Urban World History

URBAN WORLD HISTORY

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L u c - N o r m a n d T e ll i e r

URBAN WORLD HISTORY An economic and geographical perspective

2009 Presses de l’Université du Québec Le Delta I, 2875, boul. Laurier, bur. 450 Québec (Québec) Canada  G1V 2M2

Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec and Library and Archives Canada cataloguing in publication Tellier, Luc-Normand Urban World History : an economic and geographical perspective Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-2-7605-1588-8 1. Cities and towns - History. 2. Sociology, Urban. 3. Polarization (Social sciences). 4. Space in economics. 5. World history. 6. Economic history. I. Title. HT111.T44 2009

307.7609

C2008-941973-1

We are grateful for the financial assistance received from the Government of Canada under the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP). Publication of this book was made possible through the financial support of Société de développement des entreprises culturelles (SODEC). This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Layout : Alphatek Cartographer : Camille Ouellet-Dallaire Cover : Richard Hodgson

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 PUQ 2009 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 All rights reserved. No reproduction, translation, or adaptation without authorization. © 2009 Presses de l’Université du Québec Legal deposit – 1st quarter 2009 Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec / Bibliothèque et Archives Canada Printed in Canada

Table of Contents

Lisf of Figures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . XIII List of Maps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . XV INTRODUCTION. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 CHAPTER 1 FROM THE BEGINNINGS OF AGRICULTURE AND URBANIZATION TO THE FIRST URBEXPLOSIONS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 The Origins and Beginning of Humankind. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Beginnings of Agriculture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Agriculture and Topodynamic Corridors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Agriculture, Mobility, and Urbanization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Emergence of Urbanization in the Great Corridor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Appearance of Pre-urban Cities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

25 26 28 29 33 35

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Appearance of Urban Cities in the Sumer Region . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 Appearance of Urbanization in Egypt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49 The Strategic Role of the Phoenician Cities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54 The Strategic Role of the Persian Gulf . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59 The Babylonian Urbexplosion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59 The Assyrians and the Tigris Axis. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62 The Expansion of the Babylonian Urbexplosion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 The Greek Challenge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75 Urbanization in the Asian Corridor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86 The Indus Valley . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88 The Appearance of Urbanization on the Loess Plateau of China . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92 The Emergence of Urbanization in America . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96 Agriculture and Pre-Columbian Pottery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98 Urbanization in the Northern Pre-Columbian Corridor. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100 Urbanization in the Southern Pre-Columbian Corridor. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106

CHAPTER 2 UNDERSTANDING THE FIRST URBAN REVOLUTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113 The First Urban Revolution and Networks’ Critical Points . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The First Urban Revolution and Breaking Points . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1. The “Interface” Case . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2. The “Transshipment” Case . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The First Urban Revolution and Central Places . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The First Urban Revolution and Network Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The First Urban Revolution and Agglomeration Economies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

115 117 118 119 120 123 128

CHAPTER 3 THE TWO FIRST ECONOMY-WORLDS: THE ROMAN AND CHINESE EMPIRES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131 The Emergence of the Roman Economy-World. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Rise of Rome . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Consolidation of the Roman Empire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Triumph of Christianity and the Decline of the Western Roman Empire . . . . . . . . . The Fall of the Western Roman Empire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Emergence of the Chinese Economy-World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . From the Loess Plateau to the Great Plain of China . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Cities of the Great Plain of China . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Cities of the Red Basin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Greatness of the Chinese Economy-World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

134 137 142 145 151 154 155 159 162 164

CHAPTER 4 UNDERSTANDING THE DYNAMICS OF URBAN EVOLUTION. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167 Topodynamic Evolution and Spatial Competition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Topodynamic Evolution and Management of Municipal Services . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Topodynamic Evolution and Multiplier Effects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Topodynamic Evolution and Repulsive Forces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

169 172 173 174

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Repulsive Forces and the Aging of Urban Structures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177 Repulsive Forces and Polarization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 178 Repulsive Forces and Geography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179

CHAPTER 5 THE GREAT EBB: ISLAM OUT TO CONQUER THE GREAT AND ASIAN CORRIDORS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181 From the Fall of Rome to the Advent of Islam . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Rise of Islam . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Baghdad Urbexplosion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Moorish Outpost . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . South of the Sahara . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Eastern Outposts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Islam Re-Launched by the Turko-Mongol Invasions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Non-Military Progression of Islam in the Asian Corridor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Great Ebb in Southeast Asia and the Far East . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

185 189 195 198 202 206 208 215 218

CHAPTER 6 UNDERSTANDING TOPODYNAMIC INERTIA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229 Topodynamic Inertia and Agriculture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Topodynamic Inertia and Industrialization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Topodynamic Inertia and Evolution of Socio-Economic Inequalities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Topodynamic Inertia and Cumulative Process of Location Choices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Interaction Between Potentiality and Reality, a Possible Explanation of Topodynamic Inertia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Deterministic Case of Topodynamic Inertia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Role of Topodynamic Inertia in Metropolitan and City Development . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Topodynamic Inertia in Urbexplosion Development . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Topodynamic Inertia at the World Level . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Reversibility of Topodynamic Movements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

233 234 235 236 236 238 239 240 241 242

CHAPTER 7 THE GREAT EBB: EUROPE’S FIGHT FOR SURVIVAL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 243 The Byzantine Empire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Russia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Spanish Reconquista . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Resurrection of the West European Urbexplosion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Forming of France, a Territorial State . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Expansion of the Germanic Holy Roman Empire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Gestation of the Northern Europe Urbexplosion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

245 253 259 262 281 284 292

CHAPTER 8 THE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA AND THE RETURN IN STRENGTH OF THE OCCIDENT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 297 Building a Bridge Between Europe and America . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 302 The Re-Alignment of the European Economy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 306

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The Rhône, the Rhine, and the St. Gotthard Pass . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The New Pole of Northern Europe: Amsterdam and London. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Three Territorial States . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The American Periphery of the New European Economy-World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

312 315 320 329

CHAPTER 9 THE ADVENT OF MOTORIZED TRANSPORTATION AND THE SECOND URBAN REVOLUTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 351 Liberalism, Prelude to the Industrial Revolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Impact of Motorized Transportation on Urban Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Southeastward Movement in the European Section of the Great Corridor . . . . . . . . . . The Wave of Colonization that Overwhelmed Africa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The European Expansion in Asia. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

358 366 377 383 399

CHAPTER 10 UNDERSTANDING THE IMPACT OF MOTORIZED TRANSPORTATION . . . . . 417 The Impact on Polarization of Evolving from Animal to Motorized Transportation . . . . . . Reference, Attraction, and Repulsion Points . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Case of a Single Reference Point . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Case of Two Reference Points . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Case of Animal Transportation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Case of Relay . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Case of Motorized Transportation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Case of Three Reference Points, or “Triangle” Case . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Case of More Than Three Reference Points . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Explaining the Basic Paradox of Space-Economy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Motors and Networks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Interdependence of Location Decisions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Information . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Spatial Competition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Biased Reductions of Space-Friction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Larger Cities Made Possible . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Loading/Unloading Costs and Absolute Advantages. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

419 419 422 423 425 427 428 429 431 432 432 433 434 435 437 438 439

CHAPTER 11 THE AGE OF AUTOMOBILE AND THE TRIUMPH OF THE AMERICAN CORRIDOR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 441 From London to the Trans-Siberian . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Emergence of the American Corridor in North America . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Impact of the American Corridor on Latin America . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . From America to Japan and Asia in the American Corridor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

446 459 487 496

CHAPTER 12 UNDERSTANDING TOPODYNAMIC CORRIDORS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 511 The Creation and Spread of Innovations in the Geographical Space . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 513 The True Meaning of Topodynamic Corridors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 515

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CHAPTER 13 POLES AND ROUTES THROUGH HISTORY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 521 The Evolution of City Locations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Evolution in the Form of Cities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Evolution of the Form of Communication Networks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Main Categories of Cities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Evolution of Centrality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Transportation and the Relocation of Activities in the City . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Are European and Canado-American Cities as Different as It Is Usually Said? . . . . . . . . . . . Developed and developing cities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

523 525 530 531 535 538 540 542

CONCLUSION THE BROAD PATTERNS OF HISTORY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 549 BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 563 APPENDIX 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 575 TABLES OF DEMOGRAPHIC EVOLUTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 575 Demographic Evolution of Çatalhüyük, Jericho, Jarmo, Eridu, Ur, and Uruk, 7300–300 BC. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Demographic Evolution of Memphis, Thebes, Byblos, Ugarit, and Tyre, 7300–300 BC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Demographic Evolution of Babylon, Ashur, Nimrud, and Nineveh, 7300–300 BC . . . . . . . . . Demographic Evolution of Hattusa, Damascus, Jerusalem, Petra, Susa, and Persepolis, 7300–300 BC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Demographic Evolution of Mycenae, Troy, Syracuse, Catania, Taranto, and Ephesus, 7300–300 BC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Demographic Evolution of Athens, Sparta, Thebes, Byzantium, Marseille, and Alexandria, 7300–300 BC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Demographic Evolution of Ai Khanum, Khotan-Hotian, Harappa, Mohenjo-Daro, and Kalibangan, 2200 BC–AD 1300 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Demographic Evolution of Changan-Xi’an, Kaifeng, Luoyang, Beijing, Zhengzhou, Nanking, and Chengdu, 2200 BC–AD 1300 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Demographic Evolution of Mexico, Cuzco, Chan Chan, Teotihuacan, Machu Picchu, Uxmal, Tikal, and Palenque, 100–1500 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Demographic Evolution of Constantinople, Rome, Carthage, Lyon, Caesarea, and Nisa, 400 BC–AD 500 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Demographic Evolution of Baghdad, Constantinople, Córdoba, Cairo, Paris, Fes, Antioch, and Marrakech, 450–1500 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Demographic Evolution of Palermo, Seville, Granada, Adrianople, Sarai, Milan, and Venice, 450–1500 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Demographic Evolution of Isfahan, Kairouan, Thessaloniki, Bruges, Mecca, Prague, and Benin, 450–1500 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

576 576 577 577 578 578 579 579 580 580 581 581 582

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Demographic Evolution of Preslav, Ghent, Cologne, Bologna, M’banza Congo, Kiev, and Amalfi, 450–1500 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Demographic Evolution of Lisbon, Great Zimbabwe, Timbuktu, Ratisbon, Budapest, and Hamburg, 450–1500. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Demographic Evolution of Vijayanagar, Delhi, Agra, Ahmadabad, and Surat, 450–1850 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Demographic Evolution of Peking-Beijing, Hangzhou, Lahore, Zayton, and Panaji-Goa, 450–1850 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Demographic Evolution of Manila, Jakarta, Samarkand, Malacca, Colombo, and Macau, 450–1850 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Demographic Evolution of Canton-Guangzhou, Tokyo, Kyoto, Pegu-Bago, Ningbo, Nara, and Angkor, 450–1850 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Demographic Evolution of Vienna, Naples, Amsterdam, Madrid, Brussels, Rome, and Bordeaux, 1500–1850 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Demographic Evolution of Genoa, Florence, Antwerp, Norwich, Cádiz, Versailles, and Basel, 1500–1850 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Demographic Evolution of Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, Lima, Bogotá, Caracas, and Potosi, 1500–1850 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Demographic Evolution of New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Charleston, and Quebec City, 1500–1850 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Demographic Evolution of London, Paris, Manchester, Birmingham, Lille, Leeds, Glasgow, and Liverpool, 1750–2000 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Demographic Evolution of Bombay, Shanghai, Calcutta, Bangkok, Karachi, Tehran, Hong Kong, Lagos, and Kinshasa, 1750–2000 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Demographic Evolution of Barcelona, Hanoi, Addis Ababa, Cape Town, Algiers, Johannesburg, Nairobi, and Dar es Salaam, 1750–2000 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Demographic Evolution of Dakar, Belgrade, Ibadan, Tunis, Khartoum, Rotterdam, Zurich, and Kigali, 1750–2000 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Demographic Evolution of Madras, Sydney, and Singapore, 1750–2000 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Demographic Evolution of Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Berlin, Copenhagen, Warsaw, Stockholm, and Essen, 1825–2000 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Demographic Evolution of Tokyo, Mexico City, São Paulo, New York, Los Angeles, and Osaka, 1825–2000 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Demographic Evolution of Buenos Aires, Peking-Beijing, Chicago, Tianjin, Washington, San Francisco, and Mukden-Shenyang, 1825–2000. . . . . . . . . . . . . Demographic Evolution of Santiago, Dallas, Toronto, Detroit, Houston, and Minneapolis, 1825–2000 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Demographic Evolution of Atlanta, Seattle, Montreal, Vancouver, Pinkiang-Harbin, and Montevideo, 1825–2000 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

582 583 583 584 584 585 585 586 586 587 587 588 588 589 589 590 590 591 591 592

APPENDIX 2 CITIES BY TYPES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 593 APPENDIX 3 SILK ROAD NETWORK SYNTHESIS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 601 INDEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 603

List of Figures

Figure 1: Figure 2: Figure 10.1: Figure 10.2: Figure 10.3: Figure 10.4:

Evolution of the World Rate of Urbanization (cities having at least two thousand inhabitants) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 Braudel’s Scheme . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 Transportation Cost Functions Corresponding to Animal, Relay, and Motorized Transportation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 424 Finding the Optimal Location: Animal Transportation with Two Attraction Points . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 426 Finding the Optimal Location: Relay Transportation with Two Attraction Points . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 427 Finding the Optimal Location: Motorized Transportation with Two Attraction Points . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 429

List of Maps

Map 1: Map 2: Map 3: Map 4: Map 5: Map 6: Map 7: Map 8: Map 9: Map 10: Map 11: Map 12:

The Three Topodynamic Corridors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 The Beginnings of Urbanization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 The World of Phoenicians and Greeks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55 The Assyrian Empire, the New Babylonian Empire, the Persian Empire, and the Empire of Alexander the Great . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63 The Silk Road, the Straight Road, and the Asian Corridor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88 The Two Pre-Columbian Corridors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99 The Roman Empire at Its Peak (around AD 100) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134 The Great Ebb and the Fusion of the Great and Asian Corridors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185 The Great Ebb West of the Persian Gulf . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187 The Great Ebb West in the Indian Section of the Great Corridor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211 The Great Ebb in the Asian Corridor. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 216 The Great Ebb in Southeast Asia and the Far East . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 219

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Urban World History

Map 13: Map 14: Map 15: Map 16: Map 17: Map 18: Map 19: Map 20: Map 21:

The Venetian Empire from the Thirteenth to the Fifteenth Century . . . . . . . . . . . The New Westward Movement in Europe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Five Main Passes of the Alps. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Americas between 1492 and 1825 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Epicenter of the Industrial Revolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Spreading of European Colonialism through the Great Corridor . . . . . . . . . . The Spreading of European Colonialism through the Asian Corridor . . . . . . . . . . The European Section of the American Corridor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Moscow at a Crossroads of the Network Linking the Saracen Route and the ’’Route from the Varangians to the Greeks’’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Map 22: The American Section of the American Corridor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

274 307 313 330 354 384 405 447 456 461

“There really are broad patterns to history, and the search for their explanation is as productive as it is fascinating.” Jared Diamond Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997), 32

Introduction

I

n 1997 and 1998, two books became best sellers. The first one, Guns, Germs and Steel : The Fates of Human Societies, was written by Jared Diamond, and it won a Pulitzer Prize. The book’s basic premise was that the advantage some peoples have had during various epochs over other peoples cannot be ex plained by their genetics, their intelligence, or cultural superiority. It was linked to their geographical location and various environmental factors. Diamond neatly summarized his argument, stating: “History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples’ environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves.”1 The second book was written by David S. Landes, and it bore the title The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor. In contrast to Diamond, Landes believes that Max Weber was right, and that the history of economic development demonstrates that culture makes the difference.2 As for geography, he tended to minimize its influence by deriding the French geographer Edmond Demolins who claimed, at the beginning of the twentieth century, that, if the history of the world were to start over again in a context where the surface of the earth remained unchanged, it would follow the same broad lines.3 Since the beginning of history, wealthy and healthy peoples have held the conviction that their genes, their race, their culture, or their religion has made them superior to poor and ill peoples. Writing their own history, they

1. 2. 3.

Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel : The Fates of Human Societies (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1997), 25. David S. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998). Edmond Demolins, Comment la route crée le type social (Paris: Didot, “Les grandes routes des peuples, essai de géographie sociale,” 1901), 1-ix.

4

Urban World History

have attempted to persuade others that their wealth and good fortune was derived from their inner fortitude, hard work, and superior intelligence—all internal or “endogenous” factors—and that “exogenous” factors such as geography and environment played only a very minor role in their success. History presented this way, if unchecked and unchallenged, can lead to racial intolerance. The position of this book is much closer to Diamond and Demolins’s in that it argues world history can be better explained by finding and understanding the numerous spatial regularities that mark humanity’s historical evolution, while adopting a neutral perspective with respect to cultures, races, and civilizations. However, rather than highlighting the importance of geography in terms of regional climate, flora, and fauna, as do Diamond and Demolins, this work demonstrates the widespread and determining influence of what will be referred to as “topodynamic inertia”—best described as the tendency for economic development to follow long-standing spatial patterns and trends. Cultures adapt to the spatial economic logic, much more than they determine it. Space is the main organizer and the great mold of socioeconomic phenomena. Economies are based on exchanges, which take place at markets, and the flows of exchanged goods and services follow commercial routes, which are very much influenced by geography. Seas, rivers, plains, caravan routes, canals, roads and railways are all dependent on the form of the continents, their topography, climate, hydrography and vegetation. The resulting commercial routes form networks and the nodes of those play a dominant role in the economic development. Innumerable examples of this will be presented throughout this book. While spatiotemporal regularities can be identified throughout history, it is impossible to propose a coherent and systematic racial explanation of human evolution. All main racial groups have been, in turn, masters and slaves. It must not be forgotten, for example, that in the Roman Empire, and, more recently, in the Ottoman Empire, blond peoples with blue eyes were much more likely to be slaves than masters. In Ancient Egypt, the Semitic Jews were slaves while the Pharaohs of the Nubian dynasty were Negroid, or at least Nilo-Saharan. The non-racial model of history found in this work situates topodynamic inertia within the context of more general topodynamic theory (in ancient Greek, topos means “location,” and dunamis, “force”). This original theory aims to provide a coherent vision of the space-economic evolution of the world since the appearance of urbanization. It is an early contribution to “anoeconomics,” a new part of economic theory (in ancient Greek, ano means “going back through time, and going up through space”). Anoeconomics studies world economic phenomena on a scale that transcends individuals,

5

Introduction

firms, groups, and even states and governments. It is predicated on the “law of economy worlds”4 according to which economic cores exist that dominate large regions of the world, covering various territories and countries. Economy worlds law suggests that wealth is distributed from rich cores to the poor peripheries according to what Landes calls “development gradients”5 whose logic is much more geographical and spatial than national and macroeconomic. Anoeconomics is the natural extension to microeconomics (which focuses on individuals and firms in the context of market supply and demand), mesoeconomics (which deals with regional economies), and macroeconomics (which studies government policies mainly with respect to inflation and unemployment). Adopting an anoeconomic perspective, this work traces patterns of spatial regularities and the evolution of the spatial distribution of world’s populations and productions over the past six thousand years, both on the global and local (city) levels. Once such regularities have been detected, geoeconomic, political, sociological, cultural or racial logics will be looked for in order to explain them. The priority will be given to the search for culturally neutral explanations before resorting to too-often simplistic explanations based on races, cultures, or political systems. What emerges is a theory that shows clearly the predominance of space-economic explanations, and relegates to a secondary position the influence of cultural and socio-political factors on the evolution of wealth and well-being. In short, two questions will be addressed. First, are there geographical regularities in economic development? Second, if such regularities can be identified, how do they relate to economic theory? Other questions will also be addressed, particularly in the theoretical chapters. Why is it that, since the very beginning of urbanization, economic development has been structured by what can be referred to as urban poles? These can be described as urban agglomerations that dominate an urban system or at least a significant part of it. How can we explain that, throughout history, new poles have emerged, and progressively supplanted the old dominating poles? Why is it that dominant economic poles end up declining? Is there an explanation for why dominant poles succeeded one another according to identifiable spatial trajectories? Are spatial regularities better explained by political, sociological and cultural factors, or by space-economic and geographical factors?

4.

5.

This expression comes from Hervé Le Bras, La planète au village: migrations et peuplement en France (La Tour d’Aigues: Datar/Éditions de l’Aube, 1993), 199. Le Bras refers to Fernand Braudel’s concept of “economy world.” Ibid., chap. 16.

6

Urban World History

In exploring these questions, three main regularities are examined. The first delves into the very existence of poles, that is, it grapples with the idea of urbanization as an elementary phenomenon. The second refers to the “polarization of the poles,” which conjoins with the fact that poles polarize each other to produce: 1- urban systems and hierarchies; 2- “urbexplosions,” namely organic urban systems that evolve through time and space; 3- Braudelian “economy worlds.” The third major regularity is related to the historical succession of world’s dominating poles within “topodynamic corridors.” The concept of the urban system is static. It refers to the structural relationships of domination, which link together the urban poles of various sizes within a given regional, national or continental space. For instance, authors can study the French, Canadian, and North-American urban systems as well as Californian or Siberian. Most of the time, urban systems are defined with respect to political units and borders. From a systemic point of view, urban systems can and usually do extend beyond such borders, especially when they grow. This is why the concept of “urbexplosion” is useful. The idea of urbexplosion is dynamic.6 It corresponds to an evolving urban system that has an organic unity characterized by the presence of one or several poles that dominate, simultaneously or successively, the whole system, and by the fact that its external limit evolves through time in order to include many zones belonging to various regions, provinces, or countries. For example, the urbexplosion presently dominated by New York was dominated by Philadelphia, 180 years ago. Its external limit progressively extended to the interior of the continent, both in Canada and in the United States. As a dynamic construct, it even occasionally moved back as a consequence of the expansion of the Chicago or Los Angeles urbexplosions. The concept of the economy world, conceived of by Braudel, inspired by German geographers, and taken up by Wallerstein, is more static than dynamic. It refers to an urban system, or a macro-system made of urban systems, which extends over an important part of the globe, includes a dominat ing core, a semi-periphery as well as a periphery, and has reached such a degree of economic integration and self-sufficiency (autarky) that it constitutes a world in itself. The Roman Empire and the Chinese Empire from the beginning of our era are good examples of economy worlds. The widely used concepts of core and periphery lie at the heart of the notion of economy world.

6.

Luc-Normand Tellier, “Projecting the Evolution of the North-American Urban System and Laying the Foundations of a Topodynamic Theory of Space Polarization,” Environment and Planning A, 27 (1995): 1109–1131.

7

Introduction

To best understand the predominant influence of space, it is necessary to refer to theories focused on the role of geographical space in human economic systems, particularly space-economic theory. Geographical space is very complex, and it is not easy to translate it into mathematical models without losing important aspects of its context and substance. From a mathematical point of view, geographical space can be treated as a plane or spherical space, as bi- or tridimensional, as well as Euclidean, network, or topological space. Each option bears both advantages and disadvantages—each one articulates important aspects of real geographical space while leaving other influential factors in the dark. A given model may be suitable for studying a particular case while insufficient in another case. A good example of this relates to urban system theory. The classical central-place theories of Walter Christaller and August Lösch are premised on the simple concept of Euclidean “as the crow flies” distance, and succeed in illustrating how urban systems can develop in a logical way, while referring to a very abstract and unrealistically homogeneous plane (a “circular isotropic space,” to be more scientific) where all consumers are uniformly distributed.7 In contrast, Vance, and Hohenberg and Lees have created a theory of urban systems called the network system theory, based on network space and in which distances are calculated along networks.8 Both approaches are worthwhile: as a matter of fact, the urban system of France is better understood by means of Christaller’s model whereas the CanadoAmerican system corresponds more to the network system model. Studying a given spatial reality may reveal very different spatial logics depending on the scale used. Surprisingly, Euclidean and network distances have a very different relevancy at various scales. For instance, inside the city, the analysis of individual trips usually requires taking into account network distances instead of “as the crow flies” distances, since citizens normally travel along networks made of corridors, sidewalks, streets, highways, subways, bus routes, elevators, and so on. At the scale of the individual the city is, above all, an entanglement of networks. On the other hand, in studying the city as a whole or the relations between its centre and the suburbs, Euclidean distances remain relevant and essential. In the case of urban systems, the same phenomenon prevails. At the scale of a section of an urban system, for

7.

8.

About central-place theory, see Walter Christaller, Central Places in Southern Germany (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1966), and August Lösch, The Economics of Location (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954); about the notion of circular isotropic space, see Luc-Normand Tellier, Économie spatiale: rationalité économique de l’espace habité (Boucherville, Quebec: Gaëtan Morin, 1983, second edition). See James E. Vance, Jr., The Merchant’s World: The Geography of Wholesaling (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970), and Paul M. Hohenberg and Lynn Hollen Lees, The Making of Urban Europe, 1000–1950 (London and Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985).

8

Urban World History

instance at the scale of the Boston-dominated part of the northeast section of the North-American urban system, network distances are more relevant than Euclidean ones. But, at the scale of the entire northeast section of the North-American urban system, Euclidean distances are extremely useful in understanding the global logic of that system. It is interesting to note that passing from Euclidean to network distances may be progressive. One of the best tools to study spatial regularities is the analysis of gravity fields (based on gravity models).9 In such analyses, lower values of the distance exponent yield gravity fields that are better interpreted in terms of Euclidean distances to the centres, whereas higher values of the distance exponent generate maps of gravity fields that must be interpreted in terms of network distances. Passing from static to dynamic analysis makes things even more complicated. Looking at the evolution of urban systems throughout the world, de Vries points out that a great stability of the system at the international scale may be associated with an important instability of various subsystems at the national or regional scales while, inversely, a great instability of the system at the international scale may also be associated with an important stability of various subsystems at the national or regional scales.10 Moreover, as Le Bras remarks, factors that play a determining role in the spatial evolution of a phenomenon depend directly on the scale of the analysis.11 For instance, for projecting the demographic evolution at the scale of a continent, the natural growth of population is the key factor while immigration plays a marginal role, whereas, for projecting the demographic evolution at the scale a the various cities of a national urban system, natural growth usually is secondary, and immigration is the main factor. To be more specific, if Toronto outstripped 9.

10. 11.

A gravity model conveys the idea that, ceteris paribus, the more people and activities are located at two given locations and the smaller the distance is between those two points, the larger the number of interactions (trips, phone calls, e-mails, trade, exchanges, ideas, etc.) between two locations is likely to be. The impact of distance on the number of interactions varies through time and depending on geographical areas and the type of interactions. See about that: Pierre-Philippe Combes, Thierry Mayer, and Jacques-François Thisse, Économie géographique. L’intégration des régions et des nations (Paris, Economica, 2006); Audrey Bossuyt, Laurence Broze, and Victor Ginsburgh, “On invisible trade relations between Mesopotamian cities during the Third Millennium BC,” The Professional Geographer, 53 (2001): 374–383; Anne-Célia Disdier and Keath Head, “The Puzzling Persistence of the Distance Effect on Bilateral Trade,” Working Paper no. 186 (Milan: Centro Studi Luca d’Agliano, 2004); Ernesto Stein and Christian Daude, “Longitude Matters: Time Zones and the Location of Foreign Direct Investment,” mimeo (Washington: Inter-American Development Bank, 2002). Jan de Vries, European Urbanization, 1500–1800 (London and Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), 123. Ibid., 6.

9

Introduction

Montreal in terms of population growth during the last sixty years, it is not because Torontonians have had more children; it is rather because Toronto attracted more immigrants. After having noted that, generally, different factors exert a major influence at different scales, Le Bras underlines that, ultimately, the only factor that plays a role at all scales is space and distance. This point of view underpins the argument throughout this book. The search for spatial regularities requires resorting to different scales of analysis, various concepts of distance—sometimes network distance, sometimes Euclidean distance—as well as using sometime different exponents of distance in the analysis of gravity fields. In sum, the search for regularity requires disparity—the incorporation of dissimilar theories is necessary to create a unified understanding. A range of conceptual tools will be used in this work to bring out consistencies, patterns, logics, and systems, and to explain them in a theoretically and historically coherent way. Strangely enough, the main reason why geographical space has been less and less considered as a valid explanatory element of the world evolution is the fact that geographers themselves too often chose to present space as the main basis of the racial and cultural differences that, supposedly, explained history instead of seeing in space a factor that could, directly, determine the historical evolution. According to “moral” or “mesological” geography, environment and temperament have been associated. Cold climates fostered discipline, zeal for work, and self-control, whereas hot climates generated indolence, laziness, and indiscipline. This type of argument led to elaborate a racist geography that, for a long time, discredited any geographical approach to history, and prevented scholars from realizing that, far from offering a scientific basis to racism, geography could provide the bases for an understanding of history, which, completely, marginalizes the impact of races, and even cultures. Today, the expressions “North” and “South” referring to developed and developing countries are a relic of “moral” geography. It is true that, up until the recent past, rich countries, in terms of per capita income, were to be found in the temperate zones, especially in the northern hemisphere, and the poor countries, in the tropical or semi-tropical zones. However, this is absolutely not a constant of history. Islam was for many centuries at the forefront of civilization when its heart, dominated by Damascus, Baghdad and Cairo, lay relatively to the south in zones surrounded with desert. Now, one of the world’s most dynamic economies, that of Singapore, is practically located at the equator. Singapore and Malaysia no more belong to the supposedly poor South, while many northern regions of the ex-USSR are getting poorer, and are less and less part of the rich North. In this book, the influence of geographical space on the historical evolution will refer to climate or physical geography in the wider sense. ***

10

Urban World History

Readers of this book, which stresses the major role of geographical space in the world’s evolution, may be surprised to learn that its writer is no geographer. He rather is an economist who came to space-economy through studies in urbanism. Actually, the classical education of an economist in North America makes no reference to the geographical dimension of economic development. Most of the time, space-economy is considered by mainstream economists as an intellectual curiosity, and it is not included in the degree course of young economists. Geographical space is not only a neglected variable in economics programs, but economic theory even suggests that it is not an important factor in the pursuit of economic development. In order to understand this point, one must go back to the very beginning of the liberal economic thought. Liberalism was born in France, during the eighteenth century, with the Physiocrats who were the first to call themselves “economists” and to propose a theoretical framework that opposed the then dominant mercantilism (or Colbertism), which aimed to maximize national gold stocks by imposing protectionist measures in order to diminish imports. The basic thesis of liberalism argues that the well-being of consumers as a whole is maximized if consumers are entirely free to consume whatever they want, if producers are absolutely free to produce whatever they want in the way they desire, and if trade between all economic agents is absolutely free, provided that pure and perfect competition prevails. This thesis purports to be universal. It pretends to hold true for economic agents of a given region, for those sets of regions within a country, as well as for all the nations of the world. From a commercial point of view, this thesis amounts to saying “trade is better than no trade,” which is the accepted way of saying it. The theory of comparative advantages, first formulated by David Ricardo in 1817, proposes a mathematical model supporting that two countries that produce two different goods with different levels of productivity are better off if they trade, and specialize in the production of the good for which they have a comparative (as opposed to an absolute) advantage. This may sound a little abstract. To explain it, let us take a simple example. Instead of speaking of two countries, let us refer to two people, Joan and Mary, who work for a language school, and who can both teach French and type. The manager of the school has them pass two exams, one for teaching French, and the other for typing. Joan obtains the best results: she gets a grade of 90% in teaching French, and 80% in typing. As for Mary, she gets 75% in teaching French, and 70% in typing. According to the model of absolute advantage, the manager should attribute to Joan the two tasks, since she obtained the best results for the two subjects. Mary would then remain unemployed.

Introduction

11 Quickly, the manager realizes that such a distribution of the tasks on the basis of the absolute advantages is neither desirable nor efficient since it generates unemployment. He then decides to call upon Mary’s services, but he must face a difficult question: what task should Mary carry out given that she is less efficient than Joan in both. The theory of comparative advantages demonstrates that the best solution involving full employment is the one where Mary is given the task for which she is relatively less inefficient, the one for which she has a comparative advantage compared with Joan. In our example, she would be asked to type, since she obtained 87,5% of the Joan’s grade for typing while getting only 83,3% of Joan’s grade in French teaching. This solution ensures that there is full employment, that each person specializes in a given task, and that everybody benefits from the situation. In order to reconstitute David Ricardo’s reasoning, it is simple enough to replace Joan with England, Mary with Portugal, French teaching with woolen cloth, and typing with wine on order to reach Ricardo’s conclusion that England should specialize in producing woolen cloth, and Portugal, in producing wine. According to the theory of comparative advantages, in a situation of world full employment, all the regions of the world must have a comparative advantage in some sector, and development is possible everywhere in all countries, wherever they are, for the best benefit of the whole humanity. The theory of comparative advantages has had a huge effect on the evolution of modern societies. It favored free trade, industrial specialization, and economic development. However, it did not, and cannot fulfill all its promises. The liberalism it inspired did not lead to world full employment, and did not allow all the regions of the world to count on their respective comparative advantages to develop. Most liberal economists recognize this, but generally deny that the failures of the system are indeed the failures of prevailing economic liberal thinking. On the contrary, they point out that the present sub-optimal situation is due to the fact that the liberal recipe is not applied everywhere, appropriate macroeconomic policies are not adopted by all governments, and major obstacles still preclude the universal application of the liberal model. In their opinion, these obstacles radically impair the mobility of persons and know-how as well as, to a lesser extent, the mobility of capital and goods. A spatial economy approach challenges some of the dogmas of the classical liberal economic theory. Among other things, the theory of spatial competition identifies cases where, instead of favoring the achievement of “social optimum” (that is the optimum for the whole society; such an optimum corresponds to the situation where consumers benefit the most from their money spending in terms of the quantity and quality of the goods and services they buy), competition actually prevents it, which invalidates the basic thesis of liberalism. Moreover, taking into account transportation costs

12

Urban World History

leads one to question the classical conclusions of the comparative advantages theory. Nevertheless, spatial economics has never pretended to shake the columns of the liberal temple, and the economist initiated to the mysteries of space-economy rarely attempts to contest traditional micro-economic and macro-economic models. In September 1987, at a regional economics symposium that took place at Lisbon, some Belgian geographers presented two maps of Europe that profoundly disrupted the classical vision of economic development through space. The first map described the spatial distribution of values added, namely the value of the production of goods and services, of seventeen countries of Western Europe in 1980. The pattern of the production distribution was amazingly concentric, the density of production declining in all directions as it moved away from a center located somewhere around the point where the borders of Belgium, Netherlands and Germany meet. In itself, the reported regularity of the spatial distribution of production of so many different countries, countries that have been so often at war during the previous century, was astonishing. What spatial or non-spatial economic theory could explain such a pattern? Was it possible to suggest, without laughing, that, by chance, all the governments of the countries located close to the said center had adopted judicious economic policies for decades while, far from the center, all the governments had been ill advised? Could the observed pattern be explained by the theory of comparative advantages or even by the traditional space-economic theories? Not really. The observed spatial distribution questioned the very popular thesis formulated by Max Weber according to which Protestantism was more propitious to capitalism than Catholicism was. At the center mentioned above, the main towns contradicted Weber’s theory: Liege is mainly Catholic, Maastricht, Catholic in a traditionally Protestant country, and Aachen, mainly Protestant. The periphery included Protestant Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Scotland as well as Catholic Portugal, Spain, Ireland, and southern Italy. Quite naturally, the observed spatial regularity of production presented by the Belgians called for further exploration on a level that surpassed the existing models of analysis, including the contributions or lack thereof of religious and cultural groups. It became crucial that states and macro-economic policies, predicated on an extremely powerful spatial logic, had to be looked into more seriously and differently by scholars. The second map was equally fascinating. It presented the spatial distribution of the population over the same area. The population pattern differed somewhat from the production map. The latter showed an axis of the greatest densities amassing from the northwest to the southeast, and passing through the center of the production pattern. This axis corresponded approximately to the “Blue Banana” extending from northern Italy to southern

13

Introduction

England along the Rhine river; the French often refer to the “Blue Banana” as the “Dorsale” or “Ridge”12), but also included regions outside of the Banana— the regions of Dublin and Manchester, to the northwest, and the regions of Naples and Athens, to the southeast. Both to the northeast and the southwest, population densities systematically decreased as the distance to the axis of the largest densities increased. That the production and population patterns had similarities was no surprise, but their systematic differences puzzled the observers. Why were the production gradients concentric when the population gradients were almost linear? Moreover, extending the population axis to the east produced a stunning axis that went from England to the region where Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and France met, to Italy, Greece, Anatolia (Turkey), Phoenicia (Syria and Lebanon), and Mesopotamia (Iraq). Strangely enough, this axis was going back to the very historical sources of the Western civilization whose cradle lay in Mesopotamia, and whose evolution followed a long route through Phoenicia, Anatolia (under Persian influence), Greece, Rome, Venice, Paris, Amsterdam, and London. The axis of the maximum population densities seemed to be a trace, a furrow left behind by the historical evolution of the Western civilization for the last five thousand years. Had our civilization’s history a spatial coherence nobody ever suspected? And did similar spatial consistencies exist elsewhere, in the case of other civilizations? What the two maps revealed was that at the continental and world scales, productions are spatially polarized, as Fernand Braudel correctly pointed out, and that the successive dominating economic poles formed some kind of spatial chain. Such a spatial coherence of economic history cannot be understood in the light of classical liberal economic theories. It even seems to question the comparative advantages theory. One could attempt to reconcile the above with the concepts of absolute and comparative advantages in the following way. As is currently accepted, the free market generates economic cycles in which full employment and unemployment alternate. If one agrees that the closer the economy is to full employment, the more comparative advantages prevail, and that the greater the level of underemployment, the more absolute advantages determine the production spatial distribution, it is natural, through the influence of comparative advantages, for periods of full employment to favor even the peripheral regions having little or no absolute advantages. However, during periods of unemployment, the peripheral zones are affected immediately—the dominance of absolute advantages reappears and those zones having a great number of absolute advantages consolidate their domination. 12.

Roger Brunet, ed., Les villes européennes (Paris : DATAR-Reclus, La Documentation française, 1989).

14

Urban World History

Thus, from one cycle to the next, the zones that benefit from absolute advantages succeed in maintaining their domination while the peripheral zones never make up for lost time and opportunity. In this dynamic process, the very first absolute advantage ends up being centrality in itself—much more so than natural resources, labor productivity or even capital. Consequently, the more economic development progresses under the liberal model, the more the world’s economic activities are polarized, and the more acute become the disparities between centers and peripheries. World full employment becomes increasingly difficult to attain, and the comparative advantages of the peripheral regions become even more illusive. The less full employment—the condition that justifies the comparative advantages theory and, consequently, liberalism itself—the less economic liberalism works. Still, the cumulative process described above is not irreversible as dominating centers succeed one another through history. Such centers are very likely to eventually decline in the same way that, in their ascending phase, they tend to consolidate. Moreover, the process of succession of dominating centers can have its own spatial logic. It can give rise to true historical trajectories, as it happened, for instance, in Canada where the domination over the Canadian economy successively passed from Quebec City to Montreal and Toronto. The same may be observed in Eurasia where, to the west of the Persian Gulf, the main economic pole shifted from Babylon to Athens, Rome, Constantinople, Baghdad, Istanbul, Venice, Genoa, Antwerp, Amsterdam and, finally, London. Three main historical trajectories will be identified in this book. They follow three circular topodynamic corridors. The circular form of the corridors requires some explanation. It may seem odd, but on a globe the circle is a natural normal geometrical figure. In fact, in theory, it is much easier to adjust a circle to a distribution of points located on a sphere than to adjust a straight line to a distribution of points located in a Euclidean plane. On a plane, the only way to adjust the line is by moving it, whereas, on a sphere, the adjustment can be done both by changing the radius of the circle, and by moving the circle. In practice, adjusting a circle to a distribution of points located on a sphere amounts to intersecting a plane with a sphere, and this can only be done through successive approximations, while adjusting a straight line to a distribution of points located in a Euclidean plane is done in a straightforward manner by calculating a linear regression.

15

Introduction

Projection : Mercator

Projection : North Pole Orthographic

Projection : Robinson

Asian Corridor

Great Corridor

Map 1 The Three Topodynamic Corridors

Mongolo-American Corridor

16

Urban World History

The circular representation of the three topodynamic corridors must not obscure the geographical reality that underlies the corridors (see Map 1). Thus, between Ur and London, the Great Corridor is made of Euphrates and Tigris fluvial system, the Syrian Corridor, the ancient Royal Road of Persia (also known as the road of the Lydian Kings), the Aegean and Adriatic Seas, the fluvial network linking the Po, the Rhine, the Rhône, the Seine, the Escaut-Scheldt and the Meuse-Mass, and the Thames and Mersey system. To the east, between Ur and Tokyo, the Great Corridor includes the Persian Gulf, the Indus delta, the Ganges, the Xi River (Pearl River), the Yangtze River, and the Western China Sea. The Great Corridor corresponds to the southern limit of a “chain of mountain ranges” made of the Yunnan Plateau, the Himalaya, the Karakoram, Sulaiman and Kirthar ranges, the Plateau of Iran, and the Zagros, Totos Daglari, Balkans and Alps mountains. Moreover, to a great extent, it coincides with the line of one hundred centimeters of annual rainfall. This may have contributed to the fact that agriculture expanded from Mesopotamia to Northern Europe mainly through the Great Corridor. Similarly, the Indus Valley, the Silk Road, the Bian-Pien canals and the Great Imperial Canal of China, the Taiwan Strait, the Southern China Sea, the Strait of Malacca, the Indian Ocean, the Malabar Coast, and the Gulf of Cambay-Khambhat structure the Asian Corridor. As for the Mongolo-American Corridor, it is constituted of the Gulf Stream, the fluvial complex made of the St. Lawrence River, the Hudson River, the Erie Canal and the Great Lakes, the Atlantic-Pacific-Santa Fe railway linking Kansas City to Los Angeles (which skirts round the Rockies by the south), the maritime route between Los Angeles and Tokyo through the Pacific, the Japan Sea, the Yellow Sea, the Trans-Siberian railroad, the German Mittellandkanal, and the Ruhr Valley. In North America, as in the Eurasian part of the Great Corridor, the Mongolo-American Corridor often coincides with the line of one hundred centimeters of annual rainfall. The largest deviation between the geographical reality and the mathematically calculated central circles of the corridors is the Trans-Siberian, which follows a traditional natural trail that, at some points, gets eight hundred kilometers away from the central circle of the Mongolo-American Corridor. The layout of that corridor in Asia follows precisely the historical “steppes corridor” that passes through the Kirghiz Steppe, and served as the spinal column of Genghis Khan’s Mongol Empire. Except for the Trans-Siberian, most of the above-mentioned elements lie within three hundred kilometers from the three corridors’ central circles. If modern patterns of production spatial distributions are striking in their concentric character, tracing through time the evolution of these distribution patterns leads one to think in terms of trajectories. The most documented case of topodynamic trajectory relates to the shift in the population gravity center of the United States. This centre has been on the move in a systematic

17

Introduction

way since at least 1790 (year of the oldest data)—when it was located around Philadelphia—towards the southwest and Los Angeles. The observed stability of this movement gave birth to the concept of “topodynamic inertia.”13 Such a phenomenon can be spotted at all levels. For instance, at the city level, topodynamic inertia is observed both in the centripetal process of annexation and domination of the suburbs by the center of the city, and in the centrifugal process of urban sprawl. Similarly, in the case of urban systems, inertia is present in the centripetal process of the assertion of a core as well as in the centrifugal process of the extension of the hinterland towards the periphery. Inertia also plays a worldwide role in the succession of the dominating world poles within the topodynamic corridors, and topodynamic evolutions are, for the most part, slow, which makes them a good basis for generating reliable projections. Three topodynamic corridors have occupied a prominent place in the world evolution during the last six thousand years: the Great Corridor, which is the oldest, appearing with the very first urban system; the Asian or Silk Corridor, which is a little younger than the previous one, and the MongoloAmerican Corridor, which has long interacted with the two first corridors, but ended up dominating the world as a result of the appearance of motorized transportation in 1825. It is the description and history of these three corridors as they interweave with the changes and events in world history over the past six millennia that is the specific focus of the argument found in this work. The corridors are representative of spatial-economic routes that triumphed on a world scale because they led to other major routes, forming an interconnectedness, not a dead end. The axes that prevail are the most complex. For instance, the Rhine forms a system with the Po, the Rhône, the Saône, the Seine, the Thames, and the Danube. Similarly, the St. Lawrence River constitutes a network with the Hudson and the Mississippi Rivers in the same way that, very early on, the Persian Gulf, the Tigris, the Euphrates, the Syrian Corridor, the eastern part of the Mediterranean, and the Aegean Sea made up an integrated circulation system. Even the continental Silk Road is a crisscross of routes that form a complex system, though similarly intertwined axes of circulation are rare. As will be seen, no topodynamic corridors are found in Africa, in Latin America, in Central America, nor in Oceania. In sum, topodynamic corridors correspond to major communication axes, that in themselves result from the integration on a world scale of complex sub-systems of communication.

13.

See Luc-Normand Tellier and Claude Vertefeuille, “Understanding Spatial Inertia: Center of Gravity, Population Densities, the Weber Problem and Gravity Potential,” Journal of Regional Science, 35, 1 (February 1995): 155–164, and Luc-Normand Tellier and Martin Pinsonnault, “Further Understanding Spatial Inertia: A Reply,” Journal of Regional Science, 38, 3 (1998): 513–534.

18

Urban World History

Topodynamic corridors correspond to geographical realities, but, as a result, they are areas where world’s wealth and financial power concentrates. For this reason, the corridors have been repeatedly invaded by masses of poor people (generally called “Barbarians”) who arrived as conquerors, as in the case of Huns or Germans, or as immigrants, like the Celts or the Slavs. Very often, for example, the Great and the Asian Corridors have been invaded by tribes that came from the Mongolo-American corridor until that last corridor itself triumphed, and started attracting people. The dominating corridors exert an irresistible attraction force on the rest of the world. That power is observed even in the field of religion. However, all of the sections of a dominating corridor don’t benefit from the same attractiveness. Within each corridor, certain poles dominate the other ones. Moreover, dominating poles are not eternal. They succeed one another, generally according to a foreseeable spatial logic marked by topodynamic inertia. Some may argue that the three corridors are merely pedagogical tools, while others conceive of them as objective realities. This book sides with the latter, arguing forcefully and comprehensively that topodynamic corridors are as real as other structural trends such as economic cycles or historical political currents linked to democratization or socialism. The idea that no structural trend could prevail in geo-economic space while similar trends could well be recognized in a non-spatial socio-economic context seems absurd. This notwithstanding, if topodynamic corridors and trends are real, does it imply that a space-economic determinism exists, from which human societies cannot escape? The answer to that question is complex. First, it must be stressed that, in the past, topodynamic trends have been stopped, and even reversed (though this is very rare). The fall of the Western Roman Empire is a good example. Secondly, new corridors can ascend. The Mongolo-American corridor just (relatively) briefly triumphed with the two Mongol Empires. Despite that, today it dominates the world. Thirdly, certain decisions have a strong topodynamic impact. Building the Bian-Pien canals and the Great Imperial canal of China, or the Erie Canal in North America has had very important effects on topodynamic evolution. The decision made by the king and queen of Spain to send Christopher Columbus to the West in search for a route to India has had enormous topodynamic consequences. Human societies do have an influence on topodynamic trends. However, those trends themselves have been, and will continue to be, much more structural than transitory. They are slow, strong and stable, and they influence the long run and even the remote future. Most generations perceive them as unavoidable inevitabilities, as something given, which cannot be easily changed, at least not during a human lifetime. Even in the case of the “new” North American continent, the southwestward trend in the movement

19

Introduction

of the population gravity center that prevails has been and still is perceived as something so powerful that neither world war, nor civil war is likely to radically change it. Topodynamic trends are more predictable than any other economic phenomenon, infinitely more than any economic cycle. They constitute the most fundamental economic reality. One of the great errors of economic thought has been to ignore the impact that spatial concerns have had on economic outcomes. Topodynamic corridors have nothing to do with magic or mystery. They comprise interconnected communication routes, river and waterways networks, integrated and competing railways, canals, natural corridors, maritime routes, and highway networks. They correspond to the main commercial routes that came to organize the economic flow of the world over a large expanse of time. The very concrete nature of topodynamic corridors is linked to geography, but they have played their biggest role in history.

THE TOPODYNAMIC CORRIDORS INFERRED FROM THE PRESENT GRAVITY FIELDS The layout of the three corridors can be mathematically inferred from an analysis of the present world gravity fields (see Luc-Normand Tellier, “Étude prospective topodynamique du positionnement de la grande région de Montréal dans le monde aux horizons 2012, 2027 et 2060,” research paper 18 of Études, matériaux et documents, Montreal, Department of urban studies and tourism, University of Quebec at Montreal, 2002, 108–116). The Mongolo-American Corridor can be traced by means of an inverse-distance gravity model with an exponent of distance equal to 1, and by computing the gravity attraction vectors corresponding to the present world spatial distribution of values-added (productions). The gravity attraction vector computed at a given point in space corresponds to the resultant of all the attractive forces exerted by the economic “masses” of all the urban regions of the world on an individual located at that point who considers migrating. The layout of the Mongolo-American Corridor is obtained by considering Central and North America as a single region, and Eurasia as another region. The gravity attraction vectors of South America are computed while taking into account the attractive force of North America, and those of Africa, while taking into account the attractive force of Eurasia. Then, all the vectors of the world are oriented towards the Mongolo-American Corridor. By changing the exponent of distance for 2, and by treating the whole world as a single region, the Asian Corridor is obtained. In the northern part of corridor, vectors tend to follow the corridor. To the northwest of the corridor, the farther the vectors get from the corridor, the more they point towards the Mongolo-American Corridor, whereas, to the east of the northwestern part of the corridor, vectors are attracted by the Shanghai region. As for the Great Corridor, to a great extent, it corresponds to the most important population densities of the planet, namely the highest densities of Europe, the Ganges valley, the lower Yangtze River valley, and Japan. Its layout can be derived from the spatial distribution of attraction gravity potentials based on population, and an inverse-distance gravity model with an exponent of distance equal to 2.

CHAPTER

1

From the Beginnings of Agriculture and Urbanization to the First Urbexplosions

P

olarization, that phenomenon through which activities and people gather first in villages and then in small towns, cities and metropolises, is indisputably the most important and the most striking phenomenon of world’s history since the appearance of writing, five or six thousand years ago. Polarization is so omnipresent in the present world that the very first remark that must be made about it, the one that resonates with so many contemporaries, is that it did not always exist. Effectively, for about one hundred thousand years, our species, the Homo sapiens sapiens, has lived on this earth in a context where polarization of sedentary habitats virtually did not exist at all. From the beginning of urbanization until the appearance of motorized transportation, polarization had been a rather marginal phenomenon, and the world rate of urbanization calculated on the basis of cities having at least two thousand inhabitants probably never exceeded 5% (Figure 1). Today, about half the world population live in cities, and, in some countries, the urbanization rate exceeds 90%. The urban reality is so pervasive that even the inhabitants of the countryside are, in fact, urbanized, since the rural zones so deeply depend on cities. Despite that, even during the twentieth century, there have been some societies where polarization almost did not exist. For instance, in Rwanda and in Burundi, at the beginning of the twentieth century, no city, or significant village existed in a permanent manner. In those two countries profoundly agricultural with a very refined political system that could be compared with the European feudalism, the only concentrations of population that existed before the European colonization corresponded, in both countries, to the courts of the king and the queen mother, and these courts moved every time a king succeeded another. So there was no fixed village or town in the whole region. Thus, in the history of Homo sapiens sapiens, polarization is quite recent. The evolution of its most common form, urbanization, is marked by two historical phases: that of the first urban revolution, thanks to which the world rate of urbanization went from almost 0% to 5% in a little more than

24

Urban World History

World rate of urbanization %

Appearance of preurban cities

First First urban urbexplosion revolution

Second urban revolution

50%

50%

5%

1825 2000

1% ⫺1800

0.1% ⫺3200

0% ⫺6000

1%

5%

Time (years)

Figure 1 Evolution of the World Rate of Urbanization (cities having at least two thousand inhabitants)

five thousand years, and that of the second urban revolution, which, since about 1825, has propelled the world urbanization rate to the present overall rate of approximately 50%. Before describing this long evolution that began with agriculture and the settling process, in order to reconstitute the genesis of the spatial dynamics of the world history, let us start by evoking the first steps of human history.

From the Beginnings of Agriculture and Urbanization to the First Urbexplosions

25

The Origins and Beginning of Humankind Life appeared on Earth under the form of mere unicellular organisms during the Precambrian period some four billion years ago, about five hundred million years after the forming of our planet. It took life three and a half billion years to pass from the stage of unicellular organisms to that of multicellular ones. Progressively, various phyla and classes developed on Earth till one of them, the reptiles, especially the dinosaurs, came to dominate all other species. Their domination ended about sixty-three million years ago. Fifty-seven million years passed by between the disappearance of the dinosaurs and the appearance of the first pre-human beings, probably in Africa, some six million years ago. The first Homo was born with the Homo habilis some two and a half million years ago. His descendant, Homo sapiens, appeared in East Africa some two hundred thousand years ago, and gave birth to our species, Homo sapiens sapiens, some one hundred thousand years ago. It is between one hundred thousand and fifty thousand years ago that Homo sapiens sapiens experienced profound genetic changes, which favored his brain development and allowed for his mastering speech. Some seventy thousand years ago, Homo sapiens sapiens populated Asia, and Europe where he met Homo neandertalensis, which had inhabited that continent for one hundred and thirty thousand years. Homo neandertalensis and Homo sapiens sapiens coexisted in Europe for a long time till Homo neandertalensis disappeared thirty-five thousand years ago. It is just twenty thousand years ago that the first human beings started to innovate by inventing bread and using honey. This occurred in the Near East where agriculture and urbanization were also born much later. When human beings started to populate America fourteen thousand years ago, around 12,000 BC, they still had no house, nor settled villages anywhere on earth. The settling process of the human species started at various places throughout the world from around 11,000 BC, that is, some seven thousand five hundred years before the beginning of urbanization. The first dwelling places were made with clay mud mixed with minced straw. It is considered that the first significant villages were built in Mesopotamia around 9000 BC, in China around 7500 BC, and in Amazonia around 6000 BC.1 These first villages lived on gathering, hunting, and fishing, and not on agriculture. The first baskets appear at the same epoch as the settling process. The first weaved clothes are posterior, and they appear around 7000 BC.

1.

Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel : The Fates of Human Societies (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1997), 362.

26

Urban World History

THE FERTILE CRESCENT AND THE DOMESTICATION OF PLANTS AND ANIMALS Originates from the Fertile Crescent the growing of wheat, barley, bean, pea, lentil, olive, vine, fig, date palm, pomegranate, apple, cherry, plum, and pear. Wheat , barley, pea, and lentil were domesticated around 8500 BC, whereas olive, vine, fig, date palm, and pomegranate were around 4000 BC. The domestication of apple, cherry, plum, and pear came later since it required mastering the grafting technique. Numerous animals were also domesticated for the first time in the Fertile Crescent, like dog, goat, sheep, pig, and cow. Among the six most important domesticated animals, only horse and chicken have been domesticated for the first time out of the Fertile Crescent. Horse was in Ukraine, and chicken in China and Southeast Asia.

Despite the fact that agriculture has been often done by semi-nomadic populations, like the North-American Iroquois, it is generally considered that the settling process preceded agriculture and the domestication of animals. The first animal to be domesticated was dog, and it was just about 10,000 BC. Goat, sheep, and pig were domesticated around 8000 BC, cow around 6000 BC, and horse around 4000 BC.2 Donkey has been the first domesticated animal to be used for transporting people and merchandises. Before the appearance of agriculture, the total world population probably never exceeded fifteen million inhabitants (that is, the present population of the Netherlands). It has been estimated that, in that period, earth could optimally nourish a population of 8,6 million inhabitants living on hunting, fishing and gathering.3 It must be noticed that, as will be seen, the first “pre-urban cities” were basically inhabited by gatherers and hunters.

s THE BEGINNINGS OF AGRICULTURE Agriculture appeared, independently, in numerous parts of the world.4 It appeared first in Southwest Asia: in the Near East and the Fertile Crescent, in present Iran and Iraq at the foot of the Zagros mountains, in Palestine around the Dead Sea, and in present Turkey on the Anatolian plateau. In those regions, domestication of plants began about 8500 BC, and the domestication of animals (excluding than dog) around 8000 BC. Agriculture also developed in Southern Asia, on the plains liable to flooding of the Ganges (in present India), Brahmaputra (Bangladesh), and Irawaddy (Burma-Myanmar) rivers.

2. 3. 4.

Ibid., 167. Fekri A. Hassan, Demographic Archaeology (London: Academic Press, 1981). Paul Knox and John Agnew, The Geography of the World Economy, second edition (London: Edward Arnold, 1994), 144, and Jared Diamond, op. cit., 98 and 362–363.

From the Beginnings of Agriculture and Urbanization to the First Urbexplosions

27

Finally, it appeared in China, in the valleys of the Huang He (Yellow) and Yangtze rivers. In those regions, domestication of plants and animals began around 7000 BC. In the Americas, agriculture developed independently, first, in Mesoamerica, in the region of Tamaulipas to the northeast of present Mexico, and in the Tehuacán Valley to the south of present Mexico City. In these regions, domestication of plants dates back to 3000 BC, and animals to 500 BC. In the Andes, agriculture appeared in the coastal region of present Peru where plants were domesticated from about roughly 3000 BC, and animals from 3500 BC. Finally, agriculture developed from 2500 BC in the Ohio basin (in present United States). To these regions, four more zones of the world should be added where agriculture probably was developed independently: the African zone of Sahel and Sahara, tropical West Africa, Ethiopia, and New Guinea. It may seem odd that, among those regions where agriculture appeared spontaneously, many regions, like Iraq, Iran, Mexico, Andes, Sahel, and Sahara, are not considered today as particularly favorable to agriculture. It must be said that some of these have experienced important climate changes. For instance, many Sahel and Sahara zones, which are desert or semi-desert today, received normal rainfall and were covered with vegetation between 7000 and 4000 BC.5 However, it remains true that many regions where agriculture began were not easy to cultivate, and that some form of ecologic and geographical chance played a role.6 There exist about two hundred thousand vegetal species on Earth, of which just a few thousand are edible, the rest being indigestible, poor in nutritional value, difficult to prepare or uneasy to gather. Among the edible species, there are just a few hundred that have been domesticated, and most of them have been relatively early. Almost all the vegetal species cultivated today already were cultivated at the beginning of this era, at the time of the Roman Empire. At the end of the Pleistocene, climate changes favored the extension of the ecological zones favorable to growing wild cereals in the Fertile Crescent. By chance, a very high proportion of the edible vegetal species were also present in the Fertile Crescent, which contributed to the fact that this region became the first cradle of agriculture on Earth. According to Diamond, the spatial distribution of the species that can be domesticated explains, to a large extent, the geographical allocation of the cradles of agriculture. The same thing is true in the case of the domestication of animal species. Started from various independent centers, the domestication of plants and animals 5. 6.

It must be remembered that the last ice age ended just around 7000 BC. Jared Diamond, op. cit., 29.

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extended relatively rapidly to the whole planet. Ten thousand years ago, all human beings lived on hunting, fishing, and gathering. Eight thousand years later, at the beginning of this era, the vast majority of the human species lived on agriculture and breeding, whether in Eurasia, Africa, America, or Oceania. In order to understand this evolution, it is useful to know that agriculture and breeding are such that, instead of representing 0.1% of the biomass of a hectare of land as they do in an untouched “natural” environment, domesticated species get to constitute 90% of it. This allows for augmenting the production of edible calories to the point where one hectare can feed ten and even one hundred times more farmers and stockbreeders than gatherers and hunters. This is why the introduction of agriculture produced a radical increase in population densities, which is, most of the time, a prerequisite (but not a sufficient condition) for the emergence of a real urbanization.

Agriculture and Topodynamic Corridors Since domesticated vegetal and animal species differ from an autonomous source of agriculture to another, it is generally possible to reconstitute the trajectories of the migration of the various cultivated species in the same way that the geographical trajectories of the migration of ideas, religions or inventions can be traced back. For instance, the spread of the cultivation of barley and two kinds of wheat (Triticum dicoccides and Triticum dicossum) used to make bread and pasta has been pieced together.7 Those crops started in the Euphrates region about 8500 BC. They reached Anatolia and the Aegean Sea, and were grown in Cyprus and Greece from around 6500 BC. Over the Ionian and Adriatic Seas, they came to Italy around 6000 BC, then to France and Germany around 5400 BC, to Spain around 5200 BC, to England around 3500 BC, and, finally, to Norway around 2500 BC.8 The trajectory of the fastest westward diffusion of the cultivation of wheat and barley, as well as agriculture, originates from Mesopotamia and, strictly, follows the central axis of the Great Corridor. To the east, the migration of agriculture also followed the Great Corridor. It reached the Indus Valley and the Indian subcontinent about 6500 BC. The eastward movement did not stop at the Indus River. It went on inside the Great Corridor towards the Ganges Valley and the northeast of present India. However, this last stage was slower because it implied passing from regions where rains predominated during winter to regions where they 7. 8.

Daniel Zohary and Maria Hopf, Domestication of Plants in the Old World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). Jared Diamond, op. cit., 181.

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29

predominated during summer. Passing from one region to the other required using new techniques and growing vegetal species that were different from those coming from Mesopotamia. By contrast, the spread of the wheat and barley originating from Mesopotamia occurred more easily through the Asian Corridor from the Indus Valley to the Chinese Loess Plateau (in the present Shaanxi province dominated by the city of Xi’an). This fact is very important, since it testifies to a several thousand years old relation between the Indus Valley and the Loess Plateau. Out of the corridors, the agriculture migration process from Mesopotamia was slower. For instance, it is considered that the cultivation of wheat and barley reached Egypt only around 6000 BC, that is, five hundred years after it had attained the Indus River, Cyprus, and Greece. The migration to the rest of North Africa, Ethiopia, or Central Asia came even later than that. The arrival of the Mesopotamian crops in Egypt prompted the spectacular takeoff of the Egyptian civilization. Out of the eight principal crops which were the basis of the Mesopotamian agriculture and became the foundation of the Egyptian agriculture, only one, barley, existed in Egypt at a natural state before the coming of agriculture. Despite that, those imported crops found in Egypt favorable conditions that allowed that country to develop its agriculture on a very large scale. The spread of agriculture from Mesopotamia through the Great Corridor constitutes a first evidence of the existence of this corridor. A second illustration of the historical role played by the Great Corridor comes from the diffusion of the prehistoric Ubaid culture, whose name comes from an archaeological site located in the Sumer region of Mesopotamia, six kilometers west of the city of Ur. This pre-urban culture is considered to be the one that gave birth to the very first urbanization, that of the first urban revolution. The Ubaid culture developed between 5900 and 4300 BC from the site of Ubaid. From there, it expanded to the west along the Tigris, but even more along the Euphrates towards the Syrian Corridor and the Orontes River. The trajectory of the diffusion of the Ubaid culture precisely corresponds to the central axis of the Great Corridor, which also played a major role in the spread of urbanization.

Agriculture, Mobility, and Urbanization Urbanization appeared in Mesopotamia around 3200 BC, in China around 2000 BC, and in Mesoamerica around 300 BC. About five thousand years separate the appearance of agriculture and that of urbanization both in Mesopotamia and in China. In America, the lag is closer to three thousand years. Such a huge gap between the coming of agriculture and urbanization is stunning, and it shows the complexity of the conditions that are required for urbanization to emerge.

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Cities are, above all, meeting places where people exchange goods, but also information, and where they get protection in exchange for submission to a political power, spiritual grace through the intermediary of priests and worship places, as well as services and cultural experiences. In order for these exchanges to take place, a supply and a solvent demand for goods and services to exchange must exist, as well as the possibility to exchange at a reasonable cost. This is why the appearance of urbanization has been historically linked to the increase of the productivity in agriculture and breeding, as well as in the production of non-agricultural goods that could be exchanged for agricultural goods, but it has also been linked, even more importantly, to the improvement of transport and communications (among other things, by means of the use of wheel, roads, boat, and, also, writing). Many historians of urbanization (not to say the vast majority of them) have traditionally placed agriculture at the origin of urbanization on the pretence that city dwellers were offered the possibility to survive just when agricultural surpluses were realized, which made it possible for them to feed themselves. This reasoning has been repeated ad nauseam. It bears, however, a major flaw: why should farmers produce agricultural surpluses as long as it was impossible for them to exchange them for goods they did not produce? Wouldn’t it be more logical to inverse the reasoning, and to say that agricultural surpluses and market-oriented agriculture (as opposed to subsistence agriculture) were made possible by the supply on the markets of non-agricultural goods?9 To redraw our understanding of the relationship between agriculture and urbanization, it is useful to remember certain facts. First, trade, and even long-distance trade, existed in many cases prior to urbanization. In the case of Near East, it is a well-established fact. It is most likely that trade caused urbanization, at least as much as, and probably more than, agriculture did. Second, if three to five thousand years separated the beginnings of agriculture and urbanization, as far as we know, the appearance of the first “urban” cities coincided with three innovations, which deeply transformed long-distance trade. The first of these was the invention of wheel and wagon in Western Asia. It is close to the Black Sea that the oldest evidence of the existence of transportation on wheels has been found, and the relic that has been discovered there goes back to about 3400 BC. The diffusion of that invention followed the Great Corridor, as did agriculture and so many other innovations from Western Asia like plow, sail, windmill, potter’s wheel, all invented around 4500 BC, as well as lock, pulley, and rotating mill driven by

9.

Jane Jacob, in The Economy of Cities (New York: Random House, 1969), went as far as suggesting that cities made agriculture possible, and not the opposite. This is a defendable position as long as we refer to market-oriented agriculture.

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men or animals.10 It must be stressed that among the advantages of the Middle East is the presence of ancient sources of copper, mainly along the present border of Iraq and Iran in the region of the Zagros Mountains up to the Black Sea. The development of metal technology played an important role in many of those innovations. The second invention that revolutionized transportation was boat, which appeared also around 4300 to 4000 BC. It seems to have been invented first in the Black Sea region, and then in Sumer and Egypt. Boat rapidly replaced raft and pirogue that were previously used. The third invention that profoundly transformed the world of communications is that of writing, which originated, around 3400 BC, from the Fertile Crescent, in the Sumer region or Egypt. Until recently, Sumerians were considered as the inventors of writing. Now, some archaeologists uphold that Egyptians preceded them in that field. In any case, writing had a major effect by allowing for bookkeeping, complex accounting, and sending long and elaborated messages to remote destinations. The dates of the appearance of cities, wagon, boat, and writing, so to say, coincide, and all those innovations came from the Fertile Crescent or the Black Sea regions. This fact is worth noting since if, around 3200 BC, agriculture was already rather widespread in Asia, Europe and Africa, urbanization developed at that time in only one region, the Near East where those innovations took place. Thus, if the link between agriculture and urbanization can be questioned, the historical link between the increase in mobility and urbanization remains incontestable. Indeed, the prerequisite to both urbanization and a surplus-producing agriculture is the possibility to exchange, and the possibility to exchange directly depends on the means of transportation, transport costs, and the existence of efficient markets. Once the possibility to exchange is guaranteed, the natural complementarity between cities and countryside spontaneously generates the development of both cities and market-oriented agriculture, at least in regions where agriculture is possible. When trying to clarify the links between agriculture and the urban phenomenon, one must never forget that, at the beginning, the very first cities, those defined as “pre-urban” like Çatalhöyük, Jericho or Jarmo, were inhabited by hunters and gatherers in the absence of agriculture. Moreover, in different periods, numerous military, religious, or trading cities were created in arid or very little cultivated areas, sometimes surrounded with desert. Finally, if generally throughout history urbanization went together with an increase in the productivity of agriculture, many cases existed also in which urbanization rose in regions where agriculture was declining. This happened in developed as well as underdeveloped countries, and in a distant past as well as in more recent times.

10.

Jared Diamond, op. cit., 255.

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THE EVOLUTION OF WRITING There exist basically two types of writing, the phonetic and non-phonetic writings. The nonphonetic writing was invented the first, and it takes on two forms: pictograms and ideograms (or logograms). Pictograms constitute a transition from mere drawing to writing, whereas ideograms correspond to a further stage in the evolution of writing, since they move from representing things to evocating ideas. The Egyptian writing gives a perfect example of the transition from pictograms to ideograms. The Sumerian cuneiform writing, which, till recently, was considered more ancient than Egyptian writing, belongs to the group of non-phonetic writings using logograms, as do Chinese writing, appeared around 2000 BC, and pre-Columbian Mexican and Maya writings, appeared before 600 BC (it seems that Mexican writing developed first and inspired Maya writing, not the opposite). Phonetic writing is more recent, and it takes on two forms, syllabic and alphabetic writings. Syllabic writing is the oldest phonetic writing. It goes back to about 1550 BC, and it probably appeared in the middle of the Great Corridor, in Cyprus or Crete. It uses a different symbol, called grapheme, for each syllable. Among the syllabic writings, we find the Linear A of Cyprus, the Linear B of the Mycenae region in Greece, the Japanese Kana syllabary, the Indian Sanskrit syllabary, and the Ethiopian syllabary. Alphabetic writing uses a different grapheme for each phoneme (sound), whether consonants or vowels. It developed in two steps. First, Egyptians got the idea to use twenty-four different hieroglyphs to represent each of the twenty-four Egyptian consonants. About 1500 BC, the people of Ugarit, who were Semites living in the middle of the Great Corridor, were inspired by the Egyptians, and elaborated the first essentially alphabetic writing, which was limited to consonants. The Phoenician alphabet, which developed a little later right to the south of Ugarit, spread to the various Phoenician colonies, including Carthage, and, along the Great Corridor, both to the west towards Greece and to the east towards the Indian sub-continent. From the Phoenician consonantic alphabet directly derives the Aramaic consonantic alphabet (Aramaic, like Phoenician, is a Semitic language) from which originate the Semitic Arabic, Hebrew, and Syriac alphabets as well as the Indian Sanskrit syllabary appeared during the seventh century BC. Second, the alphabetic writing came to represent also vowels. Greeks were the first ones to do this during the eighth century BC. The Greek alphabet derives from the Phoenician one, and it gave birth to the Etruscan alphabet, from which comes the Latin alphabet we use, as well as to the Cyrillic, Armenian, and Georgian alphabets. The diffusion of alphabetic writing first followed the Great Corridor to the west and Greece, and to the east up to India. From there, it followed the Asian Corridor to the north (with Alexander the Great and, later, Islam) up to the western part of China, and to the south (with Islam and, later, the Spanish Empire) up to Indonesia and Philippines. Today, the alphabetic system has triumphed all over the world, except for the Far East where the writings derived from the Chinese system subsist. As far as writing is concerned, the contemporary world is divided in two parts: the alphabetic part whose single origin is Egypto-Phoenician, and the non-phonetic part whose only origin is Chinese.

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From the Beginnings of Agriculture and Urbanization to the First Urbexplosions

s EMERGENCE OF URBANIZATION IN THE GREAT CORRIDOR Let us now relate the history of urbanization over a period of more than three thousand years ending with the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC.11 The region where urbanization was born, the Levant, represents only 0.3% of the Earth’s surface. It goes from the Tropic of Cancer (twenty-third parallel north) to the forty-third parallel north, and from the thirtieth to the fiftieth meridian east (see Map 2). Today, this area includes a dozen countries: Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Israel and Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Cyprus, Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Kuwait.

Firat

Hattusa

Murat

Tigris

Çatalhöyük

Nineveh Ugarit

Eup

hra

Nimrud Jarmo Ashur

tes

Byblos Tyre Jerusalem

Damascus

Babylon

Jericho

Uruk

Petra

Ur

Susa

Eridu

Memphis

Persepolis

Nile Thebes

150 km

Map 2 The Beginnings of Urbanization

11.

About the early stages of urbanization, see: Anthony Edwin James Morris, History of Urban Form: Before the Industrial Revolutions (Harlow: Pearson Education and Prentice Hall, 1994); Vere Gordon Childe, What Happened in History (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964); Charles L. Redman, The Rise of Civilization: From Early Farmers to Urban Society in the Ancient Near East (San Francisco: W.H. Freeman, 1978), and A. Bernard Knapp, The History and Culture of Ancient Western Asia and Egypt (New York: The Dorsey Press, 1988).

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In order to understand how this territory came to play such an important role in the history of humanity, it is necessary to study its geography. Without being an island or a continent, the Levant is surrounded with water due to the presence of the Red, Mediterranean, Black and Caspian seas as well as the Persian Gulf, which is an extension of the Gulf of Oman and the Arabian Sea. Moreover, that area contains three major rivers, the Euphrates, Tigris and Nile, without forgetting the small Orontes River, which occupies a strategic position. In fact, this region constitutes one of the most important crossroads of the world, crossroads between Africa, Asia and Europe, crossroads between the Orient and Occident, and crossroads between the maritime routes of the Mediterranean and Indian Seas. In the past, the Levant has been crossed by famous trade routes like the Silk Road linking the Mediterranean Sea to China, and the Spice Road connecting India and the Mediterranean Sea through Arabia. It is also crossed by the axis of the Great Corridor that goes along the Euphrates, the Syrian Corridor and the Orontes River. Finally, it must be noted that the Euphrates and Tigris constitute an ancient river system in constant interaction.

THE PLACE OF ORIGIN OF INDO-EUROPEANS According to Orrin C. Shane III and Mine Küçük (“The World’s First City,” Archaeology, March-April 1998, 44), Colin Renfrew from Cambridge University dares to evoke the possibility that Çatalhöyük could be one of the most important cultural cradles of humankind. He suggests that the pre-urban city and its region could be the place of origin of the Indo-European peoples and languages. It must be said that the source of Indo-Europeans is not know with precision. They come from around the Black Sea; however, it is not proven that they came from Anatolia, the Caucasus Mountains, the region north of Caucasus, or Ukraine in Eastern Europe. The generally accepted thesis consists in considering that they came from the site of the kurgans (collective burial places that take the form of tumuli) in the Stalingrad-Volgograd-Tsaritsyn region north of Caucasus and the Caspian Sea. It seems that Indo-European languages originated from the Mongolo-American Corridor, and invaded the Great Corridor both to the southeast towards Persia and India, and to the west where they progressively replaced all the previous European languages with the only exception of Basque. The family of Indo-European languages includes Greek, Romance languages, Germanic languages, Slavic languages, Persian languages such as Farsi, Tajik and Dari, and Indian languages such as Sanskrit and Hindi. In total, about 144 languages are Indo-European. Semitic languages are not: they originate from Africa. The invasion of the Great Corridor by Indo-Europeans coming from the Mongolo-American Corridor occurred again and again throughout history.

Before the discovery of America and Oceania, long-distance trade was, in practice, limited to Africa, Asia and Europe. The node of those exchanges between the three continents was the Levant. Since urbanization emerges from exchanges and communications, it was logically likely to appear in that region, and, particularly, in its fertile zone. The Fertile Crescent went from

From the Beginnings of Agriculture and Urbanization to the First Urbexplosions

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the Nile Valley to the common mouth of Euphrates and Tigris on the Persian Gulf, and it skirted round the Arabic desert. It included Mesopotamia, as well as the Syrian and Canaanite Corridors (historical Canaan corresponded to the Mediterranean coast of present Israel, Lebanon, and Syria).

Appearance of Pre-urban Cities The development of gathering, fishing and hunting followed by that of agriculture and breeding favored the increase of population densities and the appearance of the first villages, and, later, of big villages that are considered as “pre-urban” cities. The term “pre-urban” underlines the fact that those cities were, to a large extent, autarkical, and, as such, they did not belong to urban systems based on intensive exchange networks. Çatalhöyük, Jericho, and Jarmo are classic examples of pre-urban cities.12 Çatalhöyük is located in Anatolia in present Turkey. In Turkish, Çatalhöyük means “pitchfork-shaped mound.” That pre-urban city is considered as the oldest known city in history despite that it was not urban, and was mainly inhabited by gatherers and hunters. In 7000 BC, it had at least six thousand inhabitants, which makes it the biggest of all the known pre-urban cities. Its site is made of two mounds separated by the Çarsamba River in the Konya Valley. It is surrounded with, to the north, the Toros Mountains, to the east, the Sultan Mountains, and, to the west, the Ala Mountains (which are all part of the “chain of mountains ranges” that give birth to the Great Corridor). Nine thousand years ago, that region was very favorable to gathering and hunting, thanks to its alluvial soil, its natural pastures full of cattle and horses, and its surrounding forests abundant in deer and wild pigs.13 The Çarsamba River did not constitute a commercial axis, and the Mediterranean Sea was away, about one hundred and fifty kilometers south, beyond the mountains. The region’s trade potential was then limited. Thus, Çatalhöyük never was more than a very big village of hunters, gatherers, and some of the first craftsmen, farmers, and stockbreeders. What strikes the most about Çatalhöyük is its form. This big fortified village occupied about twelve hectares on top of a mound, and it had no street, no alley, nor major public space. It had just a few small squares. Inhabitants had to move from one building to the other by means of ladders. Houses were made of dried bricks, and they had no entrance door. It is thought that people entered

12.

13.

See Glyn Edmund Daniel, The First Civilisations: The Archaeology of their Origins (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), and James Mellaart, Çatal Hüyük (London: Thames and Hudson, 1967). James Conolly, “Technical Strategies and Technical Change at Neolithic Çatalhöyük, Turkey,” Antiquity, 73, 282 (1999): 791.

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Urban World History

through an opening made in the roof. Hearths and ovens, storage bins, plastered floors and benches, and painted plaster walls were found in the interior. Çatalhöyük’s murals are recognized by art historians as unique in world history. The use Çatalhöyük’s inhabitants made of obsidian, that natural glass of volcanic origin, is famous. They produced obsidian polished mirrors, blades, flakes, daggers, projectiles, shatter, chips, etc. Considering its size and complexity, pre-urban Çatalhöyük was unique in the world of that epoch.14 It is clear that, in Western Asia, the city of Çatalhöyük has played a major role in the passage from the Pre-Pottery Neolithic period to the Pottery Neolithic one. The earliest known vessels that may be considered as ancestral to pottery, outside of the Far East, have been found in Çatalhöyük at an excavation level dating from about 6750 BC. They seem to correspond to the beginning of the use of utilitarian pottery in Western Asia. Let us note that the oldest fired clay figurines, which are the earliest attested precursors of ceramics, come from former Czechoslovakia, and they date back to about 25,000 BC. The oldest fired clay vessels ever found come from Japan; they date back to about 12,000 BC. Pottery appeared in the Fertile Crescent and China by around 8000 BC, and in the northern part of South America, Africa’s Sahel zone, the U.S. Southeast, and Mexico thereafter. It is in the Sahara that the oldest known utilitarian pottery was discovered. Moreover, it is in Çatalhöyük that the very first example of metal working is found. It involved copper melting. From a sociological point of view, it seems that, at the origin, Çatalhöyük’s socio-economy and productive activities were organized around the individual household, and that progressively agriculture intensified and kin-based corporate groups developed.15 Finally, Çatalhöyük marked an important stage in the settling process in Western Asia. Larger than Jericho and more advanced than Jarmo, Çatalhöyük must be considered an important birthplace of civilization. Due to the Bible, Jericho, that other pre-urban city, is much better known than Çatalhöyük. Even if it remains difficult to determine which of the two cities is the oldest, one thing is certain: Jericho never attained the size and the historical importance of Çatalhöyük. Appearing between 7800 BC and 6800 BC, Jericho was much smaller than Çatalhöyük. During the sixth millennium BC, it had a third or 50 percent of Çatalhöyük’s population; that is about 2,000 to 3,000 inhabitants. Despite the fact that both cities were walled, many things differentiate them. The luxuriance of the vegetation that surrounds Çatalhöyük contrasts with the aridity of the Jericho region. Çatalhöyük is a fluvial city, whereas Jericho is an oasis. Located in a desert zone, not far from 14. 15.

Orrin C. Shane III and Mine Küçük, “The World’s First City,” Archaeology, 51, 2 (1998), 43. James Conolly, op. cit., 798–799.

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the Jordan River or the Dead Sea, Jericho is an oasis thanks to the spring “Ayn as-Sultan.” Phosphate mines are also found in the region. The spring and the phosphate mines constitute the only real assets of Jericho, which benefits from as little commercial advantages as Çatalhöyük.

FROM ÇATALHÖYÜK TO NEW YORK AND TOKYO It is in Çatalhöyük and the other oldest pre-urban cities that the most outstanding scheme of history takes form (see Figure 2). It is characterized by the forming of a central core surrounded with a first periphery and, further, a second periphery. In Çatalhöyük’s case, the central nucleus is constituted of the city itself where developed the first functions of making (workmanship) and managing. As for the first periphery (or semi-periphery, as Braudel called it), it is marked by the development of resources (through agriculture and breeding). Finally, the second periphery is sprawling and made of tentacles. It is characterized by a pure and simple exploitation of resources (through fishing, hunting, gathering, or mineral extraction). This same scheme is observed throughout urban history both at the level of each city taken in isolation and at the level of whole urban systems. Even today, it characterizes the world urban system as a whole, which comprises three main central cores respectively dominated by New York, London-Paris, and Tokyo.

Despite that, it is estimated that human beings visited the site of Jericho as early as c. 9000 BC. Archaeological remains point to the presence of a temple and houses built of stone as early as about 8000–7600 BC. There are indications that Jericho may have started as a sanctuary, as a religious settlement. It seems that Mesolithic hunters established their sanctuary beside the perennial spring in evidence of its life-giving importance. From that point of view, Jericho could be the oldest religious city of the world. Like Çatalhöyük, Jericho surely had a defensive function. It provided shelter for the first peasants that practiced agriculture, as well as for hunters. From about 7000–6700 BC, Jericho was surrounded by a fortified enclosure with walls two meters thick and a shaft or tower nine meters high. Both agriculture and hunting (specifically fox hunting) constituted the economic basis of Jericho, which is one of the oldest agricultural sites in the world (probably older and more important than Çatalhöyük from an agricultural point of view). It must be noted that, due to the aridity of the region, agriculture probably required irrigation. It seems that an advanced agriculture existed in Jericho complete with irrigation and the domestication of animals from around 7000 BC onwards. In Jericho, houses were built of brick and the city walls of stone. Jarmo is another Levant’s pre-urban city. It is located in the region of Mesopotamia, in the upper Tigris basin, closer to the Caspian Sea than to the Persian Gulf. Although located in the mountains of the Kurdistan where the affluent of the Tigris called Little Zab originates, Jarmo is not a “river city.”

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Urban World History

RESOURCE LEVY

RESOURCE DOMESTICATION

EXCHANGE MAKING MANAGEMENT

Figure 2 Braudel’s Scheme

From the Beginnings of Agriculture and Urbanization to the First Urbexplosions

39

It is considered to be one of the world’s earliest “village-farming communities.” Its site was discovered in 1948. According to radioactive-carbon dating, the beginning of the site could be around 6750 BC, during the Pre-Pottery Neolithic period. The site of Jarmo includes fifteen archaeological levels. In one of the more recent layers, clay vessels with rough painted decorations provide the first certain evidence for the manufacture of pottery vessels. Excavations have also yielded evidence of domesticated emmer and einkorn wheats, of two-row barley, and of dogs, pigs (probably hunted instead of domesticated), sheep, and goats, suggesting the achievement of a settled agricultural way of life involving breeding. Relics have been found that indicate the existence of a form of religion with mother-goddesses. Contrary to Jericho and Çatalhöyük, Jarmo was probably not walled, and it does not appear to have achieved the same level of civilization as those cities. None of the three pre-urban cities depicted were coastal or even situated on an important river. None had a port, or was at a crossroads (roads suitable for vehicles did not even exist at that distant time). Pre-urban cities were, above all, protective devices, shelters, or agricultural communities. In the beginning, pre-urban cities were not surrounded with agricultural fields, but populated by hunters, fishermen, and gatherers. Later, farmers, breeders, and craftsmen progressively arrived. Pre-urban cities were not real cities. One could even argue that those of them that were not agriculture-oriented were not even villages, in the traditional sense of that word, since, normally, villages carry out agriculture-related functions.

Appearance of Urban Cities in the Sumer Region Real “urban” cities were to appear some millennia after the first pre-urban cities, in hot and fertile areas related to rivers that allowed for easy transportation. It happened in the Sumer region, around 3200 BC, in the context of the first urban revolution.16 These new cities were bigger than their predecessors; they had a population of 7,000–20,000, with, contrary to the pre-urban cities, a well-developed class of craftsmen and highly developed forms of social organization and government. They were inhabited by farmers (even today, in the Third World, it is estimated that roughly 25 percent of the working population in cities with populations of 5,000–20,000 work in agriculture) and craftsmen, as well as traders, soldiers, priests, priestesses, civil servants, political leaders, slaves, servants, prostitutes, water carriers, women, and children. The area covered by the pre-urban cities was on the order of 3–5 hectares whereas, from the year 3000 BC on, the first Sumerian urban cities had an area of some

16.

Vere Gordon Childe, “The Urban Revolution,” The Town Planning Review, 21, 1 (1950): 3–17.

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40 hectares, reaching 100 hectares by 2000 BC. Their social, political, and religious organization was complex and profoundly differed from the pre-urban one, which was yet rudimentary. The case of Jarmo illustrates the fact that, in Mesopotamia, agriculture and pre-urban cities were born in the remote upstream part of the Tigris basin, north of the Akkad region, in the region that would become the cradle of Assyria. By contrast, urban cities developed totally downstream in the southeastern part of Mesopotamia where the Tigris and the Euphrates meet.17 The appearance of irrigation explains that. Southeastern Mesopotamia took the form of an alluvial plain constituted of very dry zones, swamps, and reed ponds. A long dry season and weak annual rainfalls of only two hundred millimeters on average characterized its harsh climate. Without irrigation, that region could not be cultivated at least eight months a year. However, its alluvial soil was extremely fertile. Irrigation completely transformed the Sumer region, which covers the area that lies, south of Akkad, between the Euphrates and Tigris close to the junction of the two rivers, as well as Chaldea, which is the land bordering the head of the Persian Gulf between the Arabian Desert and the EuphratesTigris junction. Canals were built everywhere, and water was brought to the driest zones. Agriculture extended over an increasingly vast territory, and a large population was attracted coming from the north, from Akkad and the upstream Tigris region. The canal network also favored navigation while providing an exceptional mobility to the local economy. From 4000 BC, Sumer overran Akkad both culturally and economically. It is in that context that urbanization and the first urban system of the world emerged. Two waves of early urbanization must be distinguished in Mesopotamia. The first one started around 3200 BC and was associated with the emergence of the first true urban network, which was inhabited by the original Sumerian population. The second one is much more recent. It happened one millennium and a half later, during the second millennium BC. This latter Mesopotamian urbanization wave gave birth to the first urbexplosion, which was dominated by Babylon and a Semitic Akkado-Babylonian population. Hereby, that urbexplosion will be referred to as the “small bang” both to stress its importance as being the trigger of the whole urbexplosive process inside the Great Corridor, and to differentiate it from the “big bang” of the Industrial Revolution that took place almost 3.5 millennia later. The striking fact about what happened in the Sumer region during the “small bang” is that it is not one or several cities that suddenly appear, but truly a whole urban system made of a large number of independent, but 17.

A. Leo Oppenheim, Ancient Mesopotamia: Portrait of a Dead Civilization, revised edition completed by Erica Reiner (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1977).

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intimately intertwined “city-states,” as Toynbee named them to stress the fact that they formed societies that, while exhibiting certain of the essential attributes of the states, nevertheless retained the character and dimensions of cities. The most important and some of the oldest of these “city-states” were Eridu, Ur, and Uruk. Eridu and Ur, located to the south of the Euphrates, were both Chaldean and Sumerian, whereas Uruk, which lay between the Euphrates and Tigris, was just Sumerian. As noted earlier, the invention of wheel transportation, boat, and writing little preceded the emergence of urbanization. At the same period, wooden plowshare and copper melting were invented in Mesopotamia. It also seems that urbanization was little preceded by the appearance of the concept of state (that is, a social entity ruled by a government) since states arose for the first time in world history in Mesopotamia around 3700 BC, and just a little later in Egypt.18 Out of the Fertile Crescent, states were formed much later: around 300 BC in Mesoamerica, around 50 BC in the Andes, China, and Southeast Asia, and around AD 1000 in West Africa. Many have established a link between the development of irrigation systems and the forming of the first bureaucracies and states. According to Diamond, the true causal links would be the following: the increase in the population density favors using more and more complex technologies and organizations, which requires centralized bureaucracies that make possible the development of elaborated irrigation systems.19 This is the scenario observed in the Sumer region, and later in China.

ZIUSUDRA, NOAH, AND THE FLOOD In the Mesopotamian polytheist religious tradition, cities, water, agriculture, kingship, and the creation of the world were interrelated. The Eridu Genesis said that the universe was created out of the primeval sea. Gods were given birth, and the deities in turn fashioned man from clay to cultivate ground, care for flocks, and perpetuate the worship of the gods. Men built cities and instituted kingship. However, for unknown reasons, the gods decided to destroy humankind with a flood. Eridu’s patron god Enki did not agree with the decree. He revealed it to a man named Ziusudra who did as Enki commanded him. He built a huge boat, in which he succeeded to ride out the flood. Afterwards, he prostrated himself before the gods and was rewarded for living a godly life by being given immortality. This story is at the origin of the Bible’s narration of the Flood and Noah’s action. It must be said that archaeologists have found, in Ur and elsewhere, evidence that the Flood did occur in the Sumer region. Non-Semitic beliefs of the first Mesopotamians constitute one of the major historical bases of the Bible, which is, otherwise, so deeply associated with the Semitic culture.

18. 19.

Jared Diamond, op. cit., 278. Ibid., 22–23 and 62.

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Eridu is generally considered as the first urban city in history. In fact, the ancient list of the kings of the Sumer region designated Eridu as the oldest Sumerian city. Archaeological research confirms this. The date of foundation of Eridu is uncertain. According to some archaeologists, it could go back as far as 4500 BC. A little to the north of Eridu, by 6000 BC a large village of four to five hectares existed that preceded the foundation of Eridu. That village had both craft activities and long-distance trade in luxury goods such as copper and turquoise. That being said, it is likely that Eridu became a true urban city just around 3200 BC. It was built on sand dunes close to an affluent of the Euphrates, at the southeastern tip of the Fertile Crescent, close to Ur and not far from the junction of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers. Cultivated fields surrounded it. On its site, one of the first evidences for water transport was excavated. The model boat found in the prehistoric cemetery of Eridu attests the importance of fluvial transportation at the time. The boat dates back to about 4000 BC. A still older boat remain has been found in 2001 close to Sozopol (Bulgaria) in the Black Sea. It seems to date back to about 4000–5000 BC. It should be recalled that the oldest relic of a wheel vehicle was also found in the Black Sea region. The “Black Sea–Tigris-Sumer” axis seems to have played a major role in the development of urbanization. The function of Eridu that is best documented is neither agriculture, trade, nor transportation, but religion. The city was a sanctuary for its patron god Enki, “lord of the sweet waters that flow under the earth.” Around 2040 BC, the inhabitants of Eridu built a ziggurat in his honor. The ziggurats of Eridu, Ur, Uruk, and other Sumerian sites were pyramidal, stepped temple towers made of brick. They had no internal chambers. Their sloping sides and terraces were often landscaped with trees and shrubs. On the upper platform of ziggurats was built a chapel. In the Ancient Near East, two main communication routes linked Egypt and the Persian Gulf following the Canaanite (or Palestinian) Corridor and the Euphrates: the Road of the Sea and the Road of the Kings.20 The Road of the Sea went from the Nile Delta to Damascus while passing through Sile at the Egyptian border, as well as Gaza, Aruna, and Megiddo in the Canaanite Corridor. The Kings’ Road followed the central axis of the Great Corridor, to which it probably gave birth. It started from the Persian Gulf, went through Ur, followed the Euphrates, crossed Babylon, and went on to Mari where it divided in two main branch roads. The northern one ran along the Euphrates, took the Syrian Corridor up to Aleppo and the Orontes River, and then went south down to Damascus where it met the Road of the Sea. The second branch of the Kings’ Road lay south of the first one. It linked Mari to Damascus through 20.

André Lemaire (ed.), Les routes du Proche-Orient : des séjours d’Abraham aux caravanes de l’encens (Paris : Desclée de Brouwer, 2000).

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Palmyra (called Tadmar by the Assyrians) where another branch road went directly to the north towards ancient Harran (now written Haran). It is more or less the Road of the Sea and the Road of the Kings that Semites followed to migrate from Arabia to the hearth of Mesopotamia, and that Abraham and the patriarchs took from the opposite direction to reach the promised land of Canaan coming from Ur and Mesopotamia while passing by Harran. Semites originate from the Arabian Desert they quit around 2500 BC through the Canaanite and Syrian corridors. They then entered the region of Akkad in Upper Mesopotamia, and, from the site of Mari (in present Syria, close to the Iraqi border), they followed the Euphrates to progressively penetrate the Sumer region in Lower Mesopotamia. They entered Mesopotamia as two different groups, on the one hand, the Amorite population, and, on the other hand, the Aramaean one. Amorites settled in Syria around 2000 BC, and in Mesopotamia around 1900 BC. Later, one of their dynasties came to conquer Babylon, and, under Hammurabi, to make it the predominant city of the region. Amorites disappeared during the twelfth century BC with the triumph of the Aramaeans. The latter were nomads or semi-nomads, and they had arrived in Mesopotamia at about the same time as the Amorites. Terah, Abraham’s father, was the chief of one of the Aramaean clans settled in Ur. Arabs and Jews, both of whom consider themselves to be descendants of Abraham, have a common Aramaean origin. The Arabs are said to descend from Ishmael, the son of Abraham by his wife’s maidservant Hagar, while the Jews are said to descend from Isaac, the son Abraham had by his wife Sarah, at 100 years of age. The penetration of the Semite stockbreeders in Mesopotamia took generally a peaceful form thanks to the transhumance system. When cereals were growing, the droves were kept away from the fields and, after the harvest, cultivators were glad to welcome the stockbreeders and their herds in order for them to graze on what was left in the fields and to manure the ground. This way migrants coming from distant regions could peacefully swarm into new areas. The progressive intrusion of Semitic populations in Mesopotamia, and their accession to power in the Akkad and, later, the Sumer regions led to the fusion of Mesopotamia’s pre-Semitic and Semitic cultures. Thus, many of the main kings of Assyria and Babylonia were Semites when the original Mesopotamian population was not Semitic. Similarly, Sumerian, Assyrian and Aramaean languages systematically interpenetrated. The story of Abraham eloquently illustrates that merger. Abraham is thought to have lived at Ur around the 18th century BC under King Hammurabi of Babylon (the author of the famous “Hammurabi’s code”). Abraham is an Aramaean Semite from Ur, presented as a descendant from Shem, the oldest son of Noah. According to the Bible, around 1850–1800 BC, Abraham left Chaldea with his father Terah and his nephew Lot to return on

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THE MONGOLO-AMERICAN CORRIDOR AND THE THREE PIVOTS OF EURASIAN HISTORY Except for the Semitic and later Arab invasions of the Near and Middle East parts of the Great Corridor and the Tibetan invasions of the Asian Corridor, almost all the invasions of the central zones of the Great and Asian Corridors, both to the west and to the east, originated from three main zones of the Mongolo-American Corridor: the cradle of the Indo-Europeans located north of the Caucasus, the cradle of the Uralic-speakers in the Ural Mountains, and the cradle of the Altaics in the Altai range that extends over parts of Russia, Mongolia, and China. Indo-Europeans, Uralicspeakers, and Altaics all originate from the Mongolo-American Corridor, which, mainly made of steppes, entailed the best conditions for horses and horsemen. Historically, in Eurasia, the Great and Asian Corridors have provided the highest mobility for goods and the best conditions for wealth accumulation, while the Mongolo-American Corridor guaranteed the highest mobility for invading riders attracted by the wealth of the Great and Asian Corridors. Indo-Europeans lost their unity during the 4th millennium BC (Igor M. Diakonoff and Philip L. Kohl, Early Antiquity, London and Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991, 367–368). From their place of origin, they rode and invaded Asia Minor under the names of Hyksos , Luwians, Mitanni, Hittites , Hurrians, and Kassites. They migrated to the south of the Balkans under the names of Phrygians and Hellenes, the latter comprising the Aeolians, Dorians, Ionians , and Achaeans. They swept Persia and India under the names of Iranians, Aryans , Indo-Iranians, Indo-Aryans, Medians, Persians, Scythians, Sarmatians, Parthians, Kushans, and Yue-Che (also written Yüeh-chih). Finally, they occupied Western Europe under the names Proto-Celts , Celts, Italics , and Germans (which comprise the Goths, Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Alans , Franks, Alemanni, Burgundians , Jutes, Angles , Saxons, Suevi, Vandals, and Lombards), as well as Eastern and Northern Europe under the names of Slavs , Vikings, and Normans. In the group of the horsemen that came from the Ural mountains, we find the Finns, Estonians, Magyars (Hungarians), and Mordvin. Finally, three linguistic groups of horsemen came from the Altai region: the Turks, the Mongols, and the Manchus-Tungus-Juchens. Among the Turks, we find the Huns, Azeris, Turkmen, Bulgars , Khazars , Pechenegs , Kipchaks (called Polovtsy by the Russians, and Kumans by the Byzantines), Mamlüks, Seljuq Turks, Ottoman Turks, Kazakhs, and Uzbeks. As for the Mongolian group, it includes, among others, the Avars, Tatars (or Tartars), Liao -Khitans, and Mughals.

their ancestors’ footsteps along the Euphrates, the Balikh and the Jullab Rivers down to Harran where Terah, Abraham, and Lot settled. After his father’s death, Abraham, aged seventy-five, quit Harran with his nephew Lot. He went west along the Syrian Corridor, then south along the Canaanite (later “Palestinian”) Corridor where “a land was promised to him,” that of Canaan, already inhabited by the Semitic Canaanites. Abraham and his family traveled down to Egypt before returning to Canaan and settling in Hebron where died the patriarch, father of Isaac and grandfather of Jacob, also named Israel.

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In sum, in Eurasia, the major part of the massive migrations were oriented towards the Great and Asian Corridors, and they originated from three main regions that constituted the three “pivots” of Eurasian history (referring to the expression of Sir Halford John Mackinder who, in The Scope and Methods of Geography and the Geographical Pivot of History, London: Papers of the Royal Geographical Society, 1951 edition, wrote about Central Asia as being the “pivot of History”). It must be remembered that, among the tribes coming from the Altai, we find the Huns who invaded the Roman Empire, the Turks who, despite the fact that they had been vassals of the Avars, conquered the Byzantine Empire and the Arab world, the Mongols and Mughals who took control of the Indus Valley and northern India, as well as the Mongols who conquered China. Originating also from the Altai, the Khazars , Kumans , and Pechenegs penetrated into Eastern Europe (consult, among others, Gérard Chaliand, Guerres et civilisations, Paris: Odile Jacob, 2005). Among the German tribes, the Visigoths , Ostrogoths , Burgundians , Jutes , Angles , Saxons , Franks , Alemanni, Suevi, Vandals , and Lombards penetrated into the Roman Empire, while their Viking cousins took control of Scandinavia. The Slavs, who are not German, probably came from the swamps of the Pripyat River, an affluent of the Dnieper River that passes from Ukraine to Belarus. They entered the Byzantine world and Central Europe. Finally, coming from the Ural Mountains, the Finns and the Magyars-Hungarians invaded Central and Northern Europe. It must be noted that, except for the black Nubians, whose penetration was ephemeral, and the white Egyptians , who somewhat belong to the Great Corridor, the Semites (Amorites , Aramaeans , Jews , and Arabs) are practically the only group in history to have penetrated in a lasting way from the south into the Great Corridor. This deserves all the more mentioning since Semites originate from Africa. Actually, Semitic languages constitute one of the three branches of the North-Eritrean language family, the two other ones being those of ancient Egyptian, and Berber. North-Eritrean languages belong, with South-Eritrean languages (including Cushitic and Chad -Hamitic languages) and Omotic languages, to the Hamito-Semitic, Afrasian, or Afro-Asian language family. The sub-group of Semitic languages remains mainly concentrated in Africa, twelve of its nineteen existing languages being spoken in Ethiopia. All this suggests that the Afro-Asian language family originates from Africa, and only one of its branches expanded to the Near East (Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1997, 383).

The figure of Abraham initiates the passage from the polytheism of his Semitic ancestors and Sumerian neighbors to monotheism by keeping a part of the Sumerian religious tradition while adopting the Semitic Canaanite cult of El that became El ’Olam or Elohim (“God the Everlasting One”; Elohim is the plural form of the Hebrew word “eloha” which means “god”). In Ur, Abraham worshipped many gods, but in Canaan he committed himself to worship exclusively Elohim without however rejecting the existence of other gods. So, he professed monolatry (the worship of one among many gods), and not monotheism. True monotheism came later with pharaoh Akhenaton and prophet Moses.

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THE SEMITIC BIBLE AND THE INDO-EUROPEAN VEDAS The evolution towards monotheism came after Abraham’s epoch, maybe, among other things, under the influence of Egyptians who are likely to have been the very first to institute around 1350 BC, under Pharaoh Akhenaton (also named Amenophis or Amenhotep IV, who reigned from 1372 to 1354 BC), an official monotheist cult. Many striking similarities between hymns to Aton and Psalm 104 of the Bible suggest a link between the monotheist cult of Aton and Judaism. It must be reminded that Moses was born in Egypt around 1300–1280 BC and that the Exodus from Egypt took place around 1250 BC. That being said, ancient Mosaic religion gave birth to true monotheism just during the sixth century BC in the context of the Exile of Jews in Babylonia, when Israel ’s prophets started contesting the reality of other gods than Yahweh, something their predecessors had never done. Modern monotheism originates from the unique source of Judaism whose roots are Semitic, but also Mesopotamian and Egyptian. Christian and Moslem monotheism emerge from the Hebraic source. From a religious point of view, the modern world essentially stems from two main sources, the Bible, written from 1250 BC, and the Aryan Vedas , which are older than the Bible and were written in Sanskrit, which is an Indo-European language, between 1800 and 1200 BC. Vedas directly gave birth to Hinduism-Brahmanism and, indirectly, to Mazdakism-Zoroastrianism-Parsiism, Buddhism, and Jainism. The diffusion of those religious currents was canalized by the Great and Asian Corridors. Strangely enough, today, the majority of the populations of Indo-European origin and language are the heirs of religious traditions of Semitic origin (as in the case of European Christians, Christians and Moslems from Eastern, Northern, and Central Asia, as well as Moslems from Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan). Similarly, the majority of the heirs of religious traditions of IndoEuropean origins are not of Indo-European origin or language (as in the case of Hindus from Southern India, and Buddhists from China, Korea, Japan, or Southeast Asia). As for the numerous inhabitants of the Americas who are not of Indo-European origin, they speak Indo-European languages and practice religions of Semitic origin. In the same way, educated Africans who are not of Indo-European or Semitic origin (it is the vast majority) speak Indo-European languages and practice religions of Semitic origin. Only the Indians from Northern India have altogether an Indo-European origin, language, and religious tradition, and Israelis and Arabs have altogether a Semitic origin, language, and religious tradition. This illustrates the extent to which links between race, language, and religion are tenuous, complex, and geographically confused. Generally, religions follow the spatial logic of economic development and diffuse from the topodynamic corridors, whereas populations are attracted from the periphery to the economic poles within the topodynamic corridors. Many examples will be given of this. The contrast between the two spatial logics explains, to a great extent, the discrepancies between linguistic and religious spatial patterns.

Ur, Abraham’s homeland, lies about 17 kilometers northeast of Eridu and 16 kilometers west of the present bed of the Euphrates River. Before becoming a true urban city around 3100 BC, a little after Eridu, Ur was a village that had been founded during the 5th millennium BC. The archaeologist Leonard

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Woolley has found proof that Ur was flooded by the sea during the 5th–4th millennium, confirming the traditional story of the Flood.21 The settlement of Ur was probably revived around 4300 BC thanks to settlers thought to have been from northern Mesopotamia, from the vast region of Akkad. Before the 2nd century BC, when its course radically changed, the Euphrates ran much closer to Ur and the city was linked to the Euphrates by a canal that allowed Ur to develop as an important foreign trade market place. Ur was then rather close to the Persian Gulf, which, due to the accumulation of the Euphrates and Tigris alluvial deposits, now lies at 260 kilometers east of Ur. There are proofs that Ur was in touch with India and the Indus Valley as early as in 2350 BC, during the reign of Sargon I, the Semitic king of Akkad, founder of the first grand empire, the first permanent army, and the first conquest war. The “sea kings” of Ur were exporting goods to Dilmun (Bahrain) on the Persian Gulf and there they picked up copper and ivory coming from the east. Despite its being closer to the Euphrates than Eridu and despite its canal, Ur was not really a “river city.” It was a “city of the plain” surrounded with a rich, populated and irrigated agricultural hinterland. It was located on marginally higher ground, secure from flooding yet near enough to the Euphrates to benefit from riverside trade as it developed.22 About 2800 BC, the city covered an area of about forty hectares, with a population on the order of 24,000, while its hinterland had a population that may have reached about 500,000, which is considerable. From around 2450 BC to 2000 BC, Ur was the capital of an important empire that extended to northern Mesopotamia. It was invaded and partially destroyed by the Elamites. But most of Ur’s masters, whether Sumerian, Babylonian, Assyrian or Persian have taken care of the city and of its temples. Ur remained an important commercial center until about 150 BC, when the Euphrates changed its course. That natural event was a disaster for Ur since it destroyed Ur’s canal and connection with the Persian Gulf, as well as the sophisticated irrigation system that surrounded the city. The rich agricultural fields that made Ur a rich city soon transformed into deserts. The incredible wealth of the treasures excavated in Ur from 1922 to 1934 provides eloquent evidence that the city had achieved a level of civilization previously unknown. Treasures of gold, silver, bronze, and semiprecious stones, as well as the architecture of Ur’s monuments, reveal exceptional art. Like Eridu, Ur was also a “religious city.” Its great ziggurat was dedicated to the moon god Nanna (Sin), the patron deity and divine king of Ur. The ziggurat had three stories at its

21.

22.

P.R.S. Moorey, Ur of the Chaldees: A Revised and Updated Edition of Sir Leonard Woolley’s Excavations at Ur (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982); Harriet Crawford, Sumer and the Sumerians (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Anthony Edwin James Morris, op. cit., 22.

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origin, and was built of burnt bricks. Nabonidus, the last king of Babylon, who ruled from 556 to 539 BC, raised the ziggurat to seven stages. Ur’s is the best preserved of any ziggurat. Like other Sumerian cities, Ur was made of burnt bricks, the Sumer region having no stone. It must be stressed that, at Ur as in the other ancient Mesopotamian cities, the houses are grouped together in layouts that have “grown out of the conditions of the primitive village and are not laid out on any system of town planning.”23 As will be seen, city planning does not appear before the Harappan civilization (some say the Egyptian civilization, but this is quite debatable). The Mesopotamian unplanned approach greatly influenced the later Islamic city builders.24 Ur’s architects were acquainted with the column, the arch, the vault, and the dome. As in the famous Parthenon of Athens, the builders of Ur’s ziggurat used the principle of entasis, by which the impression of straight lines is created while in fact not a single straight line is used. Each wall, from the base to top and horizontally from corner to corner, is a convex curve so slightly bent that it gives the impression of being straight and strong, whereas true straight lines would seem to sag under the weight of the superstructure. This detail reveals a real sense of observation and innovation, which, in other fields, contributed to make Mesopotamians the founders of astronomy, mathematics, and modern sciences. We owe to the Sumerian numerical system based on number six the division of the day in 24 hours, that of the hour in 60 minutes, that of the minute in 60 seconds and that of the circle in 360 degrees. The link we observe here for the first time between the development of science, urbanization, and the space-economic forces that underlie it will never be denied throughout history. One city symbolizes more than any other the scientific contribution of Sumer, and it is the city-state of Uruk. While close to Ur and Eridu that are located to the south of the Euphrates, Uruk does not belong to Chaldea since it lies to the north, in the area between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, close to the Euphrates. The first settlement in Uruk goes back to about 3750 BC. Like Ur, around 3100 BC, Uruk became an “urban” city. In 3000 BC, temples were built over terraces. In 2700 BC, Gilgamesh fortified the city, and, in 2110 BC, the first ziggurat was built. It is in Uruk that the oldest known written document was found. It constitutes one of the world’s first evidence of semi-pictographic writing (as mentioned earlier, some recently discovered older objects, cylindrical seals, found in Egypt that bear some hieroglyphs suggest that writing appeared in Egypt even before it did in Mesopotamia).

23. 24.

P.R.S. Moorey, op. cit. See also Shamil A.A. Kubba, Mesopotamian Architecture and Town Planning 10,000–3,500 BC (Oxford: B.A.R. International Series, 1987). Hakim, Besim Selim, Arab-Islamic Cities: Building and Planning Principles (New York: KPI and London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986).

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Uruk’s document is an inventory written on a clay tablet about 3300 BC. Uruk’s semi-pictographic writing has not yet been deciphered. It is at the origin of the cuneiform script. Uruk is worth remembering for being the city where were found the oldest relics of wheel (out of the Black Sea region), swing-plough, veil, and concrete. Stone is completely lacking in southern Mesopotamia, however archaeologists have discovered that, at the beginning of the 3rd millennium BC, an artificial stone was in use in Uruk. It clearly constituted a forerunner of concrete but the secret of its manufacture apparently was lost in subsequent years. It is interesting to note that primitive forms of concrete appear this early in the history of urbanization. The Romans became masters of the art of using concrete for construction. Their concrete was made of “natural cement,” and its use became widespread. Modern “artificial” concrete is quite recent. It derives from the so-called “Portland concrete” that was invented just in the early 19th century.

Appearance of Urbanization in Egypt The forming of city-states accompanied the beginnings of urbanization almost everywhere: in Mesopotamia, but also in Phoenicia, in the country of the Philistines, in Greece, in Italy, and even in the Hausa and Yoruba regions of West Africa, as well as in the Maya region of Mesoamerica. The emergence of the “nation-state” in Egypt from the very beginning of urbanization constitutes a curiosity. Here again, geography provides excellent explanations. Historical Egypt corresponds to the Nile Valley nurtured on the rich alluvial deposits brought by its famous floods, but squeezed on both sides by the desert. The Nile provides wealth to its delta, and its valley on a width of three or four kilometers, not more, whereas the desert gives Egypt its security. Nile’s providential floods were for a long time a mystery. They are now explained by the fact that at some season the vast humidity of the Congo Basin reaches the Ethiopian mountains, which generates major rainfalls that cause the Blue Nile to swell, and the Nile to flood. The river benefits from still one more advantage: while it runs northwards, the prevailing winds blow southwards. That greatly favors navigation. In order to go north, boats only have to follow the stream, whereas, to go south, navigators just have to haul up sails. As soon as Mesopotamian domesticated vegetal species reached Egypt through trade, agriculture boomed, two kingdoms took form, one to the north, the other to the south, and the process that led to the merging of the two kingdoms developed. The Egyptian nation-state has generally been united, powerful, and independent for an almost continuous period of almost 3000 years, from 2850 BC to 30 BC. Of course, Egypt has been conquered by the Assyrians, Persians, and

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Greeks, after having been by the Hyksos, those Semitic Afrasians dominated by an Indo-European aristocracy who conquered then horseless Egypt, from 1730 to 1580 BC, thanks to their horse-drawn chariots, and established themselves, for about one century, as pharaohs over a part of Egypt inhabited by non-Semitic Afrasians. However, till the death of Cleopatra in 30 BC and her integration into the Roman Empire, Egypt never really disappeared as a state, altogether under the Old Kingdom or Empire (2649–2134 BC), the Middle Kingdom or Empire (2040–1640 BC), the New Kingdom or Empire (1532–1071 BC), the Late Period (712–332 BC), the Greco-Macedonian Period (332–30 BC), as well as the intermediary periods. “Urban” cities appeared in Egypt at practically the same time as in Mesopotamia. However, some people long contested that the first Egyptian cities were really cities. Egyptologist John Wilson, in a communication delivered to a symposium held in 1958 under the provocative title, “Egypt through the New Kingdom: Civilization without Cities,” argued that Egypt had no cities until the year 1090 BC. The debate is based on the fact that the first Egyptian cities were profoundly agricultural and, contrary to their Mesopotamian counterparts, were not fortified. It is true that Egyptian cities do not respond to all the criteria some have proposed to define a city of the epoch. According to those criteria, a concentration of population can be defined as a city only if it is surrounded with walls, it includes full-time craftsmen, its density is sufficient, its houses are made of lasting materials, it has streets, and it has a long-lasting character. In truth, the first Egyptian cities meet most of those conditions. Pre-urban cities appeared in Egypt long after they had emerged in Mesopotamia. If Jarmo was founded around 6750 BC, in Egypt, Fayun is thought to have been founded in 4400 BC and Meride, in 4300 BC. However, urban cities appear in Egypt and in Mesopotamia almost at the same time. In Mesopotamia, the first “urban” city, Eridu, was born between 3500 BC and 3200 BC, while, in Egypt, Memphis is considered to have been a real “urban” city by 3100 BC. The faster evolution observed in Egypt can be explained by the fact that agriculture started later in Egypt (it is well accepted that it started in Egypt in the sixth millennium BC, while it had started around 8500 BC in Mesopotamia). But agriculture developed much faster in Egypt thanks to the arrival of the Mesopotamian domesticated vegetal species, which provoked an acceleration of the development of agriculture that, in its turn, favored a rapid polarization of populations. In the same way the first Egyptian cities differed from the first Mesopotamian cities because of their more agricultural character, and their absence of fortifications, the first Egyptian urban system also profoundly

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dif fered from the first Mesopotamian urban system. Very early, the Mesopotamian city-states were involved in trade, and the development of their urban system was determined by commercial imperatives, while, in Egypt, the existence of a strong central authority, the relative withdrawal of the economy into itself, and the predominance of agriculture over trade favored the development of a centralized and very hierarchical urban system. In theoretical terms, as will be explained at the end of this chapter, it can be said that the Mesopotamian urban system conformed to the theory of “network systems” whereas the Egyptian one corresponded to a “central place” scheme. Thus, from the very beginning, Braudel’s scheme developed with the emergence of a center specialized in trade and located in Mesopotamia, and of a semiperiphery more agriculture-oriented including Egypt, which was the very first “territorial state” (according to Braudel’s terminology) the world had known. While in Mesopotamia city-states predominated, and were commercially and militarily competing with each other, Egyptian cities played the role of relays of the central power, and were specialized in agriculture and administration in conformity with the “central place” scheme. Many factors explain the fact that the center of the new urban network developed in Mesopotamia instead of Egypt. First, agriculture appeared in Mesopotamia before it did in Egypt. Second, the interaction that existed between the Euphrates and the Tigris had no equivalent in Egypt, since the Nile is the only important African river north of the Sahara desert. Third, because of the complexity of the Nile delta, the link between the river and Mediterranean Sea was, then, much weaker than the link between Sumer and the Persian Gulf, which represented a major commercial handicap for Egypt. As will be observed in other cases, rivers that end with a delta bear more navigation problems than those, like the Euphrates and Tigris, which run into estuaries. It is the location rationale characteristic of deltas which, to a great extent, explains that, at the head of the Nile’s delta, was founded around 3100 BC one of the greatest cities of the ancient world, Memphis. That city was located on the west bank of the Nile, south of the Nile Delta and 35 kilometers south of present Cairo. Capital of Egypt from about 2686 to 2160 BC, Memphis can be considered as the very first capital of united Egypt. Curiously enough, today, Memphis is better known as a necropolis than a metropolis. It is the city of the famous pyramids of Giza (Cheops-Khufu, Chephren, and Mycerinus, built around 2600 BC) and of the Great Sphinx. This is another illustration that the old Egyptian cities originally differed from the Mesopotamian cities. They were royal cities very preoccupied with death and the beyond, while the Mesopotamian cities were trade-oriented city-states more inclined to allow the living to pray gods than to bury the dead.

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Memphis was founded as a royal, administrative and military residence. It was not located directly on the Nile, but a canal eventually connected it with the river, and allowed it to become an important commercial center. Memphis’ location close to the Nile River, upstream from the delta, was central. It allowed easy access to the two main parts of Egypt, the delta and the Upper Nile region where Thebes (not to be confused with the Greek Thebes, the main city of the Boeotia, which was also a very important city) was located. According to the tradition, Memphis was founded by Menes, the first pharaoh of the first of the 32 dynasties of Ancient Egypt, the one who united the two prehistoric kingdoms of Upper and Lower Egypt. The city was located at the junction of the two formerly separated kingdoms. When the capital moved to Thebes, thanks to its location Memphis remained a major city. It progressively developed into a craft center, almost an industrial site with a shipyard, and a major trade center. It even became a cosmopolitan city with “ethnic” quarters inhabited by Hittites, Carians (both of Indo-European origin and from Anatolia, in present Turkey) or Phoenicians (of Semitic origin). Thebes became the capital of Egypt in 2040 BC, when the governors of Thebes united Egypt under their rule, and founded the eleventh dynasty. It is not clear how long Thebes existed before it became the capital of Egypt. Its earliest surviving monuments date from about 2100 BC. It is not impossible that Thebes was one millennium younger than Memphis. Thebes is a “river city.” It lies in the Upper Nile region on either side of the river, about 700 kilometers south of Memphis, which is a long distance. Thanks to its status as capital, Thebes emerged as a great political, administrative, and religious city. Its priests played a major role, and its diplomatic activity was considerable. The city had also a commercial and international vocation. It is at Thebes that the Phoenicians created the first deposit banks. Ships were sailing to Thebes from Lower Egypt, the Mediterranean Sea, the Aegean Sea, as well as from Sudan. Unfortunately for Thebes and for Egypt as a whole, because of the numerous falls (cataracts) and because of the difficulty to navigate further upstream, developing economic links with the Nile’s upper basin was quite uneasy. Thebes will forever be remembered as the city of a great queen and three famous pharaohs: Queen Hatshepsut, who reigned from 1503 to 1482 BC, Pharaoh Akhenaton (also named Amenophis or Amenhotep IV), who reigned from 1372 to 1354 BC, Pharaoh Tutankhamen, who reigned from 1361 to 1352 BC, and Pharaoh Ramses II, who reigned from 1304 to 1237 BC. Hatshepsut was most probably the most powerful woman the world had ever known. Three and a half millennia later, the only other woman who has reached a similar level of power may have been Catherine II the Great

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of Russia, who reigned from 1762 to 1796. Akhenaton can be considered as the historical father of monotheism. He officially imposed the cult of Aton, the only sun god, on the whole kingdom of Egypt. Monotheism did not survive Akhenaton in Egypt, but, through Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, it progressively conquered half of humankind. Finding it difficult to institute monotheism in the existing capital of Thebes, Akhenaton founded a new capital, el-’Amarna, about halfway between Memphis and Thebes. Two years after his death, his successor Tutankhamen returned to Thebes and the old faith, and el-’Amarna was abandoned.25 Akhenaton’s wife, Nefertiti, is famous for being one of the most illustrious beauties of all times. Akhenaton was succeeded by his son-in-law Tutankhamen, whose tomb was discovered in 1922, and made him instantly famous. As for Ramses II the Great, he is the best known of all pharaohs. He reigned for 67 years, from 1304 to 1237 BC. That is the second longest reign in Egyptian history (the longest being that of Pharaoh Pepi II, who reigned for 94 years, from 2246 to 2152 BC) as well as second in world history (Louis XIV reigned for 72 years, and comes the third). The upstream movement from Memphis to Thebes culminated with the accession to the throne of two Nubian (also called Kushite) dynasties. The 25th and 26th dynasties included six pharaohs who reigned from 770 to 657 BC, and were Sudano-Ethiopians. The kingdom of Kush was located in modern Sudan. Its capital has been Napata, and later Meroe. A similar upstream movement was often observed through history, for instance, in the cases of the Euphrates, Tigris, Rhône, and St. Lawrence rivers. For millennia, the Nile acted as a topodynamic axis where the dominant trend was southward and upstream. The moving of the capital from Memphis to Thebes was a good illustration of that. The fact that, eventually, the movement was reversed in favor of the Nile delta reflects the fact that moving further upstream led nowhere because of the numerous falls (cataracts) and because of the difficulty to navigate further upstream. One must never forget that the farthest sources of the Nile were just discovered around AD 1862 when John Speke and James Grant reached the Kagera River, which flows into Lake Victoria, discovered by Speke in 1858. In fact, the farthest source of the Kagera was discovered in Burundi, just in 1900, by the German Richard Kandt. That source is the Rukarara River, an affluent of the Nyabarongo, which flows into the Kagera. The beginnings of the history of urbanization were marked by the space-economic competition between three main axes: the “Black Sea-TigrisPersian Gulf” axis, the “Persian Gulf-Euphrates-Mediterranean Sea” axis, and

25.

Anthony Edwin James Morris, op. cit., 27–28.

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the “Mediterranean Sea-Nile” axis. Along the Nile axis, two trends alternated. The southward trend favored the development of economic links with the hearth of Africa, Sudan, and Ethiopia, while the northward trend favored the Nile Delta and the contacts with the Mediterranean world, Mesopotamia, Anatolia, and Greece. It is quite clear that, contrary to the Euphrates axis, the Nile one proved to be in no position to give rise to a topodynamic corridor. Ultimately the northward trend won, and the Nile axis got integrated into the Great Corridor. That welding became obvious when Alexander the Great conquered Egypt and when a Greek dynasty, the Ptolemies, ascended the Pharaonic throne. When, in 30 BC, the two last pharaohs, the Greek Cleopatra VII and the Greco-Roman Ptolemy XV Caesar (son of Cleopatra and Julius Caesar), died, Egypt had become more Mediterranean than African. Actually, Cleopatra Selene, daughter of Mark Antony and Cleopatra, and halfsister of Ptolemy XV Caesar, by her marriage to King Juba II of Mauretania, became queen of Mauretania, that Mediterranean kingdom which corresponds to modern Northern Morocco and Northwestern Algeria. In the struggle for economic power, despite its size, wealth, and considerable assets, the Nile was handicapped by the fact that, upstream, it led to no important commercial network. It was the case four thousand years ago, and it is still the case today. In spite of its majesty, just because of geography, the great Nile could not win the commercial battle against the medium-size rivers that the Euphrates and Tigris are. This did not prevent Memphis and its heir, Cairo, as well as Alexandria from standing, in their own time, among the greatest cities of the world. It must be said that none of those cities lies at more than 635 kilometers from the central axis of the Great Corridor, and that all three succeeded to connect themselves to the Spice Road we shall describe later.

The Strategic Role of the Phoenician Cities In the dynamics of the exchanges between the Tigris, Euphrates, and Nile axes, two commercial poles played a strategic role: the Persian Gulf pole at the end of the Tigris and Euphrates axes, and the Phoenician pole at the junction of the Euphrates and Nile axes. Let us start with the latter, which is the most documented and better known. It is the Phoenician cities that linked the Euphrates, Orontes, and Mediterranean Sea, but also Mesopotamia and Egypt, and developed for the first time the immense economic potential of the Mediterranean Sea (Map 3). With their relatively small population, Phoenicians never considered forming a territorial state, like Egypt or, later, Persia, in the semi-periphery of the Mesopotamian center. They were ever more ambitious.

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epr

Dn

Rhône Po Danube

Marseille

Black Sea Byzantium

Taranto

Troy Thebes Athens

Catania

Mycenes Syracuse

Carthage

Ephesus

Sparta Ugarit Byblos

Mediterranean Sea

Tyre

Alexandria

Nil e

175 km

Map 3 The World of Phoenicians and Greeks

Around 600 BC, Phoenicians are thought to have skirted round the southern extremity of Africa, starting from the Red Sea, two thousand years before Christopher Columbus and Vasco de Gama. Moreover, according to some, they even reached America. Around the Mediterranean Sea and on the Atlantic coast, they created a series of colonies and a commercial network, which, with Carthage, a city they had founded, came close to emerge as the center of a new urbexplosion capable of succeeding the Babylonian one. Among the cities of the extended Phoenician network, let us mention, in the Near East, Ugarit, Byblos, Sidon, Tyre, Berot-Beirut, Acre, Joppa-Jaffa, and Aradus-Ruwad, as well as Carthage and Bizerte in North Africa, Cádiz and Malaga in the south of the Iberian Peninsula, Malta, Palermo in Sicily, and Lisbon on the European Atlantic Coast. To the Phoenician colonies, we must add the numerous colonies of Carthage in Sicily and Spain. In sum, Phoenicians were the first true economic rivals of Mesopotamia although they did their best to keep the closest commercial relations with it. Their rise to economic preeminence led to a rivalry with the Greeks, but, above all, the Romans.

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The origin of Phoenicians goes back to the arrival of their Semitic ancestors from Arabia in the Canaanite and Syrian corridors. Phoenicia and, more generally, Canaan (which constituted the coast of modern Israel, Lebanon, and Syria) are the natural link between Egypt and Mesopotamia, which are separated by three deserts: the Sinai, the Arabic and the Syrian. A look at the topography of the region reveals a lot. Deserts lie at an altitude of more than 500 meters above the sea. The land that is under that threshold constitutes the Fertile Crescent, that fertile and relatively water-abundant area. The Canaanite Corridor is rather narrow, and Phoenicians soon understood that their future lay off the Mediterranean coast in the open sea. Sumerian and Egyptian cities were plain or river cities. The Phoenician ones belonged to a new category: they were maritime cities, the oldest of the history of humankind. Villages appeared in Phoenicia very early, around 6500–6000 BC, on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea. The founding of the village of Ugarit goes back to 6000, and even 6500 BC, that of the village of Byblos to about 5500 BC. The “city” of Byblos was founded around 3300 or 3100 BC, about the same time that Eridu, Ur, Uruk, and Memphis became real “urban cities.” Ugarit developed into an “urban city” around 3000 BC. It could be said that all those cities are from the same “generation.” Sidon and Tyre belong to a much younger generation. The city of Sidon was founded around 1500 BC, and it founded, in its turn, the city of Tyre about 1400 BC. Byblos is probably the oldest continuously inhabited town in the world, the oldest commercial city and the oldest city specialized in overseas trade. Byblos is the first of a very long list of maritime ports that dominated the world. It is the direct ancestor of Constantinople, Venice, Genoa, Antwerp, Amsterdam, London, New York, and Tokyo. It is interesting to note that “sea cities” that are so dominant today did not succeed in becoming the cores of economy worlds (in Braudel’s sense) during the first millennia of urbanization. The first true “sea city” that became the core of an economy world was Constantinople around AD 400, which is extremely recent. Venice was next. Contrary to all the cities mentioned this far, Byblos’ economy was not based on agriculture or trade with its immediate hinterland; it relied on its commercial ties with distant regions. It sent to Egypt mainly cedar and other valuable wood that were lacking in the very dry kingdom of the pharaohs, and it produced for exportation, among other things, glass (as Venice did much later; it is considered that Phoenicians invented glass). It was also used as a simple turntable for the commerce of its greater region. Thus, Byblos imported papyrus from Egypt to re-export to Greece where papyrus was referred to as byblos or byblinos. From there comes the name Bible, “the book made of papyrus.”

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Byblos was the main center of the Canaanite culture, which was completely original compared with the Egyptian or Sumerian cultures. It used Semitic languages and practiced a religion involving sacred prostitution and child sacrifices. The site of Byblos was excavated from 1921 onward and yielded up the oldest inscription that uses the Phoenician alphabet, the probable ancestor of the Greek alphabet. It must be said that the alphabet from Ugarit probably preceded the Phoenician one (both Ugaritic and Phoenician are Semitic languages). Ugaritic was written on clay tablets from left to right, like Latin and Greek, whereas Phoenician was written from right to left, like Hebrew or Arabic. Ugarit often appears to be more a Canaanite than a truly Phoenician city. It had its own language, Ugaritic, whose alphabet is the oldest of the world (the Egyptian alphabetical hieroglyphs put aside). Experts think that Ugaritic used a truly alphabetic, and not simply syllabic, writing system.

UGARIT, A CROSSROADS CITY Culturally, Ugarit was at the geographical center of three of the five sources of writing, that is the Sumerian-Akkadian, the Egyptian, and the Hittite-Aegean ones. It was far from only two sources, the Chinese and the Mesoamerican ones. The texts found in Ugarit also revealed how cosmopolitan the city was. Seven different scripts were used in Ugarit before 1200 BC: Egyptian and Hittite hieroglyphic, as well as Cypro-Minoan, Sumeran, Akkadian, Hurrian, and Ugaritic cuneiform. Even in religion, Ugarit was a source of inspiration. The analysis of the texts of the Ugarit temple revealed a lot about the Old Canaanite mythology. The three main deities of that mythology were El, Asherah of the Sea, and Baal. El became Elohim who is Yahweh, the Bible’s God. Asherah of the Sea was a goddess “mother of gods.” She was El’s consort and by him the mother of 70 gods. The cult of the Virgin Mary “Mother of God” could have indirectly originated from the cult of Asherah. In the Greco-Roman mythology, Asherah became Artemis and Aphrodite in Greece, as well as Diana or Juno in Rome. Finally, Baal, the god of fertility, ended up being the king of the gods. Baal became the Greek god Belos who in turn became Zeus in Greece and Jupiter in Rome. It seems that both the God of Israel and the main god Zeus-Jupiter of the Greek and Latin mythologies originated from Ugarit and the Canaanite mythology. Even the Canaanite habit of sacrificing children can be related to the stories of the sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham (or the sacrifice of Ismael, the Arabs’ ancestor, by Abraham in the Moslem tradition) and of the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross. The discoveries of Ugarit provided evidence that the patriarchal stories in the Bible were not merely transmitted orally, but were based on written documents of Canaanite origin. Thus, the Canaanite mythology appears to be at the origin of both the Greco-Latin mythology and the Biblical current.

The site of Ugarit was strategic. It was located about 45 kilometers to the south of the mouth of the Orontes River in a large artificial mound, about one kilometer from the Mediterranean shore, where Ugarit had its own natural port (now called Minat al-Bayda). The city had a bridge across

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the Nahr Chbayyeb giving access to a road leading to the north and the Orontes River. Another road led to the south across a bridge over the Nahr ed-Delbeh. It seems that this road was the principal commercial link of the city with other Phoenician cities. Ugarit lay at the very junction of the Canaanite and Euphrates-Orontes axes. It is also the place where the northsouth Egyptian and Phoenician axes met with the east-west axis of the Great Corridor. Moreover, the city established a strong link between, on the one hand, Mesopotamia and the Euphrates, and, on the other hand, the Aegean Sea and Greece. Quite younger than Byblos and Ugarit, Sidon and its daughter Tyre exerted a considerable influence. At its peak, Tyre was the most powerful of all the Phoenician cities. Around 814 BC, Tyre founded Carthage, which came to be even more influential. Tyre is a coastal city, but also a “sea island city.” As such, it is the ancestor of a long and glorious list of cities that includes Venice, New York, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Bombay-Mumbai, which are all located on islands close to the coast. Despite its influence, like the other Phoenician cities, Tyre’s population never surpassed fifty thousand, and its area, eighty hectares. Phoenicians’ power never came from their number. From a political point of view, Phoenician cities, which were originally city-states, often dominated by a trading oligarchy, have, like so many commercial cities through history, been submitted to foreign rules. They have been under the influence of the Empire of Ebla and, later, the Empire of Akkad. The Empire of Ebla existed from about 2350 to 2200 BC and is thought to be the very first Asian empire. Ebla lay right at the center of the Syrian Corridor, between the Orontes and Euphrates Rivers. The domination of the Empire of Akkad lasted from about 2250 to 2160 BC. The city of Agade, Akkad’s capital, was located close to the Tigris to the northeast of present day Baghdad, on a site that, surprisingly enough, has not yet been discovered. It was founded around 2300 BC by the great Semitic king Sargon, who overcame the Empire of Ebla. The region of Akkad was located between Sumer, to the south, and Assyria, to the north, in the area where the Euphrates and Tigris rivers come very close to each other. It included Babylon and modern Baghdad. Sargon not only defeated Ebla, but also the rulers of the Sumer region. This is important, since the triumph of Sargon and Akkad led to the diffusion of the Semitic Amorite culture and to the progressive marginalization of the Sumerian one. It must be remembered that Phoenicians were Semites. The Semitic Akkadian language became the language of trade and administration throughout Mesopotamia, which strengthened the links between Mesopotamia and the Phoenician cities. Around 2000 BC, Phoenicia was submitted to Egypt. In 1085 BC, the New Kingdom of Egypt collapsed, and Phoenician cities regained their independence, and Byblos became the foremost city-state of Phoenicia. The domination of Byblos lasted until around

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950 BC, when the rival city of Sidon and its daughter-city, Tyre (which eventually became the capital of the Sidonian kingdom) took over. In 743 BC, the Assyrian Empire conquered Phoenicia, and then succeeded the Babylonian, Persian, Macedonian, and Roman Empires.

The Strategic Role of the Persian Gulf The emergence of the Great Corridor as the dominant commercial axis was favored by the activity of Phoenicians to the west of Mesopotamia, but it was also, to the east, by the dynamism of the Persian Gulf traders whose history is not as well known. Excavations made around the Persian Gulf, among others, in Bahrain, have revealed the existence of Paleolithic and Neolithic sites, as well as commercial cities, which, three thousand years BC, operated between Sumer and the Indus Valley. This fact is very important, and, as will be seen, it will throw a precious light on the beginning of urbanization in the Indus Valley and the emergence of the Asian Corridor. It is clear that the trading links between the Great and Asian Corridors go back very far in time, probably to the very epoch of the birth of the Asian Corridor. Then as today, the islands of Bahrain seem to have served as warehouse for the trade between Sumer and the Indus River, in the same way Byblos did for the commerce between Egypt and Greece or Mesopotamia. Among other things, potteries, whose relics have been excavated, were transiting there. The Arabian city of Gerrha, located to the south of Bahrain, also served as warehouse and point of contact between the maritime routes, and the Arabian caravan trade in which Gerrha’s traders were very active. The exchanged products included cinnamon from India, as well as herbs, myrrh, and incense from Southern Arabia, especially from Yemen and Hadramawt.26 Incense and myrrh are oleoresinous gums obtained from flowering trees that naturally grow in Southern Arabia, on the Hadramawt Plateau. In Antiquity, myrrh and incense were considered, like silk or gold, as luxury goods whose trade over very long distances could be profitable.

The Babylonian Urbexplosion One thousand and five hundred years after the beginning of urbanization, conditions existed for the very first urbexplosion in history to emerge. A center had taken form whose commercial ramifications extended to the west up to the Mediterranean Sea, Egypt, and Greece, and to the east up to the Persian Gulf and the Indus Valley. The Egyptian and Hittite (in Anatolia) 26.

Michel Mollat du Jourdin and Jehan Desanges, Les routes millénaires (Paris : Nathan, 1988), 98–100.

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semi-periphery was also ready to play its role. Among the Tigris, Euphrates and Nile axes, the most central and the most strategically located between the other two, as well as between the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean Sea, was the Euphrates axis. There, a new city, Babylon, succeeded to stand out, among other things, thanks to its relatively central location at a place where the Euphrates and Tigris get very close to each other. The new Babylonian urbexplosion was born around 1800 BC, and dominated for more than a millennium (even if Babylon did not dominate politically all that time). Thanks to the Biblical symbol of the Babel Tower, which is nothing but Babylon’s ziggurat, the cosmopolitan character of the Babylonian metropolis of the new urbexplosion is famous. Babylon has been the first authentic “heterogenetic”27 and cosmopolitan metropolis (Ugarit was cosmopolitan, but not a metropolis), the first “London” or the first “New York” the world has known. Its triumph was preceded by one millennium and a half of Mesopotamian urbanization, by one thousand and five hundred years of research and innovation, as well as building roads, cities, fortresses, ports, irrigation channels, trade networks, and institutions. This urbexplosion would not have been possible if urbanization had not also progressed in the surrounding area, in Egypt, Anatolia, Phoenicia, but also in Greece and the Indus region. The birth of an urbexplosion cannot be an isolated phenomenon. It requires a long gestation and a favorable environment. The gestation of the Babylonian urbexplosion was the longest in history (that of New York’s urbexplosion lasted only two or two and a half centuries). The triumph of the Euphrates-Mediterranean axis over those of the Nile and Tigris was not easy. Its toughest competitor was the Tigris axis oriented towards the Black Sea. Egypt was rich and powerful, but its geographical handicap condemned it to remain, to some extent, a dead end, and disqualified it. In the case of the three axes, the prevailing movement was upstream. In the Nile’s case, that led to unknown lands. For the Euphrates, it led to the Mediterranean Sea, and, in the case of the Tigris, to the Black Sea. It is mainly the superior economic and commercial potential of the Mediterranean Sea, compared with Nubia and the Black Sea, that determined the winner. However, it must be stressed that, at the beginning, the Black Sea region was clearly ahead of the Mediterranean Sea. It has to be reminded that IndoEuropeans originated from the Black Sea region, and domestication of horses, wheel, and boat appeared there before they did anywhere else. It is thanks to horses and wheel vehicles that Indo-European Aryans conquered the Indus Valley and Northern India from 1750 BC, and Indo-European Hyksos princes took over Egypt, from 1730 BC, all that just a few years before the Babylonian urbexplosion prevailed. 27.

Made of heterogeneous groups.

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Babylon’s rise was incredibly fast. Its site is mentioned for the first time around 2500 BC. But Babylon was founded in 1894 BC when the Semitic Amorite king Sumuabum chose it to become the nucleus of his small kingdom. It took Babylon only one century to supplant the Sumerian city-states thanks to the sixth and best-known Amorite king of Babylon, Hammurabi (who reigned between 1792 and 1750 BC). Hammurabi, the author of the famous code, conquered the surrounding city-states and created the first Babylonian Empire that extended, over an area of 400,000 square kilometers, to all of southern Mesopotamia and part of future Assyria, in the Akkad region. Fifty years after Hammurabi’s death, around 1700 BC, Babylon’s population reached 300,000 inhabitants. Babylon was the very first city in the world to cross this threshold. In just two centuries, it had gone from almost nothing to the status of the largest city in the world. The rise of Babylon put an end to the rule of the city-states in Mesopotamia, and gave birth to a “city-empire,” the “first giant city of antiquity.”28 Babylon remained “the center of the world” for more than a millennium. Alexander the Great died in Babylon, in 323 BC, after having made the city the capital of his incredible empire. Babylon’s location partly explains its success. It lay on the Euphrates River (the river having now shifted its course, it no more passes there). Babylonians took advantage of the Euphrates to build numerous canals in and around the city in order to bring water to all sections of the city. Babylon was built on both sides of the river and a bridge was built over the Euphrates. Babylon was a “bridge city” like so many others (as London or Paris). Moreover, its location allowed linking easily the Euphrates and Tigris, since at its site the Euphrates and the Tigris rivers come rather close to one other. Hammurabi’s policy was focused on controlling the Euphrates waters that were so important in an area that depended exclusively on irrigation agriculture. This led him to build a long irrigation canal going from Borsippa, located a little to the south of Babylon, to the Persian Gulf. This canal followed the central circle of the Great Corridor. Hammurabi’s reign marks the launching of the westward trend in the Great Corridor. Thanks to Hammurabi, the core of the Mesopotamian economic development shifted from Sumer and southern Mesopotamia to the northwest. This movement eventually gave birth to the westward topodynamic trend that later led to the Mediterranean Sea. This trend started around 1775 BC. Like most great cities of history, Babylon attracted numerous invaders. But, during more than one thousand years, the grandeur and economic power of Babylon outlived all invasions and conquests. Successively, the Indo-European Hittites, the Kassites (who were neither Semites nor 28.

Paul Bairoch, De Jéricho à Mexico: Villes et économie dans l’histoire (Paris: Gallimard, “Arcades,” 1985), 26–27.

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Indo-Europeans), the Elamites (non Semitic nor Indo-European neighbors of the Sumerians on the Persian side), the Chaldeans, who, like Abraham, were Semites from Aramaean origin, and the Semitic Assyrians took control of the city. In 689 BC, Sennacherib, the Assyrian king who reigned from 704 to 681 BC, ordered the destruction of Babylon. His successors revised that decision and decided to rebuild it. At the death of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal, in 626 BC, a Chaldean leader, Nabopolassar, took control of Babylon and founded the Second Babylonian Empire. Nabopolassar’s son, Nebuchadrezzar II, who reigned from 605 to 562 BC, became the greatest king of Babylon and made the Second Babylonian Empire even more powerful than the first. The first Babylonian Empire had never reached the Mediterranean Sea. At its peak, that Second Empire covered Sumer, northern Mesopotamia, the Syrian Corridor, the Canaanite and Phoenician coast, as well as Palestine, and it exerted a certain suzerainty over Egypt. At that time, Babylon was crossed by two canals and had two boulevards, 24 large avenues, 53 temples and 600 chapels, covering 10,000 hectares (100 square kilometers). Its main ziggurat, that of Etemenanki, the famous Babel Tower, was 90 meters high, and it had a 100-meter-wide base and seven stages. Babylon dominated the urban world till 301 BC, when the Greek King Seleucos I decided to found a new capital named Seleucia not far from Babylon, but on the Tigris, at the end of the royal canal, which went from a site located just to the north of Babylon on the Euphrates up to the Tigris. That decision caused the decline of Babylon. Later, the Parthians, and then the Sasanian Persians established their capital at Ctesiphon, just aside of Seleucia. As for Arabians, they later chose as capital Baghdad, located on the Tigris a little upstream of Ctesiphon and Seleucia. Baghdad lies just 88 kilometers to the northeast of Babylon. As can be seen, in Mesopotamia, the victory of the Euphrates over the Tigris never was total, despite the fact that the triumph of the EuphratesMediterranean Sea axis leaves no doubt. In order to better grasp how tight has been the struggle between the two rivers, it is suitable to look at the period of the Assyrian Empire, which dominated between the first and second Babylonian Empires.

The Assyrians and the Tigris Axis The upriver movement along the Tigris is well illustrated by the succession of the capitals of the Assyrian Empire, which, till the emergence of the Persian Empire, was the greatest the world had seen, even greater than the second Babylonian Empire that succeeded it. At its peak, between about 850 and 626 BC, the Assyrian Empire covered the whole of Mesopotamia, including Sumer, a part of Persia, the entire Syrian Corridor, Canaan, including Phoenicia and Palestine, and the Nile Valley, including the delta and the Nile up to the

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first cataract located about 200 kilometers to the south of Thebes (see Map 4). The Assyrians were the first to control the entire section of the Great Corridor from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean Sea. Their empire had four successive capitals: Ashur, from 1365 to 880 BC, Nimrud (also called Kalakh or Kalkhu), from 880 to 725 BC, Nineveh, from 725 to 614 BC, and Harran after the Assyrian Empire was destroyed by the Babylonians and their allies, the Medes and the Scythians, two Iranian peoples of Indo-European origin. Nineveh lies upstream from Nimrud, which is upriver from Ashur.

Nineveh

Ashur Nimrud

Babylon

The Assyrian Empire in 671 BC

Royal Per sia nR

The New Babylonian Empire from 625 BC to 539 BC

o ad

Babylon Persepolis

1200 km

The Persian Empire around 500 BC

The Empire of Alexander the Great in 323 BC

Map 4 The Assyrian Empire, the New Babylonian Empire, the Persian Empire, and the Empire of Alexander the Great

The uphill movement is interesting since it succeeded to a very long downstream movement along the Black Sea-Tigris axis, which predominated during the period from the emergence of pre-urban cities to the rise of urban cities.

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The Black Sea region has shown dynamism long before the beginning of urbanization. As we have seen, the pre-urban city of Jarmo, located in the upper Tigris basin, was built long before the first urban cities of Southern Mesopotamia, and agriculture developed in the area of Jarmo long before it did in the Sumer region. Thus it is clear that before the emergence of Sumerian urbanization the predominant movement along the Tigris was from north to south, and not the opposite. It is likely that the appearance of the Babylonian urbexplosion greatly contributed to reverse that trend, as illustrated by the fact that the Assyrian kings decided to progressively move their capital to the north, closer to the Black Sea. That evolution bears many characteristics of a typical urbexplosive process. The first relates to the fact that, despite numerous invasions, the Assyrian conquest, and the other conquests that followed, the Babylonian pole continued to dominate economically, and to exert an influence over territories it did not dominate politically. By nature, an urbexplosion transcends political borders. A second characteristic refers to the centrifugal movements caused by the natural expansion of an urbexplosion. The economic dynamism stemming from the center spreads through space, and this brings about the development and annexation by the urbexplosion of territories increasingly remote. Many times through history, such movements have induced transfers of capitals. The transfer of the capital of the Roman Empire from Rome to Constantinople is a good example of this, as is the displacement of the capital of the United States from Philadelphia to Washington during the urbexplosion dominated by New York, or the transfer of the capital of Brazil from Rio de Janeiro to Brasilia during the urbexplosion dominated by São Paulo. It is not impossible that, by moving their capital, the Assyrian kings attempted to flee the economic ascendancy of Babylon. It must be reminded that, though Ashur was the capital of the Assyrian State during 515 years, and Nimrud for 155 years, their population never exceeded 30,000 inhabitants, while Babylon had more than 300,000 inhabitants. Ashur did not lack assets. It was located on the west bank of the Tigris River where it meets one of its affluents. Thanks to the rivers and to high escarpments, Ashur was also a “shelter city.” It was encircled by 4-kilometer-long walls and defended by a strong fortification system. Its port on the Tigris allowed Ashur to exert important commercial functions. Metals were imported from Asia Minor or Armenia, tin from northwestern Iran, and lumber from the west. Thanks to its fertile hinterland, Ashur was also an agricultural city. It was less dependent on irrigation than was the region of Sumer. Despite that, Ashur was no match for the city of Babylon. Nimrud was even better located than Ashur. Strategically situated at the juncture of the Tigris and Great Zab rivers, that city was far enough from Babylon to aspire to free itself from the economic influence of Babylon, all the

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more so since the Tigris and the Great Zab were ideally oriented. The Tigris source points into the direction of the Black Sea, and the Great Zab’s towards the Caspian Sea. Once again, the Assyrian kings were deceived: like Ashur, Nimrud did not succeed to rival with Babylon. It was decided to move the capital even more upstream, this time, to Nineveh. Nineveh is one of the oldest cities in the world. It is estimated that its first settlement goes back to the seventh millennium BC; it was almost as old as Jarmo, which is in the same region. That settlement probably became a preurban city by 3500 BC and an urban city by 3000 BC (Nimrud was founded around 1274 BC, and Ashur, about 2550 BC). Nineveh was made famous by the Bible, which presents Nineveh as the great polytheist city that Yahweh decided to convert by sending it Jonah (“Jonah of the Whale”) who succeeded in this endeavor to his own great surprise. Once the capital of the Assyrian Empire, Nineveh became a much more important city than Ashur or Nimrud. It reached a population of more than 120,000 inhabitants, according to both the Bible and archaeologists. Its location was very favorable. Farther from Babylon than the previous Assyrian capital, Nineveh corresponded to the southernmost ford of the Tigris, situated at the juncture of the Khawsal River and the Tigris. Nineveh was a bridge-city, and an important crossroads between the Tigris and the roads coming from the foothills of Kurdistan and the Orient en route to the Syrian Corridor and the Mediterranean Sea. It is difficult to determine when precisely the famous Silk Road29 between China and the Mediterranean Sea (see Map 5) began to be followed in a systematic way; many historians think that it goes back to Alexander the Great. It is likely that the silk trade on that road actually began at that period. It is estimated that China started to export silk on a regular basis from the third century BC, and that the Silk Road reached its peak between AD 100 and 1500. However, exchanges between the Orient and the Mediterranean Sea started long before that. Anyway, it is sure that, very early, Nineveh has been a strategic point in the east-west trade that followed the linear axis passing through Hecatompylos, Nineveh, and Antioch (Hecatompylos lay to the south of the Caspian Sea, and to the east of the city of Rhagea or Reayy, which gave birth to Tehran; as for Antioch, it was situated close to ancient Ugarit at the mouth of the Orontes River). Despite its major natural advantages, the exceptional power of the Assyrian Empire, and the fact that, in 689 BC, the Assyrian kings razed Babylon to the ground, just to rebuild it nine years later, Nineveh never 29.

The expression “Silk Road” comes from the great German geographer and geologist Ferdinand Paul Wilhelm Freiherr von Richthofen’s book: China, Ergebnisse eigener Reisen und darauf gegründeter Studien, (“China, the Results of My Travels and the Studies Based Thereon”) (Berlin: Reimer, 1877–1885), 5 volumes.

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succeeded to take away the first place to Babylon. In 626 BC, Babylon rose up, and gave birth to the Second Babylonian Empire (see Map 4). Fourteen years later, in 612 BC, that empire overthrew the Assyrian Empire, and its capital, Nineveh, was sacked and burnt down by the Babylonians and their allies, the Medes and the Scythians. It must be said that the overthrow of the Assyrian Empire was made easier by the reputation of an exceptional brutality Assyrians had won through centuries. That reputation gave their defeat all the characteristics of a liberation for the peoples they had so long crushed. Under the Assyrian Empire, defeated enemies were impaled, flayed, or beheaded in great number. Whole populations of conquered cities were flayed alive, and their skins exposed on the walls of the cities. Defeated kings had their lips cut and their eyes gouged out before being put in cages like animals. Mass deportations were the rule in order to denationalize conquered regions. The penal laws were more severe in Assyria than in other countries of the East. Death penalty was common. In Assyria, the social position of women was lower than anywhere in the Near East. The fall of Nineveh marked the end of the Assyrian attempt to counter the domination of the Babylonian urbexplosion. Urbexplosions constitute macro-structures characterized by a great inertia. Wars, revolutions, invasions, migrations, the intermixing of races, and empires rarely change their evolution. Urbexplosions transcend races, religions, languages, cultures, and political borders. The Assyrian assault against the Babylonian urbexplosion showed it for the first time in history. The victory of the Second Babylonian Empire consecrated the definitive triumph of the Euphrates axis over those of the Tigris and Nile. From that epoch till today, the ascendancy of the Great Corridor west of the Persian Gulf will only be truly challenged three times: first, around 370 BC, with the invasion of the Huns coming from the MongoloAmerican Corridor; second, from 1241, with the Mongol invasion arriving from the same corridor, and, third, from about AD 1825, when the modern Mongolo-American Corridor progressively rose to power thanks to the building of railways.

The Expansion of the Babylonian Urbexplosion One of the characteristics of urbexplosive processes consists in their ability to reorganize the surrounding economic reality. An urban system that metamorphoses in urbexplosion expands in all directions by creating new cities and, above all, extending its domination over the cities and urban networks it annexes and integrates in the same way a growing metropolis annexes and integrates progressively the neighboring smaller cities. This is what happened with the Babylonian urbexplosion to the north, the south, the east as well as the west. If the preparation of the emergence of a first urbexplosion

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in Mesopotamia took a millennium and a half, the rise of Babylon to the status of dominating metropolis was very rapid, and the expansion process followed. About 1600 BC, two centuries after the ascension of Babylon, the phase of expansion started. To the north, the integration of the Hittite Empire to the economic world dominated by Babylon began in a strange way, namely by a raid of the Indo-European Hittites on Babylon. Very often through history, a similar scenario occurred. The most classical example may be that of the Viking Varangians who, after raiding Constantinople without success, converted to Byzantine Orthodoxy and laid the foundations of Russia. The Hittite raid on Babylon took place in 1595 BC. Still rather barbarian, after their incursion in Mesopotamia, Hittites chose to return to their territory in central Anatolia where they created a powerful empire very influenced by the Mesopotamian culture. Hattusa, the Hittite capital, had been founded around 2350 BC, and the Hittites took control of it later, about 2100 BC, when they arrived in Anatolia from the north, probably from the present territory of Ukraine. They chose Hattusa as their capital around 1640 BC. Hattusa (called later Bogazköy and now Bogazkale) was located between the Black and Mediterranean seas, but closer to the Black Sea, in Anatolia, about 325 kilometers northeast of Çatalhöyuk and about 150 kilometers east of modern Ankara, Turkey’s capital. It was a “bridge city” located at the point of confluence of the Kizlarkaya and Buyukkaya rivers. Hattusa lay on the southwest side of the gorge of the Buyukkaya River, which is an affluent of the Kizil (or Halys) River that flows into the Black Sea. The hearth of the Hittite territory was then in the basin of the Black Sea. However, the Hittite Empire expanded towards the central axis of the Great Corridor, and not towards the Black Sea. At its apogee, during the Old Hittite Kingdom (in the 16th and 15th centuries BC) and the Hittite Empire (in the 14th and 13th centuries BC), the Hittite State even took control of the Syrian Corridor, the Orontes River, the city of Ugarit, and a part of Mesopotamia, all that without ever reaching the Black Sea. Over that vast territory, the Hittite sovereigns established a territorial state similar to the Egyptian one with whom they actually fostered close relations after a series of confrontations. The main clash between the Hittite and Egyptian empires came in 1288 BC at Kadesh on the Orontes River in Syria, in one of the greatest battles of the ancient world. Pharaoh Ramses II faced the Hittite king Muwatalli, who reigned from about 1305 to 1282 BC. Ramses II claimed victory, but the result of the battle was probably indecisive. After the death of Muwatalli, under King Hattushili III, who reigned from about 1275 to 1250 BC, a peace treaty was concluded between the Hittites and the Egyptians that resulted in dynastic marriages between the two royal families.

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Militarily powerful, the Hittites were, however, in the economic sphere of influence of the Babylonian urbexplosion. The tablets found in Hattusa have revealed that the Hittite Empire had intensive relations with Mesopotamia and that it became quite integrated with the economic system dominated by Babylon to which it provided Anatolian metals, especially copper, and bronze, its main staple commercial metal. The Hittite Empire survived the occupation of Hattusa around 1191 BC by the Indo-European Peoples of the Sea, specifically the Phrygians. The Syrian and Cilician parts of the empire became the Neo-Hittite Empire (that succeeded the Old Hittite Kingdom and the Hittite Empire) while Hattusa was becoming a Phrygian city. The NeoHittite Empire lasted for five centuries, until the Semitic Assyrian conquest of 710 BC. Thereafter, the Lydians, the Persians, and the Greeks of Alexander the Great (who were all Indo-Europeans) successively occupied the territory of the Hittites. Despite all those changes of allegiance, Anatolia continued to belong to the economic world dominated by Babylon. To the south of the Hittite country, the region of Damascus, which gave birth to Syria, experienced a similar evolution. That region occupied by the Semitic Aramaeans actually constitutes the hinterland of Phoenicia. The city of Damascus is only 80 kilometers from the Phoenician coast. It appeared in history as late as 1480 BC. It was listed under the name of “Dimashqa” in some hieroglyphic tablets of Tell el-Amarna in Egypt as one of the cities reconquered by Pharaoh Thutmose III. Damascus is separated from the Mediterranean Sea by the Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon mountain ranges, which cut off the moisture-laden winds, and make Damascus’ region a rather desert area. The city is located on the Barada River at the point where it emerges from its canyon before losing itself in the desert. The river waters a fertile alluvial plain that extends about 20 kilometers eastward. In fact, Damascus is an oasis close to the sea. The oasis made Damascus possible, but its development was linked to desert caravan routes. Damascus was a very important crossroads of the Near East caravan routes.30 To a large extent, that was due to the fact that Damascus lay on the most direct path from Babylon to the Mediterranean Sea and the great Phoenician cities of Byblos, Sidon, Tyre, and Berot-Beirut. At the origin, the road coming from the Far East passed through Hecatompylos (close to present Tehran) and Nineveh before reaching the Mediterranean Sea at the mouth of the Orontes River. With the rise of Babylon followed by the progressive transformation of that route into the Silk Road, the route branched off to Babylon and, later, to Seleucia, Ctesiphon and Baghdad, and reached the Mediterranean Sea through Damascus (see Map 5).

30.

Michel Mollat du Jourdin and Jehan Desanges, op. cit., 190.

