Readme for primacy data

These are decennial city and national population sizes in hundreds

(add two zeros) from 1930 to 1980. For some cities there are also

1985 populations. All the large countries of the world are included

and the largest cities in each country are included. There are

10,961 cases (city and year). The city population estimates are usually

for the whole metropolitan region.

In some cases where that number was not available the population

for the municipal boundary is given. If a city population greatly decreases

from one decade to the next, as is case for all the Italian cities from

1970 to 1980, this is because metro region estimates for 1980 were not

available at the time of our research, and the smaller numbers are the

populations of the central municipalities alone.

The format is:

nation, city, year, population

For the population size of the whole country the word "nation"

appears in the city column.

These data were originally collected in connection with an NSF-

sponsored research project (SES 8318793) "World Division of Labor

and the Development of National City Systems, 1800-1980. The PI was

Christopher Chase-Dunn. The data were

further cleaned and improved by Brad Lyman, Sociology, Baltimore

City Community College, Baltimore, Md. 21215.

These data were used to analyze trends in urban primacy.

Publications resulting from the projects are:

Michael Timberlake 1985 Urbanization in the World-Economy New York,

Academic Press.

Christopher Chase-Dunn 1985 "The coming of urban primacy in Latin

America" Comparative Urban Research, Vol. 11, # 1-2:14-31.

Bradford Lyman 1992 "Colonial governance in the development of

urban primacy" Studies in Comparative International Development

27,2:24-38.

Bradford Lyman 1992 "Urban primacy and world-system position" Urban

Affairs Quarterly 28,1:22-37.

The dataset is called primacy_data.xls, an Excel file, and is available from