Huge megacities of the semiperiphery (Mexico City and Sao Paolo) had
appeared among the largest cities in the system. This trend was already visible in 1970 when Mexico City was in
sixth position, Buenos Aires was ninth and Sao Paolo was tenth.
Urbanization has become so dense in
the core that it is much more difficult than it was in the past to determine
the boundaries between urbanized areas.
The fact that two of the five largest cities on earth are Japanese
corresponds to the emerging economic hegemony of Japan in the
world-system.
Long-run Patterns
Let us now review the macropatterns
of the sequences of rise and decline of city size hierarchies and changes in
the rate of urban population growth.
Look again at Figures 3 and 4 above.
By looking at both figures we can see that the city size distribution of
the Central PMN recovered from an extreme flatness that bottomed out in 1150
CE. It became nearly a rank size
hierarchy in 1300 CE and then experienced a few small ups and downs until 1600
when it again began a descent that bottomed out in 1750. It then rose again to nearly a rank size
hierarchy in 1825, wobbled a little, and then peaked in 1875. It then dropped to a rather flat
distribution in 1925 and then rose again to a slight peak in 1950. It has since descended but has not yet
reached the flatness it had in 1925.
How can we interpret this trajectory
in terms of what we know about changes in the distribution of
political-military power. The extreme
flatness of the twelfth century was likely due to the effects on the Central
PMN of forces coming from Central Asia and the Far East. Pandemic diseases and invasions by steppe
nomads caused the decline of urban populations at the end of the first
millennium and flattened the city-size distribution of the Central PMN. While the city-size hierarchy recovered
quickly (by 1300) the total urban population was much slower to recover. It did not reach the pre-crisis level until
1600 CE (See Table 1 and Figure 4).
This sequence suggests that the Central PMN was functioning as a
subsystem within a larger Afroeurasian World-System in the 12th century CE. The
simultaneities discovered by Chase-Dunn and Willard's (1993) comparison of Far
Eastern and Central PMNs suggests that this had been true for a least the
previous millennium.
The recovery of the city size
hierarchy in 1300 CE was based on the rise of Mamluk Empire in Egypt and its
successful confrontation with the Mongols (Abu-Lughod, 1989:Chapter 7). Under different dynasties Cairo was the
world city in the Central system until 1550, when it was replaced by
Constantinople, now the Ottoman capital.
The descent into flatness that was under way in 1600 was due to the
rapid growth of both Indian and European cities. Unlike the earlier flatness, this one occurred in a context of
rapid growth of the overall urban population (see Figure 4). The flatness occurred because the old
centers were not growing as fast as the new centers. This was a period of rapidly growing semiperipheral megacities similar
in some respects to the period after 1960.
The descent in to flatness bottomed
out in 1750. By this time the old
capitals of the Central PMN, except for Constantinople, had dropped way down
and the rapidly growing European cities were at the top. The flatness was due, then, primarily to the
fact that several European capitals were about the same size. This would tend to support the notion that
the eighteenth century was a period of multicentricity in the Central PMN in
which core powers were contending with one another for hegemony. Modelski and Thompson (1988) show that the
British already led in sea power in the eighteenth century, and they argue that
there was an eighteenth century "cycle of leadership" in which the
British had already attained the position of "global leader." London
was indeed the largest city, but Paris was not far behind.
The British were already the leading
power in terms of naval capability, but their hegemony in the world economy was
only beginning. By 1825 they had beaten
the French in the Napoleonic wars and firmly established their primacy in the
world market. This was reflected in the
peak of the now hierarchical city size distribution, with London pulling well
ahead of Paris by 1825.
By 1850 the city size distribution
had flattened a little because of the incorporation of Peking and Canton into
the Central PMN. We have already
remarked about the surprisingly small effect that this had on the city size
distribution. In 1875 the British
hegemony was at its peak. And it then
declined primarily because of the rapid growth of New York, Berlin and Tokyo,
new rising challengers. In 1925 the
distribution was flat again with an array of core states having very large
capital cities of about the same size -- a multicentric core once again. By 1950 the United States hegemony was at
its peak, with New York much larger than the second city, London. By 1970 the distribution shows the return of
multicentricity, with Tokyo now being the largest city and this trend toward flatness
continued until 1988.