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The Aramaean Kingdom of Damascus formed at about the same time as the Hebrew Kingdom. The first mention of the Semitic Aramaeans occurs in Assyrian inscriptions around 1100 BC. When King David started extending his kingdom, the Aramaeans were also expanding. They had formed a state in the Upper Euphrates basin along the Euphrates and its affluent the Khabur River. That state, called Bit-Adini, extended to areas of Anatolia and Syria, including Damascus. About 1030 BC a coalition of the southern Aramaeans, led by Hadadezer, king of Zobah, in league with the Ammonites, Edomites, and the Aramaeans of Mesopotamia, attacked the Hebrew Kingdom. But it was defeated by King David, who annexed Damascus. About fifty years later, the Aramaean Kingdom expanded once again and recaptured Damascus. An Aramaean, Adad-apal-iddin, came to ascend the Babylonian throne. By about 850 BC, the whole area from Babylon to the Mediterranean Sea was in the hands of the Aramaean tribes known collectively as Kaldu (i.e. the Chaldeans of the Bible, who were Aramaeans inhabiting Chaldea), and the Aramaic language diffused throughout the First Babylonian Empire. During the Second Babylonian Empire, whose territory was much larger than that of the first empire, Chaldeans were still in power, and the Aramaic language diffused through an even larger area. The Semitic Aramaic language is closest to Hebrew and Phoenician, uses the Phoenician alphabet, but bears some similarity to Arabic.

THE CONSECRATION OF ARAMAIC The supreme consecration of the Aramaic language came when, from 539 BC, Persians conquered Damascus , Mesopotamia, Egypt , Syria , Anatolia , and even a part of India. Persians then took a stunning decision that can however be understood in the context of the urbexplosion dominated by Babylon: they adopted Aramaic, and made it the official language of their empire in place of their own Indo-European language. This is how Aramaic came to extend over the whole territory of the Babylonian urbexplosion, from India to the Mediterranean Sea and Egypt. This also explains why Jesus spoke Aramaic, and not Hebrew. The triumph of one dominating language throughout the territory of an urbexplosion or an economy-world is the rule rather than the exception all through history. Under Alexander the Great and his successors, Greek supplanted Aramaic without eliminating it. The agony of Aramaic occurred the day the urbexplosion of Rome overcame the Babylonian one. It is estimated that the dispersal of the Jews by the Romans in AD 135 tolled the knell of Aramaic, which almost totally disappeared with the arrival of Arabic.

The Hebrew Kingdom of Saul, David and Solomon, and the kingdoms of Judah and Israel that succeeded to it in 931 BC more or less endured the same fate as the kingdom of Damascus. Conquered or made vassals successively by the Assyrians, Babylonians, and Persians, they belonged to a relatively minor sub-region of the Babylonian urbexplosion. Jerusalem,

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the Canaanite city captured by David who made it the capital in replacement of Hebron, never was one of the most important cities of the Fertile Crescent.31 Its population has been generally smaller than those of Hattusa or Damascus. Later, during Jesus’ lifetime, Jerusalem was not even the largest city of Judaea. With its 250,000 inhabitants, Caesarea was then two and a half times more populated than Jerusalem. The economic importance of Jerusalem was also relatively minor. Its region was little fertile, and its location was not very strategic even if it allowed to control the north-south route through the central highland of Palestine (that route was much less strategic than the north-south “Road of the Sea” along the Mediterranean Sea). Like Damascus and Jericho, its first settlement was located above a spring in a rather arid area. However, contrary to Damascus, Jerusalem was not a crossroads of caravan routes. The city is rather far from the Mediterranean Sea, as well as the Dead Sea that separates it from Mesopotamia. The closest true river is the Jordan, that has never been a significant commercial axis. Jerusalem’s main advantages came from the fact that it was sufficiently remote and easy to defend, that it belonged to the Canaanite Corridor, which constituted the natural link between Egypt, the Syrian Corridor, and Mesopotamia, and that it had been selected by David as the capital of the Hebrew Kingdom. When David conquered it around 1000 BC, Jerusalem was already about 800 years old. It had been founded by the Canaanites about 550 years before the Hebrews entered the land of Canaan (they did around 1250 BC). Despite its relative marginality, Jerusalem remains the best-known city of the ancient Babylonian urbexplosion. This is due to religion, Jerusalem being the religious center of monotheist Judaism from which originated both Christianity and Islam. However, monotheist Judaism could not be understood setting aside David’s political dream. The first fixed point in the chronology of Judaism comes from the mention of “Israel” on the famous “Israel stela” of Pharaoh Merneptah around 1207 BC. The text of the stela testifies that Israel was then a wandering tribe, not a settled population. Saul founded the Hebrew Kingdom about 1020 BC in the southern part of the land of Canaan. David succeeded him, and reigned approximately from 1004 to 965 BC. First recognized king only by his own tribe, that of Judah, David managed to have himself recognized as king of Israel (Israel being located to the north of Judaea), and to extend his power over a vast territory. Bible specialists estimate today that the first writing of the traditions concerning Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and the twelve tribes of Israel goes back to the very beginning of David’s

31.

Kamil Jamil el Asali (ed.), Jerusalem in History (Essex: Scorpion, 1989).

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reign, when he was only king of Judah, and still had Hebron as capital. 32 It must be said that it is just during Solomon’s reign, in the tenth century BC, that the text of the Bible took on the written form we know. It is in the context of the negotiations aimed at extending the power of David over Israel that the first writer (or writers) of the Bible presented Jacob-Israel as the descendent of Abraham, and the father of the twelve tribes of Israel over which David aspired to reign. By making all the inhabitants of Judah and Israel, and all the members of the twelve tribes of Israel the common heirs of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, David based his power on solid ideological foundations. The Genesis story and the transfer of the Hebrew capital from Hebron to Jerusalem were the most concrete expressions of that founding stand. However, the unity of the Hebrew Kingdom did not outlive Solomon. The geographical vulnerability of Judaea-Palestine, stuck between Egypt and Mesopotamia, surely greatly contributed to the emergence in that region of a religious current marked by the political weakness of the Jews. In the whole history of the Hebrew people, Judaea-Palestine experienced unity under a total Jewish sovereignty just under David and Solomon, that is, for about seventy years, from 1000 to 931 BC approximately. The rest of the time, the Hebrew people has been divided, most of the time dominated, and, three times, under the Egyptian, Assyrian, and Babylonian rules, enslaved or deported. A part of the Jewish people stayed in Egypt for about 500 years, from 1725 to 1230 BC, and, during much of that period, Jews were reduced to slavery. In 721 BC, the Assyrians deported three quarters of the Jewish population to the east where they were dispersed to such a point that they ended up being assimilated by the neighboring inhabitants. Finally, the captivity of the Judaeans in Babylon began in 586, and it ended in 539 BC. This history made of contrasts and suffering nurtured the religious fervor and gave Judaism an intensity and an interiority that polytheism never attained. The long gestation of monotheism within the Canaanite Corridor gave it a remarkable strength, and, eventually, the proximity of the Great Corridor favored its diffusion throughout the world, to a great extent thanks to Christianity, which expanded mainly to the northwest, later thanks to Islam, which mainly spread to the east, and, finally, thanks to the Jewish Diaspora. It must be noted that the dispersion of the Jews throughout the world, which 32.

See George E. Mendenhall, “The Nature and Purpose of the Abraham Narratives,” in Ancient Israelite Religion: Essay in Honor of Frank Moore Cross, Patrick D. Miller (ed.) (Philadelphia : Fortress, 1987), 337–356, and Moshe Weinfeld, “The Promise to the Patriarchs and its Realization: An Analysis of Fundation Stories,” in Society and Economy in the Eastern Mediterranean (c. 1500–1000 BC), ed. Michael Heltzer and Edward Lipinski (Leuven: Peeters, 1988), 353–369.

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goes back to the Exile at Babylon and even before, took an unprecedented dimension after the siege by Titus and destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70, which marked the end of the Jewish State for almost two thousand years. The dispersion was accentuated by the Roman conquest of the Massada fortress in AD 73 and, above all, the order denying all Jews access to Jerusalem given by Emperor Hadrian in AD 135. To the south of the Hebrew country, the expansion process of the Babylonian urbexplosion has also absorbed Arabia and its vast desert zones. Arabia, the Semites’ homeland, was, at the origin, a rather wild region, inhabited by nomads, clearly backward compared with Egypt or Mesopotamia. Progressively, the influence of Mesopotamia fostered economic development in the region. Two main caravan routes were created to link the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean Sea and Nile through the Arabic Peninsula. The first one went from the common mouth of the Euphrates and Tigris (that is, the Shatt-al-’Arab) to the port of Gaza, south of Judaea, while passing through Petra. The second one, somewhat parallel to the first and a little to the south, linked the port of Gerrha, located to the south of Bahrain on the Persian Gulf, to the Egyptian city of Memphis, while passing through Riyadh, Medina, and also, occasionally, Petra. As we see, Petra was a meeting point between the two routes. That city developed lately. It was founded just in 500 BC, at a time when the Babylonian urbexplosion was at its peak. Petra was built in the middle of the desert on a well-protected terrace, pierced from east to west by the Valley of Moses (Wadi Musa). Its site was approached by a narrow east-west gorge (called Es-Sik) that was easy to defend. Rather rapidly, Petra became an important staging post and entrepôt on the two routes linking the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean Sea and Nile, but also on the Spice Road going from India to Egypt through Arabia, passing through Mecca and Medina. Thanks to its proximity to the port of Gaza, it ended up being a key center for the trade between the Orient and Egypt, but also the Mediterranean Sea. With Damascus, Petra must be counted among the first great commercial cities that are strictly non-maritime. The Arabic Peninsula became a turntable of the trade issued from the Babylonian urbexplosion. Caravans conveyed cinnamon coming from India, myrrh and incense from Yemen, Hadramawt, Southeastern Egypt, and Lybia, gold and fragrant herbs from the Horn of Africa, and spices from Southern India. It must be said that the caravan route coming from the south of Arabia and going to Petra supplanted the maritime route of the Red Sea, which had become, from the second millennium BC, a pirates’ den. The rich kingdom of the Arab Nabataean tribe was created in 312 BC, and its capital was Petra. That kingdom succeeded to benefit altogether from the route of Orient, which had become the Silk Road, the Incense Road

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dominated to the south by the Sabaeans, and the Spice Road originating from India and crossing the Arabic Peninsula. The latter road became so essential for the Mediterranean economy that it eventually led to the discovery of America when conflicts between Islam and Christianity came to interrupt the trading flows. The Nabataean kingdom remained autonomous till 106 AD, when Emperor Trajan annexed it to the Roman Empire under the name of Provincia Arabia. To the northeast of the Arabic Peninsula, the maturation and expansion of the Babylonian urbexplosion favored the rise to power of Persia, that territorial state, which, to the northeast, was the counterpart of the Egyptian territorial state located to the southwest. In the case of Persia as in the case of the Assyrian capitals, a centrifugal movement of the capitals is observed, the successive Persian capitals being increasingly far from Eridu, the Sumerian point of origin of the Babylonian urbexplosion. Through its history, Persia-Iran had eight capitals (if we ignore Babylon itself, which was a “winter” capital of the Persian Empire). The oldest was Susa, founded in 3200 BC, capital of the kingdom of Elam, which had a common border with the region of Sumer and was closely tied culturally to Mesopotamia. For a long time, Susa was almost a Mesopotamian city. In fact, it successively belonged to the Akkadian, Gutian, Ur, Assyrian, and Babylonian empires. In 521 BC, Susa became the very first capital of Persia. Succeeded to Susa as capital successively the cities of Pasargadae, Persepolis, Istakhr, which are close to the Persian Gulf, Isfahan, which lies halfway between the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea, Tabriz, Qazvin, and Tehran, which are altogether close to the Caspian Sea. Susa is located at the foot of the Zagros Mountains, which belong to the “chain of mountain ranges” that gave birth to the Great Corridor. It is built on four mounds between the Karkheh River, which flows towards the south and ends up in the plain without ever reaching the Persian Gulf, and the Dez River, which is an affluent of the Karun River that joins the Shatt-al-’Arab River resulting from the merge of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers. In sum, like all the Mesopotamian cities, Susa is situated in the great river basin of the Shatt-al-’Arab. Susa’s hinterland, called Susiana, was rich, well irrigated, hot and fertile. It was originally populated by the Elamites who, contrary to the Medes and the Persians, were not Indo-Europeans, and, contrary to the Aramaeans and the Amorites, were not Semites either. Their origin was closer to that of the ancient Sumerians. The arrival of the IndoEuropean Iranians, that is, the Medes and the Persians, politically disrupted Susa and its region. Under the Achaemenid sovereigns Cyrus II and, later, Darius I, the Persians defeated, in 550 BC, their cousins the Medes who had dominated up to then and, in 539 BC, they conquered the Second Babylonian Empire and

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Babylon itself. In the period that followed, they adopted Aramaic as their official language, and they built an incredible empire that included altogether the ancient empire of the Medes, the ancient Babylonian Empire, the kingdom of Egypt, Lybia, Cilicia (in southeastern Anatolia), the kingdom of Lydia (in western Anatolia), a part of Macedonia and Thrace, as well as various territories going up to the Indus, the Aral Sea, and Caucasus. This huge territory corresponds to the following modern states: Pakistan, Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Turkey, Cyprus, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan, Egypt, and parts of Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, and Libya. The Persian Empire was the first great empire of Antiquity to be perfectly organized from one border to another. From the Danube to the Indus, the Persians imposed a single currency, a single administrative language, and a rigorous organization, while respecting the particularities of each people. The evolution of the territory of the Persian Empire veered with Darius I, who reigned from 522 to 486 BC, after succeeding to Cambyses II and Cyrus II who had reigned respectively from 529 to 522 BC and from 559 to 529 BC. His predecessors had opted for expanding the empire towards the north of Africa. Darius chose to reorient that expansion in the direction of Europe, following the logic of the Great Corridor. This led to attacking the Greeks, who were the closest Europeans. The attack started in Anatolia, where the Greeks were quite present. Darius crossed the Hellespont between Asia and Europe about 516 BC and was the first Persian king to declare war in Europe. The Persian invasion was stopped by the land victory of Marathon and the naval victory of Salamis, won by the Greeks respectively in 49033 and 480 BC. However, despite those victories, a part of Europe and Greece remained under Persian rule. The European option taken by Darius was probably dictated by economic considerations since Greece was already, at that date, a major Mediterranean economic power. In order to keep control of his huge empire, Darius I built, around 500 BC, one of the greatest and most famous roads of Antiquity, the Persian Royal Road, which was also called, later, the Road of the Lydian Kings (see Map 4). That 2,575-kilometer-long road went from Susa, the Persian administrative capital, to Sardis (near modern Izmir), the capital of ancient Lydia in Anatolia (Turkey). It included 111 staging posts where it was possible to sleep and change horses. It normally took 90 days to go from Susa to Sardis, but in a hurry the trip was possible in one week thanks to a very elaborated system of couriers. The Persian Royal Road precisely followed the Great Corridor: Sardis is practically right on the central axis of the Great Corridor while Susa 33.

The victory of Marathon took place on October 11, 490 BC precisely.

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is at a distance of 320 kilometers from it. The masters of the largest empire of that epoch had understood the strategic importance of this axis, and they decided to make it the spinal column of their empire. It is convenient to note that historians think that the Persian Royal Road may have had two secondary branches: one going from Susa to Memphis (Egypt) and the other one, from Susa to Bactra (in modern Afghanistan), the capital of Bactria.34 The Susa-Memphis route was clearly inside the Great Corridor (whose central axis it crossed), while the Susa-Bactra road was somewhat linking the Great and Asian Corridors. Historically, the Persian Royal Road was the first major land infrastructure conceived to thoroughly exploit horse transportation and relay. It was normal for such road to be built by Indo-Europeans since they are the ones who have domesticated horses. That road materialized and reinforced the natural axis of the Great Corridor. It linked Elam and Anatolia, but also indirectly Sumer and Greece. It paved the way for Alexander the Great whose empire almost exactly coincided with the Persian Empire at its climax (see Map 4). It is no exaggeration to say that the empire of Alexander the Great, to a large extent, was built by the Persians.

The Greek Challenge Under the Achaemenids, the Persian Empire had four capitals. Persepolis was the royal capital, Susa, the administrative capital, Hamadan-AgbatanaEcbatana, the capital in Media (the region of the Medes), and Babylon, the winter capital. Of the four, only Babylon was a true economic metropolis. When Alexander the Great conquered the Persian Empire in 334 BC, he chose Babylon as his new capital. He had understood that the First Babylonian Empire, the Assyrian Empire, the Second Babylonian Empire, the Persian Empire, and his own covered a single urban reality, the one of the urbexplosion dominated by Babylon. The Ancients were convinced that cities were destined to die. As de Vries reminds us, “Herodotus was convinced that discontinuity was endemic to the urban world of antiquity.”35 If cities are not eternal, urbexplosions are not either. They age and, eventually, they are doomed to be replaced by younger urbexplosions that are distant enough from the core of the old urbexplosion to progressively free themselves from its domination, and challenge it. The Babylonian urbexplosion was no exception. After a domination of more than one millennium, the main challenge came from its periphery, from Greece. 34. 35.

Michel Mollat du Jourdin and Jehan Desanges, op. cit., 113. Jan de Vries, European Urbanization, 1500–1800 (London and Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), 122.

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As already mentioned, agriculture spread from Mesopotamia to the northwest following primarily the Great Corridor. The cultivation of emmer “triticum” wheat (used to make bread) and barley reached Cyprus and Greece around 6500 BC. Five millennia later, in 1700 BC, while the Babylonian urbexplosion developed, except for the island of Crete, Greece remained an underdeveloped and underurbanized region. The Hellenic populations of Indo-European origin named the Aeolians, the Achaeans, the Ionians, and the Dorians, who formed three distinct linguistic groups (i.e. Aeolian, Ionian, and Dorian), had arrived in Greece just about two centuries before. Greece started to become an economic power only from about 700 BC, that is, one thousand years after the emergence of the Babylonian urbexplosion.36 In itself, this single fact illustrates the gap that existed originally between the economic development of Mesopotamia and that of Greece. At that time, Greeks already knew writing, and they had just invented, during the eighth century BC, the modern alphabet (including both consonants and vowels), but, above all, around 700 BC, they invented coined money, which represented a major improvement over barter. That invention caused a true revolution. The use of coins greatly favored trade and, indirectly, urbanization, since trade is a most important foundation of city growth. In fact, cities themselves started issuing their own coins, and banking activities developed that involved money changing, payment operations for trade and manufacturing, and also consumer credit and public-sector lending. Greeks were also very inventive in the field of urban development, construction, and, especially, port installations, not to mention culture, science, and civic democracy.37 All those signs of dynamism accompanied an exceptional economic effervescence. Greek urbanization relied very little on agriculture, which is not always a prerequisite of urbanization. On the contrary, it seems that it is Greece’s weaknesses in agriculture that favored, altogether, a high level of urbanization (by the standards of the time), the development of small-size cities, the creation of colonies, and commercial aggressiveness. Bairoch wrote: “The Greek cities did in fact remain limited in size. If at its height (around 500–450 BC) Athens may have reached or surpassed a population of 100,000, the other cities rarely had as many people as 40,000. Moreover, as a general rule, as soon as a city approached a population of 20,000–30,000, it decided to found a new city rather than to continue the original city’s development.

36. 37.

Chester G. Starr, The Economic and Social Growth of Early Greece : 800–500 BC (New York: Oxford, 1979). Wycherley, Richard E.. How the Greeks Built Cities (London: Macmillan and New York: Norton, 1962, second edition). This reference is a classic.

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This practice not only reflected the political and ideological underpinnings of Greek civilization, but was also apparently motivated by economic constraints. The quality of the Greek soil permitted only a modest agricultural yield and productivity, while transport costs were relatively high. This meant, in turn, that the cost of urban growth was high, in most instances probably prohibitively high … There is inevitably the problem of transport, a fact already clearly perceived by Aristotle [who] draws up two rules governing the location of the principal city. One concerns the bringing of military aid to all parts of the territory. The other seeks to ensure ‘that the city provides means of transport with a view to importing the fruits of the soil, and also wood for building, and should the need arise, the materials required for whatever kind of manufacture the city may happen to have.’ The problem of acquiring supplies of grain was important to the Greeks because the level of urbanization in Greece was high. Indeed, despite the ecological constraints on urban growth, ancient Greece appears to have been heavily urbanized. Confining myself to the classical Greek period, and basing my estimates on population data available for most of the Greek cities, I find that urban population represented some 15–25% of the total, even when the lower limit defining a city is set at five thousand people. If I reduce the threshold of urbanization it is possible to reach levels as high as 20–30%.”38 Greeks were, so to say, forced into trading. The deficiencies in agriculture incited the Greeks to trade in order to rip profits by exchanging their manufactured goods and some agricultural products like olive oil for grain and other agricultural goods they were unable to produce. By doing so, they competed with Phoenicians and became important traders for the whole of the Mediterranean basin. It is with the rise of urbanization in Greece that the Great Corridor became an important urban axis, after it had prevailed as an agricultural axis, and, later, with the spreading of the Ubaid culture, as a major cultural axis. The appearance and diffusion of urbanization in Greece followed a very clear spatial logic. The first cities were built in Crete, in that part of Greece that is the closest to Egypt, and one of the closest (with Cyprus and Rhodes) to the Syrian Corridor and Mesopotamia. Then, urbanization followed the orientation of the Great Corridor and reached the Corinthian Peninsula, called Peloponnesus or Morea, and the region of Mycenae before extending to the more continental part of Greece. The harbinger signs of urbanization in Crete go back to 4000 BC with the appearance of the settlement of Phaistos, which was both a palace and

38.

Paul Bairoch, op. cit., 107–108. Some historians estimate that the population of Athens reached 150,000 or 160,000 inhabitants, which is much more than Bairoch’s estimate.

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a pre-urban city. However, the urban phenomenon in Crete, the cradle of urbanization in Greece, becomes indisputable just around 1450 BC. Between 2000 BC and that date, Crete was civilized and had important palaces, but the urban dimension of that region could be contested. In the region of Mycenae in the Peloponnesus, the harbinger signs of urbanization appeared around 3000 BC, that is, about one thousand years later than in Crete. At that epoch, Greece was still inhabited by pre-Hellenic populations. The Indo-European Hellenic Achaeans came to Mycenae around 1900 BC. Around 1600 BC, the Achaeans created the rich kingdom of Mycenae and a brilliant civilization, which integrated Pre-Hellenic elements while being influenced by the Minoan civilization of Crete. The Indo-European language of the Achaeans of Mycenae is the most ancient form of the Greek language that has been discovered. Originally, it was written with its own symbols and not with the classical Greek alphabet. For a long time it was thought to be a different language from Greek, but the Mycenean script was finally deciphered in AD 1953 and it became apparent that the Mycenaean language was indeed Greek. It belongs to the Ionian linguistic group. Between 1400 and 1150 BC, Mycenae was the most important city of Greece, and it extended its influence over Crete and the Aegean Sea. The Mycenean trade network extended up to the city of Tanis on the Nile delta in Egypt, to Ugarit and Byblos in Phoenicia and Syria, to Troy and Miletus in Anatolia, and to Cyprus. From Mycenae, the development of Greek urbanization went, inside the Great Corridor, towards the hearth of continental Greece and Anatolia, then towards present Italy and France. The maritime and commercial character of the Greek civilization explains the magnitude of the range of that urbanization. As a general rule, as soon as a Greek city approached a certain threshold of population (about 20,000–30,000 inhabitants), its citizens used to decide to send some of themselves away to found one or several colonies. Most of the time, those colonies were maritime, and they could be very far. The first wave of Greek colonization out of continental Greece began around 750 BC, and it precisely followed the central circle of the Great Corridor in the direction of Cyprus, Anatolia (Homer’s Iliad tells, in epic terms, the conquest by the Myceneans of the city of Troy, in Anatolia), and the Syrian Corridor. So the first colonies were founded along the coast of Anatolia and at Posideion (modern Al Mina), at the mouth of the Orontes River, which is the very entrance of the Syrian Corridor leading to the Euphrates and Mesopotamia. Posideion was the very first Greek colony out of Cyprus and Ionia, which was the Greek part of Anatolia. Before expanding towards present Italy, France and Spain, the Greeks had already built a strong connection between Greece and the Mesopotamian core within the Great Corridor. All that evolution followed a “network system” logic similar to the one that had previously guided Phoenicians.

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What strikes the most about the Greek expansion is the fact that it preceded by about three centuries the apogee of the Greek civilization, which corresponds to the Age of Pericles (483–429 BC). There were already important Greek cities in Anatolia, Italy, Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, France, Spain, and North Africa when Athens reached the top. Moreover, in many fields, the cities of the Greek periphery won fame before their sisters from continental Greece did. In Anatolia, Ephesus was founded around 734 BC by Greeks coming, not from the neighboring Greece, but from the islands of the Ionian Sea that lie between Sicily and the Isthmus of Corinth. Ionians are the ones who invented coined money. By forming an alliance with Sardis, the capital of the kingdom of Lydia and the western terrestrial terminal of the Persian Royal Road, Ephesus established itself as the main maritime terminal of that road. The neighboring Greek city of Miletus, located on the Meander River, was another terminal of the same route; it exerted a certain hegemony over the Black Sea trade and created about fifty commercial entrepôts in the Aegean Sea and Black Sea regions, and between the two. In the beginning, Miletus was ahead of Ephesus and became the most important city of Anatolia. But, in 494 BC, Miletus was captured, sacked and destroyed by the Persians. Then Ephesus supplanted Miletus and became the most important city of Ionia while Miletus remained a strong competitor after having been rebuilt from 479 BC onward according to the plans of Hippodamus of Miletus, the “father of town planning.”39 Ephesus and Miletus became the most important financial centers of Asia Minor, their economic function being basically related to trade and finance. They inherited the tradition of the Babylonian financiers while adding the enhanced power ensuing from the invention of coined money. Their emergence accelerated the westward movement within the Great Corridor of the financial power that the Phoenicians had initiated by competing with the financiers of the heart of the Babylonian urbexplosion. That movement went on for millennia. To the great financial centers of Antiquity, Babylon, Byblos, Ugarit, Miletus, and Ephesus, succeeded later Venice, Genoa, Amsterdam, and London, all those cities being situated close to the central axis of the Great Corridor. West of continental Greece, Syracuse, founded in Sicily by colonists from Corinth the same year as Ephesus, became rapidly an important Mediterranean commercial center. The acme of Syracuse is incarnated by the genius Archimedes (287–212 BC), who defended his city and died on the very 39.

Miletus was not the first planned city, since the Harappan cities were planned. But Hippodamus is the first city planner whose name is known. See Anthony Edwin James Morris, op. cit., 43.

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day the Romans conquered it. Also in Sicily, Catania, founded just five years after Syracuse by Greeks coming from Chalcis (on the island of Euboea in the Aegean Sea), had a fate as brilliant as Syracuse’s. To the south of the Italian boot, Taranto was founded in 706 BC by the “Parthenian Spartans” expelled by the other Spartans in the context of a civil war, and it became the most important Greek city of Magna Graecia, that is, the territory controlled by the Greek colonies of southern Italy. It became one of the main centers of the Pythagorean philosophy. The Greeks had genius in planning their colonial expansion. They established colonies at three of the four most strategic points of the Mediterranean coast. These four points are the Strait of Gibraltar (called the Pillars of Hercules during the Antiquity), the Strait of Bosporus, and the mouths of the two main rivers of the Mediterranean basin, the Nile and the Rhône. Of those four points, the farthest from the Great Corridor and the least important before the discovery of America and Vasco de Gama’s sea route to India was the Strait of Gibraltar. The Greeks founded a colony at each of the three other points: Byzantium on the Bosporus Strait leading to the Black Sea, Marseille at the mouth of the Rhône leading to the interior of Western Europe, and Alexandria at the mouth of the Nile leading to the interior of Africa. Byzantium was founded the first in 660 BC as a colony of Megara, a coastal city situated on the Isthmus of Corinth about 35 kilometers west of Athens. The founding of Byzantium took on particular importance since it allowed Greece to take control of the Grain Route, which went from the Black Sea to the heart of Greece and the other regions of the Mediterranean Sea. The Black Sea region was at that time more developed than the territories of what later became Spain, France, England, and Germany. It produced, among other things, a lot of cereals while Greece lacked them terribly. The region of the Scythians, located to the north of the Black Sea in the Mongolo-American Corridor, possessed particularly rich corn-growing lands. According to Bairoch, Greece probably had to import a quantity of grain sufficient to feed at least 20% to 40% of its urban population.40 The European hinterland of Byzantium, called Thrace, was rich in wood, gold, silver, and arable land producing cereals. Its non-Greek inhabitants had an exceptional reputation as soldiers. Thrace also produced renowned Greek philosophers such as Democritus, Anaxarcus, and Protagoras. Close to the mouth of Rhône, Marseille (Massalia) was founded around 550 BC by Greek mariners from the Ionian city of Phocaea, in Anatolia. This event may be as important as the founding of Byzantium because it marked the opening of the interior of Western Europe (then quite wild) to 40.

Ibid.

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the influence of the Babylon urbexplosion. It heralded the conquest of Gaul by Caesar, 550 years later, and the victory of the Rome urbexplosion over the Babylon one. In order for Rome to overcome Babylon, the interior of Western Europe had to be economically conquered, and the founding of Marseille by the Greeks greatly contributed to this. If Byzantium allowed to take control of the Grain Route, Marseille offered a strategic position with respect to the Pewter and Amber roads. Pewter melted with copper gives bronze, one of the foundations of civilization, which was produced for the first time in Mesopotamia around 2500 BC. Providing the Babylonian urbexplosion with the pewter it required was uneasy. Pewter had to be imported from Asia Minor, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Iran, northwestern Iberian Peninsula, Armorica (present Brittany), or Cornwall (England). This last region was the richest in pewter, and most of its production of pewter ingots was directed towards Gaul. From there, ingots were transported on horseback during thirty days down to the mouth of the Rhône, and then to Marseille.41 Amber, that fossilized resin used in jewelling, began to be traded as early as the fourth millennium BC. Its main source was the Baltic Sea and the Jutland Peninsula. From there, it reached the Mediterranean Sea either through Bohemia, Bavaria, the Alps, and the Po Valley down to Adria (from which the name of the Adriatic Sea originates), located to the north of Po’s mouth, or through the Meuse-Mass, Saône and Rhône rivers down to Marseille.42 It seems that, before the founding of Marseille, pewter and amber reached the Mediterranean Sea mainly through the Alps and the Po Valley while, after the founding of Marseille, the Rhône route was preferred. As for Alexandria, it was founded on the site of the ancient Egyptian town of Rakotis43 by Alexander the Great in 332 BC, a century after the end of the Age of Pericles. Its founding was preceded, about three hundred years before, by the founding, in the Nile Delta, of another Greek city called Naucratis. Like Byzantium, which, under the name of Constantinople, was for many centuries the greatest city in the world, Alexandria is listed among the major cities of the history of humankind. Alexandria, which was planned for Alexander the Great by Dinocrates of Rhodes, instantly became the crossroads of the Mediterranean maritime routes, the Nile traffic, the Herbs Road coming from the Horn of Africa, and the Spice Road, which originated from India, and reached the Mediterranean Sea through Yemen, Mecca, Medina, and Petra or Aila. The remarkable commercial success of the port of Alexandria 41. 42. 43.

Michel Mollat du Jourdin and Jehan Desanges, op. cit., 55–57 and 62. Ibid., 46. Some people pretend that Rakotis was a Phoenician colony. See Anthony Edwin James Morris, op. cit., 30.

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is somewhat surprising. The port was located at the western extremity of the Nile Delta, while the Herbs and Spice roads lay to the east of the Nile. Despite this, Alexandria became the terminal of these roads. The reason for this is related to the characteristics of the Nile Delta, which are such that establishing a port anywhere is uneasy. Alexandria was the best location to build a port in the whole delta region, which allowed it to become the main destination of the Herbs and Spice roads. It is also through Alexandria that Egypt supplied the whole Mediterranean (both western and eastern) basin with papyrus, which remained till the fifth century of our era the most economical and used material for writing texts.44 Alexandria became Athens’ heir thanks to its famous library, his scientists (among them, Eratosthenes who claimed that the Earth was a sphere, and who was the first man to measure the Earth’s circumference and the degree of the tilt of the Earth’s axis, both of his estimates being astonishingly accurate; he measured the Earth’s circumference to within about 300 kilometers), his mathematicians (including Euclid), and his philosophers. The last head of the Alexandria Neoplatonician school was a woman, Hypatia, a great philosopher and the first notable woman in mathematics, whose opposition to Christianity led to her barbarous murder by the Nitrian monks and a fanatical mob of Cyril’s Christian followers in AD 415. Let us leave the periphery of the Greek world to come back to its core successively dominated by three famous cities, Athens, Sparta, and Thebes (the Greek one). Founded in 1581 BC45 in a region inhabited as early as 2800 BC, Athens became a city worthy of interest just about 700 BC. At its acme, between 483 to 429 BC, its population reached only 150,000 inhabitants, that is, only half the peak population of Babylon. Athens is located on and around the Acropolis, that rises 500 feet above sea level. It lies eight kilometers from the Bay of Phaleron, an inlet of the Aegean Sea where Athens’ port, Pireus, is situated. The Acropolis lay in the middle of an arid basin having a very limited agricultural potential, but there were springs around. The strength of Athens came from the security the Acropolis provided and from the very close link with the port of Pireus. A six-kilometer-long walled corridor even linked Athens to its port. At the end of the first Greco-Persian War in 479 BC, thanks to the great politician and naval strategist Themistocles, Athens, a continental city, succeeded to become a first-class maritime force in the region. The very central location of Athens in Greece contributed to its success, but the most important

44. 45.

Henri Pirenne, Mahomet et Charlemagne (Paris : Libraire Félix Alcan and Brussels : Nouvelle société d’édition, 1937), 71–74. When the worship of Athena was established on the Acropolis.

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factor probably was the presence at about 40 kilometers southeast of Athens of the very rich silver and lead mines of the Lavrion (or Laurium) region. In 483 BC, Themistocles convinced the Athenians to exploit the newly discovered Maronaea silver veins of Lavrion to finance the construction of the large fleet of 200 triremes that then defeated the Persians at Salamis. The Laureot Owls, Athenian silver coinage attributed to the mines, were circulated throughout the classical world and provided Athens with almost a monetary monopoly over the Greek world. The ascendancy acquired by Athens over the whole Greek world allowed it to benefit from the incredible network the Greeks had built all around the Mediterranean Sea. This was done in the commercial field, but also to a great extent in the intellectual sphere. Athens’ most famous philosophers Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Zeno, and Epicurus were the spiritual heirs of numerous philosophers from the Greek Diaspora, and some of them, like Aristotle, Zeno, and Epicurus, were stemming from the Diaspora. This debt of gratitude to the Diaspora existed also for the authors who brought fame to Athens’ culture like Pindar, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Menander, Aristophanes, Isocrates, Thucydides, and Xenophon, as well as sculptors such as Phidias and Praxiteles or architects like Ictinus and Callicrates.46 Sparta, the great rival of Athens, was founded by the Dorians long after Athens, around 820 BC. In 404 BC, at the end of the Peloponnesian Wars started in 431 BC, Sparta succeeded in replacing Athens as the most powerful city of Greece. Sparta probably never exceeded 60,000 inhabitants, which is much less than the population of 150,000 of ancient Athens at its climax. Economically, Sparta never was a Mediterranean power. Located on the right bank of the Eurotas River, in the southern part of the Peloponnesus, the city lay about 25 kilometers from the closest port, in the middle of an agricultural plain surrounded with mountains. Everything opposed Athens and Sparta. While Athens gave birth to democracy, Sparta was so fond of monarchy that it had two kings and two dynasties, the Eurypontids and the Agiads. The Spartan ruling class devoted itself to war and diplomacy, deliberately neglecting the arts, philosophy, and literature Athens so adored. Athens was a walled city, which extended its walls as far as Pireus, while Sparta took pride in the fact that it was not encircled with walls, and claimed that “its men were its walls.” Athens has left marvelous ruins, whereas none of Sparta’s buildings or monuments survived in the memory of humankind.

46.

In 86 BC, the Roman general Sulla razed Athens. Athens was rebuilt, and regained her cultural leadership in the Mediterranean world. In 267 AD, the Goths and Heruli devastated the city, which was rebuilt. In 1461, it fell to the Turks. In the 1830s Athens was re-established as the Greek capital after the War of Independence against the Turks.

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The strength of Sparta came essentially from the courage and endurance of its soldiers. Spartans made a cult of virility and war spirit. Tyrtaeus, the only renowned Spartan poet, who died around 650 BC, devoted his life to celebrating the glory of dying for Sparta. During forty-five years, from 404 to 371 BC, and from 362 to 350 BC Sparta dominated Greece. Between those two periods, Thebes, a city so old that it is almost impossible to determine the period of its founding, had its hour of glory during nine years thanks to the naval victory of Leuctra won in 371 BC by the Theban Epaminondas against the Spartan fleet, four years after Thebes had defeated Sparta at the battle of Tegyra, where Sparta had lost a battle for the first time in its history. Three distinct Indo-European linguistic groups had invaded Ancient Greece: the Dorians, the Ionians, and the Aeolians (including the Achaeans). Athens was the main Ionian city. Argos, Sparta, and Corinth were the main Dorian cities, and Thebes was the principal Aeolian city. Thebes was located in Boeotia at the strategic crossroads between the “Aeolian” road coming from the northwest, from Delphi, Phocis, and the most continental part of Greece, the “Ionian” road going to the southeast, to Athens, and the “Dorian” road going to the southwest, to the Peloponnesus, to Corinth, Argos, and Sparta. Moreover, it was situated on a low ridge dividing the surrounding fertile plain. Its location made it a natural commercial and agricultural city, as well as a natural intermediary to make peace between the various protagonists of Greek struggles. Unfortunately, the death of Epaminondas in 362 BC allowed Sparta to recover the leadership, though not for long. Around 350 BC, King Philip II of Macedonia, father of Alexander the Great, started imposing his rule over an increasingly large part of Greece. However, Sparta remained strong enough to resist the Macedonian expansion. It is the only Greek city the Macedonians never conquered nor dominated. The dissensions between the Greek cities played into their enemies’ hands throughout the Diaspora. Persia gave its support alternatively to Athens and to Sparta. The Greek Diaspora became a battlefield. After Athens’ attack on Syracuse and the destruction by the Syracusans of the Athenian fleet in 413 BC, Carthage invaded the Greek part of Sicily. Syracuse resisted and counterattacked, but, ultimately, Rome benefited from the struggle. At the end of the 3rd century BC, Rome had the complete control over southern Italy and Sicily, including Syracuse. Similarly, the conflicts between Sparta and Athens allowed Persia to extend its domination over the Greek cities of Ionia. Between 338 and 323 BC, Philip and his son Alexander the Great held in their hands the destiny of the Greek world. After having established their domination over the major part of Greece, they had the choice between turning their back on the past by pursuing the expansion towards Western Europe, or taking the control of the aging Babylonian urbexplosion. Alexander

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the Great chose that second option, and conquered the Persian Empire, added to it the major part of Greece that the Persians has never succeeded to conquer, went beyond the limits of the Persian Empire towards India, but renounced to extend his empire up to the Caucasus and the Aral Sea, as the Persians had done. By concentrating on conquering the Persian Empire and reaching the Indus River instead of pursuing the northwestward movement, Alexander the Great compromised the chances the Greeks had of giving birth to a Mediterranean empire like the future Roman Empire of which, to a very great extent, they have laid the foundations. At the end, Rome conquered the three strategic points of the Mediterranean Sea the Greeks had controlled. Romans captured Byzantium in 194 BC, Marseille in 49 BC, and Alexandria in 30 BC. And then a new urbexplosion dominated by Rome came to supplant that of Babylon. The Roman Empire was maritime and Mediterranean, while the Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian empires, as well as that of Alexander the Great (surprisingly, the heir of the maritime and Mediterranean power of Greece) were, above all, continental empires from the Levant. The passage from the domination of the Babylonian urbexplosion to the Roman one took about two millennia. As for the topodynamic evolution from Sumer to Rome over a distance of three thousand kilometers within the Great Corridor, it required three and a half millennia. What has been observed along that evolution occurred repeatedly at a pace increasingly accelerated throughout the recent history of humankind. What took two thousand years in Eurasia at the beginning of urbanization was observed during the 19th and 20th centuries over a period of one hundred years or even less. However, the topodynamic processes remained fundamentally the same. In the emergence of new urbexplosions as in the case of the first one, at first, the core is rather fuzzy, and the city that will end up dominating is not determined at the starting point. Many cities are candidates. It is just when the urbexplosion approaches maturity that one of them triumphs. While competitors fight each other, the urbexplosive process develops, and its influence spreads over increasingly vast territories that lie farther and farther from the center. At the climax, the core, the semi-periphery, and the periphery are clearly defined, and the role of each actor seems fixed for eternity, but this is just an illusion. Sooner or later, the embryo of a rival urbexplosion forms at a good distance from the center of the old urbexplosion, at a distance sufficient to allow the new urbexplosion to progressively free itself from the domination of the center, but, at the same time, sufficiently close to that center for the embryo to benefit from the energy that emanates from the old core. The gestation process of the new urbexplosion involves the forming of a fuzzy center and the competition between the candidates to the position of leader. The old urbexplosion notices the emergence of a potential rival and counterattacks.

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However, the very growth of the new urbexplosion weakens the old one until the new one overthrows it. The Babylonian urbexplosion had many children: in Egypt, Phoenicia, Persia, Greece, and Italy. Many potential rivals threatened the domination of the Babylonian urbexplosion. Neither Egypt, despite its rich and powerful state, nor Phoenicia, despite its immense commercial network, nor Persia, despite its numerous military victories, nor Greece, despite its brilliant colonial strategy, its science, and culture, could triumph. Rome did, little after Alexander the Great had had the impression that he had conquered the whole world by taking control of the entire Babylonian urbexplosion. Many factors favored Rome: the westward topodynamic movement within the Great Corridor, the good distance from Babylon, the aging of the Babylonian urbexplosion marked by too high population densities, exhaustion of soils, lost of dynamism, and lack of economic opportunities.

s URBANIZATION IN THE ASIAN CORRIDOR Urbanization had a second original birthplace, east of Mesopotamia, in the Indus Valley, which belongs to the Asian Corridor. If the first Sumerian cities became “urban” around 3200 BC, the first urban cities of the Indus Valley appeared close to one thousand years later, that is, around 2300 BC (about two hundred years after the appearance of the first pre-urban cities in this region). A third probably original birthplace of urbanization lies in China, in the Shaanxi province. It is also situated within the Asian Corridor. It is estimated that urbanization started in China about one thousand years after that of the Indus Valley, that is, around 1250 BC (pre-urban cities probably appeared in China between 2000 and 1500 BC). It has been mentioned that the Sumer region and the Indus Valley have established contacts with each other very early. For instance, the agriculture of Mesopotamian origin reached the Indus Valley around 6500 BC. And it is known that Ur had commercial exchanges with India and the Indus Valley as early as 2350 BC, that is, at the very moment urbanization was taking roots in the Indus Valley. Moreover, it is proven that, after having been introduced into the Indus Valley, the cultivation of Mesopotamian wheat and barley reached the Chinese Loess Plateau to which the Shaanxi province belongs during the second millennium BC. Various indications suggest that Chinese pottery of the Shang dynasty (that reigned from about 1770 to 1050 BC, that is, in the period when urbanization emerged in China) imported various motifs from the Indus Valley and even Mesopotamia.47 One should avoid believing 47.

Igor M. Diakonoff and Philip L. Kohl, Early Antiquity (Chicago and London : The University of Chicago Press, 1991), 408–409.

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that the first three original birthplaces of urbanization were totally isolated from each other and that the first birthplace (the Mesopotamian one) had strictly no influence on the second one, nor the second one on the third one. The relations between Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley naturally go through the Persian Gulf, the Gulf of Oman and the Arabian Sea. As for the relations between the Indus Valley and China, they follow the Asian Corridor and the route that was to become the Silk Road (when silk started to take that route, probably under Alexander the Great; see Map 5). That millennia-old road, which gave form to the northern part of the Asian Corridor, linked the Mediterranean Sea and the Indus Valley to the Chinese Loess Plateau through three main routes: the summer route from Samarkand to KhamiHami passing north of the Tien Shan Mountains through Tokmak and Barkol; the all-season route from Samarkand to Khami-Hami passing between the Tien Shan Mountains and the Tarim Basin through Kokand, Kashgar-Kashi and Turfan; the winter route from Merv-Mary to Kiuchuan-Jiuquan passing to the south of the Tarim Basin through Bactra-Balkh, Tashkurgan, KhotanHotan, and Dunhuang. The three routes converged to the east on the Hexi Corridor of the Gansu region before reaching the Huang He (Yellow River) Basin. From west to east, the main axis of the Silk Road linked the following cities: Antioch (on the Mediterranean Sea), Dura-Europos, Ctesiphon (close to Baghdad), Ecbatana-Hamadan, Rhagae (Tehran), Hecatompylos, Merv-Mary, Bukhara, Samarkand, Kashgar-Kashi, Turfan, Khami-Hami, Anhsi-Anxi, KiuchuanJiuquan, Langzhou, Fengxiang, Xi’an, and Luoyang. All the cities from Antioch to Samarkand belonged to the empire of Alexander the Great, and all the cities from Kashgar-Kashi to Luoyang have belonged to China since the Han dynasty (that is, since about 100 BC). On the 8,000-kilometer-long Silk Road, the Orient exchanged its silk,48 fur, porcelain, ceramics, jade, lapis lazuli, spices, cinnamon, fruit, rhubarb, precious woods, flowers such as ginger, pomegranate, and rose, tea, medicinal plants, as well as bronze and iron objects against Western products like gold, silver, platinum, ivory, precious stones, woolen or cotton cloth, crimson, and glassworks (it must be stressed that China did not produce glass before the fifth century AD). It is also from this road that paper and printing reached the Western world from China. On the Silk Road were also traded the incense and argan oil from Arabia as well as the spices, ivory, pearls, precious stones, and gold from India. Slaves and pretty courtesans were also exchanged. The goods traded on the Silk Road were mainly conveyed by camels, but also by horses and oxen. 48.

China kept the secret of silk production till the 5th century AD, that is, over a period of close to 1,000 years.

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Samarkand

Beijing

Antioch Ai Khanum

Khotan

Tehran Damascus

Baghdad

Changan Lahore

Luoyang

Nanking

Chengdu

330 km

Straight Road Silk Road

Map 5 The Silk Road, the Straight Road, and the Asian Corridor 49

The evolution from Sumer to Rome that has just been described is both similar and different from the one that goes from the Indus Valley to the Chinese Loess Plateau. In both cases, the covered distance approximates three thousand kilometers, and the trajectories go from the Tropic of Cancer (23rd parallel North) to the 43rd parallel North. That being said, major differences exist. In the Mesopotamian case, the Babylonian urbexplosion developed directly from the first urbanization, that of Sumer, while, because of the invasion of the Indo-European Aryans starting around 1750 BC, the urbanization of the Indus Valley aborted and did not transform into any urbexplosion. At the most, it could have contributed to the emergence of the Changan-Xi’an urbexplosion in the Loess Plateau.

The Indus Valley The Harappa civilization culminated between 2100 and 1750 BC. Its hearth was located in the Punjab region of Pakistan, close to the present border with Afghanistan, but its territory extended towards the south and the mouth of 49.

Actually, the so-called “Silk Road” is a complex network linking a very large number of cities and crossroads. Appendix 3 presents a figure which synthesizes the main elements of the Silk Road network. That figure results from a systematic comparison of the many (often quite different) existing maps of the Silk Road.

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the Indus River, and towards the east in present India’s Rajasthan. That civilization was highly urbanized, with several very large cities and an economic system based on agriculture, the raising of livestock, and trade relations with other regions located in Mesopotamia and Arabia. It used its own form of writing, which has yet to be deciphered. So the link between the Harappa urbanization and Mesopotamia, including Sumer, which is well documented, has been established thanks to archaeological as well as literary evidence from Mesopotamian sources only.50 The city that gave its name to the civilization of Harappa was founded around 2300 BC in Punjab. Like the other cities of its civilization and like the Sumerian cities, Harappa was built of burnt and unburnt bricks, and, like the future Chinese cities, it was well planned, Harappan cities being built on a rectangular grid plan. The rectilinear gridiron pattern of land subdivision was introduced in a systematic way for the first time by the Harappan civilization, which can be presented as the mother of town planning.51 Harappa had covered drains, and there were bathrooms in most of its houses, which indicates a strong desire for cleanliness that was probably connected with the concepts of ritual purity and taboo, as well as with ideas of hygiene. Despite this, no building has been discovered at any Harappan site that can with certainty be interpreted as a temple. However, Harappa artifacts have produced much evidence of the cult of the goddess and the bull. Harappa contained a citadel in the middle of the west side, with storehouses and workmen’s quarters to the north. Like the Mesopotamian cities, Harappa and its sister cities were “river cities” and relied on river transportation. Harappa was located on an extensive series of mounds on the left bank of the now dry course of Ravi River, which was an affluent of the Indus River. As in Mesopotamia, Harappan cities were based on transportation innovations. Some of their boats and bullock carts with a framed canopy have been excavated. The Harappan civilization did not know of or at least use horses, but it knew of the wheel and used oxen for transportation purposes. Its ignorance of horses caused its death. The Harappan sedentary civilization with its bullock carts was easy prey for the Aryan mobile invaders on their horse-drawn chariots. The second largest city of the Harappa civilization was Mohenjo-daro, which, in about 2000 BC, had a population of around 30,000–40,000. 50.

51.

Mason Hammond, The City in the Ancient World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972); Elisabeth E.C.L. During Caspers, “Sumer, Coastal Arabia and the Indus Valley in Protoliterate and Early Dynastic Eras: Supporting Evidence for a Cultural Linkage,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 22, 2 (1979): 121–135. Anthony Edwin James Morris, op. cit., 15. The case of the ancient Egyptian templetown of Kahun where the gridiron is found must not be seen as representative of any systematic city planning practice in Ancient Egypt (see ibid., 29).

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The Harappan urbanization and civilization developed along a natural corridor that followed the Indus and Ravi rivers. Harappa was the northern pole of the corridor, while Mohenjo-daro was its southern pole. This corridor is at the origin of the Asian Corridor. Mohenjo-daro was situated on the right bank of the Indus River, about 650 kilometers southwest of Harappa, which it resembled with its fortifications, citadel regular rectangular grid plan, and functioning network of covered sewers. Like Harappa, it was probably founded around 2300 BC, and lasted 550 years until around 1750 BC. Contrary to Harappa, which was built in both raw and burnt bricks, Mohenjo-daro was essentially built in burnt bricks. The whole region of the southern Indus Valley is famous for its brick architecture. Kalibangan, the third most important city of the Indus civilization, is a little younger than the two first ones. The settlement of Kalibangan entered its “urban” phase as late as 2150 to 1900 BC. It was located in the present Indian state of Rajasthan. It occupied a special site between two river basins, that of the Indus and the Ghaggar River. The Ghaggar River originates from northern India in the Siwalik Range and, after 320 kilometers, it joins the now underground Saraswati River that continues southwest and practically disappears in the Great Indian Desert. It is possible that, originally, the Ghaggar River (or Sutlej River) was an affluent of the Indus River or even a separate river parallel to the Indus River, and flowing down to the Arabian Sea.52 In the past, Kalibangan stood on the left bank of the Ghaggar-Sutlej River, but the course of the river has since changed, and its bed is now dry in the Kalibangan region. The plan of Kalibangan follows the grid pattern observed at Harappa and at Mohenjo-daro. Kalibangan’s streets were of regularly controlled widths, the major streets running through, while the minor lanes were sometimes offset, creating different-sized blocks. The citadel of Kalibangan was protected by a massive defensive wall of brick. In Kalibangan, both mud and burnt bricks were used, but burnt bricks were reserved for bathrooms, wells, and drains. Most of the domestic architecture was in mud brick. The Harappa civilization suddenly disappeared when the Aryans invaded India (and present-day Pakistan) between 1750 and 1000 BC. The Aryans seemingly came from present-day Iran through Afghanistan and the important Khyber Pass, which links Kabul in Afghanistan to Peshawar in present-day Pakistan. The Khyber Pass is very close to the city of Harappa, which was one of the first victims of the Aryan invasions. From the region of Harappa, the Aryans went on to the north of present-day India. Among the populations repelled by the invaders were the Dravidians who fled to the south of India where they still constitute the majority. Despite its high level of development, the Indus civilization could not resist the Aryan conquerors 52.

Ibid., 31.

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essentially because, contrary to the Harappans, the Aryans were horsemen and benefited from horse-drawn war chariots. The Aryans were shepherds and stockbreeders, and they put an end to the urban economy of Harappa and its sister cities. Urbanization revived in India a long time later. Allchin and Allchin estimate that urbanization reappeared in India, along the Ganges, during the sixth century BC at the earliest (that is 1,200 years or more after the disappearance of the Harappan civilization),53 especially in the Mauryan (between 320 and 185 BC), Asoka (from 269 to 232 BC), and Gupta (from AD 320 to 550) empires, but the link between the new Indian urbanization and the Harappan one was not obvious at all. It may even be possible that the links between the Harappa civilization and the first Chinese cities were stronger than those between the same civilization and the Indian cities of the later period.

THE DIFFUSION OF DOMESTICATED SPECIES In the case of the Great Corridor, the diffusion of urbanization followed, to a large extent, the route followed, millennia before, by agriculture and, later, by the Ubaid culture. Within the Asian Corridor, some evolutions were also a harbinger of the topodynamic evolution. For instance, it is attested that wheat, barley, cows and bulls, horses, sheep, and goats came very early to China from the Indus Valley and the west, in particular from Mesopotamia, along the Asian Corridor. Those species rapidly became integrated into the agriculture and breeding, which had developed in an autonomous way in northern and, possibly, southern China. It is also admitted that, inside China, the diffusion processes generally followed a north-south axis, which is totally in accordance with the geometry of the Asian Corridor. Most of the time, the diffusion went from the north towards the south, as in the case of the breeding of pigs, dogs, chicken, buffalo, silkworm, duck, and goose, in the case of the cultivation of millet, soya, hemp, citrus fruit, tea, apricot, peach, and pear, but also in the case of writing, the making of bronze, and the setting-up of advanced states. By contrast, rice and the technology of iron melting diffused from the south to the north (Jared Diamond , Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1997, 329–331).

One of the rare relics of the Harappa civilization in more recent India relates to the fact that it seems that the titles of “radja” (“king”) and “maharaja” (“great king”) originate from the Harappan civilization. By contrast, the imprint of the Aryans on modern India is omnipresent. The Aryans are the authors of the famous Veda texts, which are the oldest written sacred texts in the world. They were written in Sanskrit between 1800 and 1200 BC. Those texts are at the origin of Hinduism, which is at the root of Buddhism. With their religion,

53.

Bridget Allchin and Raymond Allchin, Birth of Indian Civilization: India and Pakistan before 500 BC (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968).

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the Aryans also brought a rigid social system based on the religious power of the Brahmans and the division of society into castes. That system still unofficially survives both in Moslem Pakistan and in Hindu India.

The Appearance of Urbanization on the Loess Plateau of China The history of China is long and complex. Moreover, China is the only country of the world crossed by the three topodynamic corridors. It turns out that three phases can be distinguished in the development of that country, and that they are clearly linked to the three topodynamic corridors. The first one, which corresponds to the beginning of urbanization, started around 1100 BC, and most of it took place inside the Asian Corridor. The second phase was related to the opening of China to foreign influences; it began around AD 970, and was marked by the Great Corridor. The third phase began in AD 1896, and it corresponded to the ascent of the Mongolo-American Corridor through the Russian and Japanese influences. It must be added that, before it came to dominate, the Mongolo-American Corridor had played a major role throughout Chinese history, as will be seen. The cradle of urbanization in China is situated on the Loess Plateau, where an important plain is covered with loess, a very fertile wind-deposited silt of periglacial origin transported by wind during the Quaternary Age. That Chinese region is located to the north, in the Huang He (Yellow River) Basin, about 1,200 kilometers from the Yellow Sea and 3,000 kilometers from Harappa. Thanks to the loess of that region, the Huang He carries three times as much silt as the Yangtze River, which itself carries as much silt as the Nile, Amazon and Mississippi altogether. The urbanization that developed in the loess region around 1100 BC probably was original. However, since there can be true urbanization only in a commercial context involving, among other things, long-distance exchanges (such exchanges usually develop “before” the birth of urbanization), it is relevant to ask what long-distance exchanges accompanied the first Chinese urbanization. Since east, north and south of the Loess Plateau, economic development was still primitive around 1250 BC, the hypothesis of the existence of long-distance commercial links with the west, particularly with the Indus Valley and, through it, with Mesopotamia comes to mind. There are good reasons to believe that, indeed, exchanges took place rather early, through the Asian Corridor, between the Loess Plateau and the Indus Valley, considering the diffusion to China of the wheat and barley from Mesopotamia, and the various artistic influences observed in the pottery of the Shang dynasty. On the other hand, the planning of the cities of the Harappan civilization and that of he first Chinese cities are stunningly similar: central axes oriented according to the cardinal points and intersecting at the center of the city,

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rectangular street grid, etc. This must be especially noted since those characteristics are not observed in the case of the Mesopotamian cities. Finally, as already mentioned, from 250 BC, Buddhism conquered China by following the Silk Road that went from the Harappa region to the Loess Plateau.54 This illustrates the very ancient importance of that route, which became even more important during the reign of Emperor Han Wu Ti (140–87 BC), who defeated the Huns, which considerably favored transcontinental trade along the Silk Road. Han Wu Ti was the most famous emperor of the western Han dynasty. Be that as it may, the Chinese urbanization was born on the very fertile Loess Plateau where predominated the cultivation of millet originating from China, and that of wheat and barley originating from Mesopotamia. The first Chinese cities, appeared around 1250 BC, started as ceremonial sites.55 That was the case of Hao Ching, which was the capital of the western Zhou kingdom from 1121 BC, and Xianyang, which became the capital of the emperors of the Qin dynasty in 232 BC, a little before the unification of China in 221 BC. Only progressively did those ceremonial sites acquire an urban character around 1100 BC. Bairoch estimates that “by the fifth century BC, though no city had a population of as much as 200,000 China already had four to six cities with populations in excess of 100,000.”56 The urban system that took form on the Loess Plateau was rather soon dominated by the city of Changan, which would become Xi’an (we shall refer to Changan-Xi’an, where Changan is the ancient name of the city, and Xi’an is the modern version of the same name; the same will be done with all names of Chinese cities; see Map 5). Changan-Xi’an became the second capital of united China, after the neighboring Xianyang. Changan-Xi’an bore the title of capital of China for 527 years, that is, from 206 BC to AD 8 and from AD 589 to 906. Lintong, a little to the north of Changan-Xi’an, was the site of the discovery in AD 1974 of the mausoleum of Shi Huangdi, the first emperor and unifier of China, who died in 210 BC. The mausoleum contained an army of 7,000 warriors made of pottery and equipped with weapons and horses. Changan-Xi’an is located on the fertile loess plain in the basin of the Huang He River, between the Wei River and two of its affluents, the Feng and Chan rivers. It was linked to the three rivers by a canal network. 54.

55.

56.

Buddhism was not the only religion to have spread through the Silk Road. Nestorian Christianity, Christian Monophysite Christianity, Manichaeism , MazdaismMazdakism, Zoroastrianism, Parsiism, and even the Egyptian cult of Osiris entered China through that route. Peter Wheatley, The Pivot of the Four Quarters: A Preliminary Enquiry into the Origins and Character of the Ancient Chinese City (Edinburg: Edinburgh University Press and Chicago: Aldine, 1971). Paul Bairoch, op. cit., 43–44.

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For centuries, Changan-Xi’an was, with Luoyang, the main terminal of the Silk Road. It was also one of the strategic cities of the north-south “Straight Road” that was the spine of the first united Chinese Empire, and led to the Red Basin, Sichuan, and Chengdu, the future capital of the Sichuan province (see Map 5). The Straight Road gave birth to the Indian Silk Road since it led to the Ganges after successively crossing the Yangtze River, the Mekong, which leads to Vietnam, the Salween, which leads to Burma-Myanmar and Thailand, and the Brahmaputra, which shares the same delta as the Ganges. The Red Basin constitutes the second major cradle of urbanization in China. It draws its importance from its great fertility and the fact that it is the site of one of China’s most ancient and successful irrigation systems. That system was created under the Qin dynasty between 221 and 206 BC, and it used half the water of the Min River, an affluent of the Yangtze. The link that was established very early, in the context of the first unification of China, in 221 BC, between the Loess Plateau and the Red Basin favored the emergence of the first Chinese urbexplosion, dominated by Changan-Xi’an and Luoyang up north, on the Loess Plateau of the Shaanxi province, and by Chengdu and Chongqing to the south, in the Red Basin of the Sichuan province. About 100 BC, Changan-Xi’an had a population of 250,000 inhabitants, more than 50 temples and five palaces within a twelve-meter-high and 11.9-kilometerlong wall that surrounded the city. In AD 100, it reached a population of more than 300,000 inhabitants. Luoyang, which was also called Henan-fu, was the second Chinese terminal of the Silk Road. Europeans used to call it Sera Metropolis, which means the metropolis of the Seres, being the people of that region from whose name comes the word “sericulture,” the cultivation of domesticated silk (“serica“ in Latin). Founded around 1125 BC, almost a millennium before Changan-Xi’an, Luoyang was the capital of the Zhou kingdom from 771 to 232 BC, and later the capital of unified China from AD 23 to 220. During that last period, Luoyang became the largest Chinese city. Situated to the east of Changan-Xi’an on a tributary of the Huang He, it was a commercial crossroads because of the river and Silk Road, and a dynamic city, which entered history thanks to Ts’ai Lun, an official attached to the Luoyang Imperial court of China who invented paper there in AD 105. The Chinese kept the secret of the making of paper for 600 years, till 751 when, in Samarkand, Arabs captured Chinese papermakers who revealed their secret, which reached Baghdad and Damascus in 793, and France just around AD 1270.

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THE DIFFUSION OF CHINESE AND BUDDHISM Inside the Asian Corridor, the movements of peoples and languages followed the same main trajectories. Chinese belongs to the family of Sino-Tibetan languages. The region of origin of Chinese is the middle Huang He Basin where lies the Loess Plateau . The diffusion of Chinese occurred from the north to the south, where Miao-Yao, Austroasiatic, Burmese, Thai, Lao, and Tai-Kadai were spoken. Little by little, Chinese drove back to the south those languages, and their populations of Chinese origin, down to Southeast Asia. That movement caused the immense Austronesian expansion, which was one of the biggest population movements of the last 6,000 years. Austronesian people, stemming ultimately from mainland China and Taiwan , colonized the Philippines, Java, and the rest of Indonesia, and then the Malay Peninsula as well as Polynesia and Madagascar. Austronesian languages are spoken today as native languages over more than half of the globe’s span, from Madagascar to Easter Island (Jared Diamond, op. cit., 336). More recently, the diffusion of Buddhism , which accompanied or followed the diffusion of urbanization, followed a very interesting course whose progression can be dated. Buddhism was born in Benares around 525 BC in a cultural context strongly marked by the Aryan Vedas . It became a true religious current around 400 BC. From that date, it spread throughout India and reached China through the northwest along the Great Indian Road (or Indian Silk Road) that went upstream the Ganges and Indus rivers. After having reached Bactra (Baktra Basileion in Greek) and the Hellenistic kingdom of Bactria, which became a Buddhist kingdom around 50 BC, it followed the Silk Road up to China. Let us note that in AD 1964, a Greek city of the kingdom of Bactria, called Ai Khanum and probably founded by Alexander the Great under the name of Alexandria Oxiana, was rediscovered by French archaeologists in Afghanistan, close to Tajikistan and China. That city with its Greek gymnasium, temples, and statues attests a Mediterranean presence in the very neighborhood of China. It is then normal to notice that the Buddhist statues from the beginning of this era that have been found in that region revealed a strong influence of the Greek sculpture. Buddhism entered the present territory of western China around 250 BC through the city of Khotan-Hotan, which was then an Aryan city and not a Chinese one. In 117–115 BC, the Han dynasty conquered an important part of Central Asia by taking control of the Hexi Corridor (in the Gansu Province), which is a little closer to Khotan-Hotan than to Changan-Xi’an and belongs to the Silk Road. This how Buddhism entered, a little reluctantly, in the Chinese Empire. Only two centuries later, around AD 100, did Buddhism become a significant phenomenon in the Chinese world. It had already reached Luoyang around AD 25, as well as Kaifeng and Zhengzhou around AD 50. Finally, it arrived in Nanking-Nanjing around 240. From Khotan-Hotan to Nanking-Nanjing, it had taken about 500 years for Buddhism to cover the distance from the present western border of China to the Yangtze River along the Asian Corridor. The Chinese urban development followed about the same route from the Loess Plateau to southeast China.

In the Red Basin, Chengdu was founded by the Qin dynasty around 300 BC, and it constituted an important communication node with waterways linked to the Yangtze River and its tributary, the T’o River, and overland routes coming from the region of Changan-Xi’an and leading to Tibet, the Yunnan Province (close to Burma-Myanmar), and Vietnam. To the southeast of Chengdu, the city of Chiangzhou, whose name became Chongqing in AD 1188, is older than Chengdu. Its origin is lost in the obscurity of Chinese

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legends. In 316 BC, when the kingdom of Ba was integrated into the Qin Empire, Chongqing became the capital of the region. Its location on a headland at the point of confluence of the Chialing and Yangtze rivers endowed it with both a military and commercial importance. Chongqing constituted and still constitutes the main link between the Red Basin and the Yangtze River. The city was fortified in 250 BC. By AD 200, urbanization was solidly established in China. It can even be said that an urbexplosion was born there since the urban nucleus of the Loess Plateau was spawing tentacles in all directions and conquering an ever vaster territory. Luoyang was then the largest city of China, with a population of about 350,000 inhabitants, slightly more than that of Babylon at its peak. The Chinese Empire was then transforming into a true economy-world. Indeed, the original urbexplosion progressively extended beyond the Loess Plateau and the Red Basin to cover China’s Great Plain, which stretches out to the east of Zhenzhou, from Hangzhou to Peking-Beijing. Gradually, the economy of the Chinese Empire was reaching the dimension and complexity of the only other economy-world that the world knew at that time, that is the Roman Empire.

s THE EMERGENCE OF URBANIZATION IN AMERICA If it is possible, yet unproven, that Mesopotamian urbanization exerted an influence on the rise of urbanization in the Indus Valley, and that the latter may have exerted an influence on the beginning of urbanization in China, there is no doubt that the beginnings of urbanization in America owed nothing to any external influence. This explains the many specificities of that urbanization. In the three Eurasian poles, Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, and China, urbanization developed north of the Tropic of Cancer. Pre-Columbian urbanization took place south of that Tropic. Altogether the Mesopotamia, Indus Valley, and China urbanizations were based on civilizations that knew and used wheel transportation and writing. Pre-Columbian civilizations did not know wheel transportation as they did not use the potter’s wheel (the Amerindians from the Valley of Mexico, predecessors of the Aztec, invented wheeled vehicles with axles for use as toys, but not for transport). As for writing, it was invented independently by the pre-Columbians from the Valley of Mexico before 600 BC. Their invention inspired the Maya who had a well-developed writing based on logograms called glyphs (comparable to the Egyptians’ hieroglyphic system or to Sumerian cuneiform writing). Mesoamerican civilizations from Mexico and Central America had a writing system, but, despite their significant level of urbanization, the Inca had none (if we except their “memorizers” made of knotted cords, called quipus). It must

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be noted that the absence of writing was also a feature of the development of urbanization in sub-Saharan Africa. Bronze, iron and steel played a major role in the development of urban ization in the three Eurasian poles, whereas pre-Columbian civilizations did not know iron and steel, and they used little bronze.57 Their tools and weapons were made of stone, wood or, rarely, bronze. In fact, the mass production of bronze tools was just beginning in the South American Andes in the centuries before AD 1500 and the arrival of Europeans, while it was already established in parts of Eurasia over 4,000 years earlier. Pre-Columbian societies used neither animal traction nor plow. About their only source of energy was human muscular strength. Transportation depended almost exclusively on human beings (except for the llama/alpaca in the Andes). The llama/ alpaca was confined to a small area of the Andes and the adjacent Peruvian Coast. While it was used for meat, wool, hides, and goods transport, it never yielded milk for human consumption, never bore a rider, never pulled a cart or a plow, and never served as a power source or vehicle of warfare.58 Finally, pre-Columbian navigation was very primitive: trade between the New World’s most advanced societies, those of the Andes and Mesoamerica, was carried out by rafts that sailed with the wind.59 Among the other differences, it must be observed that most of the pre-Columbian urbanization was located in mountain ranges at high altitudes, as in the cases of the Inca and Aztec (however, the Maya, who occasionally built cities in the mountains of southern Guatemala, located more frequently in the wooded plains of Yucatan, Belize, and northern Guatemala). In Eurasia, waterways and valleys structured the first poles of urbanization, which were nurtured by trade (including trade over long distances). In the case of the pre-Columbian urbanization, long-distance trade seems not to have played as important a role, probably because of the deficiencies of the transport modes. Based on such observations, most people would be inclined to think that pre-Columbian cities were very primitive. Not only were they not, but they were also more sophisticated than the Mesopotamian cities and even the European cities their conquerors came from. In AD 1500, the great pre-Columbian cities were richer, more populated, and better organized than the Spanish cities. At the time of its conquest by the Spaniards, Tenochtitlan, the future Mexico City, had about 160,000 inhabitants, and it is estimated that around AD 650, the city of Teotihuacan had reached a population of about 57.

58. 59.

In pre-Columbian civilizations, metal technology was either extremely limited or yet to be discovered. See Arthur Street and William Alexander, Metals in the Service of Man (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998). Jared Diamond, op. cit., 355. Ibid., 359.

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100,000 inhabitants. In 1500, the two largest cities of the Iberian Peninsula, Granada and Lisbon, had only about 70,000 inhabitants each.60

Agriculture and Pre-Columbian Pottery Before taking up the history of urbanization in pre-Columbian America, let us have a look at the beginnings of the domestication of animals and plants on that continent. It is thought that America was first inhabited by Mongoloid peoples coming from Asia, through northeastern Siberia, by way of the Bering Strait and Alaska, around 12,000 BC. One thousand years later, they had reached the present center of the United States; then, around 10,000 BC, they had completed their southward migration, and attained Patagonia and the extremity of South America. The migration towards the east and Greenland was slower. Amerindians reached that island just around 2000 BC.61 At the arrival of Europeans, a high proportion of Amerindians lived on hunting, fishing, and semi-nomadic agriculture. However, three important zones of sedentary agriculture existed: Mesoamerica (present Mexico and Guatemala), Peruvian and Ecuadorian Andes, and the Ohio Basin. Agriculture probably developed in those three regions in an independent way around 2500 BC. It is also possible that it did, independently, develop also in Amazonia at about the same period. In the region of the Mexico Valley, agriculture reached a very high level of sophistication. There, irrigation was very developed, and a large number of vegetal species were domesticated, as in the Andes, by the way. In Mesoamerica, three agricultural products clearly dominated: corn, beans, and squash, whereas in the Andes, the three main products were manioc, potatoes, and lima beans. Let us remind the fact that pre-Columbian agriculture gave the world maize (originating from the Maya region), many types of beans, tomato, tobacco (coming from North America), potatoes (originating from Peru; it must be noted that tomato, potatoes and tobacco all belong to the solanaceae family), sweet potatoes, squashes, chili peppers, manioc, cranberry, groundnuts (the word cacahuètes in French comes from the Aztec word for peanuts), avocado, pumpkin, pineapple, sunflower, agave, hevea (and, consequently, rubber), coca (originating from the Andes), vanilla, and cocoa (hence, chocolate; cocoa naturally grows in Central America, and it was first cultivated by the Maya), among other things. America also domesticated animals that did not exist in Eurasia, like turkey, llama, alpaca, and Guinea pig. Four of the twelve species that account for over 80 percent of the modern world’s annual tonnage of all crops come from America. They are corn, which originates from Mesoamerica, potato, manioc, and sweet potato, which all come from

60. 61.

Paul Bairoch, op. cit., 92–93. Jared Diamond, op. cit., 37.

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the Andes. The other blockbusters are wheat and barley (from Mesopotamia), rice (from India), sorghum (from West Africa and Sahel), soybean (from Eastern Asia), sugarcane (from New Guinea), sugar beet (from Europe), and fruit banana (from Southeast Asia and India).62

Teotihuacan Tenochtitlan

Uxmal Palenque Tikal

Chan Chan

Machu Picchu

230 km

Cuzco

Map 6 The Two Pre-Columbian Corridors

The diffusion of agriculture in America was hindered by the geography of the continent. Climate variations and various obstacles such as the undulating morphology of Central America slowed north-south relations down. So, agricultural products of the Andes were scarcely diffused to Mesoamerica, and

62.

Ibid., 132.

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vice versa. The diffusion of pottery allows the formulation of an interesting hypothesis about the existence of pre-Columbian topodynamic corridors (see Map 6). It is believed that the earliest pottery ever found in America came from the border region between Venezuela and Guyana, and dates back to about 4000 BC. The second earliest pottery came from Puerto Hormiga, on the Caribbean Sea in Colombia, close to Panama. It dates back to about 3500 BC. From Puerto Hormiga, it seems that the diffusion of the art of pottery took two different roads. It entered Central America and reached the present area of Mexico City around 2300 BC. But it also went towards the south along the Andes, reaching Valdivia, Ecuador, around 3000 BC (some archaeologists pretend that this site is the oldest in America…), and the region of Chan Chan in northern Peru about 2000 BC. All that seems to indicate that preColumbian civilization started in the northern part of South America and that a diffusion process took place following two main topodynamic corridors; the first towards the Valley of Mexico linking Puerto Hormiga, Kaminaljuyu and Teotihuacan, and the second along the Andes towards Peru and Chile from Puerto Hormiga to Chan Chan, the capital of the Chimú Empire, and Cuzco. It is interesting to note that, in the same way as, in the Northern Corridor, the two development poles of the Mayan region and the Valley of Mexico competed in Mesoamerica, the Chimú region located on the northern coast of Peru, in the Southern Corridor, competed with the Inca Cuzco region located in the interior in southern Peru. The pole that ultimately triumphed when the Europeans arrived to both Mesoamerica and the Andes was the one farthest from Puerto Hormiga and Colombia, that is, the Valley of Mexico and the Cuzco region.

Urbanization in the Northern Pre-Columbian Corridor Reconstructing the history of urbanization in pre-Columbian America is not always easy because of the scarcity of deciphered written documents and the destructions, which ensued from the Spanish conquest. In Mesoamerica, the order of civilizations seems to have been the following. The rise of the first pre-Columbian documented civilization, that of the Olmec who appeared around 2000 BC, culminated between 1200 and 600 BC. Their civilization was pre-urban, and their territory extended from the coastal region of the Gulf of Mexico situated to the east of present Mexico City up to the Acapulco region on the Pacific while passing by the Valley of Mexico. Their zone of origin seems to have been at the extreme south of the Gulf of Mexico in the present state of Tabasco, to the northwest of the future Maya country. The Olmec were perhaps the greatest sculptors of Ancient Mesoamerica, and they invented the calendar and the first Mesoamerican writing, which was hieroglyphic. Their territory, which can be described as the Olmec Corridor and is located where the Gulf of Mexico gets closest to the Pacific, came to canalize the

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relations between the Valley of Mexico to the northwest and the Maya country to the southeast. It is from the Tabasco center that civilization exploded in all directions: towards the northwest in the direction of Teotihuacan, the Valley of Mexico, and El Tajín, towards the southwest in the direction of Oaxaca where the Zapotec and, later, the Mixtec civilizations developed, and, finally, towards the east in the direction of the Maya country. The northward trajectory gave birth to the first pre-Columbian urban civilization, that of Teotihuacan, which generated an immense empire that came to cover the whole Mesoamerica. Teotihuacan lay a little to the northeast of present Mexico City, in the Valley of Teotihuacan, which is an extension of the Valley of Mexico. Teotihuacan’s first settlement goes back to around 450 BC. This settlement became a true city about 400 BC, and a planned metropolis about the beginning of the Christian era. Teotihuacan was planned and divided into quarters by two great avenues that crossed at the center, and the entire city was laid out on a grid plan oriented to these avenues. The Teotihuacan empire reached its acme between AD 450 and 650. Its population at that time reached between 75,000 and 100,000 inhabitants, that is, about half the population of Tenochtitlan-Mexico at the time of the Spanish conquest. Around 750, Teotihuacan was destroyed, but around 900 the Aztec gave a new life to that prestigious city. Teotihuacan has been the only city in the pre-Columbian history to dominate the whole Mesoamerica. Its empire was vaster than the future Aztec Empire, but much smaller than the future Inca Empire. At its acme, it was an economic and commercial metropolis as well as a major manufacturing center whose products (pottery, cylindrical vessels, figurines, jade and obsidian objects) were spread over Mesoamerica thanks to an important pedestrian network made of trails and paths rather than roads. Those exports were exchanged for mainly agricultural imports, but also cocoa, quetzal feathers, shells, jade, and obsidian. In AD 493, Teotihuacan founded a colony called Kaminaljuyu, located to the south of present Guatemala. That colony played a major role in the development of the Maya civilization, which had begun to emerge around AD 200–300. About 650 Teotihuacan was attacked and ransacked by the invading Toltec living about 50 kilometers northwest of Teotihuacan. The city outlived that attack, but its empire progressively crumbled. The Maya civilization somewhat developed in the political shadow of the empire of Teotihuacan since the Maya were not conquerors, and their cities were city-states, which at various periods accepted the suzerainty of Teotihuacan. The pre-urban urbanization of the Maya country goes back very far. The Maya city of Cuello, now in Belize, is thought to have been founded around 2000 BC, about the same time as Babylon (founded around 1900 BC). It is estimated that the classical Maya culture began around AD 200.

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Something is certain: many millennia ago, the Maya, who were living in the plain but not necessarily close to waterways, were mastering irrigation. This is proven by a satellite discovery made in 1980. The presence of a welldeveloped system of irrigation canals was then discovered over a zone covering a total of 14,000 square kilometers. That system supplied water to some 1,250 to 2,500 square kilometers of fields, as well as to cities with large populations like Tikal, which had about fifty thousand inhabitants, or Dzibilchaltun, which had forty thousand or more.63 The Maya civilization has had its ups and downs. After having triumphed and built great cities such as Tikal, Copán and Palenque, for unknown reasons, it declined from 800 BC. Only certain cities such as Xochicalco survived. Around AD 889, the Maya civilization revived, and its renaissance was associated with the founding of new cities, like Uaxactun, a good example of the Puuc style. Around 900, once again for mysterious reasons, the Maya civilization experienced a new decline, and all the Maya cities of the southern plains were abandoned. In 980, the Toltec invaded Yucatán and established their capital in Chichen Itza while preserving the Maya civilization. Around 990 a new Maya renaissance took place with the constitution of a new Maya Empire and the foundation of new cities like Uxmal. About 1200 a new Maya capital was built in Yucatán: Mayapan, which exerted its hegemony till 1441, when the Maya fell into decline. Archaeologists distinguish three Maya zones: the North, which corresponds to Yucatán, the Center, which is the northern part of modern Guatemala called Petén, and the South, which includes the highlands of the Mexican Chiapas region and some of the southern highlands of Guatemala. Uxmal belongs to the North, Tikal to the Center, and Copán to the South. As for Palenque, which is the most beautiful of Maya sites, it is located at the border between the three regions, west of the center, and at the border between the North and South. None of those four major Maya cities lies on the coast or on an important river. From a location point of view, the Maya, Aztec, and Inca cultures had in common a preference for highlands, for mountain sites, and for regions little connected with the seas or even with the main rivers. None of the main cities of these three civilizations can be seen as a significant port. None are on the coast, and none are located on an important river. These were truly urbanized civilizations that ignored wheel transportation and only used very primitive boats in regions where the main mode of transportation was human, without wagons or carts. Moreover, the horse, which originated from America, was not used in pre-Columbian societies. Most of America’s big wild mammals (including its horses, most of its camels, and other species 63.

Richard E.W. Adams, “Swamps, Canals, and the Location of Ancient Maya Cities,” Antiquity, 54, 212 (1980): 206–214.

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likely to have been domesticated had they survived) became extinct about 13,000 years ago.64 As for llama and alpaca, they were unknown north of the Andes. Maya cities were essentially linked by pedestrian networks. Of all the pre-Columbian civilizations, the Maya were the most intellectual: they have been called the “Greeks of the New World.” They were the most advanced in mathematics and astronomy. The Maya writing was the most sophisticated in Central America. Most Classic Maya hieroglyphs are logograms with a mainly ideographic orientation, but, in the Post-Classic period, a well-defined syllabary supplemented or even replaced logograms. The Maya created a calendar system that was partly shared with other Mesoamerican groups but that they perfected into a tool capable of recording important historical and astronomical information.65 The first year of the Maya calendars corresponded to 3113 BC. Curiously enough, this date is very similar to that of the beginning of the Jewish Era, which is supposed to be the year of the Creation, 3761 BC. Only 648 years separate the two dates. In spite of their science, the Maya had no metal technology except that which produced a few gold and copper ornaments. Like the Aztec and the other Mesoamerican peoples, they practiced sacrifice, and even cannibalism on a very large scale, essentially for religious purposes. It is estimated that three million persons have been sacrificed by the Maya through the centuries. Uxmal is much more difficult to reach than either Palenque or Tikal. This may explain why it continued to prosper for a century or so after the decline and abandonment of the southern Maya lowland centers such as Tikal and Palenque. The site of Uxmal is far from any river. It is a dry grass savanna area surrounded with heavy tropical forests. Water was furnished by wells and rain-collecting pools. These pools caused huge problems since they were an ideal site for malarial mosquitoes. Uxmal was a most important ceremonial center, and it is a masterpiece of the Puuc architecture. When the Toltec (coming from the northwest of the Valley of Mexico) or their allies invaded Yucatán about AD 980 and established their capital at Chichen Itza, northeast of Uxmal, the city continued to be occupied and became a member of the political League of Mayapan. About 1450, the League ended, and Uxmal was abandoned. Tikal is the largest and best-known city of the more than 50 known major Maya sites66. It is situated in the central part of the Maya territory.

64. 65. 66.

Jared Diamond, op. cit., 162. The Maya calendar had leap year corrections almost as accurate as those of the present day. Opinions differ as to whether or not the Maya settlements amounted to “cities.” Some authors consider them as being just ceremonial centers buried under an almost unbroken canopy of tropical forest.

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Between AD 480 and 830, Tikal’s population may have exceeded 50,000 inhabitants. Neither Tikal nor any other Maya center shows signs of town planning or neatly laid-out streets. If city planning was lacking in Tikal, public management was, however, good enough to provide water to everyone. Ten large reservoirs, partly or entirely artificial, supplied the scarce drinking water for the residents. The city seems to have been the site of an important urban renewal operation around AD 320, when a well-known “acropolis” was built. In the Early Classic period, from AD 100 to 500, Tikal and Kaminaljuyu, located a little more to the south, were important posts in the trading pedestrian network that Teotihuacan, in the Valley of Mexico, had established in southern Mesoamerica. It must be stressed that the civilization of Teotihuacan was much more urban and trade-oriented than that of the Maya. When Teotihuacan came to decline from 650, Tikal may have somewhat dominated much of the Maya lowlands. The decline of Tikal started about 800. Its population decreased as well as its artistic production. The last dated stele of Tikal is placed at 879 or 889 (Tikal’s oldest stele bears the date of AD 292). Along with the other Mayan centers of the southern lowlands, Tikal was abandoned in the tenth century. Copán lay in the highlands of the southern part of the Maya country, in present western Honduras. It was located on a site that overhangs the Motagua River. Its architecture and sculptures are famous for their baroque-evoking richness and profusion. Palenque, which vies with Copán in the field of architecture, is the most beautiful of Maya sites, located not in a mountain region, but in a flat floodplain in northern Chiapas, to the southwest of Yucatán. When the Maya civilization collapsed for a second time around AD 900, the decline seems to have started in the western region, that of Palenque. By 1000, it is clear that almost all the western and central region of the Maya territory was abandoned, most of its inhabitants having gone elsewhere. The reasons for the Maya decline may be related to invasions from the west, inter-city wars, exhaustion of land fertility due to overcrowding, etc. Nobody knows. The ultimate renaissance of the Maya civilization took place far from Palenque and Tikal, in northern Yucatán, in the region of Uxmal, Chichen Itza and Mayapan. When the Spaniards arrived in Mesoamerica, the Olmec, Zapotec and Mixtec civilizations had been replaced, the Maya civilization had practically disappeared from 1450, and Teotihuacan as well as Tula, the Toltec capital, were held by the Aztec. In 1370, 150 years before the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors, Teotihuacan had been conquered by the Aztec of Tenochtitlan, and it had become an Aztec city. The Aztec are in the same position with respect to the Valley of Mexico and the heart of Mesoamerica as the Semites with respect to Mesopotamia or the Mongols with respect to the Chinese Empire, meaning that there

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were less-developed invaders who succeeded, from the periphery, to take control of the center of a pre-urbexplosion or an urbexplosion. At the acme of Teotihuacan, around AD 600–650, the Aztec were probably absent from the Valley of Mexico. They lived then to the north of the pre-Columbian urban world, they were nomads living from hunting and gathering, and they had a primitive agriculture. Like the Mongols in China or the Germans in the Roman Empire, about AD 1150, they came from the north and progressively invaded the Valley of Mexico where they founded Atzcapotzalco on the shore of the Lake Texcoco (also called Lake Mexliapan), which lay at the center of the Valley of Mexico.67 The Aztec (also named Mexicas) were not the first barbarian invaders of Mesoamerica to come from the north, from present Sonora, Chihuahua, Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado. They had been preceded first by the Toltec and then by the Chichimec. Tenochtitlan,68 the future Mexico City, was founded later, about 1345, on a small island in the middle of Lake Texcoco. Tenochtitlan recognized the suzerainty of Atzcapotzalco, to which it paid a tribute. However, rapidly, Tenochtitlan started to assert itself. It conquered Teotihuacan in 1370, and other conquests were made. About 1420, the ruler of Atzcapotzalco, named Chimalpopoca, attempted to strengthen his domination over various cities including Tenochtitlan. A coalition of the vassal cities was formed, which succeeded in breaking the power of Atzcapotzalco, and Tenochtitlan came out the new ruler of the area. It must be said that, at this time, TenochtitlanMexico had already built the basis of an empire. It had conquered between 400 and 500 states in total. The land conquered by the Aztecs was grouped into 38 provinces. The small island occupied by Tenochtitlan spread out over the surrounding marshes and swamps, and became a place of fountains and gardens. Canals were built, and an extraordinarily intensive system of farming developed that resorted to plant and animal fertilizers, short-cycle fallowing, irrigation, earth and maguey terraces, and stone terracing. The region attained a density of 200 per square kilometer, the highest ever attained in Mesoamerica. At the arrival of the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés, in 1519, Tenochtitlan’s population was somewhere between 150,000 and

67.

68.

The Valley of Mexico lies at 2,150 meters above sea level. It is surrounded with high mountain chains. The great salt Lake Texcoco was fed at the south by two freshwater lagoons, at the northwest by two more, and at the northeast by a sluggish stream, which drained the fertile valley. The area attracted a teeming abundance of wild fowl. During the rainy season thick alluvial deposits, ideal for primitive agriculture, were washed down along the lake shore. Tenochtitlan’s name refers to the Tenochas, a small but warlike group living on islands in Lake Texcoco who became the most successful of a number of competing predatory tribes.

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170,000 inhabitants (some experts even suggest a population of 300,000). The population of its close hinterland was around 500,000 inhabitants, and the 8,000 square kilometers of the Valley of Mexico supported a population of one million and a half persons. The Aztec had a writing system, the Nahualt writing, that combined ideograms, sound symbols and figurative images. Various Aztec “codices” exist that have been made right after the conquest (the latter using both Spanish and Nahualt). They provide a better understanding of the Nahualt writing and Aztec Empire. Among them, the Codex Mendoza, Codex Borbonicus, and Codex Telleriano-Remensis are the best known. From the beginning of the Olmec civilization’s blooming around 1200 BC to the Spanish conquest of Tenochtitlan in AD 1521, 2,700 years elapsed. On the other hand, from the emergence of true urban cities around 400 BC to the conquest, less than 2,000 years had passed. During that period, only two cities, Teotihuacan and Tenochtitlan, really dominated the whole Mesoamerican urban system. It is likely that, at the time of the conquest, an urbexplosion was forming. The urbanized territory of Mesoamerica had then about the same area as Mesopotamia. However, that emerging urbexplosion was probably facing serious deficiencies in terms of mobility and modes of transportation, as well as important lacks in long-distance commercial exchanges, especially with the Inca Empire to the south. That being said, it must be underlined that exchanges effectively existed between Mesoamerica and the Andes before the Spanish period. The incense, twisted ropes made of agave fibers, animal skins, and crystallized fruit from Mesoamerica reached the Inca Empire, while the gold, silver, copper, and metallurgic techniques from the Inca were exported to Mesoamerica.69 Those exchanges remained marginal, and the lack of intensive interactions between the two great pre-Columbian empires partially caused the biological fragility and technological backwardness which facilitated the triumph of the European urban civilizations in America. Such deficiencies explain that Spain has been able to conquer the whole Mesoamerica in just two years (Cortés entered Tenochtitlan as a guest on November 8, 1519, and as a conqueror on August 13, 1521), and, later, the Inca Empire also in just two years with a handful of soldiers.

Urbanization in the Southern Pre-Columbian Corridor Compared with the Mesoamerican urbanization, the Andean urbanization of the Southern pre-Columbian Corridor appears to be late, less sophisticated, but more conquering and more structured. At the time of the arrival of 69.

The Inca were in the Bronze Age when discovered by the Spaniards. Their craftsmen made knives, chisels, axes of a mixture of copper and tin, but these tools were often not hard enough to cut rock.

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the Spaniards, the Inca Empire was much vaster than the Aztec Empire, but the latter was more populated than the former. The population of North America north of the Rio Grande may have been then around 20 million inhabitants.70 That of Mesoamerica was probably also about 20 million. Bairoch estimated the total population south of the Rio Grande around 40 million, which means that the population of South America was about 20 million. As for the population of the Inca Empire, it is estimated at about 12 million. The first urban cities appeared in South America much later than in Mesoamerica. In the latter case, the date 400 BC can be accepted, while, in the case of South America, AD 1100 is more appropriate, which implies a huge difference of one and a half millennia. In other words, when the great Inca cities were founded, Tenochtitlan-Mexico already had conquered Teotihuacan, and the Aztec urbexplosion was already close to its peak. If, in Mesoamerica, the empire of Teotihuacan was the forerunner of the Aztec Empire, in South America, the Inca Empire was preceded by the Chimú Empire, whose emergence went back to about AD 1200. The Chimú Empire was the first organized state of South America. Its capital was Chan Chan. The core of the Chimú Empire was situated on the northern coast of Peru, whereas the core of the Inca Empire was located in the interior and in southern Peru. The fact that urbanization first developed in South America on the coast of Pacific gave rise to a debate among anthropologists because everywhere else, in Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, and the Indus Valley, urbanization developed along rivers and not on maritime coasts. Despite their exceptional character, all indicates that South American settling process and urbanization did start on the Pacific coast and, after 1800 BC, progressively expanded upstream along the waterways up to the mountains.71 The hearth of the Chimú Empire lay between two small rivers that ran towards the Pacific Ocean, the Virú and the Chicama rivers, in the very region where the Mochica people developed a remarkable culture between AD 200 and 700. Its capital, Chan Chan, was located on the coast, in the Moche Valley, about halfway between the two rivers. In fact, the Chimú were the successors and heirs of the Mochica people as well as the Chavín culture. The whole area surrounding Chan Chan was irrigated, and an irrigation canal took water from the Chicama Valley to Chan Chan. The capital of the Chimú Empire was carefully planned. Its orthogonal grid covered an area of 36 square kilometers with a central fortified area of about four square 70.

71.

Ibid., 211, but Paul Bairoch (op. cit., 211) estimates that the population north of the Rio Grande was only between one and four million. About the estimates of the populations in the rest of the Americas, see Jared Diamond (op. cit., 210), and Paul Bairoch (op. cit., 97–98). Manus I. Midlarsky, Evolution of Inequality: War, State Survival and Democracy in Comparative Perspective (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1999).

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kilometers. One of the main differences between the Mesoamerican and the Andean cities probably comes from the fact that the latter are usually walled, while the former rarely are. In Chan Chan, the city walls were mainly made of mud, while the Incas used gigantic stones. Another difference comes from the fact that Mesoamerican empires just developed networks of paths and trails whereas the Chimú rulers developed a road system that is partly at the origin of the impressive Inca road system. The Chimú Empire covered a large part of the coast of Peru. It must be stressed that the Chimú and the Inca built an elaborate and often paved road network despite the absence of wheeled transportation. Their main reasons for building roads were probably military. The Chimú needed roads to move troops quickly through their empire; the same rationale that was at the origin of the Roman road system. The acme of the Chimú Empire lasted from 1360 to about 1462, when Chan Chan and the Chimú Empire were conquered by the Inca. To the south of the Chimú Empire and the southwest of Cuzco, close to the Pacific coast, a strange and fascinating culture developed: the Nazca culture, reputed for its polychrome pottery and, even more, for its “geoglyphs,” those immense drawings representing animals and geometric motifs made out of the soil and better seen from the sky. The geoglyphs, some of which are eight kilometers long, and that can only be seen from the sky, probably were meant to communicate with divinities. The Nazca valleys were urbanized, and they were eventually integrated into the Inca Empire. At the time of the arrival of Pizarro in 1533, the Inca Empire, called Tawantinsuyu, was omnipotent. It stretched along the Pacific Coast over an area of 950,000 square kilometers (which is the equivalent of Spain, Portugal, France, Germany, Austria, and Italy altogether) and a distance of about 4,000 kilometers (the distance between New York City and the Panama Canal). The forming of the Inca Empire is a long story. The people of the core of the Inca Empire were the Quechuas, and the language used by the Inca was Quechua. The term “Inca” refers only to the nobles, who probably originated from Amazonian zones and came to the region of Cuzco as migrants who settled in caves located 24 kilometers south of Cuzco. They were partially assimilated by the Quechuas and the Inca adopted their language before dominating them and becoming the local aristocracy. From that point of view, their history resembles that of the Franks in France. Cuzco became the Inca capital about 1050. Cuzco is located at an altitude between 3,000 and 3,350 meters, in the highlands of Peru between two affluents of the Amazon River, the Urubamba and the Apurimac. Cuzco is drained by the Huatanay River, which flows into the Vilcanota River, a tributary of the Urubamba. Cuzco was transformed, around 1461, by an important urban renewal operation. When the Spaniards conquered Cuzco, its population was about 60,000 inhabitants, which is very

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inferior to Tenochtitlan’s population at the same period. However, some specialists pretend that the population of “great Cuzco” reached 225,000 persons at its peak. The city was fortified, and it had a fortress called Sacsayhuamán. As a capital, it was at the head of an empire that included more than 100 independent ethnic groups who spoke at least 20 unrelated languages. The Inca culture was less advanced than that of the Maya or the Aztec. The Inca had no writing. They used professional “memorizers” to record their official history. The knotted cords, called quipus, were used for computing, as well as for transmitting messages and memorizing tales. So the Inca had no written literature, and their astronomical knowledge was limited. In science, they did not succeed in generalizing mechanical principles. They used various forms of levers, without understanding the tool’s abstract principle. In agriculture, they transformed the territories they conquered. They channeled rivers, leveled valley floors, and built terraces. Within the Inca Empire, dozens of crops, with thousands of varieties, were domesticated, the most famous being that of potato, manioc, and sweet potato. Andean peoples developed preserves of freeze-dried meat, fish, and mealy tubers that kept indefinitely and weighed much less than the original food. The giant warehouses that lined the Inca highways were filled with these preserves. Between 1450 and 1500, the Inca completed a road network whose origins probably went back to their predecessors and which constitutes one of the most outstanding engineering achievements of the pre-Columbian period. Centered on Cuzco, it included two major north-south axes; the first ran along the Pacific Coast for about 3,600 kilometers and the other one was located in the interior. Both roads were linked with many interconnecting transverse ways. Since it crossed the Andes, the network included rock tunnels and vinesupported suspension bridges. It was only partially paved, since the Inca did not have wheeled vehicles, and grades were sometimes negotiated by steps carved in the rock. The roads were designed for foot messengers, packed animals (llamas and alpacas), and, above all, troops and administrators. A relay system existed with stations and warehouses disseminated along the roads. Long convoys of llamas and alpacas supplied the warehouses. The Inca road network was as structuring as the Roman one. The modern cities of Santiago (Chile), Quito (Ecuador) and Lima (Peru) can be seen originating from this network. Santiago was the point where the two north-south roads met in the south. Quito was the northern terminal of the system and Lima was an important crossroads on the coast. Moreover, the Argentine city of Mendoza lies close to the old network.

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Francisco Pizarro, arrived with three ships, twenty-seven horses and close to two hundred soldiers, conquered and destroyed Cuzco in 1533.72 Atahuallpa, the Inca emperor, was taken prisoner, and he offered Pizarro, as a ransom, to fill with gold the room where he was kept. Pizarro accepted the deal, and the room was filled with gold. However, the Spaniards broke their promise, strangled Atahuallpa by garrotte on July 28, 1533, and kept the ransom. Atahuallpa’s brother was chosen by the Spaniards as his successor, and became Emperor Manco Cápac II. He revolted against the invaders, was forced to flee Cuzco, and took refuge in the mountains where he waged an ambush war. The last emperor probably passed the rest of his life in the region of Machu Picchu, that famous and mysterious city located about 100 kilometers northwest of Cuzco, at an altitude of 2,045 meters, on a high plateau that dominates the valleys of the Urubamba and Vilcanota rivers. Machu Picchu had about 10,000 inhabitants at the time, and the Inca abandoned it in 1572 after having been chased out by viceroy Toledo. Thereafter, Machu Picchu fell into oblivion for 339 years till the American Hiram Bingham rediscovered it in 1911. Pre-Columbian urbanization bears much specificity when compared with those of Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, or China. Its relative independence from the fluvial system is most striking. None of the three pre-Columbian cities that have been the most dominant, namely Teotihuacan, Tenochtitlan, and Cuzco, has been a fluvial port nor even a city linked to a river by any advanced fluvial transport mode. This is all the more surprising since, in Eurasia, the cores of urbexplosions generally correspond to regions crossed by a multiplicity of waterways and canals. To tell the truth, pre-Columbian urbanization better compares with the emergence of pre-urban cities, like Çatalhöyük and Jarmo, located in the highlands or very far upstream. On the other hand, by their size and their interconnections, pre-Columbian cities were clearly urban. To understand the contrast between the pre-Columbian and Eurasian cases, we must return to theory. Eurasian urbanization was the product of wheeled transportation and boat navigation. In that context, it was just logical that the hearts of the urban systems be in the flat zones, in the valleys, and in places where there were numerous waterways. By contrast, the pre-Columbian urbanization originated from civilizations that ignored wheeled transportation and boat navigation (despite that they used pirogues and rafts). For them, the

72.

Pizarro left Panama for Peru in December 1530. He landed in Peru in mid-January 1531. He entered the important Inca city of Caxamarca on November 15, 1532. Pizarro arrived at Cuzco on November 15, 1533, and, the day after, he conquered the city in a single afternoon on November 16, 1533. Pizarro founded Lima as the new capital city on January 18, 1535.

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mobility of goods, persons, and information depended on the improvement of pedestrian transport and, in the Andean case, of animal-driven transportation. Pre-Columbian urban societies seem to have carried that type of mobility to a record level, which made possible a major urbanization. In fact, most of the time, waterways constitute a major obstacle to pedestrian mobility. That explains why, in pre-Columbian America, the zones that better favored pedestrian mobility (and, consequently, urbanization) have been the zones where waterways were either rare or very narrow (hence, easy to cross). The clash between the Eurasian and pre-Columbian civilizations has been brutal, among other things, because the transportation modes of the European invaders gave them an overwhelming superiority over pre-Columbian Amerindians. The introduction of those transportation modes provoked a radical upheaval of the pre-Columbian urban systems. With the notable exception of Tenochtitlan, which became Mexico City, and Cuzco, which still exists, pre-Columbian cities were generally replaced with new cities better adapted to the new transportation modes: Acapulco, Veracruz, Guadalajara, Caracas, Cartagena, Valparaíso, Buenos Aires, etc. However, as already mentioned, some cities succeeded to adapt while taking advantage of the ancient networks, as in the case of Lima, Quito, and Santiago.

CHAPTER

2

Understanding the First Urban Revolution

W

hy did the first urban revolution take place? And why did it take place in Mesopotamia? Does theory help to understand such a major event? In this chapter, these questions will be addressed. Five aspects of the first urban revolution will be examined in a very theoretical way (those who dislike theory can skip over Chapter 2 and move directly to Chapter 3 without interrupting the thread of the story; the same will be true about Chapters 4, 6, 10, and 12). These points relate to the role of networks’ critical points, breaking points, central places, network systems, and agglomeration economies.

s THE FIRST URBAN REVOLUTION AND NETWORKS’ CRITICAL POINTS After having summed up the history of the appearance of urbanization, let us now resort to space-economic theory to better understand what has just been presented. If, more than 5,000 years ago, urbanization emerged in Mesopotamia, particularly in the Sumer region, it is probably because, with the invention of wheeled transportation, road networks had to be built and, with the invention of boat and improvement of navigation, fluvial transportation networks were developed. The same explanation also applies to the urbanization of the Indus Valley and China, as well as, in part, the case of the pre-Columbian urbanization, since pre-Columbian urban systems were also based on transportation networks which, however, involved pedestrian trails and paths instead of roads conceived for wheeled vehicles. The historical link between transportation networks and urbanization cannot be questioned. Let us see why networks contribute to polarization and, consequently, to urbanization. To demonstrate that, let us present a few concepts based on a simple example. When a location has to be found for a new activity, for instance a shoe factory, the decision-maker is guided by a location function. In the classical shoe factory example, the location function consists of minimizing the total cost

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of transportation for the shoe factory, including the cost of transporting the leather and the soles to the factory and the shoes to the market. Transportation costs exist because space friction does (because of gravity, moving from one point to another on Earth requires fighting against the “friction of space”). Through the location function, the decision-maker takes into account various reference points: in this case, the location of the leather supplier, of the sole supplier, and of the market. If there is an advantage in locating the shoe factory closer to a given reference point, this reference point is referred to as an attraction point (since it “attracts” the location of the new activity). Similarly, if there is an advantage in locating the activity farther from a given reference point, this reference point is designated as a repulsion point; for example, it could be better for the decision-maker to locate the shoe factory far from downtown where the land prices are high, downtown being a repulsion point as far as land prices are considered, in a situation where land prices regularly decrease as the distance from downtown increases, which is typical. The advantage the decision-maker finds in locating the shoe factory one kilometer closer to an attraction point is called the attractive force exerted by the attraction point on the activity to be located. The attractive force can be measured. In our example, the attractive force exerted by the location of the leather supplier corresponds to the savings made in terms of transportation cost of the leather used by the shoe factory when the location of the shoe factory is moved one kilometer closer to the leather supplier. This is equal to the “quantity of leather, in terms of tons, used by the shoe factory in one year” (for instance) times the “transportation rate applied to transporting a ton of leather over a kilometer.” The attractive force is, then, equal to (quantity ⫻ transportation rate), which (in terms of calculus) is the first derivative of the location function with respect to the variable “distance from the leather supplier.” Let us suppose that all the transportation required by the shoe factory takes place on a road network. A network is made of segments that are linking two critical points, which are intersections or segment extremities, two reference points, or a critical point and a reference point. In a network, movements must follow the network segments and all distances are calculated along the network segments (and not “as a crow flies”). The main thesis of network theory in space-economy is simple: In a network, if a location problem involves only attraction points exerting attractive forces which do not vary with distance, the optimal location must coincide either with a critical point of the network or with an attraction point.

The intuitive proof of this is quite simple. If the decision-maker considers any location C between A and B on a given segment AB, the location force pulling to the right will be equal to the sum of the attractive forces of all

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the attraction points which can best be reached by going to the right on the network, whereas the location force pulling to the left will be equal to the sum of the attractive forces of all the attraction points which can best be reached by going to the left on the network. This means that, at point C, the decisionmaker will consider only two forces: the one pulling to the right (that is to point B), and the one pulling to the left (that is to point A). The probability of the two forces being equal is considered equal to 0%. So, with a 100% probability, one of the two forces will dominate the other, and the decision-maker will be led to consider locating at point A or at point B, before considering other locations situated on the other segments of the network. On these other segments, for the same reasons, he will also be led to prefer either a critical point or an attraction point. At the end of the process, the optimal location will coincide with either a critical point or an attraction point. Thus, critical points are likely to be optimal for numerous activities that will normally locate there. This will normally induce a polarization (and eventually an urbanization) process at the main critical points of the network. It must be noticed that, if attractive forces vary with distance, things are a little more complex. In an animal-transportation context (where attractive forces increase with distance since animals get tired and their tiredness increases with distance), optimal locations can be found on a segment between the two extremities of the segment. Then the polarization probability will be smaller while remaining clearly superior to 0%. Before September 27, AD 1825 and the appearance of railways, all terrestrial transportation modes were animal-driven (or human-driven, which is similar).

s THE FIRST URBAN REVOLUTION AND BREAKING POINTS A second factor played a role in the appearance of the first urban revolution: the existence of breaking points. In an attempt to sum up the list of the locations that have favored urbanization, Bairoch wrote: “But throughout all subsequent changes, the basic principles have remained the same: transport lines constitute the essential factor governing the location of cities. And this is as true for the cities of traditional societies as for those following the Industrial Revolution. This brings us back to the tyranny of distance … In traditional societies, waterways are the determining element. Cities are born and grow in size and importance at the mouths of rivers, at the confluence of rivers, at places, such as waterfalls, where rivers become unnavigable, on the shores of lakes (as a rule at exit points), near sites suitable for the establishment of seaports, and so on. Many towns are created near fords for crossing rivers. Naturally the importance of waterways derives not only from their own intrinsic properties, but also from the economic value of the hinterlands they serve: an excellent natural harbor in a desert region without resources will

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remain rural. After the Industrial Revolution, canals and, especially beginning with the second half of the nineteenth century, railroads have fulfilled a function similar to that of rivers. The critical role played by transport in the location of cities does not rule out exceptions … The exceptions are for the most part religious centers, military centers, mining towns (precious metal), and capitals built by princely decree. Another sort of exception … is a relatively inaccessible site as a shelter from attack. And … thermal springs or spas.”1 In this quotation, falls, ports, fords, mine cities, religious cities, shelter cities, and thermal cities are all examples of breaking points. These are characterized by the fact that, at their location, the values of location functions change suddenly and abruptly. Two cases will be distinguished: 1) the case where the attractive force exerted by an attraction point radically changes when we consider two points located on both sides of a breaking point or line (this will be referred to as the “interface” case) without there being transshipment costs, and 2) the case where the attractive force does not radically change, but where crossing the breaking point or line involves “transshipment” costs (the “transshipment” case).

1. The “Interface” Case Coasts attract people and activities. This must be explained. Most of the time, it is assumed that attractive forces behave the same way in all directions: a movement involving a given distance costs the same, whatever the direction and whether the attractive forces vary with distance or not. In fact, on Earth, there are areas where transportation costs and location forces have certain characteristics, and other areas where these characteristics are different. The most obvious example refers to land and sea transportation. Shipping a ton of merchandise over 100 kilometers by boat is not the same as transporting a ton of merchandise by train: the transportation rates are different, as are the loading and unloading costs, the constraints in terms of networks or Euclidean (“as the crow flies”) distances, the time involved, etc. In sum, there exist “zones of mobility,” which possess their own conditions of traveling and transportation. All locations that are at the interface between the two types of mobility area readily have access to both systems of transportation without having to pass from one to the other. If a shoe factory is located at the interface (on the coast) it can send shoes directly by boat or directly by train without having to send them by train first and then by boat, or the other way around. This represents a real advantage, in terms of time, costs, and management. 1.

Paul Bairoch, De Jéricho à Mexico : villes et économie dans l’histoire (Paris : Gallimard, “Arcades, ” 1985), 143.

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Moreover, the shoe factory can choose the most economic mode whenever the two transportation systems compete with each other. In itself, the very competition between the two systems presents a great advantage for those who have access to both. This last advantage exists even if the transshipment costs between the two systems are equal to zero. However, all factors being considered, the global advantage of locating at an interface gets greater when the transshipment costs increase. It must be noted that, in itself, what we have just said about interfaces does not completely explain the fact that so many people and activities are located on the coast. The coast is not only an interface, it is also a location offering advantages that are not found elsewhere: a view, beaches, access to fishing, access to various sports, etc. Those aspects are important, but the “interface” factor also plays a role. The development of the Phoenician and Greek colonial networks was essentially based on the “interface” case.

2. The “Transshipment” Case Some points that are not located at an interface, that are neither critical points nor attraction points, constitute likely optimal locations because they are breaking points involving transshipment costs. Breaking points correspond to points of discontinuity in the location function. All around these points, the location function varies in a continuous way, whereas at the points of discontinuity it takes on a discrete value that has no connection with the surrounding values. Let us note that, in the interface case, on both sides of the interface the transportation cost functions vary in a continuous way, while at the points located on the interface, they take on discrete values, as in the case of the breaking points, which makes the breaking points and interface cases quite similar. A classical example of a breaking point is that of cities such as ancient Nineveh and Changan-Xi’an or modern Montreal, Washington, and Basel, which are located on important rivers at the furthest point upstream that boats can easily reach. Those cities are natural transshipment points. The advantage of locating at a transshipment point comes from the fact that the only way to avoid paying the transshipment costs is to locate at the transshipment point itself. Let us take the example of an ancient Chinese factory producing silk fabrics out of silk filament and thread coming from downstream Huang He (Yellow River) for the Western market served by the Silk Road. Locating the silk factory between Changan-Xi’an, which was the terminal of the Silk Road on the Wei River (an important tributary of the Huang He) and the Yellow Sea involved paying for transshipping the silk at Changan-Xi’an. Similarly,

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locating the silk factory between the Changan-Xi’an and the Western market involved paying for transshipping the silk filament and thread at ChanganXi’an. The only factory location where the owners could avoid paying for the transshipment of the silk fabrics and of the silk filament and thread, was Changan-Xi’an. The transshipment case is most important in terms of polarization. It explains that (almost?) all the great economic metropolises of the world (Babylon, Memphis, Changan-Xi’an, Rome, Constantinople, London, New York City, Tokyo, Paris, Los Angeles, Shanghai…) have been and still are ports, located on the coasts or on important rivers. But there are exceptions such as São Paulo, Johannesburg, and Mexico City. In modern cities, the strategic importance of subway stations is also linked to the fact that they constitute breaking points, transfer points. The “breaking point” or “discontinuity point” concept can also be relevant in cases where there are no transportation costs involved. There is a discontinuity point wherever a location bears advantages that an activity can benefit from only by being located at that point, and not by getting close to it. A discontinuity point is neither an attraction point (getting closer to it does not give anything) nor a critical point (it does not have to be at the junction of two network segments); it is a point with special features which benefit only the people or the activity located right there. At the beginning of urbanization, all the oasis cities (for instance, Jericho, Damascus, and Petra), bridge-cities (like Ugarit, Babylon, Nineveh, or Hattusa), or even religious cities (whose location was considered sacred or magic) represented discontinuity points.

s THE FIRST URBAN REVOLUTION AND CENTRAL PLACES The passage from pre-urban to urban cities corresponds to the birth of urban systems that resulted from the polarization of the urban poles themselves. From the beginning, diverse urban systems took form, and existing theories help to understand that diversity. Let us start with Christaller and Lösch’s central place theory, which provides certain explanations to the polepolarization phenomenon by insisting on the role of spatial competition.2 These authors stress the fact that, if population is spread throughout space, if goods and services require different minimum markets, and if regrouping sellers of various goods and services is advantageous, all goods and services 2.

About central-place theory, see Walter Christaller, Central Places in Southern Germany (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1966), and August Lösch, The Economics of Location (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954); about the notion of circular isotropic space, see Luc-Normand Tellier, Économie spatiale : rationalité économique de l’espace habité (Boucherville, Quebec: Gaëtan Morin, 1983, second edition).

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will not be offered everywhere nor will they be offered in every central place, and the possibility for certain central places to dominate some others will exist. It must be noted that this domination factor is much more present in Christaller’s approach, where to the hierarchy of goods directly corresponds a hierarchy of central places, than in Lösch’s, where the very idea of central place hierarchy becomes fuzzy. Conversely, the notions of “core” and “periphery” are much better illustrated by Lösch’s model, where only one central place provides all goods and services, than by Christaller’s, where many central places of the superior rank coexist. Central place theory is based on Christaller and Lösch’s common desire to conceive a theory allowing for regrouping sellers of different goods and services who are forced by spatial competition to scatter in order to maximize their market area. The main reason for attempting to regroup otherwise-scattered sellers is the desirability of “multiple-purpose trips.” Buying many different goods during a single trip is something everybody does and likes to do, simply because it is convenient. This habit favors polarization, since it induces traders offering various goods and services to congregate in market places, shopping centers, and central places. Central place theory attempts to determine how regrouping sellers of different goods can be achieved in a way that maximizes the satisfaction of consumers. Both for Christaller and for Lösch, central places exist to fulfill the needs of the consumers of their hinterland (in Dutch) or umland (in German)—their surrounding area. Both authors start their reasoning by assuming that hinterlands preexist, and that they are characterized by a homogeneous spatial distribution of consumers. However, they differ to the extent that Christaller assumes that the population is completely scattered with a homogeneous density, whereas Lösch assumes that it is regrouped in small villages having the same population and located at the vertices of a regular triangular grid. Both consider conditions of spatial competition that result in a scattering of the competitors. Both admit that, in such conditions, the optimal form of market areas is the hexagon and that, at the equilibrium corresponding to the social optimum (that is the optimum from the consumers’ point of view), all market areas then must be equal, hexagonal, and as small as possible provided that all competitors have enough customers to survive. Both distinguish superior and inferior goods and services, the superior ones having large market areas (opera or high-tech surgery are good examples of superior services), while the inferior ones have small market areas (fast food and barbershops correspond to inferior goods and services). They both classify goods and services with respect to the size of their market areas. Finally, both admit that regrouping sellers of different goods and services is desirable from the point of view of the inhabitants of the hinterlands.

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The difference between these authors comes from their two unique ways of building central place systems. Christaller contends that, if a central place can offer opera or sophisticated surgery, it should be in a position to also offer fast food and barbershop services (in practice this is what is usually observed). So he requires each central place offering a given superior good to offer, at the same time, all the goods and services that are inferior to that superior good (that means that, in Christaller’s system, all central places having the same good as their highest superior good offer exactly the same bundle of goods and services: they are identical in terms of their functions). Lösch rejects this and replaces it by the requirement that all central places in his system coincide with one of his “small villages located at the vertices of a regular triangular grid,” while accepting that a central place could offer opera, but not fast food. Why is Lösch rejecting Christaller’s way of building his central place system? For a very serious reason: in economics, one of the most important features of “social optimum” is the fact that it is characterized by a complete absence of “economic profits” (that is of accounting profits that are higher than the “normal profits” in the system; if sellers of a good are making economic profits, it means that buyers are paying too much for the good, and this is “socially sub-optimal”). Of course, forcing sellers to regroup into central places, as both Christaller and Lösch do, involves accepting that some regrouped sellers will be located at central places having market areas larger than their own “minimal” market area (they could not be located at central places having a market area “smaller” than their own minimal market area because they would go bankrupt). Those lucky sellers will end up having a market area larger than their “zero-economic-profit” market area, and they will make “abnormal profits” (that is “economic profits”). Both Christaller and Lösch knew this, and they were prepared to accept the existence of some economic profits in their systems in order to benefit from the advantages of “multiple-purpose trips.” The problem with Christaller’s system is that, even in its less economic-profit-yielding form (that is when K ⫽ 3, K being the number of times the surface of an immediately inferior market area enters in the surface of the immediately superior market area in a given system), economic profits are important, so important that Lösch decided this was unacceptable (because it meant that consumers had to pay too much for the goods they bought and, consequently, for the advantages associated with “multiple-purpose trips”), and a better system needed to be conceived. Lösch succeeded to a great extent. His system yields very little economic profits compared to Christaller’s K ⫽ 3 system. The problem is that Christaller and Lösch’s systems end up being extremely different. (It should be noted that Christaller’s system is the classic example and when authors speak of “central places” without mentioning Christaller or Lösch, they are usually referring to Christaller.) In Christaller’s system all central places of a given rank are identical. Within this system there exist many central places

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offering all goods, and those of the highest rank are surrounded by an identical central-place environment. Christaller’s system is totally symmetrical, repetitive, and well behaved. On the contrary, Lösch’s system is awkward: it allows for only one central place offering all goods, it includes central places offering strange bundles of goods and services (like opera and fast food, and nothing else), and it includes areas offering very few goods and services and areas offering a great variety of them. That being said, both models are relevant and help to understand the complexity of the pole-polarization process at various scales and throughout history, during both the first and second urban revolutions. For instance, if one looks at the Babylonian urbexplosion in terms of the domination of one pole, Babylon, over a whole urban system, Lösch’s model is more enlightening since it implies that only one central place dominates the whole system. However, to understand the structure of the Egyptian urban system, which belongs to an agriculture-oriented territorial state located in the semi-periphery of the Babylonian urbexplosion, Christaller’s model is more appropriate since it is more hierarchical and adapted to a public-administration logic that confers on each provincial head-city a central-place role with respect to its hinterland, to which it is geared and on which it very much depends.

s THE FIRST URBAN REVOLUTION AND NETWORK SYSTEMS If the gestation of the Babylonian urbexplosion very much corresponded to Christaller and Lösch’s central place models, its triumph gave birth to an expansion of the urbexplosive urban system that differed from the central place logic. Usually a central system takes form out of an already developed and exploited territory (as was the case in Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Chinese Loess Plateau, and Mesoamerica). A triumphant urbexplosion is characterized by the fact that it irradiates in all directions and annexes new undeveloped or little developed territories. This gives birth to the emergence of tentacles, which penetrate into further and further lands by means of the founding of new settlements whose role is to develop the new territories. In such areas, polarization is less a convenient way to serve an already developed hinterland than a way to invade, discover, conquer, and develop undeveloped areas. To understand polarization in such a context, we need to leave centralplace theory and to resort to another approach, proposed by Vance, and by Hohenberg and Lees—that of “network systems theory.”3

3.

See James E. Vance, Jr., The Merchant’s World: The Geography of Wholesaling (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970), James E. Vance, Jr., “Cities of External Trade in a Feudal Countryside,” Journal of Urban History 1 (1975): 484–488, and Paul M. Hohenberg and Lynn Hollen Lees, The Making of Urban Europe, 1000–1950 (London and Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985).

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Hohenberg and Lees presented the network system theory by contrasting it with respect to the central-place theory: We propose two models of such urban systems … The first model is based on the role of the city as a central place, supplying its surroundings with special services—economic, administrative, or cultural—that call for concentration at a point in space. A hierarchy of such centers, the higher-level ones serving as central places for central places, form a region around the principal center. The region, key to the relationships of town and country and to the hierarchical links among nearby towns, will receive much attention as we discuss Central Place Systems in Europe. Yet cities are more than the points around which the treads of regional unity wound. They also link the region with the world beyond, permitting it to reconcile the advantages of specialized activity with the enriching experience of diversity. In economic terms, cities enable the region to pursue its comparative advantage. In this perspective cities also belong to networks of trade, information, and influence that reach far beyond the borders of a country. As an example of the working of a Network System, consider Bordeaux. To understand its activities, the reasons for its growth or stagnation, one cannot look at the city alone or merely at its role as the capital of a region of southwestern France, its influence bounded by that of Toulouse to the east and Nantes and Limoges to the north. Bordeaux has long been an important link in international trading networks along which flowed wine, of course, but also grain, fish, timber, sugar, and oil. To follow the city’s fortunes we would need to look to London, to the Antilles or Africa, even to the Levant and the Baltic. Just as in analyzing regions we distinguish hierarchies of centers, so urban networks have their nodes and junctions, their gateways and outposts, their cores and peripheries … Thus, the two sorts of urban systems model contrasting modes of development, from the rural base upward in one case and from the urban core outward in the other.4

Most of the time, the central place scheme is seen as a corollary of rural development, the central places’ main function being to supply agricultural zones with goods and services. The network systems theory insists on the commercial basis of urban development, and on cities’ interdependence. In fact, network systems can include classical central places as well as outposts, relays, crossroads or colonial trading posts. They can also include urban sub-systems. Hohenberg and Lees (1985, p. 245) may have helped to build a bridge between the theories of urban systems and Braudel’s conception of core and periphery inside economy worlds: 4.

Paul M. Hohenberg and Lynn Hollen Lees, op. cit., 4–6.

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The French geographers E. Juillard and H. Nonn (1976) have proposed a typology of West European regions in the 1970s … The authors emphasize the spatial distribution of towns by size and activity as well as by the quality and intensity of transportation and communication links. What strikes the historically minded reader is how nearly their results recreate the regional typology that Hechter and Brustein (1980) applied to the medieval Europe … The contemporary schema also distinguishes three classes of regions, called Rhenish, Parisian, and peripherical … The “Rhenish” areas are densely urbanized and tightly bound together by transportation networks. A number of medium-sized cities share organizing functions with no one place dominating. This model holds sway from the English Midlands to Switzerland, and it also applies to much of eastern France and parts of Northern Italy. The “Parisian” regions, strongly organized by a dominant city but more rural overall than the Rhenish, are recognizable descendants of their “feudal” counterparts. While Paris and London remain archetypes, cities from Vienna to Lisbon fit this model. It is interesting to note that the retardation of Northern Italy has displaced it toward the Parisian model. Today Milan dominates the once-proud oligarchy of north Italian cities. Although far more developed than in the Middle Ages, the European periphery retains its weak urban structure. The Industrial concentrations in Scotland, Wales, and northwest Spain have only limited effects beyond a short radius. Agricultural work occupies a larger share of the work force here than elsewhere, and the urban networks tend to be anemic or incomplete.5

It is clear that, in the structure of Braudel’s economy-worlds, the Rhenish type of cities is characteristic of the core, the Parisian type, of the semi-periphery, and the “peripheral,” of the periphery, strictly speaking.6 The relations between the urban centers and their environment are much more complex in the network systems than in Christaller’s systems of central places. In the latter, each center is dominated by only one central place, and each zone of the hinterland gets supplies of each given good or service from only one central place. In network systems, relations are not exclusive and one-to-one. Each center keeps up relations (commercial or otherwise) with many other centers. Each center is active within various networks of centers. 5.

6.

Ibid., 245. The authors refer to Etienne Juillard and Henri Nonn, Espaces et régions en Europe occidentale (Paris : Éditions du CNRS, 1976), and Michael Hechter and William Brustein, “Regional Modes of Production and Patterns of State Formation in Western Europe,” American Journal of Sociology 85 (1980): 1061–1094. Jean-Pierre Orfeuil proposes a different typology of urban regions based on the urban dynamics characterized by the relation between the transportation techniques and land uses. He distinguishes three different types: Californian, Rhenish, and Saint-Simonian. See Jean-Pierre Orfeuil, Je suis l’automobile (La Tour d’Aigues: L’Aube, 1994).

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One of the space-economic features of the network theory relates to the fact that, contrary to the central-place theory, which is based on a Euclidean isotropic space, the network theory neglects Euclidean distances to focus on commercial links, often across the oceans, that are established between cities. Hohenberg and Lees7 even suggest that if these links could take a mathematical form, it would be through topology, and not through Euclidean geometry. For them, “time and money count for more than geometry.”8 In the network systems approach, cities are seen as complementary, whereas, for Christaller, they are basically standard and similar. Centrality characterizes the central places, while the centers of the network systems are marked by their nodal nature. The role and importance of each center of the network systems are destined to evolve through time, while the functions of central places do not change, central place theory being basically static. Road and railways crossroads, industrial cities and mine centers play a role in the network systems, and they are ignored by central-place theory. Hohenberg and Lees go further by observing that to the two types of cities (central-place and network) correspond two cultural types of urban community. They resort to the concepts of orthogeneticity and heterogeneticity developed by Redfield and Singer.9 According to them, orthogenetic cities elaborate and diffuse a prevailing culture they attempt to impose, whereas heterogenetic cities either favor a heterogeneous cultural environment or elaborate and diffuse a culture that is alien to their surroundings within a clearly defined structure of dominance and dependence. Putting together the contributions of Braudel, Juillard and Nonn, Hechter and Brustein, Redfield and Singer, and Hohenberg and Lees, it can be said that, inside an economy-world: – network systems of the Rhenish type composed of heterogenetic cities that favor a heterogeneous cultural environment predominate in the center (as in the ancient Babylonian region or modern London or New York regions); – central place systems and regions of the Parisian type composed of orthogenetic cities prevail in the territorial states of the semi-periphery (as in ancient Egypt or modern France); – network systems of the “peripheral” type dominated by heterogenetic cities that elaborate and diffuse a culture that is alien to their surroundings within a clearly defined structure of dominance and dependence are observed in the periphery (as in the ancient Phoenician or Greek colonial outposts located in North Africa, the Iberian Peninsula, present France, or Italy). 7. 8. 9.

Paul M. Hohenberg and Lynn Hollen Lees, op. cit., 66. Ibid., 94. Robert Redfield and Milton B. Singer, “The Cultural Role of the Cities,” Economic Development and Cultural Change 3, 1 (1954): 52–73.

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Numerous historical examples can be given of these statements. The Spain of the Inquisition persecuting heretics, the absolutist or Jacobin France imposing a uniform Parisian culture, or the Germany unified by Bismarck or Hitler ensuring the triumph of a certain form of Germanic culture over all its territory constitute eloquent examples of what prevails in the semi-periphery according to this vision. By contrast, at the center, very often cities developed, which were intellectually open to new ideas, welcoming for foreigners and foreign cultures, little conformist, and more mercantile than sectarian. We can think of Amsterdam welcoming Descartes, Geneva accepting Calvin, London receiving Marx or Zurich welcoming Lenin. We refer also to all those central cities, starting with Ugarit, Babylon, and Memphis, which let develop inside their limits foreign communities (Levantine, Greek, Jewish, etc.) specialized in maritime trade, banking, brokerage, exchange, or navigation, all those activities that are essential to the functioning of network systems. Finally, in periphery, numerous colonial cities diffused an imperialist foreign culture in the midst of militarily submitted populations. We can think of Greek Alexandria in Egypt, Roman Caesarea in Palestine, Spanish Mexico City in Mesoamerica, Caracas and Rio de Janeiro in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, or Léopoldville (future Kinshasa), Dakar, Lagos, Bombay, Calcutta, Alger, Tunis, and Casablanca in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The preceding scheme bears much likelihood. However, in the midst of a same society, most of the time, both orthogenetic and heterogenetic currents coexist. For example, at the court of Versailles, at the time of absolutism during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the clan of the Colberts defended a vision of France close to the network systems model, an image characterized by maritime imperialism and mercantilism, while the clan of the Le Telliers de Louvois was inspired by a much more agricultural vision of France that was very close to the central-place theory.10 If the clan of the Le Telliers de Louvois was at the origin of liberalism, it also played a decisive role in the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, which led to the persecution of the French Protestants, and a secondary role in the birth of Jacobinism. The Colberts bore heterogenetic values while the Le Telliers de Louvois were clearly marked by the search for orthogeneticity, but both currents coexisted at Versailles for more than a century. A similar coexistence of the two philosophies is also observed in cities. None completely fits the central-place or network-systems schemes. All is a matter of degree. All cities exert, at various degrees, functions related to supplying their hinterland, and functions of contact with the main commercial 10.

Luc-Normand Tellier, Face aux Colbert : les Le Tellier, Vauban, Turgot et l’avènement du libéralisme (Québec: Presses de l’Université du Québec, 1987).

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and financial centers of the world. All are both, at various degrees, orthogenetic and heterogenetic. All are defined with respect to territories (as in the centralplace theory), but also to transportation and communication networks (as in the network-systems theory). Even in the most ancient agricultural societies that gave birth to cities, both schemes already coexisted. Already in the time of the Phoenicians, Greeks, and their predecessors, the agricultural societies practiced long-distance trade. Historians even pretend that long-distance trade preceded the appearance of urbanization. The diffusion, from 8500 BC, of domesticated vegetal species such as wheat and barley from Mesopotamia to Western Europe, India, and China amply demonstrates that. In sum, both approaches must be seen as being complementary and not dissociable.

s THE FIRST URBAN REVOLUTION AND AGGLOMERATION ECONOMIES Another factor probably played a role in the unfolding of the first urban revolution: the existence of agglomeration economies. Some savings can be made by producing goods or services on a larger scale: they are called “scale economies.” Scale economies are to be distinguished from “agglomeration economies,” which are derived from activities being located close to one another. In the first case, scale is the saving factor, whereas, in the second, proximity is. The two concepts overlap each other to some extent in the case of economies linked to the scale of agglomerated populations or production activities. For example, the quality of the pool of qualified workers generated by the concentration of computer firms in a given city may be seen as a source of both agglomeration and scale economies. The problem with agglomeration economies is not that they are not important (in fact, they constitute one of the possible explanations of polarization and urbanization), but rather that they are “external economies,” and as such, they are not exchanged on the market place. Consequently, they have no price, their transactions are not registered (since there are none), and they are neither directly measurable nor countable. This makes it very difficult to pretend that agglomeration economies are more prevalent in given circumstances, and less in others. Building a theory on the concept of agglomeration economies is not an easy thing, and it will not be attempted here. Agglomeration economies relate to real advantages economic activities of consumption or production draw from their geographical proximity. For instance, an apiarist and an apple grower produce more each if they are located close to each other than if they are far from one another (the bees of the apiarist pollinating the apple trees of the apple grower, and the apple trees feeding the fees). Or else a lesser-known art gallery may benefit from the proximity of a better-known gallery that attracts a selected clientele. There exist

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agglomeration economies, but also diseconomies. Agglomeration diseconomies are linked to disadvantages that are associated with the proximity to certain activities. Everybody knows the classical examples of pollution and congestion. When agglomeration economies result from regrouping similar activities (art galleries, for example), we talk of “location economies,” whereas when they involve different activities (as in a shopping center), the expression “urbanization economies” is used (in the case of the apiarist and apple grower, the term “urbanization” seems odd, but this is it). Nobody disputes the fact that agglomeration economies exist, and that they played and still play a role in the polarization of populations and economic activities. However, it is important to realize that they are not a necessary condition for polarization to develop.11 Attraction points, networks’ critical points, breaking points, points of discontinuity, and even spatial competition (as will be seen) can cause polarization in a complete absence of agglomeration economies. In fact, the concept of agglomeration economies is often redundant in comparison with the classical concepts of space-economy. For instance, in the case of the art galleries, the already famous galleries can be seen as attraction points, but also as competitors in the context of the location problem of the small lesser-known galleries. Mathematically, in the location functions, agglomeration economies are implicitly taken into account since they influence the value of the parameters of the function in the same way as transportation costs, land prices, or market potentials do. Some authors tend to see agglomeration economies everywhere and to explain the urban phenomenon essentially by their existence. This is a big error. There are true agglomeration economies only when the level of the advantages stemming from spatially grouping together activities is superior to the sum of the advantages that those same activities would produce separately at the same location. In other words, there are agglomeration economies only if the productions of the apiarist and apple grower are superior when the apiarist and apple grower are producing side by side than when they are producing alone (without the other one producing) on the same location. Trying to explain urbanization only by agglomeration economies is a deadend. It leads to defining the optimal size of cities (why should agglomeration economies behave differently in one city from another?) and to questioning the very idea of an urban system grouping together cities of various sizes when everybody knows that, since the very beginning of urbanization, all urban systems are made of cities of different sizes. Moreover, as will be seen, it is easy to demonstrate that, in a context where there are no agglomeration economies at all, a simple sequence of interdependent attraction-repulsion 11.

Luc-Normand Tellier, “Et si les économies d’agglomération n’existaient pas, notre monde serait-il différent?” Organisations et territoires 13, 3 (2004): 77–80.

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problems is enough to generate cities and urban systems that are identical to those that exist. Finally, agglomeration economies are usually accompanied with agglomeration diseconomies, which cancel the former, the relative importance of those economies and diseconomies being almost impossible to determine. From an analytical point of view, the concept of agglomeration economy must be resorted to only when a phenomenon cannot be understood only with the concepts of space friction, attractive force, and repulsive force. That being said, agglomeration economies played a role in the first urban revolution. For instance, defending people was probably made easier by grouping them together and better defending them made them more efficient. Having trade activities grouped with craft activities surely benefited both. The same goes with agricultural activities and management activities related to organizing irrigation. Cities were born diversified, and diversity is their very essence and raison d’être.

CHAPTER

3

The Two First Economy-Worlds: The Roman and Chinese Empires

T

he two first economy-worlds the world has known appeared in an interval of only 250 years at the two extremities of the Eurasian continent: in the Mediterranean region and in China. They have in common the fact that they are compact, and they became politically united thanks to two empires, which covered them. However, they differ by their geography. The Roman Empire was, above all, a maritime empire built around the Mediterranean Sea, mare nostrum also called mare internum, while the Chinese Empire was basically continental although, at some epochs, it tended to make of the China Sea a Chinese mare nostrum. There is another major difference: the Roman urbexplosion was relatively recent when it gave birth to the Mediterranean economy-world, whereas the Chinese economy-world was dominated for a long time by the old Changan-Xi’an urbexplosion. Actually, before dominating, the Roman urbexplosion had to supplant the old Babylonian urbexplosion and marginalize the emerging Greek urbexplosion, while, in order for the Chinese economy-world to take form, the Changan-Xi’an urbexplosion did not have to yield ground to a new urbexplosion. It is just around AD 1400 that the urbexplosion dominated by Nanking-Nanjing and Hangzhou came to defi nitely take away from Changan-Xi’an’s urbexplosion the leadership of the Chinese economy-world. The very long domination of Changan-Xi’an is all the more worth underlining since, between AD 800 and 900, the center of gravity of the Chinese Empire passed from the north to the south, and China moved from a civilization based on wheat and millet to a civilization based on rice. On the contrary, in the case of the Roman Empire, the economic and geographical basis of the economy-world remained the cultivation of wheat, vine, and olive trees, even after the center of the economy-world had moved from Rome to Constantinople.

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s THE EMERGENCE OF THE ROMAN ECONOMY-WORLD At its peak, under the Antonine dynasty and, more precisely, at the end of Trajan’s reign that lasted from AD 98 to 117, the Roman Empire covered the whole Mediterranean Sea and most of the Black Sea. It extended to the limits of Scotland, the Rhine, the Danube and its tributary the Pruth River, the Caucasus, the Caspian Sea, the Tigris, the Persian Gulf, the Arabian Desert, the Red Sea, the Nile’s first cataract, the Sahara, and the Atlantic. Its territory was criss-crossed by the immense network of the Roman roads, which is at the very origin of the present-day European urban system. Needham estimated that the Roman Empire had about 164,000 kilometers of paved roads over a 5.2-million-square-kilometer territory, while the Chinese Empire had 35,200 kilometers of paved roads over a 13.9-million-square-kilometer territory.1 Finally, the spine of the Roman Empire was the very central axis of the Great Corridor (see Map 7).

Romans roads Maritime roads

340 km

Map 7 The Roman Empire at Its Peak (around AD 100)

1.

Joseph Needham, Science and Civilization in China: Physics and Physical Technology (Vol. 4) (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1971), 29.

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When Alexander the Great died in 323 BC, nothing really indicated that, 440 years later, the city of Rome, whose conquest never interested Alexander, would dominate in this way the entire developed Europe, the richest part of Western Asia and the whole Mediterranean Africa. Yet, at that time, with about 150,000 inhabitants, Rome was already one of the two largest European cities, as big as Athens and larger than Syracuse, the two most important Greek cities of that period. Alexander could not consider Rome as a serious competitor nor a valuable prey: its hinterland was too little developed and its military force too recent. Had not the Gauls invaded Rome 67 years earlier, in 390 BC? Wasn’t Greece at its peak? And wasn’t the Persian Empire, which, under Cyrus II, had annexed Babylon and Mesopotamia in 539 BC, the most serious of Greece’s challengers? How could Alexander imagine that, 175 years later, Rome was to conquer his own kingdom of Macedonia when Rome was still to take 73 more years to establish its domination over the whole Italian Peninsula (which was only done in 250 BC)? However, from a topodynamic point of view, the rise of Rome to power made sense. Inside the Great Corridor, that city possessed many advantages. It was on the trajectory of the northwestward movement that had so benefited Phoenicia and then Greece, and which was predominant to the west of the Persian Gulf since the triumph of the Euphrates’ axis. In the wake of that movement, the Romans, like the Greeks before them, learnt from the Phoenicians the alphabet, the art of glass-making, the purple dyeing of fabrics and the secrets of dry-farming.2 Rome had a fertile and well-watered hinterland while many Greek cities presented deficiencies in that respect. The Roman hinterland was continental and compact when Greece’s was broken up and made of islands and pieces of continents. Rome was located on the Tiber, one of the most important rivers of Italy, while most of Greece was deprived of significant rivers. Compared with Greece, Rome occupied a more central site inside the Mediterranean Sea, which allowed it to transport goods and troops more easily to and from all parts of the Mediterranean coasts. Finally, Rome had the advantage of being situated farther from the core of the Babylonian urbexplosion than Greece was. It must not be forgotten that, in the combat a young urbexplosion has to fight to affirm itself, the distance from the old dominating urbexplosion constitutes a protection. Rome was ideally placed: it was far enough from the Babylon urbexplosion to free itself from its influence, while being close enough to benefit from its radiance. Moreover, the fact that Rome belonged to the Great Corridor gave it the benefit of being on the axis followed in the past by the diffusion of agriculture and, later, urbanization. The Roman Empire came to include all the first regions 2.

Fernand Braudel, La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II, Vol. 1 (Paris : Armand Colin, 1966), 130.

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of western Eurasia that had known, right after Mesopotamia, agriculture, settling process, and urbanization, that is, to say Egypt, Judaea-Palestine, Syria, Anatolia, Greece, and Italy. The Romans took control of an already urbanized territory, but they preserved and considerably developed the urban system they inherited.3 The pax Romana favored the building of a most efficient and unprecedented transportation system, an increase in the rate of urbanization, the growth of existing cities, and the creation of numerous new cities (especially in Western Europe, as illustrated by the cases of Lyon, London, Paris, and Cologne).4 Very few cities disappeared under the Roman rule. The Latin civilization pervaded, above all, the populations living in cities, along the littorals, in the plains and valleys, but much less those living in the mountains and hardly accessible zones. Mountain dwellers kept their language, habits, and primitive techniques for making everyday tools and objects such as potteries.5 From a geographical point of view, the most striking feature of the Roman urban system is its astonishing correlation with the cultivation of olive trees and the Mediterranean climate. As much as 85–90% of the total urban population of the Roman Empire at its climax lived in the area where olive trees were grown, that is in central and southern Italy, Greece, in the Mediterranean coasts of Anatolia, Syria and Palestine, as well as in the northern Maghrib region, the southern and eastern parts of the Iberian Peninsula, and southern Gaul. It could be said that the Roman urbanization was as much “olive-tree-dependent” as the expansion of Islam was later “camel-dependent.” The southern limit of the area of olive-tree cultivation approximately corresponds to the isoline of 25 cm annual rainfall (which is the minimum rainfall for dry farming) while the northern limit corresponds to the southern limit of the zone where freezing temperatures are reached during the year. The Roman Empire extended beyond those limits only, to the

3.

4.

5.

The Romans distinguished three classes of imperial towns: the coloniae with full Roman status and privileges, the municipae with only partial Roman citizenship for their inhabitants, and the civitates, which were market and administrative centers for tribal districts. See Anthony Edwin James Morris, History of Urban Form: Before the Industrial Revolutions (Harlow: Pearson Education & Prentice Hall, 1994), 58. The philosopher Seneca (Lucius Annaeus Seneca), who lived from 2 BC to AD 65, wrote about the Roman urban boom: “All barriers have been knocked over. On virgin lands, cities have been built. The world is criss-crossed by roads. Everything is changing. Nothing is left of the old order.” Quoted by Laurent Ferri, Ils racontent la mondialisation. De Sénèque à Lévi-Strauss (Paris : Saint-Simon, 2005), 20. Erato Paris, La genèse intellectuelle de l’œuvre de Fernand Braudel : La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II, 1923–1947 (Athens : Institut de recherches néohelléniques/F.N.R.S., 1999), 56.

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north, in regions where vine or wheat could be cultivated (the case of northern Gaul and Britain), and, to the south, in regions where wheat could grow (the case of Egypt, which was one of the main producers of wheat in the whole empire). The Roman Empire reached unprecedented urbanization rates. At its peak, the European part of the empire probably had an urbanization rate of at least 8%, and even possibly 15%. Those rates may have been surpassed in the Anatolian, Syrian, and Egyptian parts of the empire. Effectively, as illustrated by the Roman road network, the most urbanized part of the empire skirt round the Mediterranean Sea by the east, from Italy to Egypt, through the cities of Rome, Ravenna, Milan, Salona (present-day Split in Croatia), Thessaloniki, Constantinople, Pergamum, Ephesus, Antioch, Palmyra, Caesarea Maritima (in Palestine), and Alexandria. It is estimated that the Roman Empire contained at least 400 and maybe 750 cities and towns with populations of more than five thousand on a territory whose total population was about 50 million. It must be noted that any estimate of the population of the Roman Empire has to be considered with skepticism. Bairoch estimates that the population of the Roman Empire was around 50–55 million including that of Roman Europe, which was around 9–12 million. According to Beloch, in the first century, at the death of Augustus, the Roman Empire had 23 million inhabitants in Europe, 19.5 million in what became the Byzantine Empire, and 11.5 million in Africa, for a total of 54 million. Maddison takes a stand that is closer to Beloch’s than to Bairoch’s. He estimates that, in the first and second centuries, the Roman Empire had a population of 20 million in Europe, another 20 million in Western Asia and 8 million in North Africa, for a total of 48 million.6

The Rise of Rome According to tradition, Rome was founded in 753 BC by Romulus, a descendant of the Troyan Aeneas and his wife Lavinia, the daughter of the king of Latium. Archaeologists and historians believe this date is realistic, but at the beginning Rome was probably a colony of Alba, which was the oldest city of Latium and struggling against the Etruscans. Three groups were competing at that time in Italy: the Greeks, Italics, and Etruscans. Both the Greeks and the Italics spoke Indo-European languages. Italic peoples included the Aequi, Latin-Falisci, Mamertini, Marrucini, Marsi, Paeligni, Sabini, Samnites, Sicani, Siculi, Vestini, Villanovans and Volsci. As for the Etruscans, like the Basques, they lived in Europe before the arrival of the Indo-Europeans. They spoke a

6.

See Paul Bairoch, Cities and Economic Development, From the Dawn of History to the Present (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988), 91–92; Karl Julius Beloch, Die Bevölkerung der Griechisch-Römischen Welt (Leipzig: Duncker and Humbolt, 1886), 507; Angus Maddison, The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective (Paris: OECD, 2001), 50.

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non-Indo-European language and mainly lived between the Tiber and Arno rivers, that is, between Rome and Florence. The Etruscan country later became Tuscia, and then Tuscany (in Latin, “Tusci” means Etruscans). Perugia, Arezzo, and Tarquinia-Corneto are among the modern cities that were Etruscan at the origin. After some time, the Etruscans succeeded in taking control of the region and Rome became a vassal of Veii, the ancient Etruscan town about 16 kilometers northwest of Rome that held hegemony over Rome in the seventh and sixth centuries BC. An Etruscan dynasty came to reign over the Roman kingdom. In 509 BC, a revolution took place and the Etruscan dynasty was replaced with a republic. The struggle with the Etruscans went on till the conquest and destruction of Veii by the Romans, in 396 BC. Then started the rise of Rome. At that time, Rome had a population of about 150,000 inhabitants, which is about the maximum population ever reached by ancient Athens. Thus, Rome was one of the largest cities of Europe even before becoming a political power. Rome’s development was due to its location right in the middle of Italy on Tiber River, in a rich alluvial plain at a distance of about 30 kilometers from Ostia, which is its harbor on the Mediterranean Sea at the mouth of the Tiber. Between Rome and Ostia, the Tiber was navigable, but upstream from Rome it was hardly so. Thus, Rome was a natural breaking point on the Tiber. From a military point of view, Rome’s site was easy to defend. It was located on heights (the seven hills of Rome: the central Palatine Hill surrounded with the Capitoline, Quirinal, Viminal, Esquiline, Caelian, and Aventine hills, which form an irregular hexagon), and far enough from the sea to be out of pirates’ reach. The development of the city started on the Palatine Hill, the home of the early Romans, and the Capitoline, that of the Sabine tribe. Though its hinterland was particularly fertile, Rome owed much of its expansion to the fact that it was a natural “ford and bridge city” built around, first, an important ford due to the presence of a small island (Tiber island) in the middle of the Tiber River and, later, the Sublicius bridge on the Tiber (to which the Cestius, Aemilius, Aurelius, Agrippa, Probus, Nero, and Aelian bridges were added later). It was also a crossroads between the northsouth axis made of the Aurelia Road coming from Pisa in Etruria and the Appia Road leading to Capua in Campania, and the east-west axis made of the Salaria Road between the Adriatic and the Tyrrhenian Seas, which constituted a part of the Salt Road (Via Salaria in Latin). The Salaria Road linked Rome with Castrum Truentinum (modern San Benedetto del Tronto), which faced Salona (in the vicinity of modern Split, Croatia) across the Adriatic Sea. Salona was an important economic city because it shipped to Rome the iron, gold, and silver from Bosnia, and because it produced salt (which the name Salona refers to). At the time, salt was one of the most important traded goods in

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the Western world. Rome’s strategic position on the Salt Road played a major role in the economy since salt and other products from Salona bound for the western Mediterranean Sea were transshipped at Rome on boats heading for Ostia and the Mediterranean. In return, Ostia’s port sent to Rome the grain coming from Egypt and the Black Sea (especially from Crimea). For more than 250 years (from 753 to 500 BC), Rome contented itself with being an important commercial city without manifesting any significant political ambition out of its immediate surrounding. The Romans just applied themselves to build a strong and rich city. Unlike the Greeks, for a long time, they did not create colonies. Rome started creating colonies just between 375 and 275 BC. After the creation of the republic, it took Rome close to 250 more years to stretch its influence over the major part of Italy. This required fighting and defeating the Etruscans, the Italic Samnites, other Italics, the Celtic Gauls who dominated Northern Italy and sacked Rome in 390 BC, and other Indo-Europeans, like the Greek who dominated southern Italy. During this period of expansion, there were setbacks such as a seven-month battle against invading Gauls. At the end, the Gauls were fought off, but left Rome in ruins, forcing the Romans to rebuild their fortifications (first built in 550 BC; the Capitol had been built in 509 BC, the year the Republic was established). The new fortifications were efficient and for eight centuries no foreign invader was to breach Rome’s walls. In 250 BC, Rome was finally master of Italy, and in a position to become the fons et origo (“source and origin”) of the Roman Empire, its civilization, power, and culture. Out of Italy, Rome’s main enemy was Carthage, whose name meant “New Town” in Phoenician. Carthage was founded in 814 BC by Phoenicians coming from Tyre, of which it remained for a time a colony. Carthage was located on a peninsula, to the south of the mouth of the Medjerda River, which is, west of the Nile, one of the four significant rivers of North Africa which open out into the Mediterranean Sea. Carthage was located between the sea and the Lake of Tunis. It benefited from a natural port and a fertile hinterland, the valley of the Medjerda. The Carthaginians showed a remarkable talent for trade and industry. They became the first maritime and commercial power of the western Mediterranean Sea by allying themselves with the Etruscans against the Greeks, whom they defeated in 540 BC at the naval battle of Aleria. A few decades later, in 510 BC, Rome signed with Carthage its very first international treaty. In this treaty, Rome recognized the trade monopoly of Carthage in the whole western part of the Mediterranean Sea. As for the Carthaginians, they agreed not to harm Rome or any of its allies. During the period that followed, the Mediterranean Sea was shared out among three naval great powers: Carthage in the west, Persia in the east, and the Greeks in the middle. During the glorious Age of Pericles in

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Athens (483–429 BC), Athens dominated the Greek part of the Mediterranean Sea, and it constituted the third naval power of the region. For close to 300 years (from 540 to 264 BC), Carthage was the undisputed master of the western Mediterranean Sea, which was, however, the less developed from an economic point of view. At its acme, its empire included the southern part of Spain, the Balearic Islands, Malta, Sardinia, the western part of Sicily, and most of the North-African coast west of Egypt. The Carthaginians exploited important silver mines in North Africa and Spain, and gold mines in Morocco. They also traded pewter from Cornwall, amber from the Baltic, as well as ivory and slaves from Africa. They became famous for producing purple and fabrics, jewels, pottery, arms, joinery, furniture, beds, cushions, and mattresses. After having practiced barter for a long time, they had their own currency and created a major commercial empire. Then, for 118 years (from 264 to 146 BC), Carthage fought against Rome during the three “Punic Wars” (the word “Punic” comes from Poeni, which means Carthaginians in Latin, and Poeni comes from Phoenikes in Greek, which means Phoenicians; the Carthaginians spoke Punic). Carthage became the obsession of the Romans. This obsession was made famous by the historic sentence: “Delenda est Carthago” (“Carthage must be destroyed”), repeatedly pronounced by Cato the Elder. At the end of the Third Punic War, in 146 BC, Carthage was destroyed by Scipio the African and the Romans. Its destruction may be considered as the tragic end of the Phoenician maritime empire that had lasted for about 850 years. It meant also the triumph of the IndoEuropeans over the Semites (it must be remembered that, like the Babylonians and the Assyrians, the Phoenicians were Semites, while the Romans were Indo-Europeans). Finally, Carthage’s defeat put an end to the last chance Africa had to dominate an economy-world. In 146 BC, it had become clear that the urbexplosion that would succeed the Babylonian one was to be Roman and not Carthaginian. From a topodynamic point of view, Carthage was disadvantaged. Actually, its position in the Mediterranean Sea was as central as that of Rome, and its link with the Medjerda River was as good as that of Rome with the Tiber. However, the continental hinterland of Rome was clearly more fertile and vaster than that of Carthage, and Rome was much closer to the central axis of the Great Corridor and the core of the Mediterranean urbanization of the time, which, undoubtedly, lay to the east and to the north of the Mediterranean Sea, and not in the southern and western regions controlled by Carthage. Finally, a last factor played a determining role: if the Tiber was part of a complex fluvial network that included the Arno, the Po, the Rhône, and the Rhine, the Medjerda River was quite alone in its sector of the Maghrib.

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STAGES OF THE FORMING OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE The decline of Carthage contributed to the rise of Rome, which took control of Carthage’s former colonies, without, however, contenting itself with them. After the First Punic War with Carthage (264–241 BC), Rome captured Sicily, occupied Corsica and Sardinia, and penetrated into Cisalpine Gaul. The Second Punic War (218–201 BC) allowed it to take control of a large part of the Iberian Peninsula (the conquest of the whole peninsula was completed by 133 BC; at that time, the Iberian Peninsula had considerable deposits of gold, silver, and copper, which had been exploited in the past by the Phoenicians and the Greeks). Illyria (that became Yugoslavia in the 20th century) passed under the control of Rome from 167 BC. In 148 BC, Rome submitted Macedonia, and, in 146 BC, the rest of Greece followed. The same year, Rome took control of Carthage and of what was left of its empire. In 133 BC, Rome inherited the kingdom of Pergamum (in Anatolia). About 120 BC, Southern Gaul was occupied in order to link the Iberian Peninsula to Italy. In 64–63 BC, Pompey conquered Syria and Judaea. Around 50 BC, Caesar added Northern Gaul to the empire. At the death of Cleopatra in 30 BC, Ptolemies’ Egypt was integrated into the empire. Between AD 43 and 83, Rome conquered Britain (that is, to say England; Julius Caesar had invaded Britain in 55 BC, but had to go back to Rome; Emperor Claudius launched the colonization of Britain in AD 43). The Roman Empire reached its maximum size when it briefly controlled Mesopotamia, between AD 116 and 129, that is for about 13 years. Trajan took it away from the Parthians between AD 115 and 117 (he conquered Ctesiphon in AD 116). His heir, Hadrian, gave up Mesopotamia to the Parthians in AD 129 in order to consolidate the borders of the Roman Empire. According to Hadrian’s policy, the Upper Euphrates River constituted a part of the eastern limit of the empire. The parts of the empire of Alexander the Great that were the first to assert their independence from the Hellenistic world were those that lay farther from the central circle of the Great Corridor, that is the Greco-Bactrian State (that included the Indus Valley), Media Atropatene (between Armenia and the Caspian Sea), Armenia (northeast of Cappadocia), Cappadocia (between the Taurus Mountains and the Black Sea), Pontus (on the southern shore of the Black Sea), Paphlagonia (on the south shore of the Black Sea), and Bithynia (northern Anatolia). The Hellenistic kingdoms that resisted the longest as Hellenistic states were crossed by the Great Corridor’s central axis. They ended up being assimilated into the Roman Empire, and, later, they constituted the very basis of the Byzantine Empire. The Roman Empire took control of the Antigonids’ Macedonia and Achaea (which was the heart of ancient Greece) in 148 BC, Attalids’ Pergama in 132 BC, Bithynia in 75 BC, and Seleucids’ Syria in 65–64 BC. As for Ptolemies’ Egypt, it was integrated in 30 BC. The Persians who, in 280 BC, had taken away the kingdom of Pontus from the Hellenistic world thanks to Mithradates I Ktistes, waged war against Rome three times. But, in 47 BC, Caesar defeated them and annexed the kingdom of Pontus to the empire. The only declared and organized enemies of Rome that were left were the Parthians, descended from the Scythian nomadic tribe of the Parnians and established in a region situated to the southeast of the Caspian Sea. The Scythians are Indo-Europeans from the Indo-Aryan and Indo-Iranian branch. Their language belonged to the Iranian speech family. From about 250 to about 200 BC, the capital of the Parthian Empire was Nisa, located north of the Silk Road. This “city of the interior” was located to the east of the Caspian Sea and to the north of the Atrak River, which runs towards the Caspian Sea. Around 200 BC, the Parthians moved their capital to Hecatompylos, located on the Silk Road a little to the east of present-day Tehran, and later, about 50 BC, to Ctesiphon on the Tigris River. The shift of the Parthian capital followed the Silk Road down to the central axis of the Great Corridor (Ctesiphon being on that axis).

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The Consolidation of the Roman Empire The heroic epoch of the empire, that of its expansion, extended from Caesar and his adopted son Augustus to Trajan, who died in AD 117.7 That of the empire’s consolidation went from Hadrian, Trajan’s heir, to the death of Alexander Severius in 235.8 Then came a long period of attempts to reorganize the empire from Maximin to the death of Theodosius I in 395.9 This was followed by the tragic decline of the Western Roman Empire till the fall of Emperor Romulus Augustulus in 476. When Hadrian came to power, he judged preferable to put an end to the expansion of the empire, not because, militarily, conquering new territories was impossible, but because the urbexplosion dominated by Rome had triumphed and transformed into the first economy-world in history. Of course, those concepts never came to his mind, but Hadrian was conscious that the city of Rome was approaching one million inhabitants (it is estimated that, at its acme, in AD 150–160, the city of Rome had a population between 800,000 and 1.3 million inhabitants, probably closer to the latter figure), which was unprecedented. Rome was then three or four times more populated than Babylon had been at its peak. Rome had reached the threshold of 300,000 inhabitants three hundred years before, around 150 BC. Hadrian was also conscious that the territory of the empire corresponded in his time to an economic universe that was to a very large extent self-sufficient. The Roman Empire constituted an immense common market served by a road network that had no equivalent (that network had been built for military more than commercial purposes) where a single currency prevailed. Within the empire, few customs duties were imposed, and the tolls were very moderate, around 2–5% of the value of the merchandise. For merchandise 7.

8.

9.

The emperors of that period belonged to the Julio-Claudian, Flavian, and NervaTrajan dynasties. The Julio-Claudian dynasty included the emperors Augustus (27 BC– AD 14), Tiberius (14–37), Gaius Caligula (37–41), Claudius (41–54), Nero (54–68). Galba (68–69), Otho (69), and Vitellius (69). The Flavian dynasty included the emperors Vespasian (69–79), Titus (79–81), and Domitian (82–96). As for the Nerva-Trajan dynasty, it included Nerva (96–98), and Trajan (97–117), Nerva and Trajan reigning together in 97 and 98. The emperors of that period belonged to the Antonine and Severus dynasties. The Antonine dynasty included the emperors Hadrian (117–138), Antoninus Pius (138–161), Marcus Aurelius (161–180), and Commodus (180–192). The eight emperors of the Severus dynasty included, among others, the emperors Septimius Severus (193–211), Caracalla (211–217), and Severus Alexander (222–235). During that period, at least sixty emperors or usurpers dominated the whole Roman Empire or parts of it. The main emperors of that period were Valerian (253–269), Aurelian (270–275), Diocletian (284–305), Constantine (306–337), Julian (355–363), and Theodosius (379–395).

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crossing the imperial frontiers, customs duties were about 12.5%, on both entry and exit.10 Moreover, the common market enjoyed peace (Pax romana) and security. The Mediterranean Sea was free from pirates and rivalries between competing states, which would not be seen again during the 1,500 years that followed the fall of Rome. Under Hadrian , the only serious external threat came from the Parthians, whom Hadrian succeeded to coax by giving them back Mesopotamia. The Parthian empire, whose capital was successively Nisa, Hecatompylos on the Silk Road, and Ctesiphon on the Silk Road and the Tigris River, covered Mesopotamia, Persia, Armenia, a part of India, and the major part of present-day Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. The Parthians had become Rome’s main enemy in 53 BC when they decisively won the battle of Carrhae (present-day Harran, southern Turkey) over the Romans.11 That had happened at a time when the heirs of Alexander the Great, the Seleucids, the Ptolemies, the Antigonids, and the Attalids had ceased to constitute an obstacle to the Roman Empire expansion. At the time of the battle of Carrhae, the Parthian Empire already covered Turkmenistan, Iran, Iraq, and parts of present-day Turkey and Saudi Arabia. It was getting very close to the Mediterranean Sea, and Rome had decided to react by attacking it. The victor, a Parthian general named Surena, was murdered by the Parthian king, Orodes, who was jealous of his general’s triumph. Conscious of the importance of resisting the Roman threat, he decided to move his capital from Hecatompylos to Ctesiphon on the Tigris River, southeast of modern Baghdad and opposite Seleucia. The Romans counterattacked. Between AD 115 and 117, Trajan took Mesopotamia and Armenia away from the Parthians, but in 129 his heir, Hadrian, gave them back Mesopotamia, but not Armenia. A successor of Hadrian, Septimus Severus, went back over Hadrian’s position, and briefly took control of Mesopotamia between AD 197 and 199. In 227, Ardachir, of the Persian Sasanian dynasty, defeated the last Parthian king, Artaban V, and put an end to this important empire. The defeat of the Parthian Empire was not good news for Rome because the Persian Sasanians were worse enemies than the Parthians. In fact, the Parthians, like the rulers of the kingdom of Pontus, had accepted the cultural influence of Greece and Rome, but the Sasanians had not. 10. 11.

Arnold Hugh Martin Jones, The Later Roman Empire, 284–602: A Social, Economic and Administrative Survey (Oxford: Blackwell, 1964), 4 volumes; Paul Bairoch, op. cit. That battle was lost by Marcus Crassus, Roman governor of Syria. According to the legend (?), the Roman troops were defeated, among other things, because of the reflection of sunshine on the silk banners unfurled by the Parthians. That reflection dazzled the Roman soldiers and scared their horses.

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BETWEEN AD 100 AND 200, THE SILK ROAD CROSSED ONLY FOUR EMPIRES The Indo-European Parthians were cousins of the Kushans (called, in Chinese, Yue-Che, also written Yüeh-chih) who had conquered the Hellenistic kingdom of Bactria around 100 BC and founded, about AD 30, the Kushan Empire that stretched over the major part of the Indian sub-continent, present-day Pakistan, Afghanistan, and parts of central Asia. Together, the Parthians and the Kushans took progressively control of the continental Silk Road, which made them rich and powerful between AD 100 and 200, at the peak of the Roman Empire, and at a time when China was still united (China disintegrated in 220, and was to unite again just in 589). So, between AD 100 and 200, only four empires shared the continental Silk Road, namely, from west to east, the Roman Empire, the Parthian Empire, the Kushan Empire and the Chinese Empire. That period was one of the most flourishing for the Silk Road. At the same time, the Kushan and Chinese empires almost completely controlled the continental part of the Asian Corridor.

Between the reign of Hadrian and that of Septimius Severus, the German threat had, little by little, overridden the Parthian threat. It is possible that the fate of the Roman Empire was decided around AD 180. The Parthians having tried to recapture Armenia, Marcus Aurelius, nephew, son-in-law, and heir of Antoninus Pius, the nephew and heir of Hadrian, sent troops that succeeded in beating off the attack. However, the Germans took advantage of that diversion to cross the Danube and penetrate into Roman territory. Marcus Aurelius had no choice but to counter-attack. He even undertook to annex the Germans’ territory (Germania in Latin) to definitely put an end to the Barbarian threat by romanizing the Germans, like the Gauls had been two centuries before.12 The Emperor died in 180 while his troops were winning over the Germans. Commodus, his son and heir, probably jealous of his father’s success, decided not to carry on his father’s plan despite that all indicated that it could succeed. Instead, he quickly came to terms with the Germans. Had he done what his father intended to do, the Germanic invasions that later devastated the empire might have been averted, the Germans could have become as good Roman subjects as the Gauls, and the fall of Rome, three hundred years later, in 476, could have been avoided. The construction of roads, military camps, forums, thermal baths, amphitheaters, aqueducts, sewers, reservoirs, and cities has been one of the main means used by Romans to integrate and romanize conquered territories.13

12. 13.

See Anthony King, Roman Gaul and Germany (London: British Museum Publications, 1990). The city of Rome was served by a system of aqueducts and reservoirs, which eventually attained a total length of some 500 kilometers. Around AD 275, Rome had 11 great thermae, 926 public baths, 1,212 public fountains, and 247 reservoirs. See Rodolfo Lanciani, The Ruins and Excavations of Ancient Rome (London : Macmillan, 1897; reprinted New York: Arno Press, 1968).

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In those endeavors, they manifested a great geographical intuition. A large number of present-day European cities have been either founded by the Romans or favored in their growth by the magnificent network of Roman roads. Lyon is a good example of the role of cities in the Roman colonization. Caesar defeated Vercingetorix in 52 BC. From that date, Romans radically transformed Gaul and made of this little-developed country one of the most prosperous parts of their empire. By developing the Lyon-Paris-London axis, they prolonged the Great Corridor, which had so much favored them. Lyon occupied a strategic position at the junction of the Saône and the Rhône, which is, after the Nile, the main Mediterranean river. The Rhône originates from Switzerland, and the Saône from Burgundy. The Saône connection with the Seine River was the first to be developed by the Romans, but, progressively, the Rhône link with the Rhine Basin proved also to be important. LugdunumLyon, founded by Munatius Plancus in 43 BC and then designated as the capital of Gaul14, rapidly became the most prosperous city of the region and the crossroads of all the traffics between Italy and northern Gaul, between the Mediterranean Sea and the Rhine region, and between western Gaul and Northern Italy. It must be noted that, more than 2,000 years after the founding of Lyon, the only maritime link that exists through the continent between the North Sea and the Mediterranean goes through the Rhône and Lyon.

CITIES FOUNDED BY THE ROMANS Among the European cities founded by the Romans, we find Lutetia -Paris , Londinium-London, Lugdunum-Lyon , and Colonia Agrippina-Cologne , but also Aquincum-Budapest , BurdigalaBordeaux, Tolosa-Toulouse, Colonia Nemausus-Nîmes, Augustodunum-Autun, Duecortorum-Reims, Rotomagnus-Rouen, Lindum-Lincoln, Glevum-Gloucester, Eburacum-York, Verulamium-St Albans, Mancumium-Manchester, Regina Castra -Regensburg , Confluentes-Koblenz, MogontiacumMainz, Augusta Treverorum-Trier, Vindobona-Vienna, Singidunum-Belgrade, Corduba-Cordoba, Salmantica-Salamanca, Hadrianopolis-Edirne (in Turkey), etc. Outside of Europe, Caesarea Maritima, which was the largest city of Judaea in Jesus’ time, and Tingris-Tangier (in Morocco) were also founded by the Romans.

The Triumph of Christianity and the Decline of the Western Roman Empire About AD 150, the famous Greek astronomer, geographer and mathematician Claudius Ptolemaeus, said Ptolemy, produced a map of the world that says a lot about the knowledge the Romans had of the world at the acme of the empire. It reveals that the best-known regions precisely correspond to the Great and

14.

Lugdunum was the only city in Gaul to be honoured with full Roman citizenship. See Anthony Edwin James Morris, op. cit., 80.

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Asian Corridors from the Atlantic to the end of the continental and maritime Silk Roads in China. The regions of the Great Corridor that are accurately described are the Mediterranean Sea, Western Europe, Egypt and Mesopotamia, the Persian Gulf, the mouth of the Indus River, and the Ganges River. In the Asian Corridor, the Indus Valley, as well as the continental and the maritime Silk Roads up to China are well known. By contrast, the regions that lie outside of the two corridors are only sketched or totally ignored. Scandinavia is assumed to be an archipelago when it is not. The Sahara Desert is presented as having an inner river network. It must be said that the Sahara was not yet totally a real desert then, and that, between 7000 and 4000 BC, during the period called the “Holocene climatic optimum,” the major part of presentday Sahara was rain-watered, covered with vegetation, inhabited by animals and humans, and crossed by rivers, like the Azawag and the Tilemsi, that have disappeared since. Sub-Saharan Africa and America are unknown to Ptolemy, and they don’t appear on his map. India south of the Indus and Ganges is incredibly atrophied compared with the better-known CeylonSri Lanka, which lay on the maritime Silk Road. As for Russia, it is almost as much a terra incognita as America is. Finally, it is clear on the map that, obviously, Ptolemy did not know whether continents were islands or oceans were lakes. The world had to wait for the discovery of America to learn that continents are islands in the midst of oceans. What Ptolemy’s map reveals is that the Roman emperors had a vision of the world which incited them to think that the northwestward movement within the Great Corridor led nowhere. To the northwest, the Great Corridor was a dead end. By reaching the North Sea and the borders of Scotland, the Roman Empire had brought the northwestward movement following the Rome-Lyon-Paris-London axis to its ultimate limit or almost. On the other hand, the Roman emperors increasingly had to face the unprecedented polarization associated with the Roman economy-world. The existence of the common market and the Mediterranean monetary union created by the Roman Empire, joined to an exceptional security level and a flourishing urbanization, had allowed to reach higher development levels and created major economic gaps between the empire and its external periphery. Those gaps generated ever greater tensions, invasions, wars, and even conflicts between the Roman generals who went to the frontiers to gain a reputation and had to accumulate ever larger spoils for acceding to power and staying there. All this was accompanied by a lowering of the Roman social morality and an increasingly frantic quest for luxury and material wealth. The most structured and sophisticated external threat was coming from the part of the Great Corridor situated immediately to the east of the Roman Empire, that is from the Persian Sasanians who, from AD 227, had succeeded the

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Parthians. However, the most unpredictable and potentially savage threat was coming from the north and its relatively uneducated, nomadic, and underdeveloped Barbarians. Between AD 286 and 293, Emperor Diocletian judged that war had to be waged on all fronts and, for that purpose, the empire had to be divided in four prefectures headed by four co-emperors called tetrarchs. The division of the empire by Diocletian followed the historical logic of the progression of urbanization within the Great Corridor. First, the prefecture of the Orient, whose urbanization was the oldest, fell to Diocletian himself, who received the title of augustus. It included Egypt, Syria, Palestine, Anatolia, Libya, and Thrace, and its capital was Nicomedia, eighty kilometers southeast of Byzantium. Second, the prefecture of Illyricum covered present-day Greece, Skopje-Macedonia, Albania, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, Slovenia, Austria, and the western part of Bulgaria. Its capital was Sirmium (modern Mitovica, Kosovo), and it was attributed to Co-Emperor Galerius with the title of caesar. Third, the prefecture of Italy included present-day Italy, Spain, and Maghrib. Its capital was Mediolanum-Milan, and it was given to Co-Emperor Maximian, who received the title of augustus. Finally, the prefecture of Gaul, which was the most recently urbanized, went from the Rhine to Spain and covered present-day France, Belgium, England, most of Switzerland, and small parts of Germany and the Netherlands. It was bestowed on Co-Emperor Constantius Chlorus (the father of the future Emperor Constantine) with the title of caesar. His capital was Augusta Treverorum (modern Tier, Germany). None of the four capitals of prefecture lay farther than 350 kilometers from the central axis of the Great Corridor. Emperor Constantine put an end to the system of the tetrarchs and judged that the priority was to protect the economic heart of the empire, which corresponded to the northeastern surround of the Mediterranean Sea that went from Rome to Alexandria. In 324, he decided to reverse the historical northwestward movement and to relaunch the empire on a more oriental basis by creating a new capital at Byzantium, which became Constantinople.15 The richest part of the empire had the shape of number 3: the upper arc of a circle included Rome, Ravenna, Salona-Split and Thessaloniki, and the lower arc passed through Byzantium-Constantinople, Ephesus, Antioch, Caesarea Maritima and Alexandria, which, before the rise of Constantinople, was the most populated and richest city of the empire after Rome and ahead of Antioch. Protecting that part of the empire was all the more essential that

15.

From about 150 BC, Byzantium became a free, tribute-paying city on the fringe of the Roman Empire. In AD 73, Emperor Vespasian formally incorporated the city into the empire. In 196, Septimus Severus renamed it Antoninia. In AD 324, Constantine made it Constantinople, which was renamed Istanbul in 1923.

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the trade of the Roman Empire with India and China was increasingly developing, particularly because of the growth of the Chinese economy-world. In that context, Constantine’s decision to select Byzantium as the new capital was understandable since that city was located on the most developed part of the Mediterranean coast, precisely half-way between Rome and Alexandria. The designation of Byzantium-Constantinople as the oriental capital of the empire had an immediate effect on the development of the city. Between 324 and 330, the city was entirely rebuilt, and in 330 it officially received the title of oriental capital of the empire. Thirty years later and more than one hundred years before the fall of the Western Roman Empire, Constantinople took from Rome the title of largest city in the world. It kept that title for more than 300 years, approximately from AD 360 to 650, when ChanganXi’an carried it. Around 400, Constantinople was a magnificent city with its 11 imperial palaces, 14 churches, 5 markets, 8 public and 153 private baths, 140 bakeries, a hippodrome, 322 streets and 4,388 houses. Several huge reservoirs16 provided the city with water, which was brought into the city by the impressive aqueduct of Valens. Constantinople’s triumph was due to the decline of Rome as much as the rise of the new capital of the Orient. In AD 390, Constantinople’ population reached between 250,000 and 300,000 inhabitants, which was far from the million and more that Rome had had at its peak. If the population of Constantinople had exceeded that of Rome, it was, to a great extent, because Rome’s population had radically declined for many reasons including the difficulty to manage such a big city. For instance, Julius Caesar was forced to ban carts from Rome’s streets during the daytime in favor of the pedestrian traffic.17 Before 21 BC, Rome had neither police nor fire protection. Fire destroyed large parts of Rome in AD 64 under Nero and in AD 191 under Septimius Severus.18 Moreover, the city was several times sacked by barbarian invaders. Rome was also affected by flooding, malaria and other diseases, river pollution, the poor bearing capacity of its soil, and its hilly topography. Between 200 and 300, the Barbarian Saxons, Franks, Alamans, Visigoths, Gepidae, Heruli, Alans, and other German Goths started invading the western portion of the Roman Empire coming from the northeast. Once again, Barbarians coming from the Mongolo-American Corridor were trying to attain the central axis of the Great Corridor. Those intrusions and,

16. 17. 18.

At least three of them could readily accommodate a modern football stadium. Anthony Edwin James Morris, op. cit., 16 and 63. Julius Caesar required the use of tiles as an incombustible roof material, and Augustus created a corps of fire-fighting night watchmen, the vigiles. Anthony Edwin James Morris, History of Urban Form: Prehistory to the Renaissance (London: George Godwin, 1972), 64.

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particularly, those of the Alamans and Franks who had crossed the Danube border, had so weakened the empire that, between AD 260 and 274, a Roman general, Postumus, sat himself up as an independent Gallo-Roman emperor ruling over Gaul, Hispania, and England, while, in the East, from 260 to 272, King Odaenathus and Queen Zenobia of Palmyra succeeded to free from Rome their kingdom situated between the Euphrates and the Mediterranean Sea to the southeast of Antioch. After the death of her husband, Queen Zenobia dreamed of making Palmyra, the Silk Road oasis-city located on the central axis of the Great Corridor between the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean Sea, the true capital of the Orient. She succeeded to take control of Syria and its capital, Antioch, as well as a large part of Asia Minor. Egypt was dragged by the movement initiated by Zenobia, who succeeded to free Egypt from the Roman authority. Emperor Aurelian, fearing that Zenobia could ally with the Sasanian Persians, intervened militarily to recapture the control over the Orient. He succeeded to do so and, in 272, Zenobia was taken prisoner and sent to Rome to keep her out of mischief. The Germanic invaders were Indo-Europeans ; however, soon, Mongoloid invaders added. Around 370, the Ephthalite Huns (also called White Huns) originating from the Altai Massif and Mongolia attempted in their turn to penetrate into the Great Corridor towards the west and Europe (through the Corridor of the Steppes and the Mongolo-American Corridor), the southwest and India, as well as the south and China.19 The great terrestrial mobility the steppes of the Mongolo-American Corridor provided the hordes of horsemen-bowmen allowed them to swoop down like predators on the accumulated wealth of the urbanized zones of the Great and Asian corridors. That greatly contributed, to the west, to the increasingly marked division (from the reign of Diocletian) of the Roman Empire between that of the Occident and that of the Orient, and, ultimately, the fall of the Western Roman Empire completed in AD 476. To the east, during the same period, invasions coming from the Mongolo-American Corridor caused the break-up of the Chinese Empire. During the 369 years between AD 220 and 589, China was united just for twenty-four years, that is, between 280 and 304. The invaders from the Mongolian Hsiung-nu confederation broke through the Great Wall of China in AD 304; within a decade, they reached the Huang He (Yellow River), and, for the next three centuries, a succession of invaders from the steppes dominated northern China. The thrust of Ephthalite Huns towards the west caused a profound destabilization of the Germanic peoples. It pushed the Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Alans, Suebi, and Vandals even more towards the West, leaving them with no other choice but to once more invade the Roman Empire. Those movements 19.

Gérard Chaliand, Guerres et civilisations (Paris : Odile Jacob, 2005).

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lasted many years. Around 370, the Alans and other tribes from Eastern Europe were overwhelmed by the Ephthalite Huns and fled westward, crossing into Gaul. The Vandals and Suebi followed them many years later, in AD 406. In 443, Attila and the Huns entered the very Roman Empire and defeated the Eastern Roman forces around Constantinople. In 452, they threatened Rome itself and the Western Roman Empire. Thus, the sedentary and urbanized world stemming from a long process of wealth polarization within the Great Corridor was subjected to the more and more violent assaults of the extremely mobile barbaric nomads coming from the Mongolo-American Corridor. It then appeared that the most fragile part of the Great Corridor was the one that had been more recently urbanized: the Occident. Almost one thousand years later, the same scenario re-occurred: Mongol hordes followed the Mongolo-American Corridor, created the vastest continental empire of world’s history, and provoked the fall of what remained of the old Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire. The strength of the Mongolo-American Corridor was based on the exceptional mobility of horses in the plains and the steppes. That of the Great Corridor came from the low transportation costs associated with fluvial and maritime transportation, while the strength of the Asian Corridor relied on the complementarity of the productions of the Orient and the Occident, complementarity that justified the merchants’ skirting round the Himalaya by the continental and maritime Silk Roads. Curiously enough, the weakening of the Roman Empire coincided with the rise of Christianity. That religion, born in Judaea, spread, like Buddhism some time before, by following the dominant currents and the logic of the topodynamic corridors. From Judaea, Jerusalem, Galilee, and the Jordan Valley, it reached Samaria, and then the coast of Joppa (presentday Tel Aviv-Yafo) and Caesarea. It followed the northwestward movement within the Great Corridor and it reached Damascus, Akko (Acre), Tyre, Sidon, Antioch (where the word “Christian” was used for the very first time), and the Syrian Corridor to attain Anatolia with Ephesus and Colossae, Greece with Philippi and Corinth, Macedonia with Thessaloniki, as well as Italy with Rome. The Letters of Paul, Peter, John, James, and Jude, and the Acts of the Apostles allow us to reconstitute to a large extent that course, which later prolonged to the Iberian Peninsula and Gaul. After having suffered many persecutions, Christianity escaped illegality in 313 thanks to Emperor Constantine I and his co-emperor, Licinius, who established religious freedom by the Edict of Milan, and then it became the official religion of the empire in 380, under Theodosius I. From its designation as capital, Constantinople was meant to be as Christian a city as Rome had been pagan at its acme.

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The recognition of Christianity as the official religion of the empire coincided with the rise of the influence of the African Church with the impressive figure of saint Augustine. This Berber who studied in Carthage and later in Milan became the bishop of Hippo (in present-day Algeria, about 200 kilometers from Carthage) in 396. Braudel stressed the fact that, at that time, spiritually, North Africa was the main support of the Christian Church and the Latin culture, much more than Italy that was then incomparably less rich than North Africa.20 The Church of Africa adopted Latin as the only official language, and imposed it to Occident’s Christians through the translations, from Greek to Latin, of the Old and New Testaments, and through the written works of Apulae, Tertullian, saint Cyprian and, later, saint Augustine who, as the true leader of the African Church, gave its definite form to the Catholic dogma and assured the unity of the African Church, a unity that was often missing elsewhere in Occident.21

The Fall of the Western Roman Empire Rome ceased being the capital of the Roman Empire long before the “fall of Rome.” As soon as AD 293, Diocletian chose Milan as the capital of the prefecture of Italy. Rome was then left without any title of capital. It must be said that the repeated barbarian invasions and plague had already begun to decimate the city, whose population declined from the third century of this era, and that the port of Ostia was progressively disintegrating. In 330, Constantinople became the main capital of the Roman Empire. In 395, at the death of Emperor Theodosius and according to his will, the Roman Empire was split between Theodosius’ sons following the logic of the topodynamic evolution. The eldest son, Arcadius, received the Eastern Roman Empire, which was the richest and whose urbanization was the oldest, while the youngest son, Honorius, got the Western Roman Empire, whose urbanization was more recent. Later, in 402, Honorius moved the capital of the Western Roman Empire from Milan to Ravenna, those cities being significantly closer to the central axis of the Great Corridor than Rome was. At the time of its “fall,” in 476, Rome had not been the capital of the Roman Empire for 183 years. In 476, the Western Roman Empire was the mere shadow of its former self. The Germans were already in control of most of Italy. In 397, Illyria had been occupied by the Visigoths under the command of Alaric who, in AD 410, during the first truly systematic barbarian invasion of Italy (the preceding invasions had rather been incursions), penetrated into Italy and destroyed Rome, but the Roman general Stilicon, who was a Vandal, expelled him and

20. 21.

Fernand Braudel, op. cit., 137. Erato Paris, op. cit., 59.

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forced him to retreat to Dalmatia. A little later, in 415, the same Visigoths had founded a kingdom in Southern Gaul, and the Franks had occupied Northern Gaul about 406. The Burgundians had penetrated in Savoy in 443. The Vandals, under the command of King Gaiseric (also called Genseric), had conquered a part of North Africa around 450 and destroyed Rome itself in 455, just three years after Rome had been threatened by Attila and the Mongolian Huns who were sacking Italy after having been defeated in 451 in Gaul by the Roman general Aetius and Theodoric, the Visigoth chief, at the Catalaunian Plains of Champagne. From about 450, the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes had started invading and occupying Britain that the Roman troops, administrators, and coinage had left in 409 following the orders of the usurping emperor Constantine III who, between 407 and 411, successively controlled Britain, as well as parts of Gaul and Spain.22 In 470, six years before the “official” fall of the Western Roman Empire, the Roman authorities had lost all power in North Africa, Britain, Gaul, and Hispania. The Franks, the Visigoths, and the Burgundians controlled Gaul and Hispania, and the Vandals had established an independent kingdom in North Africa. The Western Roman Empire was already limited to Italy, but this one had been, from 456 to 472, under the effective control of the Suebi and their chief Ricimer, who sacked Rome in 472 before dying. In 476, the last emperor of the Western Roman Empire, Romulus Augustulus, was dethroned by a German warrior named Odoacer (c. 433–493) who, after having served in the Roman Imperial Guard at Ravenna, became the first official barbarian king of Italy. Odoacer was a member of the Sciri German tribe. He was the son of Idico (or Edeco), one of the generals and ministers of Attila the Hun. Odoacer was assassinated in 493, then the Heruli, originated from Scandinavia, and the Ostrogoths took control of Italy while recognizing a form of suzerainty to Byzantium. The Byzantine Emperor Justinian I, famous for his illustrious system of laws, succeeded in reconquering Rome in 552, and then most of Italy and a part of Spain. He somewhat reconstituted the old Roman Empire. Unfortunately, his nephew and successor, Justin II, lost most of Italy to the Lombards who invaded it from 568. The capital of the Lombard kingdom was Milan, and Ravenna was relegated to the status of capital of the few remaining possessions of Byzantium in Italy. As for Rome, it became increasingly the city of the popes from Gregory I, who reigned from 590 to 604, and was the first pope to be the practical lord of Rome in municipal affairs. What characterized the end of the Western Roman Empire was observed again close to one thousand years later at the end of the Byzantine Empire, as in the case of so many other empires that build up from a central nucleus, which progressively spreads its domination over an increasingly 22.

The Roman legions withdrew from Britain as soon as AD 407.

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large territory and ever farther lands. At the beginning, that expansionist movement enriches the center of the empire. But in the long run, this attracts invaders who attempt to capture by force the whole empire or, at least, some peripheral regions of it. The empire must then mobilize increasingly important resources in order to defend its borders. This generates inflation and weakens the center’s economy because considerable resources and troops are concentrated at the borders. Sooner or later, the central power gets contested. The emperors and the central authorities are then more and more frequently overthrown, while the leaders of the periphery progressively free themselves from the center, till the whole imperial structure disrupts almost by itself. In the case of Rome, the socioeconomic dimension of the process took a great importance. Rome had emerged thanks to its economic and commercial dynamism. The expansion of the empire led to replace free workers from the region with increasingly numerous slaves. Unemployment increased and various forms of parasitism and patronage developed.23 Through various forms of taxes, Rome pumped an increasing part of the surplus out of its empire, making the economy of the city of Rome less productive and more dependent upon these pumped surpluses, and on inefficient slavery.24 Rome, which originally was a city of producers, became a city of parasitic consumers.25 That being said, the greatness of the economic and other material achievements of the Roman Empire must never be underestimated. There is no doubt that the Roman Empire was the most advanced the world had ever seen till then. Even compared to China at the same epoch, it was still unrivalled even on the eve of the fall of its western part.26 In the fields of military engineering, civil engineering, road transport, navigation, city planning, architecture, agriculture, and organizational skills, the Roman 23.

24.

25.

26.

Paul Bairoch (op. cit., 101–104) estimates that, under the Roman Empire, slaves represented about 20% of the total workforce of the Italian Peninsula. As for Rome, mass unemployment and underemployment, taken together, must certainly have exceeded 30 percent, if not 40 percent, of the population of working age (ibid., 82–84). Free Roman citizens enjoyed an incredible number of holidays. During the time of Claudius (41–54), there were 154 holidays annually. That number rose to about 200 in the third century. Anthony Edwin James Morris, History of Urban Form: Prehistory to the Renaissance, op. cit., 68. Agriculture and manufacture were carried on by slaves who were reluctant and careless labor, wasteful of material. Slavery discouraged innovation and improvement in tools and methods. Arnold Hugh Martin Jones, The Roman Economy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974), and Moses I. Finley, The Ancient Economy (London: Chatto & Windus, 1973) advance that commerce and industry occupied a minor place not only in Rome, but also in most of the Roman cities, which would have been centers of consumption more than production. Jean-Michel Poinsotte, “Les Romains et la Chine: réalités et mythes,” Mélanges de l’École française de Rome 91, 1 (1979): 431–479; Angus Maddison, Chinese Economic Performance in the Long Run (Paris : OECD, 1998), 38.

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Empire clearly equaled or surpassed the Chinese Empire at the beginning of the fifth century of this era. In the domain of construction, the Romans introduced the vaulted dome, the pane of glass, and the aqueduct bridge. The tonnage of some Roman ships exceeded 1,300 ton, while the Greek ships had an average tonnage of just 130 ton, that is, to say ten times less. Other examples could be given of the superiority of the Romans in a large number of sectors. The best illustration of the exceptional nature of the Roman world is probably given by the description of the catastrophic consequences the fall of the Western Roman Empire had on urbanization. The proportion of the population of that part of the empire living in cities with 10,000 inhabitants or more passed from about 5% under the empire to 0% after the fall of Rome.27 As for cities with 2,000 inhabitants or more, the urbanization rate declined radically: it went from about 8–15% to 5–8%. It is considered that the only structured relic of the urban system of the Western Roman Empire that survived till the midst of the Middle Ages was Septimania, that urban region of Southern France grouping together seven cities: Narbonne, Béziers, Carcassonne, Agde, Elne, Maguelonne, and Lodève.28 The fall of Rome shattered the very foundations of the Western European economy. The Mediterranean Sea definitively stopped being a secure economic space characterized by trade freedom and monetary unity. During the centuries that followed, that sea became a military and commercial battlefield for the barbarian kingdoms, the Byzantine Empire, the Arab world, and the Ottoman Empire. Finally, the economic and political unity of Western Europe broke up for a millennium and a half. Thanks to the survival of the Eastern Roman Empire for close to one thousand years, the Roman economy-world did not disappear completely, but it came out from those events greatly weakened.

s THE EMERGENCE OF THE CHINESE ECONOMY-WORLD At the other extremity of the Eurasian continent, with an interval of about 250 years, another economy-world emerged, that of the Chinese Empire stemming from the integration of three important economic regions (the Loess Plateau, the Red Basin and the Great Plain of China) under the ascendancy of the first urban pole of the history of China, that of the Loess Plateau dominated by Changan-Xi’an (Map 5).

27. 28.

Raymond W. Goldsmith,“An Estimate of the Size and Structure of the National Product of the Roman Empire,” Review of Income and Wealth (September 1984). In some parts of Western Europe, as in England, urban life effectively disappeared after the fall of Rome.

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China was unified for the first time in 221 BC. Thereafter, it experienced three periods of division. The first one lasted just 60 years, from AD 220 to 280; the second one lasted 285 years, from 304 to 589, and the last one, 372 years, from 907 to 1279. The Chinese economy-world took form during the first period of unity of the empire, which lasted 441 years, and the first period of disunity was too short to jeopardize it. By contrast, the second period of disunity, which (it must be noticed) coincided with the barbarian invasions in Occident and with the fall of the Western Roman Empire, disrupted as much the Chinese economy-world as the collapse of the Western Roman Empire disturbed the Roman economy-world. All in all, the penetration of the mobile populations of the Mongolo-American Corridor into the part of the Great Corridor that had become rich and developed thanks to the Roman Empire occurred at about the same time the Chinese part of the Asian Corridor, that had also become rich and developed thanks to the Chinese Empire, was subjected, for the same reasons, to the assaults of nomads coming from the northern steppes. However, while the Roman Empire never regained its unity after the fall of Rome, the Chinese Empire did after numerous perturbations. In 1279, when China regained its unity after some four centuries of disunity, its population had fallen from 100 million to just 60 million inhabitants.

From the Loess Plateau to the Great Plain of China The emergence of the Roman economy-world was preceded by the rise of Rome and its economy. Similarly, the growth of the Chinese economy-world started with the ascending of Changan-Xi’an, which reached one million inhabitants around AD 700, about 550 years after Rome had attained that threshold. Fifty years before, around 650, the capital of the Chinese Empire had succeeded Constantinople as the largest city of the world. Changan-Xi’an kept that title for 200 years till Baghdad dethroned it about 850. At its peak, Changan-Xi’an was surrounded by a 36-kilometer wall. The city was then a first-class administrative, agricultural, craft, and commercial center. Xi’an and Luoyang are traditionally considered as the two terminals of the Silk Road. The Ancients referred to Sera Metropolis and Sinae Metropolis as the two eastern terminals of the Silk Road. The exact location of those two cities is not precisely known yet, but it is accepted that Sera Metropolis was to the west of Sinae Metropolis as Xi’an is to the west of Luoyang, which is considered by some as Sinae Metropolis (see Map 5). Luoyang reached its acme at about the same period Xi’ang did: around 700, its population was about 350,000 persons. Basically, the whole urbexplosion of the Loess Plateau was then in turmoil, and its energy was increasingly canalized towards the east, towards the great Plain of China through the city of Zhengzhou.

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Zhengzhou is located about 270 kilometers east of Luoyang, at the eastern extremity of the Chinese continental mountain range, and to the south of the Huang He, where its valley broadens into the great eastern Chinese Plain. That immense plain forms a triangle whose three vertices are Zhengzhou, Peking-Beijing, and Hangzhou. Zhengzhou is the western entrance door of the Great Plain of China, which means a lot since the Chinese urban development started to the west. Very early, the Chinese understood the importance of establishing links between the three vertices of the Great Plain triangle. This gave birth to the most impressing canal network humankind had seen up to then. By its size, that network was absolutely comparable to the Great Wall or to the vast Roman road network, which played a similar role in the Roman Empire. Incidentally, it is worth noting that the Romans, who ruled over an empire which was, above all, maritime built a huge network of terrestrial roads, while the Chinese, whose empire was then essentially continental, built an unprecedented canal network destined to navigation. That being said, if the canals played a major role in China, it must not be forgotten that the Chinese emperors also built a road network. That network extended over 35,200 kilometers (the Roman road network was about 4 to 5 times larger), and, from 1280, the Mongol postal service covered the whole territory with 200,000 horses. The Chinese built three long canals (see Map 11). The first one, called the Northern Bian (or Pien) Canal, went from Zhengzhou to Peking-Beijing through Tianjin. The beginning of its construction would go back as far as about 350 BC. The second one, called the Southern Bian (or Pien) Canal, linked Zhengzhou to the Jiangnan Canal that led to Hangzhou. It followed the Asian Corridor, and it was built twice. The old Southern Bian Canal was built between AD 206 and 220, and it followed the Sze River, whereas the new Southern Bian Canal was constructed between 581 and 618, and followed the Kuei River. The third long canal (the most famous of them all) is called the Imperial Grand Canal. It was 1,782-kilometer long and went from PekingBeijing to Hangzhou. It was built from AD 1282–1283. Its main purpose was to supply Peking-Beijing with rice and agricultural products stemming from the south. Zhengzhou dominated the Bian canal system till 960, when the new Song dynasty chose Kaifeng as their new capital and the new terminal of the Bian canals.

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THE CHINESE DYNASTIES The Chinese history is usually divided up according to the imperial dynasties. The following list gives their name, their period, and their capital.

Dates

Dynasty

Capital

(China before unification) Xia Shang Western Zhou Eastern Zhou

Anyi (in Shanxi province) Anyang (in Henan province) Hao Ching (southwest of Changan) Luoyang

(united Chinese Empire) Qin Western Han Xin (Wang Mang’s interregnum) Eastern Han

Xianyang (west of Changan) Changan-Xi’an Changan-Xi’an Luoyang

220–280 220–265 265–280

(divided Empire) The three Sanguo Kingdoms Western Xi Jin

Luoyang

280–304 280–304

(united Chinese Empire) Western Xi Jin

Luoyang

304–589 304–316 304–439 386–581 220–589 581–589

(divided Empire) Western Xi Jin The Five Barbarians’ Sixteen Kingdoms The Five Northern Dynasties The Six Southern Dynasties Sui

Nanjing Changan-Xi’an/Luoyang

589–907 589–618 618–907

(united Chinese Empire) Sui T’ang

Changan-Xi’an/Luoyang Changan-Xi’an

907–1279 907–960 907–960 960–1127 947–1125 1127–1234 1234–1279 1127–1279

(divided Empire) (disintegrated Empire to the north) Southern T’ang Northern Sung Liao (Khitan Mongol dynasty) in the North Jin (Golden Tartar Jurchen) in the North Yüan (Mongol) in the North Southern Sung

Nanjing Kaifeng Peking-Beijing Peking-Beijing Karakorum/Changtu/Peking-Beijing Hangzhou

1279–1911 1279–1368 1368–1644 1644–1911

(united Chinese Empire) Yüan (Mongol) Ming Qing (Manchu)

Peking-Beijing Nanjing/Peking-Beijing Shenyang-Mukden/Peking-Beijing

⫾2150–⫾1650 BC ⫾1650–⫾1040 BC ⫾1040–771 BC 771–256 BC 221 BC–AD 220 221–206 BC 206 BC–AD 8 AD 9–23 AD 23–220

Luoyang

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It is while Zhengzhou exerted its economic ascendancy that the most important economic transformation China has experienced before the twentieth century occurred. Around 800, a new rice species arrived from Vietnam, which matured so rapidly that it allowed producing several crops per year. That species proved to be ideal for cultivating rice in the valley of the Yangtze River. In one century, from 800 to 900, vast marshy zones of the Yangtze River were put into exploitation, and the agricultural and economic heart of China, which was, till then, located on the Loess Plateau and the Huang He Valley, moved along the Asian Corridor to the Yangtze River Valley. According to Maddison, if, during the eighth century, only one-fourth of the Chinese population lived to the south of the Yangtze River, at the end of the thirteenth century, more than three-quarters lay to the south of the river, which appears rather exaggerated.29 It may be more realistic to say that at the end of the thirteenth century, more than three-quarters lived in the Yangtze-River Basin or south of it. The topodynamic movement from the northwest to the southeast within the Asian Corridor had profound consequences for the Chinese society. In one century, the whole China passed from a civilization based on wheat and millet to a civilization of rice requiring an intensive use of work, irrigation, and sophisticated cultivation methods. In order to favor the development of a more intensive agriculture, the Chinese leaders printed calendars and handbooks of best practice in farming as early as in the tenth century, 500 years before Gutenberg “re-invented” printing (it must be noted that the Greeks of Phaistos had discovered the principle of printing with mobile characters around 1700 BC, but they did not further exploit their invention). Those handbooks contained numerous illustrations. The very first printed book in world’s history was a Buddhist Sutra published in China, in AD 868. Under the Sung dynasty, printing became widespread. In 960, the capital of China was moved to Kaifeng, which also replaced Zhengzhou as the terminal of the Bian-Pien Canal, whose traffic was booming as a consequence of the development of Southern China. From 960 to 1060 approximately, the volume of merchandise increased threefold. Around 1078, Kaifeng’s population probably reached between 600,000 and 700,000 inhabitants. During that period, its region experienced what Hartwell called a true “industrial revolution,” its iron production increasing ninefold from 806 to 1078.30 For the first time in Chinese history, the capital of the empire was also an industrial metropolis.

29. 30.

Angus Maddison, op. cit., 18. Robert M. Hartwell, “Markets, Technology and the Structure of Enterprise in the Development of the Eleventh Century Chinese Iron and Steel Industry,” Journal of Economic History 1 (1966): 29–58.

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The Cities of the Great Plain of China The accession of Peking-Beijing to the title of capital of China involved three steps: in AD 936, Peking-Beijing became the southern capital of the (Mongol) Khitans under the Liao dynasty; in 1127, it became the capital of Northern China under the (Golden Tartar Jurchen) Jin dynasty, and, in 1279, it became the capital of the whole China under the (Mongol) Yüan dynasty. The rise of Peking-Beijing really started with the Khitan tribes and their Liao dynasty that ruled from 947 to 1125 over Manchuria, Mongolia, and the northeast corner of China proper. The Khitans created a dual government to rule their conquests, and Peking-Beijing was their southern capital from 936 to 1115. Later, in 1120, the Jin dynasty from the Juchen tribes coming from Manchuria who had formally been subjects of the Khitans defeated the Liaos and captured PekingBeijing. Seven years later, in 1127, the Jins also defeated the Northern Sung dynasty, whose capital was Kaifeng, and they decided to move the capital of Northern China from Kaifeng to Peking-Beijing, while the Sung dynasty was taking refuge in Southern China, where they chose Hangzhou as their new capital. Finally, in 1234, the Jins were beaten by the Mongols, who replaced Peking-Beijing with two capitals: Karakorum (in Mongolia) and Changtu (in China). However, in 1260, Genghis Khan’s grandson, Kublai Khan, founder of the Yüan dynasty, became emperor, and, in 1264–1267, he made PekingBeijing his only capital. But in 1279, Kublai Khan defeated the Southern Sungs, and only then did Peking-Beijing become, for the first time, the capital of the whole China. At the time Changan-Xi’an, Luoyang, and Kaifeng dominated China, Peking-Beijing was a rather secondary city despite that it had become urban rather early, around 450 BC (it must not be forgotten that Peking-Beijing’s region has been inhabited for half a million years, as the discovery of the Sinanthropus pekinensis or Homo erectus pekinensis has demonstrated). To explain how it rose to the status of capital of the whole China, it must be understood that Peking-Beijing is located at the exit of the Nankou Pass, which makes Peking-Beijing the northern entrance of the Great Plain of China. What has been observed in the west about the invasions of the Great Corridor from the Mongolo-American Corridor was also observed to the east with regard to the Asian Corridor. In the case of the northeastern part of the Asian Corridor, the only significant invasions of the corridor originating from the south were linked to the Tibetans who invaded the heart of China in the eighth century of this era. All the other significant invasions came from the north, from the MongoloAmerican Corridor, from Mongolia and Manchuria. The favorite routes of the invaders were the Nankou Pass leading to Peking-Beijing and the Ordos Desert that lies between the northern Huang He and the Loess Plateau. The Great Wall of China (see Map 11) was built, completed, and reconstructed many

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times during two millennia, from the third century BC to the seventeenth century of this era, in order to protect China from the repeated invasions from the north, from the Mongolo-American Corridor. In that context, militarily controlling Peking-Beijing was tantamount to controlling the Great Plain of China and, most of the time, China itself, especially after the Great Plain of China had replaced the Loess Plateau as the heart of China’s economy. The Jin dynasty was the first to realize that and to act accordingly. However, this did not prevent it from being overthrown by the Mongol Yüan dynasty in 1234. From 1127 to 1911, five dynasties ruled over China, three of whom came from the north: two from Manchuria (the Jins, who were Golden Tartar Jurchen, and the Qing), and one from Mongolia (the Yüans). Only the Sungs and the Mings came from China. From an agricultural point of view, the Peking-Beijing region presented serious deficiencies because of the proximity of mountains and desert zones. This explains why the Imperial Grand Canal had to be constructed: it served to feed the most strategic northern entrance of China. The topodynamic movement, which, within the Asian Corridor, went from Changan-Xi’an and Luoyang to Zhengzhou and Kaifeng, continued towards the southeast, towards the Yangtze River, Nanking-Nanjing and Hangzhou. The three longest reigning capitals of China have been ChanganXi’an, Peking-Beijing, and Nanking-Nanjing. This last city, whose name means “capital of the South,” whereas Peking-Beijing is the “capital of the North,” was the capital of China from 1368 to 1421, and then from 1928 to 1937, and from 1946 to 1949. The origins of Nanking-Nanjing are fuzzy. It became a true urban city in AD 220 when it was designated as a regional capital. Later, from 907 to 960, it became the capital of the part of China that remained under the control of the Southern T’ang dynasty. The rise of Nanking-Nanjing, between AD 500 and 1368, from the title of regional capital to that of capital of Southern China and then to capital of China, corresponded to the southeastward movement, to the construction of the canals of the Great Plain of China, and to the shift of economic primacy from the Loess Plateau to the Yangtze River Valley. Nanking-Nanjing is the main city and port of the lower Yangtze region. It is situated about 80 kilometers west of the Imperial Grand Canal on the southeast bank of the Yangtze River, which is the longest in Asia. Its location made it an ideal link between Northern China and the part of China that lay to the south of the Yangtze, between the old China of the Loess Plateau and the new China of the Great Plain, as well as between the east-west axis of the Yangtze River and the north-south axis of the Imperial Grand Canal. Noted during centuries for its satins, pongees (home-woven silks), velvets, brocades, porcelain, paper, and ink sticks, Nanking-Nanjing never had, before 1300, a population that could be compared to those of Changan-Xi’an, Kaifeng, Luoyang, Zhengzhou,

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or Peking-Beijing. Its demographic expansion really started in 1368, when it became the capital of China thanks to the advent of the Ming dynasty. However, in 1421, the Mings took the decision to give back to Peking-Beijing the title of capital of China. To the southeast of Nanking-Nanjing, the port city of Hangzhou (which the Sungs called Lin’an between 1129 and 1277, and the Europeans called Quinsay) has played a major role in the evolution of China. Located on the coast of the China Sea at the end of the Imperial Grand Canal, it became, in 1127, the capital of the Southern Sung dynasty when the latter was chased out from northern China and Kaifeng by the Mongol Yüan dynasty. Hangzhou was the only capital of China located on the coast, and, like Amsterdam, it was crossed by a high number of canals. Around 1275, at the time of Marco Polo, it had 347 bridges, and its population was around 350,000 inhabitants, when China had five or six cities exceeding 200,000.31 The topodynamic movement from the Loess Plateau to the region of Nanking-Nanjing and Hangzhou joined, in the seventeenth century, another topodynamic movement coming from the west within the Great Corridor. The latter movement, which will be called, here and in the next chapters, the “Great Ebb,” followed the fall of the Western Roman Empire. The joint impact of the two movements that converged towards the great region of the lower Yangtze River was such that, at the end of the nineteenth century, that region, to which Nanking-Nanjing and Hangzhou belonged, was clearly the most urbanized and developed region of China, altogether from an agricultural, industrial, and commercial point of view.32 The urban system of that region was then very complex, and each city was specialized in the production and trade of different goods such as cereals, rice, or silk.33 The grain trade was concentrated around Suzhou, which was the largest city in the lower Yangzi region during the mid-nineteenth century.34 According to a Chinese proverb, “In heaven, paradise; on earth, Hangzhou and Suzhou.” That latter city is located on the Imperial Grand Canal, 160 kilometers north of Hangzhou. Thanks to its countless canals, Suzhou is one of the most 31.

32. 33.

34.

Joseph Needham, op. cit., 148; Tertius Chandler, Four Thousand Years of Urban Growth: An Historical Census (Lewiston, N.Y.: St. David’s University Press, 1987); Tertius Chandler and Gerald Fox, Three Thousand Years of Urban Growth (New York: Academic Press, 1974). G. William Skinner, The City in Late Imperial China (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1977), 211–229. Liu Ts’ui-Jung, “Demographic aspects of urbanization in the Lower Yantzi Region of China, c. 1500–1900,” in Urbanization in History: A Process of Dynamic Interactions, A.M. van der Woude, Akira Hayami, and Jan de Vries (ed.) (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), 350. Ibid., 330.

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beautiful cities of China. On top of grain trade, silk production characterized Suzhou, which became such an important producer of silk that it came to be known as the true origin of the Silk Road.

The Cities of the Red Basin The economic expansion of the Yangtze River Valley that followed the building of the Imperial Grand Canal also attained the upstream region of the Yangtze River Basin, called the Red Basin, where the cities of Chengdu and Chongqing, which already occupied an important place in the Chinese urban system, experienced a revival of activity. Chengdu is an old city, which was founded around 300 BC by the Qin dynasty that, from the city of Xianyang close to Changan-Xi’an, achieved control of the whole of China and created for the first time, in 221 BC, a united Chinese Empire. The north-south spine of their empire was the “Straight Road” going from Fengxiang in the Shaanxi province of Changan-Xi’an to Chengdu, the Yangtze River, and the Red Basin in the Sichuan province, located to the south. The Qin dynasty built in the Red Basin one of China’s most ancient and successful irrigation systems, watered by the Min Jiang, a tributary of the Yangtze River. The system diverted half of the waters of the Min Jiang eastwards to irrigate the plain through a dense network of channels. The successor of the Qin dynasty, the Western Han dynasty, built at Guanxian a system for controlling irrigation called Dujiangyan, which greatly contributed to Chengdu’s development. Today, that irrigation system, which has been only slightly modified, still supports the densest agrarian population in the world. The Western Hans also developed the metallurgical industry of the Red Basin, as well as its sectors of salt deposit exploitation, lacquer production, and silk manufacturing. In medieval times Chengtu-Chengdu was famous for its fine brocades and satins, and notable for its refined culture and display of luxury. Thanks to the Straight Road and the surrounding waterways, Chengdu constituted a crossroads. From there, the traveler coming from Changan-Xi’an could take the canals and rivers to reach the Yangtze River and the China Sea or follow the Straight Road towards Tibet, towards the Mekong River leading to the Yunnan province and to Vietnam, towards the Salween River leading to Burma-Myanmar and Thailand, or towards the Brahmaputra River leading to the Brahmaputra-Ganges’ common delta. Thanks to the shift of economic primacy from the Loess Plateau to the lower Yangtze River region, Chengdu became, in the tenth century, one of the most prosperous commercial cities of China. In 812, one of the greatest commercial revolutions in the history of the world took place in Chengdu when its merchants introduced the use of paper money, which rapidly spread throughout China. It must be stressed that China was about 700 years ahead of Europe in that field. The

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first paper money was issued in Europe just in 1694 by the Bank of England. Paper money greatly favored the development of trade in China. Because of it, the proportion of the state’s revenue taking the form of money went from almost nothing to more than 50%.

MONEY BEFORE THE INVENTION OF PAPER MONEY The Greeks were the first ones to introduce coin money around 700 BC. Various materials served as money through history. The Mesoamericans (Maya, Aztec , etc.) used cocoa grains as money. To the north of Rio Grande, Amerindians used Wampuns, which consisted in shell necklaces. In India and Black Africa, people resorted to cowries, which are shells of the porcelain group. In the Fiji Islands, whale teeth were used. In the British colonies that became the United States , tobacco served as money. In Europe and Africa, the cattle was also used (the term “pecuniary” comes from pecus, which means “cattle” in Latin).

The importance of the invention of paper money comes from the fact that its supply did not depend anymore on external factors such as the availability of gold, silver, shells, cattle, or cocoa. It only relied on the will of those who issued money. Issuing money became a matter of policy and trust. Issuing money then depended, more than ever, on the good judgment of the issuers because increasing the monetary mass had become easier, but also more risky. It allowed helping the economy by increasing the demand for goods and services, but it also increased the risk of harming the economy by creating inflation. Paper money augmented the leeway, which, however, had to be used with wisdom. When it did, trade and all the economic activities benefited from it. China has been the first state in the world to experience it and to observe its effects. Those were important. It is not by chance that the appearance of paper money was followed by one of the greatest economic mutations of the whole history of China, that is, the transfer of the economic heart of the country from Changan-Xi’an’s region to the Yangtze River Basin where Chengdu lay. In the same way as the increase of the monetary mass in Europe after the discovery of the gold and silver of the Americas favored the transfer of the European economic heart from Northern Italy to Northern Europe, the creation of money resulting from the invention of paper money in China caused a major acceleration of the topodynamic movements within the Asian Corridor. To the southeast of Chengdu, Chongqing is situated at the junction of the Jialing Jiang and the Yangtze River. The Jialing Jiang is parallel to the Min Jiang. Those two tributaries of the Yangtze and the Yangtze River itself constitute the main waterways of the Red Basin. Chongqing signifies “double happiness.” The city bears that name only since AD 1088 even though it was

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founded about three thousand years ago. The considerable development of Chongqing is due to the fact that it is the port city of the Red Basin that lies the most upstream of the Yangtze River. So it is a typical “breaking point” city. From about 900, after the deep transformation of the Chinese economy due to the southeastward movement within the Asian Corridor, the Chinese economy-world was based on three strategic regions: the Great Plain of China, dominated by Peking-Beijing to the north, Zhengzhou to the west, and Hangzhou, Nanking-Nanjing, and Suzhou to the south; the Loess Plateau, dominated by Changan-Xi’an, Luoyang, and Kaifeng; and the Red Basin, dominated by Chengdu and Chongqing. The largest of the Chinese cities remained Changan-Xi’an, but the center of gravity of the Chinese economy was clearly moving towards Nanking-Nanjing and Hangzhou. The southeastward movement was accentuated by the fact that, further south, Canton-Guangzhou and the Xi Jiang (Pearl River) were emerging, as will be seen. Within the Asian Corridor, to this day, the southeastward topodynamic evolution of China has never been really reversed, but nothing precludes this happening. The urban pole of the Loess Plateau has ceased to dominate China a long time ago.

The Greatness of the Chinese Economy-World Steel was probably invented by the Chinese in the second century BC. Under the Roman Empire, the best steel available was Seric steel brought into the empire from India. Modern steel was invented by the American William Kelly in 1845 with the help of four Chinese experts. Needham estimates to one thousand years China’s lead over Europe in iron and steel metallurgy.35 The Chinese invented lacquer in the eighth century BC, if not before. They have discovered petroleum and natural gas in the first century of this era. They invented the wheelbarrow and porcelain at about the same time as paper, around AD 100, the stirrup in the third century, matches in 577, printing before 868, the mechanical clock around 690, cast iron in 954, gunpowder around 1000, and the magnetic compass around 1100. Moreover, the Chinese invented canal lock gates, deep drilling, efficient animal harnesses, kites, and sternpost rudders. They built canals on a large scale one thousand years before the Italians and the Dutch did the same (Italians did from 1458 and the Dutch from 1560).36 The Chinese agriculture was profoundly innovative, and, between the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the seventeenth century, it was ahead of the European agriculture. The Chinese generalized the rotation of crops. They produced more efficient plows. They systematically selected the cultivated species. They developed rice species allowing for two and three 35. Joseph Needham, op. cit. 36. Paul Bairoch, op. cit., 170.

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harvests per year. They diversified their agriculture by introducing numerous new species like tea, cotton, and sorghum, and even, only fifty years after the discovery of America, American crops such as maize, peanut, potatoes, and sweet potatoes. All that allowed China to quadruple its population between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries.37 The Chinese also developed coastal navigation thanks to wellconceived ships of about one thousand metric tons. Chinese trading ships were active in the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea in the ninth century. It is also proved that, later, Chinese junks frequented East African ports.38 At the beginning of the fifteenth century, China became the first maritime power of the world. It created a navy of 28,000 sailors and sent seven fleets, each composed of hundreds of vessels (some of which were 125 meters long), to Java, India, Persia, Arabia, and even the eastern coast of Africa. Under the Ming dynasty, Emperor Yung-lo (also named Chengzu) sent his eunuch admiral, Cheng Ho, on major expeditions.39 From 1405 to 1433, Cheng Ho traveled the length and breadth of the China Sea and the Indian Ocean. Had his curiosity led him towards Siberia and Alaska, he could well have discovered America before Christopher Columbus. Unfortunately, a struggle opposed the eunuchs, who favored navigation, and their opponents at the Chinese court. The opponents gained the upper hand in the power struggle, stopped sending fleets, eventually dismantled the shipyards, and forbade oceangoing shipping. This considerably weakened China in the face of foreign powers. Despite that, in 1600, the Chinese still dominated the maritime trade east of the Malacca Strait. Thanks to its navigation, canals, paper money, and road system, the Chinese trade prospered and favored the development of agriculture and industry. This allowed China to reach an urbanization rate that, around 1300, exceeded by one or two points the rate of Western Europe. The technological advance of China over Western Europe lasted from the fall of Rome to 1600 approximately.40 To a large extent, it rested on an important bureaucracy and a mandarinate based on merit and not on aristocracy. If the Greeks gave the world democracy, the Chinese gave it meritocracy.41 In Europe, it took one thousand more years for a statesman, Napoleon, to install meritocracy as the basis of the state. ***

37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

Angus Maddison, op. cit., 14. Bernard Lugan, Atlas historique de l’Afrique des origines à nos jours (Paris : Éditions du Rocher, 2001), 101. Louise Levathes, When China Ruled the Seas (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994). Jacques Gernet, A History of Chinese Civilization (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1982), and Joseph Needham, op. cit. Étienne Balazs, La bureaucratie céleste: recherches sur l’économie et la société de la Chine traditionnelle (Paris : Gallimard, 1968).

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In this chapter, the Asian Corridor has been presented as the spinal column of the Chinese economy-world in the same way as the Great Corridor was the spine of the Roman economy-world. This has been worth for the period from about AD 200 to 700. However, as will be seen in the next chapter, from the beginning of the eighth century, the influence of the Great Corridor became stronger and stronger up to the point where it came to marginalize the influence of the Asian Corridor. Moreover, at the end of the nineteenth century, the modern American Corridor stemming from the ancient MongoloAmerican Corridor also entered the stage in a dazzling way. The Chinese economy is unique because it is the result of the topodynamic evolutions of the three world corridors, all of them crossing China’s territory. Comparing the Chinese economy-world between AD 200 and 1300 with the Roman economy-world between 50 BC and AD 476 can only be done with caution. Among the differences, we found the maritime character of the Roman Empire and the more continental character of the Chinese Empire, as well as the definitive disruption of the Roman Empire and the long-run stability of the Chinese Empire, despite its long periods of disunity. But among the similarities, we must rank the invasions originating from the MongoloAmerican Corridor, which disturbed the two corridors that formed the spines of the two economy-worlds, and the shift within both economy-worlds of the economic leadership from one pole to another, from Rome to Constantinople in one case, and from Changan-Xi’an to Hangzhou, Nanking-Nanjing, and Suzhou in the other. The dynamics of the urban systems is similar in both cases with expansion phases, rivalries between the various urbexplosions constituting an economy-world, topodynamic movements, a certain inertia of those movements, the channeling of those movements through the topodynamic corridors, and the omnipresence of the polarization phenomenon, which constitutes the very foundation of the observed processes. An economyworld is made if many neighboring urbexplosions polarize each other in the sense that one of them establishes its leadership over the others without any of them renouncing to assert itself. The fact that, within an economy-world, the leadership switches, after a long period of time, from one urbexplosion to another is not at all exceptional. It is even a normal evolution, which was observed in both the Roman and the Chinese cases.

CHAPTER

4

Understanding the Dynamics of Urban Evolution

L

ike we have done in Chapter 2, let us now think about the theoretical lessons that can be drawn from the development of the two first economyworlds. Hereby, four aspects will be discussed: the influence of spatial competition, the challenges of the management of municipal services, the impact of multiplier effects, and the major role of repulsive forces.

s TOPODYNAMIC EVOLUTION AND SPATIAL COMPETITION Competitors can compete in various ways. They can challenge their rivals by lowering their prices or by launching a publicity campaign. But they can also move to a better location (some even said that, in retail trade, there are three rules: location, location, and location). Spatial competition is, without any doubt, one of the most important concepts in space-economic theory. It explains how location advantages end up being factors that determine, to a great extent, who will be the winners and the losers in the economic struggle. It also allows to understand how a solution can prevail in the spatial distribution of the competitors in a situation where, initially, nobody had an advantage over the others. However, in this last case, spatial competition can play tricks. It can have opposite effects in different circumstances. In some cases, spatial competition favors the regrouping of competitors and, consequently, polarization, while in other cases it favors a scattering of the competitors and, consequently, a form of “de-polarization.” Spatial competition acts at all levels of the economy, at the levels of small enterprises, cities, regions, countries and continents, which are all, actually, competing with each other. The concept of spatial competition is the master key for understanding the evolution of the world economy through centuries and millennia.

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The most classical analysis of spatial competition is Hotelling’s study of the behavior of two hot-dog sellers on a “Euclidean isotropic” beach where swimmers are uniformly scattered.1 In Hotelling’s example, the beach is limited (it has a beginning and an end), and each swimmer eats a given number of hot dogs a day, whatever the location of the sellers (this is the famous assumption of “unelasticity of the hot-dog demand with respect to the price of hot dogs including transportation costs,” which means that each swimmer’s demand stays the same whatever the distance he has to walk in order to get his hot dogs). When the first seller arrives at the beach, he learns about these assumptions and he readily concludes that he can locate his stand anywhere, since the demand will not change according to his location. He finds a shaded spot close to the western limit of the beach and locates his stand there. A rival observes the scene and decides to compete with the first seller. Cleverly, the rival drives his stand to the east of the first seller’s stand, because the eastern part of the beach is larger (and has more customers) than the western part. Since swimmers buy their hot dogs to the closest furnisher, the first seller soon realizes that the best location he can choose is the one that is immediately to the right of the rival. By locating there, he diverts from his competitor all the swimmers located to the right, while the rival keeps only the customers located to the left, which are a minority. Of course, the rival reacts in his turn, and a series of actions-reactions ensues. Finally, the two competitors will come to the conclusion that their best locations are side-by-side right in the middle of the beach, each having half of the customers. This is how the story goes, and its conclusion is “polarization,” since the two competitors finally congregate. One could hastily conclude from this story that spatial competition favors polarization. It is not always the case. In fact, the conclusion of the story depends very much on the assumptions. For example, if the beach were around a lake, and if it were, consequently, unlimited (without a beginning and an end), the two competitors could locate anywhere, and polarization would be unlikely. Even in the case of a limited beach, if the demand were “elastic” (that is, if the swimmers bought less hot dogs when they had to walk a long distance), the two competitors would have to move closer to the location that is more convenient for the swimmers, that is, if the beach is four kilometers long, at one kilometer from the western limit, and at one kilometer from the eastern limit (minimizing the average distance covered by a swimmer to get a hot dog). There would be a scattering of the competitors, and no polarization. In spatial competition, the rule is simple: circumstances alter cases. 1.

Harold Hotelling, “Stability in Competition,” Economic Journal 39 (1929): 41–57.

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What is to conclude from such an analysis? In fact, very important conclusions can be drawn from the hot-dog story. First, in certain circumstances, spatial competition may favor polarization, especially when the space is somewhat limited (or, better, “organically centered” with a core and a periphery) and when the considered competitors aim to serve the entire limited market. There are good examples of this, both with stores at the scale of a city and with cities at the scale of an economy-world (cities and economy-worlds both being “organically centered areas”). Of course, contrary to stores, cities cannot move and change location; however, as with stores, those with better locations succeed and those with poorer locations do not. Inside modern big cities, it is well known that department stores (which aim to serve an entire agglomeration) tend to locate side by side in the middle of downtown. Without knowing, they behave like Hotelling’s hot-dog sellers. However, the most interesting example (and the most original one) may be given by commercial cities in Braudel’s concept of “economyworlds.” As mentioned, economy-worlds tend to be somewhat self-sufficient: like simple cities, they include a center and a periphery. In the same way that in the center of big cities we find department stores, which intend to serve an entire agglomeration, in the center of economy-worlds we find a large number of competing commercial and financial cities, which intend to serve the entire economy-world. For instance, in the Chinese economy-world, in the Loess Plateau, which dominated at the beginning, Changan-Xi’an was competing with Luoyang and Kaifeng, and, later, in the Lower Yangtze River region, Hangzhou, Nanking-Nanjing, and Suzhou competed with each other. Similarly, in the Mediterranean economy-world at the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Renaissance, at the center of the economy-world in Northern Italy, there were the main competing commercial and financial cities of Genoa, Venice, Milan, and Florence. A few decades later, at the center of the North-European economy-world, the Flanders and surrounding area, the main competing commercial and financial cities were Bruges, Gent, Antwerp, Amsterdam, and London. Similarly, the non-polarizing scattered solution will normally prevail in the case of activities or cities whose functions are not intended to cover a whole organically centered area, but solely parts of it. At the city level, supermarkets, variety stores, shopping centers, liquor stores, etc. will be scattered all over the metropolitan area. Similarly, in the economy-worlds, cities (and even very large cities) having national and regional vocations are scattered over the whole economy world from the core to the periphery. In the Roman Empire, at the peak of the domination of Rome, the cities of Lugdunum-Lyon, LutetiaParis, Londinium-London, Colonia Agrippina-Cologne, Augusta TreverorumTrier, Corduba-Cordoba, Antioch, and Alexandria played a regional role. Much later, in the seventeenth century, in the case of the North-European

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economy-world, we find in this category important cities such as Paris, Madrid, Lisbon, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Berlin, and Moscow. They were major cities playing important national (and even colonial) functions, but they were not at the center of the commercial and financial game. Their role corresponded more to that of a “central place” (in the sense of Christaller and Lösch) than to an “economy-world trading place.”

s TOPODYNAMIC EVOLUTION AND MANAGEMENT OF MUNICIPAL SERVICES Cities are “locations” (they are considered to be just that every time their existence is said to be linked to networks, breaking points, and spatial competition). They serve hinterlands (this is the central-place vision). They help to conquer the world, as in the network system theory. But, in a much more pragmatic way, they constitute some kind of “clubs” whose function is to deliver services and goods (like water) to their members—the citizens. Living in a city is a good way to get various public and even private goods and services at a good price. There are even goods and services which can only be found in cities (“winter” theater, rock-and-roll concerts, sophisticated police services, high-tech medicine, etc.). Forming cities in order to get such goods and services at a good price could be considered. This happens rarely, but there are exceptions (the case of high-security senior-citizen new towns is a very good one, that may become increasingly popular). Even when the project of forming cities in order to get cheaper services is not explicit, the cost of providing municipal services influences the growth of cities through their tax competitiveness. It must be stressed that costs of municipal services are subject to both scale economies and scale diseconomies. In that field, “bigger” is not always synonymous with “cheaper.” Moreover, the growth of cities creates the need for new public services (museums, well-developed public libraries, planetariums, aquariums, botanical gardens, public exhibitions and festivals, etc.). Historically, the polarization process has been and remains influenced by the social need to have access to such more and more specialized services. While attempting to understand the various causes of the fall of Rome, an allusion has been made to the fact that Rome had become very difficult to manage. A reference has been made to the fire service and to police. Such explanations are not linked to location, hinterland, or urban systems, but directly to the management of municipal services. It is not impossible that one of the reasons for the reversal of the traditional northwestward movement within the Great Corridor was related to this precise factor. When Emperor Constantine decided to found Constantinople, he may have been influenced by the conviction that Rome had somewhat failed as a gigantic metropolis.

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In fact, it had already failed before Constantine, since his predecessor Emperor Diocletian imposed the system of the four tetrarchs and chose Milan, instead of Rome, as the prefecture of Italy.

s TOPODYNAMIC EVOLUTION AND MULTIPLIER EFFECTS As mentioned in Chapter 1, agglomeration and scale economies are difficult to estimate because they are not bought or sold in the market. On the contrary, multiplier effects correspond to series of interrelated transactions. In a closed economic system where there are no leakages, any exogenous (or “autonomous”) investment generates, in theory, infinite multiplier effects, since the initial transaction, which corresponds to the autonomous investment itself, generates an infinite sequence of induced transactions where the money spent in the first transaction is spent again and again throughout the infinite sequence of induced transactions. As soon as there are leakages in the system because of imports or of the subtraction from the multiplier flow of certain expenditures, the sequence of transactions becomes finite, as does the sum of the multiplier effects. A multiplier corresponds to the ratio of the sum of the induced effects divided by the initial effect of the autonomous investment. Multiplier effects play a role in the dynamics of polarization. A city whose economy is diversified and which offers a large number of goods and services is likely to benefit to the maximum from all the exogenous investments that are made in the city thanks to its ability to capture the maximum of the induced transactions and multiplier effects of that investment. By contrast, a mono-industrial city is hardly in a position to limit the leakages, any new autonomous investment made in such a city being likely to induce much more imports than local purchases precisely because the mono-industrial city offers very few goods and services. Multiplier effects play also a role in the “polarizarion of the poles” process and, consequently, in the evolution of urban systems, urbexplosions, and economy-worlds. The ability of a city to dominate an urban system, an urbexplosion, or an economy-world is related to a great extent to its capability to attract a high proportion of the multiplier effects of the system it attempts to dominate. A dominating city is characterized by the fact that it succeeds to capture to its benefit a significant part of the multiplier effects of almost all the autonomous investments that are made within the system it dominates, including in the most remote parts of its periphery. When the leadership passes from one core, one urban system, one urbexplosion, or one economy-world to another, the division of the multiplier effects between the old dominating centers and the emerging ones undergoes a radical change, the emerging centers succeeding to capture an increasing proportion of the

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multiplier effects to their benefit and to the detriment of the old dominating centers whose power falters and then declines rapidly. The fall of Rome may be a good illustration of that. At the beginning, Rome was a city of producers and traders who succeeded to attract more and more multiplier effects in their region. When Rome transformed into a city of consumers and parasites, its ability to capture the multiplier effects of its hinterland diminished considerably. Moreover, the taxes collected throughout the empire were spent in Rome for consumption purposes (panem et circenses, “bread and games”) rather than for reinvestment. Then Rome stopped being a dominating city from an economic point of view. When Constantinople replaced it, the new capital captured an increasing part of the multiplier effects of the empire, which probably contributed to weaken the western part of the empire and to make it more vulnerable to barbarian invasions. Similar evolutions were observed in China when the economic leadership passed from the Loess Plateau to the Yangtze River region.

s TOPODYNAMIC EVOLUTION AND REPULSIVE FORCES To understand the expansion phase of urbexplosions as well as the decline of dominating metropolises such as Rome and Changan-Xi’an, it is necessary to resort to the concept of repulsive force.2 The world of location cannot really be explained without resorting to that concept. At the outset, the idea evokes something negative and repugnant. For instance, the examples of repulsion points that come to mind are those of garbage dumps, noisy

2.

The concept of repulsive force was first developed by Luc-Normand Tellier, who was also the first to formulate the attraction-repulsion problem: see Luc-Normand Tellier, Économie spatiale: rationalité économique de l’espace habité (Chicoutimi, Quebec: Gaëtan Morin, 1985), 42–46; Luc-Normand Tellier and Boris Polanski, “The Weber Problem: Frequency of Different Solution Types and Extension to Repulsive Forces and Dynamic Processes,” Journal of Regional Science 29, 3 (1989): 387–405; these contributions led to the topodynamic theory presented in this book, and they contributed to the launching of the New Economic Geography, whose main references are: Masahisa Fujita and Jacques-François Thisse, Economics of Agglomeration: Cities, Industrial Location, and Regional Growth (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2002); Masahisa Fujita, Paul R. Krugman, and Anthony J. Venables, The Spatial Economy: Cities, Regions, and International Trade (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1999); Gianmarco Ottaviano and Jacques-François Thisse, “Agglomeration and Economic Geography,” in Handbook of Regional and Urban Economics. Volume 4, J. Vernon Henderson and Jacques-François Thisse (eds.) (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 2004). In the New Economic Geography, agglomeration forces are attractive forces, and dispersion forces are tantamount to repulsive forces. See Paul R. Krugman, Geography and Trade (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1991), and Jacques-François Thisse and Tanguy Van Ypersele, “Métropoles et concurrence territoriale,” Économie et Statistiques 326–327 (1999): 19–30.

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spots (discotheques, noisy factories), boroughs of ill fame, nuclear plants, air pollution sources, nauseating places, high-crime zones, macabre sites (as cemeteries), zones of poverty, discriminated-against urban sectors, congested crossroads, noisy highways, etc. The list could go on and on. But, on reflection, it is realized that attraction points can also constitute repulsion points even for the same person. Thus, downtowns, which are the most frequent examples of attraction points in the theories of the urban form, are also seen by the population as repulsion points because of pollution, congestion, anonymity, smell, and noise. That being said, the most frequent repulsive forces are not caused by such negative factors. On the contrary, quite often, they originate from an excess of attraction, and they play a positive and essential role in location systems. Actually, repulsive forces are so necessary to the general equilibrium of location systems that the market generates them spontaneously every time there is, so to speak, an “overflow” of attractive forces, that is, every time the action of attractive forces gives birth to a strong competition around certain particularly coveted locations. This gives rise to the appearance of location rents, of which land and property prices are the most common, but not unique expression.3 When a consumer accepts to pay a drink twice the normal price at certain prestigious spots (such as the Champs-Élysées in Paris or Via Vittorio Venetto in Rome), he accepts to pay a location rent similar to the location rents included in land and property prices. Actually, all the polarization process, which is based on the greater desirability of certain locations compared to others, generates such overbids, and these overbids can lead to equilibrium solutions just through the spontaneous appearance of repulsive forces. The most classical example of this process is given by the theory of land rent.4 The basic thesis of this theory is relatively simple in the light of the concept of repulsive force. It simply says that if a large number of location problems are defined with respect to a single point of reference that is an attraction point (that single attraction point is the village market in the

3.

4.

Repulsive forces can also stem from spatial competition in both Cournot-type and Bertrand-type competitive contexts. Cournot-type competition focuses on quantity, while Bertrand-type competition focuses on prices. Antoine Augustin Cournot and Joseph Bertrand are French mathematicians who made contributions in economics. See Pierre-Philippe Combes, Thierry Mayer, and Jacques-François Thisse, Économie géographique. L’intégration des régions et des nations (Paris: Economica, 2006), chapter 9. Theory elaborated by Johann Heinrich von Thünen, Der Isolierte Staat in Beziehung auf Landwirtschaft und Nationalökonomie (Hamburg: Puthes, 1826), and adapted to the urban context by William Alonso, Location and Land Use: Toward a General Theory of Land Rent (Cambridge : Harvard University Press, 1964).

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middle of the countryside for von Thünen, and the central business district in the middle of the city for Alonso), then the land market must arbitrate the conflict opposing all those who would like to be located at the unique attraction point. The solution that the market of land values will generate consists in transforming the single attraction point into a “repulsion point as regards land values.” This is done by awarding each location a land price that decreases as the distance to the attraction point increases. This results in transforming the single attraction point (which remains an attraction point from the standpoint of all factors except land values) into a repulsion point as regards land values. Each economic agent, whether consumer or producer, then finds an equilibrium point between the “attractive force that is independent from land values” and the “repulsive force linked to land values” exerted by the single reference point. The location where the economic agent realizes that the attractive force exerted on him by the reference point is canceled by the land-value-related repulsive force exerted on him by the same reference point constitutes his optimal location. This is relatively easy to understand since if, at a location, the “attractive force that is independent from land values” is greater than the “repulsive force linked to land values,” it is in the economic agent’s interest to get closer to the reference point, and if, at another location, the attractive force is smaller than the repulsive force, it is in his interest to get farther from the reference point. The only location which corresponds to equilibrium for the economic agent is the one where both forces are equal in absolute terms, that is, the location where they cancel out. That location is the optimum. That regulating effect of repulsive forces is present in all polarized systems at all scales. Repulsive forces are in action around subway stations, centers of boroughs, centers of “edge cities,” centers of main cities, centers of metropolises, cores of urban systems, urbexplosions, and economy-worlds, and the center of the world if such a center exists. The more our world is polarized, the more the role of repulsive forces is essential and omnipresent. The appearance of the two first economy-worlds has been a major step in that process. There is a third category of repulsive forces which is neither associated with negative factors nor stemming from an equilibrium-searching economic market. It is the category of the paradoxically “positive” repulsive forces which are related to the spirit of conquest and discovery, the thirst for influence, and the desire to expand the field of the things that are known, exploited, and dominated. While alluding to the theory of network systems, it has been underlined that urban systems, urbexplosions, and economy-worlds naturally tend to expand by generating tentacles that penetrate into peripheral zones.

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A similar process takes place within growing agglomerations, which sprawl through their suburbs, and annex the small towns of their periphery. Such centrifugal movements can partly be explained by an excess of attractive forces at the center. However, they are also explained, more positively, by the need for any polarized system to expand not really in all directions, but in the most profitable directions, that is, in those directions that maximize the positive effects for the center in terms of natural resources, development of new territories, or opening of new outlets for the center’s exports. Those repulsive forces are essential to understanding the evolution of urban systems, urbexplosions, and economy-worlds, as well as the competition they are in with each other. The process of succession of urbexplosions within the topodynamic corridors can be understood by resorting to the notion of positive repulsive force, but also by studying the aging process of polarized systems.

Repulsive Forces and the Aging of Urban Structures If there are good reasons to think that the more a system is polarized, the more repulsive forces play an important role in it, it is also likely that the older a system gets, the more the positive repulsive forces are replaced by negative repulsive forces, and the less important the equilibrating repulsive forces are. In the dynamics of cities, urban systems, urbexplosions, and economyworlds, there are phases of growth and decline. The world’s urban systems are constantly being renewed. The dominating cities of yesterday are the tourist and museum cities of tomorrow. For each Rome, Athens, Constantinople, Changan-Xi’an, Peking-Beijing, or Nanking-Nanjing which succeeded to last for millennia, how many cities are there which, like Babylon, Ashur, Nineveh, Carthage, Memphis, Thebes, Persepolis, and Sparta, after having dominated and stood out, are today but fields of ruins, unknown villages, or mere tourist attractions. At the beginning of their ascending phase, the location systems (whether cities or urban systems) are dominated by attractive forces and by the increasing competition between those attractive forces, that competition generating more and more important equilibrating repulsive forces. On the other hand, negative repulsive forces are then very weak, and the positive repulsive forces remain scarce and faint. When the location systems become strong enough to free themselves and to dominate in their turn, the positive repulsive forces associated with the conquest of new territories grow in number, as do the equilibrating repulsive forces.

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At their peak, location systems reach a point where their positive repulsive forces weaken, their equilibrating repulsive forces temper, and negative repulsive forces develop. The latter originate from the fact that the existing infrastructures are aging, new investments decrease (the development prospects being less promising), the competition from the emerging location systems becomes stronger, and the flows of immigrants that accompanied the growth of the system tend to last while the system is less and less in a position to absorb them. If a burst of growth does not occur, the aging scenario goes on and a phase of decline ensues where the positive repulsive forces are increasingly replaced by negative repulsive forces, and where the rents stemming from the equilibrating repulsive forces become smaller and smaller. The system can then die. Its death is characterized by the complete disappearance of positive repulsive forces, by a decrease of the equilibrating repulsive forces, and by the possible persistence of some negative repulsive forces. From the birth to the death of the system, its center is thus progressively transformed from an attraction point into an absolute repulsion point. That theoretical scenario does not preclude, however, a possible renaissance. The best historical example of this relates to Rome, which, after having been the largest and richest city of the world at the acme of the Roman Empire, became a field of ruins at the end of the Middle Ages before reviving and achieving a new splendor thanks to the popes of Renaissance.

Repulsive Forces and Polarization After reading the above paragraphs, someone could get the impression that the multiplication of the repulsive forces constitutes as such a factor which slows down or even stops polarization. Actually, this is not true. Computer simulations clearly demonstrate that multiplying the number of repulsive forces in a location system does not reduce its level of polarization even though it has a radical effect on the spatial form of that polarization. The more numerous repulsive forces there are in a location system, the more polarization benefits the periphery of the considered limited space to the detriment of the center of that same space. That remark is very important since it stresses the determining role played by the multiplication of the repulsive forces in the process by which location systems succeed one another through time and space. When an urbexplosion reaches its peak, the multiplication of the repulsive forces favors the development in its periphery of rivals that more and more strongly compete with the center of the peaking urbexplosion. Thus, the polarization process tends to be renewed through the emergence of new centers at

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the periphery instead of through the re-emergence of the dominating center. In fact, the number of competitors that emerge at the periphery is very limited, and those competitors do not appear anywhere. That suggests the existence of trajectories in the process of spatiotemporal succession of the urbexplosion centers, an idea that will be explored later on. Let us just remark for the moment that, in order for an emerging center to have the opportunity to win in the battle against the dominating center, it must benefit from determining advantages. One of those advantages often relates to the “youth” of the surrounding territory, that is, to its relatively intact development potential. The more considerable that intact potential is, the more the emerging territory has opportunities to benefit from the positive repulsive forces originating from the dominating center. However, the dominating center still remains in a position that allows it to recuperate through the multiplier effects a part of the benefits stemming from the emerging center. This is where distance plays a major role: the greater the distance, that is, the more the emerging center lies at the periphery, the more recuperating the benefits stemming from the emerging center will be difficult for the old dominating center. The distance protects the growth of the emerging center by freeing it from the domination of the old one. This explains that economic development tends to jump through space from aging dominant centers to emerging centers. This is what happened when Athens succeeded Babylon, Rome succeeded Athens, and Constantinople succeeded Rome, or when Nanking-Nanjing succeeded Changan-Xi’an. This is also what happened later when Amsterdam and London succeeded Venice and Genoa, as will be seen.

Repulsive Forces and Geography In that repulsive-forces-driven theoretical dynamics of location systems, the geographic space plays a determining role through its geometry, whatever the characteristics of the geographic environment. However, in practice, it is obvious that the distribution of natural resources, the topography, the fluvial networks, the climate, the presence and quality of arable lands, and the communication networks influence the dynamics of location systems. Unfortunately, too often, geographers have tended to establish direct links between the physical environment and the development of location systems while neglecting the space-economic logic of the systems in evolution, that logic being the most fundamental factor. The geographical characteristics of the environment mainly influence the selection, among all the emerging centers of the periphery, of those that are more likely to eventually reverse to their benefit the hegemony of the present dominant center. Those centers that are located on important communication

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networks or on maritime port sites, surrounded with fertile lands and a rich urban network, naturally have real advantages over their competitors in the struggle for economic power. However, topodynamic inertia, which will be analyzed at the end of the next chapter, is another factor that plays an even greater role. Let us just stress here that the topodynamic inertia that was so conspicuous in the evolution of urban civilization from Sumer to Babylon, Athens, and Rome, or, in China, from Changan-Xi’an, Luoyang, Kaifeng, and Zengzhou to Nanking-Nanjing and Hangzhou, was canalized by the Great and Asian corridors, which are, above all, geographical, topographical, and fluvial realities.

CHAPTER

5

The Great Ebb: Islam Out to Conquer the Great and Asian Corridors

T

he fall of the Western Roman Empire, made official in AD 476, is an event among the most fraught with consequences in world’s history. Europe did not really recover from it until more than one thousand years later with the discovery of America in 1492. Moreover, the repercussions of that collapse were felt throughout the Great Corridor, and also in the Asian Corridor, since the fall of Rome was associated with a complete reversal of the northwestward movement that had prevailed to the west of the Persian Gulf since the beginning of urbanization in the Sumer region. “To speak of Europe from the fifth century to the tenth century is to begin with the fall of Rome, drawing to a halt once more at the close of the period of invasions … This was an era in which the center of gravity of the urban world around the Mediterranean shifted from Europe toward the Middle East. This shift was the result of the partition of the Roman Empire into two halves, the eastern capital of which survived the fall of Rome by nearly a thousand years, from 476 to 1453. During three or four centuries, roughly from 400 to 700, Constantinople was probably the largest city in the world, before it was overtaken by Changan-Xi’an in China and then by Baghdad. With this last-named city, we come to the other center of urban gravity in the Mediterranean, the Muslim civilization, whose spread held significant implications for the continent of Europe.”1

The enrichment produced by the Pax romana had accentuated the economic disequilibrium between the Roman economy-world and the surrounding regions, which created conditions that favored the Barbarian invasions. The invaders who better succeeded were those who attacked the most vulnerable parts of the Roman economy-world, that is, the more recently developed

1.

Paul Bairoch, Cities and Economic Development, from the Dawn of History to the Present (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988), 107.

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and less densely populated ones. When those parts fell, the whole Western Roman Empire trembled and, finally, collapsed. This considerably weakened the Eastern Roman Empire. The time for the pendulum to return had come. To the powerful northwestward movement succeeded an enormous wave, which swept across the whole Great Corridor from west to east. This is what will be called here the Great Ebb. The effect of that wave was to increasingly marginalize Western Europe, the former heart of the Roman Empire, with respect to two rival empires respectively centered on Constantinople and Baghdad.2 The Great Ebb bore two stunning characteristics. First, on its way back, the pendulum slightly veered off course. Instead of going through Athens, it went through Constantinople, and, instead of returning to Babylon, it reached Baghdad. Second, the eastward movement of the Great Ebb did not only propagate through the Great Corridor. It also wormed its way into the Asian Corridor, both corridors being fused together thereafter (see Map 8). It must be said that the diffusion of Buddhism, which passed from the Ganges Valley to the Indus Valley before reaching China through the Asian Corridor, had prefigured that evolution. The progress of the Great Ebb and the binding of the two corridors took the color of Islam from the death of Muhammad in 632. Generally, religions surf on the topodynamic waves that preceded them. This was observed with Buddhism, as with Christianity, whose propagation to the west occurred about three or four centuries after the corresponding topodynamic movement towards Europe, or with Islam, whose propagation began about two hundred years after the beginning of the Great Ebb.3

2. 3.

Paul M. Hohenberg and Lynn Hollen Lees, The Making of Urban Europe, 1000–1950 (London and Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), 62. Let us mention here the rather daring thesis put forward by David Keys in Catastrophe: An Investigation into the Origins of the Modern World (London: Random House, 2000). According to that thesis, the turning point in the period that followed the fall of Rome in AD 476, may have been a huge eruption of the Krakatoa Volcano (Indonesia) that could have occurred in 535. That eruption could have been at the origin of a marked cooling of the climate on Earth, especially in Europe, and that cooling could have favored the appearance and development of plague epidemics. The first one of them, named the Justinian Plague, erupted in 542 and killed several million people in the Mediterranean basin. Keys goes on suggesting that the climatic changes that would have followed the hypothetical Krakatoa eruption could have been responsible for the decay of the Ma’rib Dam, which allowed Yemen to dominate the Arabic peninsula, and that the weakening of Yemen favored the rise of Medina, Mecca, and Islam, which came to dominate the Great Ebb.

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Rome

Constantinople Tokyo Baghdad Shanghai Delhi Guangzhou

360 km

Map 8 The Great Ebb and the Fusion of the Great and Asian Corridors

s FROM THE FALL OF ROME TO THE ADVENT OF ISLAM The evolution of the population of Rome strikingly illustrates what the decline and fall of the Western Roman Empire meant for many West European cities. Rome had a population of more than a million around AD 200. It decreased to only some 50,000 about 700, to around 35,000 in the year 1000 and to just about 15,000–20,000 in 1377. After the fall of Rome, the rate of urbanization of Western Europe (based on cities with more than 2,000 population) dropped from 8–15% to probably something like 5–8% (in 1000, that rate was around 8–9% for Christian Europe, outside Russia). Consider ing cities with more than 10,000 population, Maddison estimates that the urban ratio of Roman Europe was around 5 percent in the first century, and that went to zero in the year 1000, when there were only four towns with more

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than 10,000 inhabitants.4 The urban collapse and other signs of decline warrant the assumption that the living standards in Western Europe relapsed more or less to subsistence levels in the year 1000 (thereafter, urbanization experienced a significant recovery in Western Europe). That being said, through that bleak evolution the legacy of Rome somewhat survived. The Roman road system survived, as did to a great extent the monetary system, many technological advances, the Roman legal system, and the widespread use of Latin. The barbarian invaders were the first to attempt preserving the very ideal of the empire. Odoacer and his successors generally recognized a link of vassalage with respect to the Eastern Roman Empire, and that empire continued to lay claim to Western Europe. Under Charlemagne, the Franks succeeded to revive the Western Empire, and, later, the Habsburgs continued to promote what they called a European “universal monarchy.” Unfortunately, those dreams of unity rarely succeeded to calm down the countless armed conflicts, which put Western Europe to fire and the sword from the fall of Rome to 1945. The Church, whose rise had accompanied the decline of the Western Roman Empire, was its ultimate refuge. It became the true guardian of the western civilization and its most solid hope. In face of often illiterate barbarian sovereigns, it defended the heritage of the Greco-Roman Antiquity. It tempered the zeal for war of many lords. It created the first universities and, when the time had come, it sounded the reveille of Occident by launching the crusades, which had immense stimulating effects on the Western world. Finally, the Church remained the most official link between the Christian Orient and Occident. Despite certain dissensions which led to a first rupture between the Eastern and Western churches from 863 to 867, the unity of the Christian Church was preserved till 1054. In the aftermath of the fall of the Western Roman Empire, all indicated that the Eastern Roman Empire was in a position to appropriately take over. The Constantinople urbexplosion seemed prepared to softly succeed Rome’s urbexplosion thanks, among other things, to the superiority the Greek civilization of the Orient had regained over that of the Latin Occident, a superiority that was clear in the commercial and artistic fields. Had not Byzantium already dominated for a long time, since at least one century before the conquest of Rome by the barbarians? While the population of Rome was declining, that of Constantinople was rapidly increasing. In 360, only 36 years after its re-founding by Constantine, that city had become the largest in the world, and it remained so till 650 approximately. In 390, its population was between 250,000 and 350,000 inhabitants. Between 430 and 1000, it varied 4.

Angus Maddison, The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective (Paris : OECD, 2001), 260.

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between 400,000 and 500,000. Its maximum, 600,000, which is about half the population of Rome at its peak, was reached between 1000 and 1070. Later, Constantinople lost more and more ground in comparison with Baghdad and the large Arab cities. When the Crusaders entered Constantinople in 1204, its population had decreased to 200,000 inhabitants. And at the time of the Turkish conquest in 1453, it was only about 40,000 or 50,000 inhabitants. These data illustrate perfectly, better than anything else, the return of the topodynamic pendulum and the rate at which it occurred (see Map 9).

London

Bruges

Prague

Cologne

Milan Madrid

Kiev Sarai

Ratisbon

Paris

Barcelona

Lisbon

Amalfi

Preslav Adrianople Constantinople

Palermo

Córdoba Sevilla Granada

Antioch Baghdad

Fes Marrakech Cairo

Mecca

Timbuktu

Benin City

Mbanza Congo

Great Zimbabwe

590 km

Map 9 The Great Ebb West of the Persian Gulf

Isfahan

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A Byzantine emperor represented the greatest hope for Christianity. Emperor Justinian was a Latin-speaking Illyrian who reigned from 527 to 565. He originated from Illyria in present-day Serbia, but he was not a Slav; the Serbians who are Slavs started settling in present-day Serbia during his reign. That illustrious Christian emperor built St. Sophia, the largest church of Christianity, and succeeded in somewhat reconstituting the Old Roman Empire by chasing the Vandals out of Africa, and by retaking Italy from the Ostrogoths and a part of Spain from the Visigoths. He did this while stopping the Sasanian Persians who were threatening his empire to the east. Unfortunately, his nephew and successor, Justin II, failed to keep the territories Justinian had conquered. The Macedonian city of Thessaloniki contributed, more than any other, to link the Orient and the Occident at that time. It was the most important city on the route that went from Rome to Constantinople. Through Via Claudia Valeria and Via Traiana, Rome was linked to the port of Brundisium (called today Brindisi), which lay in the heel of the Italian boot and faced Dyrrhacium (later called Durazzo and then Durrës, in present-day Albania) across the Adriatic Sea. From the port of Dyrrhacium, Via Egnatia led to Thessaloniki on the Aegean Sea. From there, travelers took a ship to cross the Aegean and Marmara seas up to the Bosporus and Constantinople. That route, which constituted the umbilical cord between the Orient and the Occident, followed the logic of the Great Corridor, its section going from Dyrrhacium to Thessaloniki coinciding with the central axis of that corridor. Via Claudia Valeria, Via Traiana and Via Egnatia became the true spine of the core of the Roman Empire until the fall of Rome. When Rome fell in 476, Thessaloniki had become the second largest city of the Eastern Roman Empire, after Constantinople. In the year 1000, its population was about 40,000 inhabitants. More to the east, another city illustrates the ups and downs of that period: Antioch, the heir of the ancient city of Ugarit, located close to the central axis of the Great Corridor on the left bank of the Orontes River, about 30 kilometers from the Mediterranean seaport of Seleucia Pieria. Founded in 300 BC by Seleucus I Nicator, Antioch occupied, like Thessaloniki, a strategic position at the interface of the Syrian Corridor and the Mediterranean Sea. Under the Roman Empire, it was the main Mediterranean terminal of the Silk Road. It commanded both the east-west and north-south military and commercial communications in northwestern Syria. It was the natural meeting place of Asia and the Mediterranean Sea, as well as of the Far Orient and the Hellenistic and Roman worlds, in the fields of language, culture, and religion. Before the ascent of Constantinople, Antioch was the third largest city of the empire after Rome and Alexandria, and the fourth largest in the world, after Rome, Alexandria, and Ctesiphon (the Parthian and later Sasanian capital

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situated on the Tigris, close to present Baghdad and not far from Babylon), all those cities being at less than 555 kilometers from the central axis of the Great Corridor. Antioch was then the best link between the old Babylon urbexplosion and the new Roman one. Antioch was the capital of the Hellenistic Seleucid kingdom from about 280 BC, and it was conquered by the Romans in 64 BC. Antioch played an important role in the rise of Christianity. In fact, the very word “Christian” was first used in Antioch. The Church of Antioch was founded about AD 36–38, a few years after the death of Jesus, by saint Barnabas, saint Paul and saint Peter. One of the first signs of the weakening of the Roman Empire was the capture of Edessa (located more to the east) and Antioch by the Sasanian Persians in AD 260. One year later, the Sasanians were beaten by King Odaenathus of Palmyra, and Antioch became part of his kingdom under the reigns of King Odaenathus and Queen Zenobia till 272, when Emperor Aurelian of Rome recaptured the region. In 395, Antioch passed under the control of the Eastern Roman Empire. In 612, the Sasanians recaptured it, then, in 630, the Byzantines did the same before the Moslems conquered it in 636, just four years after Muhammad’s death. That last conquest had enormous repercussions. By conquering Antioch and its region, Islam was cutting the access of Christianity to the main Silk Road, and, consequently, to a large extent, to the Far East. The West had to wait for Vasco de Gama to see that link re-established in 1498 by sea, not by land.

s THE RISE OF ISLAM The fact that a city as important as Antioch was disputed by the Sasanians, the kingdom of Palmyra, and the Roman Empire as soon as in 260 shows that a vacuum was developing to the southeast of the Roman Empire at the same time the threat of the barbarian invasions was emerging to the northwest of that empire. It is that vacuum that Islam filled in a flash. The Germans were the nomad invaders of the Great Corridor coming from the northeast, and the Arabs were the nomad invaders of the Great Corridor coming from the south. One more time, the invaders from the northeast were Indo-Europeans, and those from the south, Semites. In both cases, the topodynamic phenomenon is the same, the rich center attracting the poor tribes from the periphery. However, while the former were progressively assimilated into the western culture and Christianity, the latter imposed on a large part of the Great Corridor and even of the Asian Corridor their culture and a new religion, Islam. That was made, to a large extent, by the Arab takeover of the ancient Babylon urbexplosion, which went through a new period of glory by becoming the Baghdad urbexplosion.

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The history of Islam began in AD 570 when Muhammad ibn (son of) Addullah was born at Mecca into the Hashim clan of the leading Quraysh tribe. Ancient Mecca was an oasis on the old caravan route, parallel to the Red Sea, named the Spice Road, which linked the Indian Ocean and the Arabian Sea to the Mediterranean Sea through the Arabian Peninsula. Along this road frankincense and myrrh were transported from Yemen and its eastern neighbor Hadramawt, where the “Incense Coast” lay. But were also transported numerous products arrived to Yemen through the Bab el Mandeb Strait, like the herbs from Africa, the pepper and other spices from India, as well as the cinnamon coming from Indonesia through the African trading posts of the Horn of Africa, and, more precisely, from the “Cinnamon Coast” (in presentday Somalia). That traffic insured the prosperity of the Arabs, and, especially, of Yemen, which was called “Happy Arabia.”5 Thanks to its strategic position and to the famous Ma’rib earth dam, which had transformed the whole region into an immense oasis, Yemen was dominating the Spice Road. Three political powers, the kingdom of Aksum (converted to Christianity in 350 thanks to its king Ezana; the Aksum kingdom is at the origin of present-day Ethiopia), the Byzantine Empire, and the Sasanian Persia, and three religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Mazdeanism-Zoroastrianism, were fighting over Yemen. Yemenites had converted to Judaism in large numbers, and, around 520, the Yemenite king, allied to the Persians, was persecuting the Christians. Kaleb, the Christian king of Aksum, intervened and took control of the Bab el Mandeb Strait, that separates Africa from the Arabian Peninsula, and of Yemen, where he established a Christian king who favored him. In 527, Justinian ascended the throne of Byzantium, and proposed the king of Aksum to divert the silk traffic from the continental Silk Road, which was then controlled by the Persians, to the maritime Spice Road that passed through the Bab el Mandeb Strait, which the kingdom of Aksum henceforth controlled. Having learned that, the Persians reacted by chasing the Ethiopians from the south of the Arabian Peninsula in 575 and making Yemen a vassal state.6 At the very time Yemen was losing its sovereignty, the Ma’rib dam burst around 570, and Yemen was profoundly weakened. That allowed the cities of Medina and Mecca to attempt controlling the Spice Road. Muhammad, who was a merchant, appeared in that woolly context where no political power or religion really dominated the region and where, outside the region, the two main empires, the Eastern Roman Empire and the Sasanian Persian Empire, were declining and neutralizing each other, while the kingdom of Aksum was in retreat. 5. 6.

Michel Mollat du Jourdin and Jehan Desanges, Les routes millénaires (Paris : Nathan, 1988), 105. Ibid., 111–112.

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Mecca was a city of the desert (its potable water supply came only from wells, and was not adequate to support oasis agriculture)7 and a caravan city. But it was also a religious city and a pilgrimage center. Mecca’s Ka’bah, the cube-shaped stone building, which is the holiest shrine of Islam, existed before Muhammad and, when Muhammad was born in Mecca, it was already revered as the replica of God’s house in heaven built by Abraham and Ishmael, his son by his servant Hagar, who is the ancestor of the Arabs. And already Mecca’s god was called Allah. However, for the inhabitants of Mecca and for the noble and holy house of Quraysh, which dominated Mecca as lords of the Ka’bah, Allah was only one of the gods who deserved worship. The Quraysh lords were very tolerant in religious matters and accepted other cults. People from all faiths visited Mecca. Thus, since about 375, many Jews and Christians lived in Arabia, who opposed each other in the name of their own conception of monotheism. Influenced by Judaism , Christianity, and also, possibly, by Mazdeanism-Zoroastrianism (that Persian religion accepted the existence of many divinities, but considered that only one of them, Mazdah, was worth adoring), Muhammad proposed a new religious syncretism by amalgamating the cult of Allah, Mecca’s god, and the veneration of the Ka’bah with the monotheism of Judaism and Christianity. By revealing the Koran, which, according to Islam, was inspired to him by archangel Gabriel, Muhammad gave birth to a theology that integrated altogether Abraham, Ishmael, Jesus, Virgin Mary, Archangel Gabriel, the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and the religious tradition of Mecca. Muhammad had to face the opposition of the Quraysh family that was his own (his clan, the Hashim clan, belonged to the Quraysh tribe). Ultimately, he had to flee Mecca and find refuge in Medina in 622 AD, the year of the hegira, which marks the beginning of the Muslim era. From that moment, Muhammad radicalized his position and instituted the holy war, the jihad, which imposed on Moslems the religious duty to spread Islam by waging war “by the heart, the tongue, the hand, and the sword.” That concept of holy war was probably unprecedented in history, the proselytism of Judaism, Buddhism, or Christianity never having, up to then, taken such an extreme form. From Medina, which was a sizeable agricultural oasis city, Muhammad organized military operations and, in 630, he succeeded in marching into Mecca and overcoming the Quraysh rulers. Negotiations followed, and Muhammad came to convert the tribes that had followed the Quaysh lords. When he died on June 8, 632, Islam was dominating the entire Arabia.

7.

Anthony Edwin James Morris, History of Urban Form: Before the Industrial Revolutions (Harlow: Pearson Education & Prentice Hall, 1994), 26.

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Islam then set off to conquer the core, the semi-periphery, and the periphery of the old Babylonian urbexplosion. This involved three stages: first, the conquest of the core made of the very Christianized zones of the Near East; second, the conquest of the semi-periphery constituted of Christianized Egypt and Zoroastrian Persia; and third, the conquest of the periphery represented by Christianized Maghrib and Spain, Buddhist Transoxiana, and Hindu Northern India. During the first stage, the Moslem offensive targeted at the central zone of the Great Corridor. That resulted in the conquest, in 633, of the Sumer region, where the Moslems founded Basrah. Then the offensive went along the Euphrates and the central axis of the Great Corridor towards the very Christianized region of Damascus, captured in 635, and the Syrian Corridor, conquered in 636, and, then, from Kufa on the Euphrates, it headed for Ctesiphon, the Sasanian capital situated on the Tigris close to ancient Babylon. Ctesiphon was captured in 637. The heart of the old Babylonian urbexplosion crossed by the central axis of the Great Corridor having been conquered, the turn of the semi-periphery had come. During the second stage, the offensive headed for the southwest, which led to the conquest of two very Christianized regions: Palestine, captured in 638, and Egypt, conquered in 641. The northeastern part of the semiperiphery was dominated by Mazdeanism-Zoroastrianism and the Sasanian Persians. Islam overcame them. The Sasanians took refuge in Merv (modern Mary), in present-day Turkmenistan, and they were definitely eliminated. The last Sasanian king, Yazdegerd III, was slain in 651. MazdeanismZoroastrianism barely outlived that assassination. It took refuge in India, where, today, it takes the form of Parsism. The third stage began with the arrival of the famous Arab dynasty of the Umayyads, who revived the strategy for taking control of the Great Corridor. Thereafter, around 710, the project to capture also the Asian Corridor was added. Having conquered the Babylonian urbexplosion, Islam adopted the objective to do the same with the Byzantine one, which also lay in the Great Corridor. A first maritime expedition was organized in 669 to conquer Constantinople, but it failed. A second one led to a long siege of Constantinople from 674 to 678. Once again, it failed. The Umayyads then renounced their project to attack directly the heart of the Byzantine urbexplosion for almost 40 years (in 717, a third attempt to capture Constantinople failed like the two previous ones), and they opted for a different strategy. Instead of concentrating on the conquest of the core, they decided to skirt around it by capturing the northwestern section of the Great Corridor. This led to invading first North Africa and then Western Europe, which were much more vulnerable than the very rich Byzantine Empire.

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That strategy led to the conquest, at Christianity’s expense, of presentday Tunisia in 698, of Algeria in 700, of Morocco in 708, and of the major part of the Iberian Peninsula between 711 and 714. The attempt to reach the Great Corridor from the west of Europe was stopped at the battle of Poitiers in 732, and the Arabs had to retreat to Spain. Meanwhile, the plan to attack the Asian Corridor was taking form. Various offensives were launched in that direction from 709. Towards the northeast, the vast Buddhist region of Kabul, the Khyber Pass, and Samarkand, covering the Bamian and Transoxiana or Sogdiana, was captured between 709 and 711. That conquest was all the more dazzling that the Indo-European Sogdian language (which belonged to the Iranian language group) was widely used, in its spoken and written forms, in the negotiations between the East and the West. It is through that language that new religions such as Buddhism from India and Manichaeism from Persia, had penetrated into China. To the east, Islam followed the Great Corridor to reach the Asian Corridor. It confronted Hinduism and reached the Indus Valley and the Sind region, close to the mouth of the Indus River, between 710 and 713. Thereafter, in a fourth stage, Islam diffused through the Great Corridor up to the Ganges Valley, present-day Bangladesh, and the Yunnan province in China. It followed the Asian Corridor to the north towards the Chinese Xinjiang province, and, to the south, towards Indonesia and the Philippines. That will be seen later. The diffusion of Islam till about 714 fitted both a topodynamic logic and a transportation one. In the same way that the expansion of the Roman Empire was mainly limited to the cultivation area of olive trees, vine, and wheat, the expansion of Islam during that period was dependent on the survival area of the camel (and, some say, the cultivation area of the date palm). That explains, among other things, that the eastward expansion followed the Great Corridor, whereas, to the west, it ended up following the Sahara axis in the attempt to conquer the Great Corridor by the west. The Arab world never succeeded to extend its domination beyond about the 43th parallel, in the area where the camel is no longer in its habitat. That characteristic of the Arab world bears the highest importance since it partly explains the superiority or the weakness of the Arab world at various periods. It must be said, however, that the Arabs were not the first ones to resort to camels. That animal originates from Asia, and the Persians used it. They are the ones who introduced it in Arabia and Egypt. The camel arrived in the Sahara desert just around the first century of our era. That being said, it is the Arabs who really created an urban civilization based on the camel. For instance, Islamic urban culture had its own requirements with respect to street and lane widths based on pack-animal, mainly camel traffic.8 8.

Ibid., 16.

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THE ADVANTAGES OF CAMEL OVER CART Bairoch stressed that there existed“two features of the mode of transport unique to Muslim societies: the use of camels and the absence of wheeled vehicles … In Europe the use of wheeled vehicles for human transportation was strictly regulated inside cities. But in Muslim societies the use of wheeled vehicles was exceptionally limited, not to say unknown, even in transporting merchandise from city to city or in rural areas … What makes the search for some sort of explanation all the more intriguing is the fact that carts or wagons and other wheeled vehicles were used in the Middle East for at least a few millennia before the advent of Islam. It appears, however, that the use of the wheel had already disappeared before the Arab conquest. The most plausible explanation may be the introduction and eventual predominance of the camel as a beast of burden in Muslim societies … The camel … constituted technological progress and not a step backward. In comparison to the traditional ox-drawn cart before the invention of the harness collar, the camel offered many advantages. In the first place, a camel can carry at least as much as a cart harnessed to a pair of oxen. In the second place, a camel can cover on the average 25 to 30 kilometers a day, as against 10 to 15 for a cart. And one man can drive three to six camels, whereas he can manage only one cart. A further by no means insignificant point is that a cart requires roads, while the camel does not. Finally, while camels can eat anything oxen can eat, they are also able to assimilate semidesert vegetation that oxen are incapable of eating … But though the use of camels marked progress at one stage of development, it also led to a neglect of the wheel that unquestionably had negative consequences at a later stage.” Elsewhere, Bairoch adds: “A man can transport 35–40 kilograms of freight over a distance of 30–35 kilometers per day … A horse can carry a load of 90–150 kilograms per day over a distance of between 20 and 40 kilometers, depending on the terrain and the conditions of the course … making an average of around 3–5 metric ton-kilometers per day. The performance of oxen is even less impressive. The camel, on the other hand, can carry loads twice as heavy and for far greater distances. Even when animals are harnessed to wheeled vehicles, which requires more drivers, their performance does not increase much. Before the general introduction of collars and horseshoes (in medieval Europe), a horse could transport, on good roads, about 4–7 metric ton-kilometers per day. Besides, … the wheel is not always the best solution” (Paul Bairoch, Cities and Economic Development, from the Dawn of History to the Present, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988, 375–377 and 11–12).

The adoption of the camel led to dropping the use of wheel. Strikingly, this did not reduce the level of urbanization. On the contrary, it increased it.9 During the whole Middle Ages, the Arab world was significantly more urbanized than the Christian world, and the great Arabian cities such as Damascus, Baghdad, and Cairo were much greater than any of the largest Christian cities. This does not really contradict what has been said about the historical link between the appearance of wheel transportation and the emergence of urbanization. What favors the latter is not a particular mode of transportation, but the increase in mobility and the existence of transportation networks. The

9.

See the classic about Islamic cities: Besim Selim Hakim, Arab-Islamic Cities: Building and Planning Principles (London and New York: KPI and Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986).

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wheel has been associated with both, and the camel, at that time, allowed to increase mobility even more than the wheel had done. As for networks, the introduction of camel just multiplied them. Caravans followed very precise itineraries from town to town and from oasis to oasis. The Spice Road is the best example of that. Thanks to the camel, the North African networks extended down to sub-Saharan Africa. The increase in mobility and the multiplication of networks allowed the Arab world to reach a rate of urbanization of ten to thirteen percent, which compares with the urbanization rate of the Roman Empire at its peak (between eight and fifteen percent). Around the year 1000, the total population of the Arab world was between 22 to 30 million inhabitants, that is, about half the population of the Roman Empire before the decline. At the same epoch, Christian Europe out of Russia was more populated with 27 to 35 million inhabitants, but its rate of urbanization was just eight or nine percent. In 1000, Christian Europe had not a single city of more than 100,000 inhabitants, while the Arab world had about seven of them.

s THE BAGHDAD URBEXPLOSION The takeover of the Babylonian urbexplosion by Islam and the Arabs gave it a second life. Its center and its periphery went through a profound transformation. At the center, the Arabs little modified the existing urban system. However, they founded a certain number of new cities such as Baghdad, Basrah or Kufa in Mesopotamia, and Fustat-Cairo in Egypt, and many ancient dominant cities such as Ctesiphon, Seleucia, Alexandria, Antioch, or Babylon lost their rank. They were supplanted by Damascus, Baghdad, and Cairo. By contrast, in the periphery, especially in the west, the Arabs created almost an entirely new urban system made, to a large extent, of new cities. The first great city to dominate the Arab world was Damascus, the city of the Umayyads, that famous Arab dynasty, which added to the Moslem Empire the Indus Plain and northern India, the region of Samarkand (called Transoxiana or Sogdiana), the region of Kabul (called Bamian), and Spain. The Umayyads reigned over the Arab world from 661 to 750, when they were defeated by the Abbasids, who practically destroyed Damascus, which never really recovered. In 1075, the city was left with only 5,000 inhabitants. Baghdad had completely supplanted it. Around 360, Constantinople’s urbexplosion had replaced that of Rome as the dominant urbexplosion of the section of the Great Corridor located west of the Persian Gulf. Around 850, Baghdad’s urbexplosion rose to that top position. The pendulum had come back to Mesopotamia, and it stayed there at least till 1350, when a new urbexplosion dominated by Venice and

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northern Italy emerged as a powerful rival. The city of Baghdad did not exist in Babylon’s time. It seems that it originated from a settlement founded about AD 250–350 by the Persian Sasanians and mainly inhabited by Christian Aramaeans. Baghdad was not far (about 100 kilometers) from Ancient Babylon, but it was still closer to other previous capitals such as Seleucia, the capital of the Greek Seleucids, Ctesiphon, the capital of the Parthians and of the Persian Sasanians, Agade, the capital of the Semitic kingdom of Akkad, and Dur-Kurigalzu (now called Aqarquf), the capital of the Kassites who gave Babylon a dynasty. Baghdad really became a major city when al-Mansur, the second Abbasid caliph, decided in 758 to build himself a new capital on the site of the Sasanian Baghdad. He named the capital Madinat as-Salam, the City of Peace. The city was fortified, and the caliph settled there in 765. Very soon it had a population of some 400,000. In 850, Baghdad replaced Changan-Xi’an as the largest city in the world. It reached a population of one million around 930. It was the first city to reach such a threshold after Rome. The rise of Baghdad is, to a large extent, linked to its location in the central zone of the urbexplosion that had been dominated by Babylon, on the Tigris River at the river’s nearest point to the Euphrates (less than 40 kilometers), 32 kilometers above the Tigris’ confluence with its largest tributary, the Diyala, and at a place where the Tigris can be crossed more easily than elsewhere. The site is a level plain standing a little above a vast zone liable to flooding. Baghdad’s development was favored by the fact that important marshes lay to the south of the city which forced any east-west traffic to go more to the north through Baghdad, which was a natural “bridge city.” Even at the time of Nebuchadrezzar II the Great and the Second Babylonian Empire, the site of Baghdad was used for transportation purposes. Very early a pontoon bridge was built at Baghdad over the Tigris. From Baghdad, the Diyala Valley allows the Zagros Mountains to the east to be reached easily. Baghdad became the main intersection between the east-west axis of the Silk Road leading to Antioch and Damascus, and the north-south axis linking the Persian Gulf, the Tigris, and the Black Sea. Finally, before 1258, Baghdad was about half-way between the two extreme poles of the Islamic economyworld, that is, to say Fes to the west and Delhi to the east, while being a little closer to the latter. Unfortunately, Baghdad had to experience what so often affects the center of an economy-world: in 1258, it was attacked by the Mongols from the Mongolo-American Corridor. They captured the city, sacked it, killed the caliph, and executed 800,000 of its inhabitants. The Mongols kept the control of the region for 152 years. In 1401, the Turkic-Mongol Timur, also called Tamerlane, in his turn, sacked the city at the head of the Turkic-Mongol Tatars. Then came the Turkmen, Altaic cousins of the Mongols, who also came

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from the Far East. They conquered Baghdad in 1410 and dominated it till 1534, when the Turkish Ottomans, other Altaics, captured the city and ruled the region for 368 years until 1917. The economy-world of Baghdad was the first in history to cover at the same time the two parts of the Great Corridor that lie on both sides of the Persian Gulf, the Arabian Sea, and the Sulaiman Range (in present-day Pakistan), from the Mediterranean Sea to the Ganges. In the Islamic economy-world, the great rival of Baghdad, the heir of Babylon, was Cairo, the heir of Memphis. If Baghdad was located at a place where the Silk Road leading to Antioch and Damascus easily crossed the Tigris, Cairo was situated at the strategic point where the southern Silk Road (passing through Qandahar, in present-day Afghanistan, Persepolis, Charax, founded by Alexander the Great at the common mouth of the Euphrates and Tigris, and Petra) and the Spice Road crossed the Nile before reaching Alexandria. Cairo is located at the point where the Nile starts transforming itself into a delta. Before the arrival of the Arabs, two settlements had existed on the site of Cairo. The first one was named Babylon (like the Mesopotamian city). It was located on the left bank of the Nile River. It had been occupied by the Romans about AD 30. When the Arabs came, Babylon was inhabited by Christians. In front of Babylon, on the right bank, the Romans had built a military camp (“fossatum” in Latin). When the Arab and Ismaili Shiah dynasty of the Fatimids founded Cairo, they did it from that existing military camp that lay on the right bank. They called the new city Fustat, which is a deformation of fossatum. Fustat became Cairo, “al-Qahira,” in 972. When Baghdad declined, Cairo took over. In 1300, when Baghdad had a population of only 40,000 inhabitants, Cairo’s population was around 400,000 inhabitants, that is, ten times as much. Cairo’s population reached a maximum of 500,000 inhabitants about 1350. Despite that this maximum was about half the maximum Baghdad had attained around 930, about 1350, Cairo was the greatest city of Africa, Europe and Asia Minor. From this period, its population decreased for many reasons including the fact that, in 1497–1498, Vasco de Gama’s voyage to India broke the monopoly of the Spice Road and harmed cities such as Cairo and Alexandria. To the east and west of the heart of the Arabic Islam dominated by Baghdad and Cairo, other routes and other great cities of the Moslem economy-world constituted the outposts of the central urbexplosion. Less than a century after the beginning of the Hegira, Arabic Islam extended, to the west, up to Spain, and, to the east, up to Transoxiana-Sogdiana and the Sind region of India. In its outlying territories, the Arab Empire put in place numerous new cities, especially to the west.

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The Moorish Outpost At the period Islam started expanding, North Africa and Spain had, to a large extent, already been Christian lands for a few centuries. In 395, when the Roman Empire was split between the East and the West, and 237 years before the death of Muhammad, the most Christianized regions of the world were Crete, Cyprus, Anatolia, Armenia, the Nile delta, and Numidia (present-day Tunisia and the eastern part of Algeria). Less than a century after the beginning of the Hegira, Islam had overwhelmed the major part of Armenia, the Nile delta and Numidia; it had penetrated into the territories of Anatolia and Cyprus, and it had launched numerous offensives, in 669, 674, and 717, in the direction of Constantinople. Numidia was captured from the Byzantine Empire in 698, but its conquest had begun in 670 with the founding of Kairouan by the Umayyads. Kairouan was founded on the site of the Byzantine fortress of Kamouinia. Kairouan lies in the interior of modern Tunisia, on the Low Steppes, a semi-arid alluvial plain southeast of the Central Tell. The strategic interest of Kairouan came from the fact that it was located between the mountains situated to the northwest and the Sebkha salted expanses separating the mountains from the Mediterranean Sea. The Arab invaders chose the site because it was far enough from the coast where the Byzantines dominated and close enough to the mountains to curb the Berber tribes of the region. The choice made by the Arab invaders was clever, and the rest of present-day Tunisia was conquered in 698. As for Kairouan, it became the prestigious capital of the Aghlabids, a major theological center of Islam and one of its holy cities. West of Numidia, Islam had to face not the Byzantine Empire, but instead partially Christianized Berber kingdoms. Those kingdoms had outlived the invasion of the Vandals who had come through Spain and were ultimately vanquished by the Byzantines in 533. The Arabs occupied present-day Algeria in 700 and conquered Berber Morocco in 708. The Arab conquest gave a new life to the urbanization of that region, which had been rather urbanized at the time of the Romans and of the Roman province of Mauretania Tingitana, whose capital was Tingis (Tangier), but whose urban system had almost collapsed after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. It is estimated that about half the present cities of the Maghrib have been founded by the Arabs, while the corresponding proportion in the Near East is just 10%. Since the Arab conquest, Morocco has had four capitals: in the order, Fes, Marrakech, Meknes, and Rabat. Fes is the oldest Muslim city of Morocco. It was founded in 789 on both sides of the Sebu River, which runs towards the Atlantic Ocean, at the crossroads of two caravan routes, one going from

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the Mediterranean Sea to the Tafilalet region of the Sahara Desert, and the other going from Rabat on the Atlantic to Algiers and Central Maghrib. Fes was the capital of Morocco for about 500 years, much longer than Marrakech. Very early Fes attained fame as a commercial place, a religious center, and an intellectual city. It contained the Qarawiyin Mosque, the oldest in North Africa and the most prestigious in Morocco. The Qarawiyin Mosque’s university (called “Medersa”) was founded by a rich and pious woman in 857, long before any European university. Since the 10th century, the library of the university has been most famous. The Qarawiyin Medersa and the al-Azhar Medersa of Cairo were the two most prestigious universities of the Moslem world. Fes was the largest Moroccan city around 1200. Its population, at that time, was of 200,000 inhabitants. It is clear that the Arab conquest spared Maghrib the decline the rest of the former Western Roman Empire experienced at the same period. The conquest of Spain by the Arabs10 between 711 and 714 was made from Morocco through the Strait of Gibraltar, and the Guadalete River and the Guadalquivir, which is one of the three most important rivers of the Iberian Peninsula, along with the Tagus (Lisbon’s river) and the Ebro (the river of Zaragoza). The Guadalquivir River runs towards the Atlantic Ocean, not far from the Strait of Gibraltar and Morocco. At the arrival of the Arabs, its two main cities, Seville (downstream) and Córdoba (upstream), were important Christian cities. It can be said that Seville was never founded. In fact, its location on the Guadalquivir River and the richness of its soil are such that, even in the Paleolithic period, long before the appearance of the first cities, Seville’s area was populated. About 1000 BC, a city called Tartessus already existed at Seville’s location. It lived from trade, agriculture, stock raising and mining (copper, gold and silver). Tartessus was succeeded by an Iberian city called Hispalis. Iberians, like the Basques and the Etruscans, were not IndoEuropeans. They could have originated from Africa and be Afrasian cousins of the Berbers. Then came from Gaul the Indo-European Celts who merged with the Iberians to form the Celtiberians. Around 60 BC, Caesar conquered Hispalis, which became Seville. Thereafter came the Vandals who gave their name to Andalusia (or Vandalusia). The Arab conquest of Seville caused first a decrease in its population, but, after a while, the city went through a strong growth, its population passing from 40,000 to about 150,000 inhabitants between 900 and 1200.

10.

The Visigoth forces were routed by the Arabs in 711 in a battle on the Guadalete River, which runs towards Cádiz. Córdoba and Malaga fell in 711, Sevilla in 712, and Valencia, Gerona, Zaragoza, and Lugo in 714. Barcino (Barcelona) fell in 713, but was regained by the Christians in 801.

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Founded by the Phoenicians, occupied by the Carthaginians around 230 BC, conquered by the Romans in 152 BC, invaded by the Vandals in AD 476, taken by the Byzantines in 554, integrated into the Visigoth kingdom11 in 572, and captured by the Umayyads in 711, Córdoba had an even more happy destiny than Seville under Islam. As the latter, it lay at a very good location, in a plain particularly fertile and favorable to the cultivation of cereals and olives. Chased from Damascus and from the heart of Islam by the Abbasids, the Umayyads found refuge in Córdoba, and they made it a powerful emirate in 756. In 929, they even dared to set it up as a caliphate that competed with that of Baghdad. In the year 1000, Córdoba had a population of 450,000 inhabitants. It was the largest city of Europe after Constantinople, Seville being the third one with only 100,000 inhabitants. Córdoba was the city of Averroës, who was born in 1126 and died at Marrakech in 1198. Islam never occupied the entire territory of the Iberian Peninsula. To the north, the Basque Country and the kingdom of Asturias, founded in the mountains by Pelago and Visigoth refugees, held out the Umayyads, the Arabs who occupied the larger part of the peninsula, in 717. Thereafter, their successors went from one retreat to another till the ultimate withdrawal from Grenada in 1492. Despite that, the Moslem period of the history of the Iberian Peninsula was radiant. Around 1000, the Moslem Spain was richer, more refined, more developed, and more urbanized than Christian Europe. It is estimated that, at that time, it counted for between thirty and forty percent of the whole European population living in cities of 20,000 inhabitants or more, while its population represented just between nineteen and twentyfive percent of the population of Europe out of Russia. If we consider the cities with 2,000 inhabitants and more, the urbanization rate of Moslem Spain was around fifteen to seventeen percent, when the corresponding rate for Europe out of Russia was just eleven to thirteen percent. To the 150,000 inhabitants of Córdoba and the 100,000 inhabitants of Seville, Christian Europe could then only oppose the 50,000 inhabitants of Venice and the 20,000 or 25,000 inhabitants of Paris and London. These data and the fact that Córdoba was set up as a caliphate rivaling that of Baghdad can wrongly suggest that the Moorish urbexplosion covering both Morocco and Moslem Spain was in a position to aspire to become the heart of the Arab economy-world. In 1000, the population of Baghdad was declining. It was getting further and further from one million inhabitants, and was rather around 200,000 inhabitants. So Córdoba was for a moment the largest Moslem city of the world. But that did not last because Cairo was 11.

The Roman Corduba had been the capital of the Baetia province. Under the Visigoths, it became Kordhoba and the religious center of the Christian Visigoth kingdom (Toledo was the political capital of the Visigoth kingdom).

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rising, and it overtook Córdoba around 1150. Geography limited the aspirations of Córdoba. In order to triumph, it would have to extend its domination to Gaul. Not only it did not, but it almost never stopped retreating after the victory of Pelago over the Moslems in 718. Worse, in 1031, Córdoba’s caliphate disappeared as a consequence of a civil war, and disunity prevailed among the various Moslem “taifas” (principalities) of Spain. Córdoba was only a particularly shining gem of one of the most illustrious peripheral urbexplosions of history. Geography precluded its being more than that. That urbexplosion spread to the north, but it did also to the south. Marrakech gave its name to Morocco, but it has never been as populated as Fes or Córdoba, despite that it reached 150,000 inhabitants at its peak. Nevertheless, it became famous as the capital of two important Berber dynasties that reigned over both Morocco and Spain: the Almoravids and the Almohads. It is from Marrakech that the Almoravids launched their conquest of Morocco. The main university of Marrakech, the Ben Yussef Medersa, was at some point (17th–18th centuries) the most prestigious Koranic university of Maghrib. Marrakech lies at the foot of the Atlas Mountains, not far from the Sahara, in the center of the fertile Haouz Plain, south of the Tensift River that runs towards the Atlantic, and at the crossroads of two important caravan routes: the Salt Road that went from Agadir on the Atlantic and Marrakech down to Timbuktu in Southern Sahara through the salt marshes of Teghaza, at the border of present-day Mauritania and Algeria, and of Taoudenni in present Northern Mali, and the Gold Road where transited in the direction of the Mediterranean Sea the gold from ancient Ghana (in present-day Mauritania), Begho (at the border of present-day Ghana and Ivory Coast), Bambouk (close to the Senegal River), Bourem (on the Niger River), and Lobi (on the Volta River). Caravans were not transporting only salt and gold. From the south also came ambergris, gum arabic, oryx skins used for making shields, leopard and fennec skins, as well as slaves, while, from the north, arrived luxury goods, jewels, arms, fabrics, kitchen utensils, pottery, clothes, knifes, and mirrors.12 Only one of the four successive capitals of Moslem Morocco was a port: Rabat, the present capital of Morocco, located at the mouth of the Bou Regreg River (or Oued) on the Atlantic Coast. Rabat was founded in 1150 as a military base for the expeditions to Andalusia. However, before the advent of Islam, Morocco had had another maritime capital: the Atlantic port of Tingris, today Tangier, capital of the Roman province of Mauretania Tingitana. One of the most famous sons of Tangier was Ibn Battutah, who lived between 1304 and 1377 and explored the world of his time from Morocco to China via 12.

Bernard Lugan, Atlas historique de l’Afrique des origines à nos jours (Paris : Éditions du Rocher, 2001), 73. See also: Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, Histoire des villes d’Afrique noire, des origines à la colonisation (Paris: Albin Michel, 1993).

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Egypt, Syria, Persia, Afghanistan, Asia Minor, Crimea, Arabia, India, Ceylon, Sumatra, the Sahara, and the region of Timbuktu. In all, he traveled about 120,000 kilometers, that is, three times the Earth’s circumference. Had his limitless curiosity led him to the west instead of the east, since the Atlantic currents that run along the Moroccan coast lead to the Caribbean Sea, he could have discovered America more than a century before Christopher Columbus. That continent would then have been Islamized.

South of the Sahara Thanks to the camel, Islam extended its influence south of the Sahara, which became a kind of sandy sea crossed by innumerable caravan routes. The southern “ports” of the interior sea were named Gao, Gober, Djenné, Kano, Kazargamu, Timbuktu, and Zaria. Those cities developed between the southern limit of camel transportation and the northern limit of the zone infested with the tsetse fly, which transmits sleeping sickness in humans and a similar disease called nagana in domestic animals. Timbuktu is located about twenty kilometers north of the Niger River, where it had a port called Kabara. Two important caravan routes converged on Timbuktu: one coming from Agadir in Morocco, the other from present-day Algeria. The main products transiting on those routes were salt from Taoudenni, clothes, cereals, and horses from the north, as well as gold from Begho and slaves originating from the south. At Timbuktu, met three of the five great racial groups of Africa: the Afrasians, the Nilo-Saharians, and the Nigero-Congolese. Among the Afrasians were the Moors, the Kabyles, and the Touaregs, who share together a common Berber origin, and the Arabs of Semitic origin. The Nilo-Saharians were represented by the Fulani. The Nigero-Congolese were the majority in Timbuktu, and they were represented by the Bambara and their cousins. The fourth racial group of Africa was not present at Timbuktu; it included the Pygmies of Equatorial Africa and the Hottentots-Khoisans from Sub-Equatorial Africa. Finally, in Madagascar, a fifth racial group existed, besides of the Bantu of Nigero-Congolese origin: the Austronesians originating from Indonesia called the Merina (also named Hova). The study of the diffusion of urbanization in Africa reveals a spatial regularity which transcends the distribution of those racial groups. All indicates that urbanization spread through Africa from the Great Corridor, from north to south, and from east to west. Along the Nile axis, it diffused from the delta towards the region of Thebes, then towards the kingdom of Kush (in Nubia, in present-day northern Sudan) and the kingdom of Aksum in Abyssinia-Ethiopia. From east to west, urbanization also started from Egypt, and, thanks most of the time to the Phoenicians, and, later, the Greeks, it

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reached Libya, Numidia, and the rest of Maghrib. In West Africa, the oldest signs of urbanization originate from the Songhai civilization, which probably built cities a little before this era, and whose capital was Djenné (in present-day Mali). More to the west, the kingdom of Ghana, “the land of gold” situated in the southeastern part of present-day Mauritania, probably urbanized around 500 or 600; its capital was the city of Kumbi. Two regions located right to the south of the kingdom of Ghana were, with another region situated in Sudan, the greatest providers of gold of all Africa, which, very early, fed the Trans-Saharan trade. To the south of those regions, traces of urbanization are also found, but there, the main diffusion phenomenon was related not to urbanization, but to the migrations of the Bantu population, which, contrary to urbanization, went from west to east. Among the main cradles of humankind, we have mentioned up to here the cradle of the Indo-Europeans, a region probably located to the north of Caucasus, the cradle of the Finns and Hungarians situated in the Ural region, and the cradle of the Mongoloid populations in the Altai region. There is a fourth important cradle, located in Africa, more precisely in presentday Sudan, probably in the greater area of Khartoum, from which originate both the Afrasians, also called Afro-Asians, and the Nilo-Saharans. Afrasians divided into two major families: the North-Eritreans, who gave birth to the ancient Egyptians, the Semites, and the Berbers, and the South-Eritreans, who gave birth to the Chadians who migrated towards Lake Chad, and the Kushites who settled in the Horn of Africa (Somalia) and the Ethiopian Massif. It seems that the region of origin of the Afrasians was located, around 15,000 BC, between the mountains of the Red Sea and the Ethiopian Plateau, in an area situated south of Khartoum, in Sudan.13 As for the region of origin of the Nilo-Saharans, it is likely to have been also located, around 12,000 BC, in the central region of present-day Sudan. The Nilo-Saharan and Kushite stockbreeders scattered from Sudan and the Ethiopian Massif towards the west (Fulani and Kanuri) and the south (Tutsi and Masai). Distinguishing between those breeders those whose origin is Nilo-Saharan and those whose origin is Kushite is not always easy. The Fulani and the Kanuri have clearly a Nilo-Saharan (or West-Nilotic) origin, while the Masai have a Kushite (or East-Nilotic) origin.14 But in the case of the Tutsi, things are much more complicated because they have adopted the Bantu language of their neighbors and, consequently, their linguistic origin

13. 14.

Ibid., 19. Ibid., 21, 115, and Bernard Lugan, Histoire du Rwanda, de la Préhistoire à nos jours (Paris : Bartillat, 1997).

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cannot be determined. Nilo-Saharan languages such as Acholi, Alur, Lango, Luo, Karamojong, Nandi, and Suk are spoken in Uganda, but essentially in the northern and eastern parts of that country, whereas, in southern and western Uganda, in Rwanda, in Burundi, and in eastern Congo, live Hima and Tutsi populations whose morphotypical characteristics are clearly Nilo-Saharan, but whose language is Bantu. In all likelihood, their origin is West-Nilotic, but they have been assimilated by the much more numerous surrounding Bantu populations. Finally, the fifth cradle, that of the Nigero-Congolese or Black WestAfricans, who constitute the vast majority of the Sub-Saharan population, is not precisely known. However, the region of origin of the Nigero-Congolese sub-group called the Bantu, who are mainly farmers, is situated in the region of the Benue River, a tributary of the Niger River, and of the Mount Cameroon Massif, at the present border of Nigeria and Cameroon. The expansion of the Bantu populations, which began around 3000 BC, constitutes one of the great phenomena of world’s history.15 The Bantu farmers from West Africa’s inland savanna progressively invaded most of the part of Sub-Saharan Africa located to the southeast of Niger River. On their way, they went from their original dry savanna to the wetter coastal forest of the Gulf of Guinea. They spread into the Congo Basin’s equatorial forest zone and, by soon after 1000 BC, they entered the more open and dry country of East Africa’s Rift Valley and Great Lakes. There they encountered a melting pot of Afroasiatic and Nilo-Saharan farmers and herders growing millet and sorghum, and raising livestock in drier areas, along with the Pygmy hunter-gatherers of Equatorial Africa, the Hottentot breeders, and the Khoisan hunter-gatherers of Sub-Equatorial Africa (Hottentots and Khoisans belong to the same racial group). It must be noted that Afroasiatic and Nilo-Saharan breeders occupied East Africa at least 1,500 years before the Bantu farmers came from West Africa.16 Thanks to their wet-climate crops such as yams inherited from the West African zones they had crossed, the Bantu were able to farm in wet areas of East Africa unsuitable for all those previous occupants. The Bantu acquired millet and sorghum as well as new cattle from their neighbors. Moreover, they acquired from them breeding notions and, especially, the technique to use iron for making tools. The Bantu then passed directly from the Age of Stone to the Age of Iron without passing through the Age of Copper or the Age of Bronze (in Africa, only Egypt, Nubia-Kush, and West Sahara went 15.

16.

Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel : The Fates of Human Societies (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1997), 392–401, and Bernard Lugan, Histoire du Rwanda, de la Préhistoire à nos jours, op. cit., 42–45. Bernard Lugan, Atlas historique de l’Afrique des origines à nos jours, op. cit., 41.

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through the Age of Copper and the Age of Bronze).17 By the last centuries BC the advancing Bantu had reached the East African coast. The Bantu invasion went further south. The southernmost Bantu people, the Xhosa, stopped at the Fish River, at the present border between Namibia and South Africa. Beyond that river, the climate became too seasonal and too cold for the crops the Bantu were used to. It seems that all the Bantu languages spoken in East, Central, and Austral Africa stem from Kinyarwanda and Kirundi spoken in Rwanda and Burundi.18 South of the Niger River, urbanization seems to have followed the advance of the population of the Bantu farmers. In present-day Nigeria, a very important urban system appeared at about the same time Islam was born: that of the Yoruba States. The best known of those states is the kingdom of Benin, whose most ancient city seems to have been Ife, which, by AD 850, was already a large city producing a substantial amount of iron and glass, and high-quality works of art. The city that ended up dominating the Yoruba urban system is the city of Benin, whose population reached about 65,000 people by 1500. More to the south, at the mouth of the Congo River, another Bantu urban system formed some centuries later, that of the kingdom of Congo, which was one of the most highly centralized and complex states in Sub-Saharan Africa. For instance, the empire’s economy was monetary and the king of Congo had absolute control over the cowrie shell currency. The kingdom’s capital, M’banza Congo, had a population of some 50,000 when the Portuguese discovered the city of in 1484. Much more to the south, in the region of the Zambezi River, a Bantu kingdom was created around the end of the twelfth century, that of Monomotapa. That relatively urbanized kingdom became very rich thanks to the exploitation of exceptional gold mines. It is estimated that the kingdom of Monomotapa and the three kingdoms stemming from it, including the kingdom of Togwa, whose capital probably was the city of Great Zimbabwe, produced, between 1500 and 1850, as much gold as Mexico, Peru, and Bolivia combined.19 The city of Great Zimbabwe was built between the 11th and the 15th centuries. At its acme, around 1400, its population reached some 25,000 people. The urbanization of Sub-Saharan Africa bears some particular characteristics. First, like that of the Andes, it was not associated with writing or the wheel. On the other hand, Sub-Saharan Africa’s urban buildings were rarely permanent. Great Zimbabwe and the city of Kumbi, the capital of the kingdom of Ghana, which were built in stones, constituted an exception. Finally, it seems 17. 18. 19.

Ibid., 47. Ibid., 45. Rob Summers, Zimbabwe : A Rhodesian Mystery (Johannesburg and New York: Nelson, 1963).

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that the various Sub-Saharan urban systems did not trade much with each other, even if international trade succeeded to reach them through the Sahara or the oceans. Very early, the kingdom of Congo and the Yoruba States established commercial relations with the Portuguese. However, those relations rapidly became unhealthy because they were almost exclusively focused on slave trade. It is estimated that, between 1500 and 1900, 18 million African slaves were sold: 11 million of them were shipped to the Western markets, the rest being sent to the markets of the Indian Ocean and the Arab countries. As for the kingdom of Monomotapa, its gold exports attracted Portuguese traders as early as 1500. They were not the first ones to be attracted by the gold of that region. Actually, porcelain from China and Persian pottery have been found in the ruins of Great Zimbabwe. It is possible, though not certain, that the commercial influence of Islam reached that region.

The Eastern Outposts To the east of the Arab economy-world, Islam, that Semitic religion, faced the Indo-European religious current, first under the form of MazdeanismZoroastrianism, then under the form of Buddhism and finally under the form of Hinduism. Isfahan was the largest Moslem city of Iran at that time, and it became the symbol of the triumph of Islam over Mazdeanism-Zoroastrianism, that is, Mazdeanism as reformed by Zarathushtra (also named Zoroaster) around 600 BC. Isfahan welcomed one of the most famous and influential of the philosopher-scientists of Islam, Avicenna. A Persian, Avicenna was born in present-day Uzbekistan in 980. He spent the last years of his life in Isfahan where he died in 1037. In the evolution of urbexplosions and economy-worlds, it is normal for peripheries to attempt freeing themselves from the domination of the center. The Moslem economy-world was no exception to that rule. In Iran, this led to the emergence of distinct non-Arab dynasties, like the first great native dynasty that arose in Persia after the Arab conquest, the Samanids who acceded to power in 874. Moreover, Iran adopted Shiism, a minority form of Islam stemming from the tradition of Ali, the son-in-law of Muhammad. While the Arabs and the Turks were mainly Sunni, the Persians became Shiite. Isfahan’s location is very central in Iran, about halfway between the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea, and halfway between Shiraz to the south and Tehran to the north. Isfahan is an oasis situated at a relatively high altitude (1,590 meters above sea level) along the north bank of the Zayandeh River, which is a river that does not end at the sea but rather ends up vanishing in the Great Salt Desert (called Dashte Kavir Desert). At Isfahan, a bridge allowed travelers of the north-south route linking Tehran and Shiraz to cross the Zayandeh River. It must be noted that the Silk Road leading to Antioch

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passed through Samarkand and Tehran, whereas the Silk Road leading to Charax, Petra, and Alexandria passed through Qandahar and Shiraz. Thus, the strategic axis Tehran-Isfahan-Shiraz was connecting those two main Silk Roads. It is the Umayyad dynasty which opted for expanding Islam both to the northeast, towards the central axis of the Asian Corridor following the Silk Road, and to the east, following the central axis of the Great Corridor up to the Sind region of India. The first movement put Islam in contact with Buddhism, and led to taking control of Samarkand and its region, Transoxiana (or Sogdiana). Like Isfahan, Samarkand is built in an oasis, that of Zeravchan, to the south of the Peski Kyzylkum Desert. That oasis is crossed by a tributary of the Amo-Darya River, which takes its source in the Pamirs Massif of Tajikistan and flows to the Aral Sea. Samarkand is at least 2,600 years old, making it one of the oldest cities in Central Asia.20 It probably started as the capital of the old kingdom of Sogdiana. The city was conquered by the Persians around 543 BC and by Alexander the Great in 329 BC. It constituted one of the most important crossroads of the Silk Road. Led to Samarkand the two most northern routes of the Silk Road in Northern China (the caravan summer Silk Road, also called route of the steppes, very much to the north, and the route of the northern part of the Tarim Basin located a little to the south of the first one), and the two branches of the Silk Road going respectively, to the east, towards Tehran and, to the south, towards Bactra, Kabul, and the Ganges River. The city of Samarkand, which was captured by Islam and the Arabs in AD 712, became later the capital of the Turko-Mongol Timur (also called Tamerlane) and the Second Mongol Empire. It constitutes one of the most fascinating points of the world since it was dominated alternately by the Persian, Greek, Greco-Persian, Greco-Buddhist, Buddhisto-Moslem (under the first Mongol Empire), Mongol, Turkish, Moslem, Russo-Moslem, and Sovieto-Moslem cultures. The movement of the Umayyads towards the northeast ended with the Moslem victory of Talas against the Chinese Empire and the capture of Tashkent (Uzbekistan) in 751. The Moslem troops found it preferable to stop there. The thrust of the Umayyads towards the Asian Corridor also led, more to the south, to the seizure of Kabul and the Khyber Pass the Aryans, coming from present-day Iran, had used in 1750 BC to conquer India. Like Samarkand, Kabul was once controlled by the Greeks; Alexander the Great probably went there. A cultural difference between Samarkand and Kabul comes from the fact that, despite the large number of foreign influences 20.

Samarkand’s ancient history dates from before the first recorded mention in 329 BC when, known as Maracanda, it was captured by Alexander the Great.

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Samarkand has experienced, it never was submitted to a Hindu influence, whereas it seems that a Hindu temple has been discovered in Kabul, as well as two Buddhist monasteries. As for the second movement launched by the Umayyads, still more to the south, within the Great Corridor, it led, from 710 to 713, to the conquest of the whole right bank of the Indus River as well as of the Hindu Sind region. The long struggle between Islam and Hinduism started there. The AraboMoslem expansion did not go any further. The limits of the Arab Islam were Spain and Morocco to the west, and Transoxiana and Sind to the east. However, the Moslem expansion revived later in circumstances which almost inflicted on Christianity and Hinduism the fate reserved to MazdeanismZoroastrianism. That second phase was caused by the irresistible attraction exerted on the Altaic peoples by the Great Corridor. That attraction, which killed the Western Roman Empire, came close to have the same effect on Islam, but instead it gave it a new expansion.

s ISLAM RE-LAUNCHED BY THE TURKO-MONGOL INVASIONS After the disruption of the Eurasian Empire of Attila in 453, the defeat of the Hunas branch of the Ephthalite Huns (also called White Huns) by Yasodharman and the Gupta rulers in India in 530, and the reconstitution of a united China in 589, the Altaic tribes seemed for a while to have renounced conquering the Great and Asian corridors they had invaded from the fourth to the sixth centuries. However, the upholding of the wealth of the Constantinople urbexplosion, the rise of the Arab economy-world, and the economic development of India and of the Chinese Empire re-created after some time a strong tension between the centers of wealth accumulation and the peripheral nomadic tribes from the Mongolo-American Corridor. One man cleverly exploited the explosive potential of that situation: Genghis Khan. Elected Khan of the Mongols in 1196 and Supreme Khan of all the Mongol tribes in 1206, Genghis Khan built, between those dates and his death in 1227, an incredible empire, four times as large as the one built by Alexander the Great, extending from the China Sea to the Caspian Sea and Ural, and from Hindu Kush (Afghanistan) to Siberia. That immense empire, whose capital was Karakorum in Mongolia, was the product of the MongoloAmerican Corridor, whose Asian section corresponds to the “Steppe Corridor” passing, from east to west, by the “Door of Dzungaria” linking Kazakhstan and the Chinese Xinjiang province, and by the Kirghiz Steppe and the Chu River Basin. The Steppe Corridor actually constituted the spine of Genghis Khan’s Mongol Empire that his successors extended even more. The route followed by those successors of Genghis Khan coincides almost exactly with the central axis of the Mongolo-American Corridor.

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That course so favorable to the movements of hordes of horsemen also bore many morphological advantages when, seven centuries later, the era of railroads came, as illustrated by the Trans-Siberian. Three times in the history of Eurasia, the Mongolo-American Corridor based on nomadism and the terrestrial mobility attempted to supplant the Great Corridor, characterized by a settled way of life, wealth accumulation, and the fluvial and maritime mobility: a first time at the end of the fourth century with the Huns, who failed, but provoked the fall of the Western Roman Empire; a second time during the thirteenth century with the Mongols, who succeeded for some centuries to create and maintain an immense empire, and who were an indirect cause of the fall of the Eastern Roman Empire; and a third time, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when the Mongolo-American Corridor took over the world leadership. In 1245, Genghis Khan’s successors established their domination over Russia and, in 1255, over Iran. In 1258, they destroyed Baghdad. Between 1211 and 1280, they conquered all of China. In 1294, at the death of Kublai Khan, Genghis Khan’s grandson and emperor of China, the Mongol territories dominated by Genghis Khan’s descendants included present-day China, Mongolia, the major part of Russia, Iran, Mesopotamia, and a part of Anatolia. They included the Aral Sea, the Caspian Sea and almost all of the Black Sea, and they were bordered by the China Sea, the Persian Gulf, and the Mediterranean Sea. While the empire of Alexander the Great and the Roman Empire spread over 4,800 kilometers from east to west, the Mongol Empire did over twice as much, over 9,600 kilometers. That empire controlled almost all the Silk Road, which was unprecedented and never happened again. From 1260 to 1368, the Pax mongolica allowed the terrestrial trade between Orient and Occident to reach its peak. At that period, a Mongol dynasty, the Il-Khans, reigned over Iran and Iraq, while another Mongol dynasty, the Yuans, ruled over China. Islam had then to face its greatest threat. It lost Iran, Baghdad, Mesopotamia, and a large part of Anatolia. The Mongols were even at the door of Arabia. That setback had been preceded by a considerable weakening of the power of the Arabs over the Moslem economy-world. Many non-Arab dynasties had replaced the Arab ones. In Morocco and Spain, the Berber Almoravids had replaced the Arab Fatimids in 1069, then the Berber Almohads and Marinids had succeeded them. In Tunisia, the Berber Zirids had replaced the Arab Fatimids in 972, and then the Berber Hafsids had replaced the Berbero-Moroccan Almohads in 1236. In Iran, the Iranian Samanids of Indo-European origin had partly replaced the Arab Abbassids in 874, and then, between 977 and 983, the Iranian Buyids-Buwayhids of Indo-European origin drove from power both the Iranian Samanids and the Arab Abbassids. Moreover, to the northeast of Iran, three Moslem Turkish kingdoms had been

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constituted: the kingdom of the Ghaznavids, founded in 962 in the presentday northeastern Iranian province of Khorasan and Afghanistan, that of the Qarakhanids, founded at the same epoch in Transoxiana (present-day Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan), and that of the Seljuq Turks. Between 1035 and 1040, the Seljuqs chased the Ghaznavids from Khorasan; then, between 1038 and 1063, they took control of the rest of Iran before capturing Baghdad in 1055 and, later, Asia Minor. However, when the time of the Mongol invasions came, the Seljuqs were left only with the Rum Sultanate, in Anatolia. In Afghanistan, they had been supplanted by the Afghan dynasty of the Ghurids (also called Rhurids) of Indo-European origin. In 1192, when the Afghan Ghurid Muhammad Ghuri, sultan of Ghazna, defeated the Hindu Rajputs at the battles of Taraori, the Afghan Ghurids were the ones who introduced Islam up to the Ganges, in the hearth of India. Later, in 1206, Aybak, a slave of the Ghurids become general, founded the Sultanate of Delhi. In 1290, the sultanate passed under the control of the Turkish dynasty of the Khaljis, which made it the first power of India, a power that reached its acme under the Mughal dynasty. In 1320, to the Turkish Khaljis succeeded the Turkish Tughluq who reigned till 1413. It is, to a large extent, the integration to the Moslem world of the Altaic tribes, and, secondarily, of Afghan tribes that saved Islam and relaunched it. The Turks were cousins of Genghis Khan’s Mongols. They had converted to Islam when they were hired as mercenaries by the Abbassids and, later, the Samanids of Iran. When the Mongols invaded their dominions, of course the Turks and especially the Seljuq Turks opposed them, but at the end they accepted to become their vassals. After a while, Genghis Khan’s descendants divided in two groups. Those who inherited China and Tibet became Confucians, Taoists or Buddhists, while those who received khanates or principalities located to the west of China and Tibet did as their Turkish cousins had done: they converted to Islam, often under the influence of their Turkish cousins. This is how, instead of retreating, the Moslem influence extended to new territories such as Russia, where Islam had not yet penetrated. Other Altaics followed the example of the Seljuq Turks and the Mongols: among them, the Turkmens, the Tatars, the Uzbeks, and the Ottoman Turks. Between 1370 and 1405, the Turkic-Mongol Timur Lenk, also named Tamerlane, created the Second Mongol Empire whose capital was Samarkand. Less vast than the First Mongol Empire, it nonetheless included Mesopotamia, Iran, and the Upper Indus Valley, as well as Transoxiana. It fell to the Turkish dynasty of the Mughals, and, more precisely, to Babar, descendant of Timur Lenk (who had destroyed Delhi in 1398–1399) through his father and of Genghis Khan through his mother, and to his descendants Akbar and Aurangzeb to bring to its climax the Moslem control of the whole Indian section of the Great Corridor. They did it from 1526, thanks to the battle of

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Panipat won by Babar against the Afghan dynasty of the Lodis, which had taken control of the Delhi Sultanate in 1451. In the aftermath of that battle, Babar captured Delhi, Agra and the whole Sultanate of Delhi, whose control over all northern India he reestablished (see Map 10).

Ind

una

Yam

us

Lahore

Delhi Agra

Chambal

Gang

es

Surat

Krishna

Vijayanagar

220 km

Map 10 The Great Ebb West in the Indian Section of the Great Corridor

A large number of cities bear witness to the progression of Islam towards the east owing to the rallying to Islam of numerous Altaic tribes. Of course, there are Samarkand and Kabul, but there is also, in the Upper Indus Valley, Lahore, with its long Buddhist past, which became Moslem in 1152,

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following its conquest by the Turkish dynasty of the Ghaznavids. More to the east, Delhi, captured by Islam as early as 1192, is the very symbol of that Moslem thrust. Located on the Yamuna River, the main tributary of the Ganges, in the middle of the rich Hindustan Plain, Delhi lay on the Indian Silk Road, which linked Changan-Xi’an, the Chinese Straight Road, the Ganges Valley, the Yamuna Valley, the Indian city of Mathura, the Upper Indus Basin and the city of Taxila (in present-day Pakistan) (see Map 5). Because of its strategic situation on that road, Delhi was the main soldered joint between the Great and Asian corridors (see Maps 5 and 8). That being said, the Sultanate’s trade followed mainly the Great Corridor towards Mesopotamia and Persia, where Delhi exported sugar, textiles from Bengal, shawls from Kashmir, and carpets from Lahore. The historical links between Persia and India are symbolized by the Taj Mahal, that Indian masterpiece of Persian style built by a Mughal emperor of Turkish origin. The Taj Mahal is located in Agra, which was the capital of the Delhi Sultanate from 1526 to 1638. To the southwest of Delhi and Agra lies Ahmadabad, east of the mouth of the Indus River, on the Sabarmati River, which flows in the plain of Gujarat before reaching the Gulf of Khambhat and the Arabian Sea. The Sabarmati River stems from the Aravalli Range, which also gives birth, to the northeast, to the Banas River, which runs towards the Chambal River, which leads to the Yamuna and the Ganges rivers flowing towards the Bay of Bengal. Controlling Ahmadabad on the Sabarmati, and Delhi and Agra on the Yamuna was tantamount to controlling one of the most natural and strategic fluvial and terrestrial links between the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal. Ahmadabad, which was a Hindu city, was captured by the Moslem Mughals in 1298 and integrated into the Delhi Sultanate. More to the south, Surat, which also belongs to the state of Gujarat, is located on the Tapi River that, like the Sabarmati, leads to the Gulf of Khambhat. Surat, which was integrated into the Sultanate of Delhi in 1306, is a natural port, and, from about 1600 to 1664, it was the richest city of the Mughal Empire, thanks to its commercial activities and to its production of cotton and silk. Its population was then about 125,000 inhabitants. Around 1650, Agra, Delhi, and Ahmadabad had 400,000 inhabitants each and even more. That was the epoch of the Golden Age of the Mughal Empire, a Golden Age that began in 1556 with the reign of Sultan Akbar and terminated in 1707 with the end of the reign of Sultan Aurangzeb. During that period, it is estimated that the per capita income of the Indians was superior to that of the French during Louis XIV’s reign. India was then probably the richest country on Earth. After having benefited to Constantinople, and then to Baghdad, the Great Ebb was making the fortune of the Delhi urbexplosion. For the first time in history, a topodynamic movement initiated in the section of the Great Corridor situated to the west of the Persian Gulf had continued

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towards the east beyond the Gulf. That happened, as we shall see, at a time when, to the west of the Gulf, the Great Ebb had already been replaced by a new westward movement launched by the discovery of America. The eastward movement associated with the Great Ebb went on up to China, and later Japan. During the seventeenth century, the pendulum clearly was in India. It is estimated that the population of India (including present-day Pakistan and Bangladesh) was superior to that of China till about 1750. Around AD 50, according to Maddison, the population of India was 70 million, and that of China was only 40 million; in 1750, the Indian population had reached 153 million and the Chinese one 138 million. It must be said that the area of arable land in China represents only 56.6% of the area of arable land in India. Fifty percent of India’s territory is favorable to agriculture; the corresponding proportion in China is only ten percent.21 Contrary to what happened in Persia with Mazdeanism-Zoroastrianism, the coming of Islam to India did not toll the knell of Hinduism. In the same way that, around 1750 BC, at the time of the Aryan invasions, the Deccan, in southern India, had been the refuge of the Dravidians fleeing the invaders, in front of the Moslem invasion, Hinduism strategically withdrew to the south in the hope of being able to counterattack some day. The penetration of Islam followed the Asian Corridor towards the south. It reached the Krishna River, which stems from the Ghats Mountains that dominate the Malabar Coast and runs towards the Bay of Bengal. The Sultanate of the Bahmanids was established on the left bank of the river. In 1335, the Delhi Sultanate had even succeeded to extend its influence to the south of the Krishna River and, more, of the Kaviri River, leaving to Hinduism only the Tamil extreme south and the Malabar Coast. Like the Spanish Reconquista, the Hindu counterattack lasted for centuries. It was first based on the Hindu Empire of Vijayanagar, founded in 1366 to the south of the Krishna River, but also on the Rajput Confederation and the Hindu states of Orissa to the east and of the Tamil Pandya dynasty to the south. The empire of Vijayanagar was defeated in 1565 by the Muslim Sultanate of Bijapur that had formed to the north of Vijayanagar and that included Bombay and Goa. Later, the resistance to Islam was ensured, from 1646, by the formation of the Hindu Maratha Confederation, which, in 1674, constituted a state in the western part of Deccan. Around 1500, the city of Vijayanagar, whose name means the “city of victory,” had about 500,000 inhabitants, and it was probably the second largest city of the world after Peking-Beijing (Paris, the largest European city of that time, still had only between 200,000 and 250,000 inhabitants). If we except

21.

Angus Maddison, Chinese Economic Performance in the Long Run (Paris : OECD, 1998), 20, 28.

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the Harappa civilization, which seems to have had almost no impact on the urbanization of modern India, the urbanization of the Indian sub-continent was late. Till AD 1000, India had very few cities. The fact that Vijayanagar reached half a million inhabitants in 1500 shows to what extent the Great Ebb was associated in India to a strong thrust of urbanization. Vijayanagar was defeated and disappeared with its empire in 1565. It was then razed to the ground. Today, its ruins are found in a simple village named Hampi in the Karnataka State. If Islam drove Hinduism into a corner, it also tightened the noose round a Christian Europe that was pinned to the west by the invasion of Spain in 711–714, to the southeast by the intrusion, in 1354, of the Ottoman Turks, and, to the east, by the invasion, in 1245, of Russia by the Mongols later converted to Islam. Actually, the blossoming of Islam linked to the Altaic invaders attracted by the wealth of the Great Corridor also introduced Russia into the world dominated by the Moslem powers. That period of the Russian history is symbolized by the city of SaraiBerke, the capital of the Mongol Khanate of the Golden Horde, also known as the kingdom of Qipchak or Kipchak (see Map 9). Sarai-Berke was founded about 1260 to replace Sarai-Batu, created in 1254, which had briefly replaced Itil as the capital of the Golden Horde founded in 1251 by the Mongol chief Batu Khan, son of Genghis Khan’s son Jutchti and nephew of Genghis Khan’s third son, the Great Khan Ogadai who, with Batu Khan, established the rule of the Mongols over Russia from 1245. Sarai-Berke occupied a very strategic location on the Volga River in the area where the Don River, which leads to the Black Sea, gets very close to the Volga, which runs towards the Caspian Sea. Today, Tsaritsyne, long known as Stalingrad and later Volgograd, is its real heir due to its great proximity. Four main commercial routes originated from Sarai-Berke: the first, the Road of the Steppes (or Silk Summer Caravan Road) coming from Samarkand and Bukhara (Uzbekistan) along the Volga; the second one also along the Volga, towards Kazan and Moscow; the third, the road from the south coming from Baghdad, Tabriz, and Tbilisi through the Daria Pass, also called the Iron Doors; and, finally, the road of the west leading through the Don River to Tana (Azov) on the Black Sea and, through the Dnieper River, to Kiev, Russia’s cradle. At their climax, under the reign of Khan Öz Beg, Sarai-Berke and the Golden Horde had extensive relations with Genoa and Venice who controlled the main ports of the Black Sea and Crimea, which belonged to the Golden Horde. Around 1350, the population of Sarai-Berke reached 120,000 inhabitants. Sarai-Berke was then the fourth largest European city after Paris (220,000 inhabitants), Constantinople (200,000 persons), and Granada (150,000 inhabitants).