It is our conclusion that the city size distribution of the
Central PMN reflects rather well the changes in distribution of economic and
political-military power among the contending states in the Central PMN. Our findings about macropatterns are not
greatly different from those reported in an earlier study of the city size
distribution of the modern world-system (Chase-Dunn, 1985a) despite our having
changed the spatial focus of the study somewhat by using Wilkinson's definition
of system boundaries (the network of political-military interaction). If we compare Figure 3 from this paper with
Figure 12.2 in Chase-Dunn (1985a:277) we will see a reassuring similarity. This supports the notion that errors in the
estimation of the population sizes of individual cities do not greatly affect
the SPIs because this earlier study was based, not only on a somewhat different
spatial scope, but also on a different city population data set -- Chandler and
Fox (1974). The SPI is a fairly robust
statistic.
World Cities and the Longue
Duree
What are the implications of the
above for contemporary studies of world cities? The most obvious is that world
cities are not a recent phenomenon.
National city systems have always had important international
links. Interactions among the great
cities of world-systems have been important since the first emergence of cities
in Mesopotamia five thousand years ago.
But what is new about world cities in the last few decades?
Here we rely on a recent summary of
the world cities literature by John O'Loughlin (1992). It has been alleged that world cities are
more strongly linked to one another now than ever before. Surely this is the case in a globalizing
world-system. But the trends toward
greater international political and economic integration are themselves of very
long standing. It is true that these
trends have now reached a very high point, but have they really changed the
fundamental logic of the system? That
is the question. There have always been
important "international" interactions among states and there have
been city-states that specialized in long-distance trade and finance. What has happened is that the proportion of
all production and trade in the system that crosses state boundaries has
increased. And now it is not only a few
city-states that specialize in international trade. There are proportionally more world cities and they are more
tightly linked than they used to be.
Chase-Dunn (1989,1993) has argued
that, if we properly specify the systemic constants, cycles and trends of the
modern world-system, there have been no major changes in systemic logic since
World War II despite all the claims of those who have discovered one or another
new stage of capitalism. The hegemonic
sequence has proceeded, as have the Kondratieff wave and the trends toward
increasing international economic integration and international political
integration. All the jumping up and
down about "global capitalism" misunderstands the extent to which capitalism
has long been global. The "new
world order" and the globalized economy are simply larger and more intense
than they have been in the past, but the basic logic of the system has not
changed.
The description of contemporary
world cities as polarized post-industrial phenomena needs also to be put in
comparative and historical perspective.
The trajectory of New York is strongly reminiscent of London at the end
of the nineteenth century. Both cities
experience a growth of producer services and became even more specialized as
headquarters cities as their larger national economies lost pride of place in
world manufacturing. England's declining position in manufacturing was followed
by the rising importance of the City of London in world finance. And both New York and London experienced
polarization between the "citadel" and the teeming mass of recent
immigrants. The expanded informal
sector composed of recent immigrants to New York was matched in late nineteenth
century London by a flood of Irish immigration to the East End that provided a
cheap supply of labor for the docks and the "casual labor market"
(Jones, 1971).
It has been observed elsewhere
(Chase-Dunn, 1989: Chapter 9) that world cities outlive the hegemonies of their
nation-states in many respects. The
continuing significance of Amsterdam, London and New York in contemporary
global financial affairs illustrates this point.
But despite the above claims about
long-run continuities, the telescope we have been using to look at city systems
can also give us clues about change.
The literature on world cities has generally behaved as if the important
dimension for core world cities is the control of world trade and finance. What is left out of most of this literature
is any discussion of military power.
Indeed Janet Abu-Lughod (1992) presented her paper on U.S. world cities
-- New York, Chicago and Los Angeles -- to an audience at the meetings of the
International Studies Association without ever mentioning Washington, D.C. Even stranger than her implicit assumption
that military power is not a relevant dimension of world cityness was the
response of the audience, primarily Political Scientists specializing in
international relations. They never
asked about D.C.[3]
The long run perspective we have
employed makes this background assumption stand out. Most of the largest cities in the Central PMN have historically
been capitals of militarily powerful states.