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s THE NON-MILITARY PROGRESSION OF ISLAM IN THE ASIAN CORRIDOR Between the first and second Mongol Empires, from the thirteenth century, Islam infiltrated the Asian Corridor in a rather pacific way, and, owing to the Great Ebb, advanced towards the northeast by the continental Silk Road, as Buddhism had done before (see Map 11). Thus, it penetrated into China in the province of Xinjiang where still exists today an important Moslem population in the mist of which is found the Turkish people of the Uighurs that, after having been successively Manichaean, Buddhist, and Nestorian Christian, converted to Islam from the fourteenth century. Islam also entered, by the Great Corridor and the Indian Silk Road (see Map 11), into the Chinese province of Yunnan, passing through present-day Bangladesh. The famous eunuch navigator Zheng He, whose expeditions towards the west have been mentioned, came from a rich Moslem family of the Yunnan Province, which joins Burma-Myanmar, Laos, and Vietnam. Thanks to the Arab merchants, Islam also progressed to the south, by the maritime Silk Road, towards Indonesia, which thus became the greatest Moslem country of the world. That progression skipped an important step that is worth mentioning, that of Sri Lanka, the only part of the Indian world where Buddhism survived and remained dominant. Gautama, named Buddha, or the Enlighted, founded Buddhism in the region of Varanasi-Benares on the Ganges around 500 BC. For centuries, that religion flourished in India. However, conflicts with Hinduism emerged, and the struggle between the two religions stemming from the current of the Indo-European Vedas became so bitter that, around AD 700, Hinduism practically succeeded to eliminate Buddhism from the Indian sub-continent. Ceylon, presently Sri Lanka, which occupies a very strategic position on the maritime Silk Road, was an exception. Today, seventy percent of its population are Buddhist, while that percentage is inferior to one percent in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Sri Lanka preserved Buddhism when Hinduism pursued it; it kept it when the Moslem wave passed, and it remained faithful to it when, for 441 years, the country was submitted to Christian powers, Portugal, the Dutch United-Provinces, and then Great Britain. Islam did not find a favorable ground in Sri Lanka, but it took root more to the east in the Asian Corridor, in the Malay Peninsula, which was exposed, to a large extent, to the same influences as Sri Lanka, that is, successively, to Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and later to European influences linked to the successive presence of the Portuguese, the Dutch, and the British. Everything indicates that the development of the Malay Peninsula was mainly influenced by a topodynamic movement coming from the west within the Asian Corridor. That movement became more pronounced with the Great Ebb and the arrival of Arabo-Moslem influences, and, later, from 1511, of European influences.

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Samarkand Huang He

Lahore g Yan

Indus

Hangzhou

tze

Ga

ng

es

Calcutta

Xi Jian

Zayton g

Macao

Panaji-Goa Manila

Colombo Malacca

370

Jakarta

km

The Grand Canal of China Great Wall of China

Map 11 The Great Ebb in the Asian Corridor

From about AD 700, the Malacca region belonged to the Buddhist Indo-Malay Srivijaya Empire, ruled by the Sailendra dynasty, whose center was located on Sumatra Island. Around 1200, it passed under the domination of the Indonesian kingdom of Singhasari and later, around 1290, under the rule of the mainly Indonesian Hindu kingdom of Majapahit. Around 1403, Prince Parameswara from Sumatra Island founded the city and the kingdom of Malacca, which became, around 1430, the most important commercial center of Southeast Asia. Parameswara favored the Islamization of the region by converting, probably under the influence of the Indonesian Moslems from Sumatra Island.

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The maritime Silk Road passed by the Strait of Malacca; it constituted the shortest maritime route between China and India, as well as between Europe and the Far East. Chinese merchants have been present in the Strait of Malacca as soon as during the ninth century of this era, if not well before. In 1600, they still dominated the maritime trade in that Strait, though the presence of Indian traders had always been strong there, and that of the Arab merchants had been constant since at least the eighth century. The Portuguese, who, with Vasco de Gama, had opened up the maritime route between Europe and India, were the first Europeans to try taking control of the Strait of Malacca. As soon as in 1511, with Albuquerque, they took possession of the site of Malacca. The most ancient and stronger influences on the Malay Peninsula came from the west, even if China was closer to it than India. Today, about one third of the population of Malaysia is of Chinese origin. Despite that, almost all the religions of Malaysia come from the west. Islam, which is the religion of the majority, Hinduism, and Christianity come from the west, and the “Lesser Vehicle” Buddhism (also called Theravada or Hinayana Buddhism) found in Malaysia is the same as in Sri Lanka, and it comes directly from India without having gone through China (where prevail the Tibetan or “Greater Vehicle” Buddhism, also called the Mahayana Buddhism).22 Only Taoism comes from China, and its faithful represent a small minority in Malaysia. From a cultural point of view, the Indians have long been dominant: they introduced writing into Malaysia, and they also brought Hinduism and Buddhism at the beginning of this era. In Indonesia also, Hinduism and Buddhism preceded Islam. Those two religions probably arrived at Java in the fourth century of this era through the commercial exchanges between that region and India. For a long time, the western part of Indonesia was dominated by the Buddhist Srivijaya Empire, ruled by the Sailendra dynasty, which controlled trade. In the ninth century, even the Hindu kingdom of Mataram submitted to the Srivijaya Empire. It is around 1250 that Arab traders introduced Islam in northern Sumatra. From there, the Moslem religion progressively spread to the rest of Indonesia. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the commercial ports and the Moslem sultanates extended their hold over the whole Sumatra and Java Islands. Buddhism was practically eliminated, and Hinduism found its ultimate refuge in the island of Bali, to the east of Java.

22.

In the Lesser Vehicle tradition, salvation (nirvana) can only be achieved through becoming a monk, while, in the Greater Vehicle Buddhism, it can be reached by everyone, whether lay or monk.

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Islam even reached the Philippines, the only country, with Spain and Portugal, where Moslems did, freely or under constraint, convert en masse to another religion. That happened during the years that followed the creation, in 1564, of the Spanish colony of the Philippines, which made that country a region as Catholic as Indonesia is Moslem. It is during the sixteenth century that the eastward movement associated with the Great Ebb ceased to take the color of Islam to take that of the European influence. That began with the arrival of the Portuguese in Ceylon in 1505, then in India, at Goa, in 1510, and in Malacca, in 1511. A great historical figure marked that period: that of the Basque Jesuit saint Francis Xavier, the disciple of saint Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits and himself a Basque. Between 1542 and his death, saint Francis Xavier founded missions at Goa in India, at Malacca in Malaysia, in the Moluccas Islands, in Japan, and in China. He died in China in 1552, being only 46 years old, and he was buried in Goa. The European influence was not limited only to the diffusion of Christianity. It took mainly the form of commercial and colonial conquests.23

s THE GREAT EBB IN SOUTHEAST ASIA AND THE FAR EAST For a long time, the continental part of Southeast Asia has been called Indochina by the French. This expression is totally accurate to the extent that it clearly states that this region was submitted to the determining influences of both India and China. The populating of Indochina stemmed from China, as we already noted about the diffusion of the Chinese language from the north to the south. However, the cultural and economic development of that region was first marked by India, more than China. From that point of view, the topodynamic movements from west to east have, for a long time, prevailed over the north-south movements, as demonstrated by the evolution of urbanization (see Map 12). Burma or Myanmar, that no natural barrier separates from India, was settled very early, probably as early as Northern China, and urbanization also developed there at a very remote period. By the first century of our era a large city, Peikthano, existed which grew until the fourth century, when two other cities, Thayekhettaya and Halin, superceded it. Estimating the populations of these cities is uneasy. Their population density seems to have been rather low, but they were walled, which indicates a certain degree of sophistication. The main influence in Burma and in the whole Indochina, with the exception of what was to become, at a certain time, North Vietnam, was undoubtedly 23.

The first act of state-directed imperialism of modern European history may be the Portuguese marine attack of 1415 upon the fortified Moslem city of Ceuta (north of Morocco). That being said, European imperialism really developed after the discovery of America.

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that of India from the second century of this era. It seems that this was due to the fact that the Indian merchants who were in contact with the Western and Eastern Roman empires turned very early towards Indochina to find the spices, gold and precious woods demanded first by the Romans and the Byzantines, and later by the Arabs. Buddhism was established in Burma from the third century, and Indochina very decidedly entered India’s cultural and religious sphere of influence. In 825, the city of Pegu became the capital of the Buddhist kingdom of Mon and later, in 1387, that of the Buddhist kingdom of Pegu.

Huang H

e

Kyoto Osaka

g Yan

Ningbo

tze Xi Jiang

CantonGuangzhou

Pegu-Bago

Angkor

225 km

Map 12 The Great Ebb in Southeast Asia and the Far East

Tokyo Nara

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One of the most dazzling examples of the Indian influence in Indochina is probably the city of Angkor. Founded in the ninth century, it was the capital of the Khmer Empire of Cambodia. The temples of Angkor Thom, which date from the thirteenth century, are Buddhist. By contrast, the famous temple of Angkor Vat, built about 1140, at a time when Cambodia’s economy was developing rapidly, is a Hindu temple. It is estimated that, between 1000 and 1050, the number of Cambodian cities doubled.24 At its peak, between 1200 and 1300, the city of Angkor reached a population of 150,000 inhabitants. At the time of the founding of Angkor, the Indian influence in Indochina was already ancient. The first Cambodian kingdom, called Funan, was constituted during the first century at the instigation of Indian merchants and Hindu Brahmins recently arrived from India. That kingdom included present-day Cambodia, as well as parts of Thailand and the Malaysian Peninsula. It lasted till the seventh century. The only part of Indochina where China exerted a preponderant influence was North Vietnam, which it dominated approximately from 150 to 950. It is during the Chinese domination that the “Greater Vehicle” form of Buddhism established itself in Vietnam and Laos, as it was doing in Japan. After 950, Vietnam vigorously asserted its independence from China. The Great Ebb also touched China. In fact, it contributed to start a new chapter in the development of that country by conjuring up the influence of the Great Corridor. As has been noted, the Asian Corridor dominated the first part of the history of the development of China. The second part was marked by the emergence of the Great Corridor as an important actor of this development. The cities that best illustrate that evolution are Canton (called today Guangzhou), Zayton (present-day Quanzhou), Macau, and Ningbo. Canton-Guangzhou is the oldest port of China open to international trade. During the Eastern Han period (AD 23–220), the emperors decided to develop overseas trade and chose Canton-Guangzhou as their maritime port. During the Tang period, in 714, foreigners were allowed to trade in Canton-Guangzhou, which became the Chinese terminal of the maritime Silk Road. The Arabs and Persians were the first merchants to settle in the city. They were later joined by Vietnamese, Khmers, Malays, Indonesians, Indians, and Ceylanese who traded silk, tea, china, camphor, etc. Arabs traders settled on a permanent basis in the region of Canton-Guangzhou from 800 to 1000. Canton-Guangzhou’s population reached 200,000 around 850. During the Sung period, in 970, Canton-Guangzhou was endowed with a customs office, as was Zayton-Quanzhou one century later, in 1087. When, in 1127, the

24.

Hubert de Mestier du Bourg,. “La première moitié du XIe siècle au Cambodge: Suryavarman Ier, sa vie et quelques aspects des institutions à son époque,” Journal asiatique 258, 3–4 (1970): 281–314.

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Southern Sung dynasty took refuge at Hangzhou, it relied heavily on international trade and opened nine official ports to maritime commerce and foreign trade. However, Canton-Guangzhou and Zayton-Quanzhou were already quite ahead of their new port competitors. Canton-Guangzhou is located on the Xi Jiang (Pearl River) not too far from the mouth, Macau, and Hong Kong. It is interesting to note that international trade developed in China from southern Canton-Guangzhou at a time when the center of gravity of the Chinese economy and population was clearly to the north and the interior. In fact, the trajectory of the development of the Chinese international trade clearly followed the eastern trend within the Great Corridor: Canton-Guangzhou first, Zayton-Quanzhou (which for a while competed with Canton-Guangzhou as the main international port of China) second, and Shanghai third. Why is it that it all started with the Xi Jiang and Canton-Guangzhou? Maybe simply because the Xi Jiang is the first main river encountered by ships coming from the Strait of Malacca. One must not forget that, before the discovery of America, international trade between China and any other country, with the exceptions of Japan, Russia, and Korea, involved trips to the south and, most of the time, through the Strait of Malacca. The Xi Jiang was simply the closest and most convenient entrance to the Chinese Empire, and Canton-Guangzhou was the best and most secure maritime port on the Xi Jiang River, because it was located a little inside of the continent. When, between 1269 and 1295, under the reign of the Mongol Kublai Khan (the advent of the Mongol power during the thirteenth century is what allowed Europeans to travel up to China for the first time). When Marco Polo25 made his famous trip to the Orient, he followed precisely the Asian Corridor, entering China by the Continental Silk Road, which passes through Turkistan and Khotan-Hotan, and leaving China by the Maritime Silk Road. At that time, the main port of China was the port of Quanzhou, which Kublai Khan favored and which was known in Europe and Arab countries as Zayton. The word “satin” comes from Zayton, which was then the main port from which silk was exported. Arab merchants used to call the silk satin imported from Zayton “zaituni.” Zayton-Quanzhou was founded in AD 700, under the T’angs. During the two following centuries, it developed into a major seaport and a center of foreign trade, rivaling Canton and Hanoi, which was then a Chinese port. 25.

Marco Polo is the best-known Western explorer of thirteenth-century China, but he was not the only one. Before him, the Italian Franciscan Giovanni da Pian del Carpine (1182–1253) was sent by Pope Innocent IV to meet the Great Khan, and the Flemish Franciscan Guillaume de Rubroek (1220–1293) was sent by Saint Louis, king of France, to Mongolia to meet the Great Khan in 1254.

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Between 742 and 11162, the population of Zayton-Quanzhou increased tenfold. Under Kublai Khan, it reached 500,000 inhabitants. Commercially, ZaytonQuanzhou supplanted Canton-Guangzhou. During the fourteenth and the beginning of the fifteenth centuries, it was considered the largest port in the world. From the middle of the fifteenth century, Zayton-Quanzhou started to decline, when the Chinese emperors decided to withdraw from long-range trade and prohibit open-sea navigation, and when the attacks of the Japanese pirates put the Ming dynasty on the defensive. Moreover, the harbor began to silt up. In 1600, it was just a middle-size city. When China closed on itself, the port of Macau constituted one of the few links between China and the rest of the world. The rise of Islam had cut the traditional routes linking the Occident and the Orient; the discovery of a new maritime road to India by Vasco de Gama allowed the Portuguese to become the first Europeans to establish new direct commercial relations with India and the Far East. They began trading with China from 1517. In 1547, they obtained special trading privileges in the important port of Zayton-Quanzhou, and then, in 1557, the Chinese Emperor authorized Portugal to establish factories west of the mouth of the Xi Jiang at the site of Macau and to trade from there. Macau was the most important European trading post in China for three centuries until Hong Kong, which lies on the other side of the mouth of the river, took over. During the period of isolation of China, the port of Macau, which was open only to the Portuguese, was not China’s only port link with the outside. There was also the maritime port of Amoy, open to the trade with Spanish Philippines, the fluvial port of Kiakhta, open to the Russians, the port of Canton-Guangzhou, reserved from 1567 to the other Europeans, and that of Ningbo, open to the Japanese and Koreans.26 Ningbo is located at the junction of three rivers, the Ningbo Yao, Fenghua, and Yong rivers. From 1533 to 1545, Ningbo was a Portuguese trading post, even before the Portuguese settled in Macau. Around 1539, rich silver deposits were discovered in Japan at a time China needed this metal very much. But the relations between China and Japan were then so bad that China was even prohibiting Japanese ships to enter its ports. Thus, it is the Chinese pirates and Portuguese merchants who supplied China with Japanese silver through the port of Ningbo.27 The Japanese were also very protectionist, and they even closed their ports to all foreign ships from 1639 to 1854. The sole exception concerned the port of the Island of Deshima, which belonged to the Dutch since 1641. The Island of Deshima is located right in front of Nagasaki where saint Francis Xavier 26. 27.

Angus Maddison, op. cit., 41. Ibid., 69.

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founded a mission in 1549, and where Jesuits were very successful in getting converts. Eventually, the number of Japanese Christians rose to about 300,000, which represents many more converts than the Jesuits made in Goa or in China. The Togukawa Shogun of the time, being aware of the Spanish takeover in the Philippines and wanting to avoid this in Japan, expelled the Jesuits and the Portuguese traders from Japan in 1639. Christianity was suppressed, and later contact with Europeans and other foreigners was restricted to the small Dutch trading settlement of Deshima. This is how the link between the ports of Ningbo and Deshima, which both lay on the central axis of the Great Corridor, became, from 1639 to 1854, the only link between China and Japan, and almost the only link between Japan and the rest of the world.

THE IMPACT OF THE GREAT EBB IN THE GREAT CORRIDOR It is interesting to attempt classifying according to their level of development the various regions of the Great Corridor at different epochs of the Great Ebb (see, among other references, Angus Maddison, The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective, Paris: OECD, 2001). The following table shows the evolution from the beginning of the Great Ebb, around AD 400, to 700, two centuries after the fall of Rome, to 1000, to 1600, and, finally, to 1900.

400

700

1000

1600

1900

Rank 1 (most developed)

Roman Empire

Byzantine Empire

Byzantine India and South Empire, Arab China world, and Persia

Western Europe

Rank 2

Persia

Arab world and Persia

India and South China

Western Europe

Japan

Rank 3

India and South China

India and South China

Western Europe

Eastern Europe, Arab world, and Persia

Ottoman Empire

Rank 4 (less developed)

Japan

Western Europe and Japan

Japan

Japan

Persia, India, and South China

This table distinguishes between South and North China since North China does not belong to the Great Corridor. North China was almost as developed as the Roman Empire in AD 400. The evolution described in the table can be explained basically by two topodynamic movements: the Great Ebb and the rebirth of the westward movement to the west of the Persian Gulf after the discovery of America. The topodynamic eastward movement associated with the Great Ebb is linked to the collapse of Western Europe and the rise, successively, of the Byzantine Empire, the Arab world, India and Southern China, and, finally, Japan. As for the ups and downs of Western Europe, they correspond to the collapse associated with the fall of the western Roman Empire and the Great Ebb, and then, after the discovery of America, to the rebirth of the westward movement.

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The movement pushing development towards the east, from China towards Japan, within the Great Corridor is attested and generally recognized. Japan and Korea have long been, culturally and economically, the wards of China in the same way that Burma, Thailand, and Cambodia have been the wards of India. Japan is an archipelago like Indonesia. Its topography, very contrasted climate, lack of natural resources, and volcanic character constitute a constant challenge. Even now, only twenty percent of the total area of Japan is really inhabited. Japan developed much later than China. There are no Paleolithic remains in Japan. At its origin Japan was inhabited by Ainus, which means “whites.” Ainus still exist, but they have been chased to the northern part of Japan by the invading Asians, coming from the continent or from the islands of the China and Philippine seas, that form the present population. It is just during the “Yayoi shiki” period, starting around 300 BC, that riziculture and the use of bronze and iron probably were introduced from China (bronze metallurgy arrived by the first millennium BC). Similarly, wheat and barley originating from Mesopotamia arrived in Japan through China. As late as the first century of this era, Japan’s subsistence economy was still in transition to agriculture from hunting and gathering, and from wooden to metal tools. The history of the Japanese Empire really starts with the founding in 120 BC of the Yamato Empire by Jimmu-Tenno. Militarily, this empire succeeded in expanding. It even dominated Korea from AD 363 to 662, despite that the Chinese influence in art, medicine, agriculture, religion and literature traditionally penetrated into Japan through Korea. Culturally, the Yamato Empire depended very much on China. During the fifth century, the Japanese adopted Chinese writing. Moreover, in 538 (or maybe earlier), “Greater Vehicle” Buddhism entered Japan from China and started challenging Shintoism, whose Grand Priest was the Emperor himself called“Mikado,” which means “the High Door.” From 593 to 628, the Empress Suiko and Prince Shotoku Taishi adopted Buddhism and started building Buddhist temples. Between 645 and 1192, the Yamato Empire established a bureaucracy and a state system directly inspired by China, but giving the Japanese aristocracy the prime position occupied by the mandarinate in China. During the Nara period (710–794), a reaction to the omnipresent Chinese influence emerged and led to a melting of Shintoism and Buddhism, and to the promotion of an original Japanese culture. Several times through history, Japan withdrew into itself. As mentioned earlier, this led to the almost complete shutting of the country to foreign trade from 1639 to 1854. Japan is separated from Korea by the Korea Strait with its two hundred kilometers of stormy seas, and the nearest point in China is 750 kilometers away. The isolation of Japan had certain positive aspects. For example, the two

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Mongol attempts to invade Japan in 1274 and 1281 were unsuccessful, and, when, during the fourteenth century, Eurasia was devastated by the bubonic plague (the Black Death), Japan was spared because travel into and out of Japan was very restricted, foreigners trading with Japan were more or less permanently quarantined in the port of Deshima, and there was no import of grain or other products likely to introduce pests. All that contributed to the fact that Japanese population growth was faster than that of Europe and China in the first millennium and a half of our era.28 The urbanization of Japan was late and rather slow at the beginning, even though large cities appeared early. The first true cities developed around 650–700. However, between 1580 and 1720, the urbanization of the Japanese society was exceptionally rapid. The successive imperial capitals of Japan were: Nara (first called Heijokyo), from 710 to 784; Nagaoka, from 784 to 794; Kyoto (first called Miyako), from 794 to 1868; Yoshino, from 1338 to 1573 (during that period, the Mikado has two capitals); and Tokyo (called Edo before 1868), from 1868 till today. Two capitals of the shoguns are worth mentioning: Kamakura, capital of the shogun from 1192 to 1333, and Edo, capital of the shogun from 1603 to 1867. The country’s first capital, Heijokyo, which became Nara, had a population of about 150,000 persons around 775, while, at the same period, in Western Europe, the largest city, Rome, only had about 50,000 inhabitants, and the second largest city, Paris, just 23,000. The second capital of Japan, Miyado, which became Kyoto, reached 100,000, and even 200,000 or 250,000 inhabitants as soon as the ninth century.29 Despite the presence of those large cities, Maddison estimates that, in 1500, less than 3 percent of Japanese lived in towns of 10,000 population or over.30 However, during the seventeenth century, Japan caught up, and, in 1800, that percentage passed to twelve percent. This is when a powerful Japanese urbexplosion emerged, and the city of Edo, become Tokyo, reached one million inhabitants and became as big as London around 1875.31

28. 29. 30. 31.

Ibid., 267. Paul Bairoch, op. cit., 45–46. Angus Maddison, op. cit., 256. Gilbert Rozman underlines the quite exceptional character of the economic expansion, the demographic growth, and the observed urbanization of Japan between 1580 and 1720: see Gilbert Rozman, “East Asian Urbanization in the Nineteenth Century: Comparisons with Europe,” in Urbanization in History: A Process of Dynamic Interactions, A.M. van der Woude, Akira Hayami, and Jan de Vries (ed.) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 63–66.

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Japan has a long tradition of dissociation of the official and effective powers. The Mikado who played a religious role in the context of Shintoism rapidly became a symbolic figure with the rise to power of military families. From 1195 to 1868, the real power was in the hands of great families, and, particularly, the shogun (“general-in-chief”), who was a military chief that recognized the suzerainty of the Mikado, but actually controlled Japan.

THE GREAT FAMILIES OF FEUDAL JAPAN Among the great families that have exerted power “behind the throne” in Japan, the main ones were: • the Fujiwara family that bore the titles of regent (Sesshou in Japanese) and chancelor (Kanpaku in Japanese) from 967 to 1068; • the Taira family that played an eminent role till 1185; • the Minamoto family that bore the title of shogun from 1192 to 1219; • the Hôjô family that bore the hereditary title of Sikken from 1219 to 1333; • the Ashikaga family that bore the title of shogun from 1333 to 1573; • the Toyotomi family that bore the title of chancelor from 1582 to 1603; • and the famous Tokugawa family that bore the title of shogun from 1603 to 1868.

In the provinces (“ken”), the governors, called Daimyos (“Great names”), received their orders from the shoguns. Progressively, the 1500 Daimyos became hereditary princes. Their vassals were the famous samurais. The Japanese feudal system lasted until 1871, at the beginning of the Meiji era, when the Emperor assumed all the powers abandoned by the last shogun at the time of its abdication in 1868. The Tokugawa family was the last one to exert the functions of shogun. Its founder, Ieyasu Tokugawa, was originally the Daimyos of Edo (Tokyo). In 1600, at the battle of Sekigahara, he defeated the Toyotomi Shogun. In the years that followed he eliminated all his rivals, and in 1603 he became shogun and imposed Edo as the shogun capital of Japan. As such, Edo, the future Tokyo, came to supplant Kyoto around 1650. In 1700, the population of Edo was between 500,000 and one million inhabitants, while that of Kyoto did not exceed 450,000. When Shogun Hitotsubashi Keiti of the Tokugawa family had to resign and Emperor Mutsuhito had to exert all powers in 1868, the question of the capital was addressed. The emperor decided to move the imperial capital to Edo, which he renamed Tokyo to show everybody that the new capital belonged to him.

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Under the Tokugawas, the country was submitted to a powerful central power, which did not tolerate foreign influences and trade. Moreover, a ban existed on wheeled vehicles on Japanese roads and there was a virtual absence of bridges. These restrictions were imposed for security reasons, but they made journeys very costly and time-consuming. There were also restrictions on the size of boats, which inhibited coastal shipping, foreign trade, and naval preparedness. All this constituted obstacles to trade and urbanization. Despite that, the Western influence came to be felt first through the arrival of the Jesuits and, later, through the Dutch who settled in Deshima. Translations in Chinese of Western books by Matteo Ricci and other Jesuits living in Peking-Beijing constituted the first canals of transmission of the Western knowledge. In 1720 Shogun Yoshimune lifted the ban on European books.32 A good example of the early influence of Western technology in Japan relates to guns. Firearms reached Japan in 1543, when two Portuguese adventurers armed with harquebuses (primitive guns) arrived on a Chinese cargo ship. The Japanese were so impressed by the new weapon that they commenced indigenous gun production, greatly improved gun tech nology, and by 1600 owned more and better guns than any other country in the world. The samurai opposed the spreading of guns. After 1600, the samuraicontrolled government began restricting gun production until Japan was almost without functional guns again.33 From a geographical point of view, what strikes the most in Japan’s development is the fact that the part of the country which constitutes its historical hearth (the region of Nara, Kobe, Kyoto, and Osaka), as well as its most modern part (the region of Tokyo) both turn their back on Korea, China, and Asia. They rather face the Pacific and even America. This results from geography, but also from Japan’s desire to escape from the destiny of its Asian neighbors. Around 1763, when the British Empire expanded rapidly and European colonialism became more aggressive, of all the Asian countries, Japan was the only one (with, to some extent, Thailand) to reveal itself capable to resist the assaults China, India, and Indochina were submitting to, and to which Indonesia and the Philippines already had yielded. The policy of complete isolation ensured the independence of Japan for a long period. However, there came a time when Japan had to realize that this could not last forever. That happened in 1853 and 1854, when the Americans sent Commodore Perry to instruct Japan to open their ports to foreign trade. The ultimatum was notified in 1853, and it was indicated that

32. 33.

Angus Maddison, op. cit., 257. Jared Diamond, op. cit., 257–258.

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the American fleet would come back one year later to impose that policy to Japan, if required. In 1854, under the pressure of the Americans whose fleet cruised in the Bay of Edo (Tokyo), the shogun from the Tokugawa family yielded and accepted to open two Japanese ports, Shimoda and Hakodate, to foreign trade. During the following years, the Japanese population, humiliated, reacted violently to the ever stronger presence of Westerners who came to bomb some ports of the country. In 1868, confronted to popular opposition and a revolt of the samurai, the last Tokugawa Shogun was forced to resign. The very function of shogun disappeared and the emperor had to take over all powers. Then began the Meiji period (1868–1912), which was to profoundly transform Japan. Made conscious of their backwardness compared to the West, the Japanese pledged to do everything to avoid being humiliated again. They launched a rapid Westernization, industrialized, developed their economy, reformed and equipped their army according to the Western model, built a modern fleet which, in 1905, revealed itself to be the greatest in the world, adopted a policy supporting a rising birth rate, and completely reversed the topodynamic movement coming from the west which had dominated the evolution of the country till then. They did this while launching a westward topodynamic movement which led Japan to successively conquer Korea, Manchuria, a large part of China, and, ultimately, Southeast Asia. This is how died the Great Ebb, which, from the decline of the Western Roman Empire till 1868, had lasted about 1,400 years. During that period, from the west to the east, succeeded one another at the head of the Great Corridor the urbexplosions of Rome, Constantinople, Baghdad, Delhi, Canton-Guangzhou, Zayton-Quanzhou, and, finally, Tokyo.

CHAPTER

6

Understanding Topodynamic Inertia

T

he long topodynamic evolution from Rome to Tokyo can be seen as an illustration of the phenomenon of topodynamic inertia. That concept we introduced in 1995 is altogether rich from a theoretical point of view, enlightening from an empirical point of view, and provocative in the eyes of those who see in it the evocation of an “invisible hand” guiding the evolution of the world economy.1 Hereby, it will be attempted to explain it by resorting to both historical examples and theoretical concepts. Hopefully, those explanations will demystify that concept by insisting on both the stability and reversibility it evokes, as well as its probabilistic rather than deterministic nature. In order to do so, an allusion will be made to the debate that concept has aroused. Processes of diffusion of development through space are as old as humankind. Since the beginning of archaeology, archaeologists and historians have drawn maps of the diffusion of various techniques such as pottery, bronze, iron, steel, agriculture, wheat cultivation, rice or milk production, fruit tree domestication, beer and wine production, paper making, printing, writing, wheel transportation, horse domestication, silk production, etc. Numerous examples of this have been given this far in this rediscovering of world history. Similarly, historians trace back the progression of VedaismBrahmanism-Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, or Islam. The diffusion of urbanization is also studied. All those processes are alluded to in this book. Only those who know nothing about development in Eurasia or America may be surprised by the fact that economic development illustrated by the spatial distribution of added values (production) also involves diffusion processes. The most eloquent example of this, which is relatively recent and quite documented, probably is that of the shift of the population and production centers of gravity in North America since 1790. 1.

Luc-Normand Tellier and Claude Vertefeuille, “Understanding Spatial Inertia: Centre of Gravity, Population Densities, the Weber Problem and Gravity Potential,” Journal of Regional Science 35, 1 (1995): 155–164.

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However, if explaining the diffusion of innovations by the concept of imitation or the diffusion of religions by the idea of proselytism appears rather easy, explaining that the economic power stemming from high levels of production can move from certain zones to others is more complex. On the other hand, while the regions of origin of the techniques or religions lose nothing, on the contrary, with the diffusion of the techniques and religions they generated, in the field of economic development, the regions of origin usually end up being supplanted by the regions they developed: Constantinople ended up supplanting Rome; Baghdad supplanting Damascus; Nankin-Nanjing and Hangzhou supplanting Changan-Xi’an ; and, later, London supplanting Venice, and New York supplanting London. Moreover, the diffusion of economic development is marked by the polarization trends that preclude the economic development from diffusing homogeneously in all directions. In fact, economic development somewhat jumps from one pole to another. It reproduces like banana trees, through roots that give birth to new trees, or like iris plants, through stems capable of producing the shoot and root systems of a new plant. The diffusion of economic development through roots can be assimilated to a diffusion based on the simple extraction of resources: the colonization of Congo in the nineteenth century would be a good example of this. The diffusion of economic development through stems could be seen as a diffusion oriented towards the development of markets: in that case, one could think to the colonization of India by the British. Drawing examples of diffusion of development from the history of colonialism is uneasy and somewhat ill-advised. Such examples are given as a caricature. In fact, one of the most unsettling and specific aspects of the diffusion of economic development relates to the fact that, contrary to colonialism, it acts beyond political strategies. That diffusion compels decision-makers and even succeeds to thwart their original plans, as in the cases of the freeing of the United States with respect to Great Britain and, even better, the continuation of the southwestward movement of the population and production centers of gravity of the United States following the Secession War and the victory of the Yankee Northeast in 1865. The movements observed in the spatial evolution of economic development reveal the existence of a true topodynamic inertia, which can be fed by the processes of innovation diffusion without being limited to those processes, which are profoundly different. That inertia has been observed since the very beginning of urbanization. The specialists of economic history often allude to it, but, most of the time, they do not bother to understand and explain it. They describe the shift of economic activities and population towards the southwest in North America, the movement of the economic center of the European economy from Constantinople to the north of Italy and then towards the north of Europe, the spreading of industrialization from Japan to Korea

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and then Manchuria, etc. Nevertheless, the phenomenon of topodynamic inertia remains mysterious. Let us attempt to penetrate that mystery in its geographical as well as space-economic dimensions.

s TOPODYNAMIC INERTIA AND AGRICULTURE The first reflex in front of the phenomenon of the shift of the center of economic activity through history consists in trying to find a physical explanation linked to modifications of the environment. The first hypothesis that comes to mind relates to the ecological impact of agriculture. The transition from gathering to agriculture involved eliminating on a given territory a very large number of vegetal species growing naturally to the benefit of an extremely limited number of cultivated species. That led to deforestation, the destruction of a large part of existing ecosystems, and also, very often, the exhaustion of soils due to insufficient fertilization. Developing agriculture without exhausting the soil is extremely difficult, even with modern farming techniques, and that has been, for millennia, almost impossible in many regions of the world. To deforestation often succeeded weeding (due to over-grazing), erosion, and soil deterioration. Desertification and ecological catastrophes resulted from that. It must be remembered that, among the main cradles of the world agriculture, many examples exist of territories that were fertile in the past, which are arid today. The first cradle of agriculture, Mesopotamia, is today a quasi-desert zone. The Sahel, which is one of the regions where agriculture developed the earliest without any exterior influence, is today, to a large extent, a desert. The Sahara, which is the very symbol of a desert, was, a long time ago, between about 9000 and 4000 BC, a cultivated area. Similarly, the center of Mexico that was, during the pre-Columbian period, an important agricultural zone is, today, rather little favorable to agriculture. Finally, Haiti, which has been during the eighteenth century the richest plantation area of the Americas, is today almost a bare land. Obviously, a zone that experiences a desertification process can hardly stay for a long time a dominating space from an economic point of view. Sooner or later, more recent zones that are not yet over-exploited supplant it. Those zones are often the “children” of the older zone that is declining. This constitutes a case of succession through time and space of dominating economic poles that can be easily explained. Another similar example, which is less dramatic, consists in the case of the diffusion of agriculture in new zones that are especially favorable. Agriculture did not develop at the origin in the regions of the world that are considered today as the most productive, on the contrary. Thus, California,

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the pampas of Argentina, the Canadian Prairies, the Cape region in South Africa, the southwestern and southeastern regions of Australia have been cultivated rather lately, and they are now much more productive than the regions that gave birth to agriculture. The fact that economic power progressively quit the old agricultural zones to the benefit of such new ones is no surprise.

s TOPODYNAMIC INERTIA AND INDUSTRIALIZATION There are phenomena of industrial succession that resemble those that have been just described concerning agriculture. Many modern examples can be given of that. For instance, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to the old industrial zones of Liverpool, Manchester, and Glasgow succeeded the new industrial zones of the regions of London, Paris, the Ruhr Valley, Toulouse, and Barcelona. During the twentieth century, in Belgium, to the old industrial zones of the Walloon country succeeded those of the Flemish region. At about the same period, to the zones of the old industrial heart of the United States (Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, etc.) succeeded the new zones of Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Denver, Dallas, Houston, and Atlanta. Even in the Far East, to the old industrial zones of Japan succeed those of South Korea, Taiwan, South Manchuria (Shenyang, Anshan), Peking-Beijing (with Baotou and Tianjin), Canton-Guangzhou, Shanghai (with the new development zone of Pudong), Wuhan, Nanking-Nanjing, Chongqing, Hong Kong, and the new Chinese “special enterprise zones” (SEZ) like the port of Amoy-Xiamen facing Taiwan, the island of Hainan close to Shanghai, Shenzhen near Hong Kong, Zhuhai near Macau, and Shantou northeast of Hong Kong. Those movements can be explained in various manners. The first explanation relates to the successive stages of industrialization, which bore different location requirements. At the beginning of industrialization, the availability of accessible coal or the existence of falls constituted determining location factors. Thereafter, those factors have been replaced by others more linked to market accessibility or manpower quality. The changes in the location constraints thus generated activity displacements. However, a second explanation can be formulated, which is related to a possible industrial over-exploitation (similar to the agricultural overexploitation). Historically, industries have caused damage to the environment, and produced contaminated soils, toxic air, polluted water, insalubrious worker’s housing zones, social conflicts, less dynamic communities, and urban fabrics that are altogether inadequate, too dense, little attractive, dirty, lacking green spaces, and crime-generating. Such environments have little appeal for

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new industrial investments, which leads to a progressive de-industrialization of the old zones to the benefit of new industrial areas that are cleaner, more technologically efficient, and more pleasant.

s TOPODYNAMIC INERTIA AND EVOLUTION OF SOCIO-ECONOMIC INEQUALITIES In the field of political sciences, some authors have elaborated a thesis which can help to understand the social and political aspect of topodynamic inertia.2 According to that thesis, the demographic growth linked to the settling process and the development of agriculture generated scarcity conditions, among others, in the matter of agricultural land availability. At the beginning, it is possible to find to the problems caused by that scarcity a consensus and egalitarian solution based on a collective management of the available resources and on a policy of exponential subdivision of the scarce resources. However, with the growth continuing, the exponential growth gets less and less feasible, and the egalitarian consensus becomes more and more difficult to preserve. An exogenous or endogenous perturbation is then sufficient to shatter the egalitarian situation, and lead to the instauration of non-egalitarian solutions favoring a minority to the detriment of other groups. The socioeconomic tensions stemming from the scarcity of resources are then translated into sociopolitical tensions. Those tensions can lead to a civil war and the break-up of the society under tension. One way to avoid this is to transform the internal tensions into expansion forces, which can result in the conquest of new territories, colonization movements, or population migrations out of the society of origin. Those expansion movements favor an increase of the inequalities in that society, those inequalities being described by the famous Pareto function describing the income distribution among the members of a given society. The Pareto function is a fractal function of extreme inequality. When many societies live side by side under conditions of extreme inequality, wars are inevitable and the domination of some societies over the others results. All the involved societies then become vulnerable, even those that succeeded to establish their domination over the others. In fact, the more societies dominate, the more they experience extreme inequality trends. Those trends end up undermining, weakening, and, ultimately, leading to collapse the dominating societies. Let us note that the three preceding explanations respectively related to agriculture, industry, and inequalities help to understand how a succession process can exist. However, they hardly explain the existence of topodynamic 2.

See, among others, Manus I. Midlarsky, Evolution of Inequality: War, State Survival and Democracy in Comparative Perspective (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1999).

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movements marked by very clear geographical orientations when in fact the concept of topodynamic inertia refers above all to the systematic and deep character of such trends through space.

s TOPODYNAMIC INERTIA AND CUMULATIVE PROCESS OF LOCATION CHOICES A first step in the theoretical understanding of topodynamic inertia consists in explaining how certain locations come to attract an increasing number of activities. At the origin, the concepts of inertia and polarization overlap to some extent. The fact that a location appears to be optimal for an increasing number of activities can be seen as both a polarization and an inertia phenomenon, the choices of the past orienting and determining to some extent the choices of the future. The cumulative process of successive locations has a character which is clearly probabilistic and not deterministic. The more a location attracts new activities, the more it is likely to attract some more; however, nothing compels any new activity to settle there. It is not because, at the beginning of a series of successive choices of new locations, a given location appears favored and attracts a high proportion of the new activities, that this same location will automatically continue to dominate all along the process. A rival location may well have been neglected at the beginning of the process and, later, supplant its competitor. The topodynamic inertia plays a role at various levels: it intervenes at the primary level of the appearance of polarization; it plays also a role at the level of the polarization of the poles, when topodynamic trends can be spotted within urbexplosions; and finally, it acts in the succession of the urbexplosions themselves. A long time ago, Gunnar Myrdal stressed the importance of cumulative causation in economic development processes.3 Topodynamic inertia is a major example of cumulative causation.

s THE INTERACTION BETWEEN POTENTIALITY AND REALITY, A POSSIBLE EXPLANATION OF TOPODYNAMIC INERTIA Tellier and Vertefeuille have proposed a theoretical explanation of the phenomenon of topodynamic inertia, which is based on the interaction between reality and potentiality, that is, between the reality of the accumulation of the optimal locations at certain points and the spatial distribution of the virtual optimal locations of the future.4 Modifying the scheme of

3. 4.

Gunnar Karl Myrdal, Economic Theory and Underdeveloped Regions (London: Duckworth, 1957). Luc-Normand Tellier and Claude Vertefeuille, op. cit.

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the effective locations modifies the virtual scheme of the likely future optimal locations, that virtual scheme being at the origin of the scheme of the future effective locations. Tellier and Vertefeuille have illustrated that theoretical explanation by means of three mathematical concepts: the concepts of center of gravity, of the comprehensive Weberian optimum, and of point of maximum gravity potential.5 The concept of center of gravity is purely descriptive. It is used to synthesize in a single point the whole observed spatial distribution of given activities. For instance, the center of gravity of the jobs existing on NAFTA’s territory (Canada, United States, Mexico) corresponds to the point of the North-American continent where would stay in equilibrium a weightless map of North America on which, in each center of employment, a needle would be stuck whose weight would be proportional to the number of jobs found the corresponding center of employment. The center of gravity of an observed distribution describes reality, not potentiality. By contrast, the concepts of comprehensive Weberian optimum and of point of maximum gravity potential correspond to potentiality, that is, to optima that may orient future location decisions. The comprehensive Weberian optimum corresponds to the optimum of a Weber problem where, for example, each built-up area would exert an attractive force proportional to the number of jobs it includes (a Weber problem is defined with respect to a space where it is possible to go as a crow flies from any point to any other point at the same transportation cost in all directions; it consists in finding the optimal location of a firm that is attracted by various attraction points to which it has an interest to be as close as possible while taking into account the different attractive forces exerted by each attraction point). In the context of the above North American example, the point of maximum gravity potential is the one where a future enterprise would maximize the probability that all the existing enterprises of NAFTA would buy from it in the case where the probability for an enterprise to buy from the new enterprise would be proportional to its own number of jobs, and inversely proportional to a function of the distance between that enterprise and the new enterprise (that function of the distance corresponding to a mathematically estimated gravity model). In more intuitive terms, the point of maximum gravity potential is the point where the potential clientele of the future enterprise is maximal, if that enterprise is likely to deal with all the existing enterprises in proportion to their number of jobs and according to the deterrence effect of distance (the farther a possible client is, the less likely the new enterprise is to deal with him).

5.

Ibid.

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Those three concepts are generally independent from one another from a mathematical point of view.6 That being said, cases can be found where mathematical links exist between them.7

s A DETERMINISTIC CASE OF TOPODYNAMIC INERTIA It is possible to demonstrate that, in what will be called here the “New York case,” a real shift of the center of gravity in a given direction inevitably induces a shift in the same direction of the comprehensive Weberian optimum and of the point of maximum gravity potential, which are both virtual. The New York case involves a convex Euclidean isotropic space clearly delimited (which will be called here “the continent”), and a process of penetration of the continent from a single point (New York) situated at the limit of the space (on the coast). It is then assumed that the movement of penetration of the continent by the population and economic activities from a single point is strictly radial in the sense that each attraction point moves in a systematic way as a crow flies from New York to the interior of the continent following one of the possible directions, without ever moving backwards (the penetration process occurs in all possible directions from New York). In the New York case, the center of gravity moves towards the interior of the continent in a direction that depends on the form of the continent, and the two virtual optima (the comprehensive Weberian optimum and the point of maximum gravity potential) follow the movement of the center of gravity without, however, coinciding with the latter or coinciding with each other. It is important to stress that the mathematical link between the three points is deterministic, not probabilistic, although the three mathematical concepts remain independent from each other. Despite the numerous assumptions that are associated with the New York case, this very precise theoretical case presents some interest from an empirical point of view. Historically, many cases of economic penetration of continents resemble very much the New York case. The penetration of the North American continent north of the Rio Grande followed a relatively radial pattern originating from a very limited number of points located on the coast, not too far from one another (Quebec City, New York, Boston, and Philadelphia). In the southern part of South America, the penetration originated mainly from Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires. In Africa, Dakar, Lagos, Cape Town, and Cairo have played similar roles during the nineteenth century, each in its part of the continent. 6. 7.

Luc-Normand Tellier and Martin Pinsonnault, “Further Understanding Spatial Inertia: A Reply,” Journal of Regional Science 38, 3 (1998): 513–534. Luc-Normand Tellier and Claude Vertefeuille, op. cit.

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The New York case illustrates how a link can develop between the center of gravity and a virtual situation described by the comprehensive Weberian optimum and the point of maximum gravity potential. That link can generate a phenomenon of topodynamic inertia since an initial shift of real locations causes a movement of the center of gravity, which is systematically associated with an induced shift of virtual optima, and this induced shift favors in turn the making of location decisions that tend to prolong the initial movement of the real locations. It must be noted that, in the process, the centrality of New York is progressively challenged as the center of gravity moves towards the interior of the continent and away from New York. The evolution of the system is then such that New York is likely to progressively be marginalized to the benefit of competing poles located either in the interior (like Chicago) or even at the other extremity of the continent (like Los Angeles, for example). As can be seen, despite its restrictive nature, the New York case is particularly rich in terms of understanding and intuition. The more general case where the attraction points do not move in a radial way from a single point located at the limit of the continent also bears some regularities provided that, instead of reasoning in deterministic terms, the question is tackled in probabilistic terms. Generally, if the center of gravity moves in one direction, the comprehensive Weberian optimum and the point of maximum gravity potential are likely to move in the same direction with a maximum likelihood. Thus phenomena of topodynamic inertia are likely to develop regularly at various levels, from the micro level of urban fabrics to the macro level of continents. The circular interdependence between reality and potentiality is omnipresent in the universe of locations, and it is appropriate to conceive topodynamic inertia as a phenomenon that is inherent to all location processes, rather than something awkward resulting from particular situations.

s THE ROLE OF TOPODYNAMIC INERTIA IN METROPOLITAN AND CITY DEVELOPMENT Topodynamic inertia is active at the level of cities taken individually in the centripetal processes of assertion of the downtown domination as well as the centrifugal processes of urban sprawl. The variations of land values with respect to the distance from the city center are very good indices of the topodynamic movements towards the center or the suburbs. Urban growth phenomena, suburbanization, urban sprawl, the forming of “doughnut holes,” the appearance of edge cities, and the marginalization of peripheral small towns made satellites of the large centers constitute illustrations of the existence of space-economic currents, which favor certain urban zones to the detriment of others.

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The main characteristic of those currents relates to the inertia, to the fact that once launched they tend to prolong themselves through time and space, for a period and over a distance whose lengths vary. Of course, at the beginning, specific space-economic conditions cause their appearance, but soon the interaction between reality and potentiality that characterizes topodynamic inertia intervenes and the new investments are oriented towards the zones where rising land values have been observed, and this generates the self-producing process of topodynamic inertia. Of course, such movements are not unlimited. Their end is even, most of the time, embedded in the processes that generate them, which is often the rule in the cases of topodynamic inertia. Thus, the downtown domination comes up in the end against the doughnut-holes phenomenon or, at least, the stabilization of downtown’s densities. Urban sprawl ultimately favors the forming of edge cities. The doughnut-holes phenomena can in their turn be followed by a downtown renaissance, as edge cities can integrate more closely to the central area after having freed themselves from it for a while. Those there-and-back movements are basically the result of topodynamic inertia, in the same way that pendulum movements stem from physical inertia.

s TOPODYNAMIC INERTIA IN URBEXPLOSION DEVELOPMENT Urbexplosions constitute urban systems evolving through time and space. They are fed by a centripetal movement, which favors the emergence of their center, and by a centrifugal movement, which tends to spread the domination of this center over an ever vaster territory. In their declining period, urbexplosions are retreating: the territory over which their domination extends shrinks to the benefit of competing urbexplosions, and their center weakens. Thus both the centripetal and centrifugal movements are slowed down. In the end, the urbexplosion can even die. Its urban system loses then all autonomy and it is integrated into a rival urbexplosion’s own urban system. Topodynamic inertia is active at all levels of the urbexplosive process. It marks the centripetal movement, the centrifugal one, the expansion, the contraction, and even the possible integration into the new urbexplosion. The same interaction between reality and potentiality that is seen at the level of metropolitan and city development is also seen at the scale of the urban systems. However, the case of urbexplosions is particularly interesting inasmuch topodynamic inertia is at the origin of the urbexplosions’ succession process. In fact, the centrifugal movement is what explains that, in the periphery of an urbexplosion, a new pole can develop that emerges and, thanks to the distance, separates from the mother urbexplosion, freeing itself in the end from the center it even comes to compete. That new pole

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then starts to exert a domination over the urban system that surrounds it thanks to the centripetal movement which appears around the new pole. An urbexplosive embryo then develops around the pole, and a child urbexplosion is born that generates a centrifugal movement which clashes with the centrifugal movement of the mother urbexplosion and eventually undermines it. Such an evolution does not correspond anymore to a pendulum movement. It rather relates to a process of spatiotemporal succession of urbexplosions, such a process being mainly characterized by topodynamic inertia. It must be noted that the succession process is not irreversible. An urbexplosion that has declined may come back and dominate once again. This has happened through history, although the center of the reviving urbexplosion is often different from the one the formerly declining urbexplosion had. Thus, the Babylonian urbexplosion went through a renaissance under the form of the Baghdad urbexplosion, and the Roman one, under the form of Venice and Genoa’s urbexplosion. By contrast, Constantinople’s urbexplosion experienced a second life under the form of Istanbul’s, which had the same center.

s TOPODYNAMIC INERTIA AT THE WORLD LEVEL Topodynamic inertia plays a role even at the world level. The populations, the productions, and the wealth accumulation evolve through space in a coherent manner following clearly identifiable spatiotemporal movements that are marked by inertia phenomena. Historians identify them without, however, trying to understand them most of the time. The movement that went, during Antiquity, from Mesopotamia to Phoenicia, Greece, and Rome is well known. The movement going from the Loess Plateau in northern China towards the Yangtze River Valley is less known in the Western world, although it is eminently important. The movement that happened during and after the Renaissance from northern Italy towards the Low Countries and England has been studied in detail by Braudel. The transfer of power from Europe to North America during the twentieth century also occurred progressively, following a process clearly marked by topodynamic inertia. Finally, still more recently, the development wave that developed in the Far East from Japan followed an undisputable spatial logic. There are many other similar examples. It is easier to demonstrate the importance of the concept of topodynamic inertia by referring to the world economic evolution than by presenting mathematical arguments. The best indicators of space-economic movements are certainly the investment flows. Unfortunately, they are not always easy to estimate. The shifts of production are easier to size up, but often various difficulties exist in the standardization

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of relevant production data stemming from heterogeneous sources. As for the population movements, they are generally better documented. However, since humankind has moved away from mere subsistence conditions, population densities constitute less and less worthwhile indicators of development. In spite of the various statistical obstacles, the identification of the great world topodynamic movements remains relatively easy, and the most stunning thing about them is their remarkable spatiotemporal stability, that is, their inertia, which is observed altogether in the processes of diffusion, succession, penetration, and polarization, as well as marginalization.

s REVERSIBILITY OF TOPODYNAMIC MOVEMENTS In the same way that the inertia which characterizes the evolution of urbexplosions contains the seeds of the succession of the urbexplosions at the world level, the topodynamic inertia which characterizes certain movements can give rise to bifurcations and even pendulum returns. The world topodynamic movements are reversible, although an inversion of such movements remains exceptional. Inertia is no fatality; rather, it is the mark of a trend. The inversions of topodynamic movements are generally caused by very real constraints. Thus, the westward movement from Mesopotamia collided with a huge obstacle: the Atlantic Ocean, which, before the discovery of America, led nowhere and constituted a kind of dead end. Conversely, the resumption of the same westward movement after the discovery of America is explained by the fact that the Atlantic obstacle had been removed. Later, in Europe, the eastward movement inside of the Mongolo-American Corridor that favored, from the eighteenth century, the development of Prussia and Russia, was inverted during the twentieth century because of the creation of the Iron Curtain, which interrupted the historical relations with Western Europe that sustained that movement.

CHAPTER

7

The Great Ebb: Europe’s Fight for Survival

T

he Great Ebb was caused by the collapse of Western Europe, but that part of the world got up again. Strangely enough, a factor which powerfully contributed to re-launch Western Europe was the progressive decline of the Eastern Roman Empire, assailed by Islam and others. The Eastern Roman Empire became the Byzantine Empire in 610 when Emperor Heraclius I ascended the throne, adopted the title of “Basileus,” and made Greek the official language of the empire. The long decline of the empire lasted a millennium, from 476 to 1453, date of the conquest of Constantinople by the Ottomans. The weakening of the Byzantine Empire and the loss of the Holy Land led the Occident to launch the Crusades and to directly confront the Moslem threat. From that clash resulted a new Western dynamism that led to the discovery of America. That fight of Christian Europe for survival is also a part of the Great Ebb. It is, to some extent, its reverse side.

s THE BYZANTINE EMPIRE The main battleground where the survival of Christianity was played was the Byzantine Empire where, right in the Great Corridor, was concentrated the largest part of the wealth of Christianity. It must not be forgotten that the first beneficiary of the inversion of the westward movement that had benefited Rome so much was Constantinople, whose very birth marked the beginning of the eastward movement. Between 330, when Constantinople became one of the two capitals of the Roman Empire, and 636, when Islam appeared to be a true rival, the Eastern Empire presented itself as the only heir of the old Roman Empire, and as the refuge of the greatness of that empire. In 476, the population of Constantinople was around 450,000 inhabitants. After having experienced a long decline following the fall of Rome and the Western Roman Empire, the city of Constantinople resumed its growth from about 750, when its population was just 250,000 inhabitants. Around 1050, the city reached

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its peak with half a million inhabitants (which is only half the population of Rome at its peak), and then a new period of decline succeeded. The city had just 200,000 inhabitants in 1204 when the Frankish Crusaders sacked it, and only 40,000 to 50,000 when the Ottomans captured it in 1453. However, Constantinople was just a part of the empire. Around 550, the Byzantine Empire was much more urbanized than the Western Europe dominated by the Germans. Its rate of urbanization was probably around ten to thirteen percent while the corresponding rate in Western Europe was about five to eight percent. However, urbanization receded within the Eastern Roman Empire and later the Byzantine Empire, as the Slavs, the Arabs, the Latin Crusaders, and the Turks progressively disrupted the empire through simple penetration (with the Slavs from about 530) or military conquests (with the Arabs from 636, the Latin Crusaders from 1204, and the Ottoman Turks from 1362). In fact, the swelling of Constantinople’s population from about 750 came probably as much, and maybe more, from the fact that a lot of people chased from their region by Byzantium’s enemies took refuge in Constantinople than from the fact that the city was developing. At the climax of the Eastern Empire, Constantinople was heading a powerful urbexplosion, which, after that of Rome and before that of Baghdad, dominated the western part of the Great Corridor from 360 to 850 approximately. The city ruled its urban system, of which it was the imperial and administrative capital, the main commercial port, the religious center, and the industrial metropolis. It concentrated a complex, highly bureaucratized, and thus heavily manned administration that meticulously governed the whole empire. For about three centuries (roughly 360–650) it was the largest city in the world (losing that title to the benefit of Changan-Xi’an), and still figured among the two or three largest for a further six centuries (until about 1250).1 Under that beacon city, other cities played an important role as long as they were not conquered by the Arabs or the Ottomans: Thessaloniki, Antioch, Ephesus, Adrianople, Edessa, and Jerusalem (see Map 9). These cities had populations ranging from 20,000 to 50,000. The Eastern Roman Empire reached its climax when Emperor Justinian (who reigned from 527 to 565) succeeded in somewhat reconstituting the Old Roman Empire by chasing the Vandals out of Africa, and by retaking Italy from the Ostrogoths and a part of Spain from the Visigoths. He did this while stopping the Sasanian Persians who were threatening his empire to the east. It is Justinian who built the most famous church of St. Sophia from 532 to 537. The first challenge he had to face was the penetration in Illyria (wich was his own region of origin) of Slavic populations attracted by the prosperity of the Great Corridor and the Byzantine urbexplosion. With 1.

Paul Bairoch, Cities and Economic Development, From the Dawn of History to the Present (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988), 366–367.

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respect to the newcomers, the empire adopted a policy of integration. Thus the Slavs who settled on the Dalmatian coast and closer to Italy converted to Christianity and adopted the Latin liturgy from 550. They are today’s Croats. Their Serbian brothers, who had settled more to the east, closer to Constantinople, converted later, around 850, and adopted the Greek liturgy. As long as the Byzantine Empire remained strong, the Slavs the empire had welcome and, to a large extent, assimilated did not constitute a threat. Only when the empire weakened did the Croatian and Serbian states form, in 925 for Croatia and about 1180 for Serbia. Those states were sometimes at war with Byzantium, sometimes at peace, sometimes submitted, sometimes in rebellion. Their relations with the Byzantine Empire depended a lot on the arrival of new actors also attracted by the wealth of the Great Corridor: the Bulgars, who were Turks and therefore Altaics like the Huns, and the Mongols, while the Slavs were Indo-Europeans. From 679, the Bulgars militarily invaded the Byzantine Empire and came to progressively occupy Thrace and the part of Europe situated to the north of traditional Greece, that is, a territory covering a part of present-day Bulgaria, Macedonia-Skopje, Albania, and the major part of present-day Serbia. This represented a serious problem for the Byzantine Empire for two reasons: first, because, contrary to the Slavs, the Bulgars arrived as bellicose conquerors, and second, because they were Islamized. As soon as 681, the defeated Byzantines had to yield some territory and recognize the Bulgarian state. Repeatedly, the Bulgars threatened Constantinople, which, at the same time, had to fight against the Arabs to the south. In 865, the Bulgarian leaders converted to Greek Christianity in order to get closer to the Slavic Christianized populations they dominated, but that did not calm their ardor. From 893 to 1018, the powerful Bulgarian Empire waged war on Byzantium with some peaceful periods. The Bulgarian tsar Peter even got married to a daughter of the emperor of Constantinople as a sign of alliance. In 1014, the Byzantine Emperor Basil II “Bulgaroctonus” defeated the Bulgars and blinded 15,000 prisoners before sending them back to the Bulgarian tsar Samuel. A few days later, Samuel died. In 1018, all of Bulgaria was submitted to Byzantium. It would be an error to perceive the Bulgarian Empire as a barbarian state without sophistication. Its proximity to the hearth of Constantinople’s urbexplosion made it a developed territory. The first Bulgarian Empire had Pliska and then Preslav as capital. The capital of the second Bulgarian Empire was Tarnovo. Around 950, Preslav was the capital and had about 60,000 inhabitants. It was then the largest non-Muslim city of Europe after Constantinople. Bulgaria must have been, along with Italy, the most urbanized region of Christian Europe outside of the Byzantine Empire. At some point, it even included Adrianople. That important city re-founded by the Roman Emperor Hadrian, devolved to the Eastern Roman Empire in 395, conquered by the Latin Empire of Constantinople in 1204, and re-conquered

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by the Byzantines in 1205, was attributed to the Bulgars by Byzantium in 1218 when the second Bulgarian Empire was created under Tsar John III Asen II. Adrianople was re-captured by the Byzantines around 1345 before being conquered by the Ottomans in 1355. While the Byzantine Empire had to tackle the problems created by the Slavs and Bulgars to the north, the southern flank of the empire faced still more serious assaults. The Slavs had penetrated the empire less than a century before and the Bulgar Turks had not yet arrived when the Byzantines had to confront the Arabs for the first time. That happened in 636, only four years after the death of Muhammad, at the battle of the Yarmuk River, to the east of the Sea of Galilee. The Byzantines were defeated and had to give up to the Moslem Arabs Palestine (with Jerusalem), Syria (with Damascus) and Antioch), and Egypt (with Alexandria). In 669, 674, and 717, the Arabs attempted to directly capture Constantinople, but they failed. Between the Byzantines and the Arabs, a long modus vivendi was then established that allowed the former to preserve a part of their empire and the latter to benefit from their ascendancy inside of a large part of the Great Corridor to enrich themselves, which made them less bellicose. The arrival of the Seljuq Turks, attracted like their Bulgar cousins by the Great Corridor, threw that modus vivendi back into question from 1040. In their ferocious race towards the central axis of the Great Corridor, the Seljuqs faced and defeated successively their brothers the Ghaznavid Turks of Iran, the Iranian dynasty of the Buyids-Buwayhids of Indo-European origin, the Semitic Arabs, and then the Byzantine Emperor Romanus IV Diogenes in 1071. They carried on with their conquests into Anatolia, where Islam had not yet penetrated. Around 1094, the Seljuqs came to control Transoxiana, Iran, Iraq, Syria, and almost all of Anatolia up to the Strait of Bosporus, in front of Constantinople. This is when, after six hundred years of marginality, the Western world came out from its torpor and decided to react. That happened on November 27, 1095 at Clermont in France, where a council of the Catholic Church, recently separated from the Orthodox Church (in 1054), was taking place. The one who, that day, sounded the reveille of western Christianity was the French Pope Urban II, born at Châtillon-sur-Marne under the name of Eudes de Lagery. That pope launched the very first of the eight Crusades that were to occur from 1096 to 1270 with the objective to liberate the Holy Land “from the yoke of the infidels.”2

2.

Steven Runciman, A History of the Crusades (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1951).

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The Crusades can be seen as attempts to reverse the eastward movement to the benefit of Christian Europe. From a topodynamic point of view, there are essentially six types of migrations-invasions. The first type involves the conquest by a rich center situated in a topodynamic corridor of territories belonging to a poor or less-developed periphery located outside the corridor. The conquest of America by the Europeans (before the emergence of the American Corridor) and the creation of European colonies in Africa are examples of that. The second type of migrations-invasions involves movements towards the center of a topodynamic corridor from less-developed peripheral territories situated outside the corridor. The examples of this are innumerable: let us think about the Aryan invasions of India, the barbarian invasions of the Roman Empire, the Semitic and Arab invasions of the Babylonian urbexplosion, the Slavic migrations towards the Byzantine Empire, the Turkish and Bulgar invasions of the same empire, the Tibetan, Manchu, and Mongol invasions of the Chinese Empire, or the Viking invasions of Neustria-Normandy. The third type involves, within a given topodynamic corridor, migrations-invasions from an emerging urbexplosion towards a declining urbexplosion, as in the cases of the Arab conquest of Spain or the conquest of Mesopotamia by the Romans. The fourth type concerns, within a given topodynamic corridor, migrations-invasions from a developed urbexplosion towards an emerging urbexplosion, as in the case of the conquest of England by the Normans become Frenchmen. The fifth type corresponds, within a given topodynamic corridor, to migrations-invasions from a declining urbexplosion towards an emerging urbexplosion in order to stop or even reverse a topodynamic movement that favors an emerging urbexplosion at the expense of a declining urbexplosion. To that category belong the Crusades, as well as the Spanish Reconquista or the conquest of the Arab Sicily by the Normans between 1061 and 1091. Finally, the sixth type refers to the migrations-invasions whose origin and destination are not located in a topodynamic corridor. Those are often (but not exclusively) guided by survival strategies in the context of subsistence economies rather than the search for conquest or enrichment. Thus, in Sub-Saharan Africa, the Fulani stockbreeders moved from the east to the west at about the same time the Bantu farmers moved from the west to the east. Out of the eight Crusades, only one, the first, succeeded, and it led to the founding of the first four Latin states of the Levant: the County of Edessa, created in 1098, the Principality of Antioch, also founded in 1098, the Kingdom of Jerusalem, founded by Godfrey of Bouillon and his brother Baldwin of Boulogne in 1099, and the County of Tripoli, that lasted from 1109 to 1289. Those Latin states were in fact Frankish states dominated by the French aristocracy of the time, namely the Houses of Boulogne, Rethel,

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Toulouse, Lusignan, Saint-Omer, Hauteville, Poitiers, Courtenay, Anjou, Champagne, Brienne, Châtillon, etc. The most important and symbolic conquest was that of Jerusalem, which had been captured from the Byzantines by the Moslems in 638 and was recaptured by the Crusaders, under the command of Raymond of Saint-Gilles and Toulouse, Tancred of Hauteville, and Godfrey of Bouillon, on July 15, 1099. Jerusalem remained a Christian city from 1099 to 1187, when it was overridden by the illustrious Saladin, who was a Kurd and, consequently, of Indo-European origin, then from 1229 to 1239, and, finally, from 1243 to 1244. The County of Edessa fell in 1144, the Principality of Antioch in 1268 (captured by the Mamluks of Egypt), the County of Tripoli in 1289, and the Kingdom of Jerusalem in 1291. Two other Christian states were created in the region and had a longer existence: the Latino-Byzantine Kingdom of Cyprus, which existed from 1192 to 1489, and the Latino-Armenian Kingdom of Small Armenia, which lasted from 1198 to 1375. To those states resulting from victories over the Moslems must be added four Latin states constituted at the expense of the Byzantine Empire : the Latin Empire of Constantinople, the Kingdom of Thessaloniki, the Duchy of Athens, and the Principality of Morea, the three latter being vassal states of the Latin Empire of Constantinople. The last four states resulted from the Fourth Crusade, which lasted from 1202 to 1204 and played a major role in the revival of Western Europe and the westward movement. Led by Boniface of Montferrat, that Crusade, which was officially intended to hit the Moslem power in Egypt, was rerouted towards Constantinople by the Venetians who financed the expedition. The Crusaders even dared to attack the Byzantine capital, capture it, and sack it from April 12 to 15, 1204. That conquest disrupted the Byzantine Empire. Its center became the Latin Empire of Constantinople, which lasted from 1204 to 1261, first under the House of Flanders, then under the Capetian House of Courtenay. The king of Thessaloniki, the duke of Athens, and the prince of Morea were the vassals of the Latin emperor. Three Byzantine states surrounded that center: to the east, the Empire of Trebizond, attributed to the Comnenus family, and the Empire of Nicaea, ruled by the Lascaris family (and, from 1222, the Ducas family); and, to the west, the Despotate of Epirus, granted to the Ducas family. Behind all those aristocratic families, three merchant states pulled the strings: Venice, Genoa, and Pisa. If the French lords assumed the titles, the merchants from Northern Italy saw to it that the disruption of the Byzantine Empire benefited them the most. The city of Amalfi, close to Naples, had opened the way. As soon as about 920, it had been the first Western state to

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establish regular commercial contacts with the Byzantine Empire.3 That was so beneficial that, between 920 and 1000, with its about 75,000 inhabitants, Amalfi was the largest Italian city. Unfortunately, its conquest by the Normans of Sicily in 1091, on the eve of the Crusades, put an end to its privileged relations with Byzantium, and the city declined rapidly. Venice was the one that followed the example of Amalfi with the most ambition and success. Thanks to the Crusades, Venice collected islands and port cities in the Aegean and Adriatic seas in order to create a true commercial empire (see Map 13). Genoa, called the Republic of St. Georges, also followed in Amalfi’s footsteps and competed with Venice. En 1261, the Genoese concluded an alliance with the Byzantine Empire of Nicaea and succeeded to establish trading posts at two terminals of the Silk Road on the Black Sea: Kaffa, in Crimea, and Tana, on the Don River, which runs towards the Black Sea. They had previously made alliance with the city of Pisa in order to chase the Arabs from the western part of the Mediterranean Sea. Thus, Genoa succeeded to lay hands on Corsica and Sardinia. From 1204 to 1453, date of the fall of Constantinople, Venice, Genoa and Pisa did all they could to get the maximum profit from the agony of the Byzantine Empire. Rarely in history have the states of an emerging urbexplosion so openly and ruthlessly stripped a rival urbexplosion. And all this was done while delivering inspired sermons about solidarity among Christians and the need to assist the Byzantines. On July 25, 1261, thanks to a surprise attack, the Byzantine Empire of Nicaea succeeded, with the support of the Genoese, to capture the Latin Empire of Constantinople. The Latins kept, in Greece, the Duchy of Athens and the Principality of Achaea (which was a relic of the Principality of Morea). At that time, with its 200,000 inhabitants, Constantinople remained the largest Christian city, far ahead of Paris, which had only 120,000. However, the new, partially reunited Byzantine Empire was weak. If Genoa supported it, Venice opposed it. Moreover, the dissensions among the Greeks were numerous, and the Latins, the Venetians, the Serbs as well as the Bulgars took care to exploit them. A civil war erupted between 1341 and 1347, and new actors entered who changed everything. In 1344–1345, Byzantium requested the aid of the Ottoman Turks against the Serbs. The Ottomans, like the Seljuq Turks, have an Altaic origin. Around 1200, they had been repulsed by the Mongol invasions and had taken refuge in Anatolia, where they had obtained the protection of their Seljuq cousins who used them to harass the Byzantine Empire. In 1302, at the death of the last Seljuq sultan, the Ottomans had asserted their independence.

3.

Michel Balard, “Amalfi et Byzance (Xe–XIIe siècle),” Centre de recherche d’histoire et de civilisation de Byzance, Travaux et Mémoires 6 (1976): 85–95.

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And now Byzantium called them for help against the Christian Serbs. The Ottomans jumped at that unique opportunity and got a foothold in Europe, at Gallipoli, to the southwest of Constantinople, in 1354. From that moment, little by little, the Ottomans strangled Constantinople by progressively surrounding it. In 1362, they captured Adrianople, which they renamed Edirne and made their capital. In 1389, at the famous Kosovo battle, they beat the Serbs. Then they occupied Bulgaria. When, on May 29, 1453, they took the city of Constantinople,4 the Byzantine Empire had already boiled down to that sole city. Despite that, that day was one of the saddest of the whole history of Christianity, even though, for Constantinople and its urbexplosion, the peace brought by the Ottomans allowed for a major relaunching. Thus, the population of the city, become capital of the Ottoman Empire (and, later, from 1923, Istanbul), went from 60,000 in 1453 to 600,000 around 1550 and one million around 1900. In the years that followed the capture of Constantinople, the Ottomans extended even more their domination over southeastern Europe. Around 1500, their empire covered a territory larger than present-day Turkey which included a large part of the Balkans. At its climax, around 1550, it covered present-day Turkey, Serbia, Bosnia, a part of Croatia, Albania, MacedoniaSkopje, Greece, Crete, Cyprus, Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, Crimea, Georgia, Armenia, Iraq, Syria, Palestine, a part of Arabia, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, and Algeria. The period of decline began on October 7, 1571, at the time of the naval battle of Lepanto where, thanks to Don Juan of Austria, an illegitimate son of Charles the Fifth, Spain defeated the Ottomans. However, the empire continued to pose a threat. Thus it came close to capture Vienna at various occasions, the last one being in 1683. The Ottoman Empire disappeared in 1922, 351 years after the battle of Lepanto. From a topodynamic point of view, the fall of Constantinople drove Christianity into a corner. It cut it from the Black Sea and, consequently, from the Silk Road. Right before the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the access to the Silk Road was already impossible through Alexandria, Gaza, Damascus and Tyre, and Antioch. After 1453, only two accesses were left, both through the Black Sea: the first through Trebizond, located on the southern coast of the Black Sea, and the Caspian Sea, the second through Kaffa (present-day Feodossia) or Tana (present-day Azov), both located in the northern region of the Black Sea. Trebizond fell to the Ottomans in 1461, as well as Kaffa and Tana in 1475. Thereafter, Christian Europe was cut off from the Spice Road, consequently from India, Yemen, and Somalia, but also from the Silk Road, 4.

The Turks overwhelmed Constantinople thanks to a monster cannon capable of firing projectiles exceeding 800 pounds in weight. That cannon had been previously offered to Constantinople by its makers, but rejected as too expensive.

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hence from China. The Occident had no choice but to look for a new route through the Atlantic, either towards the west and the unknown, or towards the south along the African coast. Meanwhile, as long as such routes were not discovered, a city-state played a strategic role as a link between the Christian Occident and the Moslem Orient: the Republic of Ragusa (present-day Dubrovnik in Croatia). That city, which depended on the Venetian Empire from 1204 and the time of the Fourth Crusade to 1358, succeeded to re-establish its relative independence and security from the fifteenth century by paying tribute to the Ottoman Empire, that had taken control of the Eastern Mediterranean Sea. Neutral, Catholic, traditionally linked to Italy, and vassal of the Ottomans, Ragusa made use of all connections, and emerged as an intermediary between Christianity and the Moslem world. Its fleet became during the sixteenth century the main Mediterranean fleet for heavy transportation, besides and level with Genoa and Venice, its former master. A maritime power, Ragusa succeeded also to develop its terrestrial exchanges, particularly with Belgrade, the regions of the Danube, and Istanbul.5

s RUSSIA The most important front in the struggle between Christianity and Islam was unquestionably the one whose stake was the control of Constantinople’s urbexplosion. That battle had just been lost for Christianity with the fall of the city. However, two more peripheral fronts existed where Christianity gained ground instead of losing it: Russia and Spain. The origin of Russia resembles that of France or post-William-the-Conqueror England. France is the fruit of a double crossbreeding: a crossbreeding of the Germanic Franks with the GalloRoman culture and Christianity, which produced the French aristocracy, and the crossbreeding of the French aristocracy with the essentially Celtic Gallic population. Similarly, post-William-the-Conqueror England is the fruit of the double crossbreeding of the Vikings with the French culture and Christianity, which produced the Normans, and of the Norman aristocracy with the people who lived in England before the conquest by William the Conqueror, that is, an essentially Indo-European population made of Celts, Angles, Jutes, Saxons, etc. As for Russia, it is the fruit of the crossing of the Vikings from Sweden, named both Rus and Varegs, with the Byzantine culture and Christianity, which produced the Russian aristocracy, and the crossing of the Russian aristocracy with the Slavic and Finnish populations living in present-day Ukraine 5.

Erato Paris, La genèse intellectuelle de l’œuvre de Fernand Braudel : La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II (1923–1947) (Athens: Institut de recherches néohelléniques/F.N.R.S., 1999), 92.

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and western Russia. Rus meant “redhead people” and Vareg means in Old Norse “people carrying merchandise.” The word Russia comes from Rus (in French, a red-hair Russian woman is said une Russe rousse). The origin and the destiny of Russia is profoundly marked by the Great and Asian corridors. Russia is the world’s vastest country and, till the re-emergence, around 1825, of the Mongolo-American Corridor, it was crossed by no powerful topodynamic economic current (under the Mongol Empire, the Mongolo-American Corridor played a major role militarily, but much less economically). The whole history of Russia seems to have had the sole objective of covering to the maximum the space of Eurasia situated to the north of the Great and Asian corridors. Throughout their history, the Russians systematically tried to bring their borders closer to the central axes of those two corridors. To the northeast, those borders got as close as 400 kilometers from the central axis of the Great Corridor, at the point where Russia is only separated from Alaska by the Bering Strait. More to the south, they reached Vladivostok and the Kuril Islands (that separate the Sea of Okhotsk from the Pacific Ocean), which lie at about 700 kilometers from the central axis of the Great Corridor. To the southwest, the borders of Russia got as close as about 400 kilometers from the central axis of the Asian Corridor in the region where Russia, China, Mongolia, and Kazakhstan touch each other. To the west, the closest point of the Russian border to the central axis of the Great Corridor lies on the Black Sea at the border of Georgia, and it is about 1,000 kilometers from that central axis. Even the USSR did not reach the central axis of one or the other corridors, though Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan are very close to the central axis of the Asian Corridor (however, without ever touching it). On the other hand, it must be noticed that, when the Russian borders got close to one or the other central axes of the two corridors, it was at points situated far from those corridors’ major urbexplosions. The very birth of Russia stems from the topodynamic currents that were generated by those two corridors. At the origin, the territory presently occupied by Ukraine and western Russia was populated by the IndoEuropean Slavs probably coming from the region situated right to the north of the Caucasus, as well as the Finnish coming from the Ural region. During the seventh and eighth centuries, new Altaic invasions in the direction of the Great Corridor crossed the region. After the Bulgar Turks who had arrived from 679, now their cousins, the Khazar Turks, entered the region of the Volga, Don, and Dnieper rivers as well as Crimea, and they imposed their domination upon the Slavic populations living there. Like the Bulgars, who had become Orthodox Christians, the court of the empire created by the Khazars converted, but, strangely enough, it opted, around 740, for Judaism, while Christianity and Islam were much more present in the surrounding areas.

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The vast region situated right to the north of the territory of the Bulgars and the Khazars attempted to protect itself from its powerful neighbors. The Finnish and Slavs from the region of the future city of Novgorod (located to the south of present-day St. Petersburg) called on the help of the Varegs from Birka in Sweden, who were remarkable sailors, dangerous warriors, but also good merchants. The Varegs rushed up, founded the city of Novgorod around 860, and made their chief Rurik (who died in 879) the prince of the Novgorod region in 862. From there, they extended little by little their domination over northern Russia. Rapidly, the Varegs were as attracted by the wealth of the Great Corridor as had been the Bulgars, the Khazars, and others before them. In 860, two of Rurik’s companions, Askold and Dir, decided to invade the Byzantine Empire through a route they had explored in 858. That route was later called “the road from the Varegs to the Greeks.” They reached Constantinople, but were defeated. The “road from the Varegs to the Greeks” starts from the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic Sea, follows the Neva River, passes by Lake Ladoga, follows the Volkhov River, crosses Lake Ilmen, and takes the Lovat River. It then forks to the Volga and leaves the basin of the Baltic Sea to reach the Caspian Sea Basin. After following the Volga on a short distance, it leaves the Caspian Sea Basin to enter the Black Sea Basin. It then takes the Dnieper River down to the Black Sea and Constantinople. On that mainly maritime and fluvial route, one location particularly interested the Varegs: the junction of the Desna and Dnieper rivers, the latter running from Smolensk, to the south of Novgorod, towards the Black Sea. At that point located halfway between Novgorod and Constantinople, they chose to found a new city, Kiev, and to make it their capital in 882, under Oleg the Wise (879–912), who united under his rule the territories of Novgorod and Kiev. The site of Kiev6 presented the advantage over the site of Novgorod of being closer to Constantinople, which continued to fascinate the Varegs, while being far enough from that city to be shielded from the Byzantines’ attacks. This is how Kiev became the first capital of Russia. In 944, Oleg’s successor, Igor (who can be the son either of Oleg or Rurik), took “the road from the Varegs to the Greeks” and, like Askold and Dir, tried to conquer Constantinople. Like them, he failed, but, instead of persisting in the project, he was clever enough to negotiate a form of association with the Byzantines. A trade treaty was signed, and Igor accepted to open

6.

Kiev is located on the western, right bank of the Dnieper, where a high-ground gorodishche (’burg’) of the eighth century controlled a major river crossing.

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the kingdom of Kiev to the Christian missionaries sent by Byzantium. Igor died in 945 and twelve years later, his widow, Olga, converted to Orthodox Christianity. It was the beginning of the conversion of Russia. In 988, the Grand Prince of Kiev, Vladimir I Sviatoslavitch the Great, married Ann, the sister of the terrible Byzantine Emperor Basil II “Bulgaroctonus.” As a consequence of his marriage, Vladimir converted. Later, the Orthodox Church canonized him. Vladimir is one of the patron saints of Russia. Thanks to him, Kiev became a religious center, the seat of a metropolitan bishop. Between 1000 and 1025, the population of Kiev reached about 45,000 inhabitants. With Constantinople, Ratisbon and Venice, it was one of the four largest Christian cities of Europe (the great cities of Córdoba, Seville and Palermo were then Moslem). Vladimir’s son, Iaroslav Vladimirovitch the Wise, Grand Prince of Kiev, succeeded to unite Russia, to extend the Russian territory to the Baltic Sea and to transform Kiev into the artistic and religious center of Russia. In 1044, his daughter, Ann of Kiev, married the French King Henry I and became Queen of France. During the same period, the Normans, those Viking cousins of the Varegs, were conquering southern Italy (in 1059), Sicily (from 1061 to 1072), and England (in 1066). Unfortunately, this Golden Age did not last. The Russian princes started to oppose each other and the unity of Russia vanished. Around 1054, Kiev was reduced to the rank of simple city of the principality of Galicia, whose capital was Halicz (in Polish, or Galitch in Russian). When, from 1054, the Kipchak Turks (called Polovtsy by the Russians and Kumans by the Byzantines), attracted like the other Altaics by the Great Corridor and the Byzantine Empire, invaded the region between Kiev and the Black Sea, Galicia received an important influx of refugees, which favored its development. Unfortunately, after the Kipchaks came the Mongols, who destroyed Kiev in 1240. They were commanded by Batu Khan, Genghis Khan’s grandson and nephew of Ogadai, the Great Khan who reigned at Karakorum, in Mongolia. By 1240 Batu Khan had conquered all of Russia, and by 1241 he also held Poland, Bohemia, Hungary, and the Danube Valley under his control. In December 1241 Ogadai died and Batu stopped his invasion of Europe in order to participate in the choice of Ogadai’s successor. After his return, Batu Khan established, in 1245, the Mongol suzerainty over Russia, and founded the Khanate of the Golden Horde in 1251. The Islamized Turks rapidly became more numerous than the Mongols (also called Tatars or Tartars) in the Khanate, the Turkish language replaced Mongol, and Islam became the Khanate’s religion, although the Orthodox Church survived inside of

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the vassal Russian states. Around 1350, dissentions shook the cohesion of the Golden Horde, and then Timur (Tamerlane) devastated the Khanate, which had also, in 1480, to suffer the assaults of the Tatars of Crimea. The disunity between the Altaics gave the Russians the possibility to shake off their yoke thanks to the grand princes of Moscow and Vladimir, who had taken over from the grand princes of Kiev, especially from 1326, when the metropolitan of the Russian Orthodox Church had decided to move from Kiev to Moscow. That decision was caused by the pressure exerted on the State of Kiev by the expansion of Lithuania under the Grand Duke Gediminas (Gedymin in Polish), who reigned from 1316 to 1341, and his successors. That expansion was such that Kiev was conquered by Lithuania in 1362, and, at its peak, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania covered the major part of the basin of the Dnieper and extended its territory up to the borders of the Grand Principality of Moscow. Lithuania having converted to Catholicism and allied with Catholic Poland in 1386, the grand princes of Moscow and Vladimir became the defenders of the Orthodox Church and preferred to associate themselves with the Mongols of the Golden Horde in order to resist the Lithuanians, the Poles, and the Teutonic Knights, who were all Catholics. In gratitude for their fidelity, the Golden Horde conferred, in 1328, on Ivan I the title of Grand Prince of Moscow and Vladimir. The cities of Moscow and Vladimir were part of the same principality, and, around 1250, Moscow replaced Vladimir as its capital. Less exposed than Kiev, Moscow also presented the advantage of being situated at a crossroads between the “road from the Varegs to the Greeks,” the route of the Volga and the route of the Don River.7 Another advantage of Moscow’s location came from the fact that, while being part of the Volga Basin, it was very close to the Don and Dnieper basins. Moscow is located on the Moskva River, a tributary of the Oka River that is itself a tributary of the Volga River, which flows into the Caspian Sea. Upstream, the Oka River gets very close to the source of the Don River, which runs towards the Sea of Azov (an outgrowth of the Black Sea). To the north of Moscow, going upsteam the Volga, the Volga route joins the “road from the Varegs to the Greeks” and, through it, the Baltic and Black seas. Moreover, the Moscow region was far enough from Sarai and the hearth of the Golden Horde to eventually allow its princes to defy with success the suzerainty of the Golden Horde.

7.

The earliest known reference to Moscow is of 1147. That year, the city was founded by Yuri Dolgoruki, Prince of Suzdal, on a prominent ridge alongside and commanding the Moskva River, on the left bank of the river on high ground some 40 meters above the river, in the angle formed by the main stream and a tributary, the Neglinnaia. The advantages of Moscow’s location are also described in Chapter 11 and Map 21, p. 456.

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That opportunity came with the decline of the Golden Horde. In 1380, the Mongol Khanate of the White Horde, located more to the east, succeeded to take control of the Golden Horde. Taking advantage of that confrontation between Mongols, the Russians under the command of Dmitry Ivanovich, Prince of Moscow and Grand Prince of Vladimir, dared raise their head and rebelled. They even won the battle of Kulikovo Pole against the Mongols in 1380, but, two years later, the Golden Horde forced the Russians to once again recognize its suzerainty. Then, once more, new Turkic-Mongol invaders attracted by the Great Corridor came from the east: the troops of Timur. In 1395, Timur destroyed Sarai-Berke and sacked Sarai-Batu. After his passing, discord prevailed between the Turks, the Bulgars from the Volga, the Tatars from Crimea, and the Mongols of the region. In 1480, the Tatars from Crimea destroyed what was left of Sarai-Batu. That same year, Grand Prince Ivan III freed Moscow from the Mongol suzerainty. In 1472 Ivan III had married Zoe-Sophia Paleologus, niece of the last Byzantine Emperor, Constantine XII Paleologus. Previously, Ivan III, who was from the Rurik branch of the princes of Moscow, had married Maria of Tver, from the Rurik branch of the princes of Tver. The Rurik princes of Tver had been designated on four occasions by the Mongol khans of the Golden Horde as grand princes of Vladimir. The Mongol khans of the Golden Horde were using the rivalry between the princes of Tver and the princes of Moscow, from the same Rurik dynasty, to consolidate their power over that part of Russia. At certain times, they favored the Tvers and designated them as grand princes of Vladimir; at other times, they favored the princes of Moscow. In order to put a definitive end to this power play, in 1485, Ivan III attacked his former brother-in-law Michael III, who was Prince of Tver since 1461, and forced him to flee. Ivan III then annexed Tver to the Principality of Vladimir and Moscow. That action greatly contributed to the rise of a Russian Empire centered on Moscow, which then reached a population of about 100,000. The son of Ivan III and Zoe-Sophia Paleologus, Vasily III, Grand Prince of Vladimir and Moscow, considered himself to be the heir of both the Rurik dynasty and the emperors of Constantinople. He and his descendants dreamed of making Moscow the “third Rome” by taking over from Constantinople the Ottomans had taken in 1453. After the accession of the Grand Principality of Moscow to sovereignty, the Golden Horde divided in four parts: Orthodox Russia, and the three Moslem Khanates of Kazan, Astrakhan, and the Crimea. The son of Vasily III, Ivan IV the Terrible, who was the first to take the title of “tsar” in remembrance of the Byzantine “caesars,” conquered Kazan in 1552 and Astrakhan in 1556. As for Crimea, it was annexed by Russia just in 1783, a long time after Siberia had been conquered, from 1581 to 1643, when Russia reached the Sea of Okhotsk in the Pacific Ocean.

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s THE SPANISH RECONQUISTA If the Christian Russians endured the Mongol and Moslem domination for 235 years (from 1245 to 1480), the presence of Islam in Spain lasted much longer, that is, 781 years (from 711 to 1492). The reconquest of Spain by Christianity, the Reconquista, lasted almost as long, from 717, date of the founding of the kingdom of Asturias by Pelago and Visigoth refugees, till the conquest of Granada in 1492. Patiently, Christianity maintained its pressure on the Moslems, eroded gradually their territory, and came to expulse them completely.8 From a topodynamic point of view, the Russian and Spanish cases profoundly differ. The back-and-forth movements of Christianity in Russia were, above all, caused by the successive waves of the Altaic invasions in direction of the Great Corridor and, particularly, the Byzantine Empire, the greatest lure of all. In the Spanish case, from the defeat of Poitiers in 732, the invasions coming from the south in direction of the Great Corridor had ceased. The Reconquista was mainly caused by the progressive weakening of the Arab power inside of Islam. As already underlined, from 874 in Persia and 972 in the Maghrib, the Arab dynasties gave way to Iranian, Berber, and Afghan dynasties. And then those dynasties gave way, in turn, to Altaic dynasties: Turkic or Mongol. To those changes of dynasties were associated the Great Ebb eastward movement towards India, China, and Indonesia, as well as the corresponding eastward shift of the Islam center of gravity. The Spanish outgrowth of Islam became increasingly marginal, and Christianity could recapture the lost ground. Islam’s retreat movement started from the Basque country and the Kingdom of Asturias, which the Arabs never conquered. From 711 to 1035, the Kingdom of Asturias gave birth, from west to east, to the kingdom of Leon and Castile, the Kingdom of Navarre, the Kingdom of Aragon, and the Earldom of Barcelona. The whole north of Spain was recaptured, including the cities of Santiago de Compostela (in 739), Barcelona9 (in 801), León (in 850), Coimbra (in 878), Burgos (in 884), and Porto (in 997). Between 1035 and 1086, the center of Spain, from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean Sea, was recuperated with the cities of Braga (in 1040), Segovia (in 1079), Guadalajara (in 1085), and Toledo (in 1085). Then the Christian

8.

9.

It must be pointed out that the great period of the Reconquista began with the taking of Toledo in 1085 and ended with the capture of Murcia in 1266. That period and the Norman conquest of Sicily corresponded with the epoch of the Crusades. Barcelona was called Barcino under the Roman Empire.

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Kingdom of Portugal was added.10 The kingdom of León and Castile split and gave birth to the Kingdom of León and the Kingdom of Castile, and the Earldom of Barcelona became the Kingdom of Catalonia. In 1086, the Almoravids from Morocco flew to the assistance of the Moslems from Spain, and succeeded, in October, to slow down the progression of the Christian troops. Despite that, Avila was recaptured in 1088, Saragossa11 in 1118, Soria in 1119, Lisbon12 in 1147, and Evora in 1166. Later, the Reconquista resumed thanks to the Christian victory of Las Navas de Tolosa, on July 16, 1212. From 1212 to 1300, the whole south fell except for the Moslem Kingdom of Granada. Thus, the Christians recaptured the cities of Mérida (in 1228), Badajoz (in 1229), Córdoba (in 1236), Valencia (in 1238), Murcia (in 1243), Cartagena13 (in 1243), Murcia (in 1243), Seville (in 1248), Cádiz (in 1262), and Tarifa (in 1292). From 1232, the Kingdom of Granada remained the only Moslem state of the Iberian Peninsula. Granada replaced Córdoba as the largest city of the Iberian Peninsula, after the reconquest of Córdoba in 1236.14 Around 1300, its population reached 150,000 inhabitants. It was then one of the largest cities in Europe. In 1400, its population had dropped to 100,000 in habitants. By 1519, after its capture by the Christians, its population had fallen to 70,000 inhabitants. The most glorious period of Granada’s history corresponds to the reign of the Nasrids, who ruled the Kingdom of Granada from 1238 to 1492. In order to maintain their power, the Nasrids had to waver between submission to the Christian Kingdom of Castile and dependence on their Marinid kinsmen of Fes (in Morocco). The first Nasrid ruler was a tributary vassal of the king of Castile, but, later, from 1272 to 1340, his successors opted for the Marinids’ suzerainty. In 1479, the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon were reunited thanks to the accession to the throne of Isabel of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon who had married in 1469. The two last sovereigns of the Nasrid dynasty were 10.

11. 12.

13. 14.

It must be noted that the origin of Portugal goes back to Emperor Augustus, who divided the Iberian Peninsula into three Roman provinces: Tarraconensis (northern Spain with Tarraco, present-day Tarragona, as capital), Baetica (Andalusia with Corduba as capital), and Lusitania (with Emerita Augusta, which is now Mérida, as capital). Lusitania later became Portugal. Saragossa was called Caesaraugusta under the Roman Empire. Lisbon was founded by the Phoenicians, and later occupied by the Carthaginians, before coming under Roman domination in 207 BC. Lisbon was called Felicitas Julia under the Roman Empire. Before the fall of Rome, Lisbon was taken in 419 by the Visigoths. From 714 to 1147, the city was occupied by the Moors. Cartagena was called Carthago Nova under the Roman Empire. Granada originated as Elibyrge, a Celtic settlement, occupying the high ground of the later Albayzín, across the valley of the Darro River. The Romans and Visigoths knew it as Illiberis, an obscure unimportant settlement.

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Muhammad XII the Brave and Muhammad XI, called Boabdil, who reigned before Muhammad XII, in 1482 and 1483, and also after him, from 1486 to 1492. Those two sovereigns refused to pay tribute to Castile. In retaliation, Castile attacked the Kingdom of Granada in 1491 and captured it on January 2, 1492. Few months later, that is, a few months before the discovery of America that occurred in October 1492, Isabel of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon, under the pressures of the Great Inquisitor Tomás de Torquemada,15 expelled the 170,000 Jews who did not accept conversion to Christianity while the Muslims continued to benefit from religious freedom. The expelled Sephardic Jews found refuge in the Muslim countries, in North Africa and the Ottoman Empire, and also in various Christian countries. Many Spanish cities suffered from the expulsion of their Jewish craftsmen and some trade sectors have never recovered. The religious freedom granted to the Moslems soon was questioned, and the Spanish kings organized forced conversions. The new converted were called the Moriscos. In 1499 and 1500, the Moslem Moors rebelled and, like the Jews before them, they were forced to choose between conversion and exile. Half a million of them, including the most skilled agriculturalists and artificers of the country, chose to leave. Those who converted continued to constitute a separate group. In 1609, despite their being officially Christians, the Moriscos were expelled in their turn. If the Reconquista considerably limited the religious freedom and even came to eliminate it, it also had very negative impacts on urbanization. The major part of the great cities of Moslem Spain experienced a pronounced economic and demographic decline after their capture by the Christians. That evolution can be compared to the effects of the fall of the Western Roman Empire on urbanization. What happened in Spain with the Reconquista was also observed in Sicily, where Islam was present from 827 to 1091, in Sardinia, where it was present intermittently from 711 to 1016, in Malta, where it was present from 870 to 1250, and even in the present territory of France (which was not French at the time, though), where the Saracens (as the Franks called the Moslems then) occupied the region of Narbonne, from 719 to 759, and then the region of La Garde-Freinet, to the northwest of Saint-Tropez in the Var department, between 890 and 973. La Garde-Freinet was the place where the penetration of Islam got the closest to the central axis of the Great Corridor in Western Europe. The Saracens were chased from there, after 83 years, by William I of Provence and Ghibelline (Gibelin) of Grimaldi.

15.

The Spanish Inquisition had been set up in 1478. On February 6, 1481, the first auto da fe was staged in the main plaza at Seville. In eight years, between 1481 and 1489, the Seville tribunal alone burnt more than 700 heretics.

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In those regions, a city particularly distinguished itself during the Moslem period: Palermo in Sicily. Palermo was conquered by the Arabs in 831 and it remained Moslem till 1072. Around 1060, it reached 150,000 persons, which made it the largest city of present-day Italy and one of the largest cities in Europe with Christian Constantinople, which had about half a million inhabitants, and the Moslem Córdoba, with about 450,000 in habitants, and Seville, which was about as big as Palermo. At that time, Palermo was a port whose trade with North Africa flourished, and a rich and magnificent city surrounded with a particularly well-exploited agricultural hinterland. As in the case of Granada and Córdoba, the Christian reconquest of Palermo was followed by such a population decline that, in 1300, its population was only 40,000 inhabitants.

s THE RESURRECTION OF THE WEST EUROPEAN URBEXPLOSION In spite of their considerable urban and economic backwardness, Christian Europe and, more precisely, the part of Western Europe located in the Great Corridor came to slowly rise up during the period of the Great Ebb. A new West European urbexplosion emerged, which had not Rome anymore as its epicenter, but rather numerous cities from Northern Italy: Venice, Genoa, Milan, Florence, and Pisa, all those cities belonging to the Great Corridor, as Rome had before. The gestation period of that new urbexplosion was very long, the decline and fall of the Western Roman Empire having resulted in the quasi-disappearance of the existing urbanization as well as the disruption of the political unity of Western Europe. The Catholic Church was basically the only true link between the romanized Western Europe and the barbarian one as well as between the multiple states or quasi-states that had replaced the Western Roman Empire. That being said, it must be stressed that the Church of Rome did not easily convert the new Germanic leaders. The main obstacle it had to confront was Arianism, whose name comes from Arius, that priest of Alexandria who, at the beginning of the fourth century, had negated the divine nature of Christ while continuing his apostolate. The main Germanic tribes that had chosen to convert to Christianity had adopted the Arianism preached by Ulfilas, that Arian bishop who, between 350 and 383, hence before the fall of Rome, had been active in the Danube region, to the north of Constantinople, and evangelized the Goths. Ulfilas invented the gothic alphabet and wrote the earliest translation of the Bible into a Germanic language called Gothic. The Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Vandals, Burgundians, and Lombards, among others, converted to Arianism. The Franks were the first Germans to officially convert to Roman Christianity. Their king, Clovis (whose name later became Louis, which is the name of so many kings of France), was baptized by saint Remi, bishop

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of Reims, around 498. That baptism marked a turning point in the history of Western Europe. It sealed the alliance between the Church of Rome, the Franks, and the Christianized Gallo-Roman population of ancient Gaul. During the following years, the Franks took a determining ascendancy over all the other Germans settled in the former Western Roman Empire, including the Burgundians (who, under Sigismond, around 520, were the first to abjure Arianism to convert to Catholicism), Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Jutes, Angles, Saxons, Alamanni, Suebi, Vandals, or Lombards. Little by little, Arianism retreated, and it disappeared when its last followers, the Lombards, joined Catholicism around 700. The Celts from the British Islands played an important role in the conversion of the Germans to Catholicism. Christianity penetrated into the British Islands in three successive waves. The Christianization of the Celts started with the founding of abbeys in Celtic lands. One of those first Celtic abbeys, named Candida Casa, was situated at Whithorn in Scotland and was founded by saint Ninian around 397. Another one was located at Llangarvan in Wales. During the second wave, saint Patrick evangelized Celtic Ireland. Patrick was born in England around 385; he was made prisoner by pirates and taken to Ireland. Freed, he took refuge at Auxerre in Burgundy where he became priest and, later, was consecrated bishop by saint Germanus of Auxerre in 432. He then went back to Ireland and converted that island between 433 and 461, the year he died. That gave birth to a second wave of diffusion of Christianity starting from Ireland and leading to the creation of a network of abbeys in Northumbria, in northern England, and in Scotland, thanks to saint Columba who founded the abbey of Iona Island off Scotland. The third wave led to the creation of an “English” Church (that is, of the German Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, and not anymore of the Celts). The Christianization of the “English” south of England goes back to saint Augustine of Canterbury who, probably born in Rome, converted, around 597, the Kingdom of Kent, which was the very first “English” kingdom to convert to Christianity. Progressively, the English Church integrated the older Celtic churches. However, the wave of evangelization launched from the Celtic lands passing through the AngloSaxon lands continued and reached the continent. It contributed, through the English saint Boniface, to convert the Germanic populations to Catholicism. The Old Saxony was the last region of present-day Germany to convert, which it did just during the eighth century. In 481–482, when Clovis acceded to the throne, the kingdom of the Salian Franks had Tournai (Belgium) as capital. It stretched over a territory about as large as present-day Austria, which included present-day Belgium, a part of northern France, and a large part of the Netherlands and the German Nordrhein-Westfalen Lander. From a geographical point of view, that territory was highly strategic. It was crossed by the Rhine, the Meuse-Maas, the Moselle,

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and the Scheldt, those three last rivers being in close relations with the Seine, the Saône, and the Rhône, while the Rhine was in close relations with the Danube. The expansion of the Franks followed to a large extent those fluvial links. Under Clovis, the capital of the Franks moved from Tournai, on the Scheldt, to Soissons, on the Aisne River, which is a tributary of the Oise, which runs to the Seine, and, later to Paris, on the Seine. Soissons and Paris16 were part of the kingdom of the Roman Syagrius before Clovis conquered that kingdom in 486, ten years after the fall of Rome. The kingdom of Syagrius was the last territory of Western Europe under the control of the Romans. Three centuries after Clovis, in 814, at the death of Charles the Great, Clovis’ heir at the head of the Franks, the territory submitted to them essentially covered present-day France, Germany, Italy, Navarre, Catalonia, Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxemburg, and Austria. After Clovis, the Franks had various capitals: Paris, Soissons, Orléans, Reims, Sens, Laon, Metz, Chalon, Tournai, and Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle), the capital of Charles the Great. The expansion of the Frankish Empire was favored by the weakening of the Mediterranean Europe caused by the invasion of Islam. Muslim control of the southern shores of the Mediterranean Sea extended to continual piracy along its northern shores. Trade was completely disrupted. As Pirenne observed, for the first time Europe was forced to live by its own resources. “As a result the Frankish Empire, which had so far been playing only a minor role in the history of Europe, was to become the arbiter of Europe’s destinies … Without Islam, the Frankish Empire would probably never have existed and Charlemagne, without Mahomet, would be inconceivable.”17 It must be noted that the central axis of the Great Corridor touched the kingdom Clovis had inherited and divided the territory Charles the Great dominated at his death in two equal parts. The Great Corridor axis that had been the spine of the Roman Empire was also the spine of Charles the Great’s Empire. Charles the Great’s son, Louis the Pious, preserved his father’s heritage till his death in 840. Unfortunately, that death marked the end of the attempt to reconstitute the old Western Roman Empire under the direction of the Franks. That attempt had been backed by the Church of Rome in 800, when Pope Leo III had consecrated Charles the Great emperor and placed him at the head of the new Empire of Occident. Although politically and militarily dominated by the Franks, that empire was, to a large extent, an extension of the Church 16.

17.

Paris is located at a point where the Seine can be crossed thanks to the Ile de la Cité. During the Roman period, the original Gallic inhabitants occupied the Ile de la Cité while the Romans themselves preferred the left bank, later called “Quartier latin.” Henri Pirenne, Mediaeval Cities: Their Origins and the Revival of Trade (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969).

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of Rome, which constituted the first and foremost institution of Western Europe. The Church was the holder of the spiritual power, which transcended the temporal power, and the true depositary of the Western civilization. When he chose to split his empire between his sons, Louis the Pious compromised for a very long time the unity of Western Europe, and gave birth to European feudalism, according to which the fiefs and territories were the personal belongings of their lords who could dispose of them as they pleased. The decision of Louis the Pious and feudalism originate from the Frankish laws (which included the famous “Salic law”), whose philosophy opposed the old Roman conception according to which Rome and the Empire had precedence over the person of the emperors, and the emperors over the “vicars” of Rome who administered the various “dioceses” of the Roman Empire. The power which went from top to bottom in the Roman Empire had to be built again from bottom to top in the context of the European feudalism through the logic of the relations between vassals and suzerains. From the Carolingian Empire, feudalism spread to Brittany and Pomerania (future Prussia), but also to England at the Norman conquest of 1066, as well as to Sicily and Southern Italy during the Norman conquests of the eleventh century. Later, it even reached Northern Italy, Bohemia, and Moravia.18 The first dividing up of the empire between the three first sons of Louis (Lothair, Pepin, and Louis the German) was defined in 817, during the life of Louis the Pious. However, at his death, that division was not relevant anymore since Pepin had died and Louis the Pious had had, in 823, a son from a second marriage, Charles the Bald. The Verdun Treaty was negotiated and signed in 843. According to it, the empire was split into three parts following the logic of the Great Corridor. The central part crossed by the central axis of the Great Corridor was attributed to the eldest son, Lothair, who received the title of Roman Emperor. The Kingdom of Lothair, named Lotharingia, encompassed the parts of Italy Charles the Great had conquered, including the March of Friul and Lombardy, as well as Provence, Burgundy, Lorraine, and the whole Frankish region Clovis had inherited (including present-day Belgium and the Netherlands). The Kingdom of Lotharingia was crossed by the Meuse-Maas, the Rhine, the Rhône, and the Po, which constitute the spinal column of the Great Corridor in Europe. The second surviving son, Louis the German, received the Francia orientalis located to the east of the central axis, while the youngest son, Charles the Bald, inherited Francia occidentalis situated to the west. 18.

The disintegration of the Carolingian Empire and the spreading of feudalism were favored by the continual Scandinavian invasions (Vikings, Norsemen, Danes) from the north, but also by the invasions of the Magyars and the Slavs from the east, and the Saracens from the south. For instance, the Scandinavians first invaded England in 793 and France around 800.

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Influenced by the attractive forces traditionally generated by the Great Corridor, throughout the centuries and the millennium that followed, the two Franciae, the French and the German, tried to take control of the kingdom of Lotharingia. Italy, Belgium, and the Netherlands were perpetual stakes in the Franco-German struggle, while Switzerland succeeded to establish itself as a neutral zone between the two powers, which came to take control of certain zones of Lothair’s kingdom. France came to capture Provence, Burgundy, Alsace, and Lorraine, while Germany took Nordrhein-Westfalen, those zones passing, from time to time, from one entity to the other. It is in that context that the new West European urbexplosion was born. Consistent with Braudel’s scheme, its central core was dominated by merchant cities. That core developed in Northern Italy, and its dominating cities were, at the beginning, Venice and Milan, to which Genoa and Florence added afterwards. Venice supplanted Amalfi and occupied the first rank of the Italian cities around 1000. It had then about 60,000 inhabitants. Milan caught up Venice around 1300, each city having at that time 100,000 people. Between 1300 and 1500, Milan forestalled Venice a little, but, in 1500, both cities came back to equality with 100,000 inhabitants each. Around that central core, a semi-periphery developed, which included territorial states, each one dominated by a single large city. In Southern Italy, the Kingdom of Naples and Sicily (sometimes unified, sometimes separated in two distinct kingdoms) increasingly played the role of a territorial state after having been a merchant pole at the time of Amalfi. That kingdom was dominated by the city of Naples, local heir of Amalfi, which forestalled Milan and Venice at the head of the Italian cities around 1400. The population of Naples reached close to 150,000 in 1500 and about 275,000 in 1600. In Francia occidentalis, which had become France, the city of Paris rose, reaching about 220,000 inhabitants in 1350, which made it the largest city of Christian Western Europe. More to the north, England also asserted itself as a territorial state, above all after the Norman conquest of 1066, and London stood out.19 But, in 1500, it still had only 50,000 inhabitants. Finally, to the east, in what was to become Germany, the city of Ratisbon rose to the rank of main city of Central Europe. Its population passed from about 23,000 in 800 to 40,000 in 1000.

19.

After the withdrawal of the Roman legions from Britain in AD 409, Londinium-London declined. Alfred the Great, king of Wessex from 871 to 878 and, later, king of Britain from 878 to 899, repaired the defenses and consolidated London as a fortified town. At that time, the capital of Britain was Winchester. London succeeded Winchester as the British capital early in the eleventh century, when the kings moved their residence from Winchester to Westminster. It must be added that York, the capital of the former kingdom of Northumbria, was seen as the capital of the north.

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In sum, to the radical regression of urbanization that had followed the fall of the Western Roman Empire succeeded, from about 900,20 a phase of reurbanization centered on the pole of Northern Italy dominated by Venice and Milan.21 However, from 1100, a rival of that pole appeared more to the north in the Great Corridor, between the Seine and Rhine rivers, in the region of Flanders and Brabant. The emergence of that new pole lay within a topodynamic inertia context where a northwestward movement within the Great Corridor favored the transfer of the merchant power successively from the ports of Amalfi and Bari, in Southern Italy, to Venice, Milan, and Genoa in Northern Italy, and then, later on, to Bruges, Antwerp, Amsterdam, and London in Northern Europe.22 The fact that Islam almost led to the closing of the Mediterranean Sea greatly contributed to that evolution, which was slow and followed the progressive transformation of the map of the gravity potentials in Europe, the successive poles of Amalfi-Naples, Northern Italy, and Northern Europe corresponding systematically to the zones with the highest gravity potentials.23 That topodynamic movement was accompanied by a slow and progressive rise of urbanization. It is just during the fifteenth century that the rate of urbanization of Christian Western Europe reached again the level it had under the Roman Empire, one thousand years before. It must be said, however, that certain technological improvements were carried out during the Middle Ages. In the field of agriculture, ploughs were improved; the triennial rotation of crops was adopted throughout practically the whole of Europe north of the Loire; the harnessing of horses by means of shoulder collars was improved; and the adoption of iron horseshoes was generalized. On the other hand, the introduction of windmills and water

20.

21.

22.

23.

The ninth century represented the nadir of the European urban evolution. Henri Pirenne described it as “the golden age of what we have called the closed domestic economy, and what we might call, with more exactitude, the economy of no markets.” Henri Pirenne, op. cit. Ralph Henry Carless Davis, A History of Mediaeval Europe: From Constantine to saint Louis (Harlow, Essex, and London: Longman, 1987); Henri Pirenne, op. cit.; Anthony Edwin James Morris, History of Urban Form: Prehistory to the Renaissance (London: George Godwin, 1972); Howard Saalman, Mediaeval Cities (London: Studio Vista, and New York: George Braziller, 1968). That period and that movement were very well studied by Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), and Capitalism and Material Life, 1400 –1800 (New York : Harper Torchbooks, 1974), as well as Jan de Vries, European Urbanization, 1500–1800 (London and Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), Carlo Cipolla, Before the Industrial Revolution. European Society and Economy, 1000–1700 (London: Methuen, 1981), and Paul M. Hohenberg and Lynn Hollen Lees, The Making of Urban Europe, 1000–1950 (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1985). See Jan de Vries, op. cit., 161–167.

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mills was generalized.24 The turning point of the awakening of the West may well have been the launching of the Crusades in 1096. The Crusades allowed Venice, Genoa, and Northern Italy to emerge as an urbexplosive core. They also accelerated the technological progress in Western Europe thanks to the introduction of new products like paper and gunpowder, but also by forcing the West to take up the challenge of Islam’s technological advance. And, by their very failure, the Crusades forced the West to explore the Atlantic Ocean so as to find a way to bypass the Moslem countries in order to re-establish links with India and China. However, if the Crusades accelerated the development of the Christian Western Europe, a major event slowed it down: the Black Death coming from the Silk Road that arrived, in 1346, at the port of Kaffa, controlled by the Genoans, on the Black Sea. That plague epidemic was conveyed by Genoan ships and penetrated Europe in September 1347 through the ports of Constantinople, Greece, Sicily, Venice, Genoa, and Marseille. Its trajectory followed the central axis of the Great Corridor, which shows the commercial importance of that route. Thus the plague reached Paris and London before spreading to Cádiz, Lisbon, Hamburg, Dantzig-Gdansk, and Stockholm. The Black Death was neither the first nor the last plague Europe experienced (the first one dated back to 542 under the reign of Justinian, and the last outbreak came in 1770), but it was the most devastating. From 1347 to 1352, the bubonic plague killed one-quarter of Europe’s population, with death tolls ranging up to seventy percent in some cities. Between 1347 and 1400, the population of Europe as a whole, which had grown at an average annual rate of 0.22% between 1000 and 1347, dropped by about thirty percent; it approximately fell from 79 million in 1340 to 56 million in 1400. It is estimated that the center of Italy lost two thirds of its population, while, in the Po Basin, Northern Spain, France, England, and the Low Countries, the population decreased by a proportion varying between one third and two thirds. Since cities, and especially commercial cities, as well as developed regions were more affected than the countryside, villages, or less-developed regions, economic development and urbanization went through a severe decline. Nevertheless, the population decrease eventually led to a new equilibrium between the population and the natural resources, which resulted in wage increases and a rise in the living standard. A new wave of innovations appeared in that context, in the fields of the conception and building of ships, navigation, geography, as well as artillery. In 1440, at Strasbourg, Gutenberg reinvented printing, and the second half of the fifteenth century saw the introduction of the first blast furnace. Meanwhile capitalism was born in Florence, and Italy launched Renaissance.

24.

Paul Bairoch, op. cit., 124–125.

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In order to perceive the complexity of the evolutions that marked Europe from 476 to 1400, it is useful to evoke the case of the various cities which illustrated that period. The city where the return towards the west of the topodynamic pendulum was first perceived is Amalfi, which opened the way to Venice and Genoa by being the first city of the former Western Roman Empire to reckon on the trade with Byzantium. The merchants of Amalfi were the first West Europeans to establish a permanent presence in Constantinople, probably as early as the first decades of the tenth century. However, contrary to Venice, Amalfi engaged in commercial distribution without developing any productive base of its own. Despite that, it experienced an important development from about 650 and became, around 1000, the main port and even the main city of Italy. The conquest of Amalfi by the Normans of Sicily in 1091 put an end to its commercial domination of Italy. It must be said that since the rise of Islam to the south and east of the Mediterranean Sea, maritime trade had become very dangerous. It is just from the twelfth century that long-distance trade, both by land and by sea, became an important factor in the economic and urban development of Western Europe. Amalfi contributed to improve the situation in that field. Amalfitans were very conscious of the precariousness of maritime trade. This is why they elaborated a remarkable code of maritime law called the Amalfitan Tables (Tavola Amalfitana), which was recognized in the Mediterranean until 1570. Moreover, Amalfitans worked to increase the security of navigation through innovations. According to a certain tradition first published in 1450, the magnetic compass, which greatly improved navigation, may have been invented at Amalfi independently of the Chinese. The earliest authentic information concerning the use of the compass comes from China (c. 1100), Western Europe (c. 1187), Arabia (c. 1220), and Scandinavia (c. 1300). It is not possible to state with any certainty where the first discovery occurred and whether knowledge of the use of the compass was transmitted from one area to another or whether it was the result of two or more independent inventions. It seems plausible that Amalfitans were at least responsible for the perfection of the magnetic compass. The strangest thing about the compass is that it was invented and first widely used while most people thought that the Earth was flat and, consequently, that it had no pole. In fact, the first detailed work on the magnetic compass written in 1269 by the French Pierre Pèlerin de Maricourt explained magnetic attractions by the influence of the “poles of heavens” without referring to the poles of the Earth. Maricourt’s document is considered as as an early foundation of the experimental method in science. Pèlerin de Maricourt was the master in Paris of the English Roger Bacon, who was the first one to notice that the Julian calendar was wrong and to reveal in 1248 the composition of gunpowder. Bacon pointed out the weaknesses of Ptolemy’s system, and he is considered, with Maricourt, as one of the fathers of experimental science.

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Amalfitans were present in the Holy Land even before the beginning of the Crusades. Around 950, they founded a hospital for sick pilgrims in Jerusalem, which was then under the Arab domination of the Abbassids. Around 1100, right after the Crusaders had conquered Jerusalem, that hospital was at the origin of the Order of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem, also known as Knights of Malta, which, through the years, reigned over Cyprus, Rhodes, and Malta. Two other important orders were created in the context of the Crusades: the Order of the Templars, founded in 1119–1120, and the Teutonic Order, founded in 1190. Both became extremely wealthy and powerful. The Teutonic Order came to dominate the southern part of the Baltic Sea. As for the Order of the Templars, it came to be seen as a threat by the French King Philip IV the Fair who accused them of heresy and immorality, succeeded eventually in having Pope Clement V suppress the order in 1312, and had the grand master, Jacques of Molay, burned at the stake in 1314. Amalfi peaked around 1050, and Naples handed over. However, if the merchant city of Amalfi could have aspired to play the role of a city-state at the center of an urbexplosion, Naples never became anything more than the big city of a territorial state. The center of an urbexplosion was unlikely to develop to the south of Italy both because of the great proximity of Constantinople and the smallness of the available hinterland. If the Normans of Sicily and the House of Hauteville precipitated the end of the domination of Amalfi, they made the fortune of Naples, which they conquered around 1091. From that moment, the destinies of the Naples region and Sicily were, most of the time, linked under the dynasties of the Hauteville, Hohenstaufen, Anjou, Aragon, Habsburg, Bourbon, and Bourbon Two-Sicilies. In 1000, Amalfi, the largest city of Italy, had about 80,000 inhabitants, and Naples, around 30,000. Five hundred years later, Naples had 100,000 inhabitants, and Amalfi, only 3,000. Like Venice and Genoa, the port of Naples suffered from the conquest of Constantinople by the Ottomans, but it suffered even more from the conquest of America, which led to its complete economic marginalization at a time when its population remained very large. The Rome of the decline of the Western Roman Empire and the Naples of the period that followed the discovery of America constitute two early and well-known examples of “overurbanization.” The Naples of that period is also a classical example of “prime city,” its demographic weight being out of proportion with the population and the wealth of its hinterland. From a topodynamic point of view, it can be explained by the fact that, if economic development “jumps” from the center of an urbexplosion to the center of another, the population migrations do not follow, since they do not jump. On the contrary, like alluvial deposits conveyed by waterways, they are carried by the topodynamic currents and settle on the way; so their adaptation to the spatial distribution of production is almost always behind the topodynamic

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evolution.25 This may explain why the populations lagged in Southern Italy while the economic development had jumped to the north, which caused the suburbanization of Naples, but also its “prime city” character since, in their slow migration to the triumphant urbexplosions, the populations pass first by the big local cities. This phenomenon is very common; it can be observed today, among other places, in the countries of the Sahel region in Africa. Rome had even less chances than Amalfi or Naples to become the center of the new European urbexplosion. First, its economic link with the Illyrian Salt Road and with Illyria (present-day Croatia, Serbia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina) was much weaker since that region depended on Byzantium; second, Rome did not benefit anymore from the rent its status of capital of the Roman Empire had provided for centuries. The city was now the center of the states Pepin the Short, King of the Franks and Charles the Great’s father, and the Carolingians had given the Catholic Church in 756, states that the popes systematically expanded during the centuries that followed. Those Papal States were, so to say, stuck between the Kingdom of Naples and Sicily to the south, and the Carolingian Empire or its successor the Germanic Holy Roman Empire (founded in 962 by Otto I the Great, from the East Saxon House of Liudolfing), to the north. As the essential element of the unity of the Western world, the Catholic Church had favored the reconstitution of the Western Roman Empire under Charles the Great. However, conflicts between the spiritual primacy of the popes and the temporal primacy of the emperors came to develop and gave rise to the long struggle between the Guelfs, who were siding with the papacy, and the Ghibellines, who were sympathetic to the emperors of the House of Hohenstaufen. The conflict started in Germany, and opposed the House of Welf from Bavaria and Saxony, siding with the pope, to the Hohenstaufen imperial family. However, the conflict spread to Italy with Frederick I Barbarossa from the Hohenstaufen family, and it poisoned the Italian political life from 1215 till 1309, when the popes left Rome for Avignon, in present-day southern France. In Rome, the conflict took the form of the rivalry between two great families: the Ghibelline Colonnas, the Guelf Orsinis who gave the Church three popes (Celestin III, Nicholas III, and Benedict XIII). The tensions between the Guelfs and Ghibellines, as well as between the pope and the emperor, occasionally reached such an intensity that, in 1084, Emperor Henry IV invaded Rome, and the Norman allies of Pope Gregory VII set the city on fire.26 To those conflicts 25.

26.

This has been observed for the first time by Ernest G. Ravenstein when he formulated his famous laws of migration: “The Laws of Migration,” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society 48 (1885): 167–235, and 52 (1889): 241–301. That fire led to the most destructive of all the sackings of Rome. Pope saint Gregory VII left Rome with the Norman Robert Guiscard, who had saved him from Henry IV’s attack, and took refuge at Salerno, where he died in 1085.

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added those that opposed the emperor to the king of France, France being at that time the richest and most populated state of Europe. The election in 1305 of a pro-French pope led to the moving of papacy to Avignon in 1309. The popes stayed in Avignon from 1309 to 1376, and the Western Schism it provoked, which lasted from 1378 to 1417, with its long list of popes and anti-popes, almost killed the city of Rome. In 1417, the latter already amounted to a pile of crumbling ruins. The return of papacy to Rome and the end of the Western Schism with the election of Pope Martin V in 1417 led to a rebirth of the city, which, during the two following centuries, reached an artistic glory equal or superior to the one Imperial Rome had known.27 That being said, Rome, whose wealth essentially originated from the Church’s income, never threatened the economic and commercial ascendancy of Northern Italy cities. In 1500, Rome’s population was about 55,000 inhabitants, while Naples had 150,000 inhabitants, Milan and Venice, 100,000 each, and Genoa, 60,000. It must be noted that, in 1527, Emperor Charles V sacked Rome in a new episode of the struggle between the emperors and the popes. Strangely enough, the founding of Venice28 goes back to the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Venice is one of the rare Italian or even West European cities that owe nothing to the Roman Empire. Its site made of islands and marshes never attracted the Romans, yet great experts in selecting city locations. The barbarian invasions were what forced the population of the region to find refuge in those inhospitable lands. Progressively, the runaways decided to settle on the islands. Out of fear, the twelve villages of the Venetian islands decided to form a federation in 466, 10 years before the fall of Rome. In 568, that federation, dominated at first by Ravenna and Constantinople, had to deal with the Lombard hordes that were invading Northern Italy. The local population elected a first doge (duke) in 687. In 811, in their turn, the Franks invaded the region that was under the suzerainty of the Byzantine Empire, whose rights over the Venice region were recognized and respected by the Carolingians. The benefits ensuing from the trade with the Orient and from the economic interdependence between Venice and Constantinople eventually led to the economic triumph of Venice in Western Christian Europe. From the eleventh to the sixteenth century, the Venetian Republic was the richest and most successful Italian city-state, ahead of Amalfi, Genoa, Milan, Naples, Pavia, and Verona. In 1143, the duchy became the Patrician Republic of Venice

27.

28.

In The Story of Rome (London: J. M. Dent & Co’s Mediæval Towns series, 1901), Norwood Young wrote: “if the strictly mediaeval history of Rome closes with Boniface VIII in 1303 and the period of desertion and decay comes to an end on the arrival of Martin V in 1420, the era of new life, of renaissance, begins with Nicholas V in 1447.” According to the official (and “legendary”) history of Venice, that city was founded on March 25, 421, at midday exactly.

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following the constitution by a group of ten patrician families of the Grand Council of Ten, which exerted power with the doge and the already existing legislative assembly. As Maddison 29 underlined it, the role of Venice was to reintegrate Western Europe into the Mediterranean commercial network and, above all, to develop commercial links between the Mediterranean economy and Northern Europe through the Po River, Milan, Lyon, and the Champagne fairs, not to mention the important terrestrial link between Venice, the Tarvisio Pass, and Vienna on the Danube. Venice exported grain and wine from Italy, wood and slaves from Dalmatia, and salt from its lagoons, and it imported silk and spices from the Orient. Moreover, the city of the doges dominated the eastwest and north-south exchanges by offering the goods of the West, woolen cloth, wood and raw materials coming from the Flanders, the Low Countries, Milan, Florence, and southern Germany, and by selling the products of the Orient, silk, brocades, fabric from Damascus, cotton, ivory, porcelain, and perfumes. Venice did not content itself with building a large merchant fleet and a powerful war navy, it also constituted a true empire made of trading concessions throughout the Byzantine Empire and trading posts located at the most strategic sites (Zara, Spalato, Ragusa, Durazzo, Corfu, Crete, Cyprus, Tana-Azov, Tyre, Sidon, etc.; see Map 13). Venice strongly contributed to the birth of European capitalism by developing banking, accountancy, foreign exchange, and credit markets, and by creating a solvent system of public finance. It favored innovations in the shipbuilding industry thanks to its Arsenal, and allowed for technological transfers from Asia and Egypt to the West in the fields of cane sugar production and processing, silk textiles, glassblowing, and jewellery. Its production of glass, spectacles, and books made it famous. It greatly encouraged the diffusion of Greek works in the West, and the University of Padua, very close to Venice, was one of the great intellectual centers of Europe.30 If Venice contributed to throw over the Alps, in the more northern part of the Great Corridor, the economic development of the Mediterranean area, its very success in that field eventually led to its marginalization when Northern Europe triumphed. According to Braudel, Venice dominated the European economy from approximately 1350 to 1510, Antwerp from 1510 till 1557, Genoa from 1557 to 1627, Amsterdam from 1627 to 1763, and finally London from 1763 till today. When the Ottomans captured Constantinople in 1453, Venice found itself deprived from its main asset. First, it quickly negotiated with the Ottoman Turks the maintenance of its trading rights, but 29. 30.

Angus Maddison, The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective (Paris : OECD, 2001), 52. Ibid., 19.

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in 1479, the Ottomans closed their access to the Black Sea, and in 1517, they took over Mamluk Egypt and terminated most of the Venetian trade with Asia, especially in spices. However, it is the discovery of America and its effects on the development of Northern Europe, which definitely downgraded Venice.

Venice Genoa Marseille

Naples

Constantinople

Syracuse Tunis

Antioch

Tyre

Alexandria

160 km Sea routes dominated by Venice

Map 13 The Venetian Empire from the Thirteenth to the Fifteenth Century

The great plain of Northern Italy Venice belongs to is dominated by the Po River and the city of Milan, which is located in that plain, between the Po and the Alps. Historically, Milan is the main terrestrial link between the Po and Rhine rivers. Milan is a strategic point of the Po-Rhine axis, a little like Dijon is a strategic point on the rival Rhone-Saône-Seine axis. Milan was founded by the Gauls (the Gallic Insubri) about 400 BC, and conquered in 222 BC by the Romans, who named it Mediolanum. The Romans saw at once its immense potential. They made it the crossroads of three major roads: the road to the south leading to the Po and to the Via Postumia linking Verona and Genoa; the road to the northwest leading to the Rhône, Aventicum (presentday Avenches, Switzerland) and the Rhine through the Valley of Aosta, the Simplon pass, and the Great St. Bernard Pass; and the road to the northeast leading to Regina Castra (Ratisbon) and the Danube through Lake Como and the St. Bernard Pass. Between 293 and 402, Milan was the capital of the prefecture of Italy. Milan became a part of Lombardy when the Lombards, a German tribe belonging to the Suebi group that came from Swabia, invaded

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the region in AD 568 and formed a kingdom. They conquered Milan in 569 and chose Pavia as their capital, but Milan became the great commercial city of that people that had a very keen commercial and financial sense. During the Middle Ages, the Lombards won a reputation as bankers and traders throughout Europe. In London, Lombard Street is famous for its banks. Its name comes from Lombard lenders established in the City in the thirteenth century. The two main commercial links were, undoubtedly, for Milan the one between the Po and the Rhine, but also the one between the Po and the Rhône, which lay at the heart of the Great Corridor. Till the Hundred Years’ War that opposed France to England from 1337 to 1453, for Milan as well as the whole Europe, the link with the Rhône had a much greater importance than the link with the Rhine. On the one hand, its access was easier; the connection between the Po and the Rhône passed then not by the Great St. Bernard Pass, as under the Roman Empire, but by Turin and the passes of Montgenèvre and Mont Cenis, directly towards Lyon, Dijon, Champagne, and the Flanders. On the other hand, most importantly, the Rhône runs towards the Mediterranean Sea, whereas the Rhine runs towards the North Sea. Since, generally, the heaviest products that have a low value per kilogram, like wood and metals, are transported from the periphery to the center, and the products with a high value per kilogram, in the opposite direction, as long as the core of the main European urbexplosion lay in the Mediterranean basin, the Rhône had a clear advantage over the Rhine simply because it ran in the right direction. However, this did not preclude the Rhine axis from prevailing when, because of wars or other inconveniencies, the Rhône axis was becoming hardly passable. In contrast, as soon as the economic domination passed from the north of Italy to the north of Europe, the Great Corridor axis moved slightly to the east, and the Rhine dominated, as it had started to do in the context of the Hundred Years’ War, which had made the French route too dangerous and unreliable.31 Even at that time, Milan succeeded to play its game well by establishing itself as a still more strategic link between the Po and the Rhine as it had been between the Po and the Rhône. This was done thanks to a better use of the St. Gotthard Pass, as will be seen. Strangely enough, the triumph of Northern Europe over Northern Italy and that of the Rhine over the Rhône were not necessarily bad news for Milan, since they allowed it to economically dominate Italy to an extent it had never reached at the time of the pre-eminence of the Rhône and Northern Italy. In fact, for the traffic coming from the Rhine, Milan is the natural entrance of Italy, which was not the case for the traffic coming from the Rhône. 31.

See Roger Brunet (ed.), Les Villes européennes (Paris: DATAR-Reclus, La Documentation française, 1989).

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Till the triumph of Northern Europe, the populations of Venice and Milan evolved about the same way. Milan was more populated than Venice from the fall of the Western Roman Empire till 800. Around 1050, Venice was about twice as large as Milan, but that did not last. Around 1300, the two populations were once again about equal. During the two following centuries, Milan was slightly more populated than Venice, but, in 1500, the two cities had once more the same population, about 100,000 inhabitants. Thereafter, Venice was increasingly marginalized, and Milan triumphed. Milan was known for its woolens, armaments, and silk industries, its traders, and Lombard financiers. The first important Italian port where the goods coming by the Rhône by ship could be discharged was Genoa, the great rival of Venice both in Italy and in the Byzantine Empire. The two cities had a lot of things in common. Both were city-states. Both had built commercial empires based on an alliance with the Byzantines. Both had an elected doge at their head. Both were patrician republics dominated by a limited number of great families. The great families of the “Republic of Saint-Georges,” as Genoa called itself, were the Dorias, the Fieschis, the Grimaldis (from which the Grimaldis of Monaco originate), and the Spinolas, as, in Venice, the great families were the Dandolos, the Tiepolos, the Foscaris, and the Franchettis, or, in Milan, the great families were the Della Torres, the Viscontis, the Sforzas, and the Borromeos. Genoa had a particularity: its four great families were excluded from the doge function, and the doge was elected for only two years. Two alliances marked the history of Genoa. The first one was concluded with Pisa, and it aimed at chasing the Arabs from the western Mediterranean Sea, in particular from Corsica and Sardinia. That alliance was fruitful, but, after a while, the two allies confronted each other, and, in 1284, Genoa triumphed over Pisa, and took away from it Corsica and Sardinia. The second alliance, made in 1261, involved Genoa and the Byzantine Empire of Nicea against Venice, and it allowed Genoa to establish trading posts in Kaffa, in Crimea, and in Tana, on the Don River by the Black Sea. In 1291, Genoa won a very important victory for the European economic history. It defeated the Moroccan fleet that controlled the Strait of Gibraltar, which allowed the European trade of the Mediterranean Sea to merge with that of the Atlantic. Venice benefited from that victory as much as Genoa itself. The two citystates confronted each other, and Venice temporarily vanquished in 1381. In 1407, Genoa created La Casa di San Giorgio, which was the very first public bank in European history. Genoa also launched Renaissance urbanism—the conscious arrangement of buildings into a predetermined form—by building

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the Via Nuova in 1470.32 Later, the city became the main banking center of Europe and dominated the European economy from approximately 1557 to 1627, according to Braudel. Genoa was the last city from Italy and the last Mediterranean city to dominate the European economy. Hohenberg and Lees sum up in the following way the situation that prevailed when the economic power shifted from Northern Italy to Northern Europe inside of the Great Corridor: A dual core developed whose major pole lay in Northern Italy, the minor one in the Low Countries … The two centers were linked mostly over land, despite the early importance of waterborne traffic. Finally, absolute leadership among core cities was changeable. Genoa struggled with Venice, while Milan and Florence remained handicapped by want of direct access to the sea. In the north, the fading of Bruges left a vacuum, but this posed little problem so long as financial leadership remained in the Mediterranean. In the mercantile period, the center of gravity shifted strongly toward the northwest. Indeed, the north Italian urban concentration, though it persisted, lost much of its systemic role. Not only did Marseille and Barcelona33 overtake Genoa as ports, but they did so as elements in the Atlantic, not the Mediterranean, network. A location on the Atlantic coastline favored the growth of the western ports, but the major urban centers remained within the northwestern core throughout the centuryby-century shifts from Antwerp to Amsterdam to London.”34 The fourth great economic city of Northern Italy was Florence, which was headed by three famous families: the Medicis, the most illustrious of them all, the Bardis, and the Strozzis. Florence is a “bridge city” of the interior located in Tuscany, the country of the Etruscans, on the Arno, whose mouth separates the cities of Pisa and Livorno, and leads to the Gulf of Genoa. Originally, about 200 BC, Florentia was founded at the point where the Via Cassia going from Arezzo to Bologna crossed the Arno River. Under the Roman Empire, Florentia-Florence was the crossroads of three important Roman “Viae”: one coming from Rome, called Via Flaminia, another going to Pisae-Pisa and Genua-Genoa through the Via Aemilia Scauri, and the third one, called Via Annia, going to Bononia-Bologna, the Po (called Padus), and

32.

33.

34.

Anthony Edwin James Morris, History of Urban Form: Before the Industrial Revolutions (Harlow: Pearson Education and Prentice Hall, 1994), 157: “Renaissance urbanism spread slowly from Italy to other European countries, taking some seventy-five years to reach France and a further eighty-five years to become established in England.” Barcelona was held by the Moors for 88 years (from 713 to 801). It was regained by the Franks, who made it the capital of the county of Barcelona. It prospered from the twelfth century. Later, from 1778, Barcelona was permitted to commence trading with Latin America, and further growth ensued. Paul M. Hohenberg and Lynn Hollen Lees, op. cit., 161–163.

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Patavium-Padova-Padua. Those routes met at Florence because, there, the Arno River is narrow enough to favor bridge-building. Moreover, Florence is located close to the middle of the Pisa-Florence-Ravenna axis that corresponds to the main east-west pass across the Appennine mountains. At the time Venice came to supplant Amalfi, Florence supplanted Sienna in Tuscany. In the struggle that opposed Venice and Genoa during and after the Crusades, Milan backed both horses, while Florence clearly supported Genoa. There were at that time two main networks of trade fairs and cities, which contested the economic domination of Europe. The Franco-Italian network was based on the Rhône axis, while the Italo-German network rested on the Rhine, the Elbe, and the Danube. The Franco-Italian network included the cities of Florence, Genoa, and Paris, as well as the trade fairs of Piacenza (close to the Po), Lyon, Chalon-sur-Saône, Geneva, Besançon, and Champagne (Troyes, Bar-sur-Aube, Provins, and Lagny-sur-Marne). Florence played a major role in that network, whose main financiers were the Medicis, but also the Bardis and the Strozzis. The Italo-German network grouped together the cities of Venice and Augsburg as well as the trade fairs of Bolzano (between Venice and Augsburg), Nuremberg, Frankfurt, Leipzig, Freiberg, Breslau, and Antwerp. At the head of that network were Augsburg and its two fabulously rich families: the Welsers and, above all, the family of Jacob Fugger who financed not only the activities of the network, but also the Habsburgs and the popes. The fortune of the Medicis was based on banking activities, trade with the Orient, woolen cloth production, and the monopoly of alum (used for tanning skins, for dyeing, and in medicine). As for the Fuggers, they detained the monopoly of mercury, and they were controlling the European production of lead, silver, and copper. Hohenberg and Lees sum up the evolution of the rivalry between the two commercial axes in the following terms: “Within the Italian core area the earliest ports were Bari and Amalfi. Venice surpassed them before AD 1000, while Genoa grew to strength in the succeeding two centuries. From the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries Florence and Milan disputed the leadership of the two great Italian ports. Pisa, Lucca, Pavia, and others also had days in the sun. Throughout, however, the place of Northern Italy as a key center of the European network remained secure. A similar changeable stability characterized the axis connecting Italy with the other urban center in the Netherlands. Until the eleventh century Germany and the Rhine were preferred. Then, with the development of the great fairs of Champagne, the French route prevailed until the troubles of the fourteenth century again caused Germany to come to the fore. By the sixteenth century a variety of

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routes coexisted. Their relative importance can be gauged by the shifting commercial fortunes of the cities—principally Frankfurt, Lyon, Geneva, and Augsburg—that had taken over much of the linkage role from the fairs.”35 That quotation underlines two topodynamic phenomena: on the one hand, the shift, within the Great Corridor, of the economic leadership from Southern Italy, dominated by the ports of Amalfi and Bari, to Northern Italy, dominated by the ports of Venice and Genoa, and, on the other hand, the competition, the interchangeable character, and the interdependence of the Rhône and Rhine axes whose extremely supple integrated system constitutes the true spinal column of the Great Corridor. Florence played its role of leader in the Franco-Italian network to such a point that it is considered as the real birthplace of capitalism, with its great ness and miseries. The founder of the Medici fortune was Giovanni Medici. He started building his empire by developing trade with the Orient and obtaining the monopoly of alum. Progressively, he built upon this base the largest European banking and commercial enterprise. He had 10,000 workers and 300 firms just for woolen cloth production alone. He was a true capitalist, and this was taking place in 1400, before the discovery of America and the emergence of Protestantism (which somewhat contradicts the thesis of Max Weber, who saw in Protestantism the historical base of capitalism). When Giovanni Medici launched its enterprise, a pre-capitalist context already existed in Florence. For example, in 1378, in Florence, the wool carders revolted and protested against their exploitation by unscrupulous bosses.36 Another city of the ancient kingdom of the Etruscans deserves a mention: Bologna, which was called Felsina by the Etruscans and Bononia at the time of the Roman Empire, when it was located at the intersection of the Via Aemilia and the Via Annia. The Via Aemilia went from Ancona, on the Adriatic Sea, to Piazenza and Turin through Ariminium-Rimini, MutinaModena, and Parma, while the Via Annia linked Florence to Padova and Aquileia on the Gulf of Venice. Moreover, Bologna lies close to the Reno River that runs towards Ravenna on the Adriatic Sea. Bologna has never been a great, powerful, or major commercial city. However, this is where the very first European university was born, around 1088, under the protection of the Catholic Church. The greatest contribution of the medieval universities was their inclusion of both theological and

35. 36.

Ibid., 64–66. Raymond De Roover estimated that, in 1457, the rich represented only 2% of Florence’s population, and the middle class, 16%, while the poor people constituted 54% of the population, and the destitute, 28%. De Roover, The Rise and Decline of the Medici Bank, 1397–1494 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963).

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non-theological matters. For example, aside from theology, Bologna University became famous first for its teaching civil and canon law. The mixing of theological and non-theological matters probably resulted from the fact that, after the fall of Rome, the Church had to carry out such a major social function that, when it created universities, it considered necessary to open, at the side of faculties of theology, faculties of philosophy, medicine, and law. It was around 1200 that the faculties of medicine and philosophy were added (in the case of Salerno and Montpellier, the medical schools had been founded before the universities). In the beginning, the faculties of law taught both civil and canon law, but in 1219, Pope Honorius III prohibited civil law. In France, civil law re-entered universities just 463 years later, in 1679, thanks to Chancellor Michel Le Tellier.

THE GREAT CORRIDOR AND THE FOUNDING OF THE FIRST UNIVERSITIES Many universities have been founded by the Catholic Church: at Bologna (Italy) around 1088, at Paris (France) around 1150, at Oxford (England) around 1167, at Salerno (Italy) in 1173, at Vicenza (Italy) in 1204, at Palencia (Spain) in 1208, at Arezzo (Italy) in 1215, at Padova-Padua (Italy) in 1222, at Vercelli (Italy) in 1228, at Cambridge (England) in 1229, at Toulouse (France) in 1229, at Salamanca (Spain) in 1243, at Valladolid (Spain) in 1250, at Sevilla-Seville (Spain) in 1254, at Montpellier (France) in 1289 (the School of Medicine of Montpellier had been founded in 1221), and at Heidelberg (Germany) in 1385. It must be noted that the School of medicine of Salerno in Italy had been founded as early as during the ninth century and that in the Moslem world, high-learning institutions existed long before Christian universities were founded (the Qarawiyin Mosque of Fes had a Koranic university from 857). In Western Europe, the first universities appeared along the central axis of the Great Corridor. Bologna, Paris, Oxford, Vicenza, Arezzo, Padova-Padua, Vercelli, and Cambridge are close to that axis, and the cities of Salerno and Montpellier are not too far from it. The second generation of universities was born to the southwest of the central axis, in Spain and Portugal with Palencia, Salamanca, Valladolid, Coimbra, Lisbon, Sevilla-Seville, but also in France and Italy with Angers, Orléans, Toulouse, Pavia, and Sienna. The third generation appeared in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and it mainly included universities situated to the northeast of the central axis: Treviso (Italy) in 1318, Prague (Bohemia) in 1348, Krakow (Poland ) in 1364, Vienna (Austria) in 1365, Fünfkirchen-Pécs (Hungary) in 1367, Erfurt (Germany) in 1379, Heidelberg (Germany) in 1385, Cologne (Germany) in 1388, and Ofen-Budapest (Hungary) in 1389.

Another major contribution of medieval universities came from their relative freedom despite the dominating influence of the Church. From its very beginning, the university of Bologna was under the control of its students. Elsewhere, universities often belonged to professor corporations. Occasionally, students and professors had to fight to preserve their freedom. It happened in Paris in 1200 and in Oxford in 1208–1209. The popes generally (but not always) favored university freedom at the expense of the control by the local bishops.

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They granted charts guaranteeing the autonomy of universities. It must never be forgotten that the freedom of thought and the scientific method were fostered by people like Roger Bacon, who was a English Franciscan theologian, philosopher, and scientist teaching at the universities of Paris and Oxford.

s THE FORMING OF FRANCE, A TERRITORIAL STATE The fact that the first university was born at the center of the new North Italian urbexplosion is no surprise. In contrast, the second one was founded in the semi-periphery, in the capital of the main European territorial state, France. Very rapidly, the University of Paris, later called La Sorbonne, became the most important intellectual center of Western Europe. Between 1253 and 1275, the Franciscans attracted saint Bonaventure and Roger Bacon, and the Dominicans, saint Albertus Magnus and the illustrious saint Thomas Aquinas to the University. Saint Bonaventure and saint Thomas Aquinas were Italian. Saint Albertus Magnus was German, and Roger Bacon, English. The University of Paris was more truly European than any present-day university of the United Europe, for the simple reason that the common language of all European universities during the Middle Ages was Latin, making it easy for any professor to move from one institution to another. The rise of Paris as a great intellectual center coincided with the rise of France as the dominating nation-state of Europe. The site of Paris appears to have been occupied from 2000 BC. The Gallic city of the Celtic Parisii was founded during the third century BC. In 52 BC, it was conquered by the Romans, who named it Lutetia and transformed the small town into a major city. Paris has grown out of the “île de la Cité,” which allowed to cross the Seine rather easily. Under the Roman Empire, Lutetia was at a crossroads. The main road link between the Loire and the Rhine passed by Lutetia, as well as the main link between the English Channel and the Mediterranean Sea through the Seine, the Saône, and the Rhône. Similarly, the best way to go from Rome and Lugdunum-Lyon to England was through Lutetia-Paris and Gesoriacum-Boulogne. Lutetia transformed itself into Paris during the Roman Empire, precisely in AD 360, when Julian the Apostate, prefect of the Gaul, proclaimed himself Roman emperor in Lutetia, which he renamed Paris. Clovis chose Paris as the capital of the kingdom of the Franks in 508. However, this had no long-run effects since, at the death of Clovis in 511, the kingdom of the Franks was divided between his sons. Actually, modern France goes back to the Verdun Treaty of 843, when Charles the Great ’s empire was divided up in three parts, and Francia occidentalis was attributed to Charles the Bald. The latter having lost the battle of Andernach in 876 to

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the benefit of Louis III, Louis the German’s son, the territory of Francia occidentalis was cut by the Treaty of Ribemont of 880. Till 987, the Carolingians reigned over France. However, that year, the Carolingian Louis V died without a son. The legitimate heir to the throne was then Louis V’s uncle Charles of France who, in 977, had accepted the title of duke of Lower Lorraine from his first cousin through his mother, Otto II, of the Liudolfing dynasty, emperor of the Germanic Holy Roman Empire, to whom Charles of France had taken an oath of allegiance. The main lords of France were reluctant to see a vassal of the Germanic emperor ascend the throne of France, and they supported Hugh Capet’s claims to the throne. It must be said that Hugh Capet’s grandfather, Robert I, had briefly been king of France in 922 and 923, and Robert’s brother, Eudes, had also borne that title from 888 to 898 in association with the Carolingian Charles III the Simple. The duke of Lower Lorraine claimed the throne of France, and captured Laon and Soissons in 988, but in 991, he was taken prisoner by the bishop of Laon, who handed him to Hugh Capet. Charles of France died in captivity in 993, but his male descendants, heirs of the rights of the Carolingians over the throne of France, disappeared just during the thirteenth century. In 979, Charles of France had founded the city of Brussels and made it the capital of his duchy of Lower Lorraine. As for Hugh Capet, he was the son of Hugh the Great, Count of Paris. From the accession of the Capetians to the throne of France, Paris was the undisputed center of France, even when Versailles came to be its capital. Above all a political city, Paris also emerged as an economic center thanks to the two main commercial axes that crossed it: the Orléans-Paris-Bruges axis linking the Loire, the Seine, and the Scheldt, and the Rouen-ParisMarseille axis linking the Seine, the Saône, and the Rhône. The introduction in Paris, around 670, of the silver “denier” (called denarii in Latin) accelerated the pace of economic development. Up to then, all the trade of the Roman Empire and of the countries stemming from it had been dominated by gold and, especially, by the Roman golden shilling, which had continued to be used after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Seen at the beginning as a symbol of economic and commercial regression, the appearance on the market of the silver money, which added to the existing golden money and ultimately came to replace it, increased the monetary mass, augmented the liquidity of exchanges, came to favor trade, and, at last, contributed to stimulate the urban and economic growth.37 The use of silver deniers spread along the axis of the Great Corridor, from Paris to Northern Italy, and, from there, it diffused to the rest of Europe from the center towards the periphery. 37.

Henri Pirenne, Mahomet et Charlemagne (Paris : Librairie Félix Alcan, and Brussels: Nouvelle société d’édition, 1937).

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When the Sorbonne was founded around 1150, Paris was already one of the largest cities of Europe, and France was its most populated country. In 1000, the population of Paris was just about 23,000 inhabitants, but, in 1200, it already reached 115,000. Its growth went on, and Paris had 230,000 inhabitants in 1300 and 275,000 in 1400. Because of the Hundred Years’ War, it fell to 230,000 inhabitants in 1500. That war came close to hand over France to the kings of England from the French Plantagenet dynasty (of the House of Anjou). The French possessions of the Plantagenets in France were considerable since the marriage, in 1152, of Henry II, heir of Anjou, Touraine, Maine, and Normandy, with Alienor of Aquitaine, who was the heir of the duchy of Aquitaine (Guyenne), Poitou, Saintonge, Auvergne, Perigord, Angoumois and Limousin. The Plantagenets claimed the throne of France as the descendants of Isabel of France, spouse of Edward II of England and sister of Louis X the Stubborn, Philip V the Tall, and Charles IV the Fair, who, after the death of the latter in 1328, left no direct male heir. The Valois, descendants of Charles of Valois (uncle of Isabel and her three brothers), fought with the Plantagenets over the throne of France. They came very close to lose the war, but Joan of Arc intervened and succeeded to completely reverse the situation from 1429, at a time when the territory controlled by Charles VII, the king of France, had very much shrunk. The Hundred Years’ War ended with the battle of Formigny in 1450, where the English were chased out of Normandy, and with the battle of Castillon in 1453, where they were chased out of Aquitaine. Calais was the only possession the king of England kept in France. The Hundred Years’ War ended in 1453, the same year Constantinople was captured by the Ottomans. It must be noted that the kings of England stopped bearing the title of king of France only in 1801, 348 years after they had lost the Hundred Years’ War. The importance of France at that epoch, when Northern Italy dominated economically, was not limited to the political influence of its kings. France was the most populated country of Europe. For instance, in 1200, at the time of Philip August of France and John Lackland of England, the population of France was four times higher than that of England. On the other hand, of all the languages and dialects that were trying to supplant Latin, which was not spoken anymore by anybody, except for priests and intellectuals, French, that is, to say the oïl language of Paris, was the only language able to rival Latin in the courts and universities. Between 1000 and 1453, at the end of the Hundred Years’ War, French was, at various periods, an official language of France, England, the four Latin states of the Orient, the Latin empire of Constantinople, and Sicily, under the Norman House of Hauteville. It was also used in Burgundy, Provence, the Flanders, and at the Diet of the Germanic Holy Roman Empire, along with Latin and German dialects. Richard Cœurde-Lion (the Lion-Heart), king of England, never spoke any other language

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than French, and when Charles of Habsburg became Charles I of Spain in 1516, before becoming “German” emperor Charles V in 1519, he did not speak Spanish. His mother tongue was French, and he had been raised in French in Ghent and Brussels. When Marco Polo came back from China and decided in 1298 to relate his trip in a book, he dictated the book in French (his book is entitled Le devisement du monde or Le livre des merveilles du monde). As for English, it is considered that modern English was born about AD 1500. It was preceded by four Old English dialects. During its rise, English had to compete with French, the language of the court until the end of the Hundred Years’ War in 1453. French persisted despite the fact that the Statute of Pleading had declared in 1362 that court proceedings had to be henceforth conducted in English, though “enrolled in Latin.” In Spain, Castilian prevailed over Catalan, Basque, Galician, and other regional languages at about the same epoch. In Germany, where numerous local dialects coexisted, German was derived from the Middle German dialect and established by Martin Luther in the sixteenth century thanks to the Protestant Reform. In Italy also, dialects blossomed. Italian appeared in a literary form at the court of Frederick II of Sicily, the Hohenstaufen heir of the House of Hauteville who reigned over Sicily from 1296 till 1337, and it came to be recognized with Dante and The Divine Comedy, written between 1306 and 1321.

s THE EXPANSION OF THE GERMANIC HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE If the evolution of the semi-periphery of the urbexplosion dominated by Northern Italy led to the forming of a unified territorial state in France (Francia occidentalis), the evolution was completely different in the Germanic Francia orientalis. For from tending towards the formation of a unified state, the Germanic Holy Roman Empire evolved towards a rather confederal formula respecting the privileges of a large number of principalities, duchies, cities, episcopal jurisdictions, and imperial fiefs. It must be stressed that the Germanic Holy Roman Empire included Germanic territories, but also Slavic (Bohemia, Moravia), Italian (the north of Italy, with the exception of Venice), Francophone (Francophone Brabant, imperial Burgundy, imperial Hainault, and Provence), and Dutch ones (Dutch-speaking Brabant and present-day Netherlands; as for the Dutch-speaking Flanders, it was a part of France at the origin; it included some parts of the Germanic Holy Roman Empire from about 1000, and it became entirely a part of the Germanic Holy Roman Empire in 1526; when, in 1556, the Habsburgs’ possessions were split between the Spanish and the German branches of the family, the Low Countries, which included the Flanders and Brabant, were attributed to the Spanish branch, and they stopped being part of the Holy Empire).

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Geography explains, to a large extent, the contrasted evolution of the two Franciae. To the southwest of the Great Corridor, if we neglect the cases of Brittany, which was relatively independent till the end of the tenth century, and Provence, which really became a part of France just in 1481, France was already limited by its natural borders: the English Channel, the Atlantic, the Pyrenees, and the Mediterranean Sea. It could only expand in the direction of the Great Corridor, which required a great cohesion and considerable resources since the Great Corridor was the object of everyone’s desire (in fact, to extend their domain, the Normans had to go out of the French natural borders, and conquer England, Sicily, Southern Italy, and the principality of Antioch). On the other hand, the Germanic Francia orientalis experienced the opposed situation, in the sense that the expansion towards the northeast was not only possible, but relatively easy. That expansion marked the whole history of Germany. One of the most intensive periods of that expansion spread from 1125, with the accession of Lothair of Supplinburg to the German throne (before becoming the Holy Roman Emperor in 1133), to about 1352, when the devastations of the Black Death stopped that expansion for a while. The possibility for the Germanic Empire to expand relatively easily towards the northeast diminished the internal tensions and the need to establish a strong central power. This led to the adoption of a very flexible imperial system which favored the constitution of new vassal territories in the periphery. Cologne, situated on the Rhine clearly in the Great Corridor, benefited from that flexibility and from the expansion to the northeast. Located only 70 kilometers from Aix-la-Chapelle-Aachen, Charles the Great’s capital, that episcopal city enjoyed, like so many other German cities, a great freedom within the empire. Its founding went back to AD 50, at the time the Romans had decided to build a bridge on the Rhine at that site and to create there a colony they called Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensis. The new town rapidly became an important crossroads. It was linked to the rest of the Roman Empire by three roads: one coming from Lutetia-Paris and Gesoriacum-Boulogne, another from Augusta Trevorum-Trier (in modern Germany) along the Rhine, and the road following the Rhine to Lugdunum Batavorum-Leiden (in presentday Netherlands). Terrestrial crossroads and ecclesiastic territory, Cologne was also a major port which, together with those of Lübeck and Hamburg, was involved in the founding of the Teutonic Hanseatic League, which played a major role in the Germanic expansion towards the northeast, the Baltic Sea, as well as Prussia and Poland. To understand how a Rhine city situated in the middle of the Great Corridor came to take part in that endeavor, one has to go back to the Crusades. In 1190, in St John of Acre, the Fraternity of the Teutonic Knights was formed to take care of sick persons. In 1198, it became the Order of the Teutonic Knights. In 1226, its mission was re-oriented when Pope Honorius III

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and Conrad of Mazovia, duke of Poland, asked the Order to conquer for Christianity the part of Prussia that was pagan as well as the Baltic pagan territories. The Order of the Teutonic Knights was so successful in that mission that, around 1400, it controlled a large territory, which covered present-day Estonia, Latvia, most of Lithuania, and important parts of Poland, including Danzig-Gdansk. Around 1200, the Holy Roman Empire had about 250 towns west of the River Elbe and only ten to the east. Two centuries later there were 1,500 to the west and the same number to the east.38 On that political foundation, the Germans conceived the project to erect a commercial empire. An economic association of the Baltic States was created, which existed from 1150 to 1250. That association created the German Hansa in Visby in 1161. Its objective was to develop trade by resorting to accounting and credit. Very early, Lübeck, which was the closest Baltic port to the Great Corridor, became the center of this Hansa. In 1241, Hamburg, whose port served the North Sea, and Lübeck signed an important accord with the object of protecting the passage between the Baltic Sea and the North Sea. It is in 1259 that the German Hansa gave birth to a league constituted of Lübeck, Hamburg, Wismar, and Rostock. In 1281, a similar commercial association was formed in London between Cologne and other more western German cities. In 1358, both associations merged and formed the famous German Hanseatic League, which came to include more than twenty cities most of which, like Bremen, Lübeck, Hamburg, and Cologne, figured among the largest German towns of the period (at its climax, the Hanseatic League included up to one hundred cities). At that time, Cologne had 58,000 inhabitants. Contrary to the commercial cities belonging to the commercial empires of Venice and Genoa, the cities of the Hanseatic League were submitted to no other city. They were equal partners in a freely agreed association. Thus, when the Venetian maritime empire collapsed, its vassals, like Trogir (Croatia), Rhodes, or Corfu, crumbled (even Ragusa-Dubrovnik eventually did after a period of glory), while, after the decline of the Hanseatic League from about 1400 and its dissolution in 1669, the cities of London, Antwerp, Frankfurt, Bremen, and Hamburg kept going. The products imported from the Baltic were natural resources, mainly wood, amber, and minerals, whereas the cities located closer to the central axis of the Great Corridor exported transformed products. For example, Cologne distinguished itself by the quality of its textile industry and by its production of books, leather, enamel, and metalworking. Its region also exported wine. The fact that such activities took place in an episcopal city was no exception 38.

Anthony Edwin James Morris, History of Urban Form: Before the Industrial Revolutions, op. cit., 136; E.A. Gutkin, International History of City Development (New York: The Free Press, and London: Collier-Macmillan, 1969).

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in the Middle Ages. The Church was at that epoch an important factor of urbanization and economic as well as intellectual development. In fact, the four main agents of medieval civilization seem to have been the cities, castles, monasteries, and universities. Two of the four institutions, the monasteries and the universities, were under the Church’s rule. As for the cities, many of which were also ruled by the Church, their role increased through time, and they gradually began to wrest the leading role from the monasteries and the castles somewhere in the twelfth century. In the case of the castles, the very symbol of feudalism, urbanization and trade profoundly disrupted their role. In the domains of the castles and manors, peasants were “attached” to the land they cultivated by various feudal bondages or by serfdom. Thus the very excesses of feudalism nurtured urbanization, since those who fled feudalism took refuge in the cities, which made them free (cities gave freedom to those who settled inside their walls). The more cities developed, the more the oppressed were attracted by the urban life in their pursuit of freedom and wealth. This interaction resulted in a major crisis of feudalism that ultimately resulted in its death as well as in the development of medieval cities. To the east of France, a counter-power existed to the Catholic Church: the Germanic Holy Roman Empire, whose capital was for a long time Ratisbon. Around 1000, that Bavarian city was the most important of Central Europe. It had then about 27,000 inhabitants, almost three times as much as the 10,000 inhabitants it had in 450. For centuries, the Germanic emperor was choosing the location of the Diet’s meetings between various cities, Besançon, Frankfurt, 39 Ratisbon, Spire, Augsburg, Nuremberg, Worms, and Mayence (Mainz). But from 1663 till 1806, when Napoleon put an end to the Germanic Holy Roman Empire, Ratisbon was the Diet’s permanent seat. Ratisbon-Regensburg is located at the junction of the Regen River and the Danube, in the precise area the Celts originally came from. Like so many cities, it grew around a Roman bridge. The Celtic Radasbona became the Roman Castra Regina in AD 179. Ratisbon was a strategic point on the frontier of the Roman Empire. It was the main entrance to the huge territory located north of the Danube and east of the Elbe. Four roads met there: the first came from Lugdunum-Lyon through Burgundy; the second came from Mediolanum-Milan, through the Lake of Como and the St. Bernard Pass; the third came from Verona through Trento and the Brenner Pass; and the fourth one led to Carnuntum-Petronell (32 kilometers east of Vienna) and

39.

Located at a key crossing of the Main River, where ancient trading routes converged, Frankfurt (which means “ford of the Franks”) was for many centuries one of the most important commercial cities in Germany. Its site was first mentioned in 793. In 794, Charlemagne held an imperial convocation there. From 876, it was the de facto capital of “Francia Orientalis,” the East Frankish Empire.

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Aquincum-Budapest. Thanks to its location, Ratisbon became a commercial center and the capital of the Duchy of Bavaria for 715 years, from 530 to 1245, and then of the Germanic Holy Roman Empire. Ratisbon is the symbol of the Germanization of the Empire of Occident. Under Charles the Great and his successors, the Empire of Occident was essentially European. Thus, at the death of Charles the Great, the title of emperor passed to his Carolingian descendants: Louis the Pious, king of Aquitaine, Lothair I, king of Italy, Louis II, king of Italy, Charles the Bald, king of France, Charles III the Fat, king of Swabia, etc. In 896, the title went to Arnulf, king of Germany, a bastard of Carloman, king of Italy and Charles the Fat’s brother. Thereafter, the title went to Charles the Great’s descendants through women: for example, Louis III the Blind, king of Provence (from the House of Vienne, in France), and Berengar I, king of Italy (from the House of Friuli). Up until 962, the title of emperor was basically European. That year, in Rome, Pope John XII crowned a new emperor who did not stem from the Carolingians, but rather from the East Saxon House of Liudolfing. That emperor, Otto I the Great, was the founder of the Germanic Holy Roman Empire, which included at that time only the kingdoms of Germany, Burgundy (including Provence), and Italy (limited to Northern Italy). France was no longer recognizing her belonging to the empire (the replacement of the Carolingians by the Capetians on the throne of France in 987 was, to a great extent, a result of that). Step by step, the Holy Roman Empire became increasingly German and decreasingly Roman. The Liudolfing emperors were succeeded, in 1027, by the Franconian-Salian emperors, in 1155 by the Hohenstaufen emperor Frederick I Barbarossa and his descendants, in 1209 by a Brunswick-Guelf emperor, Otto IV, in 1220 again by Hohenstaufen emperors, and, from 1273, by Habsburg, Wittelsbach, and Luxembourg emperors. The Habsburgs monopolized the title from 1437 onward, with the sole exception of Charles-Albert of Bavaria, who was emperor from 1742 to 1745. In the struggles between all those competing dynasties, Ratisbon too often chose the losers. In the illustrious conflict between the Ghibellines who were sympathetic to the House of Hohenstaufen and the Guelfs who were siding with the papacy, Ratisbon chose the Guelfs, and the Hohenstaufen emperors took their revenge by imposing the Wittelsbachs as dukes of Bavaria. The Wittelsbachs transferred the capital of Bavaria from Ratisbon to Munich in 1255. Much later, Bavaria sided with Napoleon. However, Napoleon abolished the Diet of the Germanic Holy Roman Empire, which was located in Ratisbon. Still later, Bavaria opposed Prussia and the Hohenzollerns. Prussia and the Hohenzollerns won, and the role of de facto capital of Germany that Ratisbon had played for centuries went to Berlin. And thus a very important capital ended up not being capital at all. In fact, as early as in 1000, the city had

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begun to slowly decline because its comparative advantages decreased with the development along the Danube of competing cities and with the building of alternate bridges downstream of the Danube. In 1500, its population had already fallen to only 15,000 inhabitants. In AD 200, Cologne and Ratisbon were Roman cities located at the border of the Roman Empire. The site of Hamburg has never been part of the Roman Empire. The founding of that city goes back to 804, when Charles the Great decided to build a fort at the point where the Alster River enters the Elbe estuary, which opens onto the North Sea. In 1000, when Ratisbon was dominating its region with its 27,000 inhabitants, Hamburg was still a small town of three or four thousand inhabitants. Yet, two hundred years later, in 1200, the population of Hamburg had almost caught up with that of Ratisbon: Hamburg had 20,000 and Ratisbon, 24,000. Those simple statistics give an idea of the northeastward expansion that was taking place. The rise of Hamburg was accompanied by the rise of its twin city, Lübeck, originally a Slavic principality become a German town in 1143, located 14 kilometers from the Baltic Sea, between the Trave and Wakenirz rivers that run into the Baltic. Both cities are located on the most important plain of Northern Europe, in the very fertile region of Schleswig-Holstein. The link between Hamburg and Lübeck, which is also a link between the North and Baltic seas, had a highly strategic character in the context of the northeastward expansion. This explains why the two cities have been at the heart of the Hanseatic League. The expansion of the Germanic Holy Roman Empire towards the east put the empire in contact with Slavic populations, the Czechs and the Slovaks, who had settled in Bohemia and Moravia, as well as the Magyars become the Hungarians. The Slavs have an Indo-European origin, while the Hungarians are Uralics (like the Finns and the Estonians). All were attracted by the wealth of the Great Corridor. Thus the Germanic expansion from the Great Corridor towards the east met with the inverse movement of less developed populations attracted by the Great Corridor. That phenomenon was nothing new. It has been observed repeatedly throughout history (let us think about the Hyksos in front of the Egyptians, the Slavs in front of the Byzantine Empire, or the Mongols in front of the Chinese). Most of the time, those encounters result in decent compromises. This is what happened in Bohemia, in Moravia, and in Hungary. Bohemia-Moravia became a fief of the Germanic Holy Roman Empire in 1041 and Hungary, in 1044–1046. Prague, the capital of Bohemia, is located on the Vltava River (Moldau in German), which is an affluent of the Elbe, at a site where crossing the river is made easier by fords and a topography which favors bridge-building. Its main strategic interest comes from its position between the Elbe and the Danube. The Romans had begun building a road from Carnuntum-Petronell

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(32 kilometers east of Vienna), on the Danube, to the Elbe, and the site of Prague was precisely on the way. Unfortunately, they were unable to finish it. Two major axes structure the German world: on the one hand, the Rhine, and, on the other hand, the Elbe-Danube axis of which Prague is the node. Controlling this axis was essential in order to carry the eastward expansion movement to a successful conclusion. Prague was built around two castles belonging to the Premyslid family during the ninth century. Its population grew rapidly from about 1200. From that date to 1350, it went from 22,000 to 77,000 inhabitants. Its integration to the Germanic Holy Roman Empire was such that, from 1355, it became its capital when the king of Bohemia, Charles I of Luxembourg, became the Germanic Emperor Charles IV. Born in Prague, Charles IV was a great emperor: he had founded the University of Prague in 1347, and he is remembered for having given the Germanic Holy Roman Empire a charter that lasted from 1356 to 1806, that is, for 450 years. At his time, Prague had become an important commercial and financial center and it had clearly supplanted Ratisbon in Central Europe. Its merchants and craftsmen played a major role in that city, which linked together the urbexplosion of Northern Italy, the Danube region, and the network of the Hanseatic cities of the North and Baltic seas. To the southeast of Prague, Budapest experienced at that time a stable but less striking growth. In 1350, its population still was just 18,000 inhabitants; this was only less than a quarter of Prague’s population. However, in 1500, the population of Budapest reached 25,000, while Prague’s population had decreased to 70,000. The Magyars-Hungarians have the same Uralic origin as the Finns, Lapps, or Estonians, who all, like the Hungarians, speak Finno-Ugric languages. Around 900, the Magyars settled in the plains of Pannonia (present-day western Hungary), whose part located to the south of the Danube had belonged to the Roman Empire (Buda was part of the Roman Empire, while its neighbor located on the other side of the Danube, Pest, had not).40 Their migration is one of the many that occurred between 400 and 1000, from the massifs of Ural and Altai situated in the Mongolo-American Corridor towards the western part of the Great Corridor: for example, the migrations of the Uralic tribes of the Finns and Magyars or the Altaic tribes of the Huns, the Bulgars, the Avars, the Turks (the Avars’ former vassals), the Khazars, the Pechenegs, and the Kipchaks-Polovtsy-Kumans. If, among the Slavs, the Czechs, followed by the Poles, were those who got closer to the future North European pole of the Great Corridor, among the Uralo-Atlaics, it is the

40.

Budapest originates from three urban nuclei: Obuda, which is located on the right (western) bank of the Danube where the Roman fortress of Aquincum lay, Buda, centered on a commanding hill of the right bank, and Pest, built on the extensive plain of the left (eastern) bank of the Danube.

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Magyars who did. It must be stressed that, at that time, getting closer to the region of origin of the Franks was less tempting than getting closer, as the Bulgars did, to the heart of the Byzantine urbexplosion. That being said, the Magyars and the Czechs did not make a bad choice. The Arpad’s dynasty presided over the establishment of the Magyars in what was to become Hungary. It reigned over Hungary from about 900 until 1301. However, Hungary became a kingdom only in 1000, when Pope Sylvester II sent saint Stephen, first king of Hungary, the famous crown of saint Stephen to express his gratitude for Stephen’s efforts in converting the Magyars. To the Arpad’s dynasty succeeded the French Capetian House of Anjou, founded before 1300, which reigned over Hungary, Poland, and the Latin State of Constantinople (that House must not be confused with the Plantagenet House of Anjou, founded in 878, that reigned over England and Jerusalem, nor with the Valois House of Anjou, founded around 1350, which reigned over Anjou, Maine, and Provence until 1481). After the House of Anjou came the House of Luxembourg, which reigned over both Hungary and Bohemia. One of its members, Sigismund II of Luxembourg, king of Hungary from 1387 to 1437, king of Bohemia from 1419 to 1437, and then Germanic Roman emperor from 1433 to 1437, put an end to the Western Schism by convoking the council of Constance in 1414. Before that council, between 1378 and 1417, the Catholic Church had two competing popes, one in Avignon and the other in Rome. After the council of Constance, only the pope of Rome, Pope Martin V, was accepted unanimously, and Rome was recognized as the unique center of Catholicism. At the death of Sigismund, the thrones of Hungary and Bohemia passed to his son-in-law Albert of Habsburg, and then to Albert’s son, Ladislas Posthumus. When Ladislas died without a descendant in 1457, the kingdom of Bohemia went to George of the House of Podebrady, and the kingdom of Hungary, to the former son-in-law of George, Matthias I Corvinus, who extended his kingdom to Silesia, Moravia, and Austria. At the death of George of Podebrady in 1471, Bohemia passed to Vladislav II, of the Lithuano-Polish dynasty of the Jagiellons, who was the grandson of Albert of Habsburg through his mother and, as such, also inherited Hungary in 1490 at the death of Matthias I Corvinus, whose widow he married. Hungary and Bohemia were once again united. In 1526, at the death of Louis II, son of Vladislav II, the two crowns went to Ferdinand I of Habsburg, who had married Louis II’s sister. Ferdinand I became Germanic Roman emperor in 1558. From 1526 to 1918, the Habsburgs reigned over Hungary, Bohemia, and Austria. All that complex succession of dynasties illustrates the extent to which the Germanic world of the Holy Empire, the Uralic world of the Hungarians, and the Slavic world of the Poles and Lithuanians ultimately almost merged under the protection of the Catholic Church, in the context of the eastward expansion of Francia orientalis.

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s THE GESTATION OF THE NORTHERN EUROPE URBEXPLOSION At the fall of Rome, at the beginning of the Great Ebb, the part of Europe located to the north of the English Channel and to the northeast of the Rhine downstream from Cologne was very little developed and even less urbanized. Britain had been evacuated by the Romans as early as in 409, and the part of the present-day Netherlands situated to the northeast of the Rhine had never been occupied by the Romans. If, from 476 to 1000, the most economically developed part of Christian Western Europe was southern Italy with Amalfi and Bari, and if, between 1000 and 1500, the economic leadership passed to Northern Italy with Venice, Milan, Genoa, and Florence, from 1250, there were indications in Northern Europe that a new urbexplosion was in gestation. Topodynamic inertia was clearly at work in the western part of the Great Corridor, and the movement that had gone from Constantinople to Amalfi and then Venice continued towards the northwest.41 Of course, Amalfi and Bari never were at the center of a true urbexplosion, and the urbexplosion of Northern Europe could not compare with the Byzantine urbexplosion before about 1425, when Constantinople and its urban system had already been considerably weakened. However, the northwestward topodynamic movement was already perceptible before the fall of Constantinople, and it became unquestionable with the rise of Northern Europe. Bruges was the first city to take the leadership of that region that nothing had distinguished before despite the fact that the waterways geography favored it greatly. If the Sumer region owed to a great extent its development to the fact that two rivers converged on it, the historical Low Countries, which corresponded to present-day Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands, was characterized by the fact that three important rivers ran on its territory: the Scheldt, coming from Northern France and leading to Antwerp, the Meuse-Maas, coming also from France and running towards the estuary it shares with the Rhine, and the Rhine, coming from Switzerland, France, and Germany, and running towards Rotterdam and the North Sea. Moreover, on the other side of the Straits of Dover, the Thames reached the North Sea in front of the Flanders, which was not negligible. Thus there were altogether four important rivers converging on the coast of the Low Countries. Bruges, whose name comes from “bridge” in Old Flemish, is located on none of those four rivers. It is situated on the Rei, which flows into the North Sea through the Zwin estuary that faces the estuary of the Thames across the

41.

Jan de Vries, op. cit., 158–167, has studied that evolution from 1500 by means of maps of gravity potentials based on the spatial distribution of the populations. Those maps allow following the topodynamic evolution in a very precise and concrete way.

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Strait of Dover. A bridge built by the Romans on its site was at the origin of the city, whose topography was advantageous. Bruges was located near the sea. Its port could receive seaboats before the silting up of the Zwin estuary in the sixteenth century. Moreover, it was far enough from the seacoast to be easily protected. Bruges was fortified and constituted a safe trading place. On the other hand, its great proximity to the Thames and London favored the development of important relations with the English. Finally, Bruges was linked to Ypres and Arras by road, and to Ghent by a canal. Ghent was a river port located at the junction of the Lys and the Scheldt. Bruges, Ypres, Arras, and Ghent were the most important cities of the Flanders, which originally belonged to the Kingdom of France (it became entirely a part of the Germanic Holy Roman Empire in 1526). Since the twelfth century, the Flanders and the neighboring Brabant, whose main cities were Brussels, Louvain-Leuwen, and Antwerp, were the richest regions of Northern Europe. Bruges, Ghent, and Ypres, the main cities of Flanders, were the major center of the European woollen textile industry, making very-high-quality draperies, tapestries, and furnishing materials. They imported wool from England and alum (a cleansing agent indispensable in the cloth industry) from Chios through Genoese traders. One of the main functions of Bruges was to channel the trade flows between Northern Europe and Northern Italy. There were two main roads between the Flanders and Northern Italy. The first was mainly French and passed by the Rhône, Champagne, and the Flanders. The second was inside of the Germanic Holy Roman Empire. It went from the Po, through Milan and the Alps, to the Rhine and to the North and Baltic seas. At the beginning, the French route was favored, at least before 1526, as long as the Flanders was under French suzerainty. However, Bruges and the Flanders rapidly realized that they could exploit the advantage of being at the crossroads of France, the Germanic Holy Roman Empire, and England. Bruges developed its trade with England first, wool being the main import from England. This phase was dominated by the Hansa of Bruges, also called Hansa of London. In midthirteenth century, the Hansa of London vanished and Bruges became an important city inside of the Hanseatic League, which was as German as the Hansa of London had been English. Then, the exchanges became diversified and involved goods from the Baltic Sea, Russia, the North Sea, as well as from England, France, and Italy. One of the very first stock exchanges in the world was founded in Bruges in the house of a family of bankers, the Van der Burse family. The word Bourse, which means “stock exchange” in French, comes its name and from its coat of arms that bears three purses (bourses in French). From 1291, when Genoa defeated Morocco in the Strait of Gibraltar, the link between Northern Italy and Northern Europe became increasingly maritime, and the Genoese and the Venetians dominated that route. Despite that,

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the Flanders and Brabant continued to develop because, among other things, in 1394, they fell to a younger branch of the House of France, the House of the dukes of Burgundy. That family almost succeeded in reconstituting, right in the middle of the Great Corridor, the ancient Kingdom of Lotharingia by gathering among its possessions fiefs that depended from France as well as from the Germanic Holy Roman Empire. Their French fiefs included, at an epoch or another, the county of Nevers, Charolais, Mâconnais, the duchy of Burgundy, Bar-sur-Seine, L’Isle-en-Champagne, the county of Rethel, Vermandois, Picardy, the county of Ponthieu, the county of Artois, and the county of Flanders. On the side of the Germanic Holy Roman Empire, the dukes of Burgundy possessed the county of Holland, Gelgerland, the duchy of Brabant, the county of Hainaut, the principalities of Liège and Kleve, the county of Namur, Limburg, the duchy of Luxembourg, the duchy of Bar, the duchy of Lorraine, the south of Alsace, Brisgau, and Franche-Comté (which was then called the county of Burgundy). All those fiefs were crossed by the central axis of the Great Corridor or close to it. Soon the dukes of Burgundy were among the richest princes of Europe, sometimes siding with their French cousins against the kings of England, sometimes siding with the Germanic emperors against their French cousins. Through the interplay of marriages, the possessions of the dukes of Burgundy, whose last male heir died in 1477, ended up in the hands of the Habsburgs, who also inherited Spain while exerting the functions of Germanic emperor. That threatened the economic ascendancy of Northern Europe when, some time later, Spain discovered and conquered America, and the Habsburgs were tempted to make Spain the center of the Western world. But the topodynamic forces which favored the Great Corridor and the northwestward movement prevailed, as will be seen. Meanwhile, Bruges and Ghent had reached their climax. In 1350, Bruges has about 90,000 inhabitants and Ghent, about 57,000. Then decline came. In 1500, the two cities had only 30,000 inhabitants each. During the sixteenth century, the estuary of the Zwin completely silted up, and Bruges lost its access to the sea. The port of Antwerp already had supplanted it and had become the main European commercial warehouse north of the Alps. The relative decline of Bruges and Ghent, from about 1350, was caused, among other factors, by a technological migration from the Flanders to England and by the increasing cost of wool imports. From 1336, Edward III, king of England, induced Flemish weavers to migrate to England and to settle, more particularly, at Norwich, which is located on the Wensum River a short distance north of its confluence with the Yare River whose seaport on the North Sea is Yarmouth, which faces the Netherlands. Later, under Elizabeth I, immigrants from the Low Countries arrived in such a great number that, in 1579, nearly a third of the Norwich’s population of 16,000 was made of

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immigrants. Norwich became one of the great woolen cloth manufacturing cities of Europe, and its artisan know-how spread to the rest of England, particularly to the regions of London, Bristol, and York,42 which became very rich at that period.43 This is how England progressively became integrated into the core of the new urbexplosion of Northern Europe. That had a radical effect on the exports of raw wool to the Flanders. Thus, from about 1450, since England had become an exporter rather than an importer of woolen textiles and English wool exports had dropped by four fifths, the Flanders had to start importing wool from Spain through the port of Bilbao and other Spanish Atlantic ports, which increased its production costs.44 The Flanders, with Bruges and Ghent, ceased to dominate, and other regions, like Brabant with Antwerp, Holland with Amsterdam, and England with London, attempted to take the lead of the new urbexplosion. *** The victory of the Genoese over the Moroccans in the Strait of Gibraltar, in 1291, allowed establishing a maritime link between Northern Italy and Northern Europe, and it opened up new possibilities for many Atlantic ports such as Cádiz, Seville, Lisbon, Porto, Bilbao, or Bordeaux. The port of Lisbon benefited from many advantages because of its natural character, its situation at the mouth of the Tagus River, the most important river of the Iberian Peninsula, and its location at the westernmost point of the European continent. Conquered by the Muslims in 760, reconquered by the Christians, more precisely the Portuguese, in 1147, exactly 389 years after the Muslim conquest and 345 years before the Christian reconquest of Granada, Lisbon had been founded around 1200 BC as a trading station by the Phoenicians, who also founded Cádiz around 1100 BC. The opening of the maritime route between the Mediterranean Sea and Northern Europe favored Lisbon’s growth. Its population, which was still only 15,000 inhabitants in AD 1200, reached 45,000 in 1350.

42.

43.

44.

In the Domesday Book of 1086, York is the largest registered English city with a population of 8,000 plus (London is not mentioned in the Domesday). York, the northern capital, was second in size to London, the southern capital, from its Roman origin as Eburacum through the late medieval times. Between the Roman withdrawal of AD 407–409 and its conquest by the Angles around 560, Eburacum was deserted. It is interesting to note that Constantine the Great was proclaimed Roman emperor at Eburacum in 306. The two main industries of medieval England were linked to the production of woollen cloth, and the smelting and working of iron. In the fourteenth century, the five largest English cities were, in order of importance, London, Norwich, York, Bristol, and Plymouth. Angus Maddison, op. cit., 75.

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In 1415, Prince Henry the Navigator, of the House of Bragança, instigated a Portuguese attack on Morocco and captured the strategic port of Ceuta, which was one of the terminals of the Saharan Gold Road. Henry was the third son of the Portuguese King John I and a grandson (through his mother) of John of Ghent, duke of Lancaster (the ancestor of the Lancasters who opposed the Yorks in the English Wars of the Roses), and, consequently, a nephew of the English King Henry IV. Later, Henry the Navigator became the administrator of the Order of Christ, a military order that the Portuguese crown had taken over in 1420, and used the assets of his order to found the very first maritime school, at Sagres, and finance further ventures in the Atlantic and Africa. Henry dreamed of establishing a contact with a legendary sovereign called “Priest John” who was believed to head the Christian Kingdom of Ethiopia (Abyssinia), which was supposedly resisting the Moslem expansion in Africa. To that politico-religious aim added the economic objective of finding a route for skirting round the Moslem world in order to reach India. Henry gathered around him cosmographers, cartographers, and naval engineers who created the famous caravel, and he launched expeditions that discovered the Archipelago of Madeira in 1419, the Islands of Azores in 1431, and Cap Vert (the site of Dakar) in 1445. Henry the Navigator died in 1460, but his expeditions continued. Thus, the Portuguese discovered the mouth of the Congo River in 1482 and the Cape of Good Hope in 1487 with Bartolomeo Diaz. In 1497, Vasco de Gama passed the Cape of Good Hope, discovered the route to India, and reached India on May 28, 1498. Vasco de Gama’s son, Christopher de Gama, fulfilled the dream of Henry the Navigator. Around 1540, at the head of four hundred Portuguese soldiers, he came to the rescue of Christian Ethiopia and helped it to repel the Moslem invaders led by the Turk Ahmad ibn Ibrihim al-Ghazi, nicknamed the Left-Handed.45 Taken prisoner, Christopher de Gama refused to apostatize and died for his faith in 1542. It is in that broad context that the discovery of America took place.

45.

Bernard Lugan, Atlas historique de l’Afrique des origines à nos jours (Paris : Éditions du Rocher, 2001), 117.

CHAPTER

8

The Discovery of America and the Return in Strength of the Occident

B

orn in Genoa, in 1450 or 1451, from a weaver father, Christopher Columbus probably began his career of sailor as a corsair in the service of René I the Good, duke of Anjou, count of Provence and former king of Naples, in 1472–1473. Around 1476 or 1477, sixteen or seventeen years after the death of Henry the Navigator, he settled in Lisbon where his brother Bartholomew was a cartographer. In 1479, Christopher Columbus got married with a noble Portuguese whose father was governor of the Madeira Islands. Soon after his arrival in Portugal, looking at a map drawn by the Florentine cosmographer Paolo Toscanelli, the idea came to him that it could be possible to find a route towards India by sailing to the west. The idea of Eratostenes, shared by Claudius Ptolemaeus, said Ptolemy, that the Earth was a sphere was then becoming popular, and their calculations of the Earth’s circumference were debated in the circles Columbus frequented. Eratostenes’ estimation was right to within about 300 kilometers, which implied that the distance between Portugal and Asia by the route of the west was immense, and impossible to cover with the ships that existed then. However, Ptolemy’s calculations underestimated the Earth’s circumference by about thirty percent and suggested that, to the west, Asia was much closer to Europe than it actually was. Toscanelli’s map was greatly influenced by Ptolemy’s calculations, and proved Ptolemy right instead of Eratostenes, which implied that the distance that had to be covered to reach India by the west was reasonable. Columbus got completely hooked on that idea and tried to convince the Portuguese King John II to sponsor an expedition aimed at discovering a route for India by the west. The king, advised by the best experts of the time, stuck to Eratostenes’ calculations and, around the end of 1484, refused to invest in such an enterprise despite the fact that Portugal was then the European country most interested in exploring new maritime routes. Columbus then tried to convince Charles VIII of France, Henry VII of England, the duke of Medina-Sedonia (of the House of Guzman), and the count of Medina-Celi

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(from the House of La Cerda). All of them refused. After passing eight or nine years in Portugal, in 1485, Columbus approached the kings of Spain, Isabel the Catholic and Ferdinand of Aragon, who answered that they were unable to finance such an expedition as long as the Reconquista was not over. On January 2, 1492, Granada was captured, and the Moslem presence in the Iberian Peninsula ended, which allowed the Spanish kings to revise their position and to minimally sponsor Christopher Columbus. On August 3, 1492, Christopher Columbus left the Spanish port of Palos de la Frontera at the 37th parallel North. Seventy days later, on October 12, 1492, he reached the Island of Guanahani-San Salvador in the Bahamas, 13 degrees more to the south, at the 24th parallel North. The difference of 13 degrees is most important. The closest point of the Americas to Palos de la Frontera was St. John’s, Newfoundland, in Canada. And, if Columbus had gone straight west, he would have reached Virginia Beach, in Virginia, U.S.A. Why did he end up in the Bahamas? Because of the prevailing currents (see Map 16, p. 330): the Portugal and Canary currents, which go southward along the African coast, and the North Equatorial and Caribbean currents, the latter of which, close to the Equator, goes westward in the direction of the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico it crosses before turning off towards the northeast and Northern Europe under the name of Gulf Stream. South of the equator, the South Equatorial Current leaves the African coast, follows the equator towards the west, and, as it approaches South America, splits in two: on the one hand, the Guyana Current goes towards the Caribbean Sea and, on the other hand, the Current of Brazil goes southward along the coast of Brazil before turning eastward in the direction of Africa. Those currents are due to the Coriolis force and the speed at which the Earth revolves at various latitudes. At the equator the movement of the Earth is the most pronounced. The speed at which Singapore, which is at the equator, moves is much greater than the speed at which Oslo, which is at the 60th parallel North, moves. Because of inertia and their fluidity, at the equator, the water and the atmosphere move more slowly than the Earth’s crust; consequently, while the water, the atmosphere, and the Earth’s crust all follow the eastward movement of the Earth, the water and the atmosphere, since they move more slowly, move westward in relation with the Earth’s crust. This phenomenon gives birth altogether to the Alizea “trade wind,” which goes westwards along the equator, and the North Equatorial and South Equatorial currents, which also move westwards. Of course, that general system evolves through the seasons because of the variations of the water and air masses temperature depending on the position of the sun more to the north or more to the south. That being said, the general system remains very stable.

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Given the structure of that system, discovering America from Europe or Africa was much easier for the navigators leaving ports situated either to the north or to the south of the Gulf Stream than for those who would start from the English Channel, the North Sea, the Baltic Sea, or the western coast of the British islands, since the latter had to face unfavorable eastward currents and winds. Thus, those who had the better chance to discover America were the Vikings of Iceland and Greenland, located to the northwest of the Gulf Stream, as well as the Portuguese, the Spaniards and the Moroccans who could benefit from the Portugal and Canary currents. Among them, the best placed were the Vikings of Iceland since they were closer to Newfoundland and North America. All indicates that they effectively were the first Europeans to reach America. They started by settling in small numbers in Greenland between 986 and 1500. Then, under the command of Leif Erikson, they probably reached Newfoundland around 1000, and even maybe Maine and Massachusetts (some people pretend that, during the 14th century, they could have attained Central America, and even the Andes). However, their settling on the American continent came to a sudden end, and their discovery had no repercussion. Between the arrival of the Amerindians in America around 12,000 BC and the coming of the Vikings around AD 1000, some people advance that the Chinese, the Phoenicians, the Greeks, and the Indians may have landed in America. Around 2640 BC, two Chinese astronomers, Hsi and Ho, would have crossed the Strait of Bering, and explored the western coast of North America down to Mexico and Guatemala before returning to China. The Phoenicians and the Greeks would have reached America during the first millennium BC. According to some, Phoenician traces have been found in North America and Brazil. Others even advance that the Melungeon Amerindians of Tennessee descend from the Phoenicians. Moreover, Cretan inscriptions have been, supposedly, found at Fort Benning, Georgia, in southern United States. At the same period, around 800–400 BC, Hindu missionaries would have come to America. One of them, named Votan, would have lived among the Maya. Another, called Wixepecocha, would have visited the Zapotecs from the region of Mexico, while a third one, named Sume, would have lived with the Cabocles of Brazil, and a fourth one, Bochia, with the Muycas. It is risky to make a definitive judgment on all those theses. The essential point is that, of all the possible discoveries of America, only two have had long-lasting effects: the first made by the peoples coming from Asia that gave birth to the present-day Amerindians, and the best known, by Christopher Columbus. If the geography of the dominant winds and currents explains that Christopher Columbus, coming from Spain, discovered America by the Caribbean Sea, it also helps to understand that Spanish and Portuguese America, which was discovered first, is located to the south of the part of

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America later occupied by the French and the British. Furthermore, it explains the development of triangular trade between the European Atlantic ports, Africa, and the Caribbean, which fed the slave trade. Usually, ships leaving Liverpool, Nantes, Bordeaux, or Lisbon with products made in Europe (essentially, alcohol, fabrics, and glass objects) followed the current to Africa. There, they exchanged them for slaves sold by African chiefs and kings. Charged with their human cargo, they just followed the dominant current to the Caribbean Sea, particularly towards Saint-Domingue-Santo Domingo (present-day Haiti and Dominican Republic), where they sold their slaves and bought sugar, rum, cotton, and tobacco. Then, they returned to Europe, following the Gulf Stream, where they sold their Caribbean products. Finally, the geography of winds and currents allows to understand that, when the exports of America to Europe ceased to be very valuable per kilogram (as in the case of gold, silver, or even sugar and rum) and took the form of cotton, wheat, and wood, the part of America located to the north of the Rio Grande became advantaged with respect to Latin America both because of its greater proximity to Europe and because of the Gulf Stream, which led directly to the great ports of Europe. Year 1806 was a critical point of that evolution: that year, Napoleon had to impose a continental blockade, the Continental System, forbidding the countries he controlled to trade with England, which, in its side, was preventing, thanks to its domination over the seas, the commerce of Napoleonic Europe with the rest of the world. It is in that context that substitutes for some products of the New World were found. The most famous example of that relates to sugar beet, discovered by Marggraf in 1747, whose cultivation developed in Europe owing to the blockade, and later on a still larger scale from 1850, which undermined the sugar sector in Latin America.

s BUILDING A BRIDGE BETWEEN EUROPE AND AMERICA The discovery of “India” by Christopher Columbus posed many problems of political or scientific order. First, what had been really discovered: India, another part of Asia than India, or a new continent? At his death, on May 20, 1506, at Valladolid, after having made four trips to America (in 1492, 1493–1496, 1498–1500 and 1502–1504), Christopher Columbus still could not answer that question. The first colony on the American mainland (not on an island) was founded at the Isthmus of Panama, in 1508.1 Vasco Núñez de Balboa was the first European to cross the Isthmus of Panama up to the Pacific Ocean on September 29, 1513, seven years after Columbus’ death and one year after the

1.

The city of Panama was founded on the Pacific coast in 1519. Francisco Pizarro set sail from Panama in December 1530 for what was to be the conquest of Peru.

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death of the Florentine Amerigo Vespucci who also explored the continent that bears his name and died without having had the proof that it was really a new continent. Curiously enough, in the same way that Christopher Columbus discovered America because of an error in the calculation of the Earth’s circumference, it is by error that the name of Amerigo Vespucci was given to America. In 1507, a German monk and cartographer named Waldseemüller, who worked in Saint-Dié, in Alsace, made a map that mentioned Amerigo Vespucci (in French, “Améric Vespuce”) as the discoverer of America, and he gave the continent the name of “Améric," which became “Amérique” in French and “America” in Spanish and English. Second, once established that America was a new continent, to whom did it belong? Of course, the Spaniards had just discovered it, but, except for the case of the Canary Islands frequented by the Genoese, the Majorcans, the Portuguese, and the French since the thirteenth century, the Portuguese had been the first to venture in the far Atlantic open sea and to make discoveries, such as Madeira in 1418, the Azores in 1431, and the Cape Verde Islands in 1460. Nobody knew what was the exact shape of the American continent and what islands belonged to it or not; so the question of the rights of the ones and the others over the new discoveries soon arose. The Spaniards and the Portuguese agreed to submit that question to Pope Alexander VI, the father of Cesare and Lucrezia Borgia. On May 3, 1493, the pope signed the bull Inter caetera that fixed the meridian passing at 100 leagues (418 kilometers) to the west of the Cape Verde Islands, that is the 36°8’ W meridian, as the border between the Spanish possessions to the west and the Portuguese ones to the east. One year later, on June 7, 1494, the kings of Spain, Isabel the Catholic and Ferdinand of Aragon, and the king of Portugal, John II the Perfect, modified that decision with the pope’s approval, and signed the Treaty of Tordesillas that moved the border to the west at 370 leagues (1550 kilometers) to the west of the Cape Verde Islands, at the 39°53’ W meridian. If the border had not been displaced, Brazil would have been extremely tiny, since the westernmost point of the country lies at the 34° W meridian. In fact, Brazil expanded much beyond the 36°8’ W meridian, and even the 39°53’ W meridian: the part of Brazil that lies to the west of the 40° W meridian represents about ninety percent of the present Brazilian territory. It has been recognized by everybody as being part of Brazil just in 1750. On April 22, 1529, the Treaty of Saragossa (or Zaragoza) determined a similar limit between the Portuguese and Spanish zones of influence in the western part of the Pacific Ocean. It specified an anti-meridian passing 297.5 leagues or 17° to the east of the Moluccas, which corresponds to the 145° E meridian, as the limit between the two zones: east of the meridian, Spain

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prevailed, while Portugal was to dominate west of the limit. That agreement was challenged when Spain decided in 1542, under Charles V of Spain, and succeeded in 1565, under Philip II of Spain, to take possession of the Philippines, which lie west of the 145° E meridian. As for the other European powers, like France, England, Sweden and the future United Provinces (Netherlands), they did not feel bound by the Treaties of Tordesillas and Saragossa. Between 1492, when Christopher Columbus founded the first Spanish colony of America, La Navidad,2 on the island of Hispaniola (in the present territory of Haiti), and 1500, when the Portuguese Pedro Álvares Cabral discovered Brazil, the Spaniards were the only Europeans to really exert rights over America. During the century that followed, from 1500 to 1600, the essential of the European colonization of America was Spanish. In 1600, Spain effectively controlled the whole Spanish-speaking America of today, while neither the French, the English, the Dutch, nor the Swedes possessed any colony in North America (despite some French attempts that had all failed), and while the Portuguese presence in Brazil remained limited to a few coastal cities. During that period, a European port almost monopolized the whole traffic with America, the port of Seville, where the Catholic Kings, Isabel the Catholic and Ferdinand of Aragon, had established on January 20, 1503, their Casa de Contratación (Chamber of Commerce) and the “Council of the Indies,”3 and that Charles V had designated in 1524, five years after the conquest of Mexico, as the sole entrance in Europe of the commerce with Spanish America.4 Those decisions gave a new life to the Andalusian city whose population had fallen to just 25,000 inhabitants in 1500 after having reached 150,000 in 1200, when Seville was the European capital of the Berber Almoravids and Almohads (whose main capital was Marrakech). Thanks to the trade monopoly with the Hispanic New World, the population of Seville soon exceeded 300,000 inhabitants. However, despite the incalculable value of the gold and silver from Peru, the gold from Colombia, the silver from Mexico, the sugar, coffee, and cocoa from America that passed in transit through Seville, that city never rivaled Genoa, Venice, Florence, Antwerp, Amsterdam, or London as a financial center. In Spain itself, trade was dominated by the Genoese and, to a smaller 2.

3. 4.

When Columbus returned in November 1493, the inhabitants of La Navidad had been killed by Indians. Then Columbus founded a new settlement, Isabella, some 150 kilometers further east (in present-day Dominican Republic), which was replaced in 1496 by Santo Domingo, located to the south of the island. Santo Domingo is the first permanent European settlement in the Western Hemisphere. Originally, the expression “Indies” referred to both China and India. But, after the discovery of America, it designated also the Americas. Seville is situated some 100 kilometers up the winding, muddy, and in part hazardous Guadalquivir River.

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extent, the Florentines. For almost two centuries, Seville kept its monopoly and the headquarter of the Council of the Indies that ruled America both materially and spiritually (the role of the Church in the new continent was of the utmost importance). In May 1717, the Casa de Contratación, which held the trade monopoly with America, moved from Seville to Cádiz, whose population went from 23,000 inhabitants in 1700 to 70,000 in 1800. Thus, during almost the whole period going from the discovery of America to the independence of the Spanish colonies of the New World, Andalusia was the compulsory entrance of all the European imports arriving from those colonies. Did the privilege given to the south of Spain change anything in the topodynamic evolution of Europe? Probably not. This is an extremely important fact since it demonstrates to what extent the domination of the Great Corridor in Europe was inescapable despite the explicit will of the kings of Spain who attempted to favor the Spanish economy at the expense, among others, of their Low Countries possessions. The sugar from America arrived in such quantities that this product, which was traditionally rare and considered as a luxury good, became a totally ordinary foodstuff. The gold and silver brought to Seville and, later, Cádiz by the “Silver Fleet,” as it was called, were literally siphoned, at the beginning, by Genoa and Florence, and later by Antwerp, Amsterdam, and London that the discovery of America and the new strategic role played by the Atlantic propelled to the first economic rank in Europe. Those precious metals arrived in such quantity that the European stocks of gold and silver, which, till then, were not important, at least doubled. Those monetary flows launched an unprecedented expansion of the European trade with the rest of the world, especially with America, but also with India, that Vasco de Gama had made accessible, but they also literally destroyed the sectors of production of the Spanish economy by giving birth to impoverishment, inactivity, and a more or less disguised unemployment. Indeed, the influx of precious metals provoked an increase of the nominal wages in Spain; however, the real salaries regularly decreased between 1520 and 1600 with an abrupt fall between 1588 and 1600. According to Braudel, the purchasing power of an urban worker diminished by about 30% between 1500 and 1600.5 The king of Spain squandered the gold and silver to such a point that three times, in 1575, 1577 and 1596, Philip II found himself in the impossibility to respect the financial obligations of the public treasury. That deterioration of the financial situation of Spain just worsened under Philip III and Philip IV. After having used gold and silver to the maximum, the kings of Spain ended up having no other option but to issue copper money.

5.

Fernand Braudel, La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II (Paris: Armand Colin, 1966), Volume 1, 476.

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Of course, the increase in the monetary mass stimulated the demand for goods and allowed “Europe to live above its means, to invest beyond its savings.”6 The regions of Europe, which managed to react the best to the new demand, were, at first, Northern Italy, but soon after, Northern Europe. Far from modifying the course of the topodynamic evolution to the benefit of Southern Spain, that increase just accelerated the northwestward movement that had begun within the Great Corridor. This is a permanent feature of history: the periods of economic expansion and inflation accelerate the topodynamic movements, whereas the periods of economic recession and unemployment slow them down and can even reverse them. The European boom caused by the precious metals of America just still more activated the exchanges at the hearth of the Great Corridor, at the moment the ascendancy progressively passed within that corridor from the Mediterranean Sea, the Rhône, the Saône, and the Po to the Atlantic, the Meuse-Maas, the Rhine, the Thames, the North Sea, and the Elbe. The two main rivers of the Iberian Peninsula, the Guadalquivir and the Tagus, remained, despite all the edicts of the kings of Spain and Portugal, outlying and marginal in the European fluvial system. They just could not be connected to the other rivers of the Great Corridor. Had America been discovered by the Almoravids and Almohads when Morocco and Spain formed a single country, an economic pole could have taken form around the Strait of Gibraltar and the Guadalquivir. But, in the fifteenth century, that had become impossible. The Rhône-Rhine axis already was too strong.

s THE RE-ALIGNMENT OF THE EUROPEAN ECONOMY The discoveries of America and the route to India shattered the mental universe of the great European traders. For more than a millennium, that universe was marked by the quest for the Orient, which passed by the Silk Road, the Mediterranean Sea, Antioch, Alexandria, and, above all, Constantinople. Even Northern Italy’s essential relations with Northern Europe were based on the privileged links Genoa, Venice, and the other cities of Northern Italy had established with the Orient. In less than forty years, the European merchants lost their contacts with Constantinople, taken by the Ottoman Turks, and the conviction that the future of European trade was inevitably linked to the Orient; all their mental universe was collapsing. Moreover, since America had just been discovered by Spain, and the route to India by Portugal, the Italian, French, German, Flemish, Brabant, Dutch, and English merchants who dominated the European economy probably felt threatened by the rise to power of the Iberian Peninsula. 6.

Fernand Braudel , Capitalism and Material Life, 1400 –1800 (New York : Harper Torchbooks, 1974), 268.

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Despite Genoa’s dynamism, Italy, being confined to the Mediterranean Sea, had much difficulty adapting to the new context. Naples entered a long period of decline, and Venice, which, according to Braudel, still dominated the European economy at the time of the discovery of America, as it had done since about 1350, was profoundly shaken. The fall of the Byzantine Empire had undermined its main source of wealth, and its economy was beginning to suffer seriously when the discoveries of Christopher Columbus and Vasco de Gama reoriented towards the west and the Atlantic the exchanges centered on the east of the Mediterranean Sea its power was based on. Venice did not succeed to remain in the forefront of the European economy beyond 1510. At that time, it is Antwerp, and not Seville or Lisbon, which succeeded to Venice till 1557 (see Map 14).

Norwich Amsterdam London

ine

Rh

Bruges Antwerp Gent Brussels

Ratisbon

Paris

Dan

ube

Vienna

Basel

Budapest

Lyon Milan Bordeaux

Venice

Genoa Marseille

Florence

Rome Barcelona Naples

Madrid Lisbon

Sevilla

Córdoba

Cádiz 100 km

Map 14 The New Westward Movement in Europe That evolution was natural considering the topodynamic movements that already prevailed before the discovery of America. It must be stressed that, in 1510, trade with America was still limited to the Caribbean Islands.

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The development of the new continent was not instantaneous. The Aztec Empire was conquered just in 1521, and the Inca Empire, in 1532. The precious metals from Mexico and Peru had not yet taken the route to Seville and Europe. The accession of Antwerp to the rank of Europe’s main commercial city was favored by the decline of Bruges provoked by the silting up of the Zwin River. Antwerp, like Bruges and Amsterdam, was an inland seaport. It is located on the Scheldt River (Escaut in French and Schelde in Flemish), whose basin extended to France, the Flanders, and Brabant. In fact, the four ports of Bruges, Ghent, Antwerp, and London constituted a relatively integrated system. The Rei, Zwin, and Thames rivers linked Bruges to London. Ghent was linked to Bruges by a canal, and to Antwerp by the Scheldt River, Ghent being located on that river. And the Scheldt and Thames rivers linked Antwerp to London. The Flanders became very urbanized from the thirteenth century. It included numerous craft cities. The urbanization of the Flanders spread to the neighboring Brabant, where the cities of Antwerp and Brussels became very important. Around 1500, Antwerp had become the largest and most dynamic city of the Flanders and Brabant region that had over thirty percent of its population living in cities with more than 10,000 inhabitants, making it one of the two most urbanized regions of Europe, the other one being Northern Italy.7 Coming under the kings of Spain who had inherited the fiefs of the dukes of Burgundy and who, for 30 years, had united all of them with the Germanic Holy Roman Empire (some of those fiefs were French and others already belonged to the Holy Empire when the Habsburgs decided, in 1526, to join them all to the Holy Empire till the splitting of Habsburgs’ possessions between the Spanish and the German branches of the family in 1556, when the Low Countries were attributed to the Spanish branch), Antwerp and the other cities of the Flanders and Brabant developed their trade with both the North and Baltic seas and the Iberian Peninsula, which detained a monopoly as regarded the commerce with America. From 1500 to 1550, the population of Antwerp passed from 40,000 to 90,000 inhabitants. At its peak, between 1510 and 1557, Antwerp concentrated about forty percent of the world trade, and the Spanish Low Countries were one of the most prosperous areas of Europe, as well as a major center of international trade and banking, and a substantial textile production area. It is estimated that the port of Antwerp was earning the Spanish crown seven times more revenues than the Americas. The Antwerp Stock Exchange was the main European financial center. Since 1487, it had succeeded the Stock Exchange of Bruges as the main Western European stock exchange. This title was later inherited by Amsterdam and still later by London.

7.

A.M. van der Woude, Akira Hayami, and Jan de Vries, Urbanization in History: A Process of Dynamic Interactions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 10.

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In conformity with the theses of Braudel and those of Redfield and Singer,8 the transformation of the Spanish Low Countries into a central core of the European economy was accompanied by a quest for liberties and a greater acceptance of diversity. The region became increasingly “heterogenetic,” in Redfield and Singer’s terms. The bourgeois obtained more and more privileges, and they became more and more concerned with preserving their religious and political liberties, which were greater than anywhere else in Europe. A local consensus developed according to which those liberties favored trade and economic development. The local leaders as well as the local representatives of the Spanish Crown were convinced of that. The conquest of Tenochtitlan-Mexico in 1521, that of Peru in 1532, and the attribution to Seville of the trade monopoly with Spanish America at the very moment when gold and silver from America were beginning to flow over Spain threatened Antwerp’s dominant position, all the more so since the kings of Spain were the masters of the city and hence able to slow down its development to the benefit of Seville, and Seville had allied with Genoa and Florence’s financiers to free itself from the economic power of the Low Countries. What happened between 1524, when the American monopoly was attributed to Seville, and 1627, when Amsterdam began to dominate the European economy, takes on an utmost importance. During that period, the almighty Spanish Habsburgs, who controlled Spain, Spanish America, the Low Countries, and a large part of Italy, attempted to stop the northwestward topodynamic movement to the benefit of the south of Western Europe. During that century, the Habsburgs of Spain favored Seville and Genoa to the detriment of Antwerp and Amsterdam, and they went as far as sacking Antwerp in 1576 and waging, from 1572 to 1648, an almost incessant war against the rebellious United Provinces (the present-day Netherlands). The appearance of Protestantism gave a religious tone to the power struggle that arose between Mediterranean Europe and the North Sea area. The debate about the indulgences and the fundraising for the construction of St. Peter’s Basilica was a form of rebellion of the ascending North in the face of measures intended to drain financial resources towards the south of Europe. It is not a coincidence if Protestantism emerged at the very moment when, for the first time in history, a city from Northern Europe, Antwerp, was taking the lead of the European economy, which it did around 1510. It is in 1517 that Luther, who came from the Elbe River region, rose up against the traffic of indulgences and condemned the principles behind them in his 95 Theses. Luther was condemned, and excommunicated in 1520 by Pope Leo X (born John of Medici, of the great Medici family of Florence) in a bull 8.

Robert Redfield and Milton B. Singer, “The Cultural Role of the Cities,” Economic Development and Cultural Change 3, 1 (1954): 52–73.

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(document) called Exsurge Domine. And Charles V declared him an outlaw, in 1521, by the Edict of Worms, which forced Luther to flee and take refuge in Saxony under the protection of Elector Frederic III the Wise of Saxony. The hottest struggles between Catholicism and Protestantism took place in the new urbexplosion of Northern Europe, in the Spanish Low Countries, England, and Germany. The almost entire Baltic region adopted Lutheranism, encountering virtually no opposition, while Luther was still alive. Calvin, who published a famous letter legitimizing interest loans counter to the Catholic teachings, which greatly favored the development of capitalism, settled in Geneva and won over to his cause the United Provinces (the present-day Netherlands), which had to fight for a long time to have their faith triumph, as well as Scotland, where things were much easier. England followed its king, Henry VIII, but Catholicism resisted and somewhat survived through a minority. The battle of the kings of Spain in favor of Southern Europe was also a defense of Catholicism. Antwerp was the first victim of that struggle. According to Braudel, Genoa supplanted it around 1557. Italy had not given up. Its swan song was magnificent. It took the form of the Italian Renaissance. Two cities embody that epoch: Florence and the popes’ Rome.9 However, from an economic point of view, the one which dominated that period was Genoa, while Naples experienced a rapid decline and Venice, a less pronounced but real marginalization. Genoa had the advantage over Florence, Turin, and Milan of having a direct access to the Mediterranean Sea. And in the face of Venice, it benefited from the fact that it was situated on the western coast of Italy and had long developed its links with the western part of the Mediterranean Sea, for instance with Sardinia and Corsica, but also with Spain, while Venice had put the accent on the eastern part of the Mediterranean Sea, especially on the Dalmatian coast. The alliance between Seville and Genoa, which considerably benefited the latter, was based on Genoa’s financial power and commercial network, as well as on the links between the two ports that had been established thanks to the famous naval victory the Genoese had won against the Moroccans for the control of the Strait of Gibraltar in 1291. However, Genoa soon had to confront in the Mediterranean Sea the competition of two non-Italian ports, those of Barcelona and Marseille, which came to supplant it by reckoning on their maritime links with the Atlantic.10 The successive ascendancy exerted by Antwerp, Genoa, and Amsterdam is 9. 10.

Renaissance city planning was marked by Michelangelo and Pope Sixtus V in Rome, and by Leonardo da Vinci, Brunelleschi, and the Medicis in Florence. Paul M. Hohenberg and Lynn Hollen Lees, The Making of Urban Europe, 1000–1950 (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 1985), 163.

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illustrated by the respective evolutions of their population. In 1550, Antwerp had 90,000 inhabitants, Genoa, 60,000, and Amsterdam, 30,000. In 1600, the order was different: Genoa had 70,000, Amsterdam, 65,000, and Antwerp, 46,000. In 1650, Amsterdam triumphed with 175,000 inhabitants, compared to 90,000 for Genoa and 75,000 for Antwerp. During the 70 years Genoa occupied the first rank on Europe’s economic scene, the largest city in Italy remained Naples, whose population went from 150,000 in 1500 to 280,000 in 1600. However, due to its accelerated impoverishment, Naples became and stayed overpopulated for centuries. It became the classical example of over-urbanization. The second largest city in Italy was Milan, which had 100,000 inhabitants in 1500 and 120,000 in 1600. Naples and Milan experienced significant population decreases between 1600 and 1650, as did cities such as Brescia, Cremona, Catania, and Lucca, but Naples remained overcrowded. Between 1500 and 1650, the population of Florence stayed about the same, around 70,000 inhabitants, while a “new” city was on the rise: Rome, whose population went from 55,000 in 1500 to 110,000 in 1600, to 130,000 in 1650, and to 149,000 in 1700. Rome, which, in 1450, was still a field of ruins, was at the hearth of the Italian Renaissance and the Catholic Counter-Reformation aimed at opposing a reaction to Protestantism. Profoundly challenged by Protestantism, the papacy and Catholicism gave the Eternal City a second life marked by the Renaissance masterpieces, by Michelangelo, Raphael, St. Peter’s Basilica, the Jesuit Gesu Church, Bernini, Frescobaldi, Cavalieri, Carissimi, Palestrina, and Corelli. At the same moment, Florence won fame with the Medicis, Machiavelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo, and Torricelli. Italy had become a land favored by art and science. Like religions, art and science are influenced by the topodynamic currents for they follow wealth, and wealth follows the space-economic trends. Thus, when Amsterdam and London definitely succeeded Genoa and Venice at the head of the European economy, artistic and scientific genius tended to follow the movement. To Galileo and Torricelli succeeded Newton and Leibniz, and to Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci succeeded Rubens and Rembrandt. Diamond rightly notes that, ceteris paribus, technology develops faster in the vast productive regions having a high density of population, a large number of potential inventors and many competing societies.11 This is also true of the artistic and scientific creation.

11.

Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel : The Fates of Human Societies (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1997), 261.

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s THE RHÔNE, THE RHINE, AND THE ST. GOTTHARD PASS The topodynamic movement from Northern Italy to the North Sea was accompanied by a lateral shift of the Great Corridor in the sense that the Rhône-Saône-Meuse axis was progressively marginalized by the Po-Rhine axis. To understand that important evolution, it is useful to examine the links that could be established between the Mediterranean ports and the Atlantic ones that the discovery of America and the route to India had made strategic. Essentially, there were five such links: first, the Strait of Gibraltar; second, the Bilbao-Zaragoza-Barcelona axis following the Ebro River; third, the Bordeaux-Toulouse-Béziers connection following the Gironde and the Garonne; fourth, the Seine-Yonne-Saône-Rhône connection through Rouen, Paris, Dijon, Chalon-sur-Saône, Lyon, and Marseille; finally, the Rhine-Po connection crossing the Alps. The Strait of Gibraltar solution favored Cádiz, Seville, and even Lisbon. From a maritime point of view, it was the simplest, but it had two weaknesses. First, the Arabs controlled North Africa, and crossing the Strait of Gibraltar was dangerous. Second, in terms of distance, both the North Italian pole and the North Sea pole were rather far from the Strait of Gibraltar. The BilbaoZaragoza-Barcelona axis along the Ebro River and the Bordeaux-ToulouseBéziers solution both involved much shorter distances. However, the Ebro River is not optimal since it has no important harbor at its mouth. Barcelona is located at the mouth of the Llobregat River, which is a neighboring but different river. As for the link between Toulouse and the Mediterranean Sea, it required a canal, which did not exist. The Canal du Midi was built almost two centuries after the discovery of America, from 1666 to 1681. The fourth solution, the Seine-Yonne-Saône-Rhône connection, was a logical one. It had a very long history. The Romans had developed that axis, which was the spine of the northern Roman Empire, the natural link between Rome, Gaul, and England. Moreover, before it went to the Habsburgs through inheritance, the Flanders were a part of France, and the links between Paris, the Champagne and the Flanders were well developed. It must be remembered that, during the Middle Ages, at least up to the Hundred Years’ War, the trading fairs of Champagne were at the heart of the exchanges between Northern Europe and Northern Italy. The weaknesses of the Seine-Rhône solution were political, but also technical. From a transportation point of view, the route was costly because the distance between the closest ports on the Saône (Chalon-sur-Saône) and on the Seine (Troyes in Champagne) was large, and because the Seine did not lead directly to the Flanders, which could only be reached through more transshipments and overland journeys. But the political obstacles were even more important. First, the Hundred Years’ War, from 1337 to 1453, had ruined that trade route and the fairs of Champagne less than a century before the

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Rhi ne

discovery of America. During the Hundred Years’ War period, the Rhine-Po axis had developed. Second, the Flanders had been inherited by the Habsburgs from the dukes of Burgundy. The grandson and heir of the last heiress of the dukes of Burgundy, Mary of Burgundy, daughter of Charles the Bold, duke of Burgundy, and spouse of Emperor Maximilian of Habsburg, was the Habsburg Emperor Charles V, who was also king of Spain, master of the Americas and master of a large part of Italy. Charles V was most of the time warring against the king of France, Francis I. For obvious reasons, it was impossible for him to depend on the Seine-Rhône route to maintain the trade link between his own Flanders and Italian possessions. The fifth solution was unavoidable despite the fact that, since 1499, the Swiss Cantons had quit the Holy Empire after a long struggle against the Habsburgs, and despite the numerous difficulties associated with crossing the Alps. In fact, linking the Po and the Rhine required taking a certain number of the twenty-one passes of the Alps (see Map 15).

Danu

be

Munich

Basel

Zurich Brenner St. Gotthard

Geneva Lyon

Cenis

Rhône 70

Tarvis

Simplon Milan

km

Map 15 The Five Main Passes of the Alps

Zagreb

Venice Po

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Essentially, nine main passes allow crossing the Alps. First, the Montgenèvre Pass (France) links Turin and Gap in southern France. Second, more to the north, the pass of Mont Cenis (Italy and France) joins Turin to Grenoble and Chambéry. Third, still more to the north, the Little St. Bernard Pass (France) connects the Rhône Basin in France and the Italian Aosta Valley. Fourth, the Great St. Bernard Pass (Switzerland and Italy) goes from the Rhône basin in Switzerland to the Italian Aosta Valley. Fifth, more to the east, the Simplon Pass (Switzerland) joins together the Rhône Basin in Switzerland, and Italian Piedmont. Sixth, the St. Gotthard Pass (Switzerland) links the Po and Rhine basins. Seventh, the San Bernardino Pass (Switzerland) connects the Italian Lake of Como to the source of the Rhine on the way to Liechtenstein. Eighth, the Brenner Pass (Italy and Austria) joins together the Po Basin in Italy and the Danube Basin in Austria. Ninth, the Tarvisio Pass (Italy, close to the Austrian and Slovene borders) is the traditional way between Venice and Vienna. In order to understand the importance of the St. Gotthard Pass, we have to go back to the Roman Empire. The shortest link between the navigable Po and Rhine involved the St. Gotthard Pass. Unfortunately, that pass is an uneasy one. The Romans dared not use it despite its strategic position. It was too difficult. The Romans used all nine passes except the St. Gotthard and Simplon. The Romans built a road passing through the Montgenèvre Pass and connecting Turin (Augusta Taurin) with Aix-en-Provence (Aquae Sextiae). They built another one, through the Little St. Bernard Pass, linking Piacenza (Placentia) and Vienne (in France) on the Rhône River, south of Lyon. The Great St. Bernard Pass (Mons Jovis for the Romans) was used for the road towards the Rhine going from Piacenza to Lausanne and Avenches (Aventicum) to the north of Lake Geneva. The Roman road going from Milan (Mediolanum) to Feldkirh (Clunia), to the north of Liechtenstein, passed by the Lake of Como and the San Bernardino Pass. The Brenner Pass was used for the very important Via Claudia Augusta going from Verona to Augsburg (Augusta Vindelicorum) and Ratisbon (Regina Castra). Finally, through the Tarvisio Pass went the roads linking Verona and Aquileia (Aquilea) to Carnuntum, close to Vienna, on the Danube, to Budapest (Aquincum), also on the Danube, and to Sremska Mitrovica (Sirmium), then in Pannonia and now in Vojvodina, Serbia. The St. Gotthard Pass had the advantage over the Great St. Bernard Pass of constituting a much more direct link between the Po and the Rhine, but also of being situated at the common border of the basins of the Po (which runs towards the Adriatic Sea), the Rhine (which flows into the North Sea), and the Rhône (which runs towards the western Mediterranean Sea), without forgetting the proximity of the basin of the Danube, that runs towards the Black Sea. The main obstacle to cross in the St. Gotthard Pass was

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the Reuss River coming from the Andermatt basin through the Schöllenen gorges with their vertical rock faces. It is only during the first part of the thirteenth century that the merchants of Milan decided to eliminate that obstacle by building the bridge of Devil and a “revolutionary road,” in Braudel’s terms.12 However, that road remained uneasy and, most of the time, it was reserved to mule-driven transportation. As long as commercial relations between the Holy Empire and France prospered, the Rhône route remained a strong competitor of the Alps route. However, from 1521, the conflicts between Francis I of France and Emperor Charles V made the St. Gotthard Pass the turntable of the trade between Italy and Germany. As Braudel observed, the statistics about the trade between Antwerp and Italy in 1534–1545 illustrate the clear priority given to the St. Gotthard Pass, which benefits from its central location, since it leads to Genoa and Venice as well as Milan.13 The second most frequented pass was then the Brenner Pass. The triumph of the St. Gotthard Pass caused many other triumphs. It allowed Milan to take the lead of all the cities of Northern Italy at the expense of Genoa and Venice, at a time when Northern Europe was supplanting Northern Italy. It favored the development of Basel, which is the first port upstream on the Rhine. In turn, Basel being the port of Zurich on the Rhine, its rise greatly contributed to the development of neighboring Zurich. Thus, the Po-Milan-Basel-Rhine axis triumphed over the RhôneLyon-Chalon-sur-Saône-Dijon-Troyes-Scheldt axis, which led to the victory of the Rhine and Amsterdam over the Scheldt and Antwerp, resulting in a lateral shift of the axis of the Great Corridor in Europe. That movement had consequences for the development of Protestantism in the Germanic countries, including Great Britain and the Scandinavian countries. The Basel-WormsAmsterdam-London axis became as Protestant as the Marseille-Lyon-DijonParis-Antwerp axis was Catholic. That eastward shift played a role later in the nineteenth century in the emergence of the modern Mongolo-American Corridor in Europe.

s THE NEW POLE OF NORTHERN EUROPE: AMSTERDAM AND LONDON The discoveries of America and the route to India caused the replacement of the Mediterranean economy-world by the Atlantic one. In 1627, the approximate date, according to Braudel, of the domination shift from Genoa to Amsterdam, it became clear that the center of the new economy-world would neither be a Spanish or Italian city, nor a city from the Spanish Low Countries. It would be 12. 13.

Fernand Braudel, La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II (Paris: Armand Colin, 1966), Volume 1, 489. Ibid., 189–190.

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either a city of the Dutch United Provinces or an English city. It is worthwhile to examine that evolution in the context of Braudel’s center-semi-peripheryperiphery scheme. According to that scheme, center constitutes not only an economic pole, but also a space of freedom dominated by the merchants. The emergence of the Anglo-Dutch pole is a good illustration of the dynamics which characterize the forming of the center of a new economy-world. Along the rise of the Flanders, Brabant, Holland, and England, the merchants and bourgeois of that large region acquired wealth, privileges, and power. A time came when the yoke of the aristocracy and monarchy became hardly bearable. That led to a revolt which found an ally in Protestantism. In the Flanders and Brabant, the government of the Habsburgs succeeded to regain control of the situation. On the other hand, more to the north, the Dutch United Provinces declared independence in 1572, realized it effectively in 1609, and succeeded, after a long fight, to have it recognized by Spain itself in 1648. A little later, in 1649, in England, monarchy was overthrown, Charles I was beheaded, and Cromwell established the republic, which lasted till 1660. Through all that process, the English Parliament asserted its authority, and, inside the Parliament, the House of Commons progressively supplanted the House of Lords. That led to a true constitutional monarchy in 1689, when, having overthrown his father-in-law, the Stuart James II of England, William of Orange-Nassau, Stadtholder of the United Provinces and new king of England with his spouse Mary, signed the Bill of Rights, which marked the official beginning of the English constitutional monarchy and its parliamentary regime. Surprisingly enough, it is during that politically troubled period that the United Provinces and especially Holland established themselves as the masters of the economic world, which they were for about 136 years, approximately from 1627 to 1763. It is by building on its role as a maritime warehouse that Amsterdam succeeded to take the lead in Holland, but also in the face of Bruges, and then Antwerp, and it is by building on Amsterdam that the United Provinces took the lead of the world. The rise of Amsterdam was slow. In 1300, it had only 1,000 inhabitants. In 1500, its population was still only about 20,000 inhabitants. The shift from Catholicism to Calvinism happened in Amsterdam around 1580. According to de Vries, Amsterdam had to wait till 1590 for its dominant position to be recognized inside of the United Provinces.14 Between 1600 and 1700, its population went from 65,000 to 200,000 inhabitants. That evolution is the reflection of the evolution of urbanization in the United Provinces, which lagged behind the Flanders and Brabant. Van der Woude, de Vries, and Hayami estimate that, during the early sixteenth century, 14.

Jan de Vries, European Urbanization, 1500–1800 (London and Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), 354.

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thirty-one percent of the population of the United Provinces lived in cities, while, by 1675, forty-five percent of the Republic’s population were urban, the figures of the province of Holland being higher still.15 Those urbanization rates, which were the highest in Europe, reflect the fact that the Dutch cities then dominated an urban system that extended well beyond the borders of the United Provinces. They dominated the whole urban system of Northern Europe. According to Maddison, from 1400 to 1700, the growth rate of the Dutch per capita income was the highest in Europe, and the Dutch had the highest per capita income in Europe from 1600 to the 1820s.16 Even though they represented just one sixtieth of the total European population, the Dutch monopolized a large part of the continent’s external trade. From a geographical point of view, the case of Amsterdam is stunning. That port, historically so important, is not located on the coast, not even at the mouth of a river. Originally, it lay between two lakes: to the east, the Lake of IJssel, which is a part of the North Sea, and to the west a lake which has since disappeared. It is by means of canals, so frequent in the Netherlands, that Amsterdam has been linked to the Rhine, where lay the competing port of Rotterdam. Presently, since 1876, Amsterdam sits between two canals, the Canal of Holland going northward to the North Sea, and the AmsterdamRhine Canal going southward to the Rhine River. Amsterdam’s main asset in its struggle with Antwerp was the security it offered. Its harbor and location were safe and well protected by a powerful navy. It must be said that many of the canals surrounding Amsterdam were built for security reasons, not for trade navigation. During the whole period when the United Provinces were at the head of the world economy, they had to defend themselves against the attacks of Spain, France, and also England. The canals constituted an ultimate defensive arm. Thus, in 1672, when France under Louis XIV invaded the United Provinces, William of Orange ordered the dikes and locks to be opened and the country to be flooded in order to stop the invasion. The extreme tactic was a success. The triumph of the port of Amsterdam over Antwerp occurred in an open war context. From 1585 to 1795, the Dutch blockaded Antwerp’s access to the sea, taking over its entrepôt trade and its textile industry. That blockade, which prolonged under various forms till 1863, bore fruit and induced a substantial migration of capital and skills from the Spanish Low Countries to Holland. That flight greatly contributed to make the United Provinces Europe’s primary maritime, industrial, and financial power in the seventeeth century. In 1609, the Dutch founded the Bank of Amsterdam, which became a major financial power that soon replaced the Venetian and Genoese 15. 16.

A.M. van der Woude, Akira Hayami, and Jan de Vries, op. cit., 11–12. Angus Maddison, The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective (Paris: OECD, 2001), 75.

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bankers. Amsterdam gave birth to an entirely new financial sector, maritime insurance. The creation of the Company of the East Indies marked an important step in the emergence of Dutch capitalism. That company played a major role in the building of the impressive Dutch empire, which included possessions in Indonesia, Malaysia, India, America (with New Netherland, where lay New Amsterdam, the future New York, and Dutch Guyana, present-day Suriname), China, and even Japan, where, from 1641, the Dutch possessed the Island of Deshima, off Nagasaki (as already mentioned, the port of Deshima was the only port of Japan open to foreign ships from 1639 to 1854). The Dutch succeeded the Italians at the head of European capitalism. The topodynamic trends favored them, but they also shown creativity, especially in the field of shipbuilding. The Dutch created a new type of factory ship for processing the herring catch at sea. They developed mass production of a cheap general purpose cargo vessel (the fluyt). According to Bairoch, the Dutch greatly helped Europe to take the lead of the maritime navigation at the beginning of the eighteenth century and to make real transportation costs lower by half than those obtained even as late as the close of the fourteenth century.17 The Dutch consolidated their competitive position to such an extent that they launched a true price war. They grasped the possibilities of the demand elasticity of goods such as pepper, tea, and sugar, and sought profit from volume rather than high markup. A general decrease in the prices of many commodities resulted, leading to the elimination of the weakest competitors. Amsterdam’s capitalists did not restrict themselves to mass products. They also invaded the sector of the luxury goods. Thus, Amsterdam became, thanks to its important Jewish population, the world capital of diamonds, a title it shared, most of the time, with Antwerp. If Amsterdam prevailed, it was not alone at the head of the new North European pole. Antwerp never gave up the battle. After having been the main port of Europe between 1505 and 1521, and then between 1535 and 1576, it recaptured that position between 1870 and 1955. Brussels, that city founded in 979 by the Carolingian Charles of France, Duke of Lower Lorraine, who did not succeed to have his rights over the throne of France prevail over those of Hugh Capet, took advantage of its status of main city of the Dukes of Brabant and, later, of capital of the emperor and king of Spain Charles V and capital of the Spanish Low Countries to assert itself also as a great trading city at the center of one of the wealthiest regions of the world. Located on the Senne River, a tributary of the Schelde River, Brussels controlled the river crossing 17.

Paul Bairoch, Cities and Economic Development, From the Dawn of History to the Present (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988), 97.

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on the strategic main route between Ghent and Bruges, through to Cologne and the Rhine. Its population came to equal that of Amsterdam around 1850. Moreover, the numerous German cities of the Hanseatic League continued to play a key economic role: Hamburg, Lübeck, Cologne, Bergen, Danzig, and Rostock. Finally, London and England waited for their turn. Sometimes allies, sometimes enemies of the Dutch, with whom they shared so much, they coveted the first place occupied by Amsterdam and the United Provinces. More and more, London posed as a competitor both of Paris, the great political city, and Amsterdam, the great commercial city. Paris, which had become the capital of an effectively united French nation under Francis I, who reigned from 1515 to 1547, reached half a million inhabitants around 1670, London, around 1680. In 1700, with its 550,000 inhabitants, London had already surpassed Paris, which had just 530,000. The gap between the two cities tended to increase later till the twentieth century. It must always be reminded that France remained the most populated country in Europe, and Paris was the largest European city from 1500 to 1670 approximately. Neither should the wealth of France be underestimated. The French Revolution proved it since, after ten years (from 1789 to 1799) of revolution, destruction, and war with the rest of Europe, France still found the energy, under Napoleon, to conquer the major part of continental Europe. The rise to power of England, traditionally much less populated than France, shown itself for the first time during the War of the Spanish Succession, which lasted from 1701 to 1714. That war was provoked by the death of Charles II, the last Habsburg king of Spain, who was the half-brother of Maria Theresa of Spain, the spouse of Louis XIV. In his will, Charles II designated as his heir Philip of Bourbon, duke of Anjou, grandson of Maria Theresa and Louis XIV. The latter having accepted for his grandson the crown of Spain, all the dynasties of Europe, except for the Bourbons and the Wittelsbachs of Bavaria, opposed the accession of a Bourbon to the throne of Spain. Most states considered that the Bourbons and France were already powerful enough. At the head of the coalition against Louis XIV was the king of England, William II of Orange, an old enemy of Louis XIV who also was his cousin, since William of Orange was the great-grandson of Henry IV of France, Louis XIV’s grandfather. William of Orange died in 1702, but his successor, Queen Ann Stuart, continued the fight against the king of France and sent on the continent English troops commanded by John Churchill, who became the first duke of Marlborough. Marlborough and Prince Eugene of Savoy, who commanded the Austrian troops, won battle after battle against France, but, despite this, Louis XIV succeeded to preserve the integrity of France’s territory and to maintain his grandson on the throne of Spain.

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The War of the Spanish Succession and the Seven Years’ War that followed from 1756 to 1763 placed England and London to the forefront of Europe and European imperialism throughout the world. That evolution was accompanied with an exceptional economic development and an acceleration of urbanization in England. In 1500, cities represented a minor proportion of the English population. In 1700, although cities such as Norwich, Bristol, York, and Plymouth still played a non-negligible role, London totally dominated the English urban system, its population representing sixty-five percent of the total urban population of the country. The rate of urbanization of England was then around fifteen percent, as in Spain or France, which was higher than the European average that was about thirteen percent, but at a lower level than the rate of urbanization of the Spanish Low Countries, Italy, the United Provinces, and Portugal. The English population was at that time about six million inhabitants, while France had a little more than twenty-one million inhabitants. In 1800, the rate of urbanization of England had almost reached that of the Netherlands. In 1850, it had exceeded it, and England had become the most urbanized country of Europe.18 The strength of England came from its empire, but that became obvious just in 1763, with the Treaty of Paris, which gave England the control over all of North America thanks to the cession of Canada, and the accession to the first place in India at the expense of the French. Before 1763, the British Empire did not compare, in wealth, population or area, with the Spanish, Portuguese, or Dutch empires.

s THREE TERRITORIAL STATES The discoveries of America and the route to India did not benefit only the merchant states. It also gave a new vigor to the territorial states of Europe among which were the Spain of the Habsburgs and later the Bourbons, the France of the Valois and then the Bourbons, and the Austria of the Habsburgs, which altogether transformed into nation-states. Hohenberg and Lees wrote: Recall that it was in the “feudal” regions outside the urban core of medieval Europe that nation-states developed … Only along the central trade routes from the North Sea to the Mediterranean were the free cities strong enough to block for centuries the attempt of princes to master them … By the eighteenth century the lead actors on the political stage were all kingdoms or empires. Cities then played a dual role in the early modern European political system, depending upon their geographic location and the regional intensity of urbanization. Clustered and armed with the resources of active 18.

Jan de Vries, op. cit., 169–172.

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trade, protoindustrial production, or sophisticated finance, cities retarded the development of nation-states until well after 1800. To west and east of the core, where postfeudal monarchs and their armies could dominate them, cities were turned into agents of centralization by princes intent on binding the territories of the realm ever more tightly to the crown. By borrowing their money and selling them royal offices with perquisites of status attached, French kings co-opted the urban middle classes almost as effectively as they did the courtiers at Versailles. Barel (1977) uses the term feudal bourgeoisie to bring out how frequently this class turned away from enterprise toward bureaucracy and passive landholding.19

During that period when the hearth of the European economy passed from Northern Italy to Northern Europe, the territorial states transformed into nation-states by opposing each other most of the time. However, war had a counterbalance: diplomacy. Periodically, periods of war gave way to periods of peace, and neutral zones were negotiated. The best example of this is Switzerland, which was a Habsburg territory and which succeeded in becoming a neutral country under the protection of France. In fact, France and the Habsburgs convinced themselves that the Alps were not an appropriate terrain to combat, and that it was advantageous for both to have a buffer zone—a neutral Switzerland in between. This was possible because Switzerland was part of no core, while at the same time in a strategic position between the two dominant economic cores. In the development of overseas colonies, similar agreements were also common, but they rarely lasted long. Spain was Europe’s greatest political and military power from 1524, when the “silver fleet” started its trips between America and Seville, up to 1643, when the battle of Rocroi was won by the French against the Spanish troops. During that long period, the kings of Spain reigned over Spain, Portugal (from 1580 to 1640), Spanish America, Portuguese America (from 1580 to 1640), the Balearic Islands, Minorca, the Canary Islands, Sardinia, Sicily, Naples, Southern Italy, as well as some of the wealthiest parts of Europe, the Spanish Low Countries, the Flanders, Artois, Franche-Comté, and the Milanese. Moreover, Spain had trading posts and colonies in Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, India, Indonesia (Java Island), and the Philippines. One of the characteristics of the territorial states refers to the importance given to the aristocratic ideal associated with a kind of contempt for trade, industry, and finance. Madrid, Versailles, and Vienna illustrate that, each in its own way. However, it is probably in Spain that such an attitude has taken its most extreme form. In 1675, Alfonso Nuñez de Castro wrote: “Let London manufacture those fabrics of hers to her heart’s content; Holland her 19.

Paul M. Hohenberg and Lynn Hollen Lees, op. cit., 169–170.

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chambrays; Florence her cloth; the Indies their beaver and vicuña; Milan her brocades; Italy and Flanders their linens, so long as our capital can enjoy them; the only thing it proves is that all nations train journeymen for Madrid and that Madrid is the queen of Parliaments, for all the world serves her and she serves nobody.”20 So, first power of Europe and even of the maritime world, Spain was not a commercial or economic great power. Its capital was successively Toledo,21 the ancient capital of Castile and the Visigoth kingdom, then Valladolid, from 1126 to 1561, then Madrid, then once again Valladolid, from 1601 to 1621, and finally, till now, Madrid, whose population went from only 6,000 in 1561 to 150,000 inhabitants in 1780.22 During its Golden Age, Spain sometimes failed or made errors. Among the failures, the Invincible Armada of 1588 against Elizabeth I’s England must be mentioned. As for the blameworthy acts, they include the bitter fight of the Inquisition in Spain against religious unorthodoxy, and the harsh political repression led by the Spanish generals in the Low Countries and in Portugal. Among those generals determined to subject the Flemish, Brabant, and Dutch rebels, two Italians deserve being mentioned: the Genoese Ambrogio, marquis of Spinola, and Alessandro Farnese, duke of Parma, grandson of both Pope Paul III (Farnese, whose illegitimate son was Alessandro Farnese’s father) and Emperor Charles V. Farnese was Charles V’s grandson through his mother Marguerite of Austria (1522–1586), natural daughter of Charles V and half-sister of Philip II. Marguerite of Austria had married Ottavio Farnese, future duke of Parma, in 1538, after having been the spouse of Alexander of Medici. Marguerite was a very intelligent woman. She was governor general of the Low Countries between 1559 and 1567. She had to defend the interests of the Habsburgs in a difficult situation, which worsened after her ruling. Alessandro Farnese had inherited his mother’s political skill, and he is reminded for having won back the Catholic southern Netherlands from the control of the rebellious United Provinces. Though

20.

21.

22.

Carlo Cipolla, Before the Industrial Revolution : European Society and Economy, 1000–1700 (London: Methuen, 1981), 25; Paul Knox and John Agnew, The Geography of the World Economy (London: Edward Arnold, 1994), 162. During the Islamic occupation, Toledo was an exceedingly prosperous city, which produced woollen and silk textile as well as steel blades. The city’s large Jewish community played a leading role in its commercial activities. After the Christian Reconquista, from 1355 that community suffered several pogroms before being expelled in 1492. Madrid originated as a Moorish castle-town on a small left-bank hilltop partially encircled to the south and west by the Manzanares River, a tributary of the Jarama, which flows towards the Tagus River. Madrid is located near the geometric center of the Iberian Peninsula. Madrid is the earliest of modern national capitals founded for reasons whereby entrenched local political interests were not to be allowed to influence national considerations, as in the case of Washington, Ottawa, or Canberra.

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fighting generals, Spinola and Farnese confronted the rebels in a human way, which was not the case with the implacable and sanguinary duke of Alba. Fernando Álvarez of Toledo, duke of Alba was governor general of the Low Countries from 1567 to 1573. He marked history by crushing the Dutch and Flemish revolts, sacking the port of Antwerp in 1576, and quelling the Portuguese uprising of 1582. The Spaniards also exerted violence against the Jews (expelled from Spain in 1492), the Moriscos (Spanish Moslems converted to Catholicism and expelled from Spain in 1609), and the Marranos (Spanish Jews converted to Catholicism). The repressive attitude of Spain facing the liberties the people of the Low Countries, altogether from the Flanders, Brabant, or the future United Provinces, tried to conquer, must be seen as a consequence of the logical opposition between the orthogenetic approach characteristic of the territorial states, inclined to standardize and impose a single culture (including religion), and the heterogenetic character of economy-world centers. By asserting their desire for freedom, the inhabitants of the Low Countries expressed the natural aspirations of an emerging economy-world center. Similarly, by crushing the liberation movements in the Low Countries, Madrid reacted as a territorial state preoccupied with not accepting in a part of its territory something that could not be generalized to the entirety of that territory. The liberationrepression dynamics that resulted from that situation must be seen as a natural corollary of the passing of the European economic leadership from Northern Italy to Northern Europe. Above all a territorial state, Spain often shown violent authoritarianism during that period. However, it must be said in its defense that it was the only European maritime power not to directly take part in the slave trade in Africa, while England, Portugal, France, the United Provinces, the British colonies of America (including the future United States), Denmark, Sweden, and the German cities of the Baltic Sea were all involved in it (Spanish colonies bought African slaves, but Spain refused to trade them). On the credit side of the assessment one can make of Golden-Age Spain, it must be said that it it contributed, more than any other state, to the return in strength of Christian Europe. It did so, of course, by discovering America, which revived Christianity and modified the course of spaceeconomic history by accelerating the westward topodynamic movement within the Great Corridor, and by making possible the emergence of the modern American Corridor. It did it also by winning, in 1571, the illustrious naval battle of Lepante against the Ottoman Turks. That victory put an end to the Turkish domination on the Mediterranean Sea and initiated the slow withdrawal of the Ottoman Empire in Europe, but also in North Africa and the Near East. The battle of Lepante was won by Don Juan of Austria, a natural child of Emperor Charles V and half-brother of Philip II.

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On May 19, 1643, another battle shook the Spanish domination of Europe in a lasting way: the battle of Rocroi (in present Wallony, Belgium) won by Louis II of Bourbon, prince of Condé, called the Great Condé, third cousin of Louis XIV. Since Louis XIII had died five days earlier, on May 14, 1643, five months and ten days after the death of his prime minister Richelieu, that French victory over the Spanish troops occurred precisely on the fifth day of the reign of the young Louis XIV, who was still only four years and eight months old. The Regency was ensured by the queen-mother who was assisted by Prime Minister Mazarin (Giulio Mazarini), who came from a little-known family of the Abruzzi region to the east of Rome, and, curiously enough, was Louis XIV’s godfather.23 The greatness of Louis XIV’s reign owes a lot to the two cardinal prime ministers, Richelieu and Mazarin. By making alliances outside with the Protestants and Gustav II Adolph’s Sweden, and defending Catholicism inside, Richelieu had succeeded to weaken both Austria and Spain while preserving the power of France. Mazarin perfected his work by negotiating the Treaty of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years’ War in 1648, and the Treaty of the Pyrenees, which terminated the war with Spain in 1659. The two treaties were signed at the expense of the Habsburgs, both German and Spanish, and marked the accession of France to the very first rank of European nations. In 1659, after the Fronde, that civil war of the beginning of Louis XIV’s reign, and after various conflicts with its neighbors, France found itself at peace both within and outside. It was by far the most populated country of Europe, including Russia, and one of the wealthiest, the Italian and Dutch poles being at its borders. In 1661, after the death of Mazarin, his godfather and prime minister, Louis XIV decided to personally take on power. For thirty years, from 1661 to 1691, his reign was among the most glorious ones of the history of France thanks to the exceptional team the king formed with the three greatest ministers of his reign: Michel Le Tellier, Jean-Baptiste Colbert and Louvois, Le Tellier’s son. Altough they constituted a single clan at the beginning, Le Tellier’s sister having espoused a Colbert and Jean-Baptiste Colbert having begun his career as an assistant of Michel Le Tellier, the Colberts and Le Telliers soon formed two separate clans promoting two different philosophies. Responsible for justice, the borders, and the monarchial army, whose founding they presided over, the Le Telliers perceived the role of the French territorial state in its relations with the new center of the European economy they attempted to dominate militarily as Spain had done before them. As for the Colberts, they were given the responsibility of finances, trade, industry, navy, and colonies.

23.

The Italian Mazarin settled in France on January 3, 1640; he became prime minister on December 5, 1642, and Louis XIV’s godfather on April 21, 1643, 24 days before Louis XIII’s death and Louis XIV’s accession to the throne.

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They were then led to conceive the French territorial state in the context of its relations with the periphery following an approach marked by the network systems (as in the future theory of Vance), while the Le Telliers’ approach corresponded to the logic of the future central-place theory of Christaller and Lösch. Those point-of-view differences had major consequences in the field of economic thinking. The Colberts became the promoters and defenders of mercantilism, also called “Colbertism,” while it was in the Le Tellier clan that the doctrine of economic liberalism was born thanks to Marillac, Boisguilbert, and Vauban.24 Two years after the death of Colbert, on October 5, 1685, that is, 91 years before the publishing of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, the military intendant René de Marillac, who worked under the direct orders of Le Tellier and Louvois, wrote to Claude Le Peletier, Colbert’s successor and one of the leaders of the Le Tellier clan: “the greatest secret [to maintain manufactures] is to leave all liberties in trade; men are naturally guided by their interest, and it is enough to sustain and facilitate the already established manufactures. They never have as much declined, in the kingdom and in the commerce also, as since someone has decided to augment them by authoritarian means.” That text is one of the oldest and clearest statement of the liberal doctrine in the history of economic thought, and it clearly takes on the form of a criticism of Colbert and Colbertism. In the wake of Marillac, Boisguilbert, and Vauban, the French Physiocrats, who were the first ones to bear the name of “economists,” gave birth to the first school of economic thought advocating liberalism. The great military engineer Vauban not only contributed to the art of fortifications and to the birth of liberalism; he also is the father of the doctrine of the “pré carré” (literally “square meadow”; occasionally translated as the doctrine of the “dueling ground”), which is the clearest formulation of the ideal of the territorial states.25 According to that doctrine, which is the basis of the political thought of the Le Tellier clan, France ought to extend its territory to the east to the Rhine, as close as possible to the core of the rising North European economy (and to the central axis of the Great Corridor), and, once that goal had been attained, it had to consolidate its borders and make them impenetrable by making its territory as compact and impregnable as possible. According to that philosophy, the destiny of France ought to be above all continental and European, and not colonial and imperialist, as the 24. 25.

Luc-Normand Tellier, Face aux Colbert : les Le Tellier, Vauban, Turgot et l’avènement du libéralisme (Quebec: Presses de l’Université du Québec, 1987). Voltaire regarded Vauban as “a genius of the age.” He built fortresses and waterways systems. He invented the bayonet. He made proposals for the development of New France and proposed radical reforms of the taxation system, which makes him a precursor of the Physiocrats. As a military engineer, he worked for Louvois, Louis XIV’s great Minister for War.

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Colberts pretended. The two doctrines, at once contradictory and complementary, marked the history of France. The Colbertist vision prevailed in the nineteenth century with the constitution of the second French colonial empire, but, in the twentieth century, it is clearly the vision of the Le Telliers that got the upper hand with the triumph of the European ideal. A very unfortunate side effect of the “pré carré” approach and of the orthogenetic character of the French territorial state took the form of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes that Chancellor Le Tellier signed on October 18, 1685, only twelve days before dying. The Edict of Nantes proclaimed by Henry IV in 1598 created a kind of “Protestant state within the French state.” Its revocation was celebrated by the greatest minds of France at that time, to begin with the illustrious preacher Bossuet. It put an end to the privileges Henry IV had given French Protestants, and it incited a large number of them, between 200,000 and 300,000 according to various estimates, to flee the country despite that the Revocation explicitly prevented them to do so. It must be said that the coexistence of Catholics and Protestants in a same country was absolutely not the rule in Europe at that time. France was an exception in that respect. Elsewhere, since the Peace of Augsburg, signed in 1555, had imposed the principle “cujus regio, ejus religio” (“whose fief, whose religion”) as the very basis of a lasting peace between Protestants and Catholics in the Germanic Holy Roman Empire, that principle was the norm in most regions of Europe. According to this principle, the religion of each part of the Germanic Holy Roman Empire was to be defined by its prince, and only one denomination was to be recognized, the religion of the prince’s choice being thus made obligatory for his subjects. Thus, by applying that principle to France, the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes was less scandalous by the standards of the time than unfortunate, and Vauban was the first one to dare sending a letter to Louis XIV stressing the serious effects the flight of the Protestants and their migrating to countries which were France’s enemies, such as England, the United Provinces, and Brandenburg-Prussia, had on the French economy and, particularly, on the glass and clothing industries. Contrary to England, that had always allowed its subjects belonging to religious minority groups to find refuge in the English colonies of America (for instance, the Puritans founded Massachusetts; the Roman Catholics, Maryland; and the Quakers, Philadelphia and Pennsylvania), France forbade the Huguenots (the French Calvinists) to migrate to New France, which nevertheless had an urgent need of immigrants. Those who fled overseas rather went to populate Dutch South Africa when their contribution to the population of New France could have made a difference (who knows?) and saved that French colony 75 years later.

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A city embodied the greatness of Louis XIV’s France: Versailles. That capital stemming from the will of a single man had a considerable impact on city planning throughout the world. From the gardens of Versailles and the Champs-Élysées of Paris, both designed by André Le Nôtre, originates the geometric urbanism “à la française” made of visual axes, radial layouts, theatrical façades, wide avenues, grandiose monuments, and an omnipresent and full-of-surprises planning. By his wars and his buildings, Louis XIV succeeded to militarily and culturally dominate Europe, but he never managed to dominate it economically, by the way not anymore than Napoleon did one century later. The space-economic logic is so strong that battles and empires rarely change anything to it. Philip II of Spain and Louis XIV both attempted to submit to their will the economic heart of the new Europe dominated by the Low Countries, and both failed, in the same way that Napoleon tried, without succeeding, to subjugate the London heart of the European economy at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Besides Spain and France, a third territorial state took form in the aftermath of the discovery of America: Austria, which was still, in 1492, a simple hereditary archduchy within the Germanic Holy Roman Empire. The holder of that archduchy, Frederick of Habsburg, however had the distinction of being at the same time the emperor under the name of Frederick III. The ascension of Austria as a territorial state is linked to the destiny of the House of Habsburg. The son of Frederick III, Maximilian I, had married in 1477 Mary of Burgundy, daughter and sole heir of Charles the Bold, duke of Burgundy. In 1496, Maximilian’s son, Philip the Handsome, married Joan the Mad, daughter and only heir of the Spanish kings, Isabel the Catholic and Ferdinand of Aragon. This is how, in 1504, Philip the Handsome of Habsburg, descendant of the archdukes of Austria, became Philip I, king of Spain. Till then, Austria was just one of the numerous fiefs of the Habsburgs. It became the embryo of a territorial state when Emperor Charles V, the son of Philip the Handsome and Joan the Mad, decided in 1556 to abdicate both as emperor and king of Spain, and to give the throne of Spain to his son Philip II of Spain, while managing to have his brother Ferdinand I, king of Bohemia and Hungary, elected emperor of the Germanic Holy Roman Empire in his place. Ferdinand I is the ancestor of the Habsburgs of Austria. The position of emperor being elective, the Habsburgs could hope to keep it from generation to generation only by constituting a vast and powerful domain within The Holy Empire. Moreover, the religious conflicts which agitated the Holy Empire from the appearance of Lutheranism and led to the Thirty Years’ War, which lasted from 1618 to 1648, amply demonstrated that the Habsburgs could not maintain their position as arbiter in the Holy Empire without a solid territorial basis.

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Doing so was not easy since the historical basis of the Habsburgs had been Switzerland, from which the Peace of Basel had chased them in 1499. Even Vienna, the old Vindobona of the Romans, which had been a fief of the Habsburgs since 1273, had passed in 1485 to the king of Hungary, Matthias I Corvinus, before being recaptured by the Habsburgs in 1490. On the other hand, Austria was very close to the Ottoman Empire, which had besieged Vienna in 1529 and did it again in 1683. In fifty-five years, from 1683 to 1718, three wars opposed the Turks to the Austrians. Despite all those obstacles, the Habsburgs increasingly linked their destiny to Austria’s. The Westphalia Treaty of 1648 constituted an important step in that evolution. That treaty put an end to the Thirty Years’ War and marked the end of the sacred union between the Spanish and Austrian Habsburgs. In 1635, the Habsburgs of Spain had come to the aid of the Austrian Habsburgs who were fighting against the Protestant powers allied with Richelieu’s France. Thirteen years later, the conflict ended with the dazzling victory of the German Protestants, France, and Sweden over the Habsburgs of France and Austria. The principle “cujus regio, ejus religio,” which had been adopted in Germany for the first time 93 years before, was reaffirmed. The sovereignty of the German states inside the Germanic Holy Roman Empire and their right to form alliances were recognized. France received new territories in Alsace and along the Rhine. Sweden obtained the control of the mouths of the Weser, Elbe, and Oder rivers. The Habsburgs of Spain recognized the sovereignty of the United Provinces, and the Habsburgs of Austria, that of Switzerland. The losses for both branches of the Habsburgs were so important that never again they would let their relations be based on family motivations. The Habsburgs of Austria concluded that, henceforth, they ought not rely on their Spanish cousins, and their destiny depended on their own strength within the Holy Empire. On this score, the Treaty of Westphalia had given them room to manoeuvre by recognizing the hereditary possession of Hungary and Bohemia they had acquired through marriage in 1526. Thereafter, the Habsburgs succeeded to still augment their domain and to make their capital, Vienna, the wealthiest, largest, and most influential Germanic city. From 1600 to 1850, the population of Vienna was multiplied by 8.6, rising from 50,000 to 430,000 inhabitants. In 1875, Vienna was still the largest Germanspeaking city. From Austria, a true territorial state was constituted under the leadership of the Habsburgs. In 1740, that state was almost as extensive as France and included Austria, Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia, Steiermark (Styria), Kärnten (Carinthia), Tyrol, Slovenia, Hungary, and a part of Dalmatia, those two last regions belonging to the Habsburgs without being part of the Holy Empire. It is under Napoleon, in 1804, that this state gave birth to the Austrian Empire, which became the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1867.

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s THE AMERICAN PERIPHERY OF THE NEW EUROPEAN ECONOMY-WORLD With the discovery of America and the triumph of Northern Europe emerged a new economy-world whose center, both North European and Atlantic, comprised the Low Countries and the London region, whose semi-periphery included, above all, France, Spain, and Austria, and whose periphery extended to the limits of the world, to the Philippines, Indonesia, India, various parts of Africa, but, above all, America. That continent developed in four relatively distinct great stages. The first one started in 1492 and involved exploring the continent mainly from the Caribbean. The second phase began around 1550 and was marked by the development of the mineral resources of continental Latin America. The third step started around 1680 and led to the exploitation for exportation purposes of a large-scale agriculture in the Caribbean Islands and Brazil. Finally, the fourth stage involved, from about 1760, the intensive development of the part of America situated to the north of the Rio Grande (see Map 16). The succession of those four stages followed the logic of the maritime currents and the dominant winds. Because of the Canary and Equatorial currents, the Caribbean was the easiest part of the American continent to reach by ship from the south of Europe. The mineral resources of continental Latin America justified a massive exportation towards Europe as long as their value per kilo was high, as in the case of gold or silver. After a while, the economy of the Caribbean and Brazil was oriented towards the production of sugar and rum, which had, at the beginning, a high value per kilo. Finally, for the productions whose value per kilo was lower, such as cotton, tobacco, wood, and cereals, North America had the advantage of being closer to Northern Europe and benefiting from the Gulf Stream. All in all, because of that current, as the average value per ton of the new continent exports to Europe dropped, North America found itself advantaged with respect to Latin America. The urbanization of America followed the same scheme.26 It developed first on a large scale in the mining countries such as Peru, Mexico, and Bolivia.27 Later, urbanization developed in Brazil and the Caribbean. Finally, from about 1760, it reached the part of America situated to the north of the 26.

27.

About the influence of Spain in the urbanization of the Americas, see John H. Parry, The Spanish Seaborne Empire (London : Hutchinson, 1977). About the urbanization of Latin America, see Jorge Enrique Hardoy and Carlos Tobar (ed.), Urbanization in Latin America : Approaches and Issues (New York: Anchor Books, 1975), and Richard P. Schaedel, Jorge Enrique Hardoy, and Nora Scott Kinzer (eds), Urbanization in the Americas from its Beginnings to the Present (The Hague : Aldine, and Paris : Mouton, 1978). Paul Bairoch, op. cit., 388–389.

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Quebec City Montreal Boston New York

Philadelphia

am Stre Gulf

Charleston

Cur rent

Atlantic Ocean

urr al C

nt

e

Pacific Ocean

at

ori

Caracas

C an

Eq u

ary

Mexico City

Bogotá

Lima

m ld bo

Potosí

t Cu

Rio de Janeiro

Br az il C

t rren

urr ent

Hu

720 km

Map 16 The Americas between 1492 and 1825

Rio Grande. Another indication of the progression of development throughout America is given by the founding of the universities. The first university of the continent was founded in 1538 in Santo Domingo (the present-day

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capital of the Dominican Republic); the second one in 1551 in Lima (Peru),28 the third one in 1553 in Mexico City, and the fourth one, in 1580 in Bogotá. To the north of the Rio Grande, the Quebec City Seminary was founded in 1635, and Harvard started as a small college in 1636. Its founding was followed by the founding, in 1693, of William and Mary College (Williamsburg, Virginia), of Yale College in 1701, and of the University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia) in 1740 (to the north of Rio Grande, the University of Pennsylvania was the first institution to bear the official name of university). The fact that the universities of Santo Domingo, Lima, and Mexico were awarding degrees more than 65 years before the Pilgrim Fathers set foot on Plymouth Rock in 1620 tells a lot about the historical advance Latin America had over the rest of the American continent. The stage of the exploration of America caused a true hecatomb in the aboriginal populations, and that hecatomb greatly facilitated the conquest of the continent by the Europeans. Thus, according to Diamond, the conquest of Tenochtitlan-Mexico City in 1521 was preceded, in 1520, by a smallpox epidemic, caused by one infected slave arriving from Spanish Cuba, which proceeded to kill nearly half of the Aztecs, including Emperor Cuitláhuac.29 Similarly, in Peru, the conquest of the Inca Empire in 1530 was hastened by an epidemic of smallpox spreading overland among South American Indians after its arrival, around 1526, with Spanish settlers in Panama and Colombia. The epidemic had killed the Inca emperor Huayna Capac and most of his court, as early as in 1526, and then immediately killed his designated heir, Ninan Cuyuchi. Those deaths had precipitated a contest for the throne between Atahuallpa and his half-brother Huascar, who was defeated. Atahuallpa had just won that war when Pizarro and his troops arrived. Similar scenarios happened again and again throughout North, Central and South America. It is estimated that at least three-quarters (and probably up to 95 percent) of the indigenous population perished. When Columbus landed in America, the population of the Americas was more than 40 million (and even more than 70 million); this population had fallen to somewhere on the order of 12 million in 1570 and around 10 million in 1650. On the island of Hispaniola (present-day Haiti and Dominican Republic), there were around 8 million Indians in 1492, when Columbus discovered the island; zero were left in 1535.30 There was 25 million of Amerindians in Mexico in 1519, but only 1 million were left in 1605. In Peru, the local population went from 11 million in 1500 to just 3 million in 1530. From 1500 to 1600,

28. 29. 30.

The University of San Marcos founded in Lima was the first in South America, the University of Mexico City was the first in North America. Jared Diamond, op. cit., 210. Ibid., 213.

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before a single European village had been founded, the population of the present United States went down from 2 million to 1.5 million, while the population of Canada stayed around 250,000.31 The population of the Americas did not recover its 1500 level until the first half of the eighteenth century, and it did because of immigration, not because of the natural growth of the aboriginal population. The huge population decline was caused by the deadly epidemics caused by viruses and microbes introduced by the Europeans and unknown in the New World before that time: smallpox especially, but also, among others, typhus, measles, influenza, tuberculosis, mumps, diphtheria, pertussis, leprosy, the plague, dysentery, pox, and even yellow fever and malaria, both imported from Africa through slave traffic. But it was also caused by the massacres accompanying and following the conquest, and the excesses of the colonial system of exploitation both in mining and agriculture, especially in the plantations. These excesses were such that they led to importing African slaves, who were more resistant. Finally, the economic disorganization resulting from the collapse of the pre-Columbian states and empires aggravated the situation. The regions that were most affected by the negative impacts of colonization were the most developed and urbanized prior to Columbus. This fact resulted in a major cultural decline and in the disappearance of most pre-Columbian cities. That being said, the European colonization did not bring only calamities. Among other things, it allowed for the introduction of new crops in America: wheat, rice, sugar cane, vines, salad greens, olives, bananas, and coffee. New animals were also imported: cattle, pigs, chickens, sheep, and goats for food, as well as horses, oxen, asses, and donkeys for transport (before the arrival of the Europeans, land transport possibilities were confined to human porterage in Central and North America; the Inca used llamas and alpacas). Colonization also brought wheeled vehicles, metal tools, and ploughs, which replaced digging sticks. All that contributed to enhance the economic potential of the region. The intensive exploitation of mines preceded the development of agriculture on a large scale. To the stage of exploration succeeded the phase of exploitation of silver mines of present-day Mexico, Peru, and Bolivia, and the gold mines of Colombia and later Brazil, that is, the gold mines of Minas Gerais from 1693 and those of Mato Grosso from 1720. Many important cities are relics of that period: for instance, Lima, founded in 1535 and developed thanks to the silver from Potosí and Oruro; Bogotá, founded in 1538 and developed thanks to the gold of its region; Rio de Janeiro, founded

31.

Angus Maddison, op. cit., 233.

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by the Portuguese in 1565 and developed mainly thanks to the gold of Minas Gerais and Matto Grosso conveyed to Rio by a road inaugurated in 1704. The founding of the Portuguese city of São Sebastião de Rio de Janeiro had been preceded at the same location by the founding of a “French Rio” named Fort Coligny in honor of Gaspard of Coligny, the famous Huguenot who was admiral since and who had been at the origin of the French expedition aimed at founding a new colony named Guanabara. Nicolas Durand de Villegaignon and 600 French colonists founded Fort Coligny on November 10, 1555. This colony was intended to allow French Protestants (Huguenots) to settle in America. In 1560, Portugal attacked and destroyed Fort Coligny. Owing to the development Rio de Janeiro experienced through the mining development of Minas Gerais and Matto Grosso, the colonial capital of Brazil moved from Salvador de Bahia to Rio in 1763. The conquest of Tenochtitlan-Mexico and the Aztec Empire by Hernán Cortés and his small group of conquistadors in 1521 had contributed to launch the phase of exploitation of precious metals. That conquest can be explained by the diseases as well as by the fact that the Aztec had no horses, no iron nor steel weapons, and no firearms. Moreover, some beliefs announcing the coming of almighty strangers generated fatalism, especially in Emperor Moctezuma II (also called Montezuma). Within a few months, the Aztec noblemen and the populations they dominated were subjugated, humiliated, despised, and treated like inferiors by the barbarian conquistadors who chose to destroy the magnificent city of Tenochtitlan, whose population was about 160,000 inhabitants in 1521, to build on its site a new Spanish city, Mexico City, whose population varied between 50,000 and 60,000 from 1550 to 1650. In general, the Spaniards attempted in their American colonies to build a new urban system over the old one they just destroyed or marginalized (even if the old pre-Columbian city system somewhat survived in spite of the colonial will). Under Charles V, Spain even adopted colonial “Laws of the Indies” through which, from 1521, it enforced a city planning legislation based on a gridiron street layout.32 The city of Tenochtitlan had been built on a lake (that has since disappeared), and its ground was marshy. The lake was surrounded with mountains and constituted a basin. Its site occupied a very central location, about halfway between the Atlantic and the Pacific, not too far from either. There are three significant rivers in the area of Mexico City. The main one, the Rio Grande de Santiago, goes northwestward to the Pacific (through Guadalajara). There is also the Balsas River, which travels westward to the Pacific and reaches the ocean to the west of Acapulco. Finally, the Pánuco River goes to the port of Tampico on the Atlantic. But since the arrival of 32.

Anthony Edwin James Morris, History of Urban Form: Before the Industrial Revolutions (Harlow: Pearson Education & Prentice Hall, 1994), 305.

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Cortés in 1519, the main link between Mexico City, the Atlantic, and Europe has been Veracruz, founded by Cortés on the Gulf of Mexico, while very early the port of Acapulco linked the viceroyalty of New Spain to the Philippines. Actually, if a part of the silver of Mexico took the direction of Seville, another part went to the Philippines and served to buy the main export products of China, such as silk, porcelain, and tea, destined to the European market. The mineral wealth of Mexico was significantly inferior to that of South America. Francisco Pizarro attacked the Inca Empire in 1530 with 168 Spanish soldiers: 62 riding horses and 106 on foot. The empire he attempted to conquer was the vastest of all the states of America. It was five times more extended than the Aztec Empire and covered the territories of present-day Peru and Ecuador, as well as important parts of Bolivia and Chile. However, its capital, Cuzco, had only 60,000 inhabitants, which is little compared with the 160,000 inhabitants of Tenochtitlan. Atahuallpa, the Inca emperor, commanded an army of 80,000 soldiers. On November 16, 1532, at Cajamarca, within a few minutes after the two leaders set eyes on each other, Pizarro captured Atahuallpa in front of 40,000 Inca soldiers, none of whom raised a weapon against a Spaniard. The Spaniards had steel swords and other weapons, steel armor, guns, and horses, while, to those weapons, Atahuallpa’s troops, without animals on which to ride into battle, could oppose only stone, bronze, or wooden clubs, maces, and hand axes, plus slingshots and quilted armor. When America was discovered, New World societies had just begun making bronze artifacts and had not yet started making iron ones. Pizarro proceeded to hold his prisoner for eight months, while extracting history’s largest ransom in return for a promise to free him. After the ransom—enough gold to fill a room 6.7 meters long by 5.2 meters wide to a height of about 2.5 meters, which represents 87 square meters—was delivered, Pizarro reneged on his promise and executed Atahuallpa in 1533. The gold and silver accumulated by the Inca emperors was sent to Spain. Potosí’s silver deposit was discovered in 1545 and it came to produce 300 tons of silver per year at a period when the whole Europe just produced 60 tons per year. Potosí is a typical mining city. Located in the mountains, it is not close to a river. The closest small rivers belong to the Parana River Basin. The Parana leads to Rio de la Plata (which means “River of the Silver”) and Buenos Aires. Not too far from Potosí, another major silver deposit was exploited at Oruro, which lies in the Amazon Basin, not the Parana Basin, despite that both cities lie in present-day Bolivia. The growth of Potosí was fast as lightning. From 1545 to 1600, its population went from nothing to 105,000 in habitants, and it reached 135,000 inhabitants in 1650 when it had become the largest city of the Americas, far ahead of Mexico City, which

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had then only about 55,000. In 1700, Potosí and Mexico had about the same population, around 90,000 inhabitants, and Oruro was the third largest city of America with about 70,000 inhabitants.33 In 1535, two years after the execution of Atahuallpa, Jiménez de Quesada launched the conquest of Colombia and crowned it in 1538 by founding Santa Fe de Bogotá. 34 The rich gold mines of Bogotá’s region rapidly made the fortune of the new town. Those mines and the ones of Mexico and Peru inscribed the development of Latin America in a logic of resource levying and extraction of the rent attached to some products. That logic naturally prevails in the far periphery of the economy-worlds whether it is referred to mining, oil exploitation, or drugs production (the cultivation of drugs bears a rent in the regions where it is possible or tolerated simply because it is prohibited elsewhere). The extraction activities in the periphery are often associated with a shameful exploitation of the workers. This is what happened in Spanish America, where miners and other Amerindian workers were almost enslaved. Thousands of them died, many revolted, and still more fled. A vicious circle developed in which the more America exported precious metals to Spain, the more inflation undermined the Spanish economy, and the more the Spanish Treasury resorted to America’s gold and silver to avoid bankruptcy. Ultimately, the Amerindian workers bore the brunt of that relentless pursuit of an impossible solution. The situation deteriorated to such a point that Madrid had to intervene in order to avoid the complete extermination of Amerindians. Two measures were adopted: resorting to the importation of African slaves (who were sold by other European nations, since Spain refused to trade slaves) and the creation of reducciones (from the Spanish verb reducir, which means “to soften” or “to civilize”). From 1542, the situation of the Amerindians had become so worrying that Spain adopted, from 1542 to 1545, a series of laws bestowing them the status of “free vassals” of the Crown and creating reducciones aimed at protecting the Amerindians from the white exploiters that were wandering about. Thus, a three-level society was created. On top of the hierarchy were the white Europeans, in the middle, the Amerindians, and at the bottom, the Black slaves. The whiter a person was, the more he or she was favored, and the darker the skin, the more he or she was exploited. This is how the color 33.

34.

Potosí’s population declined to about 30,000 by the early eighteenth century. It seems that, despite its important population, Potosí was prevented from ever achieving the rank of a great city by pressures from the city of Sucre, in whose jurisdiction it was located. Bogotá was made capital of the vice-royalty of New Granada established in 1739 when the viceroy of Peru was sub-divided.

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of the skin became a social factor, even if it had never been in Egypt or under the Roman or Ottoman Empires where Pharaohs, emperors, and sultans had very dark skins, while blond-hair-and-blue-eye Germans, Celts, or Slavs were often slaves. Six large regions were designated as reducciones: the peninsula of Baja California (in modern Mexico), an area located in modern Colombia northeast of Bogotá, a region located at the border of present Peru and Ecuador, an area presently divided between Peru, Brazil and Bolivia, a part of Bolivia located at the border of Brazil and Paraguay, and the famous reducción of the Guaranis in modern Paraguay, at the border of Brazil and Argentina. Within the reducciones, the Amerindians were allowed to live freely under the supervision of the Jesuits in a “communist” context where existed no money or private property, and the organization of work and the social protection were under the responsibility of the Amerindian community. Work and goods were distributed according to talent, capacity, and need. A form of autarky was practiced. Life was well regulated. A kind of idyllic society took form and blossomed. Music, singing, education, morality, generosity, and the Christian virtues were developed to a point that Europe itself had probably never known. The reducciones were such a success that Indians were coming from everywhere to join them. And, while the Indian population was decreasing throughout America, the population of these refuges was growing regularly. The very existence of such “heavens on Earth” was a threat to the exploiters and profitable activities. The first obstacle to the development of the reducciones came from the slave hunters who systematically raided the peaceful areas in order to catch slaves. These slave hunters primarily came from the Portuguese territory of Brazil. It must be said that the Portuguese were trying everything to extend the territory the Treaty of Tordesillas had bestowed them in 1494. But the Guaranis succeeded in defending themselves with the help of the Jesuits. The first fatal blow came from Portugal, whose Prime Minister Pombal expelled the Jesuits in 1759. In the second half of the eighteenth century, Portuguese finances were in desperate straits. Metropolitan revenues from Brazil were squeezed by the decline in gold production. Income from Asia had collapsed and Portugal had to bear the costs of reconstructing Lisbon after the 1755 earthquake. To meet this problem, Prime Minister Pombal expelled the Jesuits from Brazil, confiscated their vast properties, and sold them to wealthy landowners and merchants for the benefit of the crown.35

35.

Anthony Edwin James Morris, op. cit., 71.

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The second blow came from France where the heirs of the Jansenists (the Catholic group that Louis XIV had persecuted on the advice of his Jesuit confessor) were looking for revenge. The attack on the Jesuits originally launched by Blaise Pascal in 1656 received, during the eighteenth century, the support of Voltaire (who was educated by Jesuits), Madame de Pompadour, and the Encyclopédistes, who were promoting a more liberal and less religious society. Jesuits were seen as the hidden power behind the thrones of Catholic Europe. The deathblow came in France with accusations made in 1761 by a priest, Abbé Henri-Philippe Chauvelin, who accused the Jesuits of mismanagement in business matters related to America, more precisely Martinique. A campaign was conducted to convince the French King Louis XV to expel the Jesuits from France. At last, in 1764, he agreed. In the years following, the Jesuits were banned from all Catholic countries.36 In 1767, they were ordered to leave Spanish America and in 1768, they left their reducciones, which collapsed in a true human tragedy where the white exploiters destroyed everything the Jesuits and the Indians had so marvelously built over the years. The departure of Jesuits led to the decline of the reducciones, whose populations were robbed, exterminated, or dispersed by exploiters of all kind, especially by those who were looking for manpower for the plantations that were developing in various parts of the continent. The third stage of the development of America was under way, and it was dominated by the plantations and large-scale farming, which had started very early, but had become important only around 1570, and clearly predominant around 1680. Large-scale export-oriented agricultural exploitation began in the Caribbean, more specifically in Cuba, as early as in 1500, and in Santo Domingo; then it reached Venezuela, Brazil, and the other regions. The first agricultural goods produced on a large scale were tobacco and plants used in dyeing (such as indigo). Then came sugarcane (around 1548), cocoa, perfume plants, and, finally, coffee and cotton. Generally, the Europeans cultivated in the New World tropical products they were unable to grow at home. The plantations, even more than the mines, required a considerable manpower that Spain decided to bring in from Africa. That decision resulted from a campaign led by the son of a companion of Christopher Columbus who had become a planter in Cuba, the Dominican missionary Bartolomé de Las Casas, who, after having exercised his apostolate in Venezuela, went as far as writing a provocative tract entitled Very Brief Relation of the Destruction of the Indies. That text was published in 1542, precisely 50 years after the discovery of America. It denounced the exploitation and forced work imposed on the Amerindians, and launched a movement to 36.

The Jesuits survived by taking refuge in two non-Catholic countries: Frederick II’s Prussia and Catherine II’s Russia.

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protect and defend them. That tract and other writings of Las Casas made the Spanish authorities aware of the tragedy lived by the Amerindians and convinced them to resort to African slaves in order to favor the development of the plantations without oppressing the surviving Amerindians. The importation of African slaves had started as early as 1510–1515. After 1542, the Spanish authorities openly encouraged it in most of their colonies. It must be said that, contrary to Cuba and other Spanish colonies of the Caribbean area, New Spain (Mexico) did not resort to massive imports of African slaves. But in Venezuela and Colombia the coastal cities did import slaves. The Spaniards let the other European countries trade slaves between Africa and America. Between 1600 and 1870 more than nine million African slaves were shipped to the Americas. The peak was in the eighteenth century when arrivals in the Americas were over six million, and African losses were bigger owing to mortality on the passage.37 Out of the six million slaves, 41% were brought to America by England, 29% by Portugal, 19% by France, 5.7% but the United Provinces, 3% by the British colonies of America that were to become the United States, 1% by Denmark, and 0.1% by Sweden and the German Baltic cities. 38 At the time, slavery was accepted by Christians (the Quakers were among the first to refuse and denounce it), Muslims, Hindus, Chinese, and Japanese. The practice of castrating young boys was also accepted in the West (with the castrati) and in the East (with Chinese and Muslim eunuchs), without forgetting female genital mutilation, which was a common practice in various societies. According to Bairoch, “around 1825, of some 24 million inhabitants in Latin America, only a little more than 8 million were native-Americans, Europeans accounting for 4.9 million, Blacks for 4.1 million, and half-breeds for some 6.4 million.”39 Slavery was abolished for the first time in 1794, in France, in the context of the French Revolution, but in 1802 Napoleon Bonaparte restored it; this provoked an uprising in the French colony of St. Domingue and, ultimately, the independence of Haiti. Slave trade (but not slavery) was outlawed by Great Britain in 1807, by the United States in 1808, and by France and the Netherlands in 1815. As for slavery, it was abolished by the British in 1833, (anew) by the French in 1848, by the Hollanders in 1865, by President Lincoln in the United States in 1863, and by the Portuguese and the Spaniards in 1880. Slavery was abolished in Puerto Rico in 1873 and in Cuba in 1880. Brazilian slavery was maintained until 1888.

37. 38. 39.

Anthony Edwin James Morris, op. cit., 240. Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969). Paul Bairoch, op. cit., 385.

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The stage of plantation creation was dominated by cities whose first mission was to develop a prosperous agricultural hinterland. Those outposts, which are typical of network systems, were initially founded on the coasts or close to them. Among the outposts created in that period were Bahia (Brazil), founded in 1500 and developed through sugarcane and cocoa; Havana,40 founded in 1519 as San Cristobal de la Habana and developed with sugarcane plantations and trans-Atlantic trade; Caracas,41 founded in 1567 and developed through sugarcane and coffee; as well as São Paulo, founded in 1554 and developed with coffee. All those first settlements were precarious, and their agricultural basis became profitable from 1570 and even later. Most of the time, those cities became the stakes of jurisdiction conflicts, both in North America and South America. Thus, in the Caribbean, Spain had to confront France, England, and the United Provinces. The French and the Dutch opposed the Portuguese in Brazil. The former Dutch colony of Suriname, the Netherlands Antilles, French Guadeloupe and Martinique, as well as French Guiana still bring to mind the past pretensions of the United Provinces and France in the region. The Portuguese and the Spaniards confronted each other over the western basin of the Amazon. North of the Rio Grande, Spain, France, England, Sweden, the United Provinces, and even Russia had conflicting claims and, most of the time, fought for them. This leads to the fourth stage of the development of America: direct competition with Europe. That phase started around 1760 and was dominated by North America (but also Argentina). Before that stage, the New World had essentially exported to Europe only precious metals, whose high value justified conveying them over long distances, or agricultural products Europe could not produce because of its climate, which justified their high prices and their transportation across the Atlantic. During the fourth phase, America competed with Europe on its own ground, in sectors where Europe already was strong, such as the production of cereals, wood, ships, fabrics, and meat (as in the case of Argentina).

40.

41.

Cuba remained longest in Spanish hands from 1492 to 1899, that is, during 407 years Cuba was the main Spanish base for explorations of mainland North America (Cortés set out from Cuba in 1519 to conquer Mexico), and, through Havana, its principal port, the main supply and communications base for the east-bound shipping trade with Spain. In 1499, Alonso de Ojeda, accompanied by Amerigo Vespucci, explored the coast of Venezuela, naming the country “little Venice” after the huts built on piles above the swampy ground of Maracaibo. Only in 1527 was the coastal city of Coro founded as the first seat of government. In 1550 Venezuela became a captaincy-general, the capital of which was moved in 1576 under the name of Santiago de León de Caracas.

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What had been a barrier for the development of North America became an advantage. While the dominant currents had driven the Spaniards to the Caribbean instead of the north, the Gulf Stream allowed for sending at a low cost to Europe the products of the northern part of America, including those that had a relatively low value per ton (like cereals and wood). Moreover, while the equatorial currents had favored establishing strong links between Latin America and Spain and Portugal when those countries were at the top of their influence, the Gulf Stream favored the creation of strong links between Northern America and Northern Europe, which had come to dominate Europe. Finally, while the climate had allowed Latin America to provide Europe with the agricultural products it did not have, the similarity of the climates allowed Northern America to compete directly with Europe. In 1600, there was no European settlement north of the Rio Grande, while the number of Spaniards settled in New Spain (Mexico) and more to the south already reached 150,000 persons. Later, when the French, English, Swedes, Dutch, and Russians had founded trading posts, forts, villages, and cities north of the Rio Grande, their settlements remained for a long time much more marginal than those that existed at the same epoch in New Spain, Central America, or South America (not to mention the Caribbean). Bairoch wrote: Until the start of the nineteenth century, Latin America contained by far the largest part of the urban population of America, North and South. Around 1700, at a time when Latin America had twenty to twenty-two cities with populations of more than 20,000 (three of them with more than 50,000: Mexico City with 100,000, Potosí with 95,000 and Oruro with 70,000), the three largest American and Canadian cities were Boston with a population of 7,000, Quebec with 6,000, and New York with 5,000. Even as late as 1800, beside the forty-odd cities with populations of 20,000 and the total urban population of 2,900,000 in Latin America, northern North America could only muster four cities with populations of 20,000 and some 300,000 city dwellers overall. By contrast, in 1900 there were only 8 million city dwellers in Latin America as against almost 30 million in the United States and Canada.42

In 1700, the six largest North American cities (north of the Rio Grande) were, in decreasing order: Boston, Quebec City, Philadelphia, New York, Newport (Virginia), and Charleston (South Carolina). A century later, in 1800, the list had changed in the following way: Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Charleston, Quebec City, and Montreal. Then, in 1850, the order had become: New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Montreal, Charleston, and Quebec City.

42.

Paul Bairoch, op. cit., 389–390.

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The first explorers of North America were the Viking Leif Eriksson, the Italian Giovanni Caboto (John Cabot), sailing for England and King Henry VII, the Italian Giovanni da Verrazano, navigating for the king of France Francis I, and Jacques Cartier, also sailing for Francis I. Erikson left Greenland and probably reached Newfoundland around AD 1000. He called the discovered area Vinland (“land of the vine”). In 1497–1498, the Florentine, Venetian, or Genoese Giovanni Caboto explored Newfoundland and the eastern coast of North America while looking for a route to India. In 1524, the Florentine Verrazano also explored the Atlantic coast of North America from Georgia up to Newfoundland. He gave the area the name of New France. Ten years later, in 1534, Jacques Cartier, from Saint-Malo in France, discovered the St. Lawrence River. In Gaspé, he took possession of Canada in the name of Francis I, king of France. He gave the St. Lawrence its name. He traveled to an island with an impressive hill at the centre and called it “Mont Royal,” which became Montreal. North of the Rio Grande, the oldest city of more than 20,000 dwellers is Quebec City, which was founded in 1608, about 100 years after the establishment of the first European colony on the American mainland (excluding the Caribbean), at the Isthmus of Panama. Since 1608, Quebec City has never been abandoned, contrary to many European settlements that have been founded north of the Rio Grande before 1608. The settlements that failed include a settlement founded in 1541 by Jacques Cartier and Jean-François de La Roque de Roberval in Cap-Rouge (which is now a district of Quebec City), and abandoned in 1543, as well as two colonies the French Huguenots founded in present-day South Carolina and Florida. In 1562, Jean Ribault founded Fort Charles or Charlesfort in present South Carolina, while, in 1564, René de Goulaine de Laudonnière founded Fort Caroline in Florida. Like Fort Coligny (which preceded Rio de Janeiro), Fort Charles and Fort Caroline had to be abandoned after a while. The Spaniards destroyed Fort Caroline in 1565, and they founded on its site St. Augustine, which still exists, but whose population never reached 20,000 inhabitants (contrary to Quebec City). In 1599, the Marquis de La Roche founded a settlement on the Île de Sable (Sable Island, 300 kilometers southeast of Halifax, Nova Scotia), which lasted till 1603. In 1600, Pierre Chauvin founded a settlement in Tadoussac, Quebec, which was abandoned in 1601. In 1604, Pierre Dugua de Monts and Samuel Champlain founded a settlement on Isle de St. Croix (present-day Dochet Island, at the border of Maine and New Brunswick). That settlement was dismantled in 1605 and rebuilt in Port-Royal (present Annapolis, Nova Scotia). But the settlement of Port-Royal was abandoned in its turn in 1607. On May 13, 1607, Jamestown was founded in Virginia, which had been explored by Sir Walter Raleigh in 1584–1585. Jamestown was burned in 1608. As for the famous Mayflower, it arrived in Massachusetts just in 1620.

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Because of its exceptional location on a headland dominating the St. Lawrence River, Quebec City constituted a strategic outpost of France and Europe destined to open the St. Lawrence, the Great Lakes, and the interior of the North American continent to trade and European immigration. Till about 1685, it was the largest city of the territory located north of the Rio Grande. From its founding till the French defeat of the Plains of Abraham in 1759, it was the most important capital of that area. In fact, the territory Quebec City dominated then included the sites of the following present-day cities: Minneapolis-St. Paul, Milwaukee, Chicago, Toronto, Montreal, Quebec City, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, St. Louis, Kansas City, and New Orleans. That being said, in 1759, the population of Quebec City was still only 9,000 dwellers. In 1763, the Treaty of Paris, which ended the Seven Years’ War, marked the real birth of the British Empire and the triumph of England not only over the French, but also over the Dutch. During the Seven Years’ War, at least until 1761, when George III of England decided to replace the Whig prime minister William Pitt by the Tory John Bute, England had greatly benefited from its alliance in Europe with the brilliant Frederick II of Prussia against France, Austria, Russia, Saxony, Sweden, Hessen, and Brunswick. Moreover, outside Europe, the victories over France of the Plains of Abraham in New France (1759) and of Wandiwash (Vandavashy) in India (1760) had placed England in a dominating position. Thus, by the Treaty of Paris, France ceded to England Canada, Cape Breton, and the eastern part of Louisiana, the western part going to Spain, which gave Florida to England (the part of Louisiana attributed to Spain was ceded by Spain to Napoleon in 1800, who sold it to the United States in 1803). On the other hand, by the Treaty of Paris, France renounced almost all its territorial ambitions in India to the benefit of England, which became the dominant European power in India at the very moment it was becoming the only master of Northern America. The Treaty of Paris of 1763 unquestionably is one of the most important treaties the English ever signed. In 1763, the British created the Province of Quebec and limited its territory to the valley of the St. Lawrence. However, in 1774, Great Britain considerably widened the territory of the province whose capital was Quebec City. The British province then covered an immense territory that included the whole Labrador, the whole St. Lawrence basin presently in Ontario and Quebec, plus the whole territory situated between the Great Lakes, the Mississippi, and the Ohio River. That territory included the present sites of the cities of St. Paul, Milwaukee, Chicago, Toronto, Montreal, Quebec City, Detroit, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, and St. Louis. Then came the American Revolution, which created a whole new situation. In 1791, London decided that Quebec City’s sphere of influence would be limited to the sole

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Province of Lower Canada, which covered only the southern part of present-day Quebec and Labrador. Of all the above-mentioned sites, only two remained in that territory: Montreal and Quebec City. The economy of New France and, consequently, of Quebec City depended for a long time on the fur trade and particularly on the trade of beaver skins (beavers’ short hair was used to produce high-quality felt for hat fabrication). New France was rather urbanized, very trade-oriented, and relatively little rural compared with France of that epoch. Furs were directly sent to France untreated, Louis X V having forbidden all fur transformation activity in Canada (leather was tanned in Canada only for local consumption purposes). Fur trade constituted an activity typical of the periphery in the network systems logic in the same way as the extraction of gold in Colombia or silver in Peru. The Napoleonic wars allowed the Canadian economy to pass from the status of provider of “exotic” goods to that of competitor of Europe. From 1805 to 1810, during the Napoleonic continental blockade against England, the traffic in the port of Quebec increased fivefold. Fur trade was progressively replaced by lumber trade, whose volume multiplied by twenty between 1810 and 1820. Canada became a direct competitor of European countries that produced wood, such as Sweden and certain parts of Germany. A similar scenario occurred more to the south, in the future United States. The city of Boston was founded in 1630, twenty-two years after Quebec City and ten years after the 102 Puritan pilgrims of the Mayflower had settled at New Plymouth. Boston rapidly established itself as the capital of New England, which was then limited to present-day Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. At that time, the territories of present-day Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont were occupied by the French and the Amerindians, not by the English. Till 1667, New England was threatened to the east, north, and west by the French colonies of New France and Acadia , which controlled the St. Lawrence River, and to the west and south by New Netherland, which controlled the two most important rivers of the northeast of the continent after the St. Lawrence: the Hudson and Delaware rivers (in 1655, the Dutch conquered New Sweden, which controlled the mouth of the Delaware). The power struggle between Louis XIV’s France, the United Provinces, and England took place both in America and Europe. The United Provinces were the great commercial power of the time, but they had as enemies Spain, France, and England (with peaceful periods from time to time). Spain controlled the Spanish Low Countries (present-day Belgium), but its power was declining. France was at its climax and dreamed of taking political control of the Dutch center of the new European economy. Finally, England and

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London, which was with Paris the largest city of Europe, were the most direct commercial competitors of the United Provinces and Amsterdam. Spain having recognized the independence of the United Provinces in 1648 by the Treaty of The Hague, England was the first to provoke the Dutch. In 1651, it adopted the Navigation Act, requiring all merchandises entering or leaving England to be charged on English ships. That measure was directly aimed at the ships of the United Provinces. Two Anglo-Dutch Wars followed: from 1652 to 1654 and from 1665 to 1667. The latter was triggered off, among other things, by the conquest, in 1664, of New Amsterdam by the English. At the end of that war, by the Treaty of Breda of 1667, the United Provinces officially exchanged the New Netherland and New Amsterdam for present-day Suriname (Dutch Guyana), that was occupied by the English. Moreover, an alliance between the United Provinces, England, and Sweden was sealed. It was then that France decided to replace England as the main enemy of the United Provinces in Europe and to rule over all of Europe, which led it to invade the United Provinces in 1672 and to neglect its colonies. In 1640, the British colonies of North America already had 25,000 inhabitants, while New France had only 3,100 in 1663, twenty-three years later. In 1760, the population of the British colonies was 1.61 million, while that of New France was 65,000. For each French colonist, there were then 25 English colonists in North America at a time when, in Europe, for each English citizen, there were 2.5 French citizens. The Treaty of Paris of 1763, which expelled France from continental North America, just resulted from the success of England’s populating policy, and the failure of France’s. By the same treaty, England also secured its new maritime domination at the expense of the Dutch. Boston took advantage of that evolution of the balance of power in Europe. From 7,000 dwellers in 1700, its population grew to 35,000 in 1800. In 1763, all seemed to go for the best in the British colonies of North America. Why then did they rebel twelve years later, and why did the rebellion start in Boston? Let us propose a topodynamic explanation that will add to all the others. The conquest of New France opened an immense continent to the English interests. In conformity with the logic of network systems, England had long understood that, in order to accelerate the development of the interior of the continent, the simplest thing was to rely on the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes, which gave access to the heart of North America. Thus, in 1774, by the Quebec Act, the British authorities came to the conclusion that the best strategy was to somehow restore the territory of New France by merging inside the Province of Quebec the St. Lawrence Valley and the Great Lakes region, and to win the favor of the people of that province that were of French origin in order to obtain their collaboration in developing the vast territory they knew particularly well. The French-speaking

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population still represented the great majority of the population of European origin of those regions, and they had excellent relations with most of the Amerindian tribes living there. The rebellion of the British colonies started with the Atlantic colonies that were further from the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes, with those that benefited from triangular trade, while the ports of the St. Lawrence and its estuary were somewhat excluded from that form of trade. Boston had no link with the St. Lawrence Basin it had always considered as a competitor. Boston was the first to rise up in 1773, at the time of the Boston Tea Party, which followed a tax on tea unilaterally imposed by Britain. Philadelphia and New York followed. The provinces of Pennsylvania and New York did not then extend up to Lake Erie, and the fluvial links with that lake did not exist yet. As for the British provinces of Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, and Quebec, which were all linked up with the St. Lawrence and its estuary, they refused to join the rebellion movement. The Boston Tea Party and the various incidents that led to the insurrection basically resulted from the fact that many British colonies of North America had passed the stage of the simple extraction of resources that characterized the colonial outposts in a network system, and had developed an economy based on agriculture and the exploitation of renewable resources, which could more and more confront the competition of the colonial motherland. Cities like Boston, Philadelphia, and New York perceived themselves less and less as outposts used for conquering the heart of the North American continent, and more and more as societies as developed and productive as any city in England. For example, at the end of the seventeenth century, Boston had a fleet of open sea boats that was more important than that of any English city, except for London and Bristol. The upholding of a colonial status in such a context could only generate confrontations. On the other hand, in the cases of the colonies of Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, and Quebec, the network system logic kept its relevance and justified the acceptation of a colonial link based on complementarity rather than competition. At the onset of the American Revolutionary War, Philadelphia had still more reasons than Boston to establish itself as a city capable to confront the competition of English cities in all production sectors. Since 1720, it had supplanted Boston and become the largest city north of the Rio Grande. Philadelphia was founded rather late, in 1682, by William Penn, who had received, in a personal capacity, the colony of Pennsylvania from Charles II one year before (the fact that the colony was given to an individual was not unprecedented; similarly, the colony of Maryland had been attributed in a personal capacity to Lord Baltimore by Charles I in 1632). Philadelphia experienced an exceptional growth. In 38 years, it had acceded

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to the first rank of the future U.S. cities. Its population, which was 4,000 or 5,000 in 1700, reached 30,000 in 1770 and 68,000 in 1800, ten years before New York overtook it in its turn. In 1890, it lost its title of second largest U.S. city to Chicago. Philadelphia is located at the intersection of the Delaware River, the Schuylkill River, and a rift line called the Fall Line, which goes from Colombus, Georgia, to New York through Washington and Baltimore. From March 1638 to 1655, its site, which was close to Fort New Göteborg, belonged to New Sweden, founded by Peter Minuit, a Walloon who had been director general of the Dutch province of New Netherland and was then working for the Swedes. That site was annexed to New Netherland in 1655 and taken by England in 1664. The great development Philadelphia initially had can be attributed to its strategic location, the great fertility of its agricultural hinterland, and the entrepreneurship of William Penn and the Quakers who constituted the initial group of Philadelphians, as the Puritans dominated the beginnings of Boston. The Quakers were one of the sects that were persecuted in England. They can be considered as some of the most liberal among the Protestants and even the Christians. They recognize none of the sacraments, while the Calvinists and the Lutherans recognize two and the Catholics, seven. They have no ministers, priests, monks, nuns, or bishops (Calvinists have ministers but no bishops; Lutherans have both). The greatness of the Quakers comes from their pacifism. They were opposed to slavery and all kinds of war. So they were among the very first conscientious objectors. Instead of waging war against the Indians, the Quakers decided to develop peaceful relations with them. Unfortunately, their European neighbors were not following their example. The conflicts the Indians had with other Europeans came to affect the life of the Pennsylvanian colony, where the Quakers ruled without being the majority. There came a moment when the Europeans who were in favor of retaliating the Indian attacks could no longer accept the pacifist stand of the Quaker rulers. They contested the Quakers’ policy, without asking them to resign, however. When, in 1756, the Quaker rulers realized that their stand was contested, they decided to give up the power they had detained from the very beginning of the colony. Some people say that it was the first time in human history that a group who detained power gave it up voluntarily, without being forced to do so, simply on the basis of principle. When the War of Independence began in 1775, the Province of Pennsylvania had become the third largest English colony in America (next to the Provinces of Massachusetts and New York), and Philadelphia had become the largest English-speaking city in the world next to London, and the third most important economic center of the British Empire next to London and Liverpool.

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Its power relied on the dynamism of its agricultural hinterland, but also on the coal and iron ore of its region, which made Philadelphia an important metallurgical center. Then Philadelphia depended no more on England for its imports or exports. It had become a city as culturally and economically developed as any English city of the same size. Moreover, it produced and consumed basically the same goods as its British counterparts. The colonial link made no more sense. It was then just logical that Philadelphia be chosen for the signing of the Independence Declaration in 1776. However, independence was officially recognized just in 1783 by the Peace of Paris, at the end of a long war where the alliance with France and the sending of French troops commanded by the Marquis of La Fayette, the Count of Rochambeau and the Admiral of Grasse greatly helped General Washington to defeat the British General Cornwallis. The support of the Province of New York to the Insurgents was rapidly obtained. New York City even became the very first capital of the United States in 1789, a title it lost to Philadelphia in 1790. As history proved later, New York’s City’s position with respect to the Great Lakes was better than that of Boston or Philadelphia. However, throughout the wars against New France, New York City had appeared as the rival of Montreal, which controlled the access to the Great Lakes by the St. Lawrence River. The Hudson River, Lake Champlain, and the Richelieu River geographically link New York City and Montreal, which often made them natural adversaries. Thus, in the beginning of the War of Independence in 1775, the New Yorkers attacked, conquered, and occupied Montreal for seven months in the hope of cutting the tentacle the British Empire attempted to develop along the St. Lawrence towards the Great Lakes. By doing so, the Insurgents aimed to drive the British out of North America altogether. The fact that the New Yorkers made a success of that expedition shows how dynamic that city was. It was in fact, in 1775, the rising city of the continent, the only one to really vie with Philadelphia, which was nevertheless a younger city. New York City, the former New Amsterdam, has a long and varied history. The city of New Amsterdam was officially founded in 1654 as the capital of the Dutch Province of New Netherland. However, its site had been visited in 1524 by the Florentine navigator Giovanni da Verrazano who, on behalf of Francis I, king of France, had given it the name of Angoulême in commemoration of the fact that, before ascending the throne of France, Francis I had borne the title of Duke of Angoulême. Eighty-five years later, in 1609, the English navigator Henry Hudson, working for the Dutch, rediscovered the site of New York City and its river whilst seeking a Northwest passage to Asia, and left his name to the Hudson River. The first temporary European settlement was erected on the site of New York City in 1614 by Dutch seamen whose boat had burned; the settlement lasted the time to build a new boat. In 1626, the

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Wallon Peter Minuit (minuit means “midnight” in French), director general of the Dutch province of New Netherland, which covered the whole region, purchased Manhattan from the Indians for 60 guilders worth of gewgaws, the equivalent of about $75. In 1654, New Amsterdam was populated mainly by Walloons from the province of Holland. New Amsterdam was attacked by the British in 1664, and it became New York in 1667, by the Treaty of Breda, which marked the end of the second Anglo-Dutch War and gave the United Provinces Suriname in exchange for New Amsterdam. At the time of the exchange, New Amsterdam’s population was just around 3,000 inhabitants. New York’s population reached 5,000 inhabitants in 1700. It grew almost thirteenfold between 1700 and 1800, when it attained 64,000 inhabitants. In 1760, its population was 15,000. It multiplied by 4.3 between 1760 and 1800. This was only the start of its rising. In 1850, New York reached 600,000 inhabitants. It became the largest city of the world in 1920 and, with the Great Depression, it replaced London as the center of the core of the world economy around 1930. At the time it had 10 million inhabitants. New York City’s strength comes from its location at the mouth of the Hudson River and from its port, which is one of the three or four best natural harbors in the world. Moreover, the rich Hudson Valley was a natural corridor leading directly to Montreal and the St. Lawrence River, and indirectly to the Great Lakes through the Mohawk Valley linking Albany (former Fort Orange) and Lake Erie. It is by exploiting that last link through the Erie Canal, built in 1825, that New York City came to reach the first rank of the North American and even world cities. The construction of the Erie Canal became necessary when the United States lost the 1812 War against England and Canada. The Americans had waged that war while England was busy fighting against Napoleon in Europe, in the hope to take control of the St. Lawrence River. The Peace of Paris had given the United States Lake Michigan and the southern shore of the other Great Lakes. However, the maritime access to the Great Lakes through Montreal and Quebec City remained British. In 1812, the United States attempted to put an end to that situation by force, but they failed and lost the war. New York then found a way to link the Great Lakes to the Atlantic without passing by the St. Lawrence. The opening of the Erie Canal propelled New York City, cut the ground from under Montreal’s feet, and, as will be seen, favored the development of cities such as Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit, and Chicago.

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The Discovery of America and the Return in Strength of the Occident

The limit between the part of the future United States which developed an economy that competed with those of Europe and the part which based its development on the production of goods Europe could not produce corresponds approximately to the 37th parallel North. South of that latitude, the agricultural exploitation relied on the creation of plantations, especially cotton, and on the intensive use of slavery. A city dominated that region at the colonial period: Charleston, South Carolina, located on the west bank of the Ashley River at its junction with the Cooper River. Charleston was founded in 1670, a little before Philadelphia, much later than Quebec City, New York City, and Boston, and 108 years after the French had founded Fort Charles on present-day Parris Island in the Port Royal Sound, about 90 kilometers southwest of Charleston and 50 kilometers northeast of Savannah, Georgia. The French colony founded by Jean Ribault and French Protestants (Huguenots) had failed after only two years. The Spaniards had occupied the site of Fort Charles and founded Santa Elena there. The first English settlement in the region was Jamestown, Virginia, founded in 1607 and burned in 1608. Jamestown was rebuilt in 1610, but it burnt again in 1676 and 1698 before falling into decay after 1699. Thirty years after its founding, in 1700, Charleston had 2,000 inhabitants, and it had become the most important port of its region as well as the fifth largest city north of the Rio Grande, next to Boston, Quebec City, New York City, and Philadelphia. Why did the system of plantations and slavery prevail south of the 37th parallel North, while, north of that parallel, economic development involved resorting to autonomous and free workers? Basically because in the south, the climate favored productions which did not compete with those of Europe, while, in the north, productions directly competed with them. Direct competition requires discipline and innovation. It cannot rely on forced work in which workers take no initiative, as will be stressed further in reference to the American Civil War. An urbexplosion was developing north of the Rio Grande, and its center was clearly situated in the region of New York City and Philadelphia. The forming of an urbexplosion core requires the appearance of a performing milieu. Now an essential ingredient of performance is individual freedom. This is why, at the center of urbexplosions and economy-worlds, lie city-states or merchant states in which a certain form of liberalism prevails. As the gestation of the urbexplosion of the northeastern United States progressed, the coexistence within the same federal state of slavery with a highly competitive economy based on freedom became more and more difficult, which directly provoked the Civil War. ***

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Urban World History

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Western world had regained all its vigor and extended its influence over all of America as well as many other regions of the world. Its technological advance over China, India, and the Moslem world was not yet insurmountable. However, the effects of the Great Ebb were over. Within the Great Corridor, the pendulum had started again to move westward. From Baghdad, it had passed by Istanbul before reaching Venice and later Amsterdam. It was now immobilizing in London, where the “Big Bang” of the Industrial Revolution and of the emergence of motorized transportation would burst out.

CHAPTER

9

The Advent of Motorized Transportation and the Second Urban Revolution

T

he discovery of America and of the maritime route to India revived the Western world. However, it is the Industrial Revolution which propelled it far ahead of all the other regions of the Earth.1 Three events changed the course of the topodynamic evolution: the decline and fall of the Western Roman Empire, the discovery of America, and the advent of motorized transportation associated with the Industrial Revolution. The decline of the Western Roman Empire is linked to the inversion of the westward movement that had prevailed within the Great Corridor, west of the Persian Gulf. The discovery of America brought back the westward movement in the same section of the Great Corridor. Finally, the third and most important event, the advent of motorized transportation on September 27, 1825, gave birth to the second urban revolution, which made the world rate of urbanization pass from five percent in 1825 to almost fifty percent in 2000.2 It also led to the emergence, out of the ancient Mongolo-American Corridor, of the modern American Corridor which dominates the world today (see Map 17). In sum, the advent of motorized transportation inaugurated a new phase in the polarization of populations and productions throughout the world. That new polarization has repercussions on the economic disparities. According to Maddison, in 1820, Western Europe, Canada, the United States, Oceania, and Japan had a per capita income that was twice as high as the per capita income of the rest of the world; in 1998, that ratio has reached the proportion of seven to one.3 Similarly, while, in 1820, the per capita income of the richest

1.

2. 3.

See the classical reference about the beginning of the Industrial Revolution : Paul Mantoux, The Industrial Revolution in the Eighteenth Century: An Outline of the Beginnings of the Modern Factory System in England (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1961). In 1750 probably fewer than twenty percent of England’s population lived in towns; by 1900 fewer than twenty percent remained in the country. Angus Maddison, The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective (Paris: OECD, 2001), 17.

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Glasgow

Leeds Liverpool Manchester Norwich

Rhine

Birmingham

London

e

Meus Lille

Seine

Paris

70

Loire

km

Map 17 The Epicenter of the Industrial Revolution

region, Western Europe, was 2.9 times higher than that of the poorest region, Africa, in 1998, the ratio between the per capita income of the richest group of countries (the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand), and of the poorest region, Africa, was 19 to one. In order to grasp the importance of the technological innovations in the field of transportation in comparison with the many other innovations that have marked the Industrial Revolution, one must understand that, in the absence of progress in the field of transport and communication, the other

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innovations diffuse more slowly and less easily.4 Moreover, even in the absence of other innovations, the progress in the field of transport and communication would have had a direct effect on competition and, consequently, on the general level of economic performances. Finally, the improvements in the field of transport and communication have had a multiplier effect on other innovations by favoring their dissemination. The works of economic historians indicate that the beginning of the second urban revolution effectively coincided with the advent of motorized transportation. Thus, for de Vries, in Europe, the demarcation line between ancient and modern urbanization corresponds to the appearance of railways, and, according to Bairoch, the analysis of the respective impacts on urban development of the increase in crop yields, of the growing productivity in the agricultural sector, and of the decrease in the transportation costs leads to the conclusion that the reduction of the transportation costs has had the greatest impact on urbanization.5 Actually, if, between 1800 and 1910, the agricultural productivity was multiplied by 2.5 and the crop yields per hectare by 1.8, the costs of transportation have been divided by 10, which is striking.6 Another observation reveals the major impact of the advent of motorized transportation. The Industrial Revolution was preceded in England by what has been called the “proto-industrialization,” during which numerous technical innovations were introduced before the advent of motorized transportation. Proto-industrialization occurred as much in the countryside as in the cities, and it seems to have resulted in a slight decrease of urbanization, whereas the industrialization marked by motorized transportation had precisely the opposite effect. In sum, nothing proves that, without the advent of motorized transportation, all the other innovations associated with the 4.

5.

6.

For a review of the various explanations of the Industrial Revolution, see: Jacques Brasseul, “Une revue des interprétations de la révolution industrielle,” Région et Développement 7 (1998): 1–74. See Jan de Vries, European Urbanization, 1500–1800 (London and Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), 44, and Paul Bairoch, “The impact of crop yields, agricultural productivity, and transport costs between 1800 and 1910,” in Urbanization in History: A Process of Dynamic Interactions, ed. A.M. van der Woude, Akira Hayami, and Jan de Vries (Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1990), 134 and 142. See also PierrePhilippe Combes, Thierry Mayer, and Jacques-François Thisse, Économie géographique: L’intégration des régions et des nations (Paris : Economica, 2006), chapter 1. About the impact of the radical decrease of the transportation costs, see: Jean Baechler, Le capitalisme (Paris : Gallimard, 1995), and Ronald Findlay and Kevin V. O’Roorke, “Commodity market integration: 1500–2000,” in Globalization in Historical Perspectives, ed. Michael D. Bordo, Alan M. Taylor, and Jeffrey G. Williamson (Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2003), 13–64. See also: Kevin V. O’Roorke and Jeffrey G. Williamson, Globalization and History: The Evolution of a Nineteenth Century Atlantic Economy (Cambridge, Mass.: The M.I.T. Press, 1999), as well as Régis Bénichi, Histoire de la mondialisation (Paris: Vuibert, 2003).

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Urban World History

Industrial Revolution would have caused an increase in the level of urbanization. A long quotation from Hohenberg and Lees will illustrate this point: A second sort of production, manufacturing for export, linked countryside and city between 1500 and 1800. In recent years, economic historians have looked with heightened interest at protoindustrialization. In probing the roots of modern economic growth, they have found that the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries witnessed more manufacturing than was previously realized … Most research to date has focused on rural protoindustrial activity as the key to eventual industrial development, suggesting that urban production remained, on the whole, limited in scope and stagnant in volume. We wish to challenge this assumption and also to extend the notion of protoindustrial production backward in time. Cities have for centuries been major sites of manufacturing. The bulk of urban workers have always transformed materials into products. Stone, sand, and clay were metamorphosed into the fabric of the city. Flesh and grain were turned into hearty stews or elaborate pastries. Wood took a thousand shapes from a lofty roof frame to a fragile violin. Just to dress an ornament the citizens and visitors took dozens of materials and scores of trades. Human work took on endless variety and nuances of specialization. In 1400 a town of moderate size such as Nuremberg registered 141 separate crafts (Strauss 1966). In most towns, industry was organized in the traditional pattern of small masters, usually retail sellers as well as makers, grouped into guilds … Many cities manufactured goods for export under much freer conditions. Other towns developed larger establishments to fill special needs: arsenals, shipyards, mines, and “manufactories” for luxuries such as porcelain and tapestries … Urban industry was not a duplicate of rural production. For one thing, Braudel (1979) claims that urban industry flourished in a reciprocal relationship with rural manufacturing. Moreover, cities specialize in luxury goods, which are consumed mainly by urban and rural rentiers—that is, landlords and other recipients of surplus. In contrast, rural manufacturing areas produce plain goods, which are bought by ordinary folk when wages are high enough to allow it, at times when labor has enough scarcity value to share in the surplus … Rural industry thrives especially on conditions of low prices and high real wages. Urban manufactures, on the other hand, prosper when grain prices and property income are high because the products are bought mostly by recipients of rent. The relative prosperity of urban and rural worlds shifts, therefore, according to the allocation of shares of agricultural surplus … The rural phase corresponds to the depression and recovery periods, whereas urban areas enjoyed the economic advantage in boom and downturn. It is also nearly true that rising prices favored cities and falling ones

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the country … By the early nineteenth century, the old pattern of alternate urban and rural dominance was substantially destroyed in favor of more balanced development. New urban centers grew up around the initially rural mines and mills. At the same time, the increase in trade expanded the older manufacturing cities. A protoindustrial economy gave way to an industrial one.7

The passing from the phase of alternate urban and rural dominance to the definitive domination of cities corresponds to the introduction of motorized transportation. However, while the second urban revolution starts only with the appearance of railways, the formation of a proletariat, originally mainly rural, goes back to the beginning of proto-industralization.8 Many authors have tried to precise the links that exist between economic development, foreign trade, industrialization, agriculture, urbanization, and mobility. The strongest link from a theoretical point of view and the most obvious from a historical point of view is the one that joins mobility and urbanization. There is not a single example in history where an increase of mobility led to a reduction of the level of polarization and, consequently, of urbanization. Moreover, the fall of the Western Roman Empire provides an example of the devastating effect of a decrease of mobility on urbanization: the radical diminution it provoked in the fluidity of trade, liquidity of money, security in transportation, and maintenance of the road system caused the quasi-disappearance of the West’s urban system. On the other hand, the fact that, in numerous non-industrialized countries, motorized transportation was introduced and accelerated urbanization shows that, by itself, motorized transportation can generate a significant increase in urbanization, even though many authors have tended to identify industrialization as the main cause of urbanization, which is wrong. The inauguration of the very first railroad took place on September 27, 1825, in England, between Stockton and Darlington. The railroad was an achievement by George Stephenson and his son Robert, who also built the railroad between Manchester and Liverpool inaugurated on September 15, 1830. In 1835, the first passenger train service was put into place by George Head, also between Manchester and Liverpool. The inauguration of the first railroad had been preceded by the introduction of the steamship. The American Robert Fulton established the first steamship link between Albany and New York in August 1807. The beginning of motorized transportation goes back even further. In 1770, in France, Joseph Cugnot was the first to use

7. 8.

Paul M. Hohenberg and Lynn Hollen Lees, The Making of Urban Europe, 1000–1950 (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 1985), 112–115 and 136. Paul M. Hohenberg, “The City: Agent or Product of Urbanization,” in Urbanization in History: A Process of Dynamic Interactions, ed. A.M. van der Woude, Akira Hayami, and Jan de Vries (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 359.

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Urban World History

steam to propel a vehicle, and in 1776, Jouffroy d’Abbans launched the first experimental steamboat on the Doubs River, in Franche-Comté, France. That being said, it is proper to consider September 27, 1825 as the date of the true beginning of the era of motorized transportation, since it is on that day that the regular and general use of that form of transportation began.

s LIBERALISM, PRELUDE TO THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION The Industrial Revolution and the second urban revolution occurred essentially in England, and the triangle formed by Liverpool, Leeds, and London (the three “L”s) constituted the epicenter of the “Big Bang” of modern urbanization (see Map 17). The propagation of the urbanization wave followed basically two trajectories: first, that of the Great Corridor, second, that of the American Corridor. Inside the Great Corridor, the Industrial Revolution reached first, with a lag of about 25 years in comparison with England, the Northeastern region of France and Belgium, particularly the Sambre-Meuse region and the Scheldt region, and, second, with a delay of about 50 years in comparison with England, the French regions of Normandy, Alsace, and the upper valley of the Loire River (Saint-Étienne region), as well as the Swiss regions of Basel and Glarus, and, finally, with a delay of about 75 years in comparison with England, Northern Italy, Eastern Austria, and, a little outside the Great Corridor, Spain (especially Catalonia). Within the emerging American Corridor, the diffusion of the Industrial Revolution came a little later than in the Great Corridor, and it followed two directions. With a delay of about 50 years, the Industrial Revolution reached, to the west, the United States, and, to the east, Western Germany, that is, the Aachen area, the Ruhr, and the right bank of the Rhine River around Solingen and Remscheid, as well as the Czech region. Then, with a delay of about 75 years, it triumphed, to the west, in Canada, in the region of Montreal and in Nova Scotia, and, to the east, in Sweden, Russia, and then Denmark, the Netherlands, and Norway. Determining the date of the beginning of the Industrial Revolution is not an easy task. This is why the phases of diffusion of the Industrial Revolution have been defined here in terms of delay with respect to England. The first stage of the Industrial Revolution was characterized by the use of waterpower, the construction of canals, the creation of toll roads, and the adoption of new technologies in the production of iron and cotton fabrics. The second stage was marked by the intensive use of coal as a source of energy. The third stage was that of railroads, steamships, world trade, internal combustion engines, and heavy industry. Generally, the expression “protoindustrialization” refers to the two phases that preceded the advent of motorized transportation. In England, the first phase began around 1760, the second

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one around 1790, and the third one around 1825. Of course, the three phases somewhat telescoped in the countries that imitated England, the imitation process allowing to skip stages. This is why the dating of the diffusion stages remains vague despite a broad consensus about the temporal sequence of the regions touched by the Industrial Revolution. If the Industrial Revolution took place in England, many portents appeared in France, particularly during the Age of Enlightenment, which preceded the revolution. Between 1763 and the battle of Waterloo on June 18, 1815, England exerted an indisputable ascendancy over the sea and outside Europe. On that continent, London constituted the new center of the European economy-world. That being said, culturally, intellectually, ideologically, and even, most of the time, militarily and politically, France was at the head of continental Europe despite the convulsions of French political life. Actually, during the 52 years which separate the Treaty of Paris of 1763 from the battle of Waterloo, France went through the end of Louis XV’s reign, Louis XVI’s reign, the French Revolution, the Terror (with Robespierre), the First Republic, the Consulate, Napoleon’s Empire, and the first Restoration of Louis XVIII. On the eve of the 1763 Treaty of Paris, all evidence seemed to indicate that Paris could be in a position to become the core of Europe in a context where large cities were emerging throughout the continent. Paris had reached the level of half a million inhabitants around 1670, before London, which did just sometime around 1680. Between 1500 and 1750, the political influence of cities was a major factor of their growth. During that period, the rapid growth of only nine cities, all of them capitals, accounted for a third of the increase in the total European urban population. Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Dublin,9 Lisbon, London, Madrid, Paris, Rome, and Vienna, which together had a population of half a million around 1500, had two million by 1700.10 At that period, with its 20 million inhabitants, France remained the most populated country and the wealthiest state in Europe, while England had still only 7.8 million inhabitants, only thirty-nine percent of the French population. Paris was still the dominant city of the main European territorial state, but it did not dominate Europe economically. A comparison of the per capita gross domestic products (GDPs) illustrates that. According to Maddison, in 1700, the Netherlands had the highest per capita GDP in Europe, that is, a per capita income of $2,110 in 1990 international dollars.11 England followed: its per capita GDP represented two thirds (66.6%) 9.

10. 11.

Dublin’s location corresponds to a ford across the Liffey River. That river was recorded as a safe anchorage by Ptolemy. Dublin was founded in AD 841 by the Norse Vikings under the name of Dyfflin. According to Jan de Vries (op. cit.), in 1750, Paris had 576,000 and London, 675,000. Angus Maddison, op. cit., 90.

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of that of the Netherlands. Then came Italy with 52%, France with 46.7%, Spain with 42.6%, and Portugal with 40% (as a comparison, the per capita GDP of China was then worth 28.4% of that of the Netherlands). Of course, the per capita GDP varied from one French province or city to another, and the Paris region was doing better than the rest of France. That being said, its financial and commercial ascendancy did not really extend beyond France’s borders and colonial empire, whereas those of Amsterdam and London covered the major part of Europe and the world dominated by the Occident. Interestingly enough, it is in France, not in England, that liberalism as an ideology was born. This has been evoked here when referring to Marillac, Boisguilbert, and Vauban. It is also in France that an attempt was made for the first time to implement it, but it is in England that it succeeded. Let us try to understand what happened between those two countries and their thinkers during the period that preceded the Industrial Revolution. One will recall that France is a hexagon of which three sides are maritime and three sides, continental. Two of the three maritime sides face the Atlantic, and the third one faces the Mediterranean Sea. On the other hand, out of the three continental sides, one and a half separate France from Latin countries (Italy and Spain), and one and a half separate it from the Germanic world. However, from a historical point of view, the country that is both the closest to and the farthest from France remains England. Both countries belonged to the Gaul prefecture under Emperor Diocletian and to the Western Roman Empire thereafter. In 1066, England became Norman, and the Normans were French. In 1337, nine years after the death of Charles IV the Fair, the last direct Capetian to have reigned over France, the Plantagenet kings of England (themselves of French origin) pretended to the throne of France, the kings of England assuming the title of king of France for 461 years, from 1340 up to 1801. The Hundred Years’ War made England the “hereditary enemy” of France. Throughout history, when the French refused to learn English, the English learnt French, and when the English showed little desire to learn French, the French learnt English, so much so that, in the end, English has become the most Latin of the Germanic languages and French, the most Germanic of the Latin languages. Most of the time, both agreed to disagree, or disagreed while agreeing (that was de Gaulle’s specialty). France and England form an old couple, with a lot of matured love and a touch of hatred. The birth of liberalism results from their intercourse. We have already seen that at Versailles two clans existed, the Colberts and the Le Telliers. The Colberts were in charge of the three maritime sides of the hexagon. They were also responsible for the navy and colonies. They defended mercantilism, also known as Colbertism. As for the Le Telliers, they took care of the three continental sides of the hexagon. They ruled over

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the army and the continental borders, as well as the “Justice Department,” which was under the responsibility of the chancellor and guardian of the Seals. This allocation of functions lasted approximately until 1700 (more precisely, until 1701, when Barbezieux, Louvois’ son, died). Thereafter, instead of sharing the ministerial functions, the two clans alternated in power until the French Revolution and even beyond. Generally the heirs of the Le Telliers, which include the Fleury, Choiseul, and Turgot clans, dominated at the beginning of the reigns, while the heirs of the Colberts, which include the Dubois, Argenson, Maupeou, and Necker parties, stood out at the end of them.12 That scenario even repeated in 1815, when Talleyrand, a direct descendant of Colbert, played a major role in the ending of Napoleon’s reign, and the Duke of Richelieu, a direct descendant of Barbezieux, Louvois, and Le Tellier, inaugurated Louis XVIII’s reign as prime minister. Interestingly enough, liberalism developed within the Le Tellier clan, which was responsible for the army, rather than in the Colbert clan, which was responsible for the navy as well as finance. Since a part of the funds that financed France came from selling titles and privileges, the Colberts were reluctant to challenge these privileges, which quite often were slowing or impairing economic activities. France’s economy was over-regulated. Tolls existed everywhere in the country. The prices of certain goods, like salt, varied from one province to another. This complex system of regulations and privileges was literally killing French entrepreneurship. Very early, people from the Le Tellier clan started complaining. Since they were in charge of the army, they were visiting the whole country on a regular basis. They were very much aware of the problems regulations and tolls were causing. Marillac was the first one to write it and to suggest establishing the complete freedom of markets. He was followed by Boisguilbert and Vauban, the great military genius who also deserves a place in the history of economic thought. Vauban also was an important member of the Le Tellier clan, and, between 1694 and 1707, he wrote papers and a book criticizing the prevailing Colbertist economic policies and proposing the abolition of all tax exemptions that particularly benefited the nobility and the Church. Of course, this was seen as provocative, and Louis XIV ordered Vauban to keep quiet. But the reflection went on within the Le Tellier clan, especially when the clan was not in power. It gave birth, under Louis XV, to the first structured school of economic thought (mercantilism was not really structured as a thought)— the Physiocrats headed by François Quesnay, a physician as well as the first “economist” (the Physiocrats were the first to use the term). The Physiocrats insisted on the “real” side of the economy as opposed to the “monetary” side. 12.

Luc-Normand Tellier, Face aux Colbert: Les Le Tellier, Vauban, Turgot et l’avènement du libéralisme (Québec: Presses de l’Université du Québec, 1987).

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They saw in agriculture the source of all wealth. According to them, only agriculture was “productive,” and trade as well as industry were “sterile.” This did not mean that they were unnecessary but simply that trade and industry should not constitute obstacles to the development of agriculture, and that the best way to achieve this was to promote laissez-faire (“let do”). The French expression laissez-faire is the first verbal form of the idea of liberalism. The very motto of the Physiocrats was laissez faire, laissez passer. It must be noted that the promoters of liberalism during the Enlightenment period were closer to Jean-Jacques Rousseau than to Voltaire. As a former pupil of the Jesuits, Voltaire liked toying with ideas and principles. It is a fact that Voltaire was at ease with the financiers. He himself was a very successful investor. Rousseau came from a Calvinist family, and for him the very idea of winning money through simple speculation without producing real goods was despicable. Like the Physiocrats, he was at one with the farmers and producers rather than the moneymakers. He liked virtue and nature, while Voltaire liked esprit and palaces. Rousseau inspired both the liberals and the Jacobins. Voltaire inspired enlightened despots such as Frederick II the Great of Prussia and Catherine II the Great of Russia. In 1774 a disciple of the Physiocrats gained the opportunity to implement the laissez-faire philosophy. His name was Anne Robert Jacques Turgot. He was called by Louis XVI, who was starting his reign, to find a solution to the French financial problem. For two years, from 1774 to 1776, Turgot tried to introduce free trade in the French territory (“free trade” started as an internal policy, before being applied to foreign trade). He had to face the ferocious opposition of those who took advantage of the existing system. The privileged found an advocate in the person of Jacques Necker, a Swiss banker from Geneva living in Paris. Necker, who was an admirer of Colbert, openly criticized Turgot. In 1776, Turgot was dismissed by Louis XVI. One year later Necker took over and tried to find a solution to the financial problem. He did not succeed and resigned in 1781. From 1783 to 1787, a new minister, Charles Alexandre de Calonne, tried again to apply Turgot’s plan to liberalize the French economy and to introduce more justice into the fiscal system. He faced the same opponents as Turgot and, finally, he also had to leave. He was replaced by Loménie de Brienne, who also failed. Under pressure from public opinion, Louis XVI asked Necker to come back on August 15, 1788. Necker accepted, but recommended to call the États généraux (the States General), a kind a Parliament of exception that had not been called since 1614. The États généraux were called at Versailles on May 2, 1789. In Paris, the Bastille was taken on July 14, 1789, which marked the beginning of the French Revolution. Paris was again the political center of France. France’s geographical situation within the European economy-world and its being a territorial state on the fringe of the center of that economy

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may have played a role in the launching of the French Revolution that resulted from the clash of two opposed visions of the best economic policy for France. Turgot, Calonne, and Brienne were animated by the same ideals as Vauban and the thinkers of the Le Tellier clan. For them, France was above all a European power, and its objective was to become the economic hearth of Europe. In order to reach that goal, it was necessary to strengthen the competitiveness of the French producers by lowering as many protectionist barriers as possible, first inside the country and, eventually, outside it. This involved facing, if need be, the privileged, many of whom were aristocrats, and making life easier for producers of goods and services. In itself, the idea of de-compartmentalizing the French economy did not, by far, contradict the territorial status of the French state. However, the objective to favor the producers at the expense of the aristocrats and parasites of the existing control system ran directly counter to the aristocratic pillar of the French territorial state. It must be remembered that, in Braudel’s scheme, if the city-states and the merchant states of the core of the economy-worlds rely on the business bourgeoisie, the territorial states are generally dominated by an aristocracy, which was the case of Old-Regime France. This is what Necker and the defenders of the privileges of the existing system perceived and exploited thoroughly in order to get to power by opposing Turgot, Calonne, and Brienne. The confrontation of the two logics led to the revolution. From 1789 to 1815, a compromise between the objectives of decompartmentalization, taking control of the economic hearth of Europe, and preserving an aristocratic class was looked for through great declarations, like the Declaration of Human Rights, then through the Terror, war, the building of a strong cetral power, the creation of the Napoleonic Empire, and numerous reforms (such as the introduction of the Civil Code). During those years, the de-compartmentalization of the French economy and society and even of the part of Europe conquered by the French troops was to a large extent realized. Slaves were freed in 1794 (however, Napoleon Bonaparte re-established slavery in 1802), and the members of minorities, such as the Jews, were given the same rights as all the other citizens. The tariff barriers within the French territory were abolished, and liberalism became implanted thanks, among other things, to the promulgation of the Civil Code. From 1795, revolutionary France even took control of the continental part of the economic hearth of Europe by capturing the Low Countries and Rhine regions. In 1811, Napoleon’s France came to include France, present-day Netherlands and Belgium, as well as a small part of present Germany and a large part of Italy. Rome, Turin, Genoa, Antwerp, Brussels, Amsterdam, Hamburg, and Lübeck then officially became French cities. The states that depended on Napoleon’s Empire included the Kingdom of

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Spain, the Confederation of the Rhine, the Helvetic Republic, the Kingdom of Italy, the Kingdom of Naples, the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, and the Illyrian Provinces. Moreover, Napoleon’s Empire had then as allies the Kingdom of Prussia, the Austrian Empire, the Russian Empire, the Kingdom of Sweden, and the Kingdom of Denmark (which included present-day Norway). However, the London region and England, that is, the most dynamic part of the heart of the European economy-world, remained out of its grip. Far from renouncing the aristocratic ideals, the French Revolution led, under Napoleon, to the creation of two new aristocracies: a hereditary aristocracy model on the Old-Regime aristocracy, and a meritocracy based on exam selection and the education given by the Grandes Écoles (“Great Schools”) founded by Napoleon, who was the first one in the Occident to adopt the model China had experienced for two millennia with its mandarins. The Napoleonic meritocracy resulted from a melting of the liberal ideal with the aristocratic one. Since Napoleon, France does not really rely on the ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity; it is rather based on those of liberty, equality, and aristocracy, that is, the liberty to study and to pass exams, the equality of all in the context of the competitive examinations, and the respect of the aristocracy of those who passed the exams. However, far from reconciling the requirements of a territorial state with those of a center of economy-world, all those reforms just exacerbated their incompatibility. The strength of the central power, the aristocratic privileges, and the orthogeneticity (whose strongest expression was Jacobinism) associated with the functioning of a territorial state proved to be incompatible with the local freedoms, the commercial dynamism, and the heterogeneticity that are necessary in order for the center of an economy-world to function thoroughly. Napoleon was defeated by the only European merchant state he had not conquered: England, that country which had become the true hearth of the European economy-world and which, contrary to France, did not have to reconcile a European vocation, the requirements of the territorial nature of a state, and its ambitions to dominate economically. England had already opted for the creation of a world merchant empire, and had renounced, since the end of the Hundred Years’ War in 1453, the dream of heading a European territorial state. The contrast between the respective destinies of France and England is embodied in the urbanism of the two great rivals: London and Paris. London, as a mercantile capital, has never been planned by a central authority, and its development was essentially dominated by merchant interests, whereas Paris is the planned city par excellence, and its development was profoundly marked by the central state and aristocracy. Born in France, liberalism was transplanted in England with even more success, thanks to the influence, in the political and philosophical

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area, of John Locke, and, in the economic field, of Adam Smith, who, in 1763, had got in touch with the thought of the Physiocrats and the first French economists during a trip in France in the company of the young Duke of Buccleuch, of whom he was the tutor. It is in France that Smith began to write his famous Research on the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. He even considered dedicating his book to François Quesnay, but Quesnay’s death in 1774 prevented him from doing so since the Wealth of Nations was not published until 1776. After Smith came Thomas Robert Malthus, David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill, William Stanley Jevons, and Alfred Marshall, who made of the liberal economic thought a true intellectual monument. In England, the role played by Turgot in France was taken by William Pitt the Younger, thus called to distinguish him from his father, the Whig Prime Minister William Pitt the Elder. As chancellor of the exchequer at the age of 23 and prime minister at the age of 24, he was greatly inspired by Smith’s liberal ideas. Although steeming from the Whig party, Pitt the Younger was one of the inspirers of the New Tory Party, which was dominated by Robert Peel and supported free trade. From that New Tory Party and the Whig and radical currents stemmed the English Liberal Party around 1850. Historically, the Tories represented, above all, the landowners, whereas the Whigs were the objective allies of the business bourgeoisie that dominated trade and industry. The Manchester School played a major role in defending and diffusing liberalism in England. This “club” mainly gathered representatives of the textile industry. Its main representatives were Richard Cobden and John Bright, who convinced both France and Britain, the two main industrial powers, to sign a trade treaty in 1860. This treaty was a major step towards international free trade. Within the British Empire, the Manchester School and its product, the Anti-Corn Law League, fought against the measures that tended to favor Great Britain at the expense of its colonies and its colonies at the expense of the rest of the world. Thanks, to a large extent, to the Manchester School, liberalism became the dominant economic intellectual current in England during the nineteenth century. In 1846, the Corn Laws, which had been adopted in 1815 to protect British agriculture from the competition of the United States and other corn exporters, were repelled after a campaign led by the Manchester School and Richard Cobden. The corn buyers won the battle against the corn producers, and the British establishment decided to fully play the free-trade game. British marginal agriculture rapidly declined (today, only 2.1% of British workers work in the agriculture sector, which covers 60% of the country’s needs), but prices went down, industrialization and urbanization soared, the export sector developed, and the British agriculture that survived became very efficient.

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The main difference between the evolution of liberalism in France and in England relates to the relative weight of the merchant class in both countries. Due to its geographical position inside the European economyworld and its status as a merchant state, England gave economic liberalism a dimension it could not take in the French territorial state. While in England merchant interests dominated completely, in France, meritocrats, ideologists, and technocrats got the upper hand. Thus, English liberalism took on, rather early, a capitalist tone, whereas in France the liberal current took on a more political and aristocratic form, notably under the influence of Alexis de Tocqueville.

s THE IMPACT OF MOTORIZED TRANSPORTATION ON URBAN SYSTEMS The development of a liberal economic thought cleared the ground for the Industrial Revolution, but it is the advent of motorized transportation which made the difference between proto-industrialization and industrialization and generated the second urban revolution. The advent of motorized transportation had basically two effects. First, it radically modified the universe of locations by making increasingly inescapable the polarization of activities and populations. Actually, motorized transportation is characterized by marginal transportation costs which decline when distance increases. In other words, while, before the appearance of motorized transportation, doubling the traveled distance multiplied transportation costs by two and, generally, by more than two, in the case of motorized transportation, doubling the traveled distance multiplies them by less than two. This results in systematically favoring the location of new economic activities in the existing poles and making possible serving the more isolated areas from those poles at a low cost (see the first part of Chapter 10). The second effect of the advent of motorized transportation was to favor the diffusion of the innovations associated with the industrial revolution and to increase the speed of innovation production. The arrival of motorized transportation and telecommunications transformed the whole economic space. It is in that context that the basic paradox of space-economy showed itself with the greatest strength. The more transportation costs decreased and space friction was overcome, the more the magnitude of the attractive forces decreased. And the more the magnitude of the attractive forces decreased, the more polarization and urbanization triumphed, which is a true paradox. The second part of Chapter 10 (p. 432ff) looks for theoretical explanations of that most important basic paradox.

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DISCOVERIES AND INVENTIONS OF THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION Among the discoveries and inventions that have transformed the economic universe of that period and that the motorized transportation helped to diffuse more rapidly are the discovery, in 1681, by Denis Papin, a Frenchman who had migrated to England, of the mechanical potential offered by steam; the fabrication of the first operational steam engine by Thomas Savery in 1698; the building of the first industrial steam engine by Thomas Newcomen in 1712; the invention of the flying shuttle by John Kay in 1733; that of the spinning jenny by James Hargreaves in 1765; the perfecting of the spinning machinery by Sir Richard Arkwright in 1769; the perfecting of the steam engine by James Watt, associated with Matthew Boulton, from 1769; the invention of the first wool-combing machine by Edmund Cartwright in 1785; the invention of the Jacquard loom, which included all weaving motions, by Joseph-Marie Jacquard in 1793; the discoveries of Antoine Laurent de Lavoisier, guillotined in 1794, about the nature of oxygen and the foundations of chemistry; the invention of vaccination and the making of the vaccine against smallpox (made from material drawn from cowpox lesions; in Latin, “cows” is said vaccae, which gave “vaccine”) by Edward Jenner in 1796; the invention of Portland cement by Joseph Aspdin in 1824; the invention of the railroad steam locomotive by George Stephenson between 1825 and 1829; and the invention of pasteurization in 1865 and of the vaccine against rabies in 1885 by Louis Pasteur. Obviously, that list is partial, and the advent of motorized transportation extended it endlessly by favoring the birth and dissemination of techniques which revolutionized civilization: the telegraph (1820), photography (1827), the harvester (1831), the refrigerator (1834), dynamite (1866), the refrigerated cargo ship (1876), the telephone (1876), the internal combustion engine (1886), the wireless telegraph (1896), the radio (1907), etc.

To measure the amplitude of the Industrial Revolution and its in numerable effects, suffice it to stress that, between 1700 and 1980, in the industrialized countries, the per capita iron production was multiplied by 180, and that, between 1800 and 2000, the proportion of the manpower working in agriculture dropped from eighty percent to only seven percent. On the other hand, in the industrialized countries, life expectancy, which was around 28 to 35 years in 1750, has risen to 75 years and more today. Let us point out that the beginning of the Industrial Revolution was associated with a rise of urban mortality. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, mortality rates grew with population densities. Only at the beginning of the twentieth century was this relation reversed, with urban morbidity radically declining. The impact of the advent of motorized transportation was very different in the two European countries which first experienced its effects. In England, the second urban revolution gave birth to an urban system that was quite different from the one that existed before, whereas, in France, the old urban system, to a large extent inherited from the Roman roads system, adapted to the new industrial reality as if by magic. The difference between both cases can probably be explained by the decisions that have guided the construction of railways in these two countries. In England, that merchant

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state, the entrepreneurs were the ones who took or oriented the great decisions in that field, and the railroad network was built according to the location of iron mines, coal mines, ports, factories, and manufacturing plants, whereas in France, that great territorial state, the public decision-makers located in Paris had the last word in the setting-up of great infrastructures. Consequently, they favored the county towns (chef-lieux) of the départements and the existing urban centers, while in England new cities developed around the critical points of the expanding railway system. From 1825 to 1848, the length of the English network reached 8,000 kilometers. In 1870, Europe already had 105,000 kilometers of railways and North America, 88,000 kilometers. According to Bairoch, “in England, for example, with the exception of London and Birmingham none of the six largest cities of the year 1700 figured among the six largest cities of 1910.”13 Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, and Sheffield, which, in 1910, had more than 400,000 inhabitants and ranked among the six largest English cities had, in 1700, only 5,000 to 8,000 dwellers each. Conversely, cities such as Bristol, York, Plymouth, and Norwich, which had ranked among the largest cities of England for a long time, were, to a great extent, marginalized by the Industrial Revolution. That upheaval of the English urban system occurred in the context of an international urban revolution: in the developed world, there were some twenty-one million people living in cities with populations of more than five thousand around the year 1800, and, by around 1914, there were ten times as many, roughly 212 million. While the urban population of the developed countries increased tenfold, their total population rose by a factor little less than three, going from 212 million to 606 million between 1800 and 1914. Thus the level of urbanization of the developed world went up from ten percent in 1800 to thirty-five percent in 1914. Between 1800 and 1850, thirty-five percent of all growth in urban population in the developed world was concentrated in the United Kingdom alone, despite the fact that, in 1800, the United Kingdom represented only seven percent of the total population of the developed world.14 During that period, England’s urbanization rate doubled, from twenty-three percent in 1800 to forty-five percent in 1850. The accession of Great Britain to the very first rank of the countries of the world was the result of a long process. The British Isles belonged successively to the periphery of the Rome-dominated economy-world, partly as a Roman colony; to the semi-periphery of the economy-world dominated by Northern Italy, as a territorial state; and, finally, to the center of the economy-world dominated by Northern Europe, as a merchant state. Before the conquest of England by the Normans in 1066, the British Isles clearly 13. 14.

Paul Bairoch, Cities and Economic Development, From the Dawn of History to the Present (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988), 292. Ibid., 289–292.

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belonged to the periphery, and they were used as battlefields for local Celtic tribes such as the Irish, the Scots, and the Welsh, as well as Germanic invaders such as the Jutes, the Angles, and the Saxons who invaded England from Denmark and northern Germany around AD 450, and the Viking Danes and Norwegians who invaded it during the ninth century. Abandoned by the Romans from 409, England saw its cities decline. They revived just from about 600 in a context marked by the struggle between the royal burbs of the Saxon kings and the five Danish fortified towns of Nottingham, Leicester, Derby, Lincoln, and Stamford. Although Christianized from the fourth century, England, Ireland, and Scotland were left aside from the Frankish Carolingian Empire. At the time of the Norman conquest of 1066, England was a somewhat backward and little-urbanized country where, except for London, most towns had fewer than 5,000 inhabitants, while Florence and Milan each had over 50,000 residents. However, London already had about 24,000 inhabitants, which made it almost as big as Paris. England became a part of the semi-periphery just around 1300 thanks to the Plantagenets, who strengthened the links with France established by William the Conqueror, and annexed Ireland to the English crown in 1175, followed by Wales in 1283. The links between France and England became so close that they led to the Hundred Years’ War, which lasted from 1337 to 1453, when the kings of England also claimed, from 1340, to be kings of France. About 1500, England had around 5 million inhabitants, compared to more than 15 million in France, 11 million in Italy and 7 million in Spain. Two hundred years later, in 1700, England had still only 6 million inhabitants, compared to more than 21 million in France. However, since 1680, London had outmatched Paris and become the largest European city. In 1700, it had 550,000 inhabitants, while Paris had 530,000. England had urbanized a lot. Its urbanization rate was around fifteen percent, which was higher than the European rate of thirteen percent, about equal to the French and Spanish rates, but still slightly lower than those of the Spanish Low Countries (present-day Belgium), the United Provinces, Italy, and Portugal. Until 1701, England was a rather marginal player in European politics. Its overseas empire was limited compared to the Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and even French empires. British troops dared not venture on the European continent. However, in 1701, this changed with the War of the Spanish Succession provoked by the death of Charles II, the last of the Habsburg kings of Spain. Before dying, Charles II designated his grandnephew Philip, duke of Anjou, grandson of Louis XIV and Mary Theresa of Spain, as heir to the throne. Louis XIV accepted the succession for his grandson, who became Philip V, first Bourbon king of Spain. Of course, the Austrian Habsburgs rejected the king’s decision. Fearing a complete domination of Louis XIV over Europe, all the dynasties of Europe, except the Bourbons and the Wittelsbachs

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of Bavaria, sided with the Austrian Habsburgs, including the new OrangeNassau dynasty of England headed by William III of Orange. During the war, which resulted in the confirmation of Philip V as king of Spain and in some losses for France, English troops were sent to the continent by Queen Ann Stuart, who had succeeded William III of Orange in 1702, under the command of John Churchill, first duke of Marlborough. There they won the brilliant victories of Blenheim (1704), Ramillies (1706), Oudenaarde (1708), and Malplaquet (1709). Thanks to those victories, England became a major military actor in Europe. It is around 1763, with the Treaty of Paris which put an end to the Seven Years’ War, that the London region and the major part of England truly became the hearth of the economy-world dominated by the North of Europe. In 1800, England’s level of urbanization reached that of the United Provinces (which had become, in 1795, the Batavian Republic under the French domination), and, in 1850, England had become the most urbanized country of Europe and the world. The Industrial Revolution was on the way to making England the undisputed center of the world economy. In 1830, London succeeded Peking-Beijing as the largest city of the world, and, in 1840, it became the very first city of the world to have more than two million inhabitants, as it was the first one to pass the three-million mark in 1865. Around 1870, for the first time in history, a single city, London, came to dominate the economy of the whole world. London reached ten million inhabitants a little before 1910. It surrendered the title of largest city and main financial city in the world to New York around 1920–1930. London, Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, Glasgow, and Leeds are probably the best examples of what occurred in Great Britain at the time of the Industrial Revolution.15 Like Manchester, which had born the name of Mancumium or Mamucium under the Roman Empire,16 London had been founded by the Romans, who called it Londinium. It was founded in AD 43 as a Roman military base around the non-tidal ford of Westminster, which allowed the crossing of the Thames River, which flows from Oxford to Richmond, London, and the North Sea.17 Well located on the main river of Great Britain, London

15. 16. 17.

Sidney Pollard, Peaceful Conquest: The Industrialization of Europe 1760–1970 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981). Manchester-Mancumium was founded by the Romans as a fort in the first century. The name Mancumium became “Mameceastre” with the Anglo-Saxons. Londinium-London then sat at the lowest possible bridging point of the Thames. See John Morris, Londinium in the Roman Empire (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982).

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THE GREAT WORLD CITIES IN 1900 In 1900, among the twenty largest metropolitan areas of the world, five were located in Great Britain: London, at the first rank, Manchester and Birmingham, at the 10th and 11th ranks, as well as Glasgow and Liverpool, at the 16th and 17th positions respectively. The other European cities of the list were Paris and Berlin, at the 3rd and 4th ranks, Vienna, in the 6th position, St. Petersburg and Moscow, at the 8th and 12th ranks, as well as Istanbul and Hamburg, in the 19th and 20th positions. The United Kingdom was the only European country to have more than two metropolitan areas in the list, Russia and Germany having two each. Outside Europe, the United States had four metropolitan areas in the list: New York, at the second rank, Chicago, at the 5th rank, Philadelphia, in the 9th position, and Boston, at the 15th rank. Those cities added to the five British cities, in such a way that nine of the twenty of the largest metropolitan areas of the world in 1900 were “White Anglo-Saxon Protestant,” not to mention that Calcutta, which was at the 14th position, then belonged to the British Empire and represented the 10th English-speaking city of the list. From Japan, Tokyo occupied the 7th rank, and Osaka, the 18th. Finally, Peking-Beijing occupied the 13th position in the following list: Rank

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

City

Country

Continent

London New York Paris Berlin Chicago Vienna Tokyo St. Petersburg Philadelphia Manchester Birmingham Moscow Peking-Beijing Calcutta Boston Glasgow Liverpool Osaka Istanbul Hamburg

United Kingdom United States France Germany United States Austria Japan Russia United States United Kingdom United Kingdom Russia China India United States United Kingdom United Kingdom Japan Turkey Germany

Europe America Europe Europe America Europe Asia Europe America Europe Europe Europe Asia Asia America Europe Europe Asia Europe Europe

was chosen as the capital of “Britannia,” the Roman Britain, and it became an important port. Between the fall of Rome and the Norman Conquest, London was more a “border city” than a capital. It was at the border between the Jute Kingdom and the Saxon kingdoms (Essex, Wessex, and Sussex; London was

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a part of Essex). Later, London became a part of Danelaw.18 St. Alfred the Great, Saxon king of Wessex, conquered it over the Danes in 885. But even then, it remained right at the border between the Danish Danelaw and the Saxon Kingdom. The Normans were the ones who made London their capital and the capital of a united England. In the course of the following centuries, the links between the port of London and those of Bruges, Ghent, and Antwerp, located on the continent facing the Thames estuary, developed and gave birth to the port network of the Dover Strait, which associated with the Hanseatic League. Thus London became an economic, industrial, and financial metropolis on top of being a first-class political city. The Industrial Revolution and the advent of motorized transportation propelled it to the very first rank of the world cities. Lancashire was the cradle and, for a long time, the hearth of British industrialization and, consequently, world industrialization. On September 15, 1830, a regular railway service was inaugurated between Manchester and Liverpool, the two main cities of Lancashire, which then had about 100,000 inhabitants each. Thereafter, their population exploded. Twenty years later, in 1850, the population of Manchester reached 404,000 dwellers and that of Liverpool, 425,000. In 1900, Manchester had 1.25 million inhabitants and Liverpool, 940,000. The growth of the two cities is explained by the presence of large quantities of coal in the Manchester region and the existence of a good maritime port at Liverpool. Cotton came from the warmer countries through the port of Liverpool. It was shipped to the Manchester factories by the railways and transformed into fabrics thanks to the local coal mines, which provided the energy that produced the steam needed to operate the cotton factories. Then, cotton fabrics were sent by train to the port of Liverpool where they were exported throughout the world. Manchester was the world capital of the cotton industry. The first spinning mills opened in 1790 and the first weaving factories in 1815. Manchester and Liverpool benefited very much from triangular trade. Cotton was arriving through Liverpool from America, especially from the slave plantations of southern United States until the War of Independence. Manchester’s cotton fabrics19 were exported through Liverpool to Africa, where they were exchanged for slaves. The African slaves were then sent to America. The Independence of the United States led to the development

18.

19.

The treaty of 878 recognized the Danelaw as the Danes’ part of England. The five most important Danish boroughs were Derby, Lincoln, Leicester, Stamford, and Nottingham, which constituted a well-organized confederacy. The reconquest of the Danelaw by the Anglo-Saxons was completed by Edward the Elder, king of England, between 899 and 924. In about 1375 Edward III settled a colony of Flemish weavers in Manchester, initially working with wool and linen, and turning to specialize in cotton from the mid-seventeenth century.

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of new markets, especially in Latin America and India. In Manchester, progressively, other activity sectors added to cotton: metallurgical, chemical, pharmaceutical, rubber, and paper industries. Trade and finance developed as well. Manchester is located on the left bank of the Irwell River, between that river, the Irk River, and the Medlock River, which flows into the Irwell at Manchester. The Irwell runs westwards up to St. George Channel in the Atlantic. As for Liverpool, it is located at the mouth of the Mersey River and linked to Manchester by a canal. Its origin goes back to the port King John created there in 1207. Much later, its site allowed building the very first docks inaugurated in 1715 (those docks are linked to the main port by a lock, which allows keeping the level of water at about the level of the high tide during the low tide). Liverpool played a major role in the British colonial expansion. It was the main port by which the products of the British Empire entered England and from which the British manufactured goods left England for the colonies. Liverpool was the heart, the pump of the system. It also was the main port from which British emigrants left England to populate the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and all the other British colonies. It is estimated that between 1840 and 2000, about 12 million people left Great Britain. That exodus occurred in a context where the British population literally exploded. Between 1750 and 1820, the population of England doubled from 7.8 to 14.3 million, and the population of the United Kingdom (including Ireland and Scotland) did the same to reach 16 million in 1820. During the twenty years that followed, the population increased by sixty-nine percent to reach 27 million inhabitants by 1840 (this in spite of emigration). During the same period, from 1820 to 1840, the population of France increased by only twenty-six percent, from 27 million to 34 million. The British and European emigration to the new countries can be explained by the demographic explosion, but also by the explosion of the proletariat. Hohenberg and Lees have estimated that, between 1800 and 1900, the number of urban proletarians in Europe rose from 10 million to about 75 million.20 To understand those upheavals, it is useful to look at the evolution of productivity in the agricultural and industrial sectors. It is estimated that between 1740 and 1840 English agricultural productivity rose more than threefold. But agriculture is not the only factor that favored demographic growth. Outputs increased even more in the other sectors. The mechanization of spinning and the use of coal in the production of iron induced radical changes in the textile and metal sectors. By 1825, the productivity of the average worker in a modern English spinning mill equaled that of 200–300 workers employing

20.

Paul M. Hohenberg and Lynn Hollen Lees, op. cit., 272.

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the traditional equipment used at the end of the eighteenth century, and the volume of production in English ironworks was equal to that of all the rest of the world, while England had only two percent of the world’s population. As a result, England became the first major country in the world in which more than thirty percent of the working population worked elsewhere than in farming. Birmingham already was one of the main cities of England at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, which favored it even more thanks to the presence in its region of coal mines, but also of mines of iron.21 Birmingham is the most “continental” major city of Great Britain. In other words its location is central on an island where no location is more than 120 kilometers from the sea. Birmingham is located at the junction of two river basins, that of the Severn, flowing towards the Bristol Canal and the Atlantic Ocean, and that of the Trent River, flowing towards the Humber River and the North Sea. Moreover, it is about halfway between London and Liverpool. It was linked to these ports very early on, and it had the advantage of being at a location where trains traveled to the two ports. In 1880, when “Britain spun the most bales of cotton, dug the most tons of coal, smelted more iron, commanded more mechanical horsepower, and exported more than any other country.”22 Birmingham was the greatest industrial city of England, notably thanks to the industrialist Matthew Boulton, who exploited with intelligence the innovations of his associate James Watt. The industrial ascendancy of England stemmed, above all, from its exploitation of coal and iron. From 1820 onwards, iron and cast iron progressively replaced wood in the construction of machines, as, from 1860 onwards, steel replaced iron. During these periods the production of one ton of cast iron required six tons of coal, so the iron industry was mainly located near coalfields. However, the ideal was to locate close to both coal and iron mines, as in the case of Birmingham, because the shipping of heavy materials such as coal or iron ore over long distances never became an economically viable proposition in the nineteenth century. However, the building of a complex network of canals in the interior of England clearly favored the mobility of those raw materials and contributed to the industrial takeoff of the country.

21.

22.

Birmingham and Manchester were incorporated as cities just in 1838, remaining in effect villages, in local government terms, during the early phases of the Industrial Revolution. Their unincorporated status enabled new mass-production technology to be readily accepted, with comparatively free influx of non-guild-certified craft labor. Moreover, they were free from the religious restrictions imposed by the Clarendon Code against non-conformists. Paul M. Hohenberg and Lynn Hollen Lees, op. cit., 193.

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The industrial heart of England forms a triangle whose three apexes are Liverpool, London, and Leeds (the “three Ls”; see Map 17, p. 354). The three sides of the triangle correspond to the axes Liverpool-BirminghamLondon, London-Sheffield-Leeds, and Leeds-Manchester-Liverpool. All those cities are industrial, and the only important English industrial city that is located outside of the large triangle is Newcastle-upon-Tyne, which lies on the North Sea a little to the south of the Scottish border. Liverpool and Manchester belong to Lancashire, whereas Leeds and Sheffield belong to Yorkshire. In 1700, the two latter cities had a population of between 5,000 and 8,000. Two hundred years later, in 1900, both had a little more than 400,000 inhabitants. Sheffield was a major center of the steel and metal industry, while Leeds was in the middle of a region whose development was traditionally based on textile and the waterpower provided by the Aire River. Leeds was literally surrounded by textile towns such as Bradford, Huddersfield, Halifax, and Wakefield. Textile was not their only industrial sector, but in all of these cases it was a major sector. In 1900, the metropolitan area of London had 6.5 million inhabitants, those of Birmingham and Manchester, 1.2 million each, and those of Glasgow and Liverpool, about one million each. Glasgow is located in Scotland in the Strathclyde region, not far from Edinburgh, at the lowest permanent fording point of the Clyde River, which flows in the direction of the Atlantic and America, while Edinburgh is situated on the Firth of Forth, a river oriented towards the North Sea and continental Europe.23 Most of Scotland was never part of the Roman Empire. The part that was lies between Hadrian’s Wall and the Antonine Wall,24 and includes both Glasgow and Edinburgh. It was Roman for a brief period from AD 142. Scotland was converted to Christianity around 575, 200 or 300 years later than England. Glasgow and Edinburgh are the two northernmost cities of the Great Corridor reached by the northwestward movement that the discovery of America relaunched. Glasgow was Scotland’s most industrialized city and one of the most industrialized in the United Kingdom. As in the cases of Manchester, Liverpool, and Birmingham, Glasgow’s industrialization was based on the presence of coal, iron, and the easy access to the sea. The steel industry, shipbuilding, the metal industry, chemicals, textiles, and mechanics constituted the major sectors of its economy. Like Liverpool’s, the port of Glasgow played a major role in

23.

24.

Edinburgh is one of the oldest known British settlements, dating back to about 500 BC. Its history begins with a Bronze Age fortress built on the great volcanic rock which dominates the surrounding Lothian countryside some two miles south of the Firth of Forth. In AD 1018, Malcolm II chose Edinburgh as the new Scottish capital. Hadrian’s Wall was built from AD 128 across northern England from the River Tyne to the Solway Firth. The Antonine Wall was built in 142 between the Clyde River and the Firth of Forth.

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establishing solid links between the British home country and the outermost bounds of the British Empire, which became the largest and most powerful empire the world had ever known and the first truly global maritime empire established on all the inhabited continents, including Oceania. During the nineteenth century, the French urban system also had to adapt, with some delay compared to England, to the ongoing Industrial Revolution. The Christaller-type central-place structure characteristic of territorial states such as France absorbed the effects of that revolution without major disruptions of the urban hierarchy, while, in Great Britain, that merchant state situated at the hearth of the European economy-world, the network system transformed profoundly. The division of the French territory into provinces and, at the French Revolution, départements marked the whole French urban system, whose logic was less oriented towards external trade, as is the case in network systems, than towards the administration and servicing of the agricultural territories, according to the central-place model. The French cities which were the most marked by the Industrial Revolution were probably Lille and its neighboring Roubaix and Tourcoing, Valenciennes and its neighbor Anzin, Rouen, Saint-Étienne, Lyon, and Clermont-Ferrand. In all those cases and in others, the existing centers succeeded to recuperate to their profit the spinoff of the development stemming from the presence in their region of coal mines, canals, railroads, or various industrial activities. Lyon’s example is eloquent in that respect, as Hohenberg and Lees pointed out: The Lyon region provides an example of gradual adaptation to the new technology … The city of Lyon itself had long been an important center of trade and finance, an outpost of Italian commerce and banking integral to the network of the Middle Ages. During a troubled sixteenth century, Lyon bore the brunt of a number of major developments—consolidation of royal and Catholic power in France and a northward shift of economic dominance—and concentrated thereafter on a single industry, silk … Let us look at the region around 1850. Fully half the work force in silk was located outside the city of Lyon and its immediate suburbs. At the same time, Lyon merchants controlled a variety of other protoindustrial lines … It happened that wool, paper, and glass were becoming more urban, while hardware, millinery, and glove making were tending to scatter. Away from the Rhône, the most active concentration lay in the Loire basin—actually the valley of the Gier from Saint-Étienne down to the Rhône—where mining and heavy metallurgy were growing rapidly alongside the traditional ribbon and metalworking industries. The first railway in the country had been built between Lyon and Saint-Étienne …

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All seemed to augur well for Lyon in the coming boom (1850s to 1870s). Yet the promise went partly unfulfilled. Lyon capitalism remained commercial … In the very sphere of financial control, Lyon proved unable to withstand the centralizing pull of Paris … In Lyon itself, chemicals and engineering were sputtering, while regional coal production, though growing, could not keep pace with the rival northern region of France, to say nothing of the Ruhr … After the 1880s Lyon and its region regained the industrial initiative by drawing once more on the old protoindustrial virtues of flexibility and human capital. Once the dreams of financial killings and monopoly control were abandoned, the urban region proved receptive to creative ventures. Saint-Étienne shifted to steel and shipped cycles and firearms … The old textile industries … went from domestic to factory operation while remaining largely rural or small-town in location.25

At the end of the process, the French urban hierarchy was very little modified by the Industrial Revolution. Few new towns appeared, and the ranking of the old cities hardly changed. The level of urbanization was significantly raised, but the central-place system remained to a large extent unchanged. The scenario observed in France prevailed in most countries situated in the semi-periphery of the economy-world dominated by London, for example, in Italy, Spain, and Germany.26 Conversely, the English scenario occurred in North America and, to some extent, in Belgium, that country belonging to London’s immediate sphere of influence. The Borinage, which is located in the Walloon Hainaut, to the south of Bergen-Mons in Belgium, between BergenMons and the French border, and its rich coal mines experienced an important industrial development, which modified the economic equilibrium that had traditionally favored the Flanders and Brabant regions at the expense of Wallony. The city of Verviers, close to Liège, also emerged as an important industrial center.

s THE SOUTHEASTWARD MOVEMENT IN THE EUROPEAN SECTION OF THE GREAT CORRIDOR The waves of the urban and industrial Big Bang propagated from London in the three topodynamic corridors: in the Great Corridor towards the southeast, in the Asian Corridor towards the east, and in the American Corridor towards the east and west. Within the Great and Asian corridors, the movement took

25. 26.

Paul M. Hohenberg and Lynn Hollen Lees, op. cit., 189–191. Jan de Vries (op. cit., 149–150) underlines that, generally, the European urban system was little modified by the second Industrial Revolution (the one dominated by motorized transportation).

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the form of a British wave quite similar to the Islamic wave that had accompanied the Great Ebb. Actually, most of the countries conquered by Islam during the Great Ebb were also captured by the British Empire in the aftermath of the Big Bang. We will now focus on the Great Corridor, where the wave stemming from London reached Tokyo after touching the Netherlands, France, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Iran, India, and China, while the main European countries reached by that wave, namely Great Britain, France, Germany, and Italy, shared Africa between themselves. The Industrial Revolution gave birth to a new pole in the continental part of the new center of the world economy (rather than just the economyworld dominated by Northern Europe as before): the port of Rotterdam, which, after Bruges, Antwerp, and Amsterdam, became the first port of the Low Countries greater region and even of all Europe. Rotterdam had the advantage over Bruges, Antwerp, Amsterdam, and even London of being situated on the New Meuse (Nieuwe Maas), right on the common delta of the Meuse and Rhine rivers, about 30 kilometers from the North Sea. The two historical routes linking Northern Italy and the Netherlands end up at Rotterdam. The French route passes by Lyon, Dijon, and Paris, and it follows the Rhône, the Saône, the Canal of Burgundy, the Yonne River, the Seine River, the Oise River, the Sambre Canal, the Sambre River, and the MeuseMaas. That route “speaks” French up to Liège, located on the Meuse, and Dutch from Maastricht to Rotterdam. The second route passes by Basel and Switzerland, and follows the Po River, the Saint-Gotthard Pass (or another pass), and the Rhine. Along that route, people speak Italian up to the Saint-Gotthard, Swiss German up to Basel, half French half German up tu Karlsruhe, the old city of the dukes of Baden, German up to Arnhem, in the Dutch province of Guelder, and then Dutch up to Rotterdam. Thus Italy, France, Wallony, Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands, in short, the Latin and Germanic worlds, all meet in Rotterdam. When, from 1627 to 1763, Amsterdam dominated the European economy, Rotterdam was the second most important commercial center of the United Provinces. But the glorious period of Rotterdam started when the Industrial Revolution entered Germany and led to the outstanding development of the Ruhr Valley, which, as will be seen, ignited the eastward trajectory in the European part of the American Corridor. But even before this period, Europe’s demographic evolution was preparing an eastward movement. De Vries notes: [At the end of the seventeenth century] a new process of urban expansion slowly got under way. Viewed from a Europe-wide per spec tive this renewed process of urban expansion differed profoundly from the sixteenth century expansion. By 1750 the number of cities of 10,000 or more inhabitants exceeded the

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1600 peak by only 41 (or 18 per cent), but now the territories beyond the Rhine and Danube held over 35 per cent of these cities and the older urbanized lands no longer possessed a disproportionate number of the very large cities.27

Following the development of the Ruhr Valley, the Nieuwe Waterweg was built that allowed very large ships to reach Rotterdam from the North Sea without crossing any lock (while reaching Amsterdam involved crossing locks). Moreover, the deepening of the Rhine was completed in 1861; this operation truly launched Rotterdam’s role as a major trade port. Shipyards, steel factories, and the most diversified plants transformed the port town into a major industrial city. Rotterdam constitutes the industrial heart of Randstad Holland, that large conurbation which includes Rotterdam, Amsterdam, The Hague, Leyde, and Utrecht, as well as many other smaller cities. More to the south, the progression of the movement launched by the Big Bang within the Great Corridor induced the transformation of Switzerland. From a relatively poor rural region, Switzerland became an exceptionally rich country. Zurich epitomizes that metamorphosis. When the Roman core succeeded the Babylonian core as the main economic pole west of the Persian Gulf, a link formed between the ancient and new poles through cities such as Ravenna, Salona-Split, Thessaloniki, Constantinople, Pergamum, Ephesus, Antioch, and Ctesiphon. Similarly, the rise to power of London and Northern Europe did not remove the Italian pole, and the Rhine served to create powerful links between the old and new poles. Zurich bears witness to that. It became an important financial and industrial city after the triumph of London, more precisely after 1850. The opening of the St. Gotthard tunnel in 1882 and the Simplon tunnel in 1906 strengthened the link between the Po and Rhine basins and considerably favored the development of Basel and Zurich. It must be remembered that Zurich is located on the Lake of Zurich, at the point where the lake pours out into the Limmat River that joins the Aare River, which is the Rhine’s main tributary in Switzerland and the most important Swiss river. Zurich is the natural outlet of the road that comes from Milan through the St. Gotthard pass. The location of Zurich and Switzerland also explains how Zurich came to be a major banking center and Switzerland, the most important world banking center. As mentioned before, the very geography of Switzerland makes it a very uneasy battlefield and, consequently, it favors a political and military neutrality, which is the best banking insurance. Switzerland does not attract invaders because it is almost impossible to invade another country by traversing Switzerland. And because no invader wished to go through Switzerland, all potential invaders willingly accepted her neutrality.

27.

Ibid., 29–30.

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The diffusion of the Industrial Revolution reached France, Germany, and Switzerland. But it also reached the part of Spain which is closest to the central axis of the Great Corridor: Catalonia and the Basque region. Bilbao and, above all, Barcelona industrialized. From the twelfth century until the colonization of America, Catalonia had been the wealthiest of the Christian Spanish regions. The monopoly of the trade with America attributed by the kings of Spain to Seville and, later, Cádiz caused a certain economic decline of Catalonia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But, everything returned to normal in the eighteenth century, and industrialization consolidated Barcelona’s position at the head of the Spanish economy. Barcelona and its natural harbor are located at the mouth of the Llobregat River, which runs between the two important axes linking the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea on both sides of the Pyrenees, that is, the Bilbao-Ebro axis in Spain and the Bordeaux-Garonne-Aude axis in France. Barcelona is closer to the Ebro axis, to which it is in fact integrated. Barcelona is located north of the mouth of the Ebro River, which is the most important river of Northern Spain. The Ebro originates from the Basque region. It traverses Arago and its capital, Zaragoza, reaching the Mediterranean Sea about 170 kilometers southwest of Barcelona. No significant harbor lies at the mouth of the Ebro, and Barcelona must be seen as the Mediterranean terminal of a Bilbao-Ebro-Barcelona corridor. The railroad built along the Ebro Valley between Barcelona and San Sebastian (and Bilbao) on the Atlantic was the shortest terrestrial link between England and the Mediterranean Sea. More than the Strait of Gibraltar, which is much farther, the San SebastianBarcelona railroad constituted the most economical route between the new European core and the western part of the Mediterranean Sea, while the Rhine-Po link led to the eastern part of the Mediterranean. Of all the Mediterranean ports, Barcelona’s harbor was the one which adapted the best to the new industrial era, followed by the port of Marseille. The southeastward movement within the Great Corridor also reached, with some delay, the Balkans region, where it provoked deep disruptions. Since 1521, Serbia and, since 1526, Croatia had been annexed to the Ottoman Empire which, thereafter, totally dominated the region. In 1683, the Turks even threatened Vienna once again. The Industrial Revolution and the return in strength of the Occident made properly untenable the control by a Moslem power of such an important part of Christian Europe. The arrival of the wave coming from London blew up the Balkans’ status quo, and succeeded to force the Ottomans to abandon what they had not let go in the past despite the Lepante naval victory won by Spain in 1571, and even the Russian victory of Cheshme (Çesme) in 1770. At the battle of Cheshme, the Russian fleet of the Baltic Sea had moved to the Black Sea with the help of the British, and defeated the Turks. Before that battle, Russia had no access to the Black Sea, which was completely dominated by the Ottoman Empire. Thanks to the victory

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of Cheshme, Empress Catherine II the Great negotiated the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca of 1774, which, for the first time, gave Russia an access to the Black Sea and, indirectly, the Mediterranean Sea.

THE DECLINE OF THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE From 1815 to 1922, the Ottoman Empire systematically lost ground in the Balkans till its dissolution in 1922. The course of events was the following. In 1815, Serbia became a de facto autonomous principality under Ottoman suzerainty. In 1829, it was Greece’s turn to become an autonomous region inside the Ottoman Empire. In 1830, the Turks recognized Serbia as an autonomous principality under Ottoman suzerainty. In 1832, Greece became an independent kingdom. In 1856, the principalities of Moldavia and Valachia (Romania) as well as the principality of Serbia passed under the protection of Christian Europe. Four years later, in 1860, Montenegro became a de facto autonomous principality under Ottoman suzerainty. In 1863, the Ionian Islands left the Ottoman Empire and joined Greece. In 1878, Romania became an independent kingdom, Bulgaria became an autonomous region within the Ottoman Empire, and Bosnia and Herzegovina left the Ottoman Empire and were placed under the protection of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which annexed them in 1908, which eventually led to the onset of World War I of 1914–1918. In 1898, the island of Crete became an autonomous region within the Ottoman Empire. In 1908, Bulgaria got totally independent from the Ottoman Empire and became a kingdom, and the island of Crete became de facto a part of Greece, which officially annexed it in 1913. In 1910, Montenegro became an independent kingdom. Finally, in 1913, Macedonia left the Ottoman Empire and was divided between Greece, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia.

A city was at the center of the evolution of the Balkans: Belgrade (or Beograd, which means “white fortress” in Serbo-Croatian). That city is located on the Danube River at a point where it joins two of its tributaries, the Sava and the Tamis. Its site is at the convergence of three historically important routes of travel between Europe and the Balkans: an east-west route along the Danube River Valley from Vienna to the Black Sea; another that runs westward along the valley of the Sava River toward Trieste and northern Italy; and a third running southeast along the valleys of the Morava and Vardar rivers to the Aegean Sea. To the north and west of Belgrade lies the Pannonian Basin, which includes the great grain-growing region of Vojvodina. The first fortress on the site of Belgrade was built by the Celts in the fourth century BC and was known by the Romans as Singidunum. Like its Danubian sisters Castra Regina (Ratisbon), Carnuntum (close to present-day Vienna), and Aquincum (Budapest), Singidunum was a frontier post of the Roman Empire. Contrary to Ratisbon, Vienna, and Budapest, Belgrade lies in the part of the Roman Empire that became the Byzantine Empire. In fact, after having become Roman and later Byzantine, Singidunum was destroyed by the Huns in AD 442 and changed hands among the Sarmatians, Goths,

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and Gepidae before it was recaptured by the Byzantine emperor Justinian. It was later held by the Franks and the Bulgars, and in the eleventh century became a frontier town of Byzantium. When the Slavic Serbs invaded the region of Belgrade, they converted to Christianity from about 850 and adopted the Greek liturgy. Their Slavic brothers, the Croats, who speak the same language, reached a region closer to Rome, Illyria, and adopted the Latin liturgy. When the Great Schism occurred in 1054, they naturally became Roman Catholics, while the Serbs became Orthodox. The weakening of the Byzantine Empire allowed the emergence of new states like Serbia, and Belgrade’s region freed itself from Constantinople. In 1284 it came under Serbian rule, and in 1402 Stephen Lazarevic made it the capital of Serbia. The arrival of the Muslim Ottoman Empire in the region, in 1396, following the defeat the Serb kingdom suffered in Kosovo in 1389, complicated everything. Belgrade once again became a frontier city, this time at the limit between the Muslim world and Christian Europe. For four centuries, the Turks attempted to extend their empire to the north, and the Austrians and Hungarians retaliated and tried to reconquer the lost Christian territory. The Ottoman Turks besieged Belgrade in 1440, and after 1521 it was in their hands except for three periods of occupation by the Austrians, between 1688 and 1690, between 1717 and 1739, and between 1789 and 1791, and for a period of Serbian freedom following the first Serbian uprising under Karadjordje in 1804. Belgrade became the Serbian capital during the period 1807–1813, but the Turks recaptured it. Finally, thanks to the new strength the Industrial Revolution gave to the Christian world, the Serbs were given control, in 1867, of the citadel of Belgrade, and the city once more became the capital of Serbia and started to industrialize. A noticeable step of the southeastward progression of industrialization was the opening of the Ludwig Canal, forming part of the RhineMain-Danube route that links Bamberg and Ratisbon. That canal, which showed a number of flaws, and, above all, the railroads that were built subsequently allowed industrialization to progress towards the south and to pass to the Danube Basin after reaching the Rhine Basin. Around 1900, one can say that the limits of industrialized Europe passed approximately by Belgrade, Milan, Turin, Marseille, Barcelona, Bilbao, Glasgow, Stockholm, St. Petersburg, Prague, and Budapest. The central axis of the Great Corridor divided that area in two relatively equal parts and constituted its spine.

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s THE WAVE OF COLONIZATION THAT OVERWHELMED AFRICA The industrialization of Western Europe launched a new wave of European colonization (see Map 18), which can be compared with the one that had followed the discovery of America. That wave touched mainly Africa, which, in 1825, at the advent of motorized transportation, was still very scarcely colonized by the Europeans. The European colonizers were not yet present either in North Africa, where the French got a foothold just in 1830 (the British and the French were present in Egypt, but the British had not yet the status of colonial power there), in West Africa, except for the French outpost of Saint-Louis in Senegal, in East Africa, where, however, the Arabs were present since the eighth century, or in Central Africa, which was still unexplored. The only true European colonies of all Africa were then located to the south. They were the Portuguese colonies of Angola and Mozambique, and the Cape British colony, which was mainly populated with Boers of Dutch origin and Huguenots of French origin. Sixty years later, in 1885, at the Conference of Berlin, European powers divided up Africa between themselves with the sole exceptions of Ethiopia and Liberia. The only country of Africa which never experienced European colonization from 1825 till today is Liberia, which, since its very founding by the American Colonization Society to settle freed American slaves, benefited from an unofficial protection from the United States. Like South America and Oceania, Africa is a continent where none of the three topodynamic corridors passes. Those three continents have in common the fact that their hydrographic system is such that it is almost impossible to connect their main rivers with each other to constitute a dense and complex network crossing the continent from one extremity to the other. Since a topodynamic corridor is above all a particularly active transportation and exchange network, this represents a major obstacle to the emergence of a corridor. That being said, it must not be forgotten that North Africa is clearly in the sphere of influence of the Great Corridor. The only two African cities which were historically important contenders to the title of center of a dominant urbexplosion were Carthage and Cairo (the heir of Memphis). It so happens that those two metropolises are the closest to the central axis of the Great Corridor on both sides of the Libyan Desert. In both cases, their influence extended amply beyond the sole African continent. Given the traditional links that existed between Africa and the Great Corridor, it is not at all surprising to observe that the dynamics of the urbexplosive process activated within the Great Corridor by the Industrial Revolution and the advent of motorized transportation was powerful enough to rapidly make Africa into a satellite of the new urbexplosion’s British epicenter and of its semi-periphery, namely France, Belgium, Germany, and Italy, according to the logic of network systems.

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Rotterdam Zurich

Belgrade

Barcelona

Algiers

Tunis

Tehran Shanghai

Karachi Timbuktu

BombayMumbai

Khartoum

Calcutta

Hanoi

Hong Kong

Bangkok

Dakar Addis Ababa

Ibadan Lagos Kigali Kinshasa

Nairobi

Dar es Salaam

Johannesburg

1200

Cape Town km

Map 18 The Spreading of European Colonialism through the Great Corridor

The process launched by the colonization of Africa by Western Europe speaks volumes about the relations that exist between economic development, motorization, and urbanization. In 1825, non-Mediterranean Africa was little developed, its economy was essentially focused on mere subsistence, and its urbanization was embryonic on the major part of its territory. Maddison estimates that in 1820, Africa represented 7.1% of the world population and 4.5% of the world production, and that its per capita product was equal to 63.4% of the world per capita product.28 One hundred and thirty years later, in 1950, little before the end of the colonial period, Africa accounted for 9.0% of the world population, an increase of two points since 1820, and for 4.5% of the world production, a figure which remained unchanged. As for its per

28.

Angus Maddison, op. cit., 243.

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capita product, it was equal to 40.0% of the world per capita product, which represented a considerable decrease of 23.4 points. Its rate of urbanization had passed from less than five percent in 1820 to 14.8% in 1950. Today, Africa accounts for thirteen percent of the world population and only three percent of the world production. Its per capita product represents only twenty-four percent of the world per capita product, and its rate of urbanization is about forty-five percent. Africa is the proof that urbanization can progress rapidly even in countries where economic development stagnates. The most evident explanation for that stems from the fact that, despite its low level of development, motorized transportation spread in Africa from the very beginning of colonization, and it had on that continent the same favorable effect on urbanization as in more advanced countries. It is not an exaggeration to claim that the modern European colonization of Africa started in Algiers, on July 5, 1830, only five years after the beginning of the era of motorized transportation. July 5 was the day the French took over Algiers. In North Africa and in the Middle East, European colonization began with the capture of Algiers, which also launched the colonization of all of Africa. The decision to attack Algiers was made by Jules of Polignac, minister and president of the Council of Charles X, Louis XVI’s brother and the last king of France from the eldest branch of the Bourbon family. A few days after the seizure of Algiers, Polignac had to resign and Charles X abdicated. His fifth cousin Louis-Philippe, duke of Orleans, was chosen to replace Charles X and became “king of the French” (instead of “king of France”) under the name of Louis-Philippe I. When it was taken over, Algiers was a kind of “pirate city” under the protection of the Ottoman Empire. The capture of Algiers launched a long process of European colonization of Africa beginning with the Maghrib. In a few years, France extended its domination over all of Algeria. In 1881, a protectorate was established over Tunisia. The Algeciras Conference of 1906 launched the colonization of Morocco, which was first subjected to a sort of European protectorate, before becoming, in 1912, a protectorate of France. In 1911, Italy began its occupation of Libya, which was a small country compared with Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia, whose population was about 15 or 16 times larger than that of Libya. In 1912, Libya officially became an Italian colony. In 1914, after having been submitted to the very strong influence of Great Britain since 1882, Egypt officially became a British protectorate. Contrary to the Ottoman colonization, the European colonization of the Maghrib was characterized by a massive influx of colonials (such a massive influx was not observed in the other European colonies of Africa, except for South Africa). When the Turks retreated from the region, they were about 20,000. In 1936, there were 1.6 million Europeans in the Maghrib (990,000 had

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settled in Algeria, 240,000 in French Morocco, 110,000 in Spanish Morocco and Tangiers, 210,000 in Tunisia, and some 50,000 in Libya): they represented 9 percent of the total population. The influx of colonials coming from Europe was just an aspect, important in the north but negligible south of the Sahara, of the strategy of penetration of the African continent. Another, still more fundamental aspect was the creation throughout the continent of railways and road networks, which continued to polarize the African space and feed its urbanization after the independences and during the periods of economic decline. The example of Algeria is eloquent in that respect. The urbanization rate in Algeria was thirty percent in 1962. It now reaches 52.1% despite the many troubles that affected that country between 1962 and 2000. A similar situation prevailed in a large number, if not the vast majority of African countries. The development of the African transportation network was marked by two virtual axes, which have guided the imperial dreams of the two main European colonial powers. Those two axes were that of England’s “two Cs” (from Cairo to Cape Town) and that of France’s “two Ds” (from Dakar to Djibouti). The Cairo-to-Cape-Town axis was the first to be imagined, and it was by Cecil Rhodes, who, from 1882, dreamt of linking the two main territories dominated by the British in Africa, that is, Egypt to the north and the Cape Colony to the south. The British has occupied the Cape Colony from 1795 to 1803, and then anew in 1806. In 1814, at the Congress of Vienna, that colony was officially awarded to Great Britain. As for Egypt, the British dominated it officially since 1882. The project of a Cairo -Cape Town liaison by train and by boat led Great Britain to attempt reaching the north step by step from Cape Town. Thus the British established their power successively over Bechuanaland (presentday Botswana) in 1884, Mashonaland (former South Rhodesia and present-day Zimbabwe) in 1890, Nyassaland (present-day Malawi) in 1893, and Barotseland (former North Rhodesia, and present-day Zambia) in 1895. In order to do so, they had to impede the Portuguese attempt to connect their colonies of Mozambique and Angola, and to thwart the ambitions of the Germans that controlled Southwest Africa (present-day Namibia). The same Cairo-Cape Town project incited the British to take control of the territories located to the south of Egypt, in Sudan. This led them to imagine an unprecedented formula of Condominium whereby the colonial power, Britain, became “co-colonizer” with one of her colony, Egypt. Thus, in 1899, Sudan became a Britannico-Egyptian Condominium. That original formula lasted no less than 52 years and even survived the independence of Egypt in 1922. Between Sudan and Barotseland-North Rhodesia, both

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henceforth under British control, lay Congo, which had been given to Leopold II, king of the Belgians, as a personal gift at the Conference of Berlin in 1885 (that “personal gift” was as big as France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Germany, Poland, and the United Kingdom together). Leopold II, from the House of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, was the first cousin both of Victoria (whose mother was Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld), queen of Great Britain and Ireland, as well as empress of India since 1876, and her husband Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. Leopold II collaborated with the British and favored the railway project between Cairo and Cape Town. Finally, from Cape Town, the railway reached Bulawayo (Zimbabwe), Lusaka (in Zambia), Ndola (at the northern border of Zambia), Lulumbashi (former Elisabethville, Congo), the Congo River, and Kisangani (former Stanleyville, Congo). From Cairo, the railway went south down to Khartoum and Waw, in southern Sudan . At that point, only a section of about 825 kilometers (as the crow flies) between Kisangani and Waw was missing to complete the Cairo-Cape Town railway project. That stretch was never built. The main obstacle the British had to face in their desire to establish the Cairo-Cape Town liaison came in the south from Portugal and Germany, but in the north from France, which was promoting the project of building an east-west railway between Dakar and Djibouti. The French were present in Senegal since 1659 (at Saint-Louis); they had taken possession of Obock (in present-day Djibouti) in 1862, and they created the port of Djibouti in 1888. When the British decided to intervene in Sudan, the French were already there. They occupied the fort of Fachoda, and they intended to extend their influence over the whole region. The British troops commanded by General Herbert Kitchener intervened in Sudan in 1898 at the request of the Egyptians, who were then occupying Sudan. The Egyptian rule was then challenged by the followers of a leader from Khartoum, Muhammad Ahmad ibn Abdallah, who called himself the Mahdi and had come close to chasing out the Egyptians after having reconquered Khartoum in 1884. The Mahdi had died in 1885, but his followers were still rebelling. Kitchener’s army defeated the Mahdi’s followers close to Khartoum, and, on September 18, 1898, at the fort of Fachoda, the military missions of Great Britain and France met to negotiate the future of Sudan. In order to avoid war, France decided to retreat and surrender the fort of Fachoda to the British. The retreat from Sudan was all the more difficult to accept for the French that they already had begun building the railway between Djibouti and Addis Ababa along the valley of the Awash River. West of Sudan, the French were present in Chad since 1891. However, their effective control of the region was definitely ensured just in 1900 when it was decided that

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the western limit of the Nile basin would fix the border between the two colonial powers’ spheres of influence, France keeping the control over OubanguiChari (present-day Central African Republic) and Chad, and Great Britain, over Sudan. France then controlled the whole territory between the 13th and 21st parallels to the east of Dakar up to the Sudanese border. The DakarDjibouti railway project was very scarcely realized. The western counterparts of the Djibouti-Addis Ababa section were limited to a liaison between Dakar and Bamako (Mali) ending at the port of Koulikoro on the Niger River, and another stretch between Tillabery and Niamey (Niger), both on the shores of the Niger River. The Addis Ababa-Djibouti railroad and the Tillabery-Niamey section are separated by about 4,000 kilometers as the crow flies, that is, by a part of Ethiopia, Sudan, Chad, and the greater part of Niger. As for the Tillabery-Niamey section and the Dakar-Bamako railroad, about 1,000 kilometers separate them. Contrary to Eurasia and North America, Africa was never completely crossed by a transcontinental railway or canal system according to a north-south or an east-west axis. The reasons for that are numerous. Diamond strongly emphasizes the fact that the north-south orientation of Africa’s main axis represents an unfavorable factor inasmuch as, from north to south, great climate variations exist which considerably slow down the natural processes of diffusion of the vegetal and animal species, as well as of the agricultural and breeding innovations.29 Moreover, the Nile is the only important African river clearly oriented north-south, and it so happens that it is almost impossible to have it communicate with the other important rivers either through canals, as in the case of the Saône and the Seine, or through passes, as in the case of the Po and the Rhine. All the African rivers, like the South American ones, are, to a great extent, dead-ends. Finally, the Dakar-Djibouti axis lies almost entirely in desert or semi-desert zones, which limited from the very beginning its development potential. The European colonization was not compromised by the failure of the railway strategies. The cities, and particularly the coastal cities, took over from the railways. Two major urban poles existed before colonization, and they just developed further: the Cairo pole, on the Nile Delta, and the pole of Ibadan (Nigeria), later dominated by Lagos, at the mouth of the Niger River. To those two were added, thanks to the discovery of the Route of India and to colonization, the pole of Southern Africa, which was headed first by Cape Town and later by Johannesburg. Those three poles still dominate Africa today.

29.

Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel : The Fates of Human Societies (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1997), 186–187, 399–400.

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In North Africa, urbanization was clearly associated with the settlement of European and Jewish colonists. By 1936, those colonists represented nine percent of the total population, but up to forty-five percent of the urban population of the Maghrib (sixty percent in Algeria, twenty-five percent in Tunisia, and fifteen percent in Morocco), and nearly ninety percent of the Europeans living in the region were city residents, as against seven percent for the native population. The contrast between the original population and the newcomers was extreme and accentuated by the fact that the colonial administration treated them quite differently, which contributed to give birth to the independence movement. Colonization gave a strong boost to Maghrib’s urbanization, whose rate reached thirty percent in 1962. The population of Casablanca (Morocco) went from 20,000 in 1900 to 102,000 in 1921 and 680,000 in 1950. In 1900, the population of Algiers reached 150,000 inhabitants, while the population of Oran was 100,000. Colonization gave birth to a relatively new urban system in Algeria and Libya. In Morocco, it led to the founding of some new cities such as Casablanca (which was a fishers’ village before Lyautey re-founded it and made it a major city), which were integrated into the existing traditional urban system dominated by Fes, Marrakech, and Meknes. In Tunisia, the old urban system dominated by Tunis, the heir of Carthage, was little modified by colonization. The case of Egypt resembles that of Tunisia : the Egyptian urban system adapted to the new reality without profound modifications, except for the case of Port Said whose development was linked to the Suez Canal. During the second part of the nineteenth century, under the influence of France and then of Great Britain, Egypt experienced a period of strong economic growth. Between 1850 and 1910, its annual production of cotton went from 15,000 to 310,000 metric tons, and Egypt became a major world exporter of cotton. The development of the cotton sector was partly made at the expense of the grain and flour sector. Having formerly been an exporter of grain and flour of various sorts, the country became, for the first time of its history, an importer of such products around 1900. Investments and trade received a major impulse with the opening of the Suez Canal, built by Ferdinand de Lesseps and inaugurated by the French Empress Eugénie, spouse of Napoleon III, in 1869. The opening of the canal cut the distance from London to Bombay by forty-one percent, to Madras by thirty-five percent, Calcutta by thirty-two percent and Hong Kong by twenty-six percent. The Egyptian population went from about 5 million in 1850 to 11.7 million in 1910. Egypt became the most urbanized country of Africa. Its rate of urbanization reached about nineteen percent in 1900 and twenty-seven percent around 1930. The population of Alexandria went from about 4,000 in 1800 to 140,000 around 1850, 380,000 in 1910, and more than one million in 1950. The one of Cairo grew from about 260,000 in 1850 to 690,000 in 1910 and one million around 1925. It was the largest city of both Africa and the whole Moslem world.

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To the south of Egypt, modern urbanization reached Sudan with much delay. Located at the intersection of Africa’s east-west and northsouth axes, Sudan is the vastest country in Africa; nevertheless, its main city, Khartoum, still had only 100,000 inhabitants in 1930. Khartoum is situated right to the south of the Kush country, also called Upper Nubia, whose urbanization goes back to 1000 BC, and which produced a Pharaoh dynasty that ruled over Egypt from about 750 or 716 to 662 BC (that dynasty is called the “Ethiopian,” “Kushite,” or “Nubian” dynasty depending on the source). That being said, the site of Khartoum never was part of Pharaohs’ Egypt. Khartoum is located at the junction of the two main branches of the Nile River, the White Nile coming from Burundi, Rwanda, and Uganda, and the Blue Nile coming from Ethiopia. This location could have been very strategic, but the huge area that separates Khartoum from the northern rich Valley of the Nile is a desert, the Nubian Desert. Khartoum was reached by civilization through missionaries, first by Christians who Christianized the region as early as the sixth century, and then by Muslims who started to convert the region about one thousand years later. The Egyptians were the first to invade and conquer the region in 1820. But soon, the people from the area challenged the Egyptian rule by a rebellion, which lasted from 1881 to 1898. The Egyptians called the British to the rescue, and Sudan became a Britannico-Egyptian Condominium in 1899. Trading slaves for the Arabs was the main activity of Khartoum and its region for centuries. Khartoum’s present population reaches 3 million inhabitants. If the French retreated from Sudan to the benefit of the British, they maintained their presence more to the east, in the region of Djibouti and in Ethiopia. In 1862, they had taken possession of Obock, on the Strait of Bab al-Mandab where the Red Sea joins the Gulf of Aden and the Arabian Sea. By that conquest, the French intended to control directly or indirectly both ends of the extremely strategic Red Sea. At the time, the French were building the Suez Canal, which they had begun in 1859. The works were completed in two stages, the first from 1859 to 1863 and the second from 1866 to 1869, year of the inauguration. In 1888, France founded Djibouti. Discussions with the Negus (emperor) of Ethiopia were launched to obtain a larger territory around Obock and Djibouti in exchange for the building of a railway between Djibouti and Addis Ababa by the French. The Negus accepted and the French received in 1896 a territory called French Somaliland, whose capital was Djibouti, and the Djibouti-Addis Ababa railway was built between 1897 and 1917. Ethiopia is a very old country. In fact, it may be the oldest human area of the world. The oldest “hominid” ever known, the famous “Lucy,” was found in 1974 in the Omo Valley in the southwestern part of Ethiopia—the area where Ethiopia joins Kenya and Sudan. Food production developed in Ethiopia very early, and wheat, barley, and other Southwest Asian crops from

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the Fertile Crescent have been cultivated there for a long time. Ethiopians also domesticated many locally available wild species to obtain crops most of which are still confined to Ethiopia, though one of them (the coffee bean) has now spread around the world.30 As for the kingdom of Ethiopia, its origins go back to the Kingdom of Abyssinia, whose capital was Axum, close to the present-day city of Adwa and to the border of Eritrea. Axum was founded 2,500 years ago, around 500 BC. It surely is one of the oldest African cities to the south of the kingdom of Kush (Nubia). From the first to the thirteenth century of our era, Axum was a prosperous city. Its present ruins are eloquent souvenirs of its past glory. During most of the third century, the Kingdom of Axum controlled a large part of the Horn of Africa, an important part of the Red Sea, as well as the southwestern part of Arabia. About AD 275 Mani, the Iranian founder of the Manichaean religion (which has Christian roots and eventually came to extend to Persia, Mongolia, China, Egypt, and even France with the Cathari, before disappearing), considered the Axum Empire as one of the four largest in the world with Rome, Persia, and China.31 The Abyssinian Kingdom of Axum converted to Christianity during the early fourth century under Negus Aezanas, while Constantine was Roman emperor. The new church was linked to the Copt Church of Alexandria, and the link between the two churches lasted until 1959. Ethiopia was the only Christian state of Africa and the Middle East to survive the invasion of Islam. Occupied by the Moslems from 1527, it freed itself from their domination with the help of the Portuguese in 1543. It was also the only African state, with Liberia, to resist the European colonizing wave till 1935, when Mussolini and the Italians invaded the country and conquered it, despite Emperor Haile Selassie I’s protests in front of the Society of Nations in Geneva. Italy occupied Ethiopia till 1941. Addis Ababa became the capital of Ethiopia in 1889, when it succeeded Entotto, which had been the capital since 1881. The growth of Addis Ababa is linked to the influence of the Occident in Africa and to the building of the railroad. Its population has gone from less than 100,000 inhabitants in 1900 to 160,000 inhabitants in 1930 and 2.2 million inhabitants today. The Djibouti-Addis Ababa-Dakar axis epitomizes the evolution of relations between Africa and Europe. Dakar originates from the period when slave trade was the main connection between the two continents, while Djibouti evokes the Suez Canal and the European colonization of Africa that followed the Industrial Revolution and the appearance of motorized transportation. The fact that the Dakar-Djibouti link was never completed is due to the rivalry between France and Great Britain, but it also illustrates the fact 30. 31.

Ibid., 101. Michel Mollat du Jourdin and Jehan Desanges, Les routes millénaires (Paris : Nathan, 1988), 109.

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that the development of Africa initiated by the European colonization was abruptly interrupted by World War II, and also probably by the transfer of the core of the world economy from London and Paris to New York. London and Paris were quite interested in Africa; New York was not. Before the arrival of the French in Senegal, various local kingdoms existed. Many of them were created by the Fulanis between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. Originally, the Nilo-Saharan Fulanis were nomad breeders from the Sahara, and they succeeded to impose their suzerainty over a large part of that region in the same way that, before them, the Nilo-Saharan Tutsi breeders had done over a part of the African Great Lakes region. In those two cases as in those of the Aryans (in India), Germans, Hungarians, Mongols, Vikings, Turks (in Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa), and so many other mobile peoples, nomad or semi-nomad populations succeeded to dominate agricultural populations. However, in most of those cases also, the sedentary populations were those who ended up imposing their culture on their suzerains. Dakar was founded in 1862 by Louis Faidherbe, who was governor of Senegal from 1854 to 1861 and from 1863 to 1865. Dakar is located at the extremity of Cap Vert Peninsula, and it is the westernmost continental city in Africa. Right in front of Dakar lies an island called Gorée, which was one of the most famous slave-trading centers of whole Africa from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century. Gorée Island was possessed first by the Portuguese, then by the Dutch, the English, and finally by the French in the eighteenth century. In 1638, more than two centuries before founding Dakar, the French had founded Saint-Louis at the mouth of the Senegal River. In 1902, Dakar succeeded SaintLouis as the capital of the French West Africa (Saint-Louis had been capital since 1895). The French West Africa included present-day Senegal, GuineaConakry, Ivory Coast, Benin, Mali, Mauritania, Burkina Faso, and Niger. In 1900, the rate of urbanization of sub-Saharan Africa was below five percent, which is quite low, and Dakar was a major city of that region. In 1958, the time of independence came. It started with the difficult independence of Guinea-Conakry. The independence process ultimately led to the disruption of French West Africa and Dakar’s hinterland. Dakar went from being the capital of French West Africa to being the capital of small and poor Senegal. It suddenly became “oversize.” In 2000, its population was about 2 million, while the population of Senegal reached 9 million. The small regional pole Dakar had created before the independence of the West African countries has been, since, more and more marginalized compared with the coastal cities of the Gulf of Guinea such as Abidjan, Accra, and, above all, the enormous pole of Lagos and its conurbation.

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There are very few cities in sub-Saharan Africa that were important before the European colonization and still are. Among them, there are some Nigerian cities such as Benin City and Ibadan. In 1850, Ibadan’s population was 100,000 inhabitants, and it was probably the largest city to the south of Sahara in one of the less urbanized regions of the world. The rate of urbanization of that region was about three percent in 1900, which is very low; that rate reached five percent in 1950, fifteen percent in 1970, and close to forty percent in 2000. In 1930, Ibadan had 385,000 inhabitants, and it was the largest of the four most populated sub-Saharan cities, the others being Addis Ababa (160,000 inhabitants), Lagos (125,000), and Khartoum (100,000). Ibadan reached 4 million dwellers in 2000. Ibadan, Lagos, Ogbomosho, Ife, and Benin City belong to a conurbation whose origin goes back to the Yoruba civilization that inherited from two major African empires: the Empire of Ife, which flourished in the sixteenth century, and the Empire of Benin, whose climax was during the seventeenth century. Despite that the Ife Empire, the Benin Empire, and the Yorubas almost did not know writing; they produced an art of the highest quality, specifically sculptures in bronze, ivory, stone, or pottery, which during the Ife Empire reached a level of excellence that can be compared with that of any other great civilization. It must be added that, in the Ife region, gold was abundant. Today, Lagos dominates the conurbation Ibadan dominated for so long. The British founded the port of Lagos in 1861. Before colonization, sub-Saharan civilizations possessed only pirogues, and they had no ships that could cross the ocean. Thus, they did not build cities directly on the coast. In fact, the first coastal cities were posts that were used for slave trade. The Portuguese were the first to settle on the coast of Nigeria, in the fifteenth century. They were followed, during the sixteenth century, by the English, who also were there to buy slaves. The founding of Lagos led to the construction of the Lagos-Kano railway linking the coast to the north of Nigeria. In 1880, sub-Saharan Africa had a mere 200 kilometers of railroad lines, and it did not even represent 0.2% of the total exports of the Third World as a whole. By 1900, the rail network extended over 4,500 kilometers, and in 1934, over 30,000 kilometers, in 1937, the exports of sub-Saharan Africa reached six percent of the total Third World exports. The Berlin Conference of 1885 had divided up Africa between the European colonial powers and had encouraged them to invest in railroads and mining, but opening up a continent could not be done overnight. Some evolutions helped: diamonds and gold were discovered in South Africa; quinine made it possible for white men to penetrate more easily into African interior; technological developments in the West fostered the consumption of vegetable oils, both as lubricants for machines and as ingredients in the manufactures of candles, soap, and, beginning in the 1860s, margarine; finally, the European demand for tropical food products increased.

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Three urban poles dominate Africa: those of Cairo, Lagos-Ibadan, and, more to the south, Johannesburg. The poles of Cairo and Lagos-Ibadan have a lot in common. Both are linked to the deltas of two of the three longest African rivers: the Nile and the Niger (the second longest African river being the Congo River), in the same way that the pole of Shanghai is linked to the delta of the Yangtze River, and the pole of Amsterdam to the Rhine delta. Both Cairo and Lagos have fertile and well-irrigated hinterlands. However, the development of the Lagos-Ibadan region came up against a particularly hot, humid, and insalubrious tropical climate to which the Europeans adapted with great difficulty. The whole coast of the Gulf of Guinea was known as the “white man’s tomb.” The port of Lagos lies at the entrance of an inner bay, which is well protected, and beside the mouth of the Ogun River, not far from the mouth of the Niger River. Deltas are often bad locations for ports, so the ports located close to the mouth of rivers that end with deltas are often situated next to the delta itself. It is the case of the ports of Alexandria with respect to the Nile, Amsterdam and Antwerp with respect to the Rhine, and Marseille with respect to the Rhône. In sub-Saharan Africa, a third urban pole adds to those of Lagos and Johannesburg: Kinshasa, the former Leopoldville. Like those of Lagos and Cairo, Kinshasa’s pole is associated with the mouth of a great river: the Congo. Its case resembles more the case of Cairo than that of Lagos since Kinshasa is not a seaport. Kinshasa is located on the Malebo Pool (old “Stanley Pool”), which is a lakelike part of the Congo River. Kinshasa is a “breaking point” since, because of the rapids, the Congo River is hardly navigable between Kinshasa and the ocean. Normally, the river traffic coming from the interior has to stop at Kinshasa and the goods have to go on by railroad to the nearby port of Matadi, which lies at the mouth of the Congo River. By the size of its basin and its rate of flow, the Congo River is the second largest river in the world (after the Amazon). If no transcontinental railroad has been completed in Africa, there is a Trans-African train-andboat project that has been fully completed. It is the one linking Matadi and Dar es Salaam. This transcontinental link goes from Matadi to Kinshasa by train, the Congo River and its tributary the Kasai River by boat, as well as from Kamina in Katanga to Kalemie on Lake Tanganyika by train, from Kalemie to Kigoma in Tanzania by boat, and from Kigoma to Dar es Salaam by train. That route goes through Katanga and crosses the rich mine territories of Congo containing gold, cobalt, copper, diamonds, manganese, and uranium. Despite its 5 million inhabitants, Kinshasa does not dominate an urban system that could compare with the ones dominated by Lagos, Cairo, or even Johannesburg. It is surrounded with few large cities. Its twin city, Brazzaville, on the other side of the river, is the largest, and it has only 1.2 million dwellers.

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The Matadi-Kigoma-Dar es Salaam axis passes directly to the south of Rwanda and Burundi, whose capitals and main cities are respectively Kigali and Bujumbura. Rwanda and Burundi share with Ethiopia the fact that their political existence as sub-Saharan states owes nothing to the European colonization even if their present borders have been modified by that colonization. Rwanda and Burundi are twin countries, which have been enemies most of the time. The same groups (the Hutus, the Tutsis, and the Twas) exist in both countries in approximately the same historical proportions, and the same problems of coexistence of those groups have been observed in the two countries. The topography of Rwanda and Burundi is about the same, but the major part of Rwanda belongs to the Nile Basin, while the whole Burundi is part of the basin of Lake Tanganyika, which itself belongs to the Congo Basin. The magnificent Lake Kivu, which separates Rwanda from the Democratic Republic of Congo, pours its waters into the Rizizi River that flows into Lake Tanganyika, and Lake Tanganyika discharges into the Lukuga River that flows into the Congo River. Kigali is the southernmost of all the important cities situated in the Nile Basin. Since the Nile flows into the Mediterranean Sea, Kigali truly belongs to the Mediterranean basin, and it is that basin’s major city which is the farthest from the Mediterranean Sea. Like Bujumbura, it has been founded by Europeans, more precisely Germans. Before the founding Bujumbura in 1896 and of Kigali in 1908, Rwanda-Burundi was a region without cities or even permanent villages, which is all the more surprising since Rwanda and Burundi have the highest population densities of sub-Saharan Africa. Actually, before colonization, both countries had a totally dispersed pattern of territory occupation. Except for the royal courts of the kings and queens-mothers (who had their own court), there existed no stable concentration of population that could be called villages. Even the royal courts were usually moving at the end of each reign. In 1962, at the time of independence, Bujumbura had about 20,000 inhabitants and Kigali, only 7,500. Today, each of those cities has about 300,000 dwellers, and the rate of urbanization of the two countries reaches about twenty percent. Despite that the European penetration has not been deep in the two countries and the economic development remained minimal, Rwanda and, to a less extent, Burundi were led, from 1996, to extend their influence over the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo, mainly because of internal conflicts, which generated true genocides. The geographical isolation of the populations of those two small agricultural and landlocked countries just aggravated their latent conflicts whose roots are as deep as ancient. The specificity of those conflicts is that they are not literally ethnic in the sense that is common in the other African countries, the Hutus and the Tutsis having shared the same language, religions, culture, states and regions, and history for many centuries. Those conflicts involve fuzzy castes and fuzzy races, and

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they have been exacerbated by European colonization, which perverted them to the point of making them almost insolvable. The Tutsi group, which is probably of Nilo-Saharan origin (in spite of its speaking Kinyarwanda, which is a Bantu language) and was specialized in breeding, constituted the essential part of the nobility of those two traditionally feudal countries; so, the term “Tutsi” came to designate the noble persons as well as the members of the group of Tutsi origin. This situation contributed to give a racial character to social conflicts, which generated the bloodiest drifts, including genocides.32 The geographical isolation of those two countries, where neither Europe or Islam penetrated before the second half of the nineteenth century, just augmented the explosive character of their internal tensions. For a long time, Rwanda and Burundi have constituted a kind of dead end for European penetration into Africa, a dead end whose exit was, for Burundi, the road to Dar es Salaam and, for Rwanda, the route to Dar es Salaam under German domination, and later road to Mombasa under Belgian domination. At about the same latitude as Kigali, but 800 kilometers to the east as the crow flies, the city of Nairobi has experienced, since the arrival of Europeans, a situation totally different from that of Rwanda. Yet, Rwanda, neighboring Uganda, and Kenya all are equally dependent for their external trade on the port of Mombasa, on the Indian Ocean. In 1497, Vasco de Gama was the first European to visit Mombasa. He discovered there an intense commercial activity led by various merchants—Arabs, Indians from Gujarat and Malabar, and Persians—who imported silk and cotton textiles, spices, and Chinese porcelain and exported cotton, timber, and gold.33 Mombasa was then a city whose population had both Arabic and African roots, and spoke Arabic and Swahili. The Arabs arrived in the region of Mombasa from the eighth century. In the tenth century, Persians originating from Shiraz conquered the city.34 Thereafter, the Sultanate of Zanzibar extended its domination over the whole East African coast between Somalia and Mozambique. Nairobi was founded in 1899 as a railway encampment in the context of the building of the Mombasa-Kampala (Uganda) railroad, and it became the capital of the British East Africa Protectorate in 1905. It is located right to the east of the Rift Valley, which cuts through Kenya a north-south canyon 65 to 100 kilometers wide, which most paleontologists consider the very cradle of humankind.35 Because of the high altitude (1,660 meters above the sea), Nairobi 32. 33. 34. 35.

Bernard Lugan, Histoire du Rwanda, de la Préhistoire à nos jours (Paris : Bartillat, 1997). Angus Maddison, op. cit., 61. Bernard Lugan, Atlas historique de l’Afrique des origines à nos jours (Paris : Éditions du Rocher, 2001), 97. The Kenyan Rift Valley is part of the Afro-Arabian rift system that runs from the lower Zambezi River (in Mozambique) to the Jordan Valley (in Israel). The southernmost part of that system includes lakes Nyasa, Tanganyika, Kivu, Edward, and Albert.

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has a rather cool weather. The average annual temperature is only 17.5°C and fog is usual. Nairobi is linked to Kampala and Mombasa by the railway, and to the port of Malindi by the fluvial network since it is located at the origin of the Athi River, which is a tributary of the Galana River that flows into the Indian Ocean at Malindi. Nairobi remains the largest city of the former East Africa, which included present-day Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania. In 1963, when Kenya got independent, the city had a population of about 500,000 dwellers. It reached one million around 1982 and two million in 2000. Nairobi’s great rival in East Africa is Dar es Salaam, a port city whose population almost equals that of Nairobi. Founded in 1867 by the sultan of Zanzibar, Dar es Salaam is the terminal of a two-branch railway, one branch coming from Kigoma on Lake Tanganyika and the other one coming from Mwanza on Lake Victoria. It is also the terminal of the Chinese-built Tanzam railway coming from Lusaka (Zambia). The Dar es Salaam and Zanzibar region had been explored, long ago, by Indian, Indonesian, Persian and Arab traders looking for gold, ivory, and, above all, slaves. Later, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Portuguese succeeded in imposing their domination. During the eighteenth century, the Arab Sultanate of Oman took over Zanzibar, which had been a Portuguese colony for two centuries, and formed the Sultanate of Zanzibar, which dominated Dar es Salaam and the coast. Then, the Industrial Revolution gave Europe domination over the whole world. The British imposed their protectorate on Zanzibar in 1890. One year later, in 1891, the Germans created the colony of Tanganyika under the name of German East Africa. The Germans had occupied the territory since 1884. They lost it during World War I, and the British gained Tanganyika in 1920. That way Zanzibar and Tanganyika were reunited under the British rule. Zanzibar, which was an independent sultanate between 1963 and 1964, was united with Tanganyika (which had also become independent in 1961) to form Tanzania in 1964. This happened after the Black Africans of Zanzibar had ousted the Arab sultan and massacred many Arabs from the island. The East African urban pole dominated by Nairobi and Dar es Salaam remains marginal in Africa. It cannot be compared to those of Cairo, Lagos, or Johannesburg, not even to that of Kinshasa and Brazzaville. It is too far from the most usual maritime routes. The traffic between Europe, India, and the Far East passes by Cape Town and Mauritius, or, since the opening of the Suez Canal, by the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea. In both cases, it skips the East African ports. Around 1860, Mauritius and Reunion exported more goods, mainly sugar, to the developed world than all of rest of sub-Saharan Africa (excluding South Africa), which exported mainly oilseeds. Reunion and Mauritius probably The northern extension of the Kenyan Rift Valley includes the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aqaba, the Dead Sea, and the Jordan River.

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had at that time one of the largest per capita export volume in the world. The advantage of Mauritius and Reunion is precisely that the important maritime traffic linking South Africa with India and Japan travels by it while avoiding East Africa. Within that last region, it is noticeable that the distribution of urbanization goes from the coast to the interior. Kenya is more urbanized than Uganda, Uganda, than Rwanda, and Tanzania, than Burundi. The third dominant urban pole of Africa is that of Johannesburg, whose origin goes back to the creation of the Cape Colony by the Dutch in 1652, that is, 155 years after Vasco de Gama passed the Cape of Good Hope en route for India. The discovery of the route to India was an event comparable to the discovery of America in the sense that it changed completely the geographical notions of the time as well as the balance of power between the Christian and Moslem worlds. The route to India allowed Christian Europe to bypass the Moslem lands to reestablish the relations with Ethiopia, India, Southeast Asia, and China, relations that had been, to a great extent, cut more than 800 years before, that is, from the conquest by Islam of Egypt in 636, Mesopotamia in 637, and Iran in 642. In 1652, the Dutch, who were independent only since 1579, were the first European maritime power. They had founded Jakarta 42 years before and New Amsterdam (New York) 37 years before. By founding the Cape Colony, they intended to take control of one of the most important maritime routes of the world. The first Calvinist Dutch colonists were joined by numerous Calvinist Huguenots fleeing France after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes of 1685. In 1814, by the Treaty of Paris that marked the end of Napoleon’s Empire, the British received the Cape Colony that had developed under the Dutch Company of the East Indies. The Cape Colony covered only a very small part of present-day South Africa, corresponding to present-day Cape Province. The rest of South Africa was undeveloped. The Dutch and Huguenot population of the Cape Colony did not accept the British rule. Between 1835 and 1850, about 20,000 Boers (as they called themselves; in Afrikaans, Boer means “peasant”) chose to leave the colony, and founded their own independent provinces to the east and the northeast by conquering territories over the local African tribes, first the Ndebele, and then the Zulu, who ruled over a true empire in that part of Africa and were defeated for the first time by the Boers in 1838 at the battle of Blood River. This epic was called the “Great Trek.” The British governors accepted this migration, and London went as far as recognizing the independence of the new Boer provinces in 1852. There were three new provinces, Natal, Transgariep (which became later the Orange Free State), and Transvaal. Conflicts soon developed between them, and Natal annexed Transvaal in 1877, which triggered off a war. In 1881, Paul Kruger freed Transvaal. The British took advantage of the 1877–1881 War and of the Boer conflicts to impose their suzerainty over the Boer Provinces.

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In 1884, rich gold deposits were discovered at Johannesburg, which stimulated British covetousness. In 1890, Cecil Rhodes became prime minister of the Cape Colony. He was a fervent promoter of the British Empire. Between 1870 and 1890, he had conquered the territories that were to become Rhodesia, and later Zimbabwe and Zambia. His dream to build the CairoCape Town railway only led him to try to take complete control of the Boer Provinces, especially of Transvaal and the Orange Free State, which were lying right between the Cape Province and Rhodesia. From 1890 to 1895, Rhodes provoked the Boers and aggravated the tensions between them and the British. This aggravated tension ultimately led in 1899 to the Boers War that the British won in 1902. Johannesburg and the Transvaal Province have extremely rich gold, iron, diamond, silver, and chromium mines. Since 1884, Johannesburg has become one of the most famous “mine cities” of the world. But it has also become a banking center, a very industrialized area, and a trading place. Johannesburg is a true metropolis whose links with the rest of the world depend very much on the railroads that link it to the port of Durban and the port of Maputo in Mozambique. South Africa’s strategic location on the main maritime routes greatly favored its industrial development. A huge conurbation emerged around Johannesburg, which includes Pretoria, the administrative capital of South Africa, and the city of Soweto. In 2000, that conurbation had 5 million inhabitants, twice as much as the metropolitan area of Cape Town. South Africa had the highest per capita gross domestic product (GDP) in Africa after Mauritius Island. It so happens that both countries lay on the maritime route to India opened by Vasco de Gama.

s THE EUROPEAN EXPANSION IN ASIA The will of Industrial Europe to conquer the world was not limited to Africa. It was also felt throughout Asia, along the Great and Asian corridors. In that part of the world, the European domination occasionally took the form of traditional colonialism, but often also a more toned-down and discrete, but nevertheless efficient, form. In the Middle East, the European expansion clashed with the presence of the Ottoman Empire, which, above all, in the context of World War I, progressively retreated till its dismantling in 1920 (followed by the abolition of the sultanate in 1922 and the caliphate in 1924). The British occupied Egypt in 1882, and British resident agents became its actual administrators, though it remained under nominal Turkish sovereignty. In 1914, this fiction was ended, and Egypt became a protectorate of Britain. The British T.E. Lawrence (“Lawrence of Arabia”) contributed to free Arabia from the Ottoman yoke in 1918. In 1920, France received from the Society of Nations a mandate over Lebanon and Syria. At the same moment, Great Britain was given a mandate

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over Palestine, Transjordan and Iraq, while, since 1899, it had extended its protection over all the states of the Persian Gulf with the intention to take control of the Near East oil, as well as the route of India through the Suez Canal. The mandate given to Great Britain is directly at the origin of the forming of the state of Israel because it had been preceded, on November 2, 1917, by the famous Balfour Declaration promising support for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine on the understanding that the civil and religious rights of non-Jewish Palestinians would be safeguarded. That promise was conditional on the victory of World War I allies over the Ottoman Empire. Having won the war and obtained the mandate over Palestine, Great Britain allowed Jewish immigrants to settle in Palestine till 1940. The situation created by the interruption of the immigration at the very moment millions of Jews were exterminated by Hitler gave birth to an armed resistance by the Jews living in Palestine, which eventually led to the partition of Palestine in two parts in 1947, and then to the independence declaration of the State of Israel in 1948 on the very day of the British departure from Palestine. More to the east in the Great Corridor, in Iran, the two industrial powers which faced each other for the control of the region were not France and Great Britain, but Great Britain and Russia. In 1813 and 1828, the tsars of Russia took from the shahs of Iran some Caucasian regions, and then in 1884–1885, the Merv region south of Turkestan. As for the British, they relied on their Indian colony to extend their influence in Afghanistan, Baluchistan (a region located west of the Indus River), and Iran. In 1907, an agreement intervened between Russia and Great Britain by which southern Iran was placed under the protection of the British and northern Iran under that of Russia. The Bolshevik Revolution induced Great Britain to try to increase its influence in Iran by fear of seeing it diminish and jeopardizing its considerable investments in the railways and, above all, the recently discovered Iranian oil. Fearing the influence of the Russian Communists, the British supported Riza Pahlavi, who was put in charge of the army and of the Cossacks in 1919. He headed the Cossacks when they ousted the old dynasty of the Qadjars in 1925, and became the new shah of Iran. Although, politically, Persia was only partially under the protection of the British Empire (since the Soviet Union was still very influential in Iran), economically, the country was totally dominated by the British and their industrial and financial power, represented above all by the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. In order to assert the independence of his country, Shah Riza Pahlavi opted for the development of his capital, Tehran, and for a policy of rapprochement with Hitler’s Germany. When World War II was declared after the Soviet Union had signed a pact of non-aggression with Hitler, the shah had no problem pursuing his pro-German policy. However, in 1941 Hitler chose to attack the Soviet Union and denounce the pact. Stalin had no other choice than to side

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with the British. One of the first common actions of the new allies was to invade Iran and force the shah to resign. His son Muhammad Riza Pahlavi succeeded him. A city particularly benefited from the opening of Iran to the influence of the industrialized countries: Tehran. Located north of the Great Salt Desert and south of the Caspian Sea, in the southern part of the Elburz Mountains, on the Silk Road from Samarkand to Baghdad and the Mediterranean Sea, Tehran had become in 1788 the eighth capital of Persia-Iran, after Susa, Pasargadae, Persepolis, Istakhr, Isfahan, Tabriz, and Qazvin. As already mentioned, generally, the successive sovereigns of Persia and Iran have tended to progressively move the capital away from the cradle of urbanization, that is, Eridu and Sumer, and closer to the Caspian Sea. Thanks to the influence of the industrialized countries, old Tehran was transformed into a modern metropolis and a “railroad city.” It became the converging point of all the important railroads in the region. There is a line coming from the Caspian Sea, a line going to the Persian Gulf through Qom, a line going to the Black Sea and Istanbul through Tabriz, a line going to Mashhad-Meshed close to Turkmenistan, and a line leading through Qom towards Kerman in southeast Iran. Tehran’s population exploded: from 150,000 dwellers in 1900, it went to almost one million in 1950 and to about 8 million in 2000. However, the economic development of Tehran and Iran did not follow the demographic growth. Iran is just touched in the south by the Great Corridor, and it is far from the American Corridor which became so important during the twentieth century. The Silk Road is not playing its ancient role anymore, and Iran presently occupies no strategic position inside of the great maritime, terrestrial, or rail routes of the world. More to the east, the city of Karachi lies right in the Great Corridor, only 73 kilometers from its central axis. Karachi, which was the capital of Pakistan from 1947 to 1967, is a direct product of the European colonization linked to industrialization. It is located in the Sindh region, a little to the west of the delta of the Indus River on the Gulf of Oman, and it benefits from an easy access to the Persian Gulf and Iraq, the Red Sea and the Suez Canal, as well as the Indian Ocean and Africa. In 1850, the British chose its site to create a commercial port served by a railroad leading to Hyderabad, where it forked, on the one hand, towards Lahore and northern Pakistan and, on the other hand, towards India and Delhi. The port and railway were completed in 1873. Curiously enough, the region of Sindh where the Indus ends is rather arid. The river is used for irrigation purposes. In fact, a vast irrigation program permitted the irrigated area to grow fourfold since 1947. Moreover, cotton is grown, and Karachi has become an important textile center that exports its production throughout the world.

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Before British colonization, India, which included present-day Pakistan till 1947, was one of the main world producers of textile. European penetration literally ruined the Indian economy. This is how that happened: Already by the 1790s, because of mechanization, a worker in an English textile mill could produce 120 to 160 times as much cotton thread as an Indian or European traditional craftsman. During the same period, because of the use of coke, with a population of eight million, England turned out some 100,000 metric tons of cast iron, or probably as much as, if not more than, all of India with a population of nearly 200 million. Within about twenty years (around 1810–1820) this industrial change brought about a complete reversal in the flow of trade between Europe and those regions in other parts of the world with advanced traditional technological cultures, particularly Asia. Asia, which during the first years of the nineteenth century still exported manufactured goods especially to Europe, was to be inundated with European industrial products, thereby engendering a process of deindustrialization … This new form of trade would, moreover, spell the death of the system of “companies” that had in each country monopolized trade with the East and West Indies. These companies were to be replaced by genuine colonization which by 1815–1820 already affected a large part of Asia.36

The event that triggered the “complete reversal in the flow of trade” mentioned by Bairoch was the 1812 War waged by the United States against Great Britain and Canada. That faraway war had immense repercussions on India. Before that war, the United States were the world’s main cotton exporter and the British cotton industry’s main supplier. As for the Indian textile industry, it was protected by the monopoly of the East India Company, which prevented all imports of cotton textiles into India in order to protect Indian textile producers from the competition of British producers. The sudden drop of imports from America provided strong arguments for the lobby on behalf of English industrialists demanding the liberty to export cotton textiles to the vast Indian market and thereby the abrogation of the monopoly exercised by the East India Company. In 1813, that monopoly was abolished. From nothing in 1812, imports of cotton fabrics into India rose by 1814 to 0.5 million meters, by around 1820 to 12 million meters, reaching 900 million meters around 1870 and then stabilizing around 1.9 billion meters for several decades beginning in the 1880s.37 The Indian textile industry was literally ruined while that sector had made India rich in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. According to Mukerjee’s calculations, Indian real wages in the second half of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century were only a

36. 37.

Paul Bairoch, op. cit., 397. Ibid., 511–512.

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quarter of what they had been in the second half of the sixteenth century, the unusually favorable era of the reign of Akbar, the great Mughal emperor of Delhi.38 In India, as in other Asian countries, the ruin of the national manufactur ing sector and the impoverishment it caused favored a still deeper colonization by European industrial powers, and also the decline of many traditional cities. However, the phase of desindustrialization was followed in India by the emergence, often in new cities such as Karachi, Bombay-Mumbai, Calcutta, and Madras, of a new manufacturing sector capable to compete with European countries and even to win the economic battle against them. The development of the textile industry at Karachi was part of that re-industrialization movement resting on more modern and competitive bases. Soon that city diversified its industrial structure with port activities, petrol refineries, metal industry, chemistry, mechanic construction, shipbuilding, banking, finance, etc. Its population rose from 135,000 inhabitants in 1900 to 436,000 in 1941 and 8 million in 2000. Still more to the east in the Great Corridor, the cities of BombayMumbai and Calcutta represent further examples of the Great Corridor densification process which marked European expansion in Asia. What still today distinguishes the most the Great Corridor from the American one in Eurasia is the quasi-saturation of the former and the relative emptiness of the latter outside the great poles it contains (London, Berlin, Moscow, PekingBeijing, Seoul, and Tokyo). Karachi and Calcutta did not exist before British colonization. As for Bombay-Mumbai, while it existed before that colonization, it really took off after its integration to the British Empire. Founded in the thirteenth century and successively Moslem from 1348 and Portuguese from 1534, Bombay-Mumbai was given to England as a part of the dowry of the king of Portugal’s daughter, Catherine of Braganza, when she married Charles II of England in 1662. The British East Indies Company took it over in 1668. Bombay-Mumbai belongs both to the limit of the Great Corridor and to the central part of the Asian Corridor. An island, it is linked to the continent by dykes and its port is situated on the Arabian Sea, between the Gulf of Khambhat and the Malabar Coast. It faces the Arabic Peninsula and Africa. If no river ends up around Bombay, two rivers originate from its area: the Godavari and Bhima rivers. The Godavari, like the Ganges, is a sacred Indian river. It originates from the city of Nasik, which lies to the northeast of Bombay. As for the Bhima, it starts in the region of Pune, which is a city located southeast of Bombay. The Bhima is a tributary of the Kristna

38.

Radhakamal Mukerjee, The Economic History of India, 1600–1800 (Allahabad: Kitab Mahal, 1967).

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River, which, like the Godavari, runs towards the Bay of Bengal and the eastern part of the Indian Ocean. When the age of motorized transportation came, the link between the Arabian Sea, central India, and the Bay of Bengal through Bombay-Mumbai became possible thanks to the railways. Bombay was then transformed into a railway crossroads. A line was built between Bombay and Pune on the Bhima River, and another between Bombay and Nasik on the Godavari River. A third line was built between Bombay and Surat, on the Gulf of Khambhat at the mouth of the Tapi River, which originates from central India. From 1750 to 1850, the population of BombayMumbai was multiplied by 7.5, rising from 77,000 to 580,000. It reached 16 million dwellers around 2000, as Bombay-Mumbai remained the main port and the most important economic, financial and industrial pole as well as the second largest city of India, next to Delhi. It is such an active economic center that the price of a square meter of land in Bombay-Mumbai is among the highest in the world. Calcutta is the great historical rival of Bombay-Mumbai. The British Company of the East Indies founded it in 1690. It is located on the Hooghly River that is a part of the huge Ganges Delta, which is the largest delta on Earth. The Ganges is the most sacred and most important river in the whole Indian sub-continent. It also is, with the Rhine and the Yangtze River, one of the Great Corridor’s three main fluvial axes. Calcutta was the capital of British India from 1772 to 1912. During the colonial period, the European presence in Calcutta as well as in other similar European cities of Asia, like Portuguese Macau or French Pondicherry (in southern India), was most important in terms of influence while being quite slight in terms of number of individuals. It is estimated that Europeans never represented more than three percent of the total population of Calcutta, which grew from 115,000 in 1750 to one million in 1900 and reached 13 million around 2000. Like Bombay-Mumbai, Calcutta developed thanks to railways and industrialization. However, compared with Bombay-Mumbai, it was handicapped by its distance from the Persian Gulf, the Suez Canal, and Europe. The overpopulation in the Ganges Valley contributed to make Calcutta one of the most poverty-stricken large cities of the world. The Ganges delta, which lies to a great extent in Bangladesh, is one of the areas most saturated with population and poverty in the world. The economic decline caused by the desindustrialization of the nineteenth century is still visible in Calcutta in spite of the fact that Calcutta remains also a symbol of the new industrialization of India.

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Shanghai

Calcutta

Canton-Guangzhou Hong Kong

BombayMumbay

Manila Madras-Chennai

Singapore

Jakarta

Sydney

1000

km

Map 19 The Spreading of European Colonialism through the Asian Corridor

The European wave stemming from the Industrial Revolution followed, above all, the Great Corridor, but, like the Moslem wave that preceded it, it also followed the southern part of the Asian Corridor to reach cities such as Madras-Chennai, Singapore, and Sydney (see Map 19). Actually, England’s very first trading post in India was Madras, that the British founded in 1639. Madras lies on the coast of Coromandel, the eastern coast of southern India. It is located between the two most important southern rivers of the Dekkan region, which form the southern tip of India: the Cauvery and Penner rivers. Both rivers originate from the mountains of Western Ghats Kerala that separate the Malabar Coast from the basins of the rivers that run towards the Bay

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of Bengal. The European penetration into India occurred in the context of the weakening of the Mughal and Moslem power caused by the Hindu reconquest movement led by the Vijayanagara Empire, and later the Hindu Maratha Confederation. The Portuguese were the first Europeans to settle in India, at Goa-Panaji on the Malabar Coast, at Diu, Damao-Daman, and Bassein, in the region of Surat, and at Hooghly, close to Calcutta. Then came the British, the Dutch, and the French. All were looking for the famous Indian spices, pepper, cinnamon, and cloves, but also ivory and precious stones. In the eighteenth century, the most intense struggle between European powers on Indian soil involved the French and the British. In the Bengal region, French Chandernagor competed with British Calcutta, while, more to the south, French Yanaon, Mahé, Karikal, and Pondichéry-Pondicherry were faced to British Madras. The British won owing to the victories of Plassey (1757) and Buxar (1764) over the Indians, which marked the triumph of the British expansion in Bengal, the victory of Wandiwash-Vandavasy (1760) over the French, and the Treaty of Paris of 1763. Thereafter, the French presence in India became increasingly discrete, even though Pondichéry-Pondicherry remained French till 1956. Around Madras like elsewhere, the British built railways linking that city to the rest of India. However, the industrialization benefited much more Bombay-Mumbai and Calcutta than Madras, which never rivaled seriously the two former cities from 1850. At that time, Madras had 310,000 inhabitants, while Bombay-Mumbai had 580,000 and Calcutta, 413,000. Today, the population of Madras is equal to half Calcutta’s population and less than half that of Bombay-Mumbai. The takeoff of new Asian industrial cities such as Karachi, Madras, Bombay-Mumbai, and Calcutta soon generated problems for the European industrial powers, particularly for Great Britain. On the eve of World War I, that country had a negative balance of payments with the United States, industrial Europe, Canada, South Africa, and New Zealand. Britain’s trade surplus with India and China compensated for that. Between the two world wars, the industrialization of India, China, and Japan jeopardized the dominant position Great Britain had long had facing those countries. Thus Great Britain as well as other European industrialized countries got increasingly cornered. 39 In the aftermath of World War II, Great Britain had no other alternative than to grant independence to its Asian colonies. This happened in 1948 for India and Pakistan, which had been split the year before in a bloodbath. Burma, which had been a part of British India till 1937, attained independence the same year.

39.

Paul Knox and John Agnew, The Geography of the World Economy (London : Edward Arnold, 1994, second edition), 282–283.

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The European wave stemming from the Industrial Revolution also touched, within the Asian Corridor, the Strait of Malacca. The highest population densities of the whole southern hemisphere are found on the island of Java, in Indonesia. Great Britain never settled on the territory of present-day Indonesia. However, its empire surrounded (so to say) Indonesia by including, to the north, Malaysia, the northern part of the island of Borneo (Sarawak, Brunei, and Northern Borneo), and Singapore; to the east, Papua New Guinea; and to the south, Australia. As for Indonesia itself, it remained under Dutch rule till the Japanese invasion of 1942. In the wake of the Industrial Revolution, the Dutch colonization of Indonesia was exceptionally brutal, but very efficient from an economic point of view. A radical transformation of the local economy took place. The craft industries almost disappeared, while the Dutch colony became a major producer of sugar, coffee, and other agricultural exports. On a per capita basis, its exports became, around 1860, 125% higher than India’s, which means that, on average, each inhabitant of Dutch Indonesia produced 2.25 times as much exports as an Indian. The priority given by the Dutch to rural productions put a brake on the rural exodus and thus on urban growth. However, from 1910 onward, urban growth proceeded faster than growth in total population, and, around 1930, a true urban explosion was triggered. For example, the population of Jakarta, which was only 115,000 in 1900, went up to 440,000 in 1930 and to 6 million dwellers in 1992. In that part of the world, the British colonization was probably smoother than the Dutch one. If we compare the present level of development of the former British and Dutch colonies in the region, it was also more successful. Singapore is the best illustration of the success of the British colonization in Southeast Asia. The two main links between the Indian Ocean and the China Sea are the Sunda Strait, close to Jakarta, between Java and Sumatra, and the Strait of Malacca. The island of Singapore is situated in the narrowest section of the Strait of Malacca, at the entrance of the strait coming from China. The British spotted the potential of the island at the onset of the Industrial Revolution. In 1819, the British East Indies Company bought the island where lay a small fishing village called Temasek. The island belonged to the Sultan of Riau-Johor, who accepted to sell it. It is the British who founded the city of Singapore on the island and built the port, which was ideally located from a military as well as commercial point of view. It controlled the Strait of Malacca and occupied a strategic transit zone that allowed sailing ships to stop and wait before crossing the strait when the cumbersome monsoon winds became favorable. Singapore’s economic boom came after World War I. The Japanese occupied the island from 1942 to 1945, when it returned to the British. Singapore became independent in 1959 as a city-state. Despite a short integration to Malaysia from 1963 to 1965, Singapore has chosen to remain a small city-state.

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Today, Singapore is the most prosperous and famous city-state of the world. It is a living reminiscence of the past glory of Venice, Genoa, Athens, and Carthage. It is a major world economic place, an interface between the East and the West, the first transit port in the world, the main financial city of Southeast Asia, and a very sophisticated industrialized city. The industrial sectors that are present in Singapore are the most technologically advanced and the least polluting. Singapore’s population reaches 3.5 million. The city is very international and has no less than four official languages: Malay, Chinese, English, and Tamul. It must be said that Singapore is to a large extent a Chinese city. Up to 76.2% of its population is Chinese, while the Chinese represent only 32% of the population of Malaysia, where Singapore has a twin city: Johor Baharu, which has a population of about 2 million. Together, Singapore and Johor Baharu form a conurbation of 5.5 million inhabitants, close to twice the population of Kuala Lumpur (3 million). The per capita income of Singapore is the highest in Asia and one of the highest in the world. It is more than fifteen percent higher than the per capita income of Japan or Hong Kong. The industrial wave stemming from Europe touched the already much-populated countries of Asia, but it also reached the little-populated regions of Oceania. In 1788, Australia was still a relatively unknown part of the world. The Dutch who were colonizing Indonesia were the first Europeans to discover Australia. Then came two explorers: a Frenchman, Louis Antoine, Count of Bougainville, and an Englishman, James Cook. Bougainville explored the Indian and Pacific oceans from 1766 to 1769. An island of the Solomon Archipelago now bears his name. Cook explored Oceania from 1768 to 1779. The British colony called New South Wales and its capital Sydney, originally named Botany Bay, served as a penitentiary for 53 years, from 1787 to 1840. The colony’s economic takeoff was launched by the development of sheep breeding and, above all, by the discovery, in 1851, of gold mines, which introduced Australia into the great capitalist circuits of the industrial era. It must be said that, during all the Industrial Revolution and the major part of the twentieth century, the world monetary system was based on the gold standard. Gold was the very foundation of the system. The huge economic expansion triggered by the Industrial Revolution had to be fuelled by an increased supply of gold (and silver). In the same way as the increased supply of gold and silver that followed the discovery of America had had beneficial effects on the part of Europe that was in a position to increase its production of goods and services (mainly the Low Countries and England), the increase in the production of goods and services launched by the Industrial Revolution would have been jeopardized if the money supply (that is gold and silver) had not followed the evolution. This is how the gold rushes of California, Yukon, and Australia during the nineteenth century played a major role in the economic evolution of

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the period. Developing new gold mines was increasing the world money supply at a time when the booming production of goods and services required it. In 1851, the population of Sydney was 54,000 dwellers. Ten years later, in 1861, it had attained 96,000 inhabitants, and it reached 3.5 million around 2000. Today, minerals still represent fifty percent of all Australian exports. But the country has diversified its economy. For instance, Sydney developed new functions. It was a capital and an administrative center. It became a financial, industrial and commercial metropolis. The Euro-industrial colonialism also attained Indochina. It has been mentioned in Chapter 1 that the Indochinese Peninsula had originally been populated by peoples coming from Southern China who spoke MiaoYao, Austroasiatic, Burmese, Thai, Lao, and Tai-Kadai. Those populations were driven back by the invasion of Sino-Tibetan populations coming from Northern China. Thus, the Thais, who are not of Chinese origin, had settled before the Christian era in the Yunnan province in Southern China. Around 750, they slowly migrated to present-day Thailand, passing through Northern Vietnam and Laos. Until the nineteenth century, the Chinese influence on the populations of the Indochinese Peninsula yielded ground everywhere, except in northern Vietnam, to the influence of India and also, partly, Islam. Hinduism and Indian Buddhism triumphed, while Islam succeeded to stand out in Malaysia from 1300. The wave of European colonialism stemming from the Industrial Revolution engulfed the whole Indochinese Peninsula with the sole exception of Thailand. The British colonized Malaysia in 1795 and then, between 1852 and 1855, Burma, which they annexed to the British India. On its side, France took control of Vietnam from 1859, Cambodia from 1863, and Laos from 1887. Thailand, which had been part of Burma till 1782 and was called Siam till 1938, resisted the wave of European colonialism by adopting a strategy opposite the one chosen by Japan, which also resisted. While Japan resorted to protectionism, Siam signed, in 1855, a treaty with the British that allowed it to have good commercial and political relations with the British Empire without being part of it. By this treaty, Siam opened its ports to manufactured goods coming from Europe, though these goods were very cheap, and it accepted to face that new competition. On the other hand, Siam used the rivalry between France and Great Britain in the peninsula to convince both powers to keep Thailand as a buffer zone between their two colonial empires. The city of Bangkok, which had been founded just in 1772 as a royal city at a time when Siam was still under the suzerainty of Burma, benefited from the new situation to assert itself as a major port and industrial center. Located close to the mouth of the Chao Phraya River, Bangkok occupies a central position in Thailand while having an easy access to

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the Gulf of Thailand and, through it, to the China Sea and the Strait of Malacca. In 1800, Bangkok had only 45,000 inhabitants. One hundred years later, it reached 267,000 dwellers. Then, in 1950, in the aftermath of the war during which Thailand succeeded to preserve its independence by allying with Japan and then with the United States when Japan started to retreat, it reached one million inhabitants. In 2000, the population of its metropolitan area is estimated to more than 8.5 million inhabitants while the population of Thailand exceeds 60 million. Today, Bangkok is by far the largest city of the Indochinese Peninsula. It is larger than Singapore (3.5 million), Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon; 3.5 million), Hanoi (3.2 million), Kuala Lumpur (3.2 million), Rangoon (3.2 million), and Phnom Penh (0.6 million). The most populated country of the peninsula, however, remains Vietnam, which, with its 76 million inhabitants, is ahead of Thailand, but also of Burma-Myanmar (47 million), Malaysia (21 million), Cambodia (12 million), and Laos (5 million). The Indochinese Peninsula is well located, populated, and fertile. Despite some recent development, it remains a poor region of the world. A reason for this rather deceiving performance is war: civil war, colonial war, revolutionary war, war between neighboring countries, ideological war, all kinds of war. The Indochinese Peninsula has been a battlefield. A single word sums up this tragedy: Vietnam. And two cities are the symbols of these brotherly fights: Hanoi and Saigon, renamed Ho Chi Minh City. Hanoi, in the Tonkin region, was founded in 599 at the time of the Chinese domination (North Vietnam was a part of China from about 150 BC to AD 950). As for Saigon, located in the Cochinchina region, its origin goes back to a simple village that existed in the seventeenth century at a time when South Vietnam lived under Cambodian domination. That village gained some importance when, around 1780, a citadel was built there. From about 950 onwards, the northern part of Vietnam asserted its independence with respect to China, and Hanoi became the capital of the Vietnamese kingdom of Annam, which progressively extended its territory towards the south and Saigon. In 1802, under Napoleon Bonaparte (who was still consul; he became emperor in 1804), France organized a coup d’état and replaced the old Trân dynasty from the north with the Nguyên dynasty from the south, why was allied with the French. Gialong, the first emperor of the new dynasty, moved the capital of the kingdom of Annam from Hanoi to Hue, which lays half way between Hanoi and Saigon. The French colonization of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia is posterior to the Industrial Revolution. It was launched by the conquest of Saigon in 1859 and by the creation, in 1867, of the French colony of Cochinchina that later became South Vietnam. In 1873, France took control of Hanoi. It was only in 1887 that North and South Vietnam were reunited and became a French colony under the name of “Indochinese Union.” Vietnam remained

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united and a French colony from 1887 to 1941, when Japan invaded Vietnam and the rest of the Indochinese Peninsula, except Thailand, which had been cautious enough to ally with Japan. After the war in 1945, France recognized the independence of North Vietnam, which had been liberated by Hô Chi Minh and the Communists, but with the help of the British again took control of Cochinchina and Saigon. In 1954, the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu and left Vietnam. However, the Communists did not take control of South Vietnam, which remained, with the military help of the United States, a separate country until the end of the Vietnam War and the reunification of Vietnam under the Communist regime in 1975. Then Saigon was renamed Ho Chi Minh City. Ruined by the wars, Vietnam remains a very poor country, with a large population (76 million) scattered over a territory as large as Finland (which has 5 million inhabitants), and a very low rate of urbanization (about twenty percent). Despite the fact that in 1930, Hanoi was larger than Saigon (140,000 compared to 100,000 inhabitants) and despite the Communist victory, Ho Chi Minh City is today twice as big as Hanoi (their respective populations being of 5.7 and 2.5 million dwellers). If Hanoi benefits from the proximity of the port of Haiphong, which is the largest industrial center of Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh City has the advantage of being situated at a distance of approximately 80 kilometers from the Southern China Sea, at the mouth of the Saigon River, which constitutes a branch of the Mekong River, by far the most important river of the Indochinese Peninsula. The Mekong originates from Yunnan in Southern China and touches Burma, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam. Despite its not being easily navigable, it constitutes the central way of the whole peninsula, and Ho Chi Minh City dominates its mouth. The colonizing wave stemming from industrialized Europe also reached China, where it took its ugliest face. Till 1842, the only Chinese ports open to foreign ships were Macau, open to the Portuguese, Amoy, open to the Spanish Philippines, Canton-Guangzhou, open to the other West Europeans, Kiakhta, open to the Russians, and Ningbo, open to the Japanese and the Koreans.40 All those ports were linked to the China Sea, except for Kiakhta, which is on the Selenge River, a river of Mongolia that flows towards Lake Baikal in Siberia. The Western countries looked for the maximum of benefit in their trade with China because of the considerable European demand for Chinese tea, silk, and china. By the 1840s, the British, who had started buying Chinese tea one century before, were buying 14,000 tons of tea a year, not to mention the other Western nations. On the other hand, the Chinese demand for Western products was very low. This forced the Western countries to pay their Chinese imports with gold and silver, which caused 40.

Angus Maddison, Chinese Economic Performance in the Long Run (Paris: OECD, 1998), 41.

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the Western countries a disequilibrium of their trade balance with China. In 1833, the monopoly held by the British East Indies Company over the trade between Great Britain and China was abolished, and the British merchants attempted to eliminate the trade deficit with China by illegally introducing opium products in India. The stratagem succeeded and gave birth to a new triangular trade. The British merchants were sending their manufactured goods to India, where they were buying opium. From India, they were going to China where they would buy tea with the opium. They would return to Great Britain with tea as well as a huge profit. The opium market in China developed very rapidly. Between 1820 and 1839 the annual shipments of opium rose from 4,000 to 40,000 chests.41 Of course opium was causing social problems in China. Moreover, the Chinese Empire soon faced a silver deficit and major economic problems. Officially, the import of opium in China was completely illegal, but through corruption it became tolerated. In 1839, the Chinese emperor decided to stop the prohibited opium trade and the mandarin Lin Zexu ordered the destruction of 20,000 chests of opium arriving from India in Canton. In retaliation, the British waged war on China. In 1840, they occupied Shanghai and seized Hong Kong in 1841. The Opium War lasted three years until 1842, when China was forced to surrender. The Chinese had morality on their side, but the British had the military power and a complete lack of scruples. In 1842, Great Britain imposed China the Treaty of Nanking, which was followed, between 1856 and 1860, by a new military intervention, led that time jointly by Great Britain and France, and by the Treaty of 1858, which was ratified just in October 1860. The Nanking and 1858 treaties limited considerably China’s sovereignty over its external trade, a sovereignty that China recuperated just in 1929. By the Nanking Treaty of 1842, China transferred forever the island of Hong Kong to Great Britain, and opened five “treaty ports” where extraterritorial rights were given to British traders and residents, including the right for Great Britain to judge its own residents. The five ports were Canton-Guangzhou, Amoy-Xiamen, Foochow-Fuzhou, Ningpo-Ningbo and Shanghai. The Treaty of Nanking also forced China to pay the British 6 million silver dollars to compensate for destruction in 1839 of their 20,000 chests of opium and a further war “indemnity” of $21 million. In 1843, a supplementary agreement granted most-favored-nation treatment, which meant that future Chinese concessions of rights to one foreign nation could then be claimed by other foreigners. Within two years the French and Americans obtained similar concessions, and later 16 other nations received the same 41.

Michael Greenberg, British Trade and the Opening of China, 1800–1842 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1961), 221.

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privileges. The number of “treaty ports” increased through the following years; in 1917, there were 92 of them, including some, like Chongqing, in the center of China.42 The two cities that best symbolize the intrusion of the European industrialized countries in China are Hong Kong and Shanghai. Hong Kong was a British colony for 152 years, that is, from 1841 to 1941, and from 1945 to 1997. Located on an island at the mouth of the important Xi (Pearl) River (Xi Jiang), very close to Macau and not far from Canton-Guangzhou, Hong Kong experienced an exceptional growth. Between 1841, when it became British, and 1940, Hong Kong turned from a village of fishermen and pirates into a city of a little more than a million and a half inhabitants, of which only 22,000 were foreigners, 15,000 of them from the West. During the same period, the population of Canton went only from 700,000 to a little more than one million inhabitants. The victory of the Chinese Communists in 1949 was the biggest threat ever to the continuation of the trade relations Europe had developed with China for centuries. The first effect of the Communist victory was an exodus to Taiwan as well as Hong Kong. The population of Hong Kong more than doubled in 24 years. It went from 1.6 million in 1940 to 3.7 million in 1964, and it continued to grow. In 1997, when Hong Kong was returned to China, its population reached 5.7 million while its territory covered only 1,045 square kilometers (that is, the area of Martinique, whose population is 350,000 inhabitants). The proportion of Hong Kong’s population that was Chinese reached ninety-eight percent. Impressive as it is, Hong Kong’s population growth gives an underrated idea of its economic growth. In 1997, when Hong Kong returned to China, its port had become the first container port of the world, and its stock exchange was the sixth biggest. Its per capita income was then higher than US $10,000, while the per capita income of China was only about $650. On the average, a citizen from Hong Kong earned more than 15 times what a Chinese earned and a little more than a Taiwanese. Hong Kong was then one of the new industrialized countries in the same way as Brazil, China, India, Malaysia, Mexico, Pakistan, Singapore, South Korea, or Taiwan. However, it had industrialized before most of those countries, and it probably was the new industrial country that had had the biggest impact on its surrounding area. Actually, the success of Hong Kong inspired the Communist leaders of China who decided, in 1980, to create four “special enterprise zones” (SEZ). Three of those four zones, Shenzhen, Zhuhai, and Shantou, were created in the province of Guangdong to which Hong Kong was annexed in 1997, the fourth one, Xiamen (the old trading port of Amoy), facing Taiwan. In 1988, a fifth zone, the island of Hainan, was added. The creation of the special 42.

Angus Maddison, Chinese Economic Performance, op. cit., 41.

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zones was accompanied by a policy aimed at opening to foreign trade fourteen coastal cities, particularly around the delta of the Yangtze River, and Shanghai. When it was designated as a “treaty port” in 1842, Shanghai had a population of just 230,000, which was not enough to make it one of China’s main cities. The settling of numerous foreign companies in Shanghai after the Treaty of Nanking propelled the city to the first ranks of the Chinese urban hierarchy. Between 1865 and 1936, Shanghai handled forty-five to sixty-five percent of China’s foreign trade.43 By 1938 Shanghai’s population had risen to 3.6 million and Shanghai was the biggest city in China.44 The development of that city, whose name means “on the sea,” owes a lot to the location of its natural port situated on the Huangpu River, which is connected through the system of canals with the longest Chinese river, the Yangtze. Shanghai belongs to the Jiangsu province, whose capital is Nanking-Nanjing, and which, with its 62 million inhabitants, is presently the most densely populated province of China. Like the Netherlands, Jiangsu is made of fertile land intertwined with an incredible number of waterways, including the Grand Imperial Canal, as well as the Yangtze, Huai, and Huangpu rivers. It produces rice, wheat, corn, millet, soya, cotton, as well as steel, textiles, chemistry, automobiles, mechanics, and almost everything else. Like elsewhere, the penetration of the industrialized European powers was accompanied in China with the building of railroads. In 1912, the United Kingdom was granted the right to build and exploit various railways. Three main railroads were built, which follow the logic of the three topodynamic corridors that cross the country. The main railway served Shanghai. It went from Hangchow-Hangzhou to Shanghai, and from Shanghai to Nanking-Nanjing and Xuzhou. It was located at the junction of the Great and Asian corridors. A much smaller railway went from Kowloon, which faces Hong Kong, to Canton-Guangzhou. This second railroad belongs to the Great Corridor. Finally, a third British railroad linked Peking-Beijing to Tianjin and Mukden-Shenyang. It was right in the middle of the American Corridor, which will be further studied later when describing the Russian and Japanese expansion in that region. The opening of China to the influence of industrialized countries stimulated its urbanization. The Chinese rate of urbanization had decreased from 11–14% in the sixteenth century to 6.0–7.5% around 1850. The new wave revived urban growth, and the rate of

43. 44.

Alexander Eckstein, Walter Galenson, and Ta-Chung Liu, eds, Economic Trends in Communist China (Chicago: Aldine, 1968), 60–61. Linda Cooke Johnson, Cities of Jiangnan in Late Imperial China (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 180, and Dwight H. Perkins, Agricultural Development in China, 1368–1968 (Chicago: Aldine, 1969), 293.

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11–14% was reached again around 1937. The main factors behind the new urbanization trend were foreign trade and reindustrialization. Both of these factors favored the coastal areas at the expense of the interior. Between 1840 and 1928, Chinese exports increased twenty-eightfold, growing from $25 million to $700 million. Most of the cities forced open to foreign trade and European influence, like Shanghai, Ningbo and Canton-Guangzhou (all in the Great Corridor), industrialized and saw their populations grow rapidly, while the cities of the interior de-industrialized and declined. The wave stemming from the Industrial Revolution also reached Japan. It did lately, but, above all, it did from the east and the United States, more than from the west and Europe. We will come back to this when studying the progression of the wave of industrialization through the American Corridor. That progression has its own characteristics. It was not dominated by Great Britain or France, but rather by Germany, Russia, the United States, and, finally, Japan. Actually, the Industrial Revolution caused the metamorphosis, and, ultimately, the triumph of the ancient Mongolo-American Corridor, which had become simply the American Corridor.

CHAPTER

10

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I

n Chapter 2, the concept of attraction point has been introduced, and in Chapter 6, the Weber problem has been briefly defined. Here, the same concepts will be used to demonstrate, as simply as possible, that evolving from animal to motorized transportation has radical effects on the polarization processes, in order to explain why before the appearance of motorized transportation the world rate of urbanization probably never exceeded five percent, while, since the introduction of that form of transportation, that rate rose to about fifty percent. This will lead us to examine the basic paradox of space-economy.

s THE IMPACT ON POLARIZATION OF EVOLVING FROM ANIMAL TO MOTORIZED TRANSPORTATION In order to understand the historic impact of evolving from animal to motorized transportation, it is necessary to introduce the concepts of location function, references points, attraction points, repulsion points, attractive force, and repulsive force.

Reference, Attraction, and Repulsion Points When a location has to be found for a new activity, for instance a shoe factory, the decision-maker is guided by a location function. In the shoe-factory example, the location function consists of minimizing the total cost of transportation for the shoe factory, including the cost of transporting the leather and the soles to the factory, and the shoes to the market. Through the location function, the decision-maker takes into account various reference points: in this case, the location of the leather supplier, the location of the sole supplier, or the location of the market. If there is an advantage to locating the shoe factory closer to a given reference point, this reference point is referred to as an attraction

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point (since it “attracts” the location of the new activity). Similarly, if there is an advantage to locate the activity farther from a given reference point, this reference point is designated as a repulsion point; for example, it could be better for the decision-maker to locate the shoe factory far from downtown where the land prices are high, downtown being a repulsion point as far as land prices are considered, in a situation where land prices regularly decrease with the distance from downtown, which is typical. The advantage the decision-maker finds in locating the shoe factory one kilometer closer to an attraction point is called the attractive force exerted by the attraction point on the activity that has to be located. The attractive force can be measured. In our example, the attractive force exerted by the location of the leather supplier corresponds to the savings made in terms of transportation cost of the leather used by the shoe factory when the location of the shoe factory is moved one kilometer closer to the leather supplier. This is equal to the “quantity of leather, in terms of tons, used by the shoe factory in one year (for instance)” times “the transportation rate applied to transporting a ton of leather over a kilometer” The attractive force is, then, equal to (quantity ⫻ transportation rate), which is the first derivative of the location function with respect to the variable “distance from the leather supplier.” Similarly, the repulsive force exerted by the central business district through the land prices can be seen as the increment of the annual leasing cost of the site of the shoe factory that results from choosing a site that is one kilometer closer to the central business district. In the space-economic literature, three classical problems are distinguished: a) The Fermat problem was first formulated before 1640 by the famous mathematician Pierre de Fermat, and first solved by Torricelli in 1647. The Fermat problem consists of finding the location of a point that minimizes the sum of the Euclidean distances between this point and (at least) three other points in a plane. This problem amounts to locating a new activity with respect to three (or more) attraction points when all the attractive forces in the system are equal to one. In our example, this would be the case if the attractive forces exerted by the leather supplier, by the sole supplier, and by the market were all equal to one, or to the same value (which is equivalent). b) The Weber problem was “resurrected” by Alfred Weber in 1909; it had previously been imagined by Thomas Simpson in 1750 and analyzed by Launhardt in 1882. It was solved, first by Pick, who proposed a geometric solution to the triangle case in 1909, then by Kuhn and Kuenne who, in 1962, formulated an iterative numerical solution, and finally by Tellier who, in 1972, proposed an explicit trigonometric solution for the triangle

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case (only the Kuhn and Kuenne algorithm can be extended to the case where there are more than three attraction points).1 The Weber problem consists of optimizing a location function defined with respect to three (or more) attraction points exerting various attractive forces (which do not vary with distance) defined in terms of Euclidean distances in a circular isotropic plane (that is a Euclidean plane where the same characteristics are found throughout the space, and where it is possible to go as a crow flies from any point to any other point at the same transportation cost in all directions, the term “circular” referring to that; “isotropic” comes from isos, which means “equal,” and tropos, which means “form”). The Weber problem is a generalization of the Fermat problem since it extends the Fermat problem to the case where attraction forces vary from one attraction point to another. c) The “attraction-repulsion” problem was formulated and trigonometrically solved in its simplest form (two attraction points and one repulsion point) by Tellier in 1985, and solved, through an algorithm, in its more complex form by Chen, Hansen, Jaumard, and Tuy in 1992. 2 The “attractionrepulsion” problem consists of optimizing a location function defined with respect to three (or more) attraction and/or repulsion points exerting various attractive or repulsive forces defined in terms of Euclidean distances in an isotropic plane. It is a generalization of both the Fermat and Weber problems since it extends them to the case where both attractive and repulsive forces are considered. 1.

2.

Weber and Pick’s contributions are found in Alfred Weber, Alfred Weber’s Theory of the Location of Industries, translated by C.J. Friedrich (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957; original version published in 1909). See also Wilhelm Launhardt, “Die Bestimmung des zweckmassigsten Standortes einer gewerblichen Anlage,” Zeitschrift des Vereins Deutscher. Ingenieure 26 (1882): 106–115; Harold W. Kuhn and Robert E. Kuenne, “An efficient algorithm for the numerical solution of the generalized Weber problem in spatial economics,” Journal of Regional Science 4 (1962): 21–34; Luc-Normand Tellier, “The Weber problem: Solution and interpretation,” Geographical Analysis 4 (1972): 215–233. Luc-Normand Tellier, Économie spatiale: rationalité économique de l’espace habité (Chicoutimi, Quebec : Gaëtan Morin, 1985), and Pey-Chun Chen, Pierre Hansen, Brigitte Jaumard, and Hoang Tuy, “Weber’s problem with attraction and repulsion,” Journal of Regional Science 32 (1992): 467–486. The attraction-repulsion problem has preluded the New Economic Geography: see Paul R. Krugman, “Increasing returns and economic geography,” Journal of Political Economy 99 (1991): 483–499; Masahisa Fujita, Paul Krugman, and Anthony J. Venables, The Spatial Economy: Cities, Regions, and International Trade (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1999); Gianmarco Ottaviano, Takatoshi Tabuchi, and Jacques-François Thisse, “Agglomeration and trade revisited,” International Economic Review 43 (2002): 409–436; Gianmarco Ottaviano and JacquesFrançois Thisse, “Agglomeration and economic geography,” in Handbook of Regional and Urban Economics. Volume 4, eds J. Vernon Henderson and Jacques-François Thisse (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 2004).

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These problems are important from the point of view of polarization. Intuitively, the Euclidean circular isotropic plane is one of the theoretical contexts where polarization should be less likely to occur. In fact, if one ignores the cost of transportation (that is the space friction), and the loading/ unloading costs, the Euclidean isotropic plane allows for a complete spatial freedom: all movements are possible in whatever direction, all movements involve the shortest possible distance (“as-a-crow-flies distance”), and if there is a cost of transportation, it is the same per kilometer, whatever the movement direction. Mathematically demonstrating that polarization is possible even in such a little constraining space greatly helps to understand the polarization phenomenon in its very essence.

The Case of a Single Reference Point Let us analyze location problems in this context, starting with the simplest problems and increasing, step by step, the complexity of the problems. In order for a polarization phenomenon to emerge, it is necessary that new activities be likely to locate where there already are some activities. The more new activities locate where activities already exist, the more polarization there is. Let us start by considering the very simple case where a location problem is defined with respect to only one reference point. Everyone will agree that, in such a case: 1. if the reference point is an attraction point, the optimal solution will be at the attraction point (there is only one attractive force in the system, and nothing can prevent it from attracting the optimal location to the force origin, which is the attraction point); locating at the attraction point involves polarization, since the new activity chooses to locate where there already is an activity; it must be noticed that the optimal location will be at the attraction point whether the attractive force varies with distance or not, and whether there are loading/unloading costs or not; thus, the probability of polarization is equal to one hundred percent; 2. if the reference point is a repulsion point, the optimal solution cannot be at the repulsion point. The optimal location will be at the point in space farthest from the repulsion point (if the space is limited), or it will be at infinity (if the space is unlimited); this is true whether the repulsive force vary with distance or not; in such a case, polarization is impossible (and the probability of polarization is equal to zero percent). Despite its extreme simplicity, the case of a single reference point is not at all without interest. The numerous towns which emerged throughout history around royal or princely courts are good examples of that. In those

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cases, the sovereign constitutes the single attraction point for all those who aim to obtain favors from the only political decision-maker by paying court to him.

The Case of Two Reference Points Of course, location problems seldom involve only one reference point. Let us move to a more complex situation where two reference points are taken into consideration. Let us start with the simplest case: if both reference points are repulsion points, the optimal location will be at one of the points of the limit of the considered space, if the space is limited, or it will be at infinity, if the space is unlimited; then, there is no polarization, and the probability of polarization is equal to zero percent. This result is true whether the forces vary with distance or not. However, in all other cases involving two reference points, the fact that forces vary or not with distance makes a difference. First of all, let us wonder whether or not, in practice, location forces vary with distance. Since the savings from transportation costs (savings made by choosing a better location) are the most common form of attraction forces, let us think in terms of transportation costs. Everybody will agree that, for a marathon runner, the last kilometer is tougher to run than the first one: its cost in terms of energy and fatigue is greater than the cost of the first one. In fact, for human beings, the per-kilometer cost of moving increases with distance. It is also true of horses, camels, donkeys, and bulls. Animal transportation is such that its marginal cost (the cost of the last kilometer) increases with distance (see Figure 10.1). In a space where animal transportation prevails, attraction forces will increase with distance. On the contrary, motorized transportation is such that its marginal cost decreases with distance (see Figure 10.1): the cost of an airplane ticket, a railway ticket, or an intercity bus ticket can be multiplied by two when the distance involved is multiplied by three, by four, and even by five. This means that, in a space where motorized transportation prevails, attraction forces will decrease with distance; this has enormous implications in terms of polarization, as we shall see. Let us remark that the case where location forces do not vary with distance (the case considered by Fermat and Weber) is a border case; it can, intuitively, correspond to a transportation system using post houses or relay. By changing horses, it becomes possible to simply double the transportation cost while doubling the distance of transportation. In such a case, the location function takes on a linear form (see Figure 10.1).

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$

Animal transportation

A

Space

$

Relay transportation

A

Space

$

Motorized transportation

A

Figure 10.1 Transportation Cost Functions Corresponding to Animal, Relay, and Motorized Transportation

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To see the impact on polarization of moving from animal transportation to relay and then to motorized transportation, let us examine the case where, in a Euclidean isotropic space, there are two reference points that are attraction points. Let us look at the three cases: animal transportation, transportation with relay, and motorized transportation.

The Case of Animal Transportation In the case of animal transportation, if there are no loading costs at the origin and no unloading costs at the destination, polarization is impossible (with a probability equal to zero percent). Understanding this is rather simple. Let us go back to the shoe-factory scenario, but with only two attraction points: the location A of the leather supplier and the location B of the market (see Figure 10.2). Let us suppose that the decision-maker starts his search for the optimal location by considering point A as a possible optimum and by calculating the total cost of transporting the leather from the leather supplier to the factory and of transporting the shoes from the factory to the market. In order to check if the location at point A is optimal, the decision-maker can consider moving the new activity over a distance of one kilometer from point A towards point B to see if the transportation costs increase or decrease. If he does so, he will notice that he saves much in terms of the transportation cost of the shoes to the market at point B (those costs are high since point B is far, and since, in the case of animal transportation, the farther one is from the attraction point, the higher the marginal cost of transportation), whereas the resulting increase in the transportation costs of leather from point A is small (since the new activity remains close to point A). The movement out of point A will then be beneficial. The same reasoning would prevail if the decision-maker was considering moving out of point B towards point A. Then, the optimum should be between A and B, and not at one of the attraction points (this precludes polarization since the only existing activities in the system are located at A and B respectively). At every point of space where the attractive force of point A is greater than that of point B, the new activity will benefit from getting closer to A, and at every point of space where the attractive force of point B is greater than that of point A, the new activity will benefit from getting closer to B. The only point where the new activity will not benefit from getting closer to A or B is the optimal point, which lies somewhere between A and B on the straight line linking A to B.

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$

Total transportation cost Leather transportation cost Transportation cost to the market A Leather

Optimum

B Market

Space

Figure 10.2 Finding the Optimal Location: Animal Transportation with Two Attraction Points

In fact, there exists a location between the two attraction points where the total transportation cost will be lower than anywhere else; this optimal point corresponds to the point where the attractive force of attraction point A is equal to that of attraction point B, both forces canceling each other at this point (the optimal location is the location where the location forces in the system cancel each other: at which point, their resultant is null and there is no incentive to move in any direction; this is a very important remark). It must be noted that, if loading and unloading costs exist, a polarizing solution (locating at one of the two attraction points) becomes possible, but it can be proven that, everything else being equal (ceteris paribus), the greater the distance between A and B, the lower the probability of having a polarizing solution. The case of animal transportation with two attraction points helps to understand why the world had such a small rate of urbanization as long as animal transportation prevailed in a context where transportation networks did not exist, before the appearance of the wheel, roads, and fluvial transportation. The cases of Rwanda and Burundi, which had no villages or towns before the twentieth century, correspond to that situation, since, at that time, Rwanda had no relay, no motorized transportation, and not even “non-human animal transportation.”

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The Case of Relay When a horse is too tired to run anymore, the solution is to take a new horse. This is the solution of relay. In the case of relay (and linear transportation-cost functions), if there is no loading/unloading costs and if there are only two attraction points, polarization becomes “almost unavoidable” since a location of one of the attraction points could be optimal only if the two attractive forces were equal. In this case, all the locations included in the straight line joining A and B (including attraction points A and B) would be equally optimal. This exceptional case is possible, but statistically its probability is equal to zero percent. In all other cases, one of the attractive forces will be greater than the other, and the optimal location will be at the attraction point exerting the greater force (see Figure 10.3). Then, in the relay case, the probability of polarization when there are two attraction points is equal to one hundred percent. In a case where there are no loading or unloading costs and only two attraction points, moving from the animal transportation situation to a relay case has enormous consequences. It involves moving from a probability of polarization equal to zero percent to a probability of polarization equal to one hundred percent! $

Total transportation cost

Leather transportation cost

Transportation cost to the market

A Leather

B Market and optimum

Figure 10.3 Finding the Optimal Location: Relay Transportation with Two Attraction Points

Space

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The Case of Motorized Transportation If, in the relay case, polarization is “almost unavoidable,” in the case of motorized transportation, it is “unavoidable” (in a case with two attraction points). In a Euclidean isotropic plane, there exists no case where a location outside the attraction points may be optimal. To understand this, let us use the same kind of reasoning used in the case of animal transportation and refer to the shoe-factory example with only two attraction points: the location A of the leather supplier and the location B of the market. As in the previous case (see Figure 10.4), let us suppose that the decision-maker starts his search for the optimal location by considering point A as a possible optimum and calculating the total cost of transporting the leather from the leather supplier to the factory and transporting the shoes from the factory to the market. In order to check if the location at point A is optimal, the decision-maker considers moving the new activity over a distance of one kilometer from point A towards point B to see if the transportation costs increase or decrease. If he does so, he will notice that he saves very little in terms of the transportation cost of the shoes to the market at point B (those costs are low since point B is far, and since, in the case of motorized transportation, the farther one is from the attraction point, the lower the marginal cost of transportation), whereas the resulting increase in the transportation costs of leather from point A is important (since the new activity remains close to point A). The movement out of point A will then be detrimental. The same reasoning would prevail if the decision-maker were considering moving out of point B towards point A. Then, the optimum cannot be at any other point than A or B, and polarization is unavoidable. Finding which location, of A and B, is the best one involves comparing the total transportation cost at both sites. Adding loading and unloading costs just increases the dominance of attraction points. Before leaving the two-reference-point example, there is a last point to be made. If one of the reference points is an attraction point, and the other a repulsion point, and if the location forces do not vary with distance, the optimal location cannot be at the repulsion point. It will be at the attraction point, if the attractive force is greater than the repulsive force (the probability of this “polarizing” case is equal to fifty percent) or if loading and unloading costs favor the attraction point. And, if the repulsive force is greater than the attractive force, the optimum will be at the point which is the farthest from the repulsion point (if the space is limited) or at infinity (if the space is unlimited), in which case the probability of polarization is equal to zero percent. If the attractive and repulsive forces vary with distance, everything can get very complicated.

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$

Total transportation cost

Leather transportation cost Transportation cost to the market A Leather

B Market and optimum

Space

Figure 10.4 Finding the Optimal Location: Motorized Transportation with Two Attraction Points

The Case of Three Reference Points, or “Triangle” Case Now, what about a still more complex situation where there are three reference points? Let us concentrate on the simplest case involving relay and attraction forces that do not vary with distance. This is the classical case of the Weber triangle problem. Its interest lies in the fact that, contrary to the two-attractionpoint case where, normally, one attractive force is greater than the other, when there are three attraction points the case of dominance (when one force is greater than the sum of the other forces in the system) is not the rule. And, if there is no dominance, a location inside the triangle formed by the three attraction points becomes possible. A location inside the triangle involves a location out of the attraction points, and consequently does not lead to polarization. A location outside the triangle is precluded if there are only attraction points; however, it is the rule if there is at least one repulsion point. The question is: in a Euclidean isotropic plane where there are three attraction points exerting attractive forces which do not vary with distance, will polarization occur or not, and if it does, will it be likely or unlikely? When asked this question most people intuitively answer: yes, polarization is possible (since a location at one of the three attraction points is possible, at least if one attractive force is dominant), but most of the time the optimal location will be inside the triangle, and no polarization will occur.

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They are wrong. As Tellier and Polanski have shown, if attractive forces and attraction points are chosen at random, in seventy-five percent of the cases, the optimal location will coincide with one of the attraction points, and there will be polarization.3 The seventy-five-percent probability of polarization results from a fifty percent probability of having a case of dominance, and from a twentyfive-percent probability of having triangle angles precluding a location inside the triangle (case of “angle incompatibility”). In fact, if three attractive forces are chosen at random, the probability of a case of dominance occurring is fifty percent. As for the case of angle incompatibility, it stems from the fact that, at the optimal point, the three attractive forces must be oriented towards the three attraction points, and that they must also be oriented in a such a way that they cancel each other (that their resultant is null). In the triangle case, often the two conditions cannot be met at the same time. This results from the fact that, in the triangle case, the “optimum-compatible” angles between the vectors representing the attractive forces depend only on the relative values of the attractive forces, and in twenty-five percent of the cases those angles cannot be “entered” into the triangle, even if there is no dominance. The main conclusion of all this is that, in the classical case of the Weber problem, polarization is much more likely than intuition suggests. If a move is made from the Weber problem to the “attraction-repulsion” problem by replacing an attraction point with a repulsion point under the same conditions, something very counter-intuitive occurs: instead of decreasing, the probability of obtaining a polarizing solution at one of the two attraction points increases slightly, from seventy-five to seventy-seven percent.4 In fact, introducing repulsion points in a location system has little impact on the level of polarization; however, it has a huge impact on the spatial distribution of optimal locations: peripheral optimal locations are very frequent when there are repulsion points, whereas central locations are favored when there are only attraction points in the system (this is an important remark both in the interurban and intra-urban contexts). It must be noted that, in both the Weber problem and the “attractionrepulsion” problem, the solution depends solely on angles, not on distances. Wilhelm Launhardt has pointed out this astonishing fact, even before Alfred Weber resurrected the so-called “Weber problem.”5 As Launhardt has shown, once the optimal point O has been found, we can move any attraction 3.

4. 5.

Luc-Normand Tellier and Boris Polanski, “The Weber problem: Frequency of different solution types and extension to repulsive forces and dynamic processes,” Journal of Regional Science 29, 3 (1989): 387–405. Ibid. Wilhelm Launhardt, op. cit.

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point A along the straight line OA, and point O remains the optimal location, as long as point A stays on the same side of point O on the straight line OA (the same would be true if we were moving repulsion point R in the same way). This proves that point O will remain optimal, in such conditions, whatever the distance between point O and point A (or point R). This is why one cannot say (as some used to pretend) that, in the Weber problem (or the “attractionrepulsion” problem), the optimal location will be closer to the points exerting the most important attractive forces (which is absolutely untrue). However, it is correct to say that, when the optimal point O is neither at an attraction point nor at infinity (or at the limit of a limited space), if the attractive force of attraction point A is increased, the optimal location O will have to move closer to A (these two statements are not contradictory since moving closer to A does not necessarily result in having the optimal location being closer to A than to any other attraction point).

The Case of More Than Three Reference Points Let us add about the attraction-points-only case that, if forces vary with distance, the three-attraction-point case will lead to polarization with a probability of zero percent in the case of animal transportation and of one hundred percent in the case of motorized transportation. These probabilities remain the same when one increases the number of attraction points, from three to four to five, etc. However, in the relay case, increasing the number of attraction points will progressively reduce the polarization probability. When we move from the triangle case to the case of a polygon having four or more sides, the probability of dominance diminishes and the case of angle incompatibility disappears, but the possibility appears of having a concave polygon, which favors a location at one of the attraction points located inside the convex envelope of the concave polygon. What can be concluded from that long and, at times, boring reasoning? First, attraction points are sources of polarization. Second, in the very constraintfree environment of a Euclidean isotropic space, polarization is not only possible, it is even more likely than intuition inclines us to believe: it only requires space-friction (without space-friction, of course, nothing favors polarization). Third, from a simple theoretical point of view, the historical passage from animal transportation to relay, and then to motorized transportation is likely to have had enormous consequences, and so it did: historically, it may well be that no society resorting only to animal transportation without any relay ever reached a rate of urbanization higher than five to eight percent, whereas societies peaceful enough to allow for relays did reach rates of urbanization as high as twelve to fifteen percent (as the Roman Empire did), and in societies using motorized transportation, rates of urbanization lie around seventy-five percent. The second urban revolution may well have been mainly caused

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by this emergence of motorized transportation. Fourth, the appearance and multiplication of repulsive points are not likely to diminish the level of polarization. Although surprising, this does conform to observation (the “crowded” unhealthy, dirty, polluted, and congested cities still grow). However, repulsive points may have an effect on the spatial form of polarization (they may explain the appearance of “edge cities”). In sum, all that explains, to a large extent, the magnitude of the second urban revolution, which, after the advent of motorized transportation, caused, from about 1825 to 1975, the increase of the rate of urbanization of developed countries from about fifteen percent to seventy-five percent.

s EXPLAINING THE BASIC PARADOX OF SPACE-ECONOMY If, as seen in the Weber problem, space-friction is a necessary condition for getting polarization, why is it that the more Earthlings succeed in reducing space-friction, the more they congregate and accept polarization? Why is it that the more they conquer the liberty to locate anywhere, the more they accept the tyranny of polarization? What is inherent in polarization that makes it so irresistible? Seven answers to this question will be presented. All of them try to explain how a space-friction decrease can lead, indirectly, to an increase of polarization. Only one of the seven answers establishes a direct link between the decrease of space-friction and the polarization increase. It is mainly indirectly that the paradox can be explained. This observation allows continuing to dream of the day when space friction will be vanquished, thanks to Internet and other technical means, to the point where it will become possible for everyone to settle wherever they wish, on a lake or sea shore, under palm or coconut trees, in a zone with plentiful fresh and clean water, and without hurricanes, winters, mosquitoes, tropical illnesses, heat waves, droughts, clouds, pollution, and poverty…

Motors and Networks A first explanation comes easily to mind. It has been shown how motorized transportation favors polarization over animal transportation or relay, and that, in a network space, polarization is almost unavoidable since most optimal locations will be at critical points, especially in a motorized-transportation context (some optimal locations may be at attraction points). It so happens that most transportation modes, which have allowed overcoming space-friction, are motorized and that they require networks. In fact, when saying that space-friction has been decreasing, it should immediately be added that, at the same time, the dominance of motorized transportation and our dependence on networks have been increasing, consequently creating the basic polarizing

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trend. Trains, automobiles, subways, and even airplanes and modern boats are motorized and require networks (including planes and boats, whose critical points are airports and ports). One may think of roads, highways, canals, railways, subways, etc. It has been shown that passing from a Euclidean isotropic space to a network space gives birth to a strong polarizing trend. In such a case, it is not the very space-friction reduction that causes the increase of polarization, but rather the fact that this decrease of space-friction is obtained by means, which, themselves, give rise to a strong polarizing trend. Of course, there are communication modes (radio, telephone, television, Internet), which are used to reduce the space-friction, that do not require networks as constraining as road networks. In those cases, the link between the communication points gets almost immaterial (at least from the point of view of the user who, when she phones, is not really conscious of the telephone network which makes her conversation possible). But, even in such cases, there exists network nodes one has an advantage to be close to, those far from those nodes being disadvantaged.

Interdependence of Location Decisions The preceding explanation stresses the impact of the “means” used to reduce the space-friction. Let us now focus on the “effects” of a decrease of spacefriction on the level of interdependence of the various economic agents of a location system, and study the impact of those “effects” on polarization. When a location process is simulated on computer by means of a series of thousands of consecutive and interdependent attraction-repulsion problems, the strongest relationship that is observed is the following: the higher the degree of interdependence of the successive problems, the higher the resulting level of polarization. The level of interdependence corresponds to the frequency of selecting new attraction points among existing activity locations (the activity locations that existed at the beginning of the process, plus all the optimal locations of the successive attraction-repulsion problems), instead of among all the points of the considered space. Interdependence depends on space-friction. Any significant generalized decrease of space-friction favors the interaction between the various economic agents of a location system. That lowering of space-friction increases the probability of the economic exchanges to involve economic agents that distance isolated from each other before. The lower the space-friction, the greater each economic agent’s radius of action (for instance, if transportation costs are low, stores can do business with suppliers which are far away). The greater the economic agents’ radius of action, the more complex and

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diversified the relations between agents. This results in a large degree of interdependence among the agents in the economy, clearly favoring an increase in polarization.6 Here like in the preceding case, the link between the decrease of space-friction and the increase of polarization is indirect. However, history tends to corroborate that explanation. It is unquestionable that the decrease of the transportation costs and the reduction of the various obstacles to trade which were observed through the last centuries induced a greater interdependence of all the points of the globe from a location point of view. That phenomenon is so well know that the term of “globalization” has been created to designate it. Computer simulations clearly demonstrate that such an increased interdependence normally translates into a stronger polarization.

Information A third factor can explain the basic paradox of space-economy: information. Hohenberg and Lees refer to the spatial aspect of information—the raw material of innovations: Now we come to two paradoxes. A single human being or piece of information is seemingly far more mobile than inert material and easier to control than energy. Why, then, the tendency to agglomerate people and bring materials to them? The answer is a double one. First, although one person can readily move, in nonnomadic societies the community and habitat cannot. Second, information, like electricity, manifests itself as it flows in the form of communication. Its productive use generally requires encounters and collaboration among many people, as well as large, organized collections of data. Information-intensive production naturally takes place in permanent, structured concentrations of people, that is, in cities. The second paradox is that the neotechnic, information-rich mode of production is most often associated with smaller firms and large urban units … Whether involved in central place or network linkages, cities were, after all, nothing more than centers for the flow and exchange of information, and the more important ones were the more involved in this process … The heart of the city …

6.

Kei-Mu Yi has stressed the fact that the decrease of space-friction generally favors vertical specialization, each sector giving birth to a large number of specialized subsectors and interrelated specialized firms. And the more very specialized firms interact with other specialized firms, the more there are exchanges through space. So, in the end, the decrease in space-friction is somewhat counterbalanced by a significant increase in transportation, which results in the fact that space-friction still matters instead of becoming irrelevant. See Kei-Mu Yi, “Can vertical specialization explain the growth of world trade?” Journal of Political Economy 111, 1 (2003): 52–102.

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came to be occupied by banks and other financial services which, even though they apparently deal with money, credit, and capital, in fact traffic in timely information … The lesson of our excursus into the economics of industrial location is that urban development is a dynamic process whose driving force is the ability to put information to work. After 1850 the large cities became the nurseries as well as the chief beneficiaries of an explosion in knowledge-centered economic growth—a second industrial revolution.7

Hohenberg and Lees stress the importance of information in the cities and of cities in information networks. The decrease of space-friction does not only favor the transportation of goods and services; it also contributes amply to the exchanges of ideas. It is clear that the radius of action and communication of each individual increases when space-friction diminishes. Similarly, when space-friction decreases, the radius of the economic agents increases, as does the number of interactions between those agents. In such a context, information becomes strategic in the competition between sellers of all kind, of goods, services, or even ideas. Urban poles occupy a strategic position in that struggle since cities are extremely important information nodes. The urban poles that perform the best in the field of exchanges of relevant ideas and information stand out and establish their domination over the other cities. This generates an upsurge of the polarization process at all levels of the urban hierarchy. Here also the link between the decrease of space-friction and the increase of polarization is indirect.

Spatial Competition Competition has just been evoked as an explanation of the paradox. Except for the absolute advantages we shall refer to further, the most direct (though still indirect) link between the decrease of space-friction and the increase of polarization refers to the concept of spatial competition. According to that concept, the basic paradox of space-economy could be explained in the following way: when space-friction decreases, the effect of local variations of prices on spatial competition increases rapidly, which favors polarization. The best demonstration of this comes from the case where there are many competitors offering the same good at the same price, and suddenly one of the competitors starts a price war by lowering his own price, say by twenty-five percent. If space-friction is high, the radius of the induced effect on the customers of his competitors will be limited. The higher the transportation

7.