Those city-states and nation-states that performed central roles in
international trade were relatively small compared to the much larger metropoli
of the tributary empires. This began to
change in Europe with the rising importance and centrality of capitalism. Capitalist states moved in to the core and
the leading capitalist states developed a larger "home markets" that
complemented their international activities.
The Dutch hegemony can be seen to have been half way between that of
Venice and that of London in this regard.
The capitalist states were primarily naval powers when they were
small. Amsterdam and London fit this
category but London was also able to field a sizeable army. England was the first core capitalist state
to have sea power, land power and economic global reach and London was the
command center for all these types of power.
New York is only an economic capital, but it is in a core state that
includes an empire city of the older sort-- Washington. The home market of the United States has
been a very large share of the world market, and it is this that accounts for the
somewhat unusual development in which the declining hegemon has become a
receiver rather than a sender of capital investment. Tokyo is unique in being an economic center alone without its own
military back up.
In this sequence from Venice to
Tokyo we see a trend toward the greater and greater importance of economic
competition and the decreasing importance of political-military competition in
the modern world-system. This trend is
part of what many think of as globalization.
It is alleged that nation-states are no longer important actors because
the global economy makes them irrelevant.
It is also alleged that the hegemonic rivalry, the rise and fall of
hegemonic core powers in which core national segments of the world capitalist
class occasionally resort to warfare with one another in order to determine who
the new hegemon will be, is no longer thinkable. The suprahegemony of a core-wide capitalist class has supposedly
ended the phenomenon of periodic core wars.
Evidence for this is the growing importance of the Group of Seven and
the revitalized activities of the proto-world-state -- the United Nations.
We hope it is true that
political-military competition and conflict among different segments of core
capital is a thing of the past, but we worry about this conclusion. The current separation between military
capability (the United States) and economic hegemony (Japan) would seem to
shore up the conclusion that the age of world wars is behind us. But how stable is this distribution? Joshua Goldstein (1988) and Bill Thompson
(1992) show that wars among core states tend to break out late in a Kondratieff
upswing. If the long economic wave
continues as it has for at least 200 years (and probably much longer) we should
approach the end of the next upswing in the decade of the 2020s.[4] It is then that we will find out how strong
the institutions of global conflict resolution really are. If these do not prove strong enough, a war
among core states will surely be the biggest disaster that has ever afflicted
humankind.
With regard to the world city
system, what can we predict? We already
noted that the emergence of large semiperipheral megacities is not an entirely
novel phenomenon. These have often
appeared in upwardly mobile states in the past. The upward mobility of Brazil and/or Mexico, the countries
containing the two semiperipheral megacities in the top five in 1988, is
certainly questionable. The
unbelievable size of Mexico City and Sao Paolo seems to be more of a burden
than an advantage in the contemporary system.
There is evidence that the rapid growth of megacities in semiperipheral
areas has slowed down. Portes (1989)
and Lyman (1992) show that the earlier trend toward increasing urban primacy
within peripheral and semiperipheral countries has leveled off since 1970.
It is likely that the global city
size distribution will continue to flatten until another hegemony is on the
rise. The Japanese seem to have a leg
up in this horse race. Germany has been
distracted by its unification, and European unification has been interrupted by
the current economic stagnation. In the
absence of pressure from European unification the United States will be less
likely to pursue a regional rather than a global strategy.
It is not impossible that the
political effort to retool the U.S. economy for another cycle of economic
hegemony will succeed, but it is unlikely.
In the absence of strong contenders, the Japanese will certainly
continue to win, and this will probably be for the good. As a small and militarily weak country with
global economic and raw material interests Japan has the most to lose from a
new period of core conflict and should, therefore, be a strong supporter of
world government. If this scenario
plays out we might expect the continuation of a fairly flat city size
distribution with Tokyo at the top for some time to come. If New York remains the home of the United
Nations it will continue to be one of the largest cities on Earth because,
ironically, its economic hegemony will be replaced by political centrality.[5]
The political experience that the United States has developed with pluralism
and multiculturalism may be a new comparative advantage for leadership in a
multicultural world. The politics of New York can become the politics of the
world in a U.S.-led global federation. This scenario will not solve all the
problems of social justice and environmental degradation, but at least it holds
the promise of preventing another round of deadly core war.
Notes