Paul M. Hohenberg and Lynn Hollen Lees, The Making of Urban Europe 1000–1950 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press), 200–205.

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costs, the less likely a customer located at a certain distance will be to stop buying at one of the other competitors to favor the supplier offering a discount. This is logical since high transportation costs make consumers very dependent on the closest suppliers. On the other hand, if space-friction is low, consumers enjoy a greater freedom, and a large number of them will be tempted to favor the discountoffering supplier at the expense of their usual suppliers. In such a situation, the price war will spread rapidly, and the threatened competitors will have no other choice but to decrease their own prices in order to avoid bankruptcy. So, the lower the space-friction, the more extended the effects of the price war, and the more likely the other competitors will be to counter-attack, or to go bankrupt. A systematic lowering of space-friction over a long period of time exacerbates, through spatial competition, all the other forms of competition based on prices, publicity, marketing, reputation, trade marks, fashions, marginal differentiation of products, design, management, etc. That process affects all sectors of activity and even touches the competition cities make to each other. If one considers a scenario where many competitors are offering different goods, and cities themselves are competing with each other, a systematic and long-run decrease in space-friction can only result in a weakening and even disappearance of the weakest, and an increased dominance of the strongest over larger and larger territories, including eventually over the whole world. As Johnston has pointed out: “Once transport costs began to fall substantially, so that they were less than the production cost differential between the large-town, and the small-town firm, the former could begin the invasion of the latter’s market.”8 Polarization does not simply correspond to the description of the spatial distribution of activities at one point in time. It refers to a dynamic process marked by competition and the progressive triumph of the strongest points of space over the weakest.9 In one of his most famous statements, Braudel wrote: “Capitalism and towns were basically the same thing in the West.”10 He is right in the sense that capitalism and cities are altogether resulting from all the forms of competition exacerbated by the spatial competition stemming from the progressive decrease of space-friction. 8. 9.

10.

R.J. Johnston, City and Society (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), 111. Some explanations of the basic paradox of space-economy linked to spatial competition are provided by the various general-equilibrium models of the New Economic Geography (NEG) assuming the existence of increasing returns. Those models stem from Paul Krugman’s model presented in “Increasing returns and economic geography,” Journal of Political Economy 99 (1991), 483–499. See Pierre-Philippe Combes, Thierry Mayer, and Jacques-François Thisse, Économie géographique: L’intégration des régions et des nations (Paris : Economica, 2006). Fernand Braudel , Capitalism and Material Life, 1400 –1800 (New York : Harper Torchbooks, 1974), 400.

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Is “modern capitalism” a consequence (rather than a cause) of motorized transportation? One would be inclined to answer yes (at least to a great extent), while being conscious that some form of capitalism existed before “modern capitalism.” It is clear that the radical reduction of space-friction that followed the advent of motorized transportation produced a radically different space-economic world marked by much greater capacity for those who control certain points and certain sectors to extend their economic domination over larger and larger territories. That economic domination is so inescapable that it less and less requires taking the forms of colonialism, imperialism, and political domination. That being said, dominant location systems and their centers are ephemeral, and the urbexplosions that dominate today are the declining urbexplosions of tomorrow. The emergence of capitalism results from a long gestation. One of its first manifestations was the creation of vast factories hiring an embryo of proletariat in Florence during the Renaissance. The negotiation of labor as a production commodity, to be bought and sold on a free market like any other, goes back only to the late eighteenth century, when the first price-setting markets in the modern sense (as opposed to price-taking markets) were established. However, the great world-scale capitalism marked by the fluidity of capital and investments beyond political borders and empires is clearly posterior to the advent of motorized transportation. There is no doubt that the radical decrease of space-friction associated with that advent greatly contributed to its emergence and triumph through spatial competition.

The Biased Reductions of Space-Friction Up to here, the decreases of space-friction have been implicitly presented as a general phenomenon affecting all the points of the location space in a rather uniform way. Actually mainly because of the fact that most space-friction decreases result from the introduction of transportation modes requiring the construction of appropriate networks, transportation costs do not decrease and accessibility does not increase uniformly through space. When a section of railway, subway, highway, bus line, or tram line opens, the accessibility of the zones that are located close to the points of access to the new section (railway stations, subway stations, highway entrances and exits, etc.) increases much more than that of the zones that are far from such points of access. Moreover, the latter may be totally marginalized because their access to the new section is deficient. This is what is called the “tunnel effect”: the small town crossed by a new high-speed train is still more cut from the rest of the

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world than before the inauguration of the new high-speed line if that the new train does not stop there, while the train that existed before the high-speed train used to stop.11 Networks are not built at random: they are built in order to serve existing or projected poles. Once built, they lower the cost (in terms of money and time) of getting to those poles, and, by doing so, they favor their growth. Hence, there exists a chicken-and-egg circularity by which polarization generates network building which, in turn, generates polarization. In fact, in itself, network building is a polarizing process. It must also be noted that this is a two-way track. Network building increases the accessibility to the poles, but also, conversely, it favors a spreading of the influence of the pole out of its past sphere of influence. Here again, we face spatial competition. The more a pole is surrounded by an efficient transportation network, the more it is in a position to dominate a larger territory and other smaller poles. Networks not only favor polarization, they also favor the “polarization of the poles” referred to in the introduction.

Larger Cities Made Possible To live and survive a city requires a constant influx of food, fuel, raw material, water, electricity, and products of all kind. The higher the space-friction, the more limited the radius within which the city must find all the needed daily resources. Conversely, the weaker the space-friction, the longer the radius, and the more the quantity of available resources increases. Consequently, the size of the cities that can be supplied increases significantly when the spacefriction and, particularly, the transportation costs decrease.12 Of course, the possibility to build and supply larger cities removes a constraint limiting the polarization process. The more it is materially and economically possible to support very large cities, the more the brake upon polarization is neutralized. This has repercussions not only on the top of the urban hierarchy, but also from top to bottom. This rather simplistic argument is valid; however, it could not explain alone the basic polarization trend. It is valid for the “brake,” but infinitely less for the “accelerator” of the polarization process. 11.

12.

The tunnel effect is also observed in the computer society. The development of worldwide meta-networks leads to the disconnection of whole marginal areas, which end up being left aside of the vanguard. See Manuel Castels, The Rise of the Network Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1996). Paul Bairoch, Cities and Economic Development: From the Dawn of History to the Present (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988); A.M. van der Woude, Akira Hayami, and Jan de Vries, Urbanization in History: A Process of Dynamic Interactions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 7.

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Loading/Unloading Costs and Absolute Advantages The only direct link that can be established in space-economy between the decrease of space-friction and an increase of polarization forms the subject of the seventh explanation of the paradox. It relates to the absolute advantages attached to various locations. The most common form of such advantages in space-economic theory is the one of the loading/unloading costs one can avoid paying by locating at the very point with respect to which those costs are defined. While analyzing the Weber problem, it was said that this analysis was very much influenced by the existence or absence of loading and unloading costs. Most of the time, for the sake of simplicity, it was assumed that there were no loading or unloading costs. In fact, the existence of such costs always favors locations at the attraction points, and it can be proven that the lower the space-friction (and the transportation costs), the more such costs favor locating at attraction points, which induces polarization. This explanation is very important, on the one hand, because, as Petri (quoted by Knox and Agnew, p. 78) observed, “today loading and unloading goods account for the major part of ’transportation costs,’”13 and, on the other hand, because loading/unloading costs are just an example among others of absolute advantage. Absolute advantages are attached to locating at the very point that benefits from those advantages. They do not vary with the distance to that point (they are independent from that distance). Aside from the loading/unloading costs, numerous other examples of absolute advantages can be found. Suffice it to mention local characteristics such as the local climate, the skills of the local population, the reputation of local universities, the scenery, local amenities, the industrial structure, the local entrepreneurship, the local governance, the surrounding social climate, the local cost of housing, the local cost of living, etc. On the other hand, relative advantages refer to the advantages an activity gets from the fact that it locates at a more or less important distance from certain points, those advantages varying with that distance, The magnitude of the relative advantages depends on the distance to those points. The concepts of attractive or repulsive force are based on the notion of “relative advantages or disadvantages.”

13.

Peter A. Petri, “The East Asian trading bloc: An analytical theory,” in Regionalism and Rivalry. Japan and the US in Pacific Asia, eds Jeffrey A. Frankel and Miles Kahler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 21–48.

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In fact, the lowering of space-friction should normally increase the importance of “absolute advantages” with respect to “relative advantages.” Normally, that increase should translate into a greater domination of the points that are the most favored from the point of view of the absolute advantages, and by a progressive marginalization of the points and areas benefiting from low absolute advantages, which directly contributes to an increase of polarization. Let us note that absolute advantages are not randomly distributed through geographical space. If some absolute advantages are linked to geographical characteristics (such as the climate or the scenery), in the modern world most of absolute advantages result from a long polarization process, which gave birth to urban systems, urbexplosions, and economy-worlds marked by the development of “central” regions. Many attributes of central regions translate into absolute advantages. One may think of prestigious universities, powerful financial circles, high-performance communication networks, efficient local elites, solid local institutions, competent manpower, etc. When some people evoke the death of geography as a determining factor of economic development, they mainly allude to the increased importance of the absolute advantages in comparison with the relative advantages. That being said, there are very good reasons to think that the increased predominance of absolute advantages heralds not the death of geography, but rather a strengthening of the role of spatial dynamics in the world economic evolution. Of all the seven explanations of the basic paradox of space-economy, only the last one establishes a direct link between the decrease of space-friction and the increase of polarization. In all the other cases, the link is indirect, though at various degrees, the link through spatial competition remaining, after all, relatively direct. Many direct and indirect links could have been imagined to justify the opposite thesis, that is, that the decrease of spacefriction should normally diminish the polarization trend. We lost no time trying to find them for the simple reason that the world evolution seems to make of the basic paradox a kind of evidence we attempted to understand from a theoretical point of view at the same time it was observed and described from a historical point of view.

CHAPTER

11

The Age of Automobile and the Triumph of the American Corridor

W

e have followed the wave of European imperialism stemming from the Industrial Revolution from London to Shanghai via Africa. Its most blooming fruit was the British Empire, which reached its acme in the aftermath of World War I when the German defeat brought it new territories, like Tanganyika, Togo, a part of Cameroon, Namibia, a part of New Guinea, and the Bismarck Archipelago situated to the north of Australia. At that time, the British Empire seemed likely to last at least one more century. Eleven years later, in 1929, the Great Crash and the Great Depression that followed shook it, and then came World War II, which undermined its very foundations. In 1965, less than fifty years after having reached its peak, the immense British Empire did not exist anymore in practice. It had been defeated by three cities: Berlin, Tokyo, and, above all, New York. Berlin had touched it in the heart, on European soil. Tokyo had defeated it in its Asian periphery. And New York had given it the fatal blow by aiming the head, its financial supremacy. Berlin, Tokyo, and New York had something in common: they all belonged to the American Corridor. The British Empire and the wave stemming from the Industrial Europe were defeated by the rise and triumph of the American Corridor.

Actually, at the very time the British wave forced China, by the Nanking Treaty of 1842, to open its market to the competition of foreign industrial products, another wave was on the way towards the Far East coming from the east, from the United States. It reached the Bay of Tokyo in 1853 and 1854, and provoked the awakening of Japan. In the years that followed, the American presence became more pronounced in the Pacific. In 1898, the United States took control of Hawaii, Guam, and the Philippines. And in the Far East, the wave coming from the east took more and more the form of the Japanese imperialism resulting from the reaction triggered off by the American takeover by force of the Bay of Tokyo. Between 1895 and 1945, Japan extended its domination over Korea, Manchuria, a large part of China, the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Burma-Myanmar, the Aleutian Islands, Guadalcanal (in the Solomon Islands), and New Guinea.

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While the emergence of the American corridor and the rise to power of the United States and Japan disrupted the Pacific and the Far East, a similar phenomenon was observed in Europe where two new powers of the American corridor, Germany and Russia, challenged the old hegemony of the Great Corridor and the England-France-Austria-Italy axis. In 1703, Tsar Peter the Great founded St. Petersburg on the Baltic Sea. In 1774, Catherine II the Great made the Ottoman Empire draw back to the south of the Black Sea. Then, in 1867, Tsar Alexander II sold Alaska to the United States. Those three actions were meant to consolidate Russia’s position in Europe and to better defy the Great Corridor’s domination in Europe. In 1870, Prussia invaded and defeated France. The signal was clear. A new Moscow-Berlin-London axis was emerging that challenged the old Venice-London one. Everybody understands that this dynamics does not correspond to any political or military alliances. Within a given topodynamic corridor, states can contest the hegemony while having an interest in protecting their common corridor. For instance, France and Great Britain often faced each other in order to take control of the heart of the Great Corridor in Europe. However, in front of the threat stemming from the emergence of the American corridor, they agreed to take a united stand against the Germany of Kaiser Wilhelm II, and later Hitler, as well as against the Soviet Union of Stalin and his successors. However, World War II differs from World War I. Triggered off following the same scheme, that is, by a confrontation between France and Germany which amounted to a confrontation between the American and Great corridors, it ended up as a struggle for the control of the American corridor involving the great powers of that corridor: on one side, Germany and Japan, and on the other, the United States and the Soviet Union. It is interesting to note that the two countries that won differ from the two defeated ones by the fact that none of them is crossed by the Great Corridor, while the two others are. The Great Corridor being overpopulated as a result of its long domination, in a war situation, the American Corridor draws an advantage from its low population density. Inside that corridor, the United States and the Soviet Union, thanks to their distance from the Great Corridor, were relatively invulnerable during World War II. The United States were in a safer position than the Soviet Union, but, nevertheless, the latter drew a great advantage from the immensity of its territory and the dispersal of its population. Let us stress the fact that political alliances and wars rarely change the course of topodynamic evolution. In spite of the defeats of Germany and Japan and of the disruption of the Soviet Union, the American corridor still dominates the world today. The present-day most powerful cities, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Seoul, Peking-Beijing, Moscow, Berlin, Paris, and London, all belong to that corridor whose emergence and triumph will now

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be described in two steps: first, by following the movement from London to Siberia, and then by following the one from New York to Peking-Beijing. The impact of the American Corridor on Latin America will also be examined. It must be noted once again that the modern American Corridor differs from the Great and Asian corridors by the fact that it is, more than the two others, the product of human intervention. The only important river whose course clearly lies inside the American Corridor is the St. Lawrence River. However, even that river never gets closer than 400 kilometers from the central axis of the American Corridor. That corridor is basically made of manbuilt infrastructures, canals such as the Erie Canal and the Mittellandkanal, railways such as the Trans-Siberian, and roads conceived for trucks and automobiles such as the New York-Pittsburgh-Cincinnati-St. Louis-Los Angeles axis, whose last section linking St. Louis and Los Angeles is the famous Route 66. That being said, the construction of the mentioned infrastructures has been greatly favored by the morphological characteristics of the old Mongolo-American Corridor, made of steppes and relatively flat lands situated upstream of hydrographic basins. The modern American Corridor truly emerged only from 1825, the year of the advent of motorized transportation, above all, that of the inauguration of the Erie Canal, which allowed ships to navigate from the Atlantic to the Great Lakes via New York, Albany, and Buffalo. That canal and many others that added linked together the St. Lawrence River, the Great Lakes, as well as the Hudson, Delaware, Ohio, Illinois, and Mississippi rivers. That hydrographic complex gave birth to the American Corridor in North America. The construction of railways and roads just consolidated the system. A similar scenario developed in Eurasia, as will be seen. The triumph of road transportation was based on numerous inventions: the macadam, by John Loudon MacAdam in 1815; the four-stroke engine, by Nikolaus Otto in 1876; the high-speed internal combustion motor using oil gas, by Gottlieb Daimler in 1883; and tires, by John Boyd Dunlop in 1888. The first gasoline automobile was built by Carl Benz in 1886, and Gottlieb Daimler built the first truck in 1896. However, the age of automobile actually started around 1925 when Henry Ford succeeded to transform the automobile from a luxury good into a consumer good by conceiving a mass production of cars based on assembly lines and standard auto parts. Thus, the production of new motor vehicles in the United States went from 2,288 in 1900 to 177,796 in 1910, 1,612,095 in 1920, 2,988,768 in 1930, 3,826,881 in 1940, and 13,886,818 in 1990. It was around 1925 that the threshold of 2 million new vehicles was crossed. As for the total number of automobiles, whether new or old, on a world scale, it soared from

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2.5 million in 1914 to 10.9 million by 1920 and 35.1 million (of which 27.8 million in the United States and Canada alone) by 1930. The ratio of cars per thousand people was then of 210 in the United States and Canada, compared with 13 in the rest of developed market economies and 0.1 in the Soviet Union. Motorization was essential to the emergence of the American Corridor, first, because that corridor was relatively ill-served by the natural fluvial system and, second, because the population densities that existed around 1900 in the American corridor were particularly low compared with the very high densities of the Great Corridor and even the lower densities of the Asian Corridor. By allowing the establishment of intense economic relations between isolated areas, motorized transportation and, especially, the automobile transportation made possible developing formerly little-populated regions whose very development attracted considerable investment flows, which contributed to the triumph of the rising corridor.

s FROM LONDON TO THE TRANS-SIBERIAN The industrialization propagated in the American Corridor from London (see Map 20). It reached Germany and the northeast of North America around 1850, and then Russia and the Canado-American Great Lakes around 1870. The progression of industrialization within the American Corridor was generally belated compared with what happened in the Great Corridor. However, it caught up rapidly thanks to the accelerated development of the railway networks, which was easier and faster in the American Corridor than in the Great Corridor for topographical reasons. It could be said that, approximately, for a given distance from London, in terms of travel days (by boat or by road), industrialization developed about 25 years sooner in the Great Corridor (in France and Scotland, for example) than in the American Corridor, both in Europe and in America (in Germany and in the United States, for example). At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the area between Prussia and Moscow was rightfully considered by most Europeans of the Great Corridor as being as undeveloped as northeastern North America. In both cases, the considered regions were mainly rural and agricultural, and sparsely populated. In both cases the cultural links with the Europe of the Great Corridor were strong and a “frontier spirit” prevailed. If, in America, the new republic of the United States was attempting to free itself from Europe while preserving its European roots, in Eastern Europe, Frederick II the Great of Prussia, as well as Peter the Great and Catherine II the Great of Russia, embodied both the desire to strengthen the links with Western Europe and the will to bring development to the east. Their secret dream was, as Frederick

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Melchior Grimm put it, to bring about “the time when Russian would replace Greek and Germanic tongues would replace Latin languages.”1 Grimm’s phrase demonstrates that, from the beginning, in Europe, the emerging American Corridor dominated by German and Russian was seen as a rival of the Great Corridor dominated since such a long time by Greek and Latin.

St. Petersburg Moscow

Copenhagen

Berlin Essen Rhine

Mittellandkanal

320

Don

London

Warsaw Dn

Danub e

iep

er

Vo l

ga

km

Map 20 The European Section of the American Corridor

It must be said that important links existed between the two frontiers of the Western world. After the Independence, the flow of British immigrants to the United States dried up and was mainly replaced by a flow of German immigrants. As early as in 1773, two thirds of the inhabitants of the colonies of New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Connecticut did not originate from England. Germany provided so many migrants to the United States that around 1812, under President James Madison, when the United States was at war with the United Kingdom, the replacement of English with German as the official language of the United States was seriously considered. Scandinavia and Poland also sent an incredible number of immigrants to North America. On the side of Prussia and Russia, a demographic and economic effervescence was also perceivable. One of the first observers who noted the emergence of the American Corridor both in America and in Eurasia was Alexis de 1.

Quoted by Marc Fumaroli, Quand l’Europe parlait français (Paris : Éditions de Fallois, 2001), 278.

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Tocqueville who, in 1835–1849, in the conclusion to The Democracy in America, saw that two countries were likely to dominate in the two coming centuries: the United States and Russia. In Europe, the rise of the American corridor became irresistible in the second half of the nineteenth century with the transformation, around 1850, of the Ruhr Valley into a first-class industrial area thanks to the exploitation of the coal mines of the region and to major industrial investments in the steel industry. The Ruhr is a tributary of the Rhine that originates in the East. The economic history of Europe of the last 2,000 years can be summed up by three phases: first, the domination of the Rhône axis within the Great Corridor, which started to decrease considerably with the Hundred Years’ War (1337–1453); second, the domination of the Rhine axis within the Great Corridor, which became unquestionable with the triumph of Amsterdam and London from 1627 onwards; and third, the triumph of the American Corridor. The emergence and the orientation of that corridor are linked to the Ruhr, whose source points towards Berlin, Silesia, and Russia. The coal came to the steelworks from the Ruhr Basin, but the iron mineral came from the exterior and was brought by boat and rail. The transportation network that was built for that purpose followed mainly an east-west axis linking the Ruhr basin to the region of Berlin. This axis was strengthened by a series of interconnected canals going from Essen-Dortmund to Berlin and Frankfurt-upon-Oder (Frankfurt der Oder). The fact that the regions of the Ruhr, Berlin, and Silesia all depended on the Hohenzollern dynasty favored that orientation. Actually, the Hohenzollerns, whose traditional domain was in Brandenburg, that is, in the Berlin region, had received the Essen region (a part of the Ruhr Valley) as a fief as early as 1648, thanks to the Treaties of Westphalia. The Hohenzollerns were assisted in their endeavor to develop the Ruhr Basin by four great families of industrialists: the Krupp, Mayer, Hoesch, and Thyssen families, who made the Ruhr region the heart of the heavy industry of the whole Germany. The Ruhr-Berlin axis dominated by the Hohenzollerns opposed more and more, inside the Germanic world, the Great Corridor axis, traditionally dominated by the Habsburgs, and Berlin emerged as the great rival of Vienna. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were marked in Eurasia by the victory of the American Corridor over the Great Corridor, that is, by the victory of Prussia over Austria and, more to the east, that of Russia over the Ottoman Empire. In 1900, the region of the Ruhr already had 2 million inhabitants. The city of Essen specialized in the more sophisticated metallurgy, while the more standard steel industry developed in the neighboring cities of Dortmund, Bochum, Gelsenkirchen, Oberhausen, and Duisburg. The port of Duisburg-Ruhrort located to the west of Essen at the junction of the Ruhr and Rhine rivers

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became a major interior harbor. Today, it is the most important river port in Europe. As for Düsseldorf, a Rhine port located to the south of Essen, it asserted itself as the region’s main financial and administrative city. During the two world wars and the inter-war period, the Ruhr Basin was a major stake, and the French occupied the whole basin, including Essen, from 1921 to 1924, which humiliated the German people even more than the 1918 defeat, and in 1929 the Great Depression added extreme poverty to the humiliation. This situation favored the development of extremism, and Hitler and the Nazis benefited from the circumstances. In terms of surface, the Ruhr region represents one of the vastest conurbations of Germany, vaster than Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, or the Stuttgart metropolitan area. It includes Essen (620,000 inhabitants), Dortmund (569,000 inhabitants), Düsseldorf (561,000 inhabitants), Duisburg (515,000 inhabitants), Bochum (382,000 inhabitants), Wuppertal (375,000 inhabitants), and Gelsenkirchen (284,000 inhabitants). In all, the population of the conurbation reaches more than 3.3 million inhabitants, a little less than the population of Berlin. The Rhine, Ruhr, Weser, Elbe, and Oder rivers are all linked by a canal which constitutes the very spine of the European portion of the American Corridor. This canal, the Mittellandkanal, was built from 1905. It links the Ruhr to Bremen by the Weser River, but above all to Berlin by the Elbe River. Actually, it goes from the Dortmund-Ems canal, which serves the Ruhr, to the Elbe River. From there, it is possible to reach Berlin by the Elbe-tothe-Havel canal. That route goes successively through Dortmund, Minden, Hanover, Brunswick, Magdeburg, and Berlin. That last city, which is so important today, was founded just around 1230, and therefore it is not considered a very old city.2 It acquired a certain status when, in 1486, it became the capital of Brandenburg, which belonged to the Hohenzollerns as princeselectors since 1415.3 In 1701, it became the capital of the kingdom of Prussia. At that time, its population was only 30,000 inhabitants. It is under Frederick the Great, who reigned from 1740 to 1786, that Berlin began to boom thanks to the 300,000 colonists or so coming from Southern Germany and to the French Huguenots that were attracted to Prussia by Frederick. Between 1700 and 1800, Berlin’s population increased almost sixfold. It reached 170,000 inhabitants in 1800, 400,000 inhabitants in 1850, 1.6 million in 1890 and 2.4 million in 1900. Thus, from 1700 to 1900, Berlin’s population multiplied by 81, which is

2.

3.

Berlin had its origin in two separate urban settlements: Colln, first mentioned in 1237, and Berlin proper, first mentioned in 1244. Colln was located on an island in the Spree River, whereas Berlin lay on the north bank of the river. The all-powerful Hohenzollern family became Masters of the Mark in 1415.

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due, to a large extent, to the fact that, from 1871, Berlin was the capital of the German Empire, the “Second Reich.” Around 1880, Berlin supplanted Vienna and became the largest German-speaking city in the world. Berlin was an administrative and political city, but also an important industrial center. Although Berlin was rather far from the sources of raw materials such as the Ruhr Basin or Silesia, the canal and railway networks that surrounded it and linked it to those regions, as well as the efficiency of Prussian bureaucracy, made possible the development on its territory of the metallurgical industry and the sectors of chemistry, mechanics, textile, and clothing. Berlin is located on the Spree River, close to its junction with the Havel River, which is a tributary of the Elbe that flows goes to Hamburg and the North Sea. But Berlin is also linked by a canal to the Oder River, which runs towards the Baltic Sea. From the Oder, another canal led to the Vistula, Warsaw, and Danzig (present-day Gdansk). Moreover, a railway connected Essen, Hanover, Berlin, and Thorn-Torun on the Vistula. The influence of the American Corridor on the development of the European rail network showed itself very early. For example, a railway between Brussels, the Ruhr region, Berlin, Silesia, and Krakow already existed in 1850, while Paris and Lyon were not connected yet. In 1870, Warsaw, St. Petersburg, and Moscow were branched to the European network, while neither Greece nor the Ottoman Empire was yet. It is clear that, in Europe, as far as railway development is concerned, the American Corridor has clearly been ahead of the Great Corridor even though industrialization started earlier in the latter. The development of the basically continental axis between the Ruhr Basin and Warsaw profoundly modified, after 1850, the orientation of the German urban system traditionally dominated by the sea and the Hanseatic League. The eastward movement along that axis was associated with an extension of the influence of the German culture, at the expense of the Slavic world, and with an ever-greater domination of the Prussian bureaucracy. This last characteristic distinguishes the German case from that of the United States, whose development at the same time, during the second half of the nineteenth century, was much more dominated by the private sector than the state. In 1914, the axis of the Hohenzollerns had extended so much towards the east, in the direction of Moscow, that the border between the German Empire and Russia was then closer to Moscow than Essen. Poland had then been actually split between Russia and Germany, and, since 1832, the tsar, who officially bore the title of king of Poland, had abolished the autonomy of what was left from Poland, following a Polish rebellion. In 1914, the Hohenzollerns and the Russian Romanovs were face to face. On the eve of World War I, the Russian Empire extended from Germany to the Pacific, and Korea belonged to Japan. So only seven countries were then crossed by the axis of the American Corridor: Great Britain, the United States, Japan, Russia, Germany, and the Netherlands.

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If there is a country in the world where the notion of “natural borders” is fuzzy, it is Poland, whose heart, however, always remained the Vistula. The Polish territory has shifted to the West or the East so many times that there is not a single Polish city that has been continuously Polish for the last 300 years. There is no exception to this for the simple reason that, between 1795 and 1807, the country of Poland completely disappeared. Its pieces were divided between Austria, Russia, and Prussia. After the Congress of Vienna in 1815, only Prussia (and later the German Empire) and Russia stayed in Poland. From that date till 1918, the major part of Poland was under German domination when Germany triumphed and under Russian domination when Russia got the upper hand. The two traditional capitals of Poland are Krakow and Warsaw. Krakow is older than Warsaw. It was founded around AD 900, while the existence of Warsaw goes back to around 1200. In fact, Warsaw became a true city only around 1500, which is quite late in the European context. Warsaw replaced Krakow as the Polish capital in 1596. Both cities are located on the Vistula River, Warsaw being about halfway between Krakow and Gdansk, which lies at the mouth of the river. The industrialization of Poland was launched by the development of Silesia, which constitutes the very first European source of coal. Silesia belonged to Prussia from 1742 to 1870, the Germany’s Second Reich from 1870 to 1921, and then Hitler’s Third Reich from 1939 to 1945. Thus, it developed for a long time under the same aegis as the Ruhr Basin. During the second half of the nineteenth century, the Ruhr-Silesia Prussian industrial axis triumphed and propelled Germany to the forefront of the industrial world. Silesia’s main coal-mine city is Katowice, which is close to Krakow, at the limit of the Oder and Vistula basins. Its production was sent by railroad either to the west in the direction of Berlin, to the northeast towards Warsaw and Moscow, or to the southeast towards Krakow, Ukraine, and the Black Sea. To the south of Katowice, another city of Silesia became regrettably famous under Hitler: Auschwitz-Oswiecim. About 1.5 million persons were exterminated in Auschwitz’s three concentration camps between 1940 and 1945. Most of them, that is, 1.1 million, were Jews, but there were also 150,000 Poles, 23,000 Gypsies, homosexuals, Communists, nationalists, resistance fighters and political opponents. It is estimated that, during the Nazi occupation of Poland, 6 million Poles, of which 3 million Jews, have been eliminated. Throughout the territories they occupied from 1933 to 1941, the Nazis exterminated 9 million people in the concentration camps, of which 70,000 individuals whose only crime was to be handicapped or carry hereditary diseases, and 6 million Jews. Poland was the country of Europe (and probably of the whole world) where the proportion of the population that was Jewish was highest. In 1930, between ten and eleven percent of the Poles were Jewish, while that proportion was less than one percent in Germany or Great Britain, and less

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than 0.5% in France, Spain, or Italy. The two countries that followed Poland in terms of the importance of the Jewish population were Lithuania and Romania. Then came Austria, Hungary, and Latvia, where the proportion of Jews reached three to six percent. The Jewish Diaspora goes back to the sixth century BC with the exile at Babylon. However, its most spectacular development followed the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus in AD 70, the Roman repression of the revolt of Simon Bar Koziba (also called Bar-Kokheba) between 132 and 135, and the consecutive prohibition by Emperor Hadrian for all Jews to visit Jerusalem. The dispersal of the Jews led to their persecution in numerous countries of the world. Thus, during the Crusades, from 1096 to 1215, they were frequently persecuted in the Christian countries. In 1290, they were expelled from England by Edward I, as they were later from many regions of France in 1306 and 1394. Spain expelled them in 1492, and then Portugal in 1496. In the Christian countries where they were tolerated, they were most of the time confined to ghettos, and they were regularly victim of pogroms. The recognition to the Jews of the same rights as any other citizen appeared with the American Revolution, and then the French Revolution. The Jews were emancipated in 1776 in the United States, in 1791 in France, in 1830 in Greece, in 1831 in Belgium, in 1848 in the Netherlands, in 1849 in Denmark, in 1858 in Great Britain, in 1866 in Austria, and in 1871 in Germany. In fact, by depriving the Jews in 1935 from the rights they had obtained 64 years earlier, Hitler and the Nazis not only persecuted them, but, even worse, they convinced them that any progress in terms of legal protection could always be arbitrarily destroyed in the future. That conviction is one of the foundations of Zionism and the Jewish desire to create a Jewish state. Depriving the Jews from their rights was just a beginning, the extermination followed. Thus, in the ghetto of Warsaw, which contained 500,000 Jews around 1940, none were left in 1945. It must be said that the Jews of Warsaw had experienced equality of rights only once before, from 1807 to 1814, under Napoleon’s Empire, and that, before Hitler, Polish and Russian antisemitism was harsher than the German one. As a buffer state between Germany and Russia, Poland, like so many other countries of Eastern Europe, had to suffer, from 1945 to 1989, the pangs of communism after those of Hitlerism. The passing from one rule to the other was accompanied with a major change in Poland’s borders. In 1945, the Soviet Union took 170,000 square kilometers of eastern Poland and Poland took a little more than 100,000 square kilometers from eastern Germany, that is Silesia, which lies to the east of the Oder-Neisse line that presently separates Germany from Poland (the Neisse River is a tributary of the Oder). The Germans of Silesia were expelled by force. Thus the borders of the country were moved about 300 kilometers from east to west.

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Poland did not only undergo the changes imposed by others. It played a determining role in the fall of communism in Europe. That fall probably began with the election of Pope John Paul II in 1978. Karol Wojtyla was archbishop of Krakow before becoming pope, and the Polish Catholic Church was the main opponent to the Communist Polish government. The election of a Polish pope, the very first in history, encouraged the workers and union leaders to exert increased pressures on the government. In 1980, numerous strikes were organized, and the Communist government of Warsaw had to bow and authorize the Solidarnosc free union led by Lech Walesa. In 1981, General Jaruzelski became the new Communist leader. He outlawed Solidarnosc, had Walesa arrested, and declared a state of war. At the end of 1982, Walesa was freed and in 1983 the state of war was abolished. But the economic situation worsened. In 1988, the Communists were forced to negotiate with Solidarnosc and Walesa in order to stop the numerous strikes that paralyzed the country. The Warsaw government even accepted free elections. In June 1989, the Solidarnosc candidate was elected. Five months later, in November 1989, the Berlin Wall fell. To understand the advent of communism in Europe, one must pass by St. Petersburg, situated at the mouth of the Neva River, a little to the north of the American corridor. On the eve of the “October Revolution” of November 1917, St. Petersburg was the largest and most industrialized Russian city. Founded in 1703 by Tsar Peter I the Great in Ingria, a region recently conquered over Sweden, St. Petersburg was the fourth capital of Russia, after Novgorod, Kiev, and Moscow. Situated on the Baltic Sea, it was meant by its founder to show everybody, both inside and outside the country, that Russia had a European vocation. The most authentic heir of Peter the Great was Empress Catherine II the Great, daughter of the German duke of Anhalt-Zerbst and spouse of Tsar Peter III, a grandson of Peter the Great by his mother, and Duke of Holstein-Gottorp. In 1762, as soon as her husband ascended the throne, Catherine forced him to abdicate in her favor, and she had him murdered. That ambitious woman extended the Russian territory at the expense of the Ottoman Empire up to the Black Sea as Peter the Great had extended it up to the Baltic Sea (it must be noted however that, before Peter the Great, the Russians had occupied the Baltic port of Narva, in present-day Estonia, from 1558 to 1581). Those conquests were an omen of the future victory of the American Corridor over the Great Corridor in Eurasia. However, it is during the nineteenth century that Russia started to urbanize and, from 1861, to industrialize. Between 1800 and 1860, the level of urbanization increased by a third, and the number of city dwellers doubled in Russia, which, between 1800 and 1913, experienced an demographic growth unequalled in Europe. From about 53 million around 1800, the Russian population reached 81 million in 1860 and 161 million in 1913. From 1860 to 1913, the urban population of Russia rose from 6 million to more than 23 million,

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making an annual growth rate of 2.3%, as compared with 1.9% in the rest of Europe. In spite of this rapid growth, the rate of urbanization of Russia was still only 14% in 1914, while the corresponding rate for the rest of Europe was 42%. Russia was also less urbanized than Japan. Between 1860 and 1914, the population of St. Petersburg went from 500,000 to 2 million and that of Moscow, from 400,000 to 1.5 million inhabitants. A famous edict of Tsar Alexander II marked the beginning of the industrialization of Russia. The edict of March 3, 1861 emancipated the serfs and implied in addition to their freedom the possibility of their moving to the cities, at the time Russia embarked on exploiting mines and building railways and factories. The successors of Alexander II, Alexander III, Nicholas II, and their minister Serguey Ioulievitch, count Witte did their best to attract foreign capital, mainly French, in order to accelerate the industrialization of Russia. Their efforts met with success. St. Petersburg became the biggest port and the most industrialized city in Russia. In 1899, Russia had already 2.7 million industrial workers located in Moscow, Kiev, and Baku (on the Caspian Sea), but, above all, in St. Petersburg, which benefited from both its access to the Baltic Sea and its relative proximity to the rich mines of the Kola Peninsula, situated between Finland and the Barents Sea. “In 1860, Russia had 1,590 kilometers of railway lines—in other words, less than Italy, Spain, or Belgium, and only 3% of the European total. By contrast, in 1913 the Russian network was one of the largest in Europe, extending over 58,400 kilometers of track, or 17% of the European total. The production of cast iron in 1860, less than 300,000 metric tons, or 4% of the European total, rose in 1913 to 4.2 million metric tons, or 9% of the European total. The number of cotton spindles, on the order of 1 million in 1860, had grown to 9.2 million in 1913 (from 2% to 9% of the European total).”4 On the eve of World War I, the Russian part of the American Corridor was industrializing at full speed. It is in this context that the revolutions of 1905 and 1917 occurred. The first one, aggravated by the defeat of the Russian army and navy in the war against Japan, forced Nicholas II to accept the convocation at St. Petersburg of a Duma (Parliament) elected by universal suffrage. The second revolution, dominated by the personality of Lenin, led to the abdication of Nicholas II (executed with his whole family by the Bolsheviks on July 16–17, 1918), the rise to power of the Bolsheviks, the forming of the Russian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic on July 10, 1918, and the creation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (Soviet Union) on December 30, 1922. St. Petersburg, became Petrograd in 1814, lost to Moscow its title of capital in 1918, became Leningrad in 1924, and again took the name of St. Petersburg in 1991. 4.

Paul Bairoch, Cities and Economic Development: From the Dawn of History to the Present (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988), 379–380.

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The instauration of communism revived Moscow, which, founded in 1156, had become the center of the principality of Vladimir-Moscow under the suzerainty of the Mongols from 1237–1238, had succeeded Kiev as the religious capital of Russia in 1326, and had lost to St. Petersburg its title of capital in 1703. The first Russian university was founded in Moscow in 1775. Before that, the only university that existed in the region was that of Vilnius (Lithuania), founded in 1578 by the Jesuits. Around 1500, Europe had some seventy to seventy-three university towns, and Russia had none. In 1918, Lenin decided to give the title of capital back to Moscow. Moscow is located close to the center of the Great Russian Plain, on the Moskva River, a tributary of the Oka River that is itself a tributary of the Volga River, which flows into the Caspian Sea. While being part of the Volga Basin, it is very close to the Dnieper River, which flows towards Kiev and the Black Sea, and the Don River, which runs towards Rostov on the Black Sea. During the Middle Ages, the site of Moscow was strategic in the network of trade routes of Eastern Europe, where two roads dominated: the “route from the Varangians to the Greeks,” which went from the Baltic Sea and Gulf of Finland to the Black Sea and Constantinople-Istanbul via Novgorod, Smolensk, Kiev, and the Dnieper River, and the Saracen Route, more to the east, which went from the Baltic Sea and Gulf of Finland to the Caspian Sea, via Nizhny Novgorod (New Novgorod), Sarai, and the Volga River (see Map 21). At the latitude of Moscow, an east-west road linked Novgorod on the “route from the Varangians to the Greeks” to Nizhny Novgorod on the Saracen route. Moscow was the most strategic point on that east-west road because its three branches met there: the Novgorod-Moscow branch, the MoscowVladimir-Nizhny Novgorod branch (to the north), and the Moscow-RiazanNizhny Novgorod branch (to the south). Already, at that distant epoch, Moscow occupied a central location that gave access to the Baltic Sea and Gulf of Finland, to the Dnieper and Volga rivers, and to the Black and Caspian seas. In the nineteenth century, canals were built that allowed ships from Moscow to reach the White Sea (which is an extension of the Barents Sea), the Kola Peninsula (with its rich mines), the Barents Sea, as well as St. Petersburg and the Baltic Sea. Then, with the advent of railways, Moscow became a major railway crossroads. To the Trans-Siberian going from Moscow to Vladivostok were added railways leading to the Caspian Sea, the Black Sea, Kiev, Warsaw, Berlin, St. Petersburg, as well as the northern port of Arkhangelsk on the Barents Sea. Moscow emerged as one of the dominant cities of the Eurasian axis of the American Corridor going from the Ruhr Basin to Vladivostok via the Mittellandkanal, Berlin, Silesia, Warsaw, Minsk (Belarus), Nizhny Novgorod, Yekaterinburg, Novosibirsk, and Harbin (Manchuria). The TransSiberian, which covers the major part of that axis, was built between 1891

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and 1903; however, following the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905), defeated Russia had to leave Manchuria, and the Trans-Manchurian passed under Japanese control. In order to complete the Trans-Siberian, Russia built, from 1906 to 1916, a new line between Chita and Vladivostok, completely in Russian territory. Onega Lake

Lagoda Volga

Novgorod

Nizhnil Novgorod Tver

Kama Bulgar

Vladimir

Moscow Riazan

al Ur

Kiev

Dnie

per Don

Danube

Route from Novgorod to Nizhnil Novgorod Saracen Route Route from the Varangians to the Greeks

140 km

Map 21 Moscow at a Crossroads of the Network Linking the Saracen Route and the ’’Route from the Varangians to the Greeks’’

In order to size up the major impact of the emergence of the American Corridor on Moscow, it is advisable to follow the evolution of its population. It is estimated that, in 1350, 24 years after becoming the religious capital of Russia, Moscow had between 20,000 and 30,000 dwellers. Its population

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peaked under Tsar Ivan III, who put an end to the suzerainty of the Mongols, when it reached 100,000 inhabitants. But in 1520 it had dropped to only 36,000 inhabitants. Between 1700 and 1725, Moscow’s population was around 130,000. It went up to 238,000 inhabitants in 1780. In 1860, it was still less than 238,000 inhabitants although it should be taken into consideration that in 1812 Moscow was conquered by Napoleon and half-destroyed by a fire set by the retreating Russian army under Kutuzov’s command. Between 1860 and 1900, Moscow’s population exploded. It almost quintupled to reach 1,120,000 in 1900. In 1914, it reached 1.5 million inhabitants. The accelerated industrialization of the Soviet Union begun in 1928–1929 under Stalin led to a rapid urbanization. Today, the agglomeration of Moscow has more than 12 million inhabitants. The temporal evolution of the population of Moscow is much more similar to that of New York or Chicago than to that of London or Paris. Moscow really is a city of the American Corridor. The growing influence of the Soviet Union in Europe after World War II, an influence that spread over numerous satellites in Eastern Europe, contributed to give Moscow the status of a great world metropolis. Since the fall of European communism and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991, Moscow is looking for a new international status. A little to the north of the American corridor, the Scandinavian countries had an evolution that both resembles that of Russia and profoundly differs from it. There the progression of industrialization and urbanization followed, to a large extent, the same pace as in Russia; however, communism did not triumph in the Scandinavian countries, and their economic evolution was very different from the one of Russia. The railroad arrived at Copenhagen and Stockholm at about the same period as at Moscow, that is, between 1850 and 1870, and the industrialization of Denmark and Sweden really took off only around 1880. In 1859, Copenhagen had only 136,000 inhabitants, and Stockholm, 93,000. Today, their populations reach respectively 2.3 million and 1.4 million. At the end of the nineteenth century, the Scandinavian countries were still countries of emigration, mainly in the direction of the United States and Canada. For a long time, Denmark suffered from the commercial route through Hamburg and Lübeck, which allowed to pass from the North Sea to the Baltic while avoiding the Danish Peninsula. Economically marginal, Denmark was nevertheless politically influent. For instance, the Dane Knud the Great was king of England from 1016 to 1035, king of Denmark from 1018 to 1035, and king of Norway from 1030 to 1035. The French Normans who, from 1066 to 1098, conquered England, Sicily, and the Principality of Antioch, has a Danish origin. Later, Queen Margrethe I Valdemarsdotter, daughter of the king of Denmark Valdemar IV, who in 1363 became the spouse of Haakon VI, king of Norway, succeeded to unite Norway and Denmark under her rule in 1380.

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In 1397, she even persuaded Sweden to join, and a treaty was signed in Kalmar by which Sweden, Norway and Denmark united to form a single kingdom under Queen Margrethe I. The Kalmar Union lasted for 124 years until 1521, when Gustav Vasa led a rebellion and had Sweden secede. So, from 1443 to 1521, Copenhagen was the capital of the united kingdom of the four presentday Scandinavian countries (Iceland was then a part of Denmark). In 1443, Copenhagen had succeeded, as capital, the Danish city of Roskilde, whose cathedral still hosts the tombs of the Danish kings and queens. The port of Copenhagen occupies a strategic location at the entrance of the Baltic Sea. Of all the important Scandinavian cities, Copenhagen may be the best located. It is the closest to London, as well as to Essen, Hamburg, Berlin, and the central circle of the American Corridor. Copenhagen and Denmark are traditionally oriented towards Western Europe whereas Stockholm and Sweden have always been attracted by Eastern Europe, by Prussia and Russia, whose very origin goes back to the Varangians, the Vikings from Sweden. Like Prussia, Sweden was a military power before becoming an industrial one. Gustav Vasa’s grandson, the famous King Gustav II Adolph, brought its country to the top of its military and political power. He is the one who chose Stockholm5 as the new Swedish capital in 1624 (Uppsala was Sweden’s traditional capital), and who, as the best ally of Richelieu and France during the Thirty Years’ War, won major battles, notably at Breitenfeld against Tilly in 1631 and at Lützen against Wallenstein in 1632, and gave Sweden control over the Baltic Sea. The Treaties of Westphalia of 1648 recognized as Swedish possessions the territories of present-day Sweden (less the southernmost part, with Malmö and Helsingborg, which belonged to Denmark), Finland, Estonia, Livonia (with Riga), all of the territory of present-day Russia which is on the Baltic Sea around St. Petersburg, the region surrounding the mouth of the Oder River, the region of Wismar between Lübeck and Rostock, as well as the northern territory that lies between the Weser and Elbe rivers in the North Sea. Thus Sweden occupied strategic positions all around the Baltic Sea and at the mouths of the Weiser and Elbe rivers in the North Sea. During the eighteenth century Sweden lost most of its conquests. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, it was left with modern Sweden and Finland. Sweden lost Finland in 1808 to Russia, but managed to obtain Norway from Denmark in 1815, at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. It lost

5.

Stockholm was founded in 1255 on Stradsholmen, an island in the narrow channel linking Sweden’s extensive natural waterway system to the Baltic, by way of Lake Malaren. It controlled shipping along key trading routes and the north-south land crossing by way of its two bridges, Norrbo and Soberbro.

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Norway in 1905 when Norway attained independence. The Swedish economy really took off from 1849, when liberalism triumphed in England and the British Corn Laws were repealed. Those laws favored the British colonies in the United Kingdom at the expense of the other countries trading with Great Britain. From 1849, the commercial exchanges between Sweden and Great Britain significantly increased. The building of railways greatly improved the transportation of merchandises in that northern country where humid and mild climate made the road conditions precarious. Fridlizius estimates that “before the advent of the railways a whole day was normally required to move a carriage of goods over a distance of 30 km … After the railways were built, transport over the same distance took only one hour and was generally independent of weather conditions.”6 Sweden had to import the coal it needed, but this did not prevent it from industrializing. Instead of specializing in textile or consumer goods, Sweden concentrated on the steel and arm industries. Its iron mines and other minerals, its hydrographic network, as well as the abundance of wood allowed developing the sectors of wood, paper, high-quality iron, hydroelectric power, copper, lead, mechanics, and chemicals. The economic development of the Scandinavian countries followed, to a large extent, the same pattern and time framework as those of the Canadian provinces that are also located right to the north of the American corridor at a distance from New York City that can be compared with the one that separates Denmark, Norway, and Sweden from London. In terms of population and industrial structure, Sweden amazingly resembles Ontario, as Norway resembles Quebec (and Alberta as far as oil is concerned), and Denmark, the Maritime Provinces.

s THE EMERGENCE OF THE AMERICAN CORRIDOR IN NORTH AMERICA The development of America followed a network system logic centered on the European metropolises till the nineteenth century and, thereafter, on the great North American cities located on the Atlantic Coast. The history of the progression of urbanization to the north of the Rio Grande can be summed up by nine routes of penetration going from east to west, and crossing successively five north-south alignments. These alignments are, from east to west: first, the Atlantic Coast of the continent; second, the fault line uniting the transshipment points located upstream on the various waterways flowing

6.

Gunnar Fridlizius, “Agricultural productivity, trade, and urban growth during the phase of commercialization of the Swedish economy, 1810–1870,” in Urbanization in History: A Process of Dynamic Interactions, ed. A.M. van der Woude, Akira Hayami, and Jan de Vries (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 121.

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towards the Atlantic (the major part of that fault line is constituted by the Fall Line, which follows the eastern foot of the Appalachian Range); third, the Mississippi and Red River axis; fourth, the Rocky Mountains’ eastern front, and fifth, the Pacific Coast. Among the nine routes of penetration, it is possible to distinguish six east-west parallel routes and three diagonal routes going from the northeast to the southwest. The six parallel routes are the following, from north to south. The most northern of those routes crosses the five alignments at the following cities: Quebec City, Montreal, Winnipeg, Calgary, and Vancouver. The second parallel route of penetration goes from Quebec City and Montreal towards Duluth, Seattle, and Portland (on the Pacific). A third parallel route joins Quebec City, Montreal, Toronto, Detroit, Chicago, Minneapolis (on the Mississippi alignment), Seattle, and Portland (on the Pacific). The fourth parallel route of penetration starts from New York City and heads towards Pittsburgh, Cincinnati or Indianapolis, St. Louis (on the Mississippi alignment), Kansas City, Denver (on the alignment of the foot of the Rockies), Salt Lake City, and San Francisco (on the Pacific alignment). A fifth parallel route of penetration goes from Charleston (on the Atlantic alignment) to Atlanta (a little to the west of the Fall Line alignment), Memphis (on the Mississippi alignment), Oklahoma City, Albuquerque (on the alignment of the foot of the Rockies), and Los Angeles (on the Pacific alignment). Finally, a sixth parallel route of penetration goes from New Orleans (on the Mississippi) towards Dallas, El Paso (on the alignment of the foot of the Rockies), Tucson, and Los Angeles. The most direct route of penetration from London to the Pacific Coast crosses the continent diagonally. It follows the St. Lawrence River, crosses the Mississippi, skirts round the Rockies by the south, and runs into Los Angeles. It crosses the five alignments at the five following cities: Quebec City, Montreal, St. Louis, Albuquerque, and Los Angeles. A second diagonal route of penetration, the one that gave birth to the American Corridor, goes from New York City to St. Louis and Kansas City, and then makes its way towards Albuquerque and Los Angeles (see Map 22). A last diagonal route of penetration passes to the south of the preceding one from St. Louis, reaching Los Angeles through El Paso and Tucson. Before the onset of the War of Independence of the United States in 1775, England prohibited most manufacturing activities in North America (France had done the same in New France). Despite that, around 1775, the thirteen colonies that were to become the United States circumvented the bans and produced, for domestic purposes, about fifteen percent of the world production of iron, as much as England and Wales together. An economic power was then clearly in gestation.

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Vancouver Montreal

Seattle

Minneapolis

Columbia

Chicago

Toronto

Detroit

o

ad

r olo

San Francisco

New York

Houston

sis

Atlanta

Mis

Dallas

Los Angeles

sip

pi

C

Atlantic Ocean

oco

Amaz

on

Pa

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a

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Fran

cisco

Pacific Ocean

Orin

Magd

elena

Mexico

Santiago

Railway

300

km

Sao Paulo

Montevideo

Buenos Aires

Map 22 The American Section of the American Corridor

The emergence of the American Corridor in America became possible only when that endogenous development process amplified, was oriented towards the interior of the American continent, and generated powerful intracontinental exchanges along the aforementioned routes of penetration as well as along the Mississippi axis. Actually, a topodynamic corridor is, above all, a polarizing and energizing transportation axis, which induces synergies. The geography of North America presents major advantages over that of South America. The St. Lawrence directly leads to the Great Lakes, and the Great Lakes Basin can easily be connected with the Mississippi Basin, whereas, as already mentioned, in South America, as in Africa, the great rivers can hardly be connected with one another. That being said, the St. Lawrence entails some difficulties. On the one hand, it is frozen in wintertime; on the other hand, its mouth lies in a rather inhospitable northern territory. A series of events led to associate to the St. Lawrence axis another, human-made axis,

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which was to give birth in the region of New York City to the pole and the network head that were necessary for the American Corridor to take form in America. That series of events, which has already been evoked, involved two cities: Montreal and New York City. After the Treaty of Paris that ended the American Revolutionary War in 1783, the United States controlled the whole Lake Michigan and half of each of the four other Great Lakes without, for all that, controlling the St. Lawrence, which was the only access way to the Great Lakes from the Atlantic. The St. Lawrence River remained under British rule, as well as Montreal, which, founded in 1642 by Paul de Chomedey de Maisonneuve, was the closest point to the Great Lakes ships could reach inside the continent. From the very beginning of the Revolutionary War, in November 1775, the American insurgents had attacked and conquered Montreal, which represented a strategic position because of its interior port, but also because of its situation at the junction of the Ottawa, Richelieu, and St. Lawrence rivers. The Ottawa River was a major commercial route for the fur trade: through the French River (“rivière des Français”), it gave access to the Georgian Bay, an excrescence of Lake Huron. As for the Richelieu River, it led, almost in a beeline, to Lake Champlain, the Hudson River, and New York City. In June 1776, after seven months of occupation, the American troops had to abandon Montreal to the British army, and the following negotiations confirmed, in 1783, the rights of Great Britain over that city and its river. Twenty-nine years later, in 1812, the Napoleonic Wars and the difficulty for Great Britain to simultaneously face Napoleon in Europe and the United States in America convinced President James Madison to declare war on Great Britain in the hope of conquering Canada and, particularly, the St. Lawrence fluvial way. For a second time, the Americans set off on capturing Montreal. That time, even before reaching it, they were stopped on October 26, 1813 at Châteauguay by French Canadian troops commanded by CharlesMichel d’Irumberry de Salaberry. Nevertheless, war went on, ending just in 1815, without the Americans succeeding to capture the St. Lawrence. The problem of the access to the Great Lakes from the Atlantic remained unsolved. The Americans then took a decision which was to greatly contribute to the emergence of the American Corridor. From 1817 to 1825, they built the Erie Canal between Albany and Buffalo, which allowed ships to reach the Great Lakes from the Atlantic and New York City by sailing the Hudson River upstream to Albany, and then sailing the Mohawk River upstream, following the canal down to Oswego and Rochester on Lake Ontario, and down to Buffalo on Lake Erie, just upstream of the Niagara Falls. That route followed the natural topography of the continent. No mountain interfered with it, and it presented the immense advantage of giving access to the four most upstream Great Lakes while avoiding the Niagara Falls.

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As from 1825, Montreal stopped being the unavoidable entrance to the Great Lakes, and New York City took the lead of the North American urban system. In 1700, Quebec City was the second largest city north of the Rio Grande (a little behind Boston), and Montreal was fourth. In 1763, when Canada was transferred to Great Britain, even though the population of the thirteen colonies that were to form the United States was about 30 times higher than that of New France, Quebec City and Montreal were still among the six largest cities north of the Rio Grande. In 1800, with its 15,000 inhabitants, Montreal still occupied the seventh rank. With the opening of the Erie Canal, it dropped to the tenth rank in 1850, while Quebec City had gone down to the fifteenth place. Marginalized in North America, Montreal nevertheless prevailed in Canada, where it had supplanted Quebec City around 1830 and was to be supplanted by Toronto just 140 years later, around 1970. During its glorious period, Montreal was the most important inner port in America, a major cereal harbor, a financial capital, a great industrial center, and one of the continent’s major rail crossroads. In 1700, New York’s population was only 5,000. It rose to 15,000 in 1760. In 1800, it was still only 64,000. The Erie Canal opened in 1825, and in 1850 New York’s population jumped to over 600,000, which means that it had increased almost tenfold in fifty years. From 1800 to 1920, that population was multiplied by 156. In 1800, New York was not the largest city of Englishspeaking North America; Philadelphia was larger. Around 1810, New York became the largest city of the United States, and around 1920 it became the largest city in the world when it overtook London, which had been the largest since succeeding Beijing in 1830. About 1930, New York became the first city in history with a population of more than 10 million. Today, New York’s agglomeration reaches over 19 million inhabitants, including Philadelphia. The turning point in New York’s history was the opening of the Erie Canal, which allowed New York to extend its hinterland towards the Great Lakes region and become the best link between the Atlantic, Europe and the heart of the North American continent. By doing so, it took the leadership of northeast North America. The Erie Canal opened up the Midwest Prairies, the produce of which could flow eastward to New York, with manufactured goods making the return journey westward. Buffalo was New York’s main partner to the west, but two other partners played a major role: Liverpool and New Orleans. The links between New York and Liverpool were particularly strong: for example, the first regular liner service between America and Europe was inaugurated in 1818 between Liverpool and New York. Liverpool, New Orleans, and New York were the three vertices of the “cotton triangle.” Liverpool shipped textiles and manufactured goods to New York. Those goods were exchanged for cereals coming from Buffalo and the West. Cereals were sent to New Orleans and exchanged for cotton that was shipped to Liverpool.

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Progressively, New York took control of the cotton trade and brought cotton from New Orleans to produce textile or to ship it to Liverpool, which was New York’s main partner abroad. Thus, New York strengthened its position, while Liverpool topped off. The possibility for New York to get involved in triangular or even polygonal trade gave it a major advantage over Montreal, yet situated closer to Liverpool: actually, prisoner of the St. Lawrence axis, Montreal could not benefit from any form of triangular maritime trade. It must be noted that New York had previously participated in another profitable triangular trade that involved the exportation of rum from New York to Africa, where rum was exchanged for slaves who were sent to the Caribbean Islands, which exported their sugar to New York where it was transformed into rum. Progressively, an industrial megalopolis took shape around New York.7 Boston had been the first city of America to industrialize in the wake of the American independence. It had been followed by New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Montreal, not to mention the numerous small and medium industrial towns of New England. “Overall, there emerged a three-part segmentation of the Manufacturing Belt, with a heavy bias towards consumergood production in the ports of Baltimore, Boston and New York, a producergood axis between Philadelphia and Cleveland, and a western cluster of rather less specialized consumer-oriented manufacturing cities.”8 Boston and New England dominated the wool textile industry till the 1920s and 1930s, when that sector migrated to the South. Pittsburgh took control of the iron, steel, and aluminum sectors, while Chicago did the same with the grain and meat sectors, Houston and Calgary with the oil sector, and Buffalo and Minneapolis with the flour industry. Finally, from 1913, Detroit became the undisputed center of the automobile industry. New York took the lead in the sugar-refining, coffee-roasting, and cotton-textile sectors. Thanks to its links with the Great Lakes region, its maritime port, its manufactures, the dynamism of its financial, commercial and industrial elites, and the network of great universities of Northeastern United States (especially the Ivy League), New York came to dominate the capitalist world around 1917, owing to World War I. Even the Great Depression

7.

8.

The word “megalopolis” comes from the French geographer Jean Gottman. See Jean Gottman, Megalopolis: The Urbanized Northeastern Seaboard of the United States (New York: The Twentieth Century Fund, 1961). About the building of American cities, see also John W. Reps, The Making of Urban America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), and John W. Reps, Cities of the American West (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979). Paul Knox and John Agnew, The Geography of the World Economy (London : Edward Arnold, 1994, second edition), 183.

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of 1929–1932 did not bring into question its ascendancy over the world economy. On the contrary, the Wall Street crash of October 1929 just illustrated the determining place New York occupied in the capitalist world. Thereafter, New York’s supremacy remained unchallenged till 1987’s stock collapse, when Tokyo suddenly appeared as a potential successor to New York at the head of the world economy. But the Asian crisis of 1997 soon confirmed that New York was still playing the first role thanks to its port, which remains the second most important in the world (after Rotterdam), its place in the economy of the United States, and the strength of that economy. The rise of New York and its greater region was not an isolated phenomenon. At the periphery of the New York urbexplosion, another urbexplosion soon developed within the American corridor: that of Chicago, which even seemed at times to threaten New York’s domination. The Erie Canal and the Pennsylvania Canal, whose Philadelphia-Pittsburgh section was inaugurated in 1834 and which later reached the city of Erie on Lake Erie, had connected the Atlantic Basin to the St. Lawrence Basin. The next step consisted in establishing similar links between the Great Lakes and Mississippi basins. Before the opening of the Erie Canal, the main access road to the West of the United States was the Ohio River, which flows towards the southwest, and the main entrance to the West was Cincinnati, which is located on the Ohio just north of the Kentucky border, where the conquest of the West had started around 1788. The building of the Erie Canal moved a little to the north the axis of east-west exchanges. Five canals established a link between the Great Lakes and Mississippi Basin. Four of them linked Lake Erie to the Ohio River. From east to west, they are: the Pennsylvania Canal, between Erie and Pittsburgh on the Ohio; the Ohio and Erie Canal, between Cleveland and Portsmouth, at the junction of the Ohio with the Scioto River; the Miami and Erie Canal, between Toledo and Cincinnati; and the Wabash and Erie Canal, between Toledo and Terre Haute, Indiana, linking Lake Erie and the Wabash River, a tributary of the Ohio River. Finally, a fifth canal, much shorter than all the others, connected Lake Michigan and the Illinois River. This was the Illinois and Michigan Canal, inaugurated in 1848 between Chicago and La Salle. This last canal propelled Chicago to the first ranks of the American cities and allowed it to completely supplant Cincinnati in the West. In 1830, Chicago still had only 400 inhabitants, to a large extent French Canadians. That village lay in a region that Louis Jolliet and Jacques Marquette had explored in 1673, at the mouth of a river the French had named Checagou. The voyageurs of New France had created a fur trading post there because, by sailing upstream the Checagou, it was possible to reach rapidly the source of the Illinois River, which flows towards the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico. The city of Chicago was incorporated in 1837, eleven years before the inauguration of the Illinois and Michigan Canal. From 1848, this

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canal linked Lake Michigan to the Mississippi by connecting the Chicago and Illinois rivers. The Illinois and Michigan Canal, the development of the port of Chicago and the opening in 1852 of two westbound railroads made Chicago one of the most strategic transportation pivots in North America. In 1856, Chicago became the chief rail center of the entire United States. From 4,200 inhabitants in 1837, the population of Chicago went to 30,000 inhabitants in 1850, 109,000 inhabitants in 1860, one million in 1887, and 2 million in 1907. Chicago overtook Philadelphia as the second largest city in the United States in 1890 and was recently surpassed by Los Angeles. Today, with a population of a little over 8 million, Metropolitan Chicago is the third largest city of the Canado-American urban system. Chicago is the most eloquent example of the North American urban explosion during the nineteenth century and the best illustration of the second stage of the development of the United States, the one related to railroads and steamships. A first major phase, which lasted from 1790 to 1830, was marked by the use of sailing ships and wagons. The second phase went from 1830 to 1870, and triggered industrialization and the urbanization process that transformed a very rural country into a true urbanized country. The third phase went from 1870 to 1920, and was associated with the introduction of steel and electricity. Finally, the fourth stage, which extended from 1920 to 1960, corresponds to the triumph of the automobile industry. Chicago’s development perfectly reflects the second phase when, in 1830, the United States became the first country after England to have a railroad, and succeeded to extend its rail network over 15,000 kilometers by 1860 and then to as much as 420,000 kilometers by 1913. In 1820, the United States still were a very rural country: just 6% of the U.S. population lived in towns with populations of 5,000 or more, compared with 13–14% in Europe. Thirty years later, in 1850, the American rate of urbanization reached 14% by 1850 and 64%, a century later, in 1950. From 1820 to 1870, the U.S. urban population increased fourteenfold, and the annual growth rate of American cities was of 5.5%, as against 3.8% between 1870 and 1990. During the nineteenth century, 98 large cities emerged throughout the world. More than half of them were in North America, north of the Rio Grande: 48 in the United States and three in Canada. The economic potential of Chicago’s hinterland, the Midwest, contributed as much to its growth as the surrounding transportation network. The Midwest has important mine resources: coal, oil, zinc, and iron. But above all, Chicago is the most important center of the Corn Belt, the main corn-producing region of the United States. A rich agricultural area, the Corn Belt region includes the states of Illinois, Iowa, and Missouri, as well as the western part of Indiana and the eastern parts of Kansas and Nebraska. The Corn Belt is surrounded by other important “belts.” To the east stretches the Dairy Belt

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of Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. To the southeast lies the Cotton Belt of Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas. In the Great Plains of the West, the Wheat Belt, important producer of wheat, includes, to the north, the Canadian provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba, as well as, more to the south, the states of Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Montana and, still more to the south, Kansas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, and parts of Texas and Colorado. The development of agriculture contributed as much to the rise of the United States as industrial development. It is estimated that in 1910, each American farmer produced about three times more than their European counterpart, despite the fact that the latter had already doubled or tripled their own productivity over what it had been at the start of the nineteenth century. The increase in agricultural productivity went on, even exceeding the increase in industrial productivity. Beginning in the 1940s in the United States and in the 1950s in Europe, agricultural productivity increased roughly twice as fast as industrial productivity, reversing the previous trend.9 The Corn Belt belongs to the Midwest, as opposed to the Far West, which lies to the west of the Mississippi River. It also belongs to the North of the United States as opposed to the South and the Sun Belt, which stretches from Florida to California. During the American Civil War, Illinois and the entire Corn Belt sided with the North and the Yankees. The demarcation line between the Confederate States of the South and the Union states of the North did not correspond to a parallel distinguishing the north from the south, but rather to the southern limit of the American Corridor. All the states crossed by the central axis of the American Corridor (except for Texas that the axis touches slightly to the north), including California and New Mexico, and all the states situated to the northwest of the corridor sided with the Union, while all the states located to the southeast of the American Corridor, including a state as northern as Virginia, belonged to the Confederate States. In 1861, when the Secession War started, the inhabitants of the Confederate States were not systematically poorer than those of the Federated States. Among the ten richest states of the United States, on a per capita basis, five belonged to the southeast: Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, and South Carolina. During the Civil War, from 1861 to 1865, that of the North was 2.4 times superior to that of the South. And, if we consider only the free population (as opposed to the slaves), the ratio was 3.9 rather than 2.4. As for the production of the North, it was 11.5 times superior to that of the South. It would be wrong to say that the economic domination of the North was a result of the Civil War. It existed before and it was a determining factor in the victory of the North.

9.

Paul Bairoch, op. cit., 385.

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It must be stressed that, for various reasons, the cities that developed and still exist as significant cities in the South are younger than the old cities of the North. In fact, the South developed much more slowly than the North. From a geographical point of view, the most important explicative variable of the Civil War remains the cultivation of cotton. All the American states that produced cotton joined the Confederacy, and all the states of the Confederacy produced cotton. Similarly, in the countryside, there was a direct correlation between the cultivation of cotton and the proportion of the population represented by slaves.10 Thus it can be understood that the question of slavery became the main bone of contention. For the North, which was industrializing, slavery was becoming more and more unacceptable for moral reasons, but, above all, for reasons related to economic performance. It is interesting to note that, at the opposite of the American Corridor, in Russia, a similar debate was taking place, at the same time, in a similar context, about serfdom, which was abolished in 1861, the very same year the American Civil War started. Slavery (as serfdom) is so to say incompatible with the industrial capitalism inasmuch as the latter is based on competition. The performance in an industrial enterprise can only be favored in a context of freedom: freedom to dismiss less-performing workers and freedom for workers to quit an unsatisfactory job. Despite the often-inhuman conditions observed in the factories at the beginning of modern capitalism, none of them ever functioned in a context of slavery. The industrialization of the United States called for the abolition of slavery, as it called for the abolition of serfdom in Russia. The states of the American Corridor, which were in a process of industrialization, realized that, while the cotton states, whose plantations relied on slavery, were convinced that the abolition of slavery would be fatal to them. War was the only way out. It lasted for four years and created 600,000 fatalities, more than the Napoleonic wars. The American Civil War was the bloodiest war of the nineteenth century, and also the bloodiest in the whole history of the United States. Despite the international recognition of the Confederate States of America by England and France, and despite the determination of the South, thanks to its economic and demographic superiority, the North won both militarily and economically. In 1867, at the end of what many historians consider as the first industrial war in history, the northeast of the United States found itself as the first industrial power in the world next to Great Britain, which was not far ahead. The very last Confederate city to fall was Charleston, South Carolina. Founded in 1670, that city had been, in 1700, with its 2,000 inhabitants, the fifth largest city north of the Rio Grande (after Boston, Quebec City, New York City, and Philadelphia). The capital of the Confederate States 10.

C.S. Hammond, American History Atlas (Maplewood, N.J.: Hammond, 1968), A-21.

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of America was Richmond, Virginia, but the city of the South that was rising at the time the Civil War was triggered off was Atlanta, Georgia. Among the fifteen states that formed the Confederate States of America, only four were part of the thirteen colonies that formed the United States at its origin. They are Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. Of them, Georgia is the southernmost. It is limited by the Atlantic and two rivers, the Savannah River to the northeast, which leads to the city of Savannah, Georgia, and the Atlantic, and the Chattahoochee River to the southwest, which is a tributary of the Apachicola River in Florida that flows into the Gulf of Mexico. Atlanta is located a few miles south of the Chattahoochee River and about in the middle of the northern part of Georgia. It lies on the Allegheny Watershed in the foothills of the Blue Ridge, which is a mountain range belonging to the Appalachians. When the Civil War started, Atlanta was still a new town. It had been founded in 1837 under the name of Terminus as the southern terminus of a railway coming from Washington, D.C. through Tennessee. The name of Atlanta was adopted in 1845. The city became a rail crossroads when, to the first rail link, three others added and were completed by 1860. The Civil War abruptly interrupted the rise of the city, which, in December 1864, was razed and burnt to the ground by the Yankee General William Tecumseh Sherman during the “Great March to the Sea” that divided the Confederate States in two and greatly contributed to the North’s final victory. Its location saved Atlanta and allowed it to develop again thanks to the railways. Atlanta is located at the intersection of two major axes: one from New York and Washington to New Orleans and Houston, and the other from Chicago to Miami. Today, Atlanta is the main railway crossroads of the South, and also a most important air hub. In the territory of the former Confederate States that lies east of the Mississippi River, Atlanta has become, with its 2.5 million dwellers, the largest city after Miami. In the aftermath of the Civil War, the secessionist states experienced a long period of withdrawal and decline, which nevertheless was followed, from about 1965, by a return in strength. “In overall terms, it has been estimated that the Mid-Atlantic region (New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania) experienced a net loss of over 175,000 jobs during the period 1969–76, whereas the South Atlantic region (Delaware, D.C., Florida, Georgia, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia) experienced a net gain of over 2 million jobs in the same period. This represents a job loss of 1.5 per cent in the Mid-Atlantic region and a gain of 24.4 per cent in the South Atlantic region, compared with a net gain of some 15 per cent in the US as a whole.”11

11.

Paul Knox and John Agnew, op. cit., 235.

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The reconstruction period that followed the Civil War in the United States was marked by industrial dynamism and exceptional inventiveness. It was the great epoch of the introduction of the innovations that used electricity: those of Samuel Morse (telegraph), Thomas Edison (phonograph, electrical bulb), Alexander Graham Bell (born in Scotland, but living in the United States and Canada, Bell has long been considered the inventor of telephone, but he was preceded by the Italian Antonio Meucci), Nikola Tesla (born in Croatia, but living in the United States, Tesla discovered alternating current and terrestrial stationary waves), and Frank J. Sprague (tramway). Another invention singularly marked the evolution of the cities of the world: the automobile, whose capital became Detroit. That city is situated a little north of the central axis of the American Corridor, close to the Canadian border, between Lakes Erie and Huron. Its development clearly lay within the westward movement of the North American economy. Nothing really predestined Detroit to become the city of the automobile. It was founded in 1701 by Antoine of Lamothe and Cadillac, who named it “Fort Pontchartrain du Détroit” (in French, détroit means “strait”). The name of Pontchartrain given by Cadillac comes from Jérôme Phélypeaux, count of Pontchartrain and Maurepas, who was Louis XIV’s minister of Navy at the end of his reign. Detroit is located on the Detroit River, which links Lake St. Clair and Lake Erie. Lake St. Clair leads to the St. Clair River, which origins from Lake Huron. In fact, Detroit is a strait between Lake Huron and Lake Erie, between the upper Great Lakes (Superior, Michigan, and Huron) and the lower Great Lakes (Erie and Ontario), which means that it constitutes a most strategic point. However, Detroit’s development owes more to the automobile and Henry Ford than to any mere geographical factor. Henry Ford founded the Ford Motor Company in 1903, and, thanks to him, Detroit became the cradle of the second industrial revolution by “Fordism” characterized by assembly lines, mass production and consumption, the use of standard auto parts, and the lowering of production costs. Fordism contributed, more than any other innovation, to the emergence of the American Corridor, its triumph over the Great Corridor, and the passage from the economic domination of the London pole to that of northeastern North America. Already in 1914, seventy-two percent of the automobiles in use worldwide were in the United States. In 1945, Europe and Japan were ruined, the United States produced the vast majority of all the cars of the world, and Detroit was the American city where car production was concentrated. Since then, the automobile industry has evolved. The research and development centers of the automobile industry have multiplied without, however, really leaving the American Corridor or the European part of the Great Corridor. They concentrate in Detroit and Los Angeles in North America, in Japan and South Korea in Asia, as well as in Germany, France, Italy, and Belgium in

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Europe. As for assembly shops, they are much more spread around the world: in all the regions of the United States, in Brazil, Mexico, Canada, Spain, and elsewhere.12 The boom of the automobile industry in the Detroit region also had repercussions in the neighboring region of southern Ontario in Canada. This greatly contributed to the triumph of the metropolitan region of Toronto over that of Montreal in Canada. In terms of location, Toronto has very few advantages over Montreal, except for its being situated to the southwest, on the trajectory of the economic evolution of the continent. Its site was first used by the French who built there a fur trading post around 1725 and then, in 1750– 1751, a fort named Fort Rouillé. Toronto is situated at the mouth of a small river, named the Humber River by the English. A trail called the Toronto Passage existed from Lake Ontario along the Humber and Nottawasaga rivers that led to the Georgian Bay, which is a part of Lake Huron, where the fur trade was most active (in fact, “Toronto” meant “meeting point” in Amerindian). That passage allowed Indians and voyageurs to go directly from Lake Ontario to Lake Huron and bypass the Niagara Falls and Lake Erie. This, however, was not enough to transform Fort Rouillé into a town. The French even burnt down the fort in 1759 to avoid its being captured by the English. The real development of Toronto started in 1791 when the British decided to divide what was left, after the American independence, of the former Province of Quebec into two parts: Upper Canada (present-day Ontario), whose population was mainly British, and Lower Canada (presentday Quebec), whose population was mainly French. In 1793, a city named York was founded by Upper Canada’s first governor, John Graves Simcoe, at the former site of Fort Rouillé, and Simcoe made it the new capital of Upper Canada. In 1834, York became Toronto. In 1812, the population of York was only 700 inhabitants. In 1851, the population of the Toronto agglomeration reached 30,000. In 1891, it rose to 150,000. The development of Toronto took off just in the twentieth century. The industrialization of the region, associated with the triumph of Fordism, and its status of capital of the most important province of Canada made its population reach one million inhabitants in 1950. Toronto clearly rose to the rank of metropolis of Canada thanks to the opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway in 1959. The seaway allowed ships coming from Europe to reach Toronto. In the following years, the economic power rapidly shifted from Montreal to Toronto, which was well prepared to benefit from the new situation. Banking, decision-making, and even manufacturing moved to Toronto. The agglomeration of Toronto now exceeds 4 million inhabitants. 12.

Yannick Lung, “L’articulation global/local dans l’industrie automobile,” in Dynamique des activités et évolution des territoires, eds Bernard Boureille and Bernard Guesnier (Poitiers : ADICUEER, 1994), 121–154.

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The destiny of the city of Washington somewhat resembles that of Toronto. The latter is located 226 kilometers north of the central axis of the American corridor, while Washington is 336 kilometers south of the same axis, and both cities have been created as capitals: Washington in 1790, Toronto in 1793. Washington succeeded Philadelphia as the capital of the United States in 1800, but, like Toronto, it started booming just after World War II. The site of Washington was chosen by George Washington in 1790 to become the site of the new capital of the United States for various reasons. It almost coincided at that time with the center of gravity of the population of the United States, and it lay on the Potomac River, which constitutes the natural border between Northern and Southern United States. In fact, during the Civil War, the states lying to the north of that river joined the Yankee party, while those to the south joined the Confederacy. Washington lies directly on the Fall Line, that fault line which separates the Appalachian Range from the Atlantic Plain and generates many falls. Thus are situated directly on the Fall Line: New York City, Trenton, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Alexandria and Richmond in Virginia, Columbia in South Carolina, Augusta, Macon, and Columbus in Georgia, as well as Tallassee in Alabama. Let us note that the first four cities are on the verge of forming one and only metropolitan area, the urban fabrics of Washington and Baltimore being already joined and those of Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York almost touching each other.13 Washington’s location on the Fall Line explains why ships could not go any further upstream on the Potomac: all fluvial traffic coming from the Atlantic had to stop at Washington (which was originally named Georgetown). From the beginning, the possibility was considered to build a canal along the Potomac between the new town and the cities of Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, and Cumberland, Maryland, located upstream to the northwest, which was done later. Harpers Ferry was the starting point of the Wilderness Road, which played an important role in the conquest of the West. At Harpers Ferry, the pioneers left the Potomac and followed the Shenandoah Valley, in the Appalachian Range, between the Blue Ridge Mountains to the east and the Alleghenies to the west, in the direction of the valleys of the Roanoke River and New River. From there, they headed for the Cumberland Gap, which is a natural pass situated at the junction of the states of Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee. That pass allowed to go through the Cumberland Plateau and reach two tributaries of the Ohio River: the Cumberland River flowing south towards Nashville, Tennessee, and the Kentucky River going north. That route, discovered in 1750, was the main one followed by the inhabitants 13.

The Fall Line conurbation even extends up to Boston through Hartford, Connecticut. The French geographer Jean Gottman named that urban mega-structure “megalopolis.” See Jean Gottman, op. cit.

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of the thirteen colonies that gave birth to the United States, who started the expansion towards the West. As can be seen, Washington occupied a quite strategic position between the North and the South, as well as between the East and the West. Washington had been the capital of the United States for only 14 years when it was attacked and partially burnt down by the British in the context of the Canado-American War of 1812. The invading British Admiral Sir George Cockburn ordered the burning of the Capitol, the White House, and the Navy Arsenal. The city was rebuilt, but, in 1846, it still had only 50,000 dwellers. The population of Washington reached one million just during World War II. Today, Metropolitan Washington has close to 5 million inhabitants, and even 7.5 million if Baltimore is included, the suburbs of the two cities being actually merged. The American capital continues to grow at a time when the cities of the northeast of the country lose ground in a context where the cities that rise are more and more located in the “Big L,” that is, west or south of the city of St. Louis, which is situated at the intersection of the Mississippi River and the central axis of the American Corridor. The Great Lakes region being occupied, and the Appalachian Range crossed, among others, through the pass of Cumberland Gap, the next step in the progression of urbanization was the conquest of the West, from the Mississippi to the Pacific, along the routes of penetration mentioned earlier. The northernmost route, exclusively in Canadian territory, went from Montreal to Vancouver via Ottawa and Winnipeg. A second route existed a little more to the south, through Canada and the United States, and had been explored before the northernmost one. It started from Fond du Lac (now Duluth), the westernmost point of the Great Lakes at the extremity of Lake Superior, and reached the Columbia River in a beeline. As early as 1680, Daniel Greysolon Duluth had left Montreal (where he lived) and gone halfway between Lake Superior and the Pacific. In January 1734, two other Montrealers, Louis-Joseph and Pierre, the two sons of Pierre de La Vérendrye, after having also left Montreal, were the first explorers of European origin to reach the foothills of the Rockies. Between 1804 and 1806, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark completed Duluth’s tour and reached the mouth of the Columbia River and the Pacific. North of the Rio Grande, they were the first explorers to reach the Pacific by land. A third northern corridor materialized just with the arrival of railways. It passed in the north of the United States and went from Chicago to Minneapolis and Seattle. The fourth route was explored rather early. It crossed the Rockies in its widest section and linked Kansas City (which was initially called Independence), Denver, Salt Lake City, and San Francisco. That course was located a little to the south of two trails followed by the first pioneers, namely

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the Oregon and California trails, and it entailed many difficulties because of the long journey in the Rockies. The fifth route went from Charleston to Atlanta (a little to the west of the Fall Line), Memphis, Oklahoma City, Albuquerque, and Los Angeles, and it was explored progressively and rather late. A sixth route, also entirely in present-day United States, did not start from the Atlantic Coast, but rather from the Gulf of Mexico. It linked New Orleans or Houston to Los Angeles through Dallas, El Paso, and Tucson. It was exploited just with the arrival of railways. As already mentioned, given the existence of the St. Lawrence River and the fact that the mass of the Rockies greatly diminishes in the southern United States, the most natural and direct corridor between London and the Pacific Coast of North America passed by Newfoundland, Quebec City, Montreal, Detroit, Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas City, Albuquerque, Tucson and Los Angeles. Before 1763, that course was in French territory from Quebec City to Kansas City, and in Spanish territory from Tucson to Los Angeles, which delayed its development. That seventh corridor corresponds to both the seventh and eighth routes of penetration, and it was explored rather early. The seventh route of penetration included the Santa Fe Trail between Kansas City and Albuquerque, and the Spanish Trail between Albuquerque and Los Angeles. That route corresponds to the central axis of the American Corridor. Finally, a last course stood out rather early. It started in New York City and led to Pittsburgh, followed the National (also called Cumberland) Road to Columbus, Indianapolis, and Vandalia, then went on to St. Louis and the route of the Butterfield Overland Mail up to El Paso, Tucson, and Los Angeles. All those routes were later used to build the North American network of railways and roads. For instance, the famous Route 66 links St. Louis, Tulsa, Oklahoma City, Albuquerque, and Los Angeles, a mix of the two last routes of penetration. The development of the territory situated between the Mississippi and the Pacific proceeded both from the Mississippi and the Pacific Coast. In the eastern part of that territory, the development of Minneapolis and St. Paul constituted an important step. Like Detroit, Chicago, and St. Louis, those two cities originate from New France. The sites of Minneapolis and St. Paul were Sioux lands before their annexation to New France. They belonged to the Santee Dakota group of the Sioux tribe. The “Minne” of Minneapolis and Minnesota comes from the Sioux language, meaning “water.” Minneapolis and St. Paul were founded by the French and French Canadians. Minneapolis owes its existence to the Saint-Antoine (St. Anthony) Falls, so called by Father Louis Hennepin in 1680, and to the village of Saint-Antoine, which was founded by the falls. As for St. Paul, it goes back to a village founded by Pierre Parrant and Father Lucien Galtier from 1838. The interest of the St. Anthony Falls was twofold: first, at their foot, it was possible to build a port, and, second, the

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energy provided by the falls was at the origin of many economic activities. It was used for grinding flour and for creating a lumber center in 1848 and a flour-milling center. Minneapolis became the urban pole of a vast agricultural region that produced mainly wheat. It came to be called the “Flour City of the United States” and the Minneapolis Grain Exchange became one of the world’s largest cash-grain markets. In the late nineteenth century railroads were built that transformed Minneapolis into a transportation hub. Two railways led to Duluth on Lake Superior, one to Sault Ste. Marie at the junction of lakes Superior and Huron, one to Milwaukee on Lake Michigan, one to Chicago on Lake Michigan, and seven to various parts of the Far West. If the St. Anthony Falls made the fortune of Minneapolis, its port made that of St. Paul. That port is the most upstream one on the Mississippi, and it constitutes the port of entry at the head of the navigation on the Mississippi River for all the northern part of the Mississippi Basin. St. Paul specialized in port activities, the shoe industry, and cattle-breeding-related activities. The Mississippi River being the border between the Midwest and the Far West, Minneapolis belongs to the Far West and St. Paul, to the Midwest. Between 1762 and 1803, the sites of Minneapolis and St. Paul were parts of two different political entities. The site of Minneapolis belonged to Spanish Louisiana from 1762 to 1800 and to French Louisiana from 1800 to 1803, whereas the site of St. Paul was part of the “Indian Territories” that belonged to New France before their being yielded to England in 1763, and, from 1774 to 1783, it was part of the British Province of Quebec. In 1849, with the creation of the state of Minnesota and the selection of St. Paul as capital, the two cities definitively shared the same destiny. The development of Minneapolis came later than that of Chicago. In fact, it was more contemporaneous with the development of Los Angeles. In 1850 Los Angeles had no more than about 2,000 people and Minneapolis was only a little village, while Chicago had already 30,000 inhabitants. By 1910, Los Angeles and Minneapolis had a population of more than 300,000 each, and Chicago, more than 2 million. The Minneapolis-St. Paul agglomeration mainly developed from 1880 onwards, and now its metropolitan area represents 3.2 million inhabitants. Except for San Diego, founded in 1769, the oldest important city on the Pacific Coast north of Mexico is San Francisco, whose founding goes back to 1776, and the route of penetration that leads to it (the third mentioned above) was explored rather early, but significantly after the founding of the city. San Francisco’s origin is Spanish, the city having belonged to Spain till 1821, and then to Mexico until 1847. The capture of California by the United States in 1841 is a strange epic whose actors were Mexico, independent since only 1821, the United States, but also Great Britain, which was present in British Columbia

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and also in the Oregon Country, that is, in present-day states of Washington and Oregon. In California as in Texas, the American conquest was preceded by an influx of migrants coming from the United States. The migration towards Texas started a little before 1830; the one towards California, ten years later. In 1846, the Yankee population of California was high enough for an American takeover to become feasible. Then intervened a novel character: John Charles Frémont, an American Southerner of French and British origin, born in 1813 in Savannah, Georgia. His father was Louis-René Frémont, born in Quebec City in 1768, and his mother was Ann-Beverley Whiting from Virginia. The Frémonts were an important merchant family of Quebec City. John Charles Frémont was an explorer, a cartographer, as well as a military man. In 1838, he was made assistant to the French explorer Jean-Nicolas Nicollet, who was surveying and mapping the upper Mississippi and Missouri rivers for the American government. In 1841 Frémont also helped Nicollet survey the Des Moines River. Later, on his own, Frémont mapped much of the territory between the Mississippi Valley and the Pacific Ocean. In 1845, Frémont applied to the Mexican authorities for permission to carry on explorations in California. Although his application was granted, it was soon revoked, and Frémont was ordered to leave the Mexican territory. At that point, Frémont abandoned its role of cartographer to act as a political character. He decided to resist the order and fortified a strong position near Monterey, to the south of San Francisco, where the American flag was raised and he waited for the Mexicans. In the spring of 1846, Frémont decided to leave Monterey to reach Oregon at a moment when relations between Mexico and the United States were getting particularly tense. Texas, which had won its independence from Mexico in 1836 and voted for annexation by the United States, had seen its proposition rejected by the Van Buren administration in the same year. But in 1845, the American Congress accepted the annexation, and the transfer of authority took place in 1846. Mexico decided to react, and it sent troops on April 25, 1846, to oppose the American army that was occupying a contested territory. In reaction, on May 12, the United States declared war on Mexico. The Mexico-American War was to last till the end of 1847, and led to the conquest of Mexico City by the Americans on September 14 of that year. It is in that warlike context that, in April 1846, the U.S. Government sent Frémont a messenger directing him to go back to California and care for its interests there. The United States was then convinced that an alliance was taking form between Mexico and Great Britain in order to stop the American expansion towards the Pacific. The Americans even suspected that, for that purpose, the Mexican authorities could transfer California to Great Britain.

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Frémont returned to California and reached San Francisco with the intention to seize and hold California. When he reached San Francisco, a British warship was effectively waiting in the Bay of San Francisco, but no fighting took place. Frémont seized San Francisco without a gunshot, and, on July 10, 1846, the American settlers of California elected him as governor. On August 13, 1846, Captain Frémont and Commodore Robert F. Stockton entered Los Angeles, which was then the capital of California, without a shot being fired. In January 1847, a revolt was put down, and in the same month Frémont accepted California’s capitulation from Mexican officials at Cahuenga Pass, near Los Angeles. The next year, in 1848, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo put an end to the Mexican-American War and officially ceded California, as well as present-day New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, and Arizona to the United States. In 1850, California became the thirty-first state of the Union. As for Frémont, he was nominated for the presidency of the United States in 1856 by the Republican Party. He was defeated by the Democratic candidate James Buchanan, who raised the issue of the French, Canadian, and Catholic origins of Frémont’s father despite that Frémont had been raised as a Protestant. Frémont was profoundly against slavery, more so than Abraham Lincoln, who succeeded him as the Republican candidate to the presidency. The two politicians opposed each other on that question, Lincoln being less eager than Frémont to abolish slavery. The influence of Frémont in California, and also in neighboring Arizona, of which Frémont was governor from 1878 to 1883, contributed a lot to the siding of those states with the North against the South (where Frémont originally came from) during the Civil War, which started just five years after Frémont’s candidacy to the presidency of the United States. In that war, California and the West sided with the Yankees, while Texas sided with the Confederates. The fact that San Francisco was the first site north of the Gulf of California to experience a real development is not surprising. The Bay of San Francisco is a most natural port, one of the most natural in the world. The city is located at the mouth of the Sacramento River, which is the most important of California, and one of the few Canado-American important rivers flowing towards the Pacific (with the Fraser and Columbia rivers). To those location advantages added important mineral resources, which launched the development of the region. The California Gold Rush of 1849 and the silver discovery in 1859 of the Comstock Lode, in Nevada, justified major investments in railways. The first line was that of the Central Pacific, inaugurated in 1869. It followed the fourth route of penetration and linked San Francisco to Ogden, close to the Great Salt Lake. From there, the Union Pacific line led to Omaha, on the Missouri River, and the Kansas Pacific line, to Kansas City. The construction of the Central Pacific was followed by that of the Southern Pacific line along the Pacific Coast, from the Mexican border up to Seattle.

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The population of San Francisco, which was only 20,000 inhabitants in 1850, reached 439,000 in 1900. During the same period, the population of Los Angeles went from 2,000 to 107,000. As can be seen, at the beginning of the twentieth century, San Francisco was considerably ahead of Los Angeles. It was then the financial and administrative metropolis of the Pacific region. The growth of California went on at an accelerated pace during the twentieth century thanks, among other things, to the opening, on June 7, 1914, of the Panama Canal, whose construction had been started by Ferdinand de Lesseps and the French in 1881, but completed by the Americans. For various reasons, Los Angeles supplanted San Francisco around 1940, and it still clearly leads over the latter despite the prestige of the universities of the San Francisco region, in particular Berkeley and Stanford, and in spite of San Francisco’s unquestionable charm and the presence, to the south of the city, of the Silicon Valley and its enterprises of high technology. Today, Metropolitan Los Angeles represents 11 million people, and Metropolitan San Francisco, just 6 million. The victory of Los Angeles over San Francisco is a matter for serious thought. Although it had been the capital of California till 1854, when Sacramento took over, Los Angeles was still, in 1850, a “cow town” of 2,000, surrounded with ranches, where “gambling, drinking, and whoring” were the main occupations. The city had been founded on September 4, 1781 (after San Diego, founded in 1769, and Los Angeles, founded in 1776), when 44 recruits from Mexico, half of them children and most of them of Indian and African blood, assembled on the west bank of the Los Angeles River to claim the land they had been promised by Governor Felipe de Neve, who was leading them. They named the village they were founding “El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de Los Angeles” (The Town of Our Lady the Queen of the Angels). In 1835, the population of the village was up to 1,250 in habitants, most of them of Spanish or Mexican origin. From 1862 to 1865, a catastrophic drought took place and most of the ranches went bankrupt, leaving Los Angeles, which had just lost its title of capital, with no perceivable future. Unlike San Francisco, it had no natural port, no river, no gold or silver mines, and not even drinkable water in quantity. Its only natural advantage was still little exploited. In 1869, the Spanish Trail leading to Santa Fe and Independence (Kansas City), and the road of the Butterfield Overland Mail leading to St. Louis had not yet given birth to railway-building projects, while San Francisco had just been connected to Ogden, close to the Great Salt Lake. Yet, those routes, especially that of the Butterfield Overland Mail, presented obvious advantages from a topographical point of view. Moreover, the population center of gravity of the United States kept moving directly towards Los Angeles. In 1850, it was around Spencer, West Virginia, and it was to reach Cincinnati in 1880. A topodynamic inertia phenomenon was underway, and it clearly favored Los Angeles.

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In 1876, the Southern Pacific line along the West Coast was inaugurated, and in 1885 the Santa Fe line from Kansas City, following approximately the Spanish Trail, was added, making the exporting of oranges to the east possible. However, a harbor and a source of water were essential. Hope was coming back, but Los Angeles still lacked a port and a good water supply. In 1913, water was brought through a 376-kilometer-long aqueduct from the Owens Valley in the Sierra Nevada. The year after, a man-made harbor was built that became the “cargo capital of the West.” Its first wharf was ready in 1914, at the very moment the Panama Canal was inaugurated. Suddenly, the city was advantaged with respect to San Francisco: its rail links with the east of the United States were more efficient, and its new port was significantly closer to the Panama Canal. It must be stressed that, still today, the major part of the Canal’s traffic (more than 80%) comes from or goes to the United States. By fuelling the development of cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle, the Panama Canal favored the movement from the northeast to the southwest within the American Corridor and the triumph of that corridor in the world. Closer to the Panama Canal, Los Angeles is also closer than San Francisco to a port giving access to the Atlantic. Actually, it takes 50 percent more time to go by car or truck from San Francisco to Houston than to go from Los Angeles to the same port (49 h 50 min compared with 33 h 20 min). In 1911, Los Angeles found for itself a new and quite original vocation. That year, the former Blondeau Tavern was transformed into the very first motion-picture studio of Hollywood. Meanwhile, the population of the city was growing: 107,000 inhabitants in 1900, 310,000 inhabitants in 1910, and 4 million inhabitants in 1950. Aside from the motion-picture and food industries, Los Angeles has become, especially in the wake of World War II, a most important center of manufacturing, aviation, oil production and refinery, transportation, communications media, tourism, banking, insurance, as well as steel and automobile production. It came to dominate a growing urbexplosion whose influence extends to Seattle and Vancouver, Denver, Dallas, Houston, and Mexico. This urbexplosion is the only real rival of the New York urbexplosion, Los Angeles being the most likely heir to New York in North America. But, in terms of population and economic power, the New York urbexplosion is still much stronger than that of Los Angeles. However, the southwestward movement goes on despite its slowing down since the Asian crisis of 1997. The Pacific Coast and the Sun Belt of the southern states still rise, and Los Angeles is located at the angle of the “Big L” formed by the two axes of the Pacific Coast and the Sun Belt. Houston is part of the eastern section of the horizontal stroke of the “Big L.” It is located at about the same longitude and the same distance from the central axis of the American corridor as Minneapolis. It is the closest Atlantic port to Los Angeles. Today, it is the third most important port of

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the United States next to those of New Orleans (including the port of South Louisiana) and New York. The port of Houston is linked to the Gulf of Mexico by 84-kilometer-long canals named the Houston Ship Channel and the Intracoastal Waterway, which lead to the Galveston Bay on the coast. Houston’s development relies very much on oil production and exportation. But diversification has taken place in Houston as in Minneapolis. Electronic, chemical, metal, textile, and cotton industries, as well as cattle breeding, have developed and transformed the economic structure of the city and its region. The rise of the city started at about the same period as that of Los Angeles, that is, around 1900. The city was founded in August 1836 by two land speculators, the brothers Augustus C. and John K. Allen, who advertised their new town as the future “great interior commercial emporium of Texas.” Two months later, the Allen brothers had a “virtual” town designated as the capital of the new independent Republic of Texas. The Texan government moved there in 1837 and two years later, due to the denunciation of the Allen brothers’ maneuver as corrupt, the capital was moved from Houston to Austin. Houston then became a small cotton-shipping port. In 1891, it found a new vocation thanks to the building of twelve railways. But the real impulse came in 1900 with a hurricane that almost destroyed the port of Galveston. This event proved that the interior port of Houston was much safer than the coastal port of Galveston and thereafter, Houston became the leading Texan port. At about the same time, in 1901, oil was discovered in the area, which brought considerable industrial development. It triggered the expansion and prosperity of the city. As in the case of California, where the Gold Rush happened after the Mexican troops had left, in Texas the discovery of oil took place after the Texans had won their independence. In 1821, the Mexican authorities had allowed a group of Anglo-Americans led by Stephen F. Austin to settle in Texas, which belonged to the recently independent Mexico. By 1836, the several Anglo-American colonies of Texas had about 20,000 inhabitants, and an independence movement took form, which was rapidly opposed by the Mexican government. The Anglo-American Texans declared independence on March 2, 1836, but, in April, four months before the founding of Houston by the Allen brothers, the Mexican General Antonio López de Santa Anna defeated the insurgents at the Alamo, and destroyed the city of Harrisburg, situated very close to the future Houston. However, on April 21, Santa Anna was defeated and captured by Sam Houston in San Jacinto, 25 kilometers from the present center of Houston, giving Texas its independence. Sam Houston became president of Texas. The new nation asked in 1836 for its integration into the United States, but the administration of Van Buren refused. It is only when the United States realized that Great Britain favored the independence

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of Texas, because it would prevent the United States from expanding towards the west, that Washington accepted to welcome Texas into the Union. As mentioned earlier, the U.S. and Texan congresses approved the annexation in 1845, and Texas became the twenty-eighth state of the Union in 1846, which triggered off the Mexican-American War. Fifteen years later, on March 2, 1861, Texas seceded and joined the Confederate States of America. It was admitted again into the United States just on March 30, 1870, five years after the end of the Civil War. If Houston was founded five months after Texas’ declaration of independence, Dallas’ incorporation took place in 1856, twenty years after the independence of Texas and ten years after the annexation of Texas to the United States. However, John Neely Bryan had built the first cabin of the future city of Dallas in 1841. In 1858, two years after its incorporation, Dallas was augmented by skilled French and Swiss artisans from the unsuccessful Fourierist utopian colony (called phalanstère in French) in nearby La Réunion. In Charles Fourier’s conception, the phalanx was to be a cooperative agricultural (and not industrial) community bearing responsibility for the social welfare of the individual, characterized by continual shifting of roles among its members. Fourierist communities were founded in France, but many of them started in the United States. La Réunion was one of them, as was Brook Farm, Massachusetts, and the North American Phalanx of Red Bank, New Jersey. In the case of Dallas, the initial development of the city was favored less by the Fourierist approach than by its failure. The French and Swiss settlers from La Réunion who joined the emerging Dallas community soon assisted in the rise of a most capitalist city. In the 1870s, railroads arrived at Dallas and Fort Worth, and the area became a transportation hub about as important as Atlanta. The hub was located at the intersection of two main axes: an east-west axis going from Atlanta to San Diego and Los Angeles in California, and a north-south axis going from Minneapolis and Kansas City to Houston. Dallas is located in a clayey zone particularly favorable to cotton farming, on the Trinity River at the confluence of the Clear and West Fork tributaries of the river. Dallas’ neighboring “twin city,” Fort Worth, is located a little to the west on the West Fork tributary. The Trinity River runs towards the Gulf of Mexico and leads to the Galveston Bay. Its mouth lies a little to the east of Houston. Thanks to the railroads and its location, Dallas became a huge wholesale market and an important world-scale cotton center. The Dallas Cotton Exchange was organized in 1907, and in the 1920s forty percent of the cotton crop of the United States came from the black-clay fields around Dallas, which was for many years the world’s largest inland cotton market.

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In 1930, the great East Texas oil field was discovered, and transformed Dallas into a major oil center. Progressively, banking, insurance, manufacturing and aircraft sectors added and contributed to the change of Dallas from a regional city to a booming metropolis. After World War II, in 1946, it began a period of spectacular growth, partly due to the establishment of two large aircraft firms. Due to its very central location, the Dallas-Fort Worth airport, opened in the 1970s, became one of the three busiest in the world. The competition between the Dallas-Fort Worth Metropolitan Area and that of Houston is made on equal terms. In 1900, the two agglomerations had about the same population: Houston had 44,000 inhabitants and Dallas, 42,000. In 1950, Houston took the lead: it had 700,000 dwellers and Dallas, 514,000. But, in 1975, Dallas forestalled Houston with 2.4 million inhabitants against 2.1 million for Houston. Today, Metropolitan Houston totals 4.1 million and Metropolitan Dallas, 3.5 million. The east-west axis of the “Big L” goes from Houston to Los Angeles through Dallas and Phoenix. Its south-north axis extends from Los Angeles to Vancouver through San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle. The development of the cities of the south-north axis situated to the north of San Francisco is clearly posterior to the one of the cities of the east-west axis. As for the immense area between the “Big L” and the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, it includes only one important city: Denver, whose rather precocious development was launched by the discovery of gold in 1859 and boosted by the arrival of a railway in 1870. Denver belongs to the fourth route of penetration, which includes Kansas City, Denver, the Great Salt Lake, and San Francisco. The cities of Portland, Oregon, and Seattle belong to the same “generation” as Denver and Dallas. Actually, the founding of Portland goes back to 1844 and that of Seattle to 1853. As for Vancouver, it belongs to the next generation since it was founded just in 1886. Stunningly, the history of the beginning of those three latter cities is more linked to the history of London or Montreal than to that of San Francisco or any other American city. In order to understand this, one must go back to the very discovery of America. Before the arrival of Christopher Columbus, Mesoamerica was the most developed part of North and Central America. On the other hand, as has been pointed out, the maritime currents naturally led the Spaniards towards that region to their greatest benefit. It is just little by little that the Spaniards explored and took control of the regions located more to the north. In the Pacific region of present-day United States, they founded first San Diego, and then San Francisco and Los Angeles. They ventured more to the north, and, as early as in 1774, Juan Pérez Hernández claimed in the name of Spain the territories situated north of California. Moreover, the Spaniards established a fur trade post at Nootka Sound, in present-day British Columbia. However, that area was colder and its only economic interest was

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related to fur trade, with which the Spaniards had little experience, fur being much less popular in southern Europe than in the north. Soon, they had to face the competition of the Russians, the British, and the Canadians. The Russians possessed Alaska from 1741, when the Danish mariner Vitus Bering took possession of the area in the name of Russian Empress Elizabeth I, Peter I the Great’s daughter. From that date till 1867, when the United States purchased Alaska, the Russian fur traders, especially attracted in the region by sea-otter and other pelts, extended their influence over Alaska, but also present-day British Columbia, Oregon, and Washington State. They even founded a fort that was to become Fort Ross, which lies in present California, about 120 kilometers north of San Francisco. Nevertheless, the continent’s most dynamic fur traders were neither Russian nor Spanish. They belonged to two competing companies: the Hudson’s Bay Company, based in London, and the North West Company, based in Montreal. The Hudson’s Bay Company is the oldest joint-stock merchandising company in the English-speaking world. It was chartered on May 2, 1670 under Charles II following the initiative of two voyageurs from New France, Pierre Esprit Radisson and his brother-in-law Médard Chouart Des Groseilliers. Between 1658 and 1663, Radisson and Des Groseilliers had made an unlicensed fur-trading expedition to lakes Superior and Michigan, where they heard of the “Bay of the North Sea” that gave direct access to the region. When they returned to Quebec City in 1663, the French authorities confiscated their furs and fined them because they had failed to secure a government license. Exasperated, Radisson and Des Groseilliers fled to Boston. From there, in 1665, they were escorted to England, where in 1668 they persuaded a group of London merchants to attempt to gain control of the fur trade of the mid-continent by bypassing the St. Lawrence River controlled by the French by way of Hudson’s Bay. This led to the formation in 1670 of the Hudson’s Bay Company, that was given exclusive trading rights for the entire territory that drained into Hudson Bay. They received the major support of a Wittelsbach: Prince Rupert (which means “Robert” in German) of Bavaria, duke of Cumberland. The German prince living in London was a son of Frederick V, Elector Palatine and king of Bohemia, and Elizabeth Stuart, the daughter of King James I of England. Through his mother, he was a nephew of Charles I of England, and a first cousin of Charles II and James II, father of two queens of England: Mary II, spouse of William of Orange, and Anne Stuart. His sister having married the Elector of Hanover, Prince Rupert was also the uncle of George I of England. That great figure became the first governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company, and he gave his name to Rupert’s Land where the Company had almost all rights. Rupert’s Land covered present-day northern Quebec, northern Ontario, Manitoba, most of Saskatchewan, southern Alberta, the part of Minnesota, North Dakota and

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South Dakota that corresponds to the Red River Basin, as well as the part of the Canadian Nunavut Territory that surrounds the Hudson Bay. Outside of Rupert’s Land, the Hudson’s Bay Company extended its influence over the Island of Vancouver, and the present territories of the states of Washington and Oregon. As for the North West Company based in Montreal, which competed with the Hudson’s Bay Company, it established its control over the continental part of present-day British Columbia. Soon, the fur traders and colonists from the United States manifested their interest for the zone situated to the north of California, and the British and American interests came into conflict. In 1811, the Pacific Fur Company, owned by Americans, established a trading post at Astoria, at the mouth of the Columbia River. Then, in 1815, the Oregon Trail opened for the colonists. It partially followed the third route of penetration, already mentioned. It started from Kansas City, went north up to the Platte River, reached Fort Laramie, and then Fort Hall-Pocatello, Idaho, followed the Snake River, and later the Columbia River up to Portland, Oregon. In 1818, in order to avoid an open conflict, Great Britain and the United States agreed to jointly occupy what they called the Oregon Country, which covered the present states of Oregon, Idaho, and Washington, the northwestern part of Montana, as well as the part of the province of British Columbia situated south of the 54° 40’ latitude. That compromise lasted till 1846, and was questioned when the United States gave Frémont the order to seize California for fear that it could be transferred to Great Britain. Negotiations took place between the U.S. and Great Britain on the dividing up of Oregon Country. An accord was reached in June 1846, which led to the formation of the Oregon Treaty, defining the border between the United States and British Columbia. The years that followed were marked by numerous conflicts between Whites and Amerindians. A first war between the two groups lasted from 1848 to 1850; three years later, Seattle was founded, and was named for the Suquamish Indian chief Seathl. From 1853 to 1893, the city was just a precarious sawmill center that had to face not only two more wars with the Indians, one from 1855 to 1858, during which it was attacked in 1856, and the other in 1877, but also anti-Chinese riots in the 1880s and a disastrous fire in 1889. Growth finally came with the arrival of the Great Northern Railway in 1893, which transformed Seattle into a major rail terminus. The fine landlocked harbor of Seattle became a strategic main supply depot for Yukon and Alaska. With the Klondike gold rush of Yukon (begun on August 17, 1896) and the opening of the Panama Canal (June 7, 1914), Seattle’s port developed. A word must be said about the Panama Canal, which radically changed the trade conditions between the Atlantic Coast of the Americas and the Pacific Coast and Asia. Despite that they are located a little at the

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margin of their respective topodynamic corridors, both the Panama Canal and the Suez Canal played a most important role in the evolution of their respective corridors. By fuelling the development of cities such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle, the Panama Canal favored the westward trend within the American Corridor in the same way as the Suez Canal nurtured the eastward trend in the Great Corridor. The port of Seattle possesses another strategic advantage: of all the North American ports situated to the south of Canada, it is the closest to Japan and the Far East. That advantage played an increasing role in the development of the city as that part of Asia became a major economic power. Another factor, more difficult to foresee, greatly contributed to the development of Seattle, and it was the decision taken by William Edward Boeing to build its aircraft plants in the Seattle region. Born in Detroit, William Boeing had founded in 1916 the Pacific Aero Products Company, which became the Boeing Airplane Company the following year. It is mainly thanks to World War II and the war against Japan that shipyards and the aircraft industry developed and transformed Seattle into a world leader of those sectors. The after-war boom just consolidated the growth of those sectors in Seattle. Of the three main Boeing plants, the first one is located at Seattle, and the second one, at Renton, close to Seattle. As for the third one, it is situated in Wichita, Kansas, practically at the geometric center of the United States. After having been for a long time in Seattle, the Boeing head office is now in Chicago. Boeing Company is, with Airbus, one of the two largest aircraft producers in the world. More recently, another world-scale company was born in Seattle: Microsoft, founded in 1975 by Paul Allen and William (Bill) Gates (born in Seattle in 1955). Microsoft’s headquarters are in Seattle. In 1910, the population of Seattle was 240,000. Its metropolitan area had 864,000 inhabitants in 1960 and 1,240,000 inhabitants in 1970. It now reaches 2,4 million inhabitants. Seattle is the most important agglomeration of North America north of San Francisco and west of Dallas. However, its two neighbors, the agglomerations of Vancouver and Portland, are close behind, the first one with a population of 2 million, and the second one with 1.8 million, not to mention Denver, far more remote, and its 2 million inhabitants. Portland draws its importance from its location at the mouth of the Columbia River and from its port, which is even more active than that of Seattle. The port of Vancouver is also to be reckoned with. Since several years, it has outranked Montreal as Canada’s main port. Nevertheless, the links between Montreal and Vancouver are, historically, more filial than competitive. The city of Vancouver was founded in 1886 in the part of British Columbia where the North West Company of Montreal had once dominated. The North West Company was formed in 1776 mainly by Scottish Montrealers

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who intended to cooperate in order to resist inland advances of the Hudson’s Bay Company. Among its leaders was James McGill, who sponsored the foundation of Montreal’s McGill University. The North West Company’s strategy was to conquer new territories by exploring them before the arrival of the Hudson’s Bay Company. That approach was crowned with Alexander Mackenzie’s discovering, in 1789, the Mackenzie River, which flows towards the Beaufort Sea, and his reaching the Pacific overland in July 1793. Alexander Mackenzie was a partner of the North West Company. He is not the only leader of the North West Company whose name was given to an important river. His colleague Simon Fraser was also rewarded for having explored British Columbia. He was the first European to reach the mouth of the Fraser River (named in his honor), where Vancouver was later founded. By 1795, the North West Company exerted a control over two-thirds of the Canadian fur trade. The birth of Vancouver must be attributed to yet another Montrealer, Sir William Cornelius Van Horne. In 1886, the first Canadian transcontinental railway was inaugurated by the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR). The first train left Montreal on June 28, 1886 and arrived at Port Moody, British Columbia on July 4. At the time Van Horne was vice-president of the Canadian Pacific Railway and, a few months earlier, he had announced that his company would extend its line 20 kilometers westward from Port Moody in order to take advantage of a better harbor and terminal site. There Vancouver was founded. The provincial government gave the CPR over 2,500 hectares of crown land and it incorporated the city of Vancouver on April 6, 1886. As for Van Horne, in 1888, he succeeded George Stephen as president of the Canadian Pacific Railway, and he found himself in a still better position to favor the growth of the city whose creation he had caused. Thanks to its status of terminal of the transcontinental linking Montreal to the Pacific, the favorable location of its port, and the agricultural wealth of the Fraser Valley, Vancouver succeeded to face the competition. Progressively, Vancouver ascended the ranks of the urban hierarchy. Around 1900, it had passed Victoria, the capital of British Columbia, as the leading commercial center on Canada’s West Coast. In 1914, a second Canadian transcontinental was inaugurated: the Grand Trunk Railway. It passed by Winnipeg, Saskatoon, and Edmonton, ending at Prince Rupert, located far to the north of Vancouver, while the Canadian Pacific Transcontinental linked Winnipeg and Vancouver through Regina and Calgary. From its very inauguration, the Grand Trunk Railway met numerous problems, and its builders went bankrupt. The Canadian government had to intervene in order to save the railway. It decided to create a Crown corporation, the Canadian National, which took possession of the Grand Trunk’s assets. Despite that government intervention, Vancouver easily won the battle against Prince Rupert, after having surpassed Victoria.

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The third competitor was Winnipeg, located about halfway between Montreal and Vancouver, at the point where the two transcontinentals joined before splitting up again. In the 1920s Vancouver replaced Winnipeg as the leading Canadian city west of Toronto. By 1963, in spite of the fact that the population of Montreal was greatly superior to that of Vancouver, the port of Vancouver supplanted that of Montreal and ranked first among Canadian ports in tonnage. The rise of Asia and the strengthening of the exchanges between the Far East and North America greatly favor Vancouver and its neighbors on the Pacific Coast, Seattle and Portland. That being said, nothing indicates that those three cities will, in the medium run, supplant their three competitors from the south, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Diego, which have the advantage of belonging to the central zone of the American Corridor.

s THE IMPACT OF THE AMERICAN CORRIDOR ON LATIN AMERICA In 1800, on the eve of the emergence of the American Corridor, Latin America remained much more urbanized and, from many points of view, more advanced than Anglo-Saxon America. It was even more urbanized than Europe, and its rate of urbanization was then twice as high as that of Russia. The triumph of the American Corridor turned that situation upside down. Between 1860 and 1865, the rate of urbanization of Canada and the United States became superior to that of Latin America as a whole, even though countries such as Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay still have today rates of urbanization that are greater than those of Canada and the United States. Let us attempt to understand that reversal of situation. The rise of Napoleon and his conquest of Portugal in 1807 and Spain in 1808 had more consequences for Latin America than for Portugal and Spain themselves. Actually, although the Napoleonic troops were chased out of Portugal by the British as early as 1811, and from Spain by the Spaniards themselves in 1814, the situation stemming from the temporary disruption of the colonial link between the Portuguese and Spanish Americas and the Portuguese and Spanish kings overthrown by Napoleon ultimately led to the emancipation of the colonies of America. In the case of the Spanish colonies, this took the form of a true accession to independence, while, in the case of Brazil, this led to the creation, in 1822, of the Empire of Brazil. That empire had the status of a constitutional empire under the Portuguese House of Braganza. Since the emperor of Brazil renounced to cumulate the titles of king of Portugal and emperor of Brazil, the House of Braganza was split into two distinct branches. The Napoleonic interlude and the disruption of the colonial links created a tragic vacuum in the economic relations the Spanish colonies had developed with their colonizing country. The situation was less problematic in the case of Brazil because of that country’s softer evolution. However,

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the economic decline of Portugal during the nineteenth century also caused problems for the Brazilian economy. In both cases, in the Hispanic countries as well as in Brazil, Great Britain tried and, most of the time, succeeded to fill up the vacuum stemming from the withdrawal of the former colonial powers by imposing its manufactured goods, its investments (especially in railways), and its political influence. In Hispanic America, the period of the accessions to independence went from 1810, when the independence movement emerged in New Granada (the future Colombia), to 1825, when Bolivia became independent.14 The aftermath of that long period of wars and troubles was distressing. The colonial economy based upon plantations and exchanges with the colonizing country was ruined, and the traditional links which united the various regions of the colonial empire through the central power could not be replaced by purely Latin American links.15 The space that was previously unified disintegrated, and the local leaders of all kind confronted each other. The Hispano-American economy never completely recovered. As for Brazil, it succeeded to preserve its unity and relative peace. But even Brazil had to adapt to a situation where the links with Europe were no more what they had been. While Anglo-Saxon America industrialized, Latin America healed its wounds. Except for Mexico and Paraguay, Latin America industrialized almost one century later than the North American part of the American Corridor. Geography partially explains that fact. Industrialization diffused through Europe and America from London. And New York, Boston, Montreal, and Philadelphia were much closer to London and industrialized Europe than any Latin American center. If the sea currents and the dominant winds had favored Latin America at the time of sailing, the introduction of motorized ships considerably reduced that advantage, while enhancing the benefits for Anglo-Saxon America of being much closer to London. On the other hand, the intensive building of canals and railways in North America gave birth to a particularly efficient network system, which, at the same time, facilitated the exchanges inside the already developed zones, and allowed to better penetrate the continent and reach the Pacific. North America’s topography and hydrographic system

14.

15.

The great “liberators” of Spanish South America were Simón Bolívar, who liberated present-day Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador and Bolivia, and José de San Martín, who liberated Argentina, Chile, and Peru. After the independence period, there was no commercial rapprochement between Spain and its former American colonies comparable to that between England and the United States in the late eighteenth century. Impoverished Spain had little to offer, in goods or markets, to its former colonies, and Latin Americans were in no mood to strengthen their relations with Spain.

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greatly contributed to this due to the relative easiness to link together the Hudson River, the St. Lawrence, the Great Lakes, the Ohio River, the Illinois River, the Mississippi, and the southern part of the Rockies (between Texas and Los Angeles). In order for a network system to triumph, it is necessary that at least one of the penetration tentacles open onto new possibilities of exchange with a developed or high-potential area. By transforming itself into a great economic axis, the tentacle of the American corridor stemming from London and New York fostered the development of the New York urbexplosion and the whole Anglo-Saxon America. Unfortunately, nothing similar occurred south of the Rio Grande. For essentially topographical and hydrographic reasons, no transcontinental rail axis was built south of the Rio Grande, except for the short railway along the Panama Canal and the relatively marginal railway linking Buenos Aires and Mendoza in Argentina to Valparaíso in Chile. Moreover, the fluvial basins of Latin America have remained practically independent from one another, and, within each country, the urban system developed according to the central-place model without any supranational urban system emerging, contrary to what happened in the Canado-American case. In Latin America, until recently, the external economic links of the national urban systems were stronger with North America or Europe than with the other Latin American urban systems. Since the emergence of the American corridor, those urban systems have been, to a great extent, integrated to the periphery of that corridor, despite that some of the largest cities of the world are found there. Mexico is the Latin American country that is closest to the American corridor, and the first one to have industrialized. The central axis of the American corridor even crosses four American states which have belonged in the past to Mexico: Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California. Mexico started industrializing from about 1830. Around 1850, it was not only the most industrialized of all Latin American countries, but also more industrialized than most European countries and most of the Canado-American regions situated outside the Montreal-Pittsburgh-Philadelphia-New York-Boston polygon. For example, at that time, Mexico already produced textile, iron, steel, glass, and paper. A complex system of railways was built around Mexico City, not following a logic of penetration of the continent, but rather according to a logic of centralization. The emergence of the American corridor and the rise of the United States led to the Mexican defeat at the time of the Mexican-American War of 1846–1847, and they contributed to the marked weakening of the Mexican state. A civil war broke out between 1858 and 1861, which was followed, in 1861, by a French invasion, and then by the founding, in 1864, with the support of Napoleon III, of a Mexican Empire headed by Maximilian of Habsburg, brother

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of the Emperor Francis-Joseph of Austria. In 1867, Maximilian was defeated, taken prisoner, and executed. Thereafter, Benito Juárez García, a liberal and anticlerical, was elected president of the Republic. Internal troubles declared once again in 1911 in the context of a revolution which lasted till 1920. In 1924, Plutarco Elias Calles came to power and applied an anticlerical policy. In 1928, he founded the powerful National Revolutionary Party, which became the Institutional Revolutionary Party that governed Mexico for 72 years, from 1928 to 2000, without any interruption. From an economic point of view, Mexico has had its ups and downs. To the first industrialization of the middle of the nineteenth century succeeded a second one at the end of the same century under Porfirio Díaz, who called on foreign capital, and then a third one, from 1940, under Ávila Camacho. The discovery of oil led to the nationalization of oil production in 1938. New discoveries of immense oil reserves took place in the 1970s, and Mexico fully benefited from the oil boom from 1973 to 1980. But all those favorable evolutions were interrupted by numerous crises such as those of 1980 and 1994, during which the Mexican peso devalued by forty percent. Today, Mexico is the fourth most important economy of the Third World. It belongs to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) since 1994. It is as urbanized as any developed country. Its rate of urbanization went from twenty percent in 1910 to fifty percent in 1950 and about seventy-five percent today. The Mexican economy is diversified and increasingly industrialized. However, the Mexican per capita income is just about one third of the per capita income of Canada and the United States, and the informal sector represents a high proportion of the Mexican economy. Mexico City is one of the largest cities in the world. Its agglomeration has a population of more than 21 million, but its economic influence does not really extend beyond the Mexican borders. It possesses no port or river. Its main advantage stems from its central location halfway between the Pacific and the Atlantic. At the time of the Spanish conquest, the south of Mexico was clearly more developed than the north. With the emergence of the American Corridor and the shift of the American economy’s center of gravity towards the southwest, hence towards the Mexican border, the cities in the north of the country have progressively modernized, and the most marginalized zones are increasingly concentrated to the south, particularly in the Chiapas region. The general topodynamic evolution of the North American continent favors Mexico in the long run, though it is little likely that it could come to dominate the continent in a foreseeable future. The great rival of Mexico City in Latin America is São Paulo, whose population of 18.8 million compares with that of Mexico City, and whose production exceeds that of the latter. More than half of the Brazilian gross national product originates from the São Paulo region. Moreover, within a distance

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of 600 kilometers are two other major agglomerations: Rio de Janeiro, with its 11.4 million inhabitants, and Belo Horizonte, with its 4.5 million dwellers. São Paulo is one of the oldest cities in South America. It was founded in 1554 by the Jesuits as a mission for the Amerindians. However, its economic takeoff occurred only at the end of the nineteenth century, from 1880. Without being far from the coast, São Paulo, in some way, has his back turned towards the sea. The geography of Brazil is quite exceptional. It is dominated to the north by the little populated and urbanized Amazon Basin, and to the south by the very populated and urbanized basin of the Paraná River, which flows not towards the Brazilian Coast, but rather towards the Rio de la Plata and Buenos Aires. The Paraná Basin is separated from the Brazilian Coast by a mountain range, the Serra do Mar. São Paulo is located on a tributary of the Paraná River, the Tietê, and two tributaries of the latter, the Pinheiros and the Tamanduateí, at the limit of the Paraná Basin, on the heights of the Serra do Mar, only 50 kilometers from the coast and the port of Santos. Till the 1880s, São Paulo remained an administrative city (it was the capital of a “captainry”), and a city of adventurers looking for slaves (at least in the beginning), gold, silver, and diamonds. Around 1880, the introduction of the cultivation of coffee in the rich Tietê Valley and the linking of São Paulo to the port of Santos by a railway gave birth to a mushroom city. In 1872, the population of São Paulo was still only 26,000 inhabitants. It went to 240,000 in 1900, and then to 2.2 million in 1950 and 10 million in 1975. Till 1930, the agriculture of its region was totally focused on the cultivation of coffee. Thereafter, cotton, rice, sugar cane, and breeding were added to coffee production. Bauxite was found. The railway network extended to the whole southern part of Brazil and São Paulo became its heart. However no transcontinental railway was built: the railroad leading to Bolivia does not go beyond the Andes cordillera. Contrary to what happened in North America, no tentacle stemming from the urbexplosion dominated by São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro gave birth to a major axis of development likely to generate a topodynamic movement which could favor the emergence of new urbexplosions. In spite of this, São Paulo transformed into a first-class center thanks to an extensive and diversified industrialization, as well as the development of banking, stock exchange, finance, and other tertiary activities. São Paulo became the undisputable economic core of Brazil. However, till recently, its influence did not really extend beyond the borders of Brazil. With the creation, in 1995, of Mercosur, the free-trade zone between Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay, this is rapidly changing. The Brazilian economy ranks among the three most important economies of the Third Word, and its industrial sector occupies the tenth position in the world. That being said, Brazil is sapped by inequalities. Some

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seventy-five percent of the Brazilian farmers possess less than 10 hectares of land. Together, those small farmers control only three percent of the cultivated lands of the country. The weakness of São Paulo does not stem from its own poverty, since it is relatively rich, but rather from the poverty of its periphery and the relative weakness, till recently, of its integration to the world urban system. In South America, Buenos Aires has long been the richest and most promising city. It is not anymore even though, with its 13 million inhabitants, it remains the third most important agglomeration of Latin America. Argentina constitutes an exceptional case because the historical basis of its economy has been agriculture and breeding, while its rate of urbanization is one of the highest in the world (it now reaches eighty-seven percent). Buenos Aires represents 38.5% of the total population of Argentina, while Mexico City represents only 18.3% of the Mexican population, and São Paulo, 6.3% of the Brazilian population. Buenos Aires is the most classic example of urban primacy, even more so than Paris. France, which has traditionally been an agricultural country dominated by its capital, never offered a contrast as pronounced between the strength of the agricultural sector, an exceptional urbanization, and the presence of a dominating city. France never was as urbanized as Argentina is, and Paris never had in France the weight Buenos Aires historically had in Argentina. In order to understand this, one must look at the history and geography of the country and its capital. Buenos Aires was founded in 1580 under the name of Santa Maria del Buen Aire, on the Río de la Plata (“Silver River”), discovered in 1516 by the Spaniard Díaz de Solís.16 The Río de la Plata is the common mouth of the Paraná and Uruguay rivers, whose basins extend in Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, and Bolivia. Due to the alluvial deposits conveyed by those waterways, creating a port on the Río de la Plata was uneasy. The river is often too shallow, and canals have to be dug in the Río. Buenos Aires is the best port of the Río de la Plata in spite of the fact that an “inwater canal” (a canal dug inside the river) called “Canal Punta Indio” had to be created to serve it. The hinterland of Buenos Aires, which includes the famous Pampa, is well suited for breeding, and a little less suited for agriculture. As long as the exportation of the Argentine meat to Europe and North America was impossible, the economy of Argentina did not really take off. For centuries, Buenos Aires remained a

16.

Buenos Aires was founded twice. The first time, in 1534, it was founded by Don Pedro de Mendoza at an ill-chosen spot. Its inhabitants led by Domingo Martínez de Irala left the site, and went up the Paraguay River to found the colony of Asunción. By 1580 Asunción had grown strong and prosperous enough to re-found Buenos Aires on a site a few kilometers north of the abandoned settlement.

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rather small city. It was the capital of the viceroyalty of La Plata from 1776. In 1816 it became the capital of the new Republic of Argentina, thanks to General José de San Martín who, after having freed his own country, fought for the independence of Chile and Peru. In 1876, a French ship, called Le Frigorifique, conceived by Charles Tellier, came to Buenos Aires. It arrived from Rouen. It was the first refrigerator ship in the world, and Buenos Aires was its first destination. When she returned to Rouen, the ship was full of still-fresh Argentinean meat. The trip had demonstrated that exporting beef from Argentina to Europe was feasible and profitable. That triggered off a true economic boom in Argentina. Along with wheat, meat became the most important export of Argentina. Investments rolled in from all parts. Ever more numerous herds and a multitude of gauchos invaded the Pampa. An incredible railway network was built all around Buenos Aires, reaching every corner of the Pampa and cultivable regions. The population of Buenos Aires exploded: from 74,000 in 1850, it reached 830,000 in 1900. The city became one of the largest and richest cities of the world, a new Chicago built on the model of Paris. Immigrants flocked from Spain and Italy. From World War I to the aftermath of World War II, Argentina was the richest country in Latin America and one of the richest in the world, along with the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, with which it shared so much. Unfortunately, while the American Corridor and the revival of the Far East allowed those countries to maintain their status, the quite peripheral situation of Argentina with respect to the great topodynamic corridors came to impair its development. No more than São Paulo or Mexico, Buenos Aires had succeeded to create out of one of its tentacles an axis of development similar to the American Corridor. Yet an embryonic axis had developed. It went from Montevideo to Córdoba passing by Buenos Aires and Rosario. Unfortunately, that axis never reached the Pacific, and the links spun between Buenos Aires, Rosario, and Córdoba hardly extended to Montevideo, which is located on the other side of the Río de la Plata, in a country very concerned with its independence with respect to both Argentina and Brazil. Originally, Argentina and Uruguay both belonged to the viceroyalty of La Plata. In 1815, a certain José Artigas took advantage of the struggle that was going on in the rest of the viceroyalty of La Plata between the Spaniards and the independence fighters led by San Martín, and formed an independent government in the part of the viceroyalty that was to the northeast of the Río de la Plata and to the east of the Uruguay River. Portuguese Brazil reacted by invading the whole area, which was little populated by gauchos and the Charrúas Indians and became a part of Brazil from 1816 to 1828. With the help of the Argentines the people of Uruguay struggled to free themselves from the Portugo-Brazilian rule.

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Great Britain intervened, and in 1828 Uruguay officially became independent. In 1832 the gauchos definitely overcame the Charrúas Indians they exterminated. An internal struggle followed that opposed the conservatives backed by Argentina and the liberals backed by Great Britain and France, which led to a civil war from 1839 to 1851. These events benefited Brazil, which annexed the entire northern part of the country in 1851. Since then, Uruguay relies on the equilibrium of its relations with its two powerful neighbors. Montevideo was founded in 1726. Its development and that of Uruguay are a smaller-scale replica of those of Buenos Aires and Argentina. In both cases, we find about the same Pampa, the same exports (meat, leather, wool, wheat, and sugar), the same high level of urbanization, the same domination of the main city, the same importance of railways and the same domination of a great port over the whole country. The main waterway of Uruguay is the Río Negro, a tributary of the Uruguay River. Montevideo is far from the Río Negro and in fact the links between the Atlantic port of Montevideo and the interior of the country are provided by the railroad network. The agglomeration of Montevideo has a population of 1.75 million inhabitants, which represents almost half the population of Uruguay, whose rate of urbanization is practically ninety percent. In 1920, Montevideo already had 700,000 dwellers, and it was then larger than Mexico City, which had only 600,000. Since 1975, its growth has considerably slowed down, and it has been supplanted by about fifteen other Latin American cities. In Chile, Santiago17 had only 510,000 inhabitants in 1920. It is one of the cities, which have passed Montevideo since : today, its population reaches 5.4 million, three times the population of Montevideo. As in Argentina and Uruguay, the rate of urbanization of Chile is very high (85.4%), and its main city, Santiago, counts for a third of the national population. What most distinguishes Santiago from Buenos Aires and Montevideo is its great mine wealth. Santiago is literally surrounded with major mines of copper, nitrate, iron, manganese, silver, and molybdenum. However, Chile is also an agricultural country. Like São Paulo, Santiago is situated at a small distance (about 100 kilometers) from the coast of which it is separated by the mountains, and, like São Paulo, it is located at the entrance of an agricultural valley, the Valle Central. It is linked by railway and road to the important port of Valparaíso, which was founded in 1536, five years before Santiago. Both cities are close to the Cumbre Pass where the railway and the road linking Valparaíso to

17.

Chile was settled directly from Peru by Pedro de Valdivia, who arrived in late 1540 in command of 200 Spaniards and a large force of Peruvians. He founded Santiago de Chile on February 12, 1541.

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Buenos Aires cross the Andes. That transcontinental axis is the only true one of all South America. It cannot be compared with the New York-Los Angeles axis from the viewpoints of its rather limited length, its traffic or its impact on the economic development, which remained limited until the creation of the Mercosur. Among other things, that free-trade zone attempts to strengthen the links between Chile and Argentina. Those two countries, which have so many things in common, belonged to the same administrative entity only between 1552 and 1776. Before the arrival of the Spaniards, the northern region of Chile was part of the Inca Empire while the south of present-day Chile and Argentina was not. From 1552 to 1776, the present territories of the two countries depended on the viceroyalty of Peru. In 1776, Argentina was placed under the authority of the new viceroyalty of La Plata, while Chile continued to belong to the viceroyalty of Peru. At the time of independence, the two countries followed different paths. Geography explains this as it explains the strange shape of the Chilean territory, which is constituted of a 4,200-kilometerlong and 200-kilometer-wide stripe of coastal land along the Pacific Ocean. It extends from the 17th parallel to the 57th parallel south. Because of the form of the Andes cordillera, which constitutes its eastern border, Chile is 21 times longer than wide, which has no equivalent in the world. Another characteristic of Chile is the fact that, given the narrowness of the Pacific Basin, none of the numerous waterways of Chile is long or important. From a political point of view, Chile differed during a long period from the other Latin America n countries by its long democratic tradition. The Chilean fight for independence lasted from 1810 to 1818, when San Martín and O’Higgins won the battle of Maipú and gained independence. From the end of the dictatorship of O’Higgins in 1823 to the fall of Salvador Allende in 1973, democracy prevailed most of the time in Chile, although there have been some periods of trouble and strong power. The dictatorship of General Agusto Pinochet lasted from 1973 to 1990. Since then, the country has returned to his long democratic tradition in a context of prosperity the Pinochet regime contributed to create despite its violence, crimes, repression, and excesses. The Chilean economy is entirely export-oriented, and, till the forming of the Mercosur, its links with the rest of South America were rather weak. While the three countries of North America have all succeeded to establish links between the Atlantic and the Pacific, South America remains divided in two parts: the Pacific front and the Atlantic side. To the north of Tierra del Fuego, where Chile controls the Strait of Magellan, among the thirteen South American countries, only one, Colombia, has an access to both oceans.

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s FROM AMERICA TO JAPAN AND ASIA IN THE AMERICAN CORRIDOR The westward movement from New York to Los Angeles in the American Corridor also reached Asia in 1854. The expedition of Commodore Perry, of the US Navy, which forced Japan to open its ports to foreign ships, has been evoked earlier in this book. That event had repercussions on all of East Asia. To fully understand the unique character of the evolution initiated by this incident, one must consider the basic trends that had prevailed up to then in the evolution of the Far East. The development of China had been marked by the transfer between 800 and 900 of the economic power from the Loess Plateau, the cradle of the Chinese urbanization, to the valley of the Yangtze River, following the Asian Corridor, while the population movements during the invasions went, most of the time, from north to south. From a religious point of view, from India, Buddhism had followed the Silk Road and the Asian Corridor, and had reached China, then Korea, and finally Japan. As for the influences coming from the west of the Persian Gulf, those of the Arabs and, later, the Europeans, they had penetrated into China through the Great Corridor from the Xi Jiang (Pearl River), and then the Yangtze River, and into Japan by the East China Sea and, particularly, the port of Deshima. Culturally, the prevailing influences went from west to east, from China towards Korea and then Japan, or from India towards China and Southeast Asia. Secondarily, it happened that they also went from north to south, as in the case of the Chinese influence in Indochina. In sum, till 1854, the movements and influences going from west to east systematically prevailed over those going from east to west. This changed radically in the aftermath of the incident of the Bay of Tokyo. It has been stressed that urbanization started in Japan much later than in China. However, its progression was very fast. Some analysts estimate that in 1800 Tokyo was more populated than London and that it was the largest city in the world (which is rather surprising). But the Japanese rate of urbanization was not yet high at that time. That rate reached eighteen percent just around 1920, when Japan was clearly less urbanized than Latin America, for example. The rapid rise of the Japanese urbanization rate is posterior to 1920. In the decade that followed, the annual growth rate of the urban population of Japan was 4.4%, and it grew in the 1930s to 6%, which was probably unprecedented anywhere in the world. That evolution was all the more noteworthy that, at the time of Commodore Perry’s arrival in the Bay of Tokyo, Japan remained a backward and inward-looking country much behind the West and even China from a technological point of view. What happened during the century going from 1850 to 1950 can be summed up in the following way. On March 31, 1854, the Convention of Kanagawa was signed between Japan and the United States. It designated the

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ports of Yokohama and Kobe as “treaty ports” open to foreigners. In January 1867, Emperor Komei tenno died and was succeeded by Emperor Mutsuhito-Meiji tenno (“Mutsuhito” was the emperor’s name while he was alive, and “Meiji tenno” is his name since his death). In November 8 and 9 of the same year, the last Shôgun, Hitotsubashi Keiti, also called Yoshinobu (of the Tokugawa family), resigned. On April 6, 1868, Emperor Mutsuhito-Meiji tenno proclaimed the Five Articles Charter announcing the suppression of feudalism and the westernization of the Empire. Under the emperor, direct imperial rule returned to Japan for the first time since the eleventh century, and the Shogun capital Edo became the imperial capital Tokyo. The famous Meiji Era had begun. On January 1, 1869, Emperor Mutsuhito-Meiji tenno published the “Program for the new era.” In 1871, feudalism was officially abolished, Japanese were sent abroad to study, and foreign technicians and teachers were encouraged to come and work in Japan. The same year, the yen, based on the gold standard, replaced the ryo as the official Japanese currency, the equality of everybody for taxation purposes was proclaimed, and education was made compulsory. In 1872, the Bank of Japan was founded, regulatory military service was imposed, the samurais lost their military monopoly, and the army was reorganized under French instructors following French and Prussian models. On February 27, 1879, Japan manifested for the first time since 1592 and 1597, when Japan had attempted (to no avail) to invade Korea, a will to break its insular isolation and exert an influence on the continent: it obtained access to three Korean ports. In September 1877, after the revolt and the defeat of Kagoshima, the cast of the samurais was abolished. On February 11, 1889, Emperor Mutsuhito-Meiji tenno made public the Constitutional Act that transformed the absolute monarchy into a constitutional one. The year after, the first Diet convened. On July 31, 1894, the westward movement from Japan inside the American Corridor took an aggressive form: Japan declared war on China, and invaded Korea and Manchuria. It was the beginning of a long process in three stages. During the first one, Japan infiltrated the American Corridor by taking control of Korea in 1905, Manchuria in 1932, the Chinese region of Jehol in 1933, and the region of Peking-Beijing in 1935. In the second phase, Japan extended its domination to the Great Corridor by capturing the regions of Nanking-Nanjing and Shanghai in 1937. Finally, the third stage involved conquests in the Asian Corridor: those of Hong Kong in 1938, CantonGuangzhou in 1939, the Philippines in 1942, and the Dutch Indies (Indonesia) in 1942. Let us reconstitute the succession of events. In 1895, Japan eliminated the suzerainty of the Chinese Qing dynasty over Korea (the Qing dynasty originated from Manchuria and reigned over China). On April 17 of the same year, defeated China signed the Treaty of

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Shimonoseki by which China ceded Taiwan and the Pescadores Islands, and recognized the independence of Korea. Fearing the domination of Japan, Korea then developed its links with Russia, which, in conformity with the eastward movement stemming from Europe in the American Corridor, was increasingly present in Manchuria, particularly at Liaodong on the Yellow Sea and in Korea. The Russians were not the only Europeans to exert an influence over the region: the Germans settled in the Bay of Jiaozhou, and the French, at Guangzhouwan. In order to counterbalance Germany, France, and Russia, Great Britain signed an accord with Japan in 1902. The clash between the eastward movement coming from Europe and the westward one coming from the United States and Japan took the form of the Russo-Japanese War, triggered off on February 8, 1904 by the sinking by Japan of three Russian ships anchored at Port Arthur before any declaration of war. The collision between the two topodynamic movements occurred on the Yellow Sea, on the Sea of Japan, in Korea, and in Manchuria, that is, a little to the east of the antipode of New York inside the American Corridor. On August 10, 1904, the Japanese destroyed the Russian fleet of Vladivostock. Less than one year later, on May 27, 1905, the Russian Baltic fleet arrived, after a journey of eight months all around Europe, Africa, and Asia, in the Strait of Tsushima that separates Korea from Japan, was in its turn destroyed by the Japanese fleet. On September 5, 1905, the Treaty of Portsmouth (U.S.) ended the conflict. Japan received some Russian territories (the southern part of Sakhalin Island), a dominating position in Manchuria, and a protectorate over Korea. Five years later, on June 24, 1910, Japan annexed Korea. In 1912, Emperor Mutsuhito-Meiji tenno died and was succeeded by Emperor Yoshihito, named Taisho tenno after his death in 1926. This put an end to the Meiji Era, during which the Japanese population has passed from about 30 million in 1868 to 52 million in 1913. On August 23, 1914, true to its alliance with Great Britain, Japan sided with Russia and waged war on Germany. At the end of the war, thanks to the German defeat, Japan obtained the German possessions in the Pacific. The Japanese victory at the end of the Russo-Japanese War and that of the Allies, including Japan, at the end of World War I just accentuated the westward movement. In 1926, Emperor Hirohito, renamed Showa tenno at his death in 1989, succeeded his father, Emperor Yoshihito (Taisho tenno), and the Japanese westward expansion received a new impulse. In 1932, Japan invaded China and captured Shanghai on January 28, 1932, and then Manchuria, in 1933, where it created the Manchukuo Empire uniting Manchuria and the Chinese region of Jehol under puppet Emperor Puyi of the Manchu Qing dynasty. Puyi was the former emperor of China; he is known as the “Last Emperor.” In March 1932, the Japanese quit Shanghai after an armistice. This was just a temporary withdrawal. Five years later, in 1937, Japan declared war

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on China and invaded the regions of Inner Mongolia, Peking-Beijing, Kiangsu, Shanghai, and Canton-Guangzhou. In 1938, Japan similarly invaded the regions of Taiyuan (Shanxi), Kaifeng, Ningbo, Wuhan-Hankou, and Xiamen (Amoy). In 1940, the Japanese expansion extended to North Vietnam. In 1941, with a population of 74 million inhabitants and allied with the triumphant Hitlerian Germany, Japan made one of the greatest mistakes of the Germany-Italy-Japan Axis. Before any declaration of war on the United States, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and waged war against the United States. That attack forced the United States to enter the war against Hitler and its allies, which they had refused to do till then. The American counterattack was progressive, the enormous production apparatus of the American economy having to be reconverted for military purposes. During that period, Japan moved ahead. In 1942, it took control of French Indochina, Thailand, Burma, British Malaysia, the Netherlands East Indies (Indonesia), and the Philippines. Three years later, the time of capitulation came. On August 6, 1945, the United States dropped an atom bomb on Hiroshima, and then, on August 9, a second one on Nagasaki. On August 14, Japan surrendered, three months after the capitulations of the German army at Reims, on May 7, and at Berlin, on May 9. The official capitulation of Japan was signed on September 2 on the USS Missouri, and the country was placed under American supervision. A new era opened for Japan. Thereafter the westward movement took a pacific form, that of the recovery and expansion of an economy which, after the war, was totally ruined. That expansion followed the same trajectories as the military expansion which had preceded. It was first oriented towards South Korea inside the American Corridor. Then it followed the Great Corridor towards Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Shanghai. Finally, it went through the Asian Corridor towards Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, and Indonesia. The economic growth of Japan after the war was all the more impressing that the country has little natural resources. From close to nothing, Japan’s share in the world production rose to four percent in 1960 and to fifteen percent in 2000, when Japan had become the world’s second economy, first car and ship producer, second steel and chemicals producer, and third textile producer, while being at the avant-garde of the electronics, robotics, biotechnologies, multimedia, and new materials sectors. The industrial sector then represented ninety-five percent of the Japanese exports though the tertiary sector included fifty-eight percent of Japanese workers. Tokyo, which had been at the center of the military expansion, also was central to the economic one. Today, it is still, with London, one of New York’s main rivals. Its metropolitan region, called Kanto, has 31 million inhabitants in a country whose rate of urbanization is ninety percent. Tokyo constitutes one of the three great economic poles of the world with New York and the

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London-Paris pole. Nevertheless, it remains one of the less cosmopolitan great cities of the world. Its port complex, which includes the ports of Yokohama and Kanto as well as that of Tokyo, and its financial sector are among the two or three most important in the world. The agglomeration of Tokyo is not alone at the head of the Japanese urban hierarchy. Osaka, Kobe, and Kyoto form together the agglomeration of Kansai, which represents 17.6 million inhabitants. Moreover, between the metropolitan region of Tokyo and that of Osaka lies the Chukyo-Tokai region of Nagoya, with 8.6 million inhabitants. Those three agglomerations, all situated on the Honshu Island and oriented towards the Pacific instead of Asia, represent fifty percent of the population of Japan and sixty-three percent of the Japanese gross national product. Osaka is located in the delta of the Yodo River, which flows into the Bay of Osaka. Numerous canals cross the city, which lies at the center of an important railway network. Already, in 1700, Osaka was an important city. Its population was about 400,000 dwellers. Osaka has a very long history. In the fourth century, long before Nara, it was the capital of Japan under the name of Naniwa. In the sixteenth century, it became the stronghold of General and Prime Minister Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who exercised power over Japan till his being defeated by Tokugawa Ieyasu, the founder of the Shogun dynasty of the Tokugawas. In the eighteenth century, Osaka became Japan’s main commercial center. The evolution of the Japanese urban system is characterized by three stages. In the beginning, a multitude of small regional urban systems developed. Then, in the beginning of the seventeenth century, two important systems emerged: one, to the west, around Osaka and Kyoto, and the other, to the east, around Edo-Tokyo. Around the end of the period of the Shôguns of the Tokugawa family, in the first half of the nineteenth century, both systems merged, and Tokyo definitively took the lead of the urban macrosystem. That evolution differs from the one of China, the regional urban systems having survived in China till the end of the nineteenth century.18 Some historians estimate that the period of fast industrialization and major urban development experienced by Japan from 1875 was preceded, as in the case of protoindustrialization in England, by a phase of de-urbanization, which could have lasted from 1800 to 1875 approximately.19 18.

19.

Gilbert Rozman, “East Asian urbanization in the nineteenth century: Comparisons with Europe,” in Urbanization in History: A Process of Dynamic Interactions, ed. A.M. van der Woude, Akira Hayami, and Jan de Vries (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 60–70. Ibid., 66–67, and Jan de Vries, European Urbanization , 1500 –1800 (London and Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), 244–245. Bairoch disagrees with this analysis, and does not identify a period of urban decline in the history of Japan during the nineteenth century (op. cit., 359–361).

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The urbexplosion dominated by Tokyo extends beyond the borders of Japan and includes the Korean urban system. Korea is a peninsula which faces Japan and is linked to China and Russia by Manchuria. Four powers of the American Corridor have exerted a determining influence on Korea. China exerted suzerainty over the country from 1637 to 1895. Japan took control of it in 1905 and annexed it from 1910 to 1945. The Soviet Union protected North Korea from 1945 to 1991, while the United States have protected South Korea since 1945. In the course of its history, Korea has been both united and independent for only 10 years, from 1895 to 1905. The rest of the time, Korea has had to accept being either a vassal state, a protectorate, a colony, or a divided country. Modernization and industrialization reached Korea about twenty years after they did Japan. The westward movement within the American Corridor started in Asia, at Tokyo, in 1854. The modernization of Japan truly started around 1875, and Korea’s did around 1895 under the influence of Japan. That being said, the urbanization of Korea goes back much further, probably to the four centuries of Chinese occupation going from 108 BC to AD 313. Before that, organized societies existed in Korea, but no real city. The occupying Chinese set up command centers that gave birth to genuine cities. Till the end of the nineteenth century, the Korean and Japanese urban systems were totally independent from one another. Their binding resulted from a complex evolution which began with the opening of Korea to foreign influences. In 1866, Korean forces repulsed two attacks by French warships. In 1871, a United States flotilla came to avenge the destruction of a U.S. merchant ship by the Koreans, but it was beaten back. Following these incidents, the regent Taewongun, who was King Kojong’s father, opted for a policy of isolationism similar to the one that prevailed in China. In 1873, Taewon-gun became so unpopular for the enormous financial burden he had imposed on the people that he had to resign. His influence was replaced with that of Queen Min and her relatives. Japan took advantage of the period of instability to dispatch a fleet and pressure Korea into signing a treaty of trade and friendship. The ports of Pusan, Wonsan, and Inch’on were opened to the Japanese in 1876. This launched a long evolution that led to the progressive decline of the Chinese influence and to the transformation of Korea into a satellite state of Japan. In 1884, the Li-Ito Agreement was signed, which guaranteed a SinoJapanese balance of power in the Korean Peninsula. In 1894, tensions between China and Japan reached a climax and a war broke out. Japan declared war on Korea, and its forces crossed the Yalu River into China. Japan emerged victorious and, in 1895, by the Treaty of Shimonoseki, China was forced to recognize that its suzerainty over Korea had lapsed, and Korea became independent. During the following years, Koreans attempted to consolidate their independence by playing Russia against Japan. This led to the Russo-Japanese

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War, which resulted in the victory of Japan, and the Treaty of Portsmouth that was signed through the mediation of the United States, recognizing Japan’s undisputed supremacy in Korea. In 1910 Japan simply annexed Korea. Japanese rule was absolutely ruthless, oppressive, and exploitative for Korea. But the Japanese invested massively in the country. They built a nationwide transportation and communications network, established a new monetary and financial system, and modernized the Korean urban system while integrating it to the Japanese one. The 1945 Japanese defeat brought an opportunity for Korea to recover independence. However, the end of the rivalry between China and Japan unfortunately led to the rise of the struggle between the Soviet Union and the United States. At first, it was thought that the division of the country into a communist North Korea and a liberal South Korea could be a solution, but it soon became apparent that conflict could not be avoided. War broke out in June 1950. The North Korean troops launched a full-scale invasion of South Korea. The war concluded with an armistice on July 27, 1953. It had lasted for three years and one month, and accounted for about four million casualties, including civilians. Forty-three percent of Korea’s industrial facilities were destroyed and thirty-three percent of its homes devastated. The Korean War involved Korean, Soviet, Chinese, and UN troops. The soldiers of the United Nations were mainly American, but also British, Canadian, French, Belgian, Turkish, Thai, and Philippine (with some other nations participating). In the end, Korea remained divided. The communist regime of North Korea survived the Soviet regime. But while South Korea was experiencing an economic takeoff thanks to industrialization, North Korea lived under very harsh conditions and occasionally starved. Today, the urban system of South Korea clearly belongs to the Tokyo urbexplosion, and the average income of a South Korean is about ten times that of a North Korean. Between 1973 and 1999, of all the emerging countries of Asia, South Korea experienced the highest increase of per capita product, thanks to an annual per capita product growth rate of 6.1%. The countries that followed were Singapore and China with a rate of 5.4%, Taiwan with 5.3%, Thailand with 4.8%, Hong Kong and Malaysia with 4.1%, Sri Lanka with 3.3%, and India with 3%. In the urbexplosion dominated by Tokyo, the Seoul agglomeration occupies a top-grade position. By its population of 20 million dwellers, it comes right behind the agglomeration of Tokyo and before that of Osaka, whose production nonetheless exceeds that of the Seoul region. Seoul is located on the Han River, only 60 kilometers from the port of Inchon on the very strategic Yellow Sea. Like Tokyo and Peking-Beijing, Seoul lies almost on the central axis of the American Corridor, about halfway between the two cities, a little closer to Peking-Beijing. It stresses its originality with respect to the two other cities while serving as a bridge between them. Among the differences that

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distinguish Seoul and South Korea from their Japanese, Chinese, and Russian neighbors, there is christianity, which entered Korea from China around 1750. South Korea is the most Christian country in Asia after the Philippines. About twenty percent of South Koreans are Christian (this represents more than 9 million persons). After having touched Korea, the westward movement reached Manchuria, where it met with the eastward movement coming from Russia. The role played in Korea by Japan in the building of railroads and modern infrastructures was initially filled in Manchuria by Tsarist Russia. In 1896, deeply disturbed by the rising Japanese power, China concluded a secret alliance with Russia granting the Russians the right to build the Chinese Eastern Railway across northern Manchuria, from Chita in Siberia to the port of Vladivostok on the Sea of Japan. In 1898 Russia intimidated China into granting it the right to build a connecting railway linking Harbin, located at the point where the Chinese Eastern Railway crossed the Sungari-Songhua River, a tributary of the Amur River, to the city of Mukden-Shenyang and two ports of the Liao-Tung Peninsula on the Yellow Sea: Port Arthur-Lüshun and Dairen-Dalian (those two cities have since been merged under the name of Lüda). Moreover, Russia also obtained a 25-year lease of the Liao-Tung Peninsula, which China had ceded to Japan in 1895, but which Japan had been compelled to promptly return to China by Russia, supported by Germany and France. Already present in the Sea of Japan, Tsarist Russia thus got a foothold in the region of the Yellow Sea. The city of Harbin was at the center of its penetration strategy, but it was the city of Mukden-Shenyang that was in the heart of Japan’s strategy. Before 1896, Harbin was a market town and a minor fishing village on the Sungari River, a 1,800 kilometer-long tributary of the important Amur River. In 1896, it became the construction center for the Chinese Eastern Railway and later, an important crossroads and an industrial city in the context of numerous political upheavals. Actually, since 1896 Harbin has had many different rulers. From 1896 to 1900, it was in Chinese Manchuria, but within the Russian zone of influence. It was occupied by the Russian troops between 1900 and 1905. After the Russo-Japanese War, it was put under a joint ChineseJapanese administration. In 1931, it was occupied by the Japanese. In 1932, Japan created the Manchukuo Empire (Harbin was named Pinkiang during the Manchukuo period) that had Hsinking-Changchun as capital. On March 1, 1934, the Japanese enthroned the former emperor of China, Puyi, as emperor of Manchukuo under the name of Kangde. In 1945, Harbin was occupied by the Soviet troops and, in 1946, the Soviet forces were replaced by the Chinese Communist army. Since 1949 Harbin has been part of the Popular Chinese Republic. Through all those political changes, Harbin continued to grow. Its population rose from about 41,500 inhabitants by 1911 to 332,000 by 1931,

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662,000 by 1940, 750,000 by 1942, 1.16 million by 1953, and 2 million by 1970. Today the population of its metropolitan area reaches 4.5 million dwellers. It must be noted that after the Russian Revolution of 1917 Harbin became a haven for refugees from Russia, and for a time it was the largest Russian city outside the Soviet Union. Even in 1938, under the Manchukuo Empire dominated by the Japanese, 27,000 Russians lived in the city. Under the Chinese communist regime, Harbin and its region carried on industrializing. They even were at the avant-garde of the industrialization of China, which largely developed from the American Corridor, Manchuria having been for a long time the most industrialized region of China. Harbin developed into the center of one of the most important Chinese industrial complexes based on a rich and diversified agriculture, on the forests and mineral wealth of the surrounding region, which is rich in coal, lead, copper, iron, and tungstene, as well as on the five railway lines that go through Harbin and the city’s important port on the Sungari River. That being said, Harbin is not the main industrial center of Manchuria. That title falls to Shenyang, the former Mukden. At the time of the confrontation between Russia and Japan, Harbin was at the center of Russian strategy because it constituted the main crossroads of the railways Russia controlled. On the other hand, it is the city of MukdenShenyang, also controlled by the Russians in January 1905, which mainly interested the Japanese because it was located at the crossing of the Chinese Eastern Railway and the road linking Peking-Beijing and Tianjin to Seoul and the Korean port of Pusan, which directly faces Japan. Mukden-Shenyang lies on the Hun River, a left-bank tributary of the Liao River which flows south towards the Yellow Sea. Harbin is a new city that was no more than a village before 1896 while Mukden-Shenyang is an old city. Before AD 900, it was a frontier post along the edge of a wall, known as the Willow Palisade, that separated the southern part of Manchuria under the control of China from the rest of Manchuria that was under the control of nomadic and tribal peoples. In 1625, the rising Manchu dynasty of the Qings conquered Shenyang, which they renamed Mukden, which is a Manchu name, and chose as their capital. In 1644, the Qings supplanted the Mings on the Chinese imperial throne and moved their capital from Mukden-Shenyang to Peking-Beijing. Booming economic development came much later when the Russian railway between Port Arthur-Lüshun and Harbin was built in 1898. The railway went through Mukden, which became a railway hub with the building of the other strategic railroad linking Seoul and Peking-Beijing through Pyongyang (North Korea), Mukden-Shenyang, and Tianjin. Today, MukdenShenyang remains, next to Peking-Beijing, the leading railway center of modern China.

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Mukden was the site of the most important battle of the RussoJapanese War. Mukden was a Russian stronghold. The Battle of Mukden took place from February 19 to March 10, 1905. On March 10, Russia surrendered and the city fell to the Japanese. That decisive victory allowed the Japanese to win the war. The Japanese westward trend within the American Corridor had triumphed over the Russian eastward one. From the takeover of Manchuria by Japan in 1931, Mukden became the most important Japanese colonial city, and transformed into a great industrial city thanks to the extremely rich coal and iron mines of its region, which became one of the most important steel-producing centers in the world. The population of Mukden was 200,000 inhabitants in 1920, 510,000 inhabitants in 1935, 770,000 inhabitants in 1938 (including 91,000 Japanese), and 1.2 million inhabitants in 1941. After the Japanese defeat of 1945, Mukden took its former name of Shenyang and established itself as one of the main industrial centers of modern China. Today, the metropolitan area of Shenyang has 6.4 million inhabitants. It is the most important agglomeration in Manchuria and the sixth most important in China next to Shanghai (12 million), Peking-Beijing (9.4 million), Xianggang-Hong Kong (8.2 million), Chongqing (7 million), and Tianjin (6.8 million). After having swept Manchuria, the westward movement within the American Corridor reached Peking and its port, Tianjin. Present-day China has three autonomous municipalities that are not part of provinces: Peking-Beijing, Shanghai, and Tientsin-Tianjin, which has a long history and is located at a ford on the Hai He River that goes from the Peking region to the Yellow Sea. The city lies at a distance of 120 kilometers from Peking and 56 kilometers from the Gulf of Bo Hai on the Yellow Sea. It was the northern terminus of the Imperial Grand Canal after its being linked, from 1282–1283, to Peking by the Hai River. Since then Tianjin has been a major transshipment center (especially for cereal) and the commercial gateway to Peking. Originally, a ford allowing to cross the Hai River lay at its site: by the way, Tianjin means “Heavenly Ford.” Under the Ming dynasty, from 1368 to 1644, Tianjin became the leading economic center of northern China because of its role as the Imperial Grand Canal terminus. It also boomed because during that period the urbanization of China was progressing fast. It is estimated that, in 1500, when China’s population was around 110–140 million, the rate of urbanization of China reached about eleven to fourteen percent, which was superior to the European rate at the same time. Later, between 1700 and 1850, China experienced a strong demographic growth that the Chinese cities did not succeed to follow. From 460 million, the Chinese population tripled, reaching 420 or 440 million inhabitants. On the other hand, the urban population just doubled at the very moment urbanization was re-launched in Europe. The beginning of the industrial era in Europe coincided in China with a relative decline, which favored the penetration of European colonialism into China, especially through Tianjin.

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From 1858 on, Tianjin led the way to the opening of China to modernization. The city’s modern economic development started with the Treaties of Tianjin, signed on June 26 and 27, 1858, which ended the Anglo-French War of 1856–1858 against China (not to be confused with the Opium War that ended with the Nanking Treaty of 1842). The Treaties of Tianjin authorized the establishment of British and French concessions in Tianjin and in ten other Chinese ports, those eleven ports being opened to the British, French, American, and Russian ships. China having manifested some reluctance to implement those treaties, the Allies occupied Tianjin on August 23, 1860. The settling of foreigners just amplified in the following years in spite of some attempts by China to slow down the process. This led to the Boxer War of 1900, during which an international force of 18,000 took the city and destroyed its fortifications. The Allied Western forces occupied the city from 1900 to 1907. So, between 1895 and 1902, additional concessions were given to Japan, Germany, Russia, Austria-Hungary, Italy, and Belgium. Meanwhile, the Huang (Yellow) River had shifted its course and the Imperial Grand Canal had become silted up in the early 1850s. Progressively, Tianjin transformed from a fluvial terminus of the Grand Canal into the main ocean port serving the Yellow River network and the Hai River, as well as a major railway crossroads. Three main railroads were built: one coming from Mukden-Shenyang, a second from Peking-Beijing and a third from Jinan on the Yellow River. In 1937, the westward movement stemming from Japan overwhelmed the eastward movement originating from Europe. From the beginning of the Sino-Japanese War of 1937–1945, the Japanese occupied Tianjin, and, in 1939, the Japanese blockaded its British and French concessions. As in Manchuria, the Japanese greatly improved the infrastructures. They built the new harbor of Tanggu, which is closer to the Yellow Sea, and Tianjin kept modernizing. After the Japanese defeat of 1945, Tianjin remained under the control of the Nationalist troops of Chiang Kai-shek until mid-January 1949, when the city was captured by the Communists. From 200,000 inhabitants in 1840, the population of Tianjin rose to 1 million in 1939, then it climbed to 4.3 million in 1970 and is at 6.8 million today. Tianjin is the second largest port of China, next to Shanghai, and its third manufacturing center, next to Shanghai and Mukden-Shenyang. The steel and motor industries are particularly present in the city. In terms of per capita income, except for the very rich special region of Xianggang-Hong Kong, the Tianjin region is third after the Shanghai and Peking-Beijing regions, and ahead of the Hangzhou region, which is fourth. The Canton-Guangzhou region is fifth, the Kiangsu-Jiangsu region to the north of Nanking-Nanjing is sixth, and the seventh is the Mukden-Shenyang region. It must be observed that all the regions of the above list belong to the three topodynamic corridors. They are either crossed or very close to the three topodynamic central circles.

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The American Corridor is represented with the regions of Peking-Beijing, Tianjin, and Mukden-Shenyang. These regions are mainly based on heavy industry and government (in the case of Peking-Beijing). The Great Corridor includes the regions of Xianggang-Hong Kong, Shanghai, Hangzhou, and Canton-Guangzhou. These regions are more light-industry-and-trade-oriented than the regions of the American Corridor. As for the Asian Corridor, it assembles the regions of Nanking-Nanjing and Kiangsu-Jiangsu. The main role of the Asian Corridor is to join the two other corridors. The westward movement stemming from Japan wormed its way first into the American Corridor, then into the Great Corridor and, finally, into the Asian Corridor. Despite the Japanese defeat of 1945, and thanks to the numerous “economic miracles” observed in the region since, the westward and southwestward movement still prevails in the three corridors of the Far East. Our journey through seven thousand years of history will conclude in Peking-Beijing, this 2,750-year-old city which has remained one of the world’s largest cities for at least 500 years. With Babylon, Rome, Constantinople, Baghdad, Cairo, Paris, London, and Tokyo, it shares the apron of the world history. It is no port, no fluvial crossroads, no great agricultural city, no great commercial city, and nevertheless its strategic situation at the entrance of the Chinese Great Plain and its favorable location with respect to the Asian Corridor and the American Corridor have made it a mag nif icent millennial city. The Far East is dominated by the triangle formed by the three Great Corridors. The three vertices of that triangle are Tokyo, at the crossing of the Great and American corridors, Shanghai, at the intersection of the Great and Asian corridors, and Peking, at the point of tangency between the Asian and American corridors. We visited Peking for the first time in the context of the emergence of urbanization in the Asian Corridor. We returned to it for a second time in the context of the progression of the Great Ebb in the Asian Corridor. Here, it will be examined in an unprecedented context where the wind of history blows from east to west. In 1860, for the first time, Western troops, coming from the eastern coast, invaded Peking. They were British and French, and they took control of the city in the context of the 1858–1860 War, when the central power was weakened by the Taiping Rebellion led by Hong Xiuquan, who pretended to be Jesus’ brother and founded the dynasty of Taiping. That rebellion lasted from 1851 to 1864 and threatened Peking, which was on the verge of submitting to Hong Xiuquan when the British and French troops intervened and saved the Qing dynasty by helping it to defeat Hong Xiuquan’s partisans. Thanks to those events, Great Britain and France consolidated their presence in China and in Peking and contributed to transform that city into an important industrial production center, while, traditionally, Peking was above all a center of consumption living on the taxes and food brought from

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all parts of China through the Imperial Grand Canal. The main factor that triggered the transformation of Peking into a production center was the building of railways. The main railway linked the capital to the port of Tianjin and Shanghai. A second railway linked the capital to Manchuria, MukdenShenyang, and Harbin; a third linked it to the Loess Plateau, Xi’an, and the “cradle of China,” and a fourth linked it to Mongolia. Peking became one of China’s most important railway crossroads. Later, in 1920, in the Western Hills close to the city, ore and anthracite deposits were developed and a steel industry emerged in the region. Steels plants were built, and their highquality steel production supplied such growing industries as machine building, electrical engineering, and precision-instrument manufacturing. Thereafter, the industrial structure diversified and Peking became one of China’s major industrial centers. That long modernization of Peking often occurred in a context of great political instability. After the Taiping Rebellion came the Moslem revolts in the provinces of Shaanxi and Gansu (in the part of the Asian Corridor that lies to the northwest of Xi’an), the cession of China’s rights over Eastern Siberia to Russia in 1860, over Indochina to France in 1885, and over Burma-Myanmar to Great Britain in 1886, the war with Japan from 1894 to 1895, the Boxer War in 1900, the Russo-Japanese War, especially in Manchuria, in 1904 and 1905, and the end of the millennial Chinese Empire in 1911. Followed the election of Sun Yat-sen as president of the Republic in 1921, the succession of Ch’iang Kai-shek (Jiang Jieshi), who was elected president in 1928, the Long March of Mao Tse-tung from 1934 to 1936, the occupation of Peking by the Japanese from 1937 to 1945, and the triumph of the Communists in October 1949. The communist victory did not calm down the country. Mao led the Hundred Flowers campaign in 1956 and 1957, and then the Great Leap Forward of 1958 to 1960, which resulted in a famine and 30 million casualties. The rupture with the Soviet Union was consummated in 1960. Then came the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976, the rule of the Gang of Four in 1976 and 1977, the emergence of a New China with Deng Xiaoping in 1978, the incidents of Tiananmen Square in 1989, and the dismissal of the opponents to the new economic policy in 1992. The fact that Peking and all of China have succeeded to modernize and become key economic powers in such a troubled context tells volumes about the topodynamic forces that prevailed since the opening of the Chinese ports to foreign ships in 1842. In 1949, the Chinese Communists attempted to slow down the growth of Shanghai, which had become the economic penetration point for the West, but Shanghai continued to develop. They then tried to slow down urbanization by means of various controls, and urbanization continued to progress. In 1900, the Chinese rate of urbanization was around 8%, which was less than the rate of 9.5% observed elsewhere in the developing countries.

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In 1949, when the Communists took power, that rate had probably reached that of the rest of Asia, that is, about seventeen percent. The rate of urbanization of China is now estimated at thirty-six percent, and it is expected that it will reach sixty percent by 2023. The New China accepts that evolution and has decided to accompany it and to take advantage of it instead of thwarting it. Thus, in 1980, the Chinese government launched a policy of creation of Special Enterprise Zones (SEZ) intended to attract foreign investment. Those zones are located in the Great or Asian corridors, close to the intersection of the two corridors. In the Asian Corridor is the old port of AmoyXiamen (opposite Taiwan). In the Great Corridor lie the island of Hainan (close to Shanghai; it became a SEZ only in 1988), Shenzhen (close to Hong Kong), Zhuhai (near Macau), and Shantou (to the northeast of Hong Kong). In order to illustrate the success of these zones, let us mention the example of Shenzhen, which grew from a rural town of 23,000 inhabitants in 1979 to a huge agglomeration with three million inhabitants today. The wave coming from the east, from the United States and Japan, surges over South Korea, China, and Southeast Asia regardless of the political regime. Up to now, only North Korea resists the movement. That wave stemming from the American Corridor infiltrated the Great and Asian corridors, where it provoked unprecedented trend reversals. In the Great Corridor, two trend reversals have been observed through history, both west of the Persian Gulf. The first one was associated with the fall of Rome, and it gave birth to the Great Ebb, while the second one was caused by the discovery of America. East of the Persian Gulf, the eastward dominant movement had always prevailed. It has just been reversed by the westward wave coming from the American Corridor. Similarly, in the northern and southern parts of the Asian Corridor, the eastward movement had always triumphed till the arrival of the westward wave reversed that movement with the rise of the Japanese power. The emergence of the American Corridor out of the old Mongolo-American Corridor constitutes one of the most important spaceeconomic upheavals of the world history. Those observations are sufficient to prove it.

CHAPTER

12

Understanding Topodynamic Corridors

I

n order to deepen our understanding of topodynamic inertia and corridors, it is necessary to examine the process by which innovations spread through the geographical space. This will lead us, in a next step, to precise the true meaning of topodynamic corridors.

s THE CREATION AND SPREAD OF INNOVATIONS IN THE GEOGRAPHICAL SPACE As seen in the two previous chapters, the role of innovations becomes more and more important as world history unfolds. Are innovations immaterial or are their creation and diffusion influenced by geography? Here are some thoughts about this, suggested by the economic theory. Some authors have suggested that polarization could be partly explained by innovations. They were referring to the spatial nature and the spatial effects of innovation. The famous “growth-pole theory” bases the notion of regional and urban development on the idea that cities act as “growth poles” by favoring the creation and, later, diffusion of innovations. Since Schumpeter, everybody agrees that innovations (technical, commercial, financial, etc.) play a major role in economic progress and development.1 Their cycles (there seems to exist cycles during which innovations are comparatively numerous and cycles of fewer innovations) are geared to economic cycles. In times of depression, people and enterprises are led to take more risks and to innovate, whereas, in times of prosperity, the “risks of risking” are perceived as unnecessary. Conversely, it is through innovations that we emerge from recessions, and that a new period of prosperity can take place.

1.

Joseph A. Schumpeter, Theory of Economic Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 1912 and 1967); Joseph A. Schumpeter, Business Cycles: A Theoretical, Historical and Statistical Analysis of the Capitalist Process (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1939).

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The question here is not the importance of innovations in economic development. It is whether or not innovations play a major role in spatial polarization and dynamics of economic activities. Are innovations spacesensitive? Can they easily be transferred from one location to another? Are they more likely to appear and be adopted in cities and regions which are already well developed and economically aggressive, or can they appear anywhere and propel economic development wherever they appear, whatever the level of development of the location? This is a highly debatable topic, and it is not our intention to enter into the vast literature that goes from the traditional “growth-pole theory” to the more recent approach of the “innovative milieus.”2 It is true that innovations can circulate at the speed of information, and information can circulate at the speed of electricity, yet it is also true that all environments are not equally fit for producing, receiving, and introducing innovations. Actually, the environments that are the most favorable in that respect are often those where exists a synergy involving innumerable exchanges of information and very complex communication networks. Historically, such information nodes developed in cities and have come to be so identified with them that the very definition of cities implies that they be crossroads of ideas and exchanges of information. This leads many people to think, without questioning any further, that the more a society innovates, the more it is urban, and that the more it is urban, the more it innovates. There exists between cities and innovation processes such intercausality that, most of the time, it is almost impossible to distinguish the direction of the causalities. Thus, throughout history, many analysts have come to wonder whether writing had created cities or cities, writing, whether commercial agriculture had created cities or cities, commercial agriculture, whether metallurgy had fostered urbanization or urbanization, metallurgy, whether the revolution in the modes of transportation and communication had caused the second urban revolution or vice versa, whether the automobile and Fordism had produced the modern city or the other way around, etc. Even from a strictly theoretical point of view, the increases in the level of polarization resulting from the appearance of transportation networks or the transition from animal to relay transportation, and from relay to motorized transportation cannot be understood without referring to the notion of innovation. A polarized world can be conceived in a static context excluding the idea

2.

Bernard Planque, “Mutations du système productif et dynamiques territoriales dans les pays industrialisés, quelques incertitudes,’’ in Dynamique des activités et évolution des territoires, ed. Bernard Boureille and Bernard Guesnier (Poitiers : ADICUEER, 1994).

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of innovation; however, it is almost impossible to imagine a dynamic process of polarization without assuming the existence of at least one innovation. All seems to suggest that, once the polarizing process has been launched by at least one innovation, the polarization itself is likely to generate other innovations, which, most of the time, in their turn, favor a further polarization. In the end, the most amazing fact is that history has provided very few examples of innovations that have slowed down polarization, or at least urbanization, rather than accelerating them. Polarization-inducing innovations diffuse through channels of information and topodynamic corridors orient channels of information and, consequently, polarizing trends. Let us now have a theoretical reflection on the true meaning of topodynamic corridors.

s THE TRUE MEANING OF TOPODYNAMIC CORRIDORS While the concept of topodynamic inertia frightens those who, erroneously, see in it the sign of a determinism that leaves little room for the interventions of the states and regions, the concept of topodynamic corridor often bothers those who, also erroneously, perceive some kind of magic in it. Actually, it is not the existence of topodynamic corridors that is surprising, it is rather their inexistence which would be stunning, considering that the true basis of economic development lies in the intensity of the economic flows, and that those flows are clearly channeled. A little before Vance formulated its theory of the network systems, Whebell had proposed a theory of the urban systems based on the notion of “corridor,” which, in various aspects, resembled Vance’s theory.3 According to Whebell, development followed certain corridors of penetration, which took the form of routes of communication: waterways, railroads, mountain passes, natural paths, etc. The example of the fluvial ways was particularly inspiring since it was possible to follow step by step the successive development of cities by going up along certain axes such as the Nile, the Rhône, or the St. Lawrence.

3.

See James E. Vance, Jr., The Merchant’s World: The Geography of Wholesaling (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970); James E. Vance, Jr., “Cities of external trade in a feudal countryside,” Journal of Urban History 1 (1975): 484–488; C.F.J. Whebell, “Corridors: A theory of urban systems,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 59 (1969): 1–26.

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The fact that development corridors exist and they coincide with great axes of communication will surprise nobody, no more than the fact that, within those corridors, the economic power passes successively from one city to another following a systematic spatiotemporal order, as illustrated by so many historical evolutions. One can think of the shift of economic leadership from Sumer to Babylon on the Euphrates, from Memphis to Thebes on the Nile, from Marseille to Lyon on the Rhône, from Hamburg to Berlin on the Elbe and its tributaries, from Venice to Milan in the Po region, or from Quebec City to Montreal and then Toronto, Detroit, and Chicago in the St. Lawrence Basin. If all those examples involve upstream movements, downstream evolutions were also observed: for instance, from Córdoba to Seville on the Guadalquivir or from Chengdu and Chongqing to Shanghai on the Yangtze River in China. Canals and railroads have also given birth to development corridors. The main difference between the three world topodynamic corridors described in this book and the above-mentioned development corridors comes from the fact that the topodynamic ones result from the integration of the development corridors. In short, topodynamic corridors constitute macro-corridors of development that link together a multiplicity of micro-corridors. For clarity purposes, here, the course of the central axes of the three topodynamic corridors has been determined mathematically by computing circles on the globe. However, this mathematical simplification can be questioned since, historically, the central axes have slightly shifted through time. The best example is given by the Rhône and the Rhine, those to “twin” rivers characterized by the fact that the first one flows southward while the other runs towards the north. It is clear that, under the Roman Empire, the Rhône significantly prevailed over the Rhine from an economic point of view. During the Middle Ages, the Rhine axis developed a lot, mainly because of the Hundred Years’ War, while the present territory of France was torn by war. However, it is only after the discovery of America that the Rhine truly triumphed over the Rhône. So, before that discovery, the central axis of the Great Corridor corresponded to the Rhône, while afterwards, it coincided with the Rhine. It is also important to note that, despite that the circularity of the topodynamic corridors may suggest that the intensity of the economic exchanges is the same throughout a given corridor, such is absolutely not the case. In all corridors and at all times, certain sections of the corridors experienced a much more important commercial dynamism than the others. There even is an extreme case where a section of a topodynamic corridor has registered, so to say, no commercial activity at all. We refer to the section of the Great Corridor that runs from the British Isles to Japan. Of course, trade between

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those two zones has been important and determining; however, it did not follow the course of the Great Corridor, which corresponds to the Canadian Northwest Passage (which was frozen most of the time, but which may greatly develop in the future due to climate warming). That trade rather followed maritime routes through the Cape of Good Hope, the Suez Canal, and the Panama Canal. On the other hand, a corridor section which benefits from an important commercial activity during a certain period may some time later become a neglected zone. Thus the Mediterranean Sea, which was so active at the time of the Roman Empire, became a troubled zone little favorable to trade when its shores were divided between the Christians to the northwest and the Moslems to the southeast. Consequently, one must not consider the topodynamic corridors as immutable realities as far as their course or even their number are concerned. It must be reminded that the American section of the American Corridor is not even two hundred years old, and that nothing precludes the emergence of a new topodynamic corridor. It has been suggested that a Trans-tropical corridor may eventually emerge, which could link Tokyo, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Bogotá, São Paulo, Johannesburg, Mauritius Island, Bangkok, Shanghai, and Tokyo.4 One or two more decades will be necessary to validate that intuition (the section that should develop in order for such a corridor to have a chance to emerge is the section between Mexico City, Bogotá, and São Paulo; trade in the other sections is already very dynamic). In any case, it remains possible that a new topodynamic corridor will emerge sooner or later for the simple reason that the old urbexplosions and the old corridors tend to get congested and eventually suffocate because of too high densities. The spectacular recovery of the Mongolo-American Corridor in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries can be explained to some extent by the congestion of the two other corridors and by the low density that then characterized the territories crossed by the Mongolo-American Corridor. Since the Asian Corridor played a rather marginal role in the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, in its rise, the American Corridor had basically only one competitor: the Great Corridor. On top of being favored by its low population density, the American Corridor benefited from another advantage over the Great Corridor: it allowed for a real circularity of the commercial flows. Intensive commercial exchanges were possible throughout the American Corridor, while, as already mentioned, such was not the case inside the Great Corridor between the British Isles and Japan. 4.

Luc-Normand Tellier, “La guerre d’Oussama ben Laden à la lumière de l’interprétation topodynamique de l’histoire du développement économique,” Organisations et territoires 11, 2 (2002): 87–95.

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In fact, that major weakness in the circularity of the Great Corridor has played a determining role in the evolution of the topodynamic movements within that corridor. Two important reversals of the topodynamic movements observed there can be indirectly attributed to that factor: first, the reversal of the westward movement in the context of the fall of the Western Roman Empire, then the reversal of the eastward movement in the Far East with the advent of the Meiji Era in Japan (in the latter case, the emergence of the American Corridor also played a major role). Why does a real circularity constitute an advantage for a topodynamic corridor? For the simple reason that topodynamic corridors correspond to particularly intense currents of exchanges. A corridor can only prevail at the world level by funneling a large part of international exchanges. If it succeeds to do so, its dominant poles are in a position to take control of the financial and commercial flows of the world. The more the channeling of the flows is efficient between all the points of a topodynamic corridor, the more that corridor can establish itself as a leader. It is clear that the fact for the Great Corridor that the so strategic trade between Northern Europe and the Far East had to go through the Suez Canal, the Panama Canal, or the Cape of Good Hope, rather than through the frozen Canadian Northwest Passage, created a handicap for upholding the historical domination of the Great Corridor. Before the advent of railways and trucking, the American Corridor was little likely to establish its domination on a solid basis. Since the triumph of those two modes of transportation, maritime transportation does not totally dominate the international trade anymore, as land transportation can efficiently compete with sea transportation. Due to its topography, the American Corridor was providentially in a position to benefit from the new context. This is what happened with the rise of the United States, Germany, Russia, and the Japanese influence in the Far East. Since then, the flows of goods, services, capital, and information that link the great cities of the American Corridor, New York, Toronto, Chicago, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Seoul, Peking, Moscow, Berlin, Brussels, Paris, and London, are the most intense on Earth, which presently provides the American Corridor with the mastery of the world. The topodynamic corridors are the arteries of the world economic system, but it must not be forgotten that the arteries are supplied by the veins and the veins, by the capillaries. The flows that are registered within the corridors stem from a system of ramifications, which reaches the remotest recesses of the economic spaces connected to the world economic system. Those ramifications reach the arteries at the topodynamic corridors’ great economic poles, which constitute the critical points of the system. It would then be entirely erroneous to conceive the topodynamic corridors as being

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closed circuits confined to total circularity. On the contrary, they are open to the rest of the world, their role being to activate the exchange flows coming from all directions by channeling them in an efficient way. Far from being an obstacle to the world economic development, they constitute its motor and heart. The better they play their role, the more the world economic system progresses. Admittedly, some regions benefit more than others from that system, and the zones situated close to the dominant corridors are more likely to develop than those that are farther from them. However, the dynamics of the system is such that no “inhabitable” region can be viewed as being condemned to marginality forever as long as the system keeps moving. In fact, the system is doomed to move; otherwise it dies, and the world economy goes back to the state that existed 6,000 years ago: simple subsistence.

CHAPTER

13

Poles and Routes through History

S

o far, world history has been presented in this book through the poles, routes, and trajectories that marked it. The time has come to look at the evolution of the poles and routes in the light of world history. The words city, agglomeration, metropolis, urban system, road, route, and corridor refer to realities that have evolved through time. Let us try to see how by attempting to characterize the poles and routes which have prevailed at various stages of the history of urbanization. Talking about a pre-urban city of 6,000 inhabitants is manifestly not tantamount to evoking a modern city of 30 million. The concept of city is so flexible that, originally, the boundary between it and the concept of village was as fuzzy as is today the boundary between the concepts of great city and region (the notion of “metropolitan area” is an expression of this confusion). Equally obvious is that a modern city of 100,000 inhabitants completely differs from a city of the same size that existed 3,000 years ago. Cities have metamorphosed through history. Their location, functions, and form have profoundly changed, as did the communication routes. This is the question that will now be addressed.

s THE EVOLUTION OF CITY LOCATIONS The pre-urban cities were located upstream, like Çatalhöyük and Jarmo, or in desert zones, like Jericho. On the other hand, the first urban cities were fluvial cities in Mesopotamia (Eridu, Ur, Uruk), in the Indus Valley (Harappa, Mohenjo-Daro, Kalibangan), as well as in the Chinese Loess Plateau (ChanganXi’an, Luoyang, Kaifeng). The first urban cities were also frequently cities of canals, like the Sumerian cities of Eridu, Ur, and Uruk or the city of Chengdu in the Chinese Red Basin. However, in pre-Columbian civilizations, the fluvial cities were very rare. There the first cities were located in the mountains at high altitudes, as in the cases of Teotihuacan, Cuzco, and Machu Picchu, in the jungle, as for Uxmal, or in the plain, as in the case of Palenque.

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Pre-urban cities served most of the time as shelters, refuges, or watersupply centers, as in the case of the oasis-cities. With fluvial cities, the commercial functions progressively prevailed, and more the modes of transportation and irrigation improved the more fluvial cities developed downstream. That evolution continued till the appearance of true maritime cities. Little by little, the latter established their growing ascendancy west of the Persian Gulf, where the Phoenician, Greek, and Italian cities of the Mediterranean Sea took over from the fluvial cities of Mesopotamia, as well as in China, where fluvial cities from the Loess region had progressively to face the competition of sea-oriented cities (Canton-Guangzhou, Zayton-Quanzhou, Hangzhou). West of the Persian Gulf, that evolution ultimately resulted in the progressive marginalization of the continental empires (the Babylonian, Assyrian, Egyptian, Hittite, and Persian empires, as well as the empire of Alexander the Great), served or occasionally rivaled by the Phoenician and Greek maritime networks, to the benefit of the first true maritime empire, the Roman Empire, whose triumph had been prepared by the Phoenician, Carthaginian, and Greek urban networks. The expansion of the Roman Empire was accompanied by a wave of urbanization marked by the creation of castra, those rigorously planned military settlements, which gave birth to numerous cities. Later, the bastides (walled towns built in the southwest of present-day France),1 also well planned and founded according to a comprehensive plan, marked the Middle Ages both because of their urbanistic characteristics and because of the freedom and egalitarianism they favored. Between 1144, date of the founding of Montauban, the very first bastide, and 1350, more than one thousand bastides were built in southern France, but also elsewhere in Western Europe.2 However, if Roman cities mainly had an administrative and military vocation, medieval cities were much more based on trade and craft industry. With the development of open-sea navigation, ocean cities came to compete with maritime cities situated on interior seas (like the Mediterranean Sea or the Black Sea). ZaytonQuanzhou and Hangzhou were among the first ocean cities to stand out. 1.

2.

The most active bastide builders were saint Louis, king of France, and his brother Alphonse, count of Poitiers and Auvergne, who lived in the thirteenth century (saint Louis reigned from 1226 to 1270). During that century, as a result of the Albigensian crusade, the territory of the king of France extended to the Mediterranean for the first time. Bastides were built in this new French territory. A Plantagenet king of England, Edward I, built ten bastides in Wales and two in England. James E. Vance, Jr., The Continuing City: Urban Morphology in Western Civilization (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 28; Anthony Edwin James Morris, History of Urban Form: Before the Industrial Revolutions (Harlow: Pearson Education & Prentice Hall, 1994), 92–93 and 119–138. Morris makes a distinction between the “bastide towns” founded in France, England, and Wales and the “planted towns” founded in East Germany, Poland, South Bohemia, and around Florence.

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However, the discoveries of America and of the maritime route to India were what really allowed ocean cities such as London, New York, and Tokyo to emerge as world or “global” cities.3 That evolution was accompanied by a progressive marginalization of local maritime empires such as those of Venice and Genoa, and the appearance of the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, French, and British world maritime empires. The advent of motorized transportation gave birth to a new type of cities, the railway cities. Numerous fluvial and maritime cities became railway cities, but many other cities which were unlikely to develop before the appearance of railways developed thanks to railroads. The American Corridor provides many examples of this: Atlanta, Dallas, Kansas City, Harbin. Although railways and the roads conceived for motorized transportation did, most of the time, consolidate the existing cities, they have had an important impact by giving a new strength to cities located upstream as opposed to cities situated close to the sea or at the mouth of rivers. The trend which favored the development of cities located more and more downstream since the beginning of urbanization was not totally reversed by the advent of motorized transportation; however, the more continental upstream cities lost a large part of their handicap, with the result that cities like Chicago, Berlin, Moscow, or Peking (and even Paris) found themselves in a better position to compete with cities like London, New York, or Tokyo. Many of the present-day great cities of the developing countries are upstream cities, like Mexico City, São Paulo, Johannesburg, Nairobi, Addis Ababa, Baghdad, Delhi, or Chongqing.

s THE EVOLUTION IN THE FORM OF CITIES Cities have metamorphosed profoundly through history from the point of view of their expanse, density, and circulation networks as well as their height, their public space, and the characteristics of their buildings. Attempting to systematize their evolution is not easy because of the great diversity of their forms. Nevertheless, in a rather simplified way, six stages will be distinguished here in the evolution of the urban form through history. The first stage was that of the pre-urban or urban refuge-cities. Their main function was to protect from strangers, enemies, and invaders. Those cities were generally, though not always, surrounded with walls, fortifications, or stockade, and they could be located in isolated or hardly accessible sites. They were very compact and huddled up. That first stage was eventually marked by the development of exchanges between pre-urban cities in

3.

The concept of “global city” has been developed by Saskia Sassen, The Global City (New York: Princeton University Press, 1991).

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a context where the wheel did not exist yet. The development of commercial activity required a minimal level of security and protection of the private property, as well as the creation of interurban communication networks. In the wet regions, this gave birth to fluvial cities or cities located around fords, whereas, in desert zones, oasis-cities developed serving as staging points for caravan networks. Those first commercial cities were also compact and often fortified. They seemed to be improvised, their passageways forming labyrinths as in the souks of Arab cities. A first phase was also associated with the appearance of ceremonial centers with a religious or political character. The idea of urban planning progressed considerably through the building of such cities. Straight lines, axes, plays of light and shadow, sculptures, monuments, sanctuaries, palaces, public places, and processional ways became means to inspire respect, devotion, adoration, submission, and wonder. Those cities, more than any other, attempted to spread in order to impress, which made their fortification more difficult. The second stage marked a rupture with the first one by giving birth to strictly “urban” (and no more “pre-urban”) cities. In Eurasia, it was the result of the adoption of animal-traction wheel transportation. That type of transport requires the building of roads, bridges, and quays. A road network developed which gave rise to crossroads cities, relay cities, bridge cities, and port cities, which emerged around the networks’ critical points and breaking or transshipment points. Inside those cities, streets had to be laid out to allow wheel vehicles to move around; public spaces had to be dedicated to parking, and the joint management of the pedestrian and vehicle flows required the adoption of minimal rules.4 Those cities remained compact and generally fortified, but the public space dedicated to vehicular traffic was systematized and occupied a more important place than during the previous stage. Growth often generated problems for compact cities, the urban fabric tending to extend beyond the city limits and to give rise to primitive suburbs, which had to be eventually integrated to the city by means of the construction of new fortifications.5 In certain cases, the second stage gave birth to amphibious cities where the street network was superposed on the canal network. Amphibious cities appeared very early in Sumer, where cities such as Ur learned very early to conciliate canals, streets, and roads. Later, many amphibious cities became 4.

5.

Such traffic problems probably explain that, in European medieval cities, markets generally took place not at the city center, but close to the doors of the city, and the fairs, even far from the city. Only in the nineteenth century, with the building of railroad stations, did traffic enter the very heart of the cities. Civil trading communities which grew up outside the walls of burgs were called “faubourgs” in French (which comes from Latin: foris burgum—“outside the burg”) or suburbs in English (which also comes from Latin: sub urbs—“close to the city”).

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famous, like Hangzhou and Tianjin in China, or Venice, Amsterdam, and Stockholm in Europe. Moreover, many bridge cities also became partially amphibious cities by developing on both sides of their river. One can think of Rome, Florence, Paris, or London. Amphibious cities were more difficult to defend and fortify. Their strength was commercial, but their weakness, military. Their openness, the superposition of their traffic networks, their connection to the traffic flows, and the more radial and less concentric distribution of their population heralded the modern cities.6 Vance deals with the morphology of Western “urban” cities through history and stresses the particular contribution of the planned new cities through the second stage, whether it be the castrae built by the Roman armies,7 the bastides created in Southern France and elsewhere, or the orthogonalstreet-grid cities of the American Middle West. Those cities are not without evoking the cities of the Harappan civilization, the old Chinese ceremonial cities, or certain pre-Columbian cities. The appearance of motorized transportation in 1825 generated a new dynasty of cities.8 During the third phase it triggered, the problem of coordinating the road and railway networks was posed in all the cities, industrial or not, where railroads passed. The superposition of the networks caused numerous problems, both vertical and horizontal. Grade crossings and viaducts had to be laid out to coordinate or vertically separate the traffics,9 while horizontally the industrial areas directly connected to the railroads became increasingly separated from the residential areas. Similarly, built spaces became increasingly separate from green spaces. Public parks and squares developed while, previously, green spaces were mainly private gardens.10 The horse-drawn 6.

7.

8. 9.

10.

The second stage of the evolution of the form of cities was studied in depth by Anthony Edwin James Morris, History of Urban Form: Prehistory to the Renaissance (London : George Godwin, 1972), and History of Urban Form: Before the Industrial Revolutions, op. cit., as well as James E. Vance, Jr., op. cit. It must be noted that many cities founded by the Romans started with a gridiron street pattern, but they lost it afterwards, acquiring in its place an organic growth form during the Middle Ages. London and left-bank Paris are classical examples of that. See Anthony Edwin James Morris, History of Urban Form: Before the Industrial Revolutions, op. cit., 86 and 192. Studied, among others, by Peter Hall, Cities in Civilization (London: Phoenix, 2001), and James E. Vance, Jr., op. cit. Leonardo da Vinci was centuries in advance of his time when, in his ideal city, he advocated multi-level separation of vehicular and pedestrian traffic with special routes reserved for the heaviest goods traffic. Anthony Edwin James Morris, History of Urban Form: Prehistory to the Renaissance, op. cit., 172. For instance, in the Paris of Francis I, who reigned from 1515 to 1547, there were no public urban spaces of major significance. By contrast, the private open spaces, particularly convent gardens, were many. It seems that the first “monumental square” was imagined by Michelangelo in 1550. It is the Capitoline Piazza, built in Rome

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omnibus and then the electrical tramway appeared, intending to increase intraurban mobility. It generated a first phase of urban sprawl which announced the one that automobile caused later. That first phase started after 1830 in Paris and London. Public investments required for setting up the new urban infrastructures were considerable and necessitated the adoption of various measures: expropriations, zoning, regulations, etc. The sewer, aqueduct, and street networks had to be adapted to the new needs stemming from sprawl. Most of the old fortifications were demolished. Boulevards and avenues were created. Haussmann’s Paris remains the most classical example of that period. Hohenberg and Lees set at about 1850 the turning point from which the densities and congestion of European cities began to decrease.11 Some cities experienced a fourth phase, that of the introduction of the subway, which completely separated two superposed networks of motorized transportation by reserving them two different levels, the passage from one to the other being made by foot. Subway had two opposite effects. On the one hand, it favored urban sprawl by providing an easier access to downtown from the periphery; on the other hand, it favored higher densities in the center or at least a reduction of the space reserved for parking and individual transportation in downtowns. In a fifth phase, automobile added to tramway and subway. That innovation caused a true revolution in the design of cities. Highways appeared in the center of the city as well as in its periphery. The first one, built between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, was inaugurated in 1940. Suburbs boomed, and urban sprawl became the rule. Users of public transportation abandoned that type of transport and adopted the individual automobile. Downtowns had to adapt to ever-increasing car flows requiring more and more parking space. Pollution, congestion, and parking costs soared. In the cities built after the advent of the tramway, especially in North America, the social classes that could not afford automobiles found themselves trapped in the high-density center, and ghettos formed. But little by little, all social classes ended up having access to the suburbs. The wealthy North Americans had paved the way in the 1830s; the middle class had followed

11.

in 1664 around the statue of Marcus Aurelius according to Michelangelo’s 1550 plan. Before 1550, sculpture was treated as part of a building, never as the focal point of a public place. Between 1585 and 1590, Pope Sixtus V erected several granite obelisks in Rome at the center of piazzas. In Paris, the Place Royale (present-day Place des Vosges) completed in 1612 was the prototype of the residential square. Authors point out that French squares are marked by representative display, monumentality, and integration into the global plan of cities, whereas English squares are focused on privacy, residential comfort, and seclusion from the turmoil of the surrounding neighborhood. Paul M. Hohenberg and Lynn Hollen Lees, The Making of Urban Europe, 1000–1950 (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 1985), 391–394.

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from the 1880s, and the underprivileged sections of the population settled there from the 1900s. In the older cities whose centers had been built before the advent of motorized transportation, in Europe and Latin America, the poor people could not afford staying in the center, and left for the suburbs, which became problem zones. Urban sprawl eventually caused a decline of the population living downtown. In some countries, especially in North America, phenomena of desertion and demolition of the center have been observed. Rich boroughs of the center impoverished. The periphery extending almost without limit, secondary centers developed which competed with the center. In some cases, as in Los Angeles, that evolution occurred without meeting any obstacle, while, in other cases, as in San Francisco, a return of the population towards the center attempted to slow down urban sprawl.12 In a sixth phase, sprawl generates a new type of agglomeration, the linear city. The urban fabrics of agglomerations in a row, which were previously separated, come to touch each other and knit together following certain structuring lines. For example, along the Californian coast, from San Diego to Santa Barbara through Los Angeles, urbanization extends over hundreds of kilometers, forming an urban ribbon following the coast almost without interruption. The same phenomenon is observed in France along the Côte d’Azur. Similarly, to the northeast of the United States, the fault line called the Fall Line progressively gives birth to an immense linear agglomeration spreading from Washington to New York City and including Baltimore and Philadelphia. In Europe, the same thing seems to happen within the American Corridor along the Rhine and the Ruhr, where the emerging linear agglomeration goes from Rotterdam towards Hanover through Essen and Dortmund. Those six phases did not succeed each other in a uniform way and smoothly. Three rather radical disruptions were caused by the appearance of wheel transportation, by the advent of motorized transportation, and, finally, by the triumph of automobile. Many old cities, like Paris, Peking, Mexico, Constantinople-Istanbul, Moscow, or London, experienced the majority of the phases, but no city went through all six phases since no pre-urban city has given birth to a great modern city. Actually, most modern cities experienced only the more recent phases. The order of the phases has generally been respected although cases exist of returns to an anterior phase. For instance, in Mesopotamia, the appearance of Islam and the predominance of camel transportation led to the giving-up of wheel transportation and a return to labyrinthine urban fabrics.

12.

See, about the evolution of American cities, the classical reference: Jane Jacobs, The Life and Death of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage, 1961).

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s THE EVOLUTION OF THE FORM OF COMMUNICATION NETWORKS The six phases of the evolution in the form of cities result from the evolution of the transportation and communication modes, and, consequently, of the types of networks built by humankind. The very first networks were made of simple pedestrian paths improvised in the forest or savanna. Then, as soon as crafts, pirogues, small boats, canoes, etc. allowed going upstream or maneuvering against opposing winds, fluvial and lake networks added to the pedestrian networks and appeared in the zones where risks were limited, the currents were weak, and the obstacles, easy to overcome. In certain societies which ignored wheel transportation, like the Inca Empire, far from being improvised, the pedestrian networks were planned and built for military and commercial purposes. Those networks preceding wheel transportation have occasionally produced very sophisticated cities as in the case of the pre-Columbian cities of Teotihuacan, Tenochtitlan or Cuzco, which have never been served by transportation networks more advanced than those. The advent of wheel transportation made compulsory the building of roads and bridges. Various techniques were imagined to cobble, pave, and build public works.13 Wharfs had to be laid out to facilitate the transshipment of merchandises from boats to wheel vehicles and vice versa. At about the time of the invention of wheel transportation, ships appeared. Those could convey much more persons and merchandises over much longer distances, including in the open sea, than simple pirogues or canoes. The nodes linking the maritime, fluvial, and road networks as well as the crossroads that already existed inside each type of network became as many sites favorable to the development of cities. The improvisation which had played an important role in the creation of the pre-wheel networks, could not continue and was soon replaced by public planning. The ports and bridges became strategic locations. An important step followed in the pacified regions ruled by a central power capable to impose respect: the appearance of relay transportation. That form of transportation significantly increased mobility, and the staging posts became new sources of activity and population polarization. Public transportation was born in that context, first in Paris, thanks to Blaise Pascal, as will be seen. The advent of motorized transportation provoked a radical metamorphosis of the existing transportation infrastructures. Motorized transportation was freed, to a large extent, from the constraints imposed by winds and even (partially) currents. The railway network was superposed to the road networks, and roads transformed radically with the appearance of macadam 13.

Street paving started in 1185 in Paris. It started in 1235 in Florence (by 1339, all of Florence was paved). In Germany, Lübeck was the first city to start paving its streets in 1310.

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and tarmac, whose use became widespread in North America and Western Europe just from the 1920s. The building of viaducts allowing for the superposition of various networks generalized. In the cities, the tramway, subway, and automobile started interacting. Their coordination gave birth to vertical transportation by means of elevators or escalators which, contrary to horizontal transportation, was most of the time free for the users. Highways, one-ways, traffic lights, grade crossings, subway stations, train stations, bus stops, and hundreds of other innovations related to transportation appeared. Then came the airplanes, helicopters, airports as well as the modes of telecommunication, the telegraph, telephone, the Internet … The more urbanization exploded, the more the world was becoming a village; and the more vehicles covered very long distances, the more the world shrank. Everything had become networks to such an extent that the citizen of the world was not really conscious anymore that his voice, his steps, his image, and his belong ings henceforth circulated only through networks made of wires, cables, waves, air corridors, sidewalks, aisles, streets, highways, maritime routes, elevators, subway lines, tubes, tunnels, bridges, viaducts, and nodes.

s THE MAIN CATEGORIES OF CITIES The concept of city is very simple, but the list of the kinds of cities one can draw up is almost unlimited. Similarly, establishing the chronology of the appearance of various kinds of cities is an insurmountable task. For example, one could think that planned “pre-conceived” cities appeared after the improvised “organic” cities. In the case of the pre-urban cities, this is quite likely. However, it is not that clear as soon as we refer to urban cities. In the Sumer region and in the Indus Valley, the oldest urban cities that have been excavated reveal a precocious planning intention, maybe at the very beginning of the forming of those cities. For instance, the specialization of the neighborhoods and certain forms of segregation appeared very early and led to various cityplanning orientations. In the cities of the Roman Empire and Italian Renaissance, the wealthy, the poor, the artisan activities, the administrative functions, the commercial activities, and the religious practices were intertwined, albeit often regrouped around certain poles dominated by great patronizing families. On the other hand, in the Moslem cities and the medieval cities of Northern Europe, specific quarters were reserved for the Jews, the administrative functions, and the commercial and artisan functions. As for China, according to some archeologists, the ceremonial cities would be the oldest. And this type of cities essentially results from a planning will. The most ancient city-planning traditions owe a lot to religion or magic. One may think of the principles of the Chinese feng shui which orient

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the conception of the cities as well as the smallest buildings, or the Indian doctrine of the vastu vidya. Those two traditions can go back to the civilization of Harappa in which the orientation of cities was dictated by magic diagrams. The pre-Columbian civilizations also seem to have been under similar influences. That being said, progressively, city planning quitted the domain of the sacred to enter that of functional rationality. With the Greeks, quite rational principles of urbanism have been elaborated. According to them, the widest streets of the city ought to be oriented east-west in order to allow the dominant West winds to clean the air. The walls facing the south had to be higher in order to favor sun exposure and those facing the north, lower for protecting the houses from the North winds. Moreover, the fore roofs facing the south had to be wide and long enough to protect from the hot summer sunrays. Later, Greek and Etruscan traditions gave birth to Roman urbanism, whose Gromatici and libri rituales specified the rules to follow in the context of the founding of new cities concerning the street orientation, the location of doors of the city walls, and hundreds of details of urban life. Contrary to the Greek city conceived as an open system, of which only the initial center was planned in advance, the Roman city was planned from the beginning as a closed system clearly demarcated, and cut by two axes that crossed at the center: the decumanus, oriented east-west, and the cardo, oriented northsouth. The principles of Roman urbanism have been relatively little followed in Rome itself, which often was the main exception to its own rules. However, they inspired the engineer and architect Vitruvius who, in his book De architectura, enacted a long list of rules intended to guide the construction of cities and buildings, rules that survived the Roman Empire, and marked the Renaissance.14 Fortification is another criterion for classifying cities. Though it is unquestionable that the advent of motorized transportation tolled the knell of the very idea of walled cities, it would be a mistake to suggest that before motorized transportation all cities were fortified. It is also an exaggeration to say that all the first cities were systematically walled. Among the pre-urban cities, Çatalhöyük and Jericho were surrounded with walls, but Jarmo was not. As for the first “urban” cities, they were fortified in Mesopotamia, but they

14.

Marcus Vitruvius Pollio’s book was rediscovered in about 1412–1414, and reprinted in 1521. Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472), born in Genoa, raised in Venice, and educated at the University of Bologna, wrote De Re Aedificatoria, published in twelve volumes in 1485, which is considered as the first theoretical treaty of city planning in Renaissance. Antonio Averlino “Filarete” produced the first fully planned ideal city of the Renaissance in his Trattato d’Architettura. It must be noted that Gothic architecture was asymmetrical and vertical, whereas Renaissance architecture tended to be symmetrical and horizontal.

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were not in pharaohs’ Egypt, nor in the Roman Empire at the apogee of pax romana. That being said, the Egyptian and Roman cases remain exceptional, and it is correct to say that, very early, if not at the very beginning, urban cities have generally been protected by external walls. An interesting case is that of Athens, whose protective wall came to include both the city of Athens and the port of Pireus located at about ten kilometers from Acropolis. Even Rome came to be fortified in 271 by Emperor Aurelian. In the Middle Ages, the unending struggles associated with feudalism gave rise to a considerable number of fortified cities and strongholds, like the ones of Coucy and Château-Gaillard, which were so huge that they acquired an urban character.15 Actually, various French, German, and English cities originate from strongholds. The geometrical form of street grids leads to define some great categories of cities. The labyrinthine urban network which characterizes the European medieval cities and the Arab cities is very old. However, the orthogonal grid also appears very early in the Indus Valley, with Harappa and Mohenjo-daro, and in China, with Changan-Xi’an, Luoyang, Peking and Chengdu. Many Greek and Roman cities, like Ephesus, Alexandria, Lyon, and Caesarea, were built according to that model.16 In America, Teotihuacan, Chan Chan and Cuzco also had an orthogonal street grid. The radial scheme, illustrated by the German city of Karlsruhe, built in the eighteenth century in the Baden, finds its best-known representation in Paris. It is much more recent than the labyrinthine and orthogonal systems. It truly compels recognition just from Le Nôtre, that great landscape architect who has drawn the Champs Élysées in Paris and the gardens of Versailles.17

15.

16.

17.

The growth of Paris required no less than five different walls: the first built in AD 360; the second one in 1180; the third, in 1370; the fourth, in 1784–1791; and the fifth, in 1841–1845. See Anthony Edwin James Morris, History of Urban Form: Before the Industrial Revolutions, op. cit., 99. It seems that the Western origin of the orthogonal grid goes back to the fifthcentury-BC Greek architect Hippodamus, who applied that scheme to his home city, Miletus, and to the port of Athens, Piraeus. See Léon Homo, Rome impériale et urbanisme dans l’Antiquité (Paris: Albin Michel, 1951). However, as seen in Chapter 1, much before Hippodamus, the Harappan cities were built on a rectilinear gridiron pattern of land subdivision. A similar gridiron can also be found in the ancient Egyptian city of Kahun. See Anthony Edwin James Morris, History of Urban Form: Before the Industrial Revolutions, op. cit., 15. In 1521, Charles V of Spain issued the code of “city planning practice” based on a gridiron street layout. This had a huge impact on Latin American urbanism. The Champs Élysées was begun by André Le Nôtre in 1667. Le Nôtre was also involved in the planning of the town of Versailles as well as the gardens of the château. Pierre Lavedan, Histoire de l’urbanisme: Renaissance et temps modernes (Paris : Henri Laurens, 1959). Berlin has its own “Champs Élysées” named the Unter den Linden, which was at the origin an avenue of lime trees giving access, like the Champs Élysées, to the

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The radial street grids strangely mix with both labyrinthine and orthogonal systems. In Paris and in the ancient cities that have been modified following Haussmann’s model, the radial axes have been superposed over the labyrinthine network inherited from the Middle Ages, the circular network stemming from the demolition of the old city walls.18 On the other hand, certain American cities such as Washington and Detroit, which have been influenced by French urbanism, merged the orthogonal and radial schemes, while their sisters, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, opted for a generally orthogonal model. Between the labyrinthine and geometrical forms, whether orthogonal or radial, there are street systems that could be called organic or topographic. They are to a large extent dictated by the morphology of the sites. In those cases, the layout of the streets is planned and drawn according to the geographical constraints in situations where geometric, orthogonal, or radial regularities are almost impossible. On may think of cities such as Edinburgh, Quebec City, or Rio de Janeiro. Finally, many modern grids have been conceived with the intention to discourage automobile circulation in residential areas. Those street networks systematically resort to loops and dead ends. Beyond the forms, is it possible to objectively compare cities through history in terms of their efficiency? Above all, cities are places where goods, services, and information are exchanged. They are immobile constructions whose function is to increase the mobility of things, persons, and ideas. So their capacity to favor communications constitutes a major indicator of their efficiency. Two indices of that efficiency consist in the speed and the number of interactions that cities have allowed at different periods of the world evolution. There is no doubt that, from the point of view of speed as well as the number of interactions, because of the increase in the rate of urbanization, the history of the last 6,000 years is marked by an almost constant progression, followed by a vertiginous acceleration since the advent of motorized transportation. The increase in the number of interactions is easily explained by the increase in the number of cities and in the urban population. As for the speed of interactions, it probably augmented just very slowly during the long period that preceded motorized transportation. Even the invention of wheel transportation probably had a very little impact on the speed of exchanges between cities. Inside them, it rather had the effect of slowing them down by making

18.

open country and forests on the west. Both the Champs Élysées and the Unter den Linden contributed to the fact that the western sides of both Berlin and Paris became the most fashionable and expensive residential areas. The term “boulevard” reminds that transformation. It comes either from Nordic bulvirke (bulwark), which means palisade—a medieval form of defense used before the employment of real walls and ramparts—or from old Dutch bolwerc, which means palisade or ramparts.

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traffic more cumbersome, to such an extent that in France, till the seventeenth century, the right to circulate by coach in cities was restricted to the king and the nobles. On the other hand, the appearance of relay transportation certainly augmented significantly the speed of interurban communications and exchanges. From that point of view, it was a prelude to the revolution of motorized transportation and the equally considerable revolution of electricity and, hence, telegraph, telephone, radio, television, and the Internet. An important aspect of the efficiency of interurban and intraurban exchanges has a political character. Cities are human communities that benefit from a relative degree of independence or autonomy, and con ferring a certain proportion of their population the right to intervene in the city affairs. Through history, there have been dominating cities, like Rome, Constantinople, or Venice, and dominated cities. Among the dominated cities, one must distinguish the city-colonies and the colonized cities. The former include many famous Phoenician and Greek cities, and they played a role in the extension of the power and influence of the mother-cities, and, consequently, though dominated by their mother city, they dominated in their turn their surrounding territory. Conversely, colonized cities had master-servant rather than parent-child relations with their mother-cities, with all the consequences this involves. From a political point of view, it is likely that cities’ level of efficiency in their exchanges was directly linked to the degree of freedom. Generally, the more cities and their citizens benefited from a great liberty, the more cities have been active agents of exchange and, conversely, the more cities have played a major role in the exchanges, the more they have favored freedom for their citizens. From that point of view, it must be said that history has experienced ups and downs, the progression of liberty having often been followed by serious setbacks, both in terms of the cities themselves and of their citizens. All suggests that there exists a positive correlation between the freedom of cities and the liberty of their citizens. City-states have been republics and democracies much before central states became so. Democracy was not born in the city-state of Athens by chance.

s THE EVOLUTION OF CENTRALITY In space-economy, it has long been considered that all the cities, whatever their category, could be simplified for theoretical purposes and represented by a single attraction point. That vision stemmed from Johann Heinrich von Thünen’s theory of land prices, and has been adopted by William Alonso, who

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has elaborated a theory of the urban land prices that inspired other authors.19 In von Thünen’s model, the single attraction point was the market where cultivators bought their inputs and sold their outputs. In Alonso’s model, the central business district is the only attraction point in the city. Von Thünen and Alonso’s approaches generate concentric rings around the single attraction point. Alonso’s city is rigorously circular, and it is made of successive rings that correspond to densities and land prices, which decrease as the distance to the center increases. The most surprising thing about Alonso’s very simple model is the fact that it has long coincided with the very complex reality of real cities. How could a single attraction point so easily sum up the presence of thousands of attraction points which constituted the real city? The answer is probably linked to spatial competition. In any city, all the attraction points compete with one another because each of them exerts attraction forces over a certain number of economic agents that are also likely to be under the influence of the other attraction points in the system. In that very complex interplay of competition, the most central attraction points are favored, and a center emerges, which a single attraction point succeeds to sum up in a relatively satisfactory manner. At the time of animal transportation, when marginal transportation costs tended to increase with distance, cities were compact, but their center was relatively blurred. The religious center could be to the north, the political center to the east, the commercial center to the west, the military center to the south, and the geometric center at the center. That being said, even in compact cities, a center really existed as far as land prices were concerned. Actually, it has been demonstrated that in Florence, at the Renaissance, land prices decreased from the center to the periphery.20 The densification of the center developed much before the advent of motorized transportation. Thus, the Romans came to invent the apartment building (the insula), which allowed Rome to reach the threshold of one million inhabitants without the city sprawling too much.21 The Romans were also the first ones to conceive aqueduct systems that fully exploited the architectural potential of the arch.22 Thanks to their remarkable civil engineering, they brought water to the very center of their cities, which favored their growth and densification. 19.

20. 21.

22.

Johann Heinrich von Thünen, Der Isolierte Staat in Beziehung auf Landwirtschaft und Nationalökonomie (Hamburg: Puthes, 1826); William Alonso, Location and Land Use: Toward a General Theory of Land Rent (Cambridge : Harvard University Press, 1964). Gene A. Brucker, Renaissance Florence (New York: Wiley, 1969), 23–24. Two basic types of housing were found in Rome : the domus for single-family occupation, and the insula or building block divided up into a number of apartments or cenacula. Anthony Edwin James Morris, History of Urban Form: Prehistory to the Renaissance, op. cit., 63. Jérome Carcopino, Daily Life in Ancient Rome (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1956, and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960); Rodolfo Lanciani, The Ruins and Excavations of Ancient Rome (London: Macmillan, 1897, reprinted New York: Arno Press, 1968).

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With the introduction of motorized transportation, the marginal costs of transportation started to decrease with distance, and space friction was radically reduced. In a first phase, cities extended, and the center of the agglomeration asserted itself markedly with respect to a periphery, which often sprawled randomly in all directions. The assertion of the center was favored by the advent of motorized transportation, but also by the introduction of new high-rise building techniques. In 1854, Henry Waterman installed the first elevator for persons in New York City. Two years later, in 1856, again in New York, Elisha Otis equipped the H.V. Haughwout department store with the first “safe” elevator for persons, which could prevent catastrophes in case of fall. Skyscrapers with a traditional structure but using elevators appeared in New York City in 1875 with the Equitable Insurance Company Building, while skyscrapers with a steel structure appeared in Chicago in 1885 with the Home Insurance Building. The construction of high-rise buildings was also favored by the creation of high-performance concrete and reinforced concrete, by the improvement of the pumps and plumbing required to supply skyscrapers with water, and by the generalization of the use of electricity.23 A second phase followed where the role of the center as the crossroads of all the traffics eventually generated repulsion forces linked to pollution, congestion, noise, stress, crime, etc. This is when, in many agglomerations, especially in the United States, the periphery attempted to progressively free itself from the center, and “edge cities” developed.24 Then Alonso’s model based on the existence of a single attraction point lost some relevance, and a multiple-center model of the city succeeded. A third phase seems likely to succeed the second one: the forming of linear agglomerations or, rather, of lines of agglomerations. The extension of agglomerations is not uniform in all directions. Certain directions better foster development than others. In fact, agglomerations are linked by networks, some of which being more structuring than others. Urban expansion along the latter eventually favors the welding of agglomerations, which were previously independent from each other. We alluded to this phenomenon about the macro-agglomeration which is presently developing between Washington and New York City. Many other examples of the emergence of such linear agglomerations can be found throughout the world, for instance between Detroit and Toronto, between Osaka and Tokyo, between Hong Kong and Canton-Guangzhou, or between Shanghai and Nanking-Nanjing. 23.

24.

Various inventions, like that of efficient water-closets in 1890, also produced healthier cities. The early Industrial Revolution was associated in cities with appalling living conditions. For instance, the history of British towns in the first half of the nineteenth century is, to a considerable degree, the history of typhus and tuberculosis. It is estimated that the advantage the countryside had over cities in terms of longevity disappeared around 1900. After that date, urban dwellers tended to live longer than country folks. Joel Garreau, Edge City: Life on the New Frontier (New York: Doubleday, 1991).

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s TRANSPORTATION AND THE RELOCATION OF ACTIVITIES IN THE CITY The evolution of the urban form through history was accompanied with important relocations of activities. Of course, some commercial activities geared to the residential sector followed the populations towards the suburbs. However, a part of them first consolidated at the center of the agglomerations. Department stores appeared in Paris in 1852 (the first one was named Bon Marché), and then developed in the centers of all the other great cities of the industrialized world. The development of the tramway networks and the advent of the automobile benefited them till highways appeared, favoring the building in the periphery of very large shopping centers which competed with department stores. The first such shopping center was inaugurated in 1923, in the suburbs of Kansas City. From the 1930s and, above all, from the 1970s, the industrial sector also did move to the periphery. It was attracted there by the availability of larger and cheaper lots, and by the possibility to avoid the traffic congestion of the center. The progressive triumph of trucking over train also strongly contributed to that evolution, trucks having access to all the recesses of the urban fabric whereas trains just stop at the stations. It must also be said that factories required more and more space. Thus, in the New York City region, before 1922, each factory occupied, on the average, 104 square meters of land per worker. That ratio reached 200 square meters of land per worker around 1940, and 455 square meters of land per worker around 1950.25 The generalization of the use of pallets and forklifts contributed greatly to that evolution. The centrifugal movements of numerous commercial and industrial sectors contributed to weaken the center to which, nevertheless, headquarters and the superior tertiary sector, as well as the arts and entertainment sectors remained generally faithful. The mutation of the urban fabric was caused by the evolution of the modes of transportation, but, conversely, it also caused numerous problems to the latter by opposing private and public transportation. Initially, all intraurban transports were private. It is in Paris that public transportation was actually born. This started around 1620, when Nicolas Sauvage had the idea to establish a stable in the Saint-Fiacre hotel in order to rent horses and coaches that Parisians soon called fiacres (cabs). Later, in 1662, the famous philosopher, mathematician, and scientist Blaise Pascal invented public transportation by inaugurating a service of carriages circulating along predetermined routes, stopping at set stops, and taking on board passengers paying a fixed price. That innovation succeeded, and the service was extended to five different itineraries. Unfortunately, the common people eventually were banned from using the service, and the enterprise declined before disappearing in 1677. 25.

James E. Vance, Jr., op. cit., 435.

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Still in Paris, 151 years later, in 1828, public transportation reap peared with the first horse-drawn omnibus. The omnibus formula was adopted in London the following year, in 1829, and then in New York City in 1831. In New York, the horse-drawn omnibus was put on rails from 1832. However, that system was not really successful since the overground rails considerably impaired the movement of other vehicles. In 1852, a French engineer living in New York City invented the rails embedded in the roadway, and the omnibus network extended in all directions. The introduction of the omnibus was followed by that of suburban trains, which truly launched the suburbanization phenomenon. Boston, and then Paris have been forerunners in that field. As early as in 1837, a train linked Paris to the suburb of Saint-Germain. Later, a second line was inaugurated to Versailles. After the suburban train came the subway, whose first line was built in 1863 in London. That first subway functioned with steam, which caused huge problems. Nevertheless, New York City imitated London and built a subway in 1868, and then Istanbul did the same in 1875. The great revolution in public transportation occurred with the electrification. Electrical tramways were invented in 1879 by the German firm Siemens, and a tramway service was inaugurated for the first time in 1881 in Frankfurt. The introduction of electricity allowed to reduce significantly the fares. In 1887, in Boston, Henry Whitney introduced for the first time a uniform fare independent from distance, which had a spectacular impact on urban sprawl. In 1888, Frank Sprague, an assistant of Thomas Edison, created the first trolley and installed it in Richmond, Virginia. In order to do so, he had to solve numerous technical problems and to devise new electric supply and electric traction systems. His inventions were then applied to the electrified suburban lines all over the world. From 1890, the London subway was progressively electrified, and the electrified subway system was then adopted successively by New York City and Istanbul, and then by the new subways of Budapest (1897), Glasgow (1897), Vienna (1898), Paris (1900), Boston (1901), Berlin (1902), Philadelphia (1907), Hamburg (1912), Buenos Aires (1913), Madrid (1919), Barcelona (1924), Athens (1925), Tokyo (1927), Osaka (1933), and Moscow (1935). The development of suburban-train, tramway, and subway lines caused the first wave of suburbanization, which was truly caused by the expansion of public transportation, not by the development of private transportation. The latter got the upper hand only with the triumph of the automobile around 1925. From that date, the urban sprawl was dominated by private transportation, and public transit progressively appeared no more to be a factor of suburbanization, but rather a means to limit the use of automobile and, consequently, to slow down the expansion of the suburbs. That conception is, to a large extent, erroneous since, in fact, the development of public transportation has much more accompanied the urban sprawling than held it up.

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Anyway, the competition between the two modes of transportation remains strong, public transportation having few chances to win, but private transportation being increasingly perceived as a source of pollution, congestion, noise, stress, useless sprawling, and wasting. It must be stressed that between 1983 and 1995, the average distance traveled by an urban dweller in the Western countries has increased by about thirty-three percent as the urban fabrics extend in all directions and form edge cities.26 Such an evolution impairs the functioning and development of public transportation, since the urbanized territory becomes increasingly sprawled and disarticulate.27

s ARE EUROPEAN AND CANADO-AMERICAN CITIES AS DIFFERENT AS IT IS USUALLY SAID? Two things distinguish the Canado-American cities from the European ones: the state of the downtown urban fabric, and the location of the rich and the poor in the city. While it is extremely rare to find lots that are unoccupied or dedicated to temporary uses in European downtowns, such a thing is rather frequent in North America, especially in the northeastern part of the continent. Where does that difference come from? It has been noted that the introduction of motorized transportation has first resulted in the consolidation of the center and the appearance of high-rise buildings. Later, with the generalization of the use of the automobile and suburbanization, the densities of occupation of the center declined, both in Europe and North America. Those decreases in densities were associated with demolitions in the North American central areas, but much more rarely in the European downtowns. The reason for that is probably related to the very different history of downtown areas in the two continents. The European urbanization is very old compared with that of North America, which urbanized later than Europe but also Latin America. Contrary to their European and Latin American equivalents, Canado-American central districts have, to a large extent, been built after the advent of the railways and motorized transportation. The high-rise buildings were erected there very early, even before the triumph of the automobile. Already in 1940, the average height of the buildings in North American central districts exceeded significantly that of the buildings found in European downtowns. The triumph of the automobile led to the construction of highways, including in the city centers, and to an increased demand for parking places at the same time that repulsive forces linked to pollution, congestion, crime, and stress 26. 27.

See François Ascher, Métapolis, ou l’avenir des villes (Paris : Odile Jacob, 1995). See Michel Bonnet, Mobilités, accessibilité et territoires (Paris : Presses universitaires de France, 2000).

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were developing in the central districts. The urban fabric of downtowns had to radically metamorphose, less in the central business district than in the areas surrounding it. This is when “doughnut holes” developed at the center. The same trends prevailed in Europe without, however, generating “doughnut holes,” first because those trends were less pronounced in Europe, where rail transportation competed and still competes today much more with the automobile than in North America, second because, since European downtowns had developed before the advent of motorized transportation, few highrise buildings existed there, and third because in Europe, the wealthy had never really left the central districts for the suburbs. That last factor evokes the second major difference between the European and North American urban realities. While, in continental Europe, the popular classes and immigrants are very often found in the suburbs, and the wealthy and the natives of the country are localized in the center, the opposite is generally observed in North America. That difference stems from history: the European downtowns being older and built at a more human scale, they had kept a charm and a quality of life that do not exist at the same degree in many Canado-American central districts.28 Moreover, as Alonso noted, the location of households and the various activities in the city is extremely dependent on the sought acreage.29 In a land market that is in equilibrium, each household or economic activity locates at the distance from the center where the attractive force exerted on it by the center is cancelled by the repulsive force exerted by the same center through the variations from the center of the price of a square meter, multiplied by the number of square meters occupied by the household or the economic activity. Thus, the more a household or an economic activity wants to occupy a big acreage, the more the repulsive force exerted by the center through the land prices is important and the more the household or economic activity locates far from the center. Since, generally, the wealthy in North America value much more the surface of their piece of land than the European rich do, they are led to locate farther from the center than their European counterparts. One of the consequences of the differences observed in the location of the rich and the poor in Europe and in North America relates to segregation. That phenomenon exists in both continents, albeit at various degrees from one city to another. However, in continental Europe, ghettos of poverty generally develop in the suburbs, whereas in North America, they are often 28.

29.

The importance of amenities is stressed by: Jacques-François Thisse, Jan K. Brueckner, and Yves Zenou, “Why is central Paris rich and downtown Detroit poor? An amenitybased theory,” European Economic Review 43 (1999): 91–107. William Alonso, op. cit.

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found close to the center. In Europe, the rise in the land values in the center expels the poor towards the periphery, while, in North America, it is the departure of the wealthy for the periphery that favors the transformation of certain central zones into slums and, eventually, ghettos. In both cases, the market mechanisms are, nevertheless, the same. The difference between the outcomes in both cases comes essentially from the history of urbanization in both continents and the value attached to the area of their piece of land by the residents. It must be noted that in the cities of the United Kingdom, the North American scheme is frequent. In the 1840s, for example, in Manchester, the wealthy tended to leave the center and move to the suburbs; this produced a social stratification where social status increased with the distance to the center. That evolution was logical since, as it has been said, the industrialization on Great Britain has favored, as in North America, the emergence of new cities and almost of a new urban system. Two last curiosities must be noticed concerning the location of the social groups. Since both north of the Tropic of Cancer and south of the Tropic of Capricorn, the dominant winds are generally west winds, the districts that are less exposed to the plants’ smoke and pollution are generally located to the west, which explains that in London, Paris, Berlin, Montreal, and many other cities, the rich boroughs are to the west and the poorest to the east. On the other hand, it has been observed that the social classes are often distributed from the center following sectors demarcated by rays stemming from the center (according to a scheme which resembles Lösch’s central-place model). Such phenomena can be explained by the geography (topography, waterways, shores, etc.) or the structuring impact of certain infrastructures. As for the spatial distribution of the ethnic and sociocultural groups in the city, it is marked by phenomena of aggregation (“reuniting people alike”), separation (“good fences make good neighbors”), and segregation (“excluding for protecting”).

s DEVELOPED AND DEVELOPING CITIES Today’s world is dominated by three major economic poles: the North American pole, centered on New York City (and its rival Los Angeles); Western Europe, centered on London and Paris; and the Far East, centered on Tokyo (but also Peking, Shanghai, and Hong Kong). Moreover, it appears that the polarizations of populations and productions are increasingly dissociated. The three economic poles less and less correspond to the biggest concentrations of population, which is a new phenomenon in the world’s history.

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Today, urbanization has become a world phenomenon that covers all countries, a rate of urbanization of fifty percent and more will soon be standard throughout the world, and the polarization of populations is on the verge of reaching a ceiling (since the urbanization rate cannot exceed one hundred percent…), but the polarization of economic development still goes on and generates growing inequalities in spite of the rise of several poor countries. In 1820, the ratio between the per capita gross national product of the richest region of the world (Western Europe) and that of the poorest region (Africa) was 3 to 1. That ratio reached 15 to 1 in 1950 before falling to 13 to 1 in 1973, but it rose again and reached 19 to 1 in 1998, when the richest region corresponded to the new Western countries (United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand), and the poorest region was Africa.30 However, it must be stressed that despite the growing gap between the richest and poorest countries, if we exclude Africa and the poorest parts of Latin America, the trend that prevails in the rest of the world is one of reduction of the disparities. The growth of the richest countries reaches a ceiling, and that of an enormous proportion of the developing populations is going on and, even in some cases, accelerating: suffice it to mention China, South Korea, India, and Southeast Asia. If we consider only the continents crossed by the three topodynamic corridors, Eurasia and North America, the dominant trend unquestionably points towards a major reduction of the disparities. Today, none of the cities that dominate economically (New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, London, Paris, and Tokyo) is among the metropolises that are growing the faster from a demographic point of view, those metropolises being generally in the developing countries (Mexico City, Lagos, Cairo, São Paulo, Calcutta, Bombay-Mumbai, to name but a few). Urbanization has ceased to be synonymous with economic development, which does not mean that it has become an obstacle to it. That recent dissociation of the polarization of populations from the polarization of productions, which probably started in the 1960s, constitutes the great phenomenon of our time. That phenomenon is associated with another unprecedented phenomenon: the development of an over-urbanization in the periphery. The phenomenon of over-urbanization characterized by a polarization of populations that exceeds what is desirable considering the polarization of productions is not a recent phenomenon: Imperial Rome in the fourth century and a city such as Naples in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are classical examples of over-urbanization. That phenomenon was then associated with dominant cities that had attracted a too large population and were suddenly experiencing a marked decline.

30.

Angus Maddison, The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective (Paris : OECD, 2001), 126.

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The over-urbanization which is observed today in the economically peripheral regions of the world is not of that type. It comes from the fact that many cities of the developing world increasingly play the role not of springboards, but of refuges and lifebelt in the middle of the storm caused by the polarization of the productions at the world scale. That being said, it must be immediately added that over-urbanization does not affect all the regions which belonged to the periphery in 1960–1970, for instance. The world is changing, as is the world periphery. As pointed out earlier, entire zones of the old periphery are emerging today: South Korea, the eastern part of China, Singapore, Malaysia, Mauritius Island, the northern part of Mexico, etc. In all those rising regions, urbanization is most of the time healthy and could not be considered as over-urbanization. It must not be forgotten that there are poor regions which emerge from under-development, while others, formerly rich, are declining (one can think of the cases of some former Soviet Republics or Argentina, whose situation can, however, be provisional). The traditional opposition of the rich North and the poor South holds less and less: Singapore, which triumphs, is at the equator, while Moscow, which lies north of London, New York City, and Tokyo, declines (at least compared to what it represented in the world around 1970). This does not imply that the present evolutions have no geographical coherence. On the contrary, the world regions which rise benefit from topodynamic trends (linked to the location forces) that are neatly identifiable. In America, the New York-Los Angeles axis clearly dominates, and, in that part of the American Corridor, the movement goes traditionally from New York City to Los Angeles, although this movement has slowed down since the 1990s following the Asian crisis. In Europe, the London-Berlin axis remains, and people can wonder if, despite the present difficulties of various East European countries, the eastward trend along the European section of the American Corridor will not prevail in the end over the westward trend revived by the collapse of the communist countries, the southward trend impaired by the fact that the link with North Africa takes time to establish itself, or even the southeastward trend, which remains weak compared with the eastward trend since the Czech Republic and Poland rise more rapidly than countries such as Croatia or Serbia. In Asia, three trajectories exist. They follow the Tokyo -Seoul-Peking axis of the American Corridor, the TokyoShanghai-Canton-Calcutta-Delhi axis of the Great Corridor, and the ShanghaiTaiwan-Singapore-Bombay axis of the Asian Corridor. In all three cases, the movement goes towards the west or the southwest. Apart from that, two secondary poles are developing: one in Latin America, dominated by São Paulo (and, less and less, by Buenos Aires), and the other in South Africa, dominated by Johannesburg.

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It must be pointed out that, if the North American pole shows no sign of being on the verge of giving up its place at the head of the world economy and if, in the economic arena, Western Europe conquers some ground to the east, it is in Asia that the highest growth in the world has been observed since 1950. This must be all the more stressed that, for a period of 450 years, from 1500 to 1950, Asia has stagnated while all the other regions of the world progressed. In 1500, Asia represented 65% of the world’s gross product. In 1950, that proportion had gone down to only 18.5%. Since then, it has doubled to reach 37.2% in 1998.31 The rapid transformation of the world economy results from the rapid growth of international trade, as well as the explosion of the foreign direct investments. Since 1945, international trade has grown twice as fast as the world GDP, and the foreign direct investments went from about five percent of the world GDP in 1945 to nine percent in 1992 and fifteen percent in 2000. Moreover, those investments were increasingly spread over more diversified parts of the world and economic sectors. In fact, foreign direct investments have come to play at least as important a role as international trade.32 When tackling the problems related to the present urbanization, one must systematically distinguish the problems affecting the rich or rising cities from those affecting the poor cities. In the rich cities, the problems essentially stem from the evolution of the urban fabric and from the excessive use of the automobile, both being directly interrelated. Urban sprawl is particularly pronounced in the rich cities, and this translates into a progressive decrease of the densities at the center as well as the forming, at the agglomerations’ periphery, of employment poles within what were dormitory suburbs. In sum, while agglomerations get bigger and bigger, they can also become increasingly shapeless, as their center can be marginalized because of the competition of the subcenters of the suburbs. The concept of centrality must then be completely redefined in the new metropolitan context. From a political point of view, that evolution leads to question the traditional notion of citizenship (what are the place and role of the ordinary citizen in a shapeless city?), as well as the place and role of the existing municipalities in the metropolitan dynamics. Two concentric circles drawn around the center of the agglomeration play an important role in the understanding of the new urban dynamics. A first circle located at a few kilometers from the center delimits a central zone within which decreases in population densities and even “doughnut-hole” phenomena can be observed. The radius of that circle corresponds to the 31. 32.

Angus Maddison, op. cit. See Jean Chesnais, La Mondialisation du capital (Paris : Syros, 1994).

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distance from the center where the attractive forces of the center are neutralized by the repulsive forces linked to, among other things, downtown pollution, congestion, or crime (inside the circle, the repulsive forces get the upper hand while, outside it, the attractive forces do). The second circle coincides with the “extension margin” of the agglomeration. The radius of that circle is such that the zones that are located close to the circle but inside it benefit from the urban sprawl phenomenon, whereas the zones located close to the circle but outside it not only do not benefit from the urban sprawl, but are weakened by the increasing competition made by the expanding agglomeration as the urban sprawl progresses.33 From a sociopolitical point of view, in North America, the central zone delimited by the first circle faces important challenges (poverty, slum forming, homeless populations, crime, aging infrastructures, pollution, noise, congestion, traffic jams, terrorist threats, etc.) in a context where taxes reach a ceiling, especially because of the flight of the middle class towards the suburbs. The first ring delimited by the two circles enjoys an enviable position. It attracts the industrial, commercial, and real-estate investments, as well as a new generally well-to-do population. Finally, out of the extension margin, a problematic situation is observed which is marked by a decline which, occasionally, can become dramatic. That decline is soothed by the fact that the inhabitants of those zones nourish the hope of seeing one day the extension margin including them. That scheme, which is classical in North America, is somewhat different in continental Western Europe where, as it has been mentioned, the middle and high classes are less attracted by the periphery, and the suburbs have been deliberately developed to receive the poorest classes. Nevertheless, even there, densities tend to diminish at the center, and the effects of urban sprawl are comparable to what happens in North America on both sides of the extension margin. Those phenomena mark the serious problem of metropolitan governance. How can the common metropolitan interest prevail in a context where the objective interests of the various zones of the metropolitan region systematically diverge? How is it possible to reconcile the urgent demands from the center struggling with growing problems in a context of increasingly scarce resources with the feeling of tranquillity of the inhabitants of the suburbs who are satisfied with their prosperity, their calm environment, and their moderate taxes? For the dwellers of the center, living in town really makes 33.

It has been observed that generally building highways tends to empty the surrounding areas of the large cities to the benefit of those cities and their immediate suburbs. See François Plassard, Les autoroutes et le développement régional (Paris : Economica, 1977).

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sense at the center, whereas, for the suburbanites, it is not the city, but rather the central districts, which generate problems, even if it remains essential. Actually, can the center live as a center without its periphery, and can the periphery benefit from its advantages without the center fully playing its role? That is the question. It must be pointed out that in the long history of urbanization, that question has never been more relevant than it is today. Talking of the problems of the rich contemporary cities gets almost embarrassing when they are compared with those of the great cities in developing countries. Nevertheless, certain similarities exist between the evolutions of the two sets of cities. In both rich and poor cities, a generalized urban sprawl prevails; motorized transportation is increasingly present, generating more and more pollution and congestion; and it is increasingly difficult to find ideal formulas of local and metropolitan governance. That being said, all those problems are so acute in the poor cities that the solutions which can be considered in rich countries are most of the time out of reach in poor countries. This is due to the lack of resources, but also to the effects of those additional problems posed by the informal character of a large part of the poor economies, by the difficulty to put in place an efficient system of local tax collection, by the understandable difficulty felt by the local ill-paid civil servants to resist the temptation of corruption, and by the fact that poverty greatly fosters crime. Moreover, poor cities experience a much higher morbidity than rich cities do. There, AIDS proliferates, the management of liquid waste is deficient, and the sanitary conditions favor the development of all kinds of illnesses. In the face of so many enormous challenges, local authorities are often driven to abdicate their responsibilities. The garbage collection service progressively renounces its mission. Public transportation is left to the private enterprise (sometimes with good results). City planning is replaced by improvisation. The police services become corrupt and, in the end, the political authorities manage their own private interests rather than those of their fellow citizens. All those phenomena are seriously accentuated in a situation of overurbanization. Today, it is in the poorest countries, especially in Africa, that the growth of urbanization is the fastest. The rate of urbanization of Africa was 14.8% in 1950, and it reached 42.2% in 2000. That explosion of the urban population occurs while Africa, which represents 12.9% of the world population, produces only 3.1% of the world gross product and has an annual rate of economic growth inferior to the world average (2.74% compared to 3.01% for the whole world between 1973 and 1998). It is clear that the urban growth in the poor countries is often less attributable to a healthy economic growth than to the fact that cities serve as refuge for populations in quest for hope.

Conclusion

The Broad Patterns of History

T

he synthesis of world history that ends here differs from those proposed by Will Durant or Arnold Toynbee, who insisted a lot on empires, political figures, and civilizations. It is much closer to the syntheses made by Mumford and Bairoch, albeit those authors remain distant from the Braudelian perspective adopted here.1 The vision of world evolution presented in this book borrows from Braudel the concepts of economy-world, center, semiperiphery, and periphery. However, it goes beyond the strictly Braudelian framework when it introduces the concepts of topodynamic inertia, topodynamic corridor, urbexplosion, and topodynamic trajectory. Similarly, the link that has been established here between the topodynamic movements and the diffusion of religions cannot be found in Braudel, no more than the systematic references to the space-economic theory and the concepts of attractive force, repulsive force, spatial competition, or land-price theory. The vision developed here assigns a major place to geography, relief, and the hydrographic network; however, it is more space-economic than strictly geographical. As a conclusion, let us sum up the theses which characterize the vision that has been presented of the great principles which underlie the world’s evolution since the appearance of the urban phenomenon.2 The first of those 1.

2.

See Will Durant, The Story of Civilization (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1935–1967); Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1934–1957); Arnold Toynbee, Cities of Destiny (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967); Arnold Toynbee, Cities on the Move (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970); Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, Its Prospects (New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1961); and Paul Bairoch, Cities and Economic Development, from the Dawn of History to the Present (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988). See about this the three following papers: Luc-Normand Tellier, “Projecting the evolution of the North-American urban system and laying the foundations of a topodynamic theory of space polarization,” Environment and Planning A 27 (1995): 1109–1131; Luc-Normand Tellier, “Le Québec et ses régions à l’intérieur de la dynamique spatiale

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principles is as fraught with consequences as it is simple: polarization and economic development do not occur anywhere, anytime. They result from a spatiotemporal evolution marked by development trajectories. Second, economic development is polarized and it is characterized by the appearance of urbexplosions, that is, urban systems that have an organic unity which transcends the political borders, and of economy-worlds, that is, urban macro systems covering an important part of the globe and including a center constituted of merchant states and city-states, a semi-periphery made of territorial states, and a periphery made of colonies or economically dependent states. Third, the semi-periphery tends to follow a very hierarchical “central-place” logic, whereas the periphery and the relations between the center and the periphery are marked by the tentacular logic of the “network systems.” The spatiotemporal succession of the economy-world centers occurred historically within three almost circular topodynamic corridors. The oldest corridor, called the Great Corridor, goes from the Sumer region (with the cities of Eridu, Ur, and Uruk) westward, towards London, along the Euphrates, the Syrian Corridor, the Aegean Sea, the Italian Peninsula, the Rhône, and the Rhine, and eastward from Sumer towards Tokyo, along the Persian Gulf, the Ganges, the south of China, the region of Hangzhou and Ningbo, and the China Sea. The second oldest corridor is the Asian Corridor, which goes, to the north, from the Indus Valley to the mouth of the Yangtze River along the continental Silk Road and the Imperial Grand Canal, and, to the south, from the Indus towards the Malabar Coast, Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Taiwan along the maritime Silk Road. Finally, the modern American Corridor, the heir of the ancient Mongolo-American Corridor, goes westward from London, towards Los Angeles, along the transcontinental railway linking New York City, Chicago, Kansas City, and Los Angeles, and eastward from London, towards Tokyo, along the Mittellandkanal, between the Ruhr Valley and Berlin, and along the Trans-Siberian, between Moscow and Manchuria. The economy-world centers have succeeded to each other inside those three corridors in six main steps: the birth of the three corridors; the rise of Rome inside the Great Corridor, and of the Loess Plateau inside the Asian Corridor; the Great Ebb within the Great and Asian corridors; the conquest of America and the rebirth of the Western world; the advent of motorized transportation and the Big Bang of the Industrial Revolution

de l’économie mondiale,” in Le Phénomène régional au Québec, ed. Marc-Urbain Proulx (Québec: Les Presses de l’Université du Québec, 1996), 9–28; Luc-Normand Tellier, “A Challenge for Regional Science: Revealing and Explaining the Global Spatial Logic of Economic Development,” Papers in Regional Science 76, 4 (1997): 371–384.

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centered on London; the generalization of the use of automobile and the triumph of the American Corridor. The Roman Empire constitutes the outcome of the westward trajectory inside the Great Corridor. The westward movement is stopped by the fact that the Atlantic remains a dead end till the discovery of America. The fall of Rome is associated with the return of the pendulum towards the east, which had repercussions up to the Pacific. The Great Ebb precedes and accompanies the expansion of Islam up to Indonesia. The conquest of America and the rebirth of the West herald the advent of a new westward trajectory within the Great Corridor. The Industrial Revolution gives birth to a major wave which penetrates the three corridors from London and favors the expansion of the British Empire. Today, the American Corridor includes almost all the great cities that dominate the world economy: Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Moscow, Peking, Seoul, and Tokyo. The world evolution is marked by a fundamental phenomenon of “topodynamic inertia” based on the interaction between potentiality and reality, every modification of reality causing a change in the virtual optimal locations which orient the real location decisions in a way that may often favor a change similar to the one which initially modified reality. That phenomenon, which has been very well studied through the years in North America in the context of the well-known southwestward shift of activities, can also be observed throughout the world’s economic history.3 Topodynamic inertia has an entropic character in the sense that it is fed by the process of disintegration of the old dominant poles. But it can also feed a negative-entropy process leading to the forming of new poles. In thermodynamics, entropy is associated with the degradation of energy (according to the second law of thermodynamics). When a system falls apart or a structure decomposes, it is said that entropy increases (for instance, when a perfume is sprayed and it diffuses through a room, its entropy is said to be increasing); on the contrary, when disorder is replaced by order, entropy decreases, and some people talk of “negentropy” (“negative entropy”). The topodynamic diffusion process associated with spatial inertia is “ignited” by a “negentropic” process, which takes the form of a spatio-economic “urbexplosion.” Polarization is a structuring process, hence a negentropic phenomenon, and urbexplosions are the result both of polarization and the “polarization of the poles.” Urbexplosions lead to the centripetal process of the formation of a core dominating a periphery. 3.

Some researchers has studied the evolution of the urban system of Japan between 1940 and 2000, and they have concluded that even the nuclear cataclysm of Hiroshima and Nagasaki may have had no effect at all on the long-run evolution of the Japanese urban system. See Donald R. Davis, and David E. Weinstein, “Bones, bombs, and break points: The geography of economic activity,” American Economic Review 92 (2002): 1269–1289.

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However, there is a reciprocal centrifugal process, which involves the core’s broadening its periphery by invading the inner territory. This centri fugal process nurtures spatial inertia and is associated with increasing entropy. An economy-world is made of a certain number of urbexplosions, that is, organic urban systems whose external limit evolves through time beyond political borders. The center of the urbexplosion often lies at an interface between two areas involving different mobility conditions, generally at the interface between a continent and the ocean, as in the cases of Amsterdam, London, New York City, Tokyo, or Constantinople-Istanbul, but also at times at the interface between desert and arable land, as in the case of Damascus or Marrakech. Most of the cores of the urbexplosions which have dominated economy-worlds not only have been located at interfaces, but have been ports (Constantinople, Genoa, Venice, Antwerp, Amsterdam, London, and New York). The evolution of urbexplosions is marked by a change in the interplay of attractive and repulsive forces. There exists a lag between the appearance of the attractive forces and that of the repulsive forces they generate. The attractive forces precede, sometimes considerably, the repulsive forces. In the short run, the polarizing attractive forces dominate, and they generate, on the one hand, repulsive forces linked to land values (the stronger the polarization process is, the faster the land values rise) and, on the other hand, positive repulsive forces associated with the urbexplosion expansion and the conquest of the surrounding hinterland. The history of the nineteenthcentury United States is a good example of that phase. In the long run, the polarizing attractive forces give precedence to attractive forces of an implosive nature, and the positive repulsive forces are replaced by negative repulsive forces of an entropic nature leading to the disintegration of the urbexplosion through mechanisms linked to aging, pollution, congestion, and urban decay. The decline of the Western Roman Empire illustrates such a process. It must be noted that the increase in the number of repulsive forces has a negligible effect on an urbexplosion’s level of polarization. On the other hand, it has a determining effect on its spatial form. The more the number of repulsive forces increases, the more the urbexplosion’s periphery develops at the expanse of the center, which can lead to the break-up of the urbexplosion. The fall of the Roman Empire and the break-up of the urbexplosion dominated by Rome to the benefit of Constantinople and, later, the barbarian kingdoms is an example of this, as is the end of the Arabo-Moslem Empire of the beginning of Islam, dominated by Damascus, Baghdad, and Cairo, which broke up to give birth to the Berber sultanates of North Africa and Spain, the Seljuq Turkish and later Ottoman empires, and the Safavid Empire of Iran.

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There exists a process of aging and reproduction of urbexplosions. Those are not immortal, and they can give birth to new ones. There is an interdependence between urbexplosions which follow each other. The old urbexplosions generate the new ones. The Constantinople urbexplosion gave birth to that of Venice and Genoa, which led to the emergence of that of Antwerp, Amsterdam, and London. And the urbexplosion of London gave birth to that of New York City, which in its turn gives rise to that of Los Angeles. Multiplier effects play a role in the process of succession from one urbexplosion to another.4 For example, the multiplier effects which previously benefited New York City increasingly enure to Los Angeles as the urbexplosion of Los Angeles asserts itself with respect to New York. The “central-place” and “networksystem” logics play a role in the process of succession from one urbexplosion to another. The emergence of an urbexplosion follows a “network-system” logic (the emerging urbexplosion extending its tentacles in all directions), while, at maturity, an urbexplosion tends to function according to a “central-place” logic oriented towards the upholding of the control of conquered territory by the urbexplosion center. Centers of gravity move within a country, an urbexplosion, and also inside continents because of the evolution of the relative weight of their urbexplosions. Thus, in North America, the shift of the gravity center towards the southwest (more precisely towards Los Angeles) results from both the shift of the gravity center of the New York urbexplosion towards the interior of the continent and the progressive transfer of economic power from the New York urbexplosion to that of Los Angeles. In order to understand the dynamics of urbexplosions, the “rank-size rule” introduced by Felix Auerbach and popularized by George Kingsley Zipf is of little help if it is applied in a country or a territory whose limits are purely political.5 Zipf observed that if the city populations in the United States were plotted against city rank on a double logarithmic scale, the result would be approximately a straight line with a slope of –1. In other words, each city would be half the size of the city next highest in rank. This is known as the ‘normal’ rank-size distribution. Zipf did not discover

4.

5.

Multiplier effects generally benefit the economic poles. However, it must also be said that, through transfer payments, economic poles also finance the periphery. For instance, it is estimated that about ten percent of the total income of cities such as Paris or London is redistributed to the peripheral areas through transfer mechanisms. See Laurent Davezies, “Un essai de mesure de la contribution des budgets des pays membres à la cohésion européenne,” Économie et prévision 138–139 (1999): 179–197. Felix Auerbach, “Das Gesetz der Bevölkerungskonzentrazion,” Petermanns Geographische Mitteilungen 59 (1913): 73–76; Alfred J. Lotka, Elements of Physical Biology (Baltimore : Williams and Wilkins, 1924); George Kingsley Zipf, Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort (Cambridge, Mass.: Addison Wesley, 1949).

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the rank-size rule—it was noted much earlier by F. Auerbach —, but he was the first to try to explain it. By replacing the slope of –1 by a parameter, a Pareto function is obtained, which defines the “general” rank-size distribution, which is based on the population of the largest city. Some researchers have thought that the rank-size rule could be helpful to understand the evolution of urban systems. Unfortunately, that rule could make sense only within the evolving limits of a given urbexplosion, provided that those limits are scientifically determined, setting aside the administrative borders. But even in such a case, the rank-size rule remains little reliable since a given urbexplosion can be dominated successively by many dominant cities, as in the case of Northern Europe, which has been successively dominated, from a commercial point of view, by Bruges, Antwerp, Amsterdam, and London and, from a demographic point of view, by Paris and then London. The topodynamic evolution has political incidences in terms of democracy, absolutism, and political domination. Democracy prevails more easily at the center where, according to Braudel, merchant states and citystates predominate. Centralized regimes are normal in the territorial states of the semi-periphery. Finally, dictatorships and repressive regimes are frequent in the far periphery, which is subjected to the domination of the center. Similarly, the topodynamic evolution has sociocultural incidences in terms of “heterogeneticity” and “orthogeneticity,” according to the concepts introduced by Redfield and Singer.6 The economy-world centers are generally heterogenetic, in the sense that they are open to the diversity of cultures and languages. The cosmopolitan character of Babylon, Rome, London, and New York City illustrate that. The territorial states which surround the centers are naturally orthogenetic: they tend to impose a single language and a single culture. France is the classical, but not unique, example of this. One may also think of Bismarck and Hitler’s Germany, and of the Inquisition Spain. As for the periphery, it experiences a colonial-type heterogeneticity, one or two “dominant” world cultures imposing their domination over colonized local cultures. The examples here are innumerable. The Portuguese, Spanish, French and British colonies, as well as their ancestors, the Roman colonies, are but a few. The urbexplosion and economy-world peripheries depend a lot on the exploitation of natural resources, whereas the centers depend above all on human resources. The urbexplosion and economy-world centers are vast aspirators which drain off the human and material resources of the peripheries. In the periphery, the human resources that are the least drawn up by

6.

Robert Redfield and Milton B. Singer, “The cultural role of the cities,” Economic Development and Cultural Change 3, 1 (1954): 52–73.

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the center are those which are necessary for extracting the material resources from the periphery to the benefit of the center. The “elasticity” of production with respect to population is greater at the center than in the periphery. In other words, if there exists an “optimal” population at the center as well as in the periphery, exceeding that “optimal” population has more negative consequences in the periphery than at the center because the center is less constrained by the limits imposed by material resources the periphery depend on. The more the level of polarization rises, the greater the gap between the elasticity of production with respect to population at the center and the corresponding elasticity in the periphery. The more space friction decreases, the more polarization increases and the capacity of the periphery to support an excess population diminishes. Thus, the official unemployment and disguised unemployment are generally more present and virulent today in Central America South America, and Africa than they were a century ago. The population drifts which result from such situations follow Ravenstein’s second law, which says that populations locate according to a process of sedimentation nurtured by the flows of goods, services, and persons.7 Along an important road of communication, populations “deposit” themselves on the way in accordance with rules similar to those by which alluviums deposit at the bottom of waterways. The more important the flow, the more important the quantity deposited. And the quantity of deposited alluvium is inversely proportional to the speed of the flow. Thus, for example, the unemployed from the Sahel region migrate to the great cities of the Sahel; a part of them go on and migrate to the coastal countries of West Africa, and a part of the latter go on and migrate to the great European cities. This is also observed in the developed countries. Thus, in the United States, the movement towards Los Angeles implies that people from Maine migrate to Boston, a part of them migrate from Boston to New York City, and a part of the latter migrate up to California. Of course, there are frequent direct migrations from the Sahel to Paris or from Maine to Los Angeles, but, if the mass of migrants is considered instead of the individual paths, the flows respect Ravenstein’s second law. The topodynamic evolution is made of inertia, ruptures, forward and backward movements. If inertia generally prevails, it does not prevail all the time. Several times through history, changes of trajectory occurred. Those changes have been fraught with consequences and exceptional. The Great Ebb is a good example of that, as is the rebirth of the westward movement

7.

Ernest G. Ravenstein, “The laws of migration,’’ Journal of the Royal Statistical Society 48 (1885): 167–235, and 52 (1889): 241–301.

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which followed the discovery of America, or the emergence in the Far East of westward movements after the awakening of Japan under the impulse of the United States and the Western world. The topodynamic trends are influenced by economic cycles, and vice versa. The phases of economic prosperity accelerate the topodynamic movements, whereas recessions slow them down and can even temporari ly reverse them. The monetary mass influences the topodynamic trends: increases in the monetary mass and inflationary upsurges accelerate topodynamic movements while reductions in the monetary mass and deflationary situations slow them down. Two eloquent examples of this are given by the transfer of the economic heart of China from the Loess region to that of the Yangtze River in the aftermath of the creation of paper money, and by the shift of the economic power in Europe from Northern Italy to Northern Europe favored by the considerable influx of gold and silver generated by the discovery of America. Both the topodynamic evolution and urbanization depend on the mobility conditions. The lowering of space friction favors polarization. Historically, all the advances in the field of transportation and communication have been followed by an increase in polarization and not the reverse, despite that, each time, some people have forecasted the opposite. The shape of the transportation cost functions has a direct influence on the rate of urbanization, on the urban form, on the size of the largest agglomerations, and on the industrial structure of the cities. The impact of the advent of motorized transportation is very meaningful in that respect. The change from animal transportation to relay and motorized transportation has been accompanied by a radical increase in the rate of urbanization, by the shift from the compact city to the sprawled one, by an increase in the maximum size of cities, and by an increase in the weight of the tertiary sector compared with that of the primary sector. In the societies using animal transportation without relay, the rate of urbanization never exceeded five percent. In such societies, the form of the cities was compact, and the size of the cities probably never exceeded 300,000 inhabitants. As for the allocation of the urban jobs between the three classical sectors of the economy, it was approximately the following: twenty percent of the jobs in the primary sector, forty percent in the secondary, and forty percent in the tertiary sector. In the societies that have developed relay transportation, the rate of urbanization may have reached fifteen percent, but certainly not more. The form of the cities was still compact, but with an openness on the extensions of the city outside its walls. In those societies, the city size may have exceptionally exceeded one million dwellers. As for the distribution of the urban jobs, it looked as follows: ten percent of the jobs in the primary sector, fifty percent in the secondary, and forty percent in the tertiary sector.

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Finally, in the societies using motorized transportation, the rate of urbanization can exceed seventy-five percent, the cities are sprawled, and the city size can exceed 20 million inhabitants. As for urban employment, it is divided in the following way: one percent in the primary sector, twenty-five percent in the secondary sector, and seventy-four percent in the tertiary sector. As can be seen, there is no contradiction between urban sprawl and polarization. On the contrary, all decreases in the space friction favor altogether polarization and, consequently, urbanization and urban sprawl. Similarly, the eventual development of dough nut holes in the modern central areas does not contradict the polarization and urban sprawl trends. It is normal for urban-sprawl to be accompanied with a relative weakening of the center in terms of residential density. *** In the light of the preceding statements, let us now try to answer the questions that have been formulated in the introduction of this book. The first of those questions was: Are there geographical regularities in the economic development? The answer to that question is a resounding and unambiguous “yes.” Those regularities exist at all scales. At the largest scale, regularities take the form of the topodynamic corridors. At the medium scale, this book has presented innumerable examples of the structuring impact of waterways, valleys, mountain ranges, canals, railway corridors, coasts, passes, climate, deserts, vegetation, currents, winds, etc. At the smallest scale, broad spatial patterns have been identified as regards the evolution of the form of cities through history, and the universal character of those patterns has been stressed. The second question posed in the introduction was: Are there economic explanations of the observed geographical regularities? Those explanations exist, and they are essentially linked to the action of space friction and mobility on the constitution of the built environment and real estate that are the very bases of cities. The mobility conditions and geographical constraints are what determines the nature, the importance, and the layout of the economic networks, and those networks make up the spinal column of the topodynamic corridors and the logical framework of the urban systems, urbexplosions, and economy-worlds. A third basic question dealt with the relative weight of the racial, religious, political, sociological, or cultural factors in relation to space-economic factors. Many references have been made to those human factors throughout the book. It would be absurd to deny their role in the world evolution. However, it seems that they have been much more frequently influenced by the space-economic and topodynamic logic than they have determined or bent that logic.

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The migrations of the human races have been profoundly marked by the corridors and the topodynamic corridors, as well as by the domination of certain poles at certain periods. On the other hand, in our opinion, races have had no influence whatsoever on the topodynamic evolution of the world. All the races of the world have been in turn masters and slaves, learned and ignorant, rich and poor, developed and underdeveloped. There exists no racial logic of history. It must not be forgotten that, according to Maddison’s estimates, the poorest region of the world in 1000 was Western Europe, and that, in the European languages, the word “slave” (esclave in French, esclavo in Spanish) comes from the word slavus in Latin, which designated persons of the white race, often having blond hair and blue eyes, of Slav origin, who had been reduced to slavery by the Germans, who had themselves, like so many other Indo-Europeans, been previously reduced to slavery by the Romans, who had neither blond hair nor blue eyes. The same goes for religions. It has been pointed out that religions generally surf on the topodynamic waves. Till the fall of Rome, to the west of the Persian Gulf, the religious currents have followed the westward trend within the Great Corridor. The Mesopotamian religions are at the origin of the Judeo-Christian current, which, itself, diffused mainly towards the northwest inside the same corridor. Later, Islam surfed eastward on the wave of the Great Ebb up to China and Indonesia. Similarly, before Jesus and Muhammad, the message of Buddha diffused from India towards China along the Silk Road and the Asian Corridor. Religions color the topodynamic movements; they do not determine them. The same can be said about political empires. Those can expand and triumph for a moment only by following the topodynamic movements, which always have the last word. The Western Roman Empire fell because the pendulum had already begun its eastward return, as, by the way, Emperor Constantine had realized. It is not the fall of Rome which has provoked the return of the pendulum; it just revealed it in a striking way. Similarly, the British Empire has been the product and not the cause of the European revival and the Big Bang of the Industrial Revolution. Emperors and empires pass, while topodynamic logic prevails. In the field of social classes, the rules, if they exist, are not clear.8 If the exacerbation of the inequalities may have contributed to the fall of the Western Roman Empire, a too great pursuit of equality may have caused the fall of the Soviet Union. Midlarsky goes as far as saying that the emergence of democracy requires inequalities, but that increasing inequalities jeopardizes democracy. In the Braudelian scheme, what matters the most is not really 8.

Manus I. Midlarsky, Evolution of Inequality: War, State Survival and Democracy in Comparative Perspective (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1999).

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the inequality of social classes, but rather the nature of the social classes that dominate. And that nature is determined by topodynamic logic: at the center, the merchant class dominates; in the semi-periphery, aristocracy or bureaucracy dominate, while, in the far periphery, power lies in the hands of colonial powers and local puppets. Finally, cultures themselves seem to rely more on topodynamic logic than to determine it. Heterogenetic cultures lie at the center, orthogenetic ones in the semi-periphery, and the colonial cultures imposed upon the local cultures in the far periphery. Cultures adapt to topodynamic movements which mold them, and are not modified by them. The numerous preceding observations stem from the reading this book has made of the world history. They use its concepts and theoretical framework while presenting a synthesis of its bases. They sum up its vision of the world, of its development and evolution. They do not pretend, however, to close the debate. Our world has so often stunned those who believed to have understood it that cautiousness and wisdom coincide on that. Let us only wish that the coherence of the reading of the world history that ends here will foster the reflection of those who follow by convincing them the geographic space is the great “organizer” and the great mold of the world economic and urban history.

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Appendix 1

Tables of Demographic Evolution1

1.

The following demographic curves are based on various data sources, such as: Paul Bairoch, Cities and Economic Development, from the Dawn of History to the Present (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988); Tertius Chandler, Four Thousand Years of Urban Growth: A Historical Census (Lewiston: St. David’s University Press, 1987); Tertius Chandler and Gerald Fox, Three Thousand Years of Urban Growth (New York: Academic Press, 1974); and Jan de Vries, European Urbanization, 1500–1800 (London: Harvard University Press, 1984).

576

Urban World History

Demographic Evolution of Çatalhöyük, Jericho, Jarmo, Eridu, Ur, and Uruk, 7300–300 BC 70,000 60,000

Population

50,000 Çatalhöyük Jericho Jarmo Eridu Ur Uruk

40,000 30,000 20,000 10,000 0 7300 BC 6300 BC 5300 BC 4300 BC 3300 BC 2300 BC 1300 BC

300 BC

Demographic Evolution of Memphis, Thebes (Egypt), Byblos, Ugarit, and Tyre, 7300–300 BC 120,000

100,000

Population

80,000 Memphis Thebes (Eg.) Byblos Ugarit Tyre

60,000

40,000

20,000

0 7300 BC 6300 BC 5300 BC 4300 BC 3300 BC 2300 BC 1300 BC

300 BC

577

Appendix 1

Demographic Evolution of Babylon, Ashur, Nimrud, and Nineveh, 7300–300 BC 350,000 300,000 250,000

Population

200,000

Babylon Ashur Nimrud Nineveh

150,000 100,000 50,000 0 7300 BC 6300 BC 5300 BC 4300 BC 3300 BC 2300 BC 1300 BC

300 BC

Demographic Evolution of Hattusa, Damascus, Jerusalem, Petra, Susa, and Persepolis, 7300–300 BC 100,000 90,000 80,000

Population

70,000 60,000

Hattusa Damascus Jerusalem Petra Susa Persepolis

50,000 40,000 30,000 20,000 10,000 0 7300 BC 6300 BC 5300 BC 4300 BC 3300 BC 2300 BC 1300 BC

300 BC

578

Urban World History

Demographic Evolution of Mycenae, Troy, Syracuse, Catania, Taranto, and Ephesus, 7300–300 BC 140,000 120,000

Population

100,000 Mycenae Troy Syracuse Catania Taranto Ephesus

80,000 60,000 40,000 20,000 0 7300 BC 6300 BC 5300 BC 4300 BC 3300 BC 2300 BC 1300 BC

300 BC

Demographic Evolution of Athens, Sparta, Thebes (Greece), Byzantium, Marseille, and Alexandria, 7300–300 BC 400,000 350,000

Population

300,000 250,000

Athens Sparta Thebes (Gr.) Byzantium Marseille Alexandria

200,000 150,000 100,000 50,000 0 7300 BC 6300 BC 5300 BC 4300 BC 3300 BC 2300 BC 1300 BC

300 BC

579

Appendix 1

Demographic Evolution of Ai Khanum, Khotan-Hotian, Harappa, Mohenjo-Daro, and Kalibangan, 2200 BC–AD 1300 60,000

50,000

Population

40,000 Ai Khanum Khotan-Hotian Harappa Mohenjo-daro Kalibangan

30,000

20,000

10,000

0 2200 BC 1700 BC 1200 BC

700 BC

200 BC

300

800

1300

Demographic Evolution of Changan-Xi’an, Kaifeng, Luoyang, Beijing, Zhengzhou, Nanking, and Chengdu, 2200 BC–AD 1300 1,000,000 900,000 800,000

Population

700,000 600,000

Changan-Xi’an Kaifeng Luoyang Beijing Zhengzhou Nanking Chengdu

500,000 400,000 300,000 200,000 100,000 0 2200 BC 1700 BC 1200 BC 700 BC

200 BC

300

800

1300

580

Urban World History

Demographic Evolution of Mexico, Cuzco, Chan Chan, Teotihuacan, Machu Picchu, Uxmal, Tikal, and Palenque, 100–1500 180,000 160,000 140,000

Population

120,000

Mexico Cuzco Chan Chan Teotihuacan Machu Picchu Uxmal Tikal Palenque

100,000 80,000 60,000 40,000 20,000 0 100

300

500

700

900

1100

1300

1500

Demographic Evolution of Constantinople, Rome, Carthage, Lyon, Caesarea, and Nisa, 400 BC–AD 500 1,000,000 900,000 800,000

Population

700,000 600,000

Constantinople Rome Carthage Lyon Caesarea Nisa

500,000 400,000 300,000 200,000 100,000 0 400 BC

250 BC

100 BC

50

200

350

500

581

Appendix 1

Demographic Evolution of Baghdad, Constantinople, Córdoba, Cairo, Paris, Fes, Antioch, and Marrakech, 450–1500 1,000,000 900,000 800,000

Population

700,000 Baghdad Constantinople Córdoba Cairo Paris Fes Antioch Marrakech

600,000 500,000 400,000 300,000 200,000 100,000 0 450

600

750

900

1050

1200

1350

1500

Demographic Evolution of Palermo, Seville, Granada, Adrianople, Sarai, Milan, and Venice, 450–1500 160,000 140,000

Population

120,000 100,000

Palermo Seville Granada Adrianople Sarai Milan Venice

80,000 60,000 40,000 20,000 0 450

600

750

900

1050

1200

1350

1500

582

Urban World History

Demographic Evolution of Isfahan, Kairouan, Thessaloniki, Bruges, Mecca, Prague, and Benin, 450–1500 120,000

100,000

Population

80,000 Isfahan Kairouan Thessaloniki Bruges Mecca Prague Benin

60,000

40,000

20,000

0 450

600

750

900

1050

1200

1350

1500

Demographic Evolution of Preslav, Ghent, Cologne, Bologna, M’banza Congo, Kiev, and Amalfi, 450–1500 70,000 60,000

Population

50,000 Preslav Ghent Cologne Bologna M´banza Congo Kiev Amalfi

40,000 30,000 20,000 10,000 0 450

600

750

900

1050

1200

1350

1500

583

Appendix 1

Demographic Evolution of Lisbon, Great Zimbabwe, Timbuktu, Ratisbon, Budapest, and Hamburg, 450–1500 50,000 45,000 40,000

Population

35,000 30,000

Lisbon Great Zimbabwe Timbuktu Ratisbon Budapest Hamburg

25,000 20,000 15,000 10,000 5,000 0 450

600

750

900

1050

1200

1350

1500

Demographic Evolution of Vijayanagar, Delhi, Agra, Ahmadabad, and Surat, 450–1850 600,000

500,000

Population

400,000 Vijayanagar Delhi Agra Ahmadabad Surat

300,000

200,000

100,000

0 450

650

850

1050

1250

1450

1650

1850

584

Urban World History

Demographic Evolution of Peking-Beijing, Hangzhou, Lahore, Zayton, and Panaji-Goa, 450–1850 1,800,000 1,600,000 1,400,000

Population

1,200,000 Peking-Beijing Hangzhou Lahore Zayton Panaji-Goa

1,000,000 800,000 600,000 400,000 200,000 0 450

650

850

1050

1250

1450

1650

1850

Demographic Evolution of Manila, Jakarta, Samarkand, Malacca, Colombo, and Macau, 450–1850 120,000

100,000

Population

80,000 Manila Jakarta Samarkand Malacca Colombo Macau

60,000

40,000

20,000

0 450

650

850

1050

1250

1450

1650

1850

585

Appendix 1

Demographic Evolution of Canton-Guangzhou, Tokyo, Kyoto, Pegu-Bago, Ningbo, Nara, and Angkor, 450–1850 1,000,000 900,000 800,000

Population

700,000 Canton-Guangzhou Tokyo Kyoto Pegu-Bago Ningpo-Ningbo Nara Angkor

600,000 500,000 400,000 300,000 200,000 100,000 0 450

650

850

1050

1250

1450

1650

1850

Demographic Evolution of Vienna, Naples, Amsterdam, Madrid, Brussels, Rome, Bordeaux, and Genoa, 1500–1850 450,000 400,000 350,000

Population

300,000

Vienna Naples Amsterdam Madrid Brussels Rome Bordeaux Genoa

250,000 200,000 150,000 100,000 50,000 0 1500

1550

1600

1650

1700

1750

1800

1850

586

Urban World History

Demographic Evolution of Genoa, Florence, Antwerp, Norwich, Cádiz, Versailles, and Basel, 1500–1850 120,000

100,000

Population

80,000 Genoa Florence Antwerp Norwich Cádiz Versailles Basel

60,000

40,000

20,000

0 1500

1550

1600

1650

1700

1750

1800

1850

Demographic Evolution of Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, Lima, Bogotá, Caracas, and Potosí, 1500–1850 250,000

Population

200,000

150,000

Mexico City Rio de Janeiro Lima Bogotá Caracas Potosí

100,000

50,000

0 1500

1550

1600

1650

1700

1750

1800

1850

587

Appendix 1

Demographic Evolution of New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Charleston, and Quebec City, 1500–1850 700,000 600,000

Population

500,000 400,000

New York Philadelphia Boston Charleston Quebec City

300,000 200,000 100,000 0 1500

1550

1600

1650

1700

1750

1800

1850

Demographic Evolution of London, Paris, Manchester, Birmingham, Lille, Leeds, Glasgow, and Liverpool, 1750–2000 12,000,000

10,000,000

Population

8,000,000

London Paris Manchester Birmingham Lille Leeds Glasgow Liverpool

6,000,000

4,000,000

2,000,000

0 1750

1800

1850

1900

1950

2000

588

Urban World History

Demographic Evolution of Bombay, Shanghai, Calcutta, Bangkok, Karachi, Tehran, Hong Kong, Lagos, and Kinshasa, 1750–2000 18,000,000 16,000,000 14,000,000

Population

12,000,000

Bombay Shanghai Calcutta Bangkok Karachi Tehran Hong Kong Lagos Kinshasa

10,000,000 8,000,000 6,000,000 4,000,000 2,000,000 0 1750

1800

1850

1900

1950

2000

Demographic Evolution of Barcelona, Hanoi, Addis Ababa, Cape Town, Algiers, Johannesburg, Nairobi, and Dar es Salaam, 1750–2000 4,000,000 3,500,000 3,000,000 Barcelona Hanoi Addis Ababa Cape Town Algiers Johannesburg Nairobi Dar es Salaam

Population

2,500,000 2,000,000 1,500,000 1,000,000 500,000 0 1750

1800

1850

1900

1950

2000

589

Appendix 1

Demographic Evolution of Dakar, Belgrade, Ibadan, Tunis, Khartoum, Rotterdam, Zurich, and Kigali, 1750–2000 2,500,000

Population

2,000,000

Dakar Belgrade Ibadan Tunis Khartoum Rotterdam Zurich Kigali

1,500,000

1,000,000

500,000

0 1750

1800

1850

1900

1950

2000

Demographic Evolution of Madras, Sydney, and Singapore, 1750–2000 7,000,000 6,000,000

Population

5,000,000 4,000,000

Madras Sydney Singapore

3,000,000 2,000,000 1,000,000 0 1750

1800

1850

1900

1950

2000

590

Urban World History

Demographic Evolution of Moscow, St. Petersburg, Berlin, Copenhagen, Warsaw, Stockholm, and Essen, 1825–2000 14,000,000 12,000,000

Population

10,000,000 Moscow St. Petersburg Berlin Copenhagen Warsaw Stockholm Essen

8,000,000 6,000,000 4,000,000 2,000,000 0 1825

1850

1875

1900

1925

1950

1975

2000

Demographic Evolution of Tokyo, Mexico City, São Paulo, New York, Los Angeles, and Osaka, 1825–2000 35,000,000 30,000,000

Population

25,000,000 Tokyo Mexico City São Paulo New York Los Angeles Osaka

20,000,000 15,000,000 10,000,000 5,000,000 0 1825

1850

1875

1900

1925

1950

1975

2000

591

Appendix 1

Demographic Evolution of Buenos Aires, Peking-Beijing, Chicago, Tianjin, Washington, San Francisco, and Mukden-Shenyang, 1825–2000 12,000,000

10,000,000

Population

8,000,000 Buenos Aires Peking-Beijing Chicago Tientsin-Tianjin Washington San Francisco Mukden-Shenyang

6,000,000

4,000,000

2,000,000

0 1825

1850

1875

1900

1925

1950

1975

2000

Demographic Evolution of Santiago, Dallas, Toronto, Detroit, Houston, and Minneapolis, 1825–2000 6,000,000

5,000,000

Population

4,000,000 Santiago Dallas Toronto Detroit Houston Minneapolis

3,000,000

2,000,000

1,000,000

0 1825

1850

1875

1900

1925

1950

1975

2000

592

Urban World History

Demographic Evolution of Atlanta, Seattle, Montreal, Vancouver, Pinkiang-Harbin, and Montevideo, 1825–2000 4,500,000 4,000,000 3,500,000

Population

3,000,000 Atlanta Seattle Montreal Vancouver Pinkiang-Harbin Montevideo

2,500,000 2,000,000 1,500,000 1,000,000 500,000 0 1825

1850

1875

1900

1925

1950

1975

2000

Appendix 2

Cities by Types1

1.

The main cities presented in the book are hereby characterized as regards their location and urban form. Their list follows the plan of the book.

594

Urban World History

B

R

A

T

Y

Z

D

R

P P

R R R R R

P

R

P P P P P P P P P P P

R R R R

F B B C C C

L H B B B B B

X X X

S S U U

S D L D

B C C C C C

F

U

H H

F

S S S S S

L L L

S

L

B N B

C C C

V W K V V V V V V W

F F

H

B B B B B B

P P P P P

P

L X

V

O O O O O O

O O O O O O

R R

O O O

R R R R

O O O O O O O

T

T T T T T

O O O O O O O

Sprawling

J

Circled

Orthogonal-radial

P

Planned curved

Radial

D

Planned-unplanned

Orthogonal

L

Unplanned

Amphibian

U M S S S S S

Religious

X

Railway-crossroads

B

Political

River-crossroads

N

Desert

Bridge

I

Plain

Inland maritime

H

Urban form

Shelter

Mainland-island

F

Mine

Sea-island

C

Breaking-point

River-mouth

Index Çatal Jericho Jarmo Eridu Ur Uruk Memphis Thebes Byblos Ugarit Tyre Babylon Ashur Kalakh Nineveh Hattusa Damascus Jerusalem Petra Persepolis Mycenae Troy Catania Syracuse Taranto Ephesus Athens Sparta Byzantium Marseille Alexandria Harappa Mohenjo Kalibangan Ai Khanum

Coastal

Location

E

595

Appendix 2

B B

X X

S S

B B

L L L

P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P

L L L L

I C L S B C

L

H B

X

B

X X

L L

C C

P P P P P P P

B X X

L L L D

B B

X X

Y

Z

V W K

T T

T T T

R R R R

W W W W

A T T

O O W W

R R

O O O O O O O O O

T T

O

O O O O

L L

P P

R R

R R R R

O O O O O O O O O O O

Sprawling

T

Planned curved

A

Circled

Planned-unplanned

Unplanned

R R R R

Orthogonal-radial

J

L

C C C C

B B

P P P P

Radial

D D

L U U

N

L

Orthogonal

U M S

Amphibian

X

Religious

Breaking-point

B

Railway-crossroads

River-crossroads

N

Political

Bridge

I

Desert

Inland maritime

H

Plain

Mainland-island

F

Shelter

Sea-island

C

Mine

River-mouth

Index Khotan Changan-Xi’an Loyang Zhengzhou Kaifeng Peking Nanking Chengdu Teotihuacan Palenque Tikal Uxmal Mexico city Chan Chan Cuzco Machu Picchu Rome Carthage Nisa Lyon Caesarea Constantinople Ratisbon Bologna Amalfi Palermo Constantinople Thessaloniki Antioch Preslav Adrianople Kiev Mecca Baghdad Cairo

Urban form

Coastal

Location

E

596

Urban World History

X M L L

B U

L L L

B C

F N I N

B B B B B B B B B

D D D

A

T

Y

Z

V W K

R R R

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

W L P L

N B C

X

H B

C

F B B B B

L D L

C C C C C

F

B

Y P

O O

Sprawling

Unplanned

R

Circled

Orthogonal-radial

J

Planned curved

Radial

Planned-unplanned

Orthogonal

P P P P P P P P P P P P P P

Amphibian

D

Religious

L L

Political

U M S

Desert

X

Railway-crossroads

B B

Plain

N

Shelter

I

Mine

Inland maritime

H

Breaking-point

Mainland-island

F

Urban form

River-crossroads

Sea-island

C

Bridge

River-mouth

Index Isfahan Sarai Zimbabwe Mbanza Congo Benin City Timbuktu Kairouan Fes Marrakech Lisbon Córdoba Seville Granada Paris Cologne Hamburg Prague Budapest Milan Bruges Ghent Venice Ahmadabad Surat Vijayanagar Delhi Agra Lahore Samarkand Peking Hangzhou Goa Colombo Malacca Jakarta

Coastal

Location

E

597

Appendix 2

Unplanned

P

J

R

A

T

Y

Z

V W K

Sprawling

Orthogonal-radial

D

Circled

Radial

L

Planned curved

Orthogonal

Planned-unplanned

Amphibian

U M S

Religious

X

Railway-crossroads

B

Political

Breaking-point

N

Desert

River-crossroads

I

Plain

Bridge

H

Shelter

Inland maritime

F

Mine

Mainland-island

C C C C

Sea-island

Index Manila Macao Zayton-Quanzhou Pegu Angkor Canton Ningbo Nara Kyoto Tokyo Cádiz Bordeaux Naples Rome Florence Genoa Basel Madrid Versailles Vienna Antwerp Brussels Amsterdam Mexico City Caracas Bogotá Lima Potosí Rio de Janeiro Quebec City Boston New York Philadelphia Charleston Paris

Urban form

River-mouth

Coastal

Location

O

E

F L L F

P P

N

C P P P

B C H F

N

B

C B B

R L

C B B

F

N

C

L L

P P P

L

P

Y

E

B

N P P P P

C M C M C C

C

F F F

N

B

X

N

B

X

S

P P P

H

F I

B

W

598

Urban World History

C

F I

C

Amphibian

Orthogonal

Radial

Orthogonal-radial

Unplanned

J

R

A

T

Y

Z

V W K

P

W

U

B

U

F

C B

X

C N

B X

D

C

P P P P P P

L C

F

P P P P

U B B C

U M

C D C C

F H F F

C C C C C

F F

P P P

U N

B B B

P P P P

H B U

H

P P

J

Sprawling

Religious

P

Circled

Railway-crossroads

D

Planned curved

Political

L

M M

B B B

Planned-unplanned

Desert

B

U M S M

Plain

N

X

Urban form

Shelter

B B

Mine

F

N

Breaking-point

C

I

River-crossroads

H

Bridge

F

Inland maritime

Sea-island

C

Mainland-island

River-mouth

Index Manchester Liverpool London Birmingham Glasgow Leeds Lille Rotterdam Zurich Barcelona Belgrade Algiers Tunis Khartoum Addis Ababa Dakar Ibadan Lagos Kinshasa Kigali Nairobi Dar es Salaam Johannes Cape Town Tehran Karachi Bombay Calcutta Bangkok Hanoi Hong Kong Shanghai Madras Singapore Sydney

Coastal

Location

O

E

599

Appendix 2

I C

F F F

N

H N N

B B B B B B B

L

X

L L

U

U U

B F F

L L

U N B B

X

N

U

P P P P P

L M

B C C C C C C

F

B

F

B

F

B B B B B

X

P

N

P L L L

P

J J J J J J J J J J J J J J J J J J J J J J J J J J J J

T

Y

Z

V W K

A

T T

R R

Sprawling

A

Planned curved

R

Circled

Planned-unplanned

J

P M

C C

P P P P P P

Unplanned

H

J

Orthogonal-radial

F

P

Radial

C

H

D

Orthogonal

B C C

L L L

Amphibian

U M S M

Religious

X

Railway-crossroads

B

Political

River-crossroads

N

Desert

Bridge

I

Plain

Inland maritime

H

Urban form

Shelter

Mainland-island

F

Mine

Sea-island

C

Breaking-point

River-mouth

Index Essen Berlin Copenhagen Stockholm Warsaw St. Petersburg Moscow Montreal New York Chicago Detroit Mexico São Paulo Santiago Buenos Aires Montevideo Toronto Atlanta Minneapolis Houston Dallas Los Angeles San Francisco Seattle Vancouver Tokyo Osaka Seoul Harbin Shenyang Tianjin Beijing

Coastal

Location

O

E

E E

E T

Appendix 3

Silk Road Network Synthesis1

1.

Appendix 3 attemps to synthesize the main elements of the Silk Road complex network as they appear in various very different maps of the Silk Road.

BLACK SEA CASPIAN SEA

Sarai

Aralsk

Tokmak

BarigazaBharakucca

Chineses cities Cities that belonged to the empire of Alexander the Great Cities which never belonged to China nor to the empire of Alexander the Great

Sarapana

BAY OF BENGAL

Tamralipti

Chengdu

Xi’an

Fengxiang Lanzhou

Jiuquan

It appears that the main axis of the Silk Road goes from Antioch up to Xi’an, and that the pivot of the whole system is made of the triangle Balkh-Merv-Bukhara-Samarkand-Khokand, and the rectangle Balkh-Kabul-Taxila-Dera Ghazi Khan-Ghazni.

MEDITERRANEAN SEA

Ephesus

ARAL Batkol TIEN SHAN SEA MOUNTAINS Sardis Sa ma Tabriz Nisibis rk a Urgench Dura nd Anxi Turfan Khokand Merv Europos Antioch He Teh Ecb Cte B Kashgar uk Hami si ha ran cato a ra mp Palmyra phon tana ylo TARIM BASIN s Balkh Damascus Tyre Persepolis Ghazni Tashkurgan Tun-huang Kandahar Kabul Khotan Charax Gaza PERSIAN Spasinou Taxila Petra GULF PLATEAU OF TIBET Gerrha & Delhi Dera HIMALAYA Ghazi Khan Alexandria Patala Benares ARABIAN Sarnath SEA

Phasis Trezibond

Constantinople

Tanais-Azaq

602 Urban World History

Index

A Aachen see Aix-la-Chapelle Abbasids 195, 200 Abidjan 392 Abraham 42, 43, 45, 46, 57, 62, 70, 71, 191, 477 Abyssinia 202, 296, 391 Acadia 343 Acapulco 100, 111, 333 Accra 392 Achaea 141, 251 Achaeans 44, 76, 78, 84 Acre 55, 150, 285 Addis Ababa 387, 390, 391, 393, 525, 588, 598 Adria 81

Adrianople 246, 247, 252, 581, 595 Aeolians 44, 76, 84 Aeschylus 83 Afrasians see Afro-Asians Africa 17, 19, 25, 27-29, 41, 45, 49, 54, 55, 74, 79, 80, 97, 99, 124, 126, 135, 137, 139, 140, 146, 151, 152, 163, 165, 188, 190, 192, 195, 197-199, 202-205, 238, 246, 249, 261, 262, 271, 296, 300-302, 312, 321, 323, 329, 332, 337, 338, 354, 372, 378, 383-386, 388-399, 401, 403, 443, 461, 464, 498, 543, 544, 547, 554, 557 Afro-Asians 45, 50, 202, 203 Agglomeration diseconomies 129 Agglomeration economies 128 Agra 211, 212, 583, 596

604 Agriculture 26, 28, 29, 40, 98, 153, 233 Ahmadabad 212, 583, 596 Ai Khanum 95, 579, 594 Aix-en-Provence 314 Aix-la-Chapelle 12, 264, 285, 358 Akbar 210, 212, 403 Akhenaton 45, 46, 52, 53 Akkad 40, 43, 47, 58, 61, 196 Akko see Acre Aksum 190, 202 Alamans see Alemanni Alamo 480 Alans 44, 148, 149 Alaric 151 Alaska 98, 165, 254, 444, 483, 484 Alba (city) 137, 323 Alba, Fernando Álvarez of Toledo, duke of 323 Albania 147, 188, 247, 252 Albany 348, 357, 414, 445, 462 Albertus Magnus (saint) 281 Albuquerque 217, 460, 474 Alemanni 44, 45, 148, 263 Aleria (battle of) 139 Alexander the Great 54, 61, 63, 65, 68, 69, 75, 81, 84-87, 95, 135, 141, 143, 197, 207-209, 524 Alexander VI (Rodrigo Borgia, pope) 303 Alexandria 54, 80-82, 85, 95, 127, 137, 147, 171, 188, 195, 197, 207, 248, 252, 262, 306, 389, 391, 394, 472, 533 Alexandria, 578, 594 Algeria 54, 151, 193, 198, 201, 202, 252, 385, 386, 389 Ali (son-in-law of Muhammad) 206 Alienor of Aquitaine 283 Allah 191 Allende, Salvador 495 Almohads 201, 209, 304, 306 Almoravids 201, 209, 260, 304, 306 Alonso, William 175, 176, 339, 535-537, 541 Alsace 266, 294, 303, 328, 358 Altai 44, 45, 149, 203, 290 Altaics 44, 197, 210, 247, 256, 257 Amalfi 250, 251, 266, 267, 269-272, 278, 279, 292, 582, 595 Amazonia 25, 98 Amber Road 81

Urban World History

America 10, 16-19, 25, 28, 29, 55, 73, 80, 96, 98-100, 102, 103, 106, 107, 111, 146, 165, 183, 202, 213, 218, 221, 223, 227, 231, 232, 237, 238, 241, 242, 245, 249, 261, 270, 274, 279, 294, 296, 300-309, 312, 313, 315, 318, 320, 321, 323, 326, 327, 329, 331-347, 350, 353, 368, 371, 372, 375, 377, 380, 383, 388, 398, 402, 408, 445-447, 459-464, 466, 468, 470, 474, 479, 481, 482, 485, 487-489, 491, 492, 495, 496, 509, 516, 525, 528, 529, 531, 533, 540-544, 546, 552, 553, 555, 557, 558 Amorites 43, 45, 73 Amoy see Xiamen Amphibious cities 526 Amsterdam 13, 14, 56, 79, 127, 161, 171, 174, 179, 267, 273, 277, 295, 304, 305, 308-311, 315-319, 344, 347, 350, 359, 360, 363, 378, 379, 394, 421, 448, 527, 554-556 Amsterdam, 585, 597 Anatolia 13, 28, 52, 54, 59, 60, 67-69, 74, 75, 78-80, 136, 141, 147, 150, 198, 209, 248, 251 Anaxarcus 80 Ancona 279 Andalusia 199, 201, 260, 305 Andernach (battle of) 281 Andes 27, 41, 97-100, 103, 106, 109, 205, 301, 491, 495 Angers 280 Angkor 220, 585, 597 Angles 44, 45, 152, 253, 263, 295, 369 Anglo-Dutch Wars 344 Angola 383, 386 Angoumois 283 Anjou 250, 270, 283, 291, 299, 319, 369 Ann of Kiev 256 Ann Stuart 319, 370 Annam 410 Anoeconomics 4 Antigonids (dynasty) 141, 143 Antioch 65, 87, 137, 147, 149, 150, 171, 188, 189, 195197, 206, 246, 248-250, 252, 285, 306, 379, 457 Antioch, 581, 595 Antonine dynasty 134, 142 Antonine Wall 134 Antoninus Pius 142, 144 Antwerp 14, 56, 171, 267, 273, 277, 278, 286, 292-295, 304, 305, 307-310, 315-318, 323, 363, 372, 378, 394, 554-556, 586, 597 Anzin 376

605

Index

Appalachian Range 460, 472, 473 Appia Road 138 Apulae (writer) 151 Aquileia (city) 279, 314 Aquitaine 283, 288 Arabia 43, 56, 59, 72, 73, 87, 89, 143, 165, 190, 191, 193, 202, 209, 252, 269, 391, 399 Arabian Sea 87, 90, 190, 197, 212, 390, 403 Arabs 43, 45, 46, 57, 94, 189-191, 193, 195, 197-200, 202, 206, 207, 209, 219, 220, 246-248, 251, 259, 262, 276, 312, 383, 390, 396, 397, 496 Aragon 259, 260, 270 Aral Sea 74, 85, 207, 209 Aramaeans 43, 45, 68, 69, 73, 196 Aramaic language 69 Arcadius 151 Archimedes 79 Arezzo 138, 277, 280 Argenson 361 Argentina 234, 336, 339, 487-489, 491-495, 544 Argos 84 Arianism 262, 263 Aristophanes 83 Aristotle 77, 83 Arkhangelsk 455 Arkwright, Richard 367 Armenia 64, 74, 81, 141, 143, 144, 198, 252 Armenia, Small 250 Arnhem 378 Arno 138, 140, 144, 277, 536 Arpad (dynasty) 291 Arras 293 Arsenal 273, 473 Artois 294, 321 Aryans 44, 60, 88, 90, 91, 207, 392 Ashikaga (family) 226 Ashur 63-65, 177, 577, 594 Aspdin, Joseph 367 Assyrian Empire 59, 62, 63, 65, 75 Astrakhan 258 Asturias 200, 259 Atahuallpa 110, 331, 334, 335 Athens 13, 14, 48, 76, 77, 79, 80, 82-84, 135, 136, 138, 140, 177, 179, 180, 184, 250, 251, 253, 408, 533, 535, 539 Athens, 578, 594 Atlanta 234, 460, 469, 474, 481, 525, 592, 599

Attalids 141, 143 Attila 150, 152, 208 Attraction point 129 Atzcapotzalco 105 Augsburg 278, 279, 287, 314, 326 Augustine (saint) 151, 341 Augustine of Canterbury (saint) 263 Augustus (emperor) 137, 142, 148, 260, 480 Aurangzeb 210, 212 Aurelia Road 138 Aurelian (emperor) 142, 149, 189, 533 Auschwitz-Oswiecim 451 Austin 480 Australia 234, 354, 373, 407, 408, 443, 493, 543 Austria 108, 147, 263, 264, 280, 291, 314, 319, 320, 322, 324, 327-329, 342, 358, 369, 371, 444, 448, 451, 452, 490, 506 Austrian Empire 328, 364 Austro-Hungarian Empire 328, 381 Austronesians 202 Auvergne 283, 524 Avars 44, 45, 290 Avenches 274, 314 Aventicum see Avenches Averroës 200 Avicenna 206 Avignon 271, 272, 291 Azores 296, 303 Aztec 96-98, 101-104, 106, 107, 109, 163, 308, 333, 334 Aztec Empire 101, 106, 107, 308, 333, 334

B Babar 210 Babel Tower 60, 62 Babylon 14, 40, 42, 43, 48, 58, 60-62, 64, 65, 67-69, 71-75, 79, 81, 82, 85, 86, 96, 101, 120, 123, 127, 135, 142, 177, 179, 180, 184, 189, 192, 195-197, 452, 507, 516, 556 Babylon, 577, 594 Babylonian Empire 61-63, 69, 73-75 Bacon, Roger 269, 281 Bactra 75, 87, 95, 207 Bactria 75, 95, 144 Baghdad 9, 14, 58, 62, 68, 87, 94, 143, 155, 183, 184, 187, 189, 194-197, 200, 209, 212, 214, 228, 232, 241, 246, 350, 401, 507, 525, 554

606 Baghdad, 581, 595 Bahamas 300 Bahmanids 213 Bahrain 47, 59, 72 Bairoch, Paul 61, 76, 77, 80, 93, 98, 107, 117, 118, 137, 143, 153, 164, 183, 194, 225, 246, 268, 318, 329, 338, 340, 355, 368, 402, 438, 454, 467, 500, 551 Balboa, Vasco Nuñez de 302 Balearic Islands 140, 321 Bali 217 Baltic Sea 81, 255, 256, 270, 285, 286, 289, 290, 293, 301, 308, 323, 380, 444, 450, 453-455, 458 Baltimore 346, 472, 473, 529 Baltimore (Lord) 345, 464 Bamako 388 Bambara 202 Bangkok 409, 517, 588, 598 Bangladesh 26, 193, 213, 215, 404 Bank (deposit) 8, 76, 127, 163, 277-279, 308, 317, 376, 379, 399, 403, 479, 481, 482, 491, 497 Banking see Bank (deposit) Bantu 202-205, 249, 396 Bar 278, 294, 452 Barbezieux, Louis Le Tellier, Marquis of 361 Barcelona 199, 234, 259, 260, 277, 310, 312, 380, 382, 539, 588, 598 Bari 267, 278, 279, 292 Barnabas (saint) 189 Bar-sur-Aube 278 Bar-sur-Seine 294 Basel 315, 328, 358, 378, 379 Basel, 586, 597 Basil II “Bulgaroctonus” (emperor) 247, 256 Basque (language) 284 Basque (people) 200, 218 Basque (region) 200, 259, 380 Basrah 192, 195 Bastides 524 Bastille 362 Batu Khan 214, 256 Bavaria 81, 271, 288, 319, 370, 483 Bavaria, Charles-Albert of 288 Belgium 12, 13, 147, 234, 263-266, 292, 324, 343, 358, 363, 369, 377, 383, 452, 454, 470, 506 Belgrade 145, 253, 381, 382, 589, 598 Bell, Alexander Graham 470 Belo Horizonte 491

Urban World History

Beloch, Karl Julius 137 Benares (Varanasi) 95, 215 Bengal (Bay of) 212, 213, 404, 406 Bengal (region) 212, 406 Benin (kingdom) 205, 392, 393, 582, 596 Berber (tribes) 45, 151, 198, 201, 202, 209, 259, 304, 554 Bergen 319, 377 Bering Strait 98, 254 Berlin (city) 172, 288, 371, 403, 443, 444, 448-451, 455, 458, 499, 516, 518, 525, 539, 542, 544, 552, 553, 590, 599 Berlin (Conference) 383, 387, 393 Bernini 311 Besançon 278, 287 Béziers 154, 312 Bian Canal 156, 158 Bible 41, 43, 46, 56, 57, 65, 69-71, 191, 262 Bijapur (Sultanate of) 213 Bilbao 295, 312, 380, 382 Birmingham 368, 370, 371, 374, 375, 587, 598 Black Death 225, 268, 285 Black Sea 30, 42, 49, 53, 60, 63-65, 67, 79, 80, 134, 139, 141, 196, 209, 214, 251, 252, 254-257, 268, 274, 276, 314, 380, 381, 401, 444, 451, 453, 455, 524 Boat 31 Bochum 448, 449 Boeing, William Edward 485 Boers 383, 398, 399 Bogotá 331, 332, 335, 336, 517, 586, 597 Bohemia 81, 256, 265, 280, 284, 289-291, 327, 328, 483, 524 Boisguilbert, Pierre Le Pesant de 325, 360, 361 Bolivia 205, 329, 332, 334, 336, 488, 491, 492 Bologna 277, 279, 280, 532, 582, 595 Bolsheviks 454 Bolzano 278 Bombay-Mumbai 58, 403, 404, 406, 543 Bonaventure (saint) 281 Boniface (saint) 263 Bordeaux 124, 145, 295, 302, 312, 380, 585, 597 Borgia, Cesare 303 Borgia, Lucrezia 303 Borinage 377 Borneo 407 Bosnia 138, 147, 252, 271, 381 Bosporus 80, 188, 248

607

Index

Bossuet, Jacques Bénigne 326 Boston 8, 234, 238, 340, 343-347, 349, 371, 463, 464, 468, 472, 483, 488, 489, 539, 557, 587, 597 Boston Tea Party 345 Botswana 386 Boulogne 249, 281, 285 Boulton, Matthew 367, 374 Bourbon 270, 319, 324, 369, 385 Bourbon Two-Sicilies 270 Boxer War 506, 508 Brabant 267, 284, 293-295, 306, 308, 316, 318, 322, 323, 377 Bradford 375 Bragança (House of) 296 Brahmanism 231 Brahmaputra 26, 94, 162 Brandenburg 326, 448, 449 Braudel, Fernand 5, 6, 13, 38, 51, 56, 124-126, 135, 136, 151, 171, 241, 253, 266, 267, 273, 277, 305-307, 309, 310, 315, 356, 363, 436, 551, 556 Brazil 64, 300, 301, 303, 304, 329, 332, 336, 337, 339, 413, 471, 487, 488, 491-493 Brazil (Current of) 300 Brazzaville 394, 397 Breaking point 119 Bremen 286, 449 Brenner Pass 287, 314, 315 Brescia 311 Breslau 278 Brienne, Loménie de 250, 362, 363 Brindisi 188 Brisgau 294 Bristol 295, 320, 345, 368, 374 Britain 137, 141, 152, 215, 232, 266, 292, 315, 338, 342, 345, 365, 368, 370, 371, 374, 376, 378, 385-389, 391, 399, 400, 402, 406, 407, 409, 412, 415, 444, 450-452, 459, 462, 463, 468, 475, 476, 480, 484, 488, 494, 498, 507, 508, 542 British Columbia 475 Brittany 81, 265, 285 Bruges 171, 267, 277, 282, 292-294, 308, 316, 319, 372, 378, 556, 582, 596 Brunswick 288, 341, 342, 449 Brussels 82, 282, 284, 293, 308, 318, 363, 450, 518, 585, 597 Budapest 145, 280, 288, 290, 314, 381, 382, 539, 583, 596

Buddha 215, 560 Buddhism 46, 91, 93, 95, 150, 184, 191, 206, 207, 215, 217, 219, 220, 224, 231, 409, 496 Buddhism, Greater Vehicle 217, 220 Buddhism, Lesser Vehicle 217 Buenos Aires 111, 238, 334, 489, 491-494, 539, 544, 591, 599 Buffalo 342, 348, 445, 462-464 Bujumbura 395 Bukhara (Uzbekistan) 87, 214 Bulgaria 42, 74, 147, 247, 252, 381 Bulgarian Empire 247 Bulgars 44, 247, 248, 251, 254, 255, 258, 290, 382 Burgundians 44, 45, 152, 262, 263 Burgundy (dukes of) 294, 313, 327 Burgundy (region) 145, 263, 265, 266, 283, 284, 287, 288, 294, 308, 378 Burma see Myanmar Burundi 23, 53, 204, 205, 390, 395, 398 Bute, John 342 Buxar (battle of) 406 Buyids-Buwayhids 209, 248 Byblos 55-59, 68, 78, 79, 576, 594 Byzantine Empire 45, 137, 141, 150, 152, 154, 190, 192, 198, 223, 245-251, 255, 256, 259, 272, 276, 289, 307, 381 Byzantium 80, 81, 85, 147, 148, 152, 186, 190, 246-248, 251, 256, 269, 271, 382, 578, 594

C Caboto, Giovanni 341 Cabral, Pedro Alvares 304 Cadillac, Antoine Laumet de La Mothe, sieur de 470 Caesar 54, 81, 141, 142, 145, 148, 199 Caesarea Maritima (Palestine) 137, 145, 147 Cairo 9, 51, 54, 194, 195, 197, 199, 200, 238, 383, 386389, 394, 397, 399, 507, 543, 554, 581, 595 Calais 283 Calcutta 127, 371, 389, 403, 404, 406, 543, 544, 588, 598 Calgary 460, 464, 486 Callicrates 83 Calonne, Charles Alexandre de 362, 363 Calvin, Jean 127, 310 Calvinism 316 Cambodia 220, 224, 409-411

608 Cambridge 7, 8, 47, 75, 89, 123, 134, 165, 174, 175, 184, 248, 267, 279, 280, 310, 316, 355, 357, 421, 438, 500, 528, 536, 555 Camel 202 Cameroon 204, 443 Canada 6, 14, 237, 300, 320, 332, 340-343, 348, 353, 358, 373, 402, 406, 446, 457, 462, 463, 466, 470, 471, 473, 485-487, 490, 493, 543 Canadian National 486 Canadian Pacific Railway 486 Canal du Midi 312 Canals 40, 102, 105, 516 Canary Currents 300, 301 Canary Islands 303, 321 Candida Casa 263 Canton-Guangzhou 164, 220-222, 228, 234, 411-414, 497, 499, 506, 524, 537, 585 Cap Vert 296, 392 Cape (colony and town) 234, 238, 296, 303, 342, 383, 386-388, 397, 398, 517, 518 Cape Verde Islands 303 Cape, 588, 598 Capetians 282, 288 Capitalism 267, 306, 436 Caracas 111, 127, 339 Caracas, 586, 597 Carcassonne 154 Caribbean (region) 100, 202, 300, 301, 307, 329, 337341, 464 Caribbean Current 300 Carinthia (Kärnten) 328 Carissimi, Giacomo 311 Carolingians 271, 272, 282, 288 Carrhae (battle of) 143 Carthage 55, 58, 84, 139-141, 151, 177, 383, 389, 408, 580, 595 Cartier, Jacques 341 Cartwright, Edmund 367 Casa de Contratación 304, 305 Casa di San Giorgio 276 Casablanca 127, 389 Castile 259, 260, 322 Castilian 284 Castillon (battle of) 283 Castra 145, 274, 287, 314, 381 Catalan 284

Urban World History

Çatalhöyük 35, 37, 39, 110, 523, 532, 576, 594 Catania 80, 311, 578, 594 Cathari 391 Catherine II the Great of Russia 362, 446 Caucasus 44, 74, 85, 134, 203, 254 Cavalieri, Emilio de 311 Celts 18, 44, 199, 253, 263, 287, 336, 381 Central African Republic 388 Central place 121 Central-place theory 121 Çesme (battle of) 380 Ceuta 218, 296 Chad 45, 203, 387 Chadians 203 Chalcis (Greece) 80 Chalon-sur-Saône 278, 312, 315 Champagne 152, 250, 273, 275, 278, 293, 312 Champagne fairs 273 Champlain, Samuel de 341, 347, 462 Chan Chan (Peru) 100, 107, 533, 580, 595 Chandernagor 406 Changan-Xi’an 88, 93-95, 119, 120, 133, 148, 154, 155, 157, 159, 160, 162-164, 166, 171, 174, 177, 179, 180, 183, 196, 212, 232, 246, 523, 533, 595 Changtu (China) 157, 159 Charax 197, 207 Charles I of England 483 Charles III the Fat (emperor) 288 Charles of France 282, 318 Charles the Bald 265, 281, 288 Charles the Bold, duke of Burgundy 313, 327 Charles the Great (emperor) 264, 265, 271, 281, 285, 288, 289 Charles V (emperor) 272, 283, 284, 299, 304, 310, 313, 315, 318, 322, 323, 327, 333, 533 Charles VIII of France 299 Charles-Albert of Bavaria (emperor) 288 Charleston 340, 349, 460, 468, 474, 587, 597 Charolais 294 Chavín culture 107 Cheng Ho (admiral) 165 Chengdu 94, 95, 162-164, 516, 523, 533 Chengdu, 579, 595 Chesme see Çesme (battle of) Chiang Kai-shek 506

Index

Chicago 6, 40, 44, 86, 93, 137, 183, 194, 234, 239, 246, 318, 342, 346, 348, 355, 368, 371, 414, 421, 438, 439, 444, 454, 457, 460, 464-466, 469, 473-475, 485, 493, 516, 518, 525, 534, 537, 543, 551-553, 591, 599 Chichen Itza 102-104 Chichimec 105 Chile 100, 109, 334, 487-489, 493-495 Chimú 100, 107, 108 Chimú Empire 100, 107, 108 China 16, 18, 25-27, 29, 41, 44-46, 65, 86, 87, 91-96, 105, 107, 110, 115, 128, 133, 134, 144, 146, 148, 149, 153-166, 174, 180, 183, 184, 193, 206-208, 210, 213, 215, 217, 218, 220-224, 228, 241, 253, 254, 259, 268, 269, 284, 301, 304, 318, 334, 350, 360, 364, 371, 378, 391, 398, 406, 407, 409-414, 443, 496, 497, 500-508, 516, 524, 527, 531, 533, 543, 544, 552, 558, 560 China, Sea of 16, 18, 133, 161, 162, 165, 209, 410-411, 552 Chinese Empire 6, 94-96, 104, 133, 134, 144, 149, 154, 155, 157, 162, 166, 207, 208, 221, 249, 412, 508 Chios (Greece) 293 Choiseul, Étienne François de 361 Chongqing 94, 95, 162-164, 234, 413, 505, 516, 525 Christaller, Walter 7, 120-123, 125, 172, 325, 376 Christianity 53, 70, 71, 73, 82, 93, 145, 150, 151, 184, 188-191, 193, 208, 217, 218, 223, 231, 245, 247, 248, 252-254, 256, 259, 261-263, 286, 323, 375, 382, 391 Church 151, 186, 189, 248, 256, 257, 262-264, 271, 272, 279, 280, 287, 291, 305, 361, 391, 453 Cincinnati 342, 445, 460, 465, 478 Civil Code 363 Clark, William 473 Clement V (pope) 270 Cleopatra 50, 54, 141 Clermont-Ferrand 376 Cleveland 234, 342, 348, 464, 465 Clovis 262-265, 281 Cochinchina 410 Coimbra 259, 280 Colbert, Jean-Baptiste 127, 324, 325, 361, 362 Colbertism 10 Cologne 136, 145, 171, 280, 285, 286, 289, 292, 319, 582, 596 Colombia 100, 304, 331, 332, 335, 336, 338, 343, 488, 495 Colossae 150 Columba (saint) 263

609 Columbus, Christopher 18, 55, 165, 202, 299-304, 307, 331, 332, 337, 472, 474, 482 Commodus (emperor) 142, 144 Comnenus (family) 250 Como (lake) 274, 287, 314 Company of the East Indies 318, 398, 404 Condé, Louis II of Bourbon, prince of (called the Great Condé) 324 Congo 49, 204-206, 232, 296, 387, 394, 395 Congo, 582, 596 Constance, council of 291 Constantine III (usurping emperor) 152 Constantine XII Paleologus 258 Constantinople 14, 56, 64, 67, 81, 120, 133, 137, 147, 148, 150, 151, 155, 166, 172, 174, 177, 179, 183, 184, 186, 188, 192, 195, 198, 200, 208, 212, 214, 228, 232, 241, 245-248, 250-253, 255, 256, 258, 262, 268-270, 272, 273, 283, 291, 292, 306, 379, 382, 455, 507, 529, 535, 554, 555, 580, 581, 595 Constantius Chlorus (co-emperor) 147 Cook, James 408 Copán 102, 104 Copenhagen 172, 359, 457, 458, 590, 599 Córdoba (Argentina) 493 Córdoba (Spain) 199-201, 256, 260, 262, 516, 581, 596 Corelli, Arcangelo 311 Corfu 273, 286 Corinth 79, 80, 84, 150 Coriolis, Gustave Gaspard 300 Corn Belt 466, 467 Corn Laws 365, 459 Cornwallis, Charles 347 Corridor, American 378, 414, 446, 457, 458, 485, 507 Corridor, Asian 17, 75, 90, 146, 192, 414, 446, 507, 509 Corridor, Great 17, 40, 54, 58, 61, 74, 75, 78, 141, 146, 192, 378, 414, 446, 485, 507 Corridor, Mongolo-American 17 Corridor, Syrian 17, 58, 62, 78, 192, 378 Corridor, topodynamic 17, 54, 414, 485 Corsica 79, 141, 251, 276, 310 Cortés, Hernan 105, 106, 333, 334, 339 Cotton 372, 467, 481 Cotton Belt 467 Council of the Indies 304, 305

610

Urban World History

Counter-Reformation (Catholic) 311 Courtenay 250 Cremona 311 Crete (island) 76, 77, 198, 252, 273, 381 Crimea 139, 202, 214, 251, 252, 254, 257, 258, 276 Croatia 137, 138, 147, 247, 252, 253, 271, 286, 380, 470, 544 Croats 247, 382 Cromwell, Oliver 316 Crusaders 187, 246, 250, 270 Crusades 245, 248, 249, 251, 259, 268, 270, 278, 285, 452 Ctesiphon 62, 68, 87, 141, 143, 188, 192, 195, 196, 379 Cuello 101 Cugnot, Joseph 357 Cuitláhuac (emperor) 331 Cumberland Gap 472, 473 Cuzco 100, 108-111, 334, 523, 530, 533, 580, 595 Cyprian (saint) 151 Cyprus 28, 29, 74, 76-78, 198, 250, 252, 270, 273 Cyrus II 73, 74, 135 Czech region 358 Czechs 289, 290

D da Vinci, Leonardo 310, 311, 527 Daimyos 226 Dairy Belt 466 Dakar 127, 238, 296, 386-388, 391, 392, 589, 598 Dallas 234, 460, 474, 479, 481, 482, 485, 525, 591, 599 Dalmatia 152, 273, 328 Damascus 9, 42, 68-70, 72, 94, 120, 150, 192, 194-197, 200, 232, 248, 252, 273, 554, 577, 594 Danelaw 372 Dante 284 Dantzig-Gdansk 268 Danube 17, 74, 134, 144, 149, 253, 256, 262, 264, 273, 274, 278, 287, 289, 290, 314, 379, 381, 382 Dar es Salaam 394-396, 397, 588, 598 Darius I 73, 74 Darlington 357 David (king) 3, 10, 11, 69-71, 161, 184, 365, 553 de Vries, Jan 8, 75, 161, 225, 267, 292, 308, 316, 317, 320, 355, 357, 359, 377, 438, 459, 500 Deccan 213

Deindustrialization 402 Delhi 196, 212, 228, 401, 403, 404, 525, 544, 583, 596 Delhi, Sultanate of 210, 212, 213 Della Torre 276 Democritus 80 Demolins, Edmond 3, 4 Deng Xiaoping 508 Denmark 12, 323, 338, 358, 364, 369, 452, 457-459 Denver 234, 460, 473, 479, 482, 485 Department stores 538 Derby 369 Deshima (island) 222, 225, 227, 318, 496 Detroit 234, 342, 348, 460, 464, 470, 471, 474, 485, 516, 534, 537, 541, 591, 599 Diamond, Jared 1, 3, 4, 25-28, 31, 41, 45, 91, 95, 97, 98, 103, 107, 204, 227, 311, 331, 388 Dien Bien Phu 411 Dijon 274, 275, 312, 315, 378 Diocletian (emperor) 142, 147, 149, 151, 173, 360 Djenné (Mali) 202, 203 Djibouti 386-391 Dnieper River 45, 254, 255, 455 Dochet Island 341 Domestication 28 Dominican Republic 302, 304, 331 Don Juan of Austria 252, 323 Don River 214, 251, 257, 276, 455 Dorians 44, 76, 83, 84 Dortmund 448, 449, 529 Dravidians 90, 213 Dublin 13, 359 Dubois, Guillaume 361 Ducas (family) 250 Duisburg 448, 449 Duluth 460, 473, 475 Durant, Will 551 Düsseldorf 449 Dzibilchaltun 102

E Eastern Empire 245, 246 Eastern Roman Empire 151, 154, 184, 186, 188-190, 209, 219, 245-247 Eastern Zhou (dynasty) 157 Ebla, Empire of 58 Ebro River 312, 380

611

Index

Ecbatana 75, 87 Economy world 5 Edessa 189, 246, 249, 250 Edict of Milan 150 Edirne 145, 252 Edison, Thomas 470, 539 Edo 225, 226, 228, 497, 500 Edward II of England 283 Egypt 4, 29, 31, 33, 41, 42, 44, 46, 48-54, 56, 58-60, 62, 68-72, 74, 75, 77, 78, 82, 86, 89, 107, 123, 126, 127, 136, 137, 139-141, 146, 147, 149, 192, 193, 195, 202, 204, 248, 250, 252, 273, 274, 336, 383, 385, 386, 389-391, 398, 399, 533 Egyptians 31, 45, 46, 67, 96, 203, 289, 387, 390 Elam 73, 75 Elamites 47, 62, 73 Elbe River 309, 449, 458 England 11, 13, 28, 47, 80, 81, 141, 147, 149, 154, 163, 241, 249, 253, 256, 263, 265, 266, 268, 275, 277, 280, 281, 283, 285, 291, 293-295, 302, 304, 310, 312, 316, 317, 319, 320, 322, 323, 326, 338, 339, 341-348, 353, 355, 357-360, 364-370, 372-376, 380, 386, 402, 403, 405, 408, 444, 447, 452, 457, 459, 460, 464, 466, 468, 475, 483, 488, 500, 524, 536 English Parliament 316 Enlightened despots 362 Epaminondas 84 Ephesus 79, 137, 147, 150, 246, 379, 533, 578, 594 Epicurus 83 Epirus 250 Eratosthenes 82 Erfurt 280 Eridu 41, 42, 46-48, 50, 56, 73, 401, 523, 552, 576, 594 Erie Canal 16, 18, 348, 445, 462, 463, 465 Erikson, Leif 301, 341 Essen 448-450, 458, 529, 590, 599 Essex 70, 267 Estonia 286, 453, 458 Estonians 44, 289, 290 Ethiopia 27, 29, 45, 54, 190, 202, 296, 383, 388, 390, 391, 395, 398 Etruscans 137, 139, 199, 277, 279 Euclid 82 Eugene of Savoy, prince 319

Euphrates 16, 17, 28, 29, 40-44, 46-48, 51, 53, 54, 58, 60-62, 66, 69, 72, 73, 78, 135, 141, 149, 192, 196, 197, 516, 552 Euripides 83

F Fachoda 387 Faidherbe, Louis 392 Fall Line 346, 460, 472, 474, 529 Fall of the Western Roman Empire 148, 149, 151, 154, 155, 164, 183 Far West 467, 475 Farnese, Alessandro, duke of Parma 322 Fatimids 197, 209 Feldkirh 314 Ferdinand I of Habsburg (emperor) 291 Ferdinand of Aragon 260, 300, 303, 304, 327 Fertile Crescent 26, 27, 31, 41, 42, 56, 70, 391 Fes 196, 198, 201, 260, 280, 389, 581, 596 Finns 44, 45, 203, 289, 290 Firearms 227 Fish River 205 Flanders 171, 250, 267, 273, 275, 283, 284, 292-294, 308, 312, 316, 321-323, 377 Fleury, André Hercule de 361 Flood (biblical) 41, 47 Florence 138, 171, 262, 266, 268, 273, 277-279, 292, 304, 305, 309-311, 322, 369, 437, 524, 527, 530, 536, 586, 597 Florentines 305 Ford, Henry 445, 470, 505 Formigny (battle of) 283 Fort Caroline 341 Fort Charles 341, 349 Fort Coligny 333, 341 Fort Worth 481, 482 France 5, 7, 10, 13, 28, 78-80, 94, 108, 124-127, 147, 154, 221, 248, 253, 256, 261-266, 268, 271, 275, 277, 280-285, 287, 288, 292-294, 304, 308, 312-315, 317321, 323-329, 337-339, 341-344, 347, 357-367, 369371, 373, 376-378, 380, 383, 385-391, 398-400, 409, 410, 412, 415, 444, 446, 452, 458, 460, 468, 470, 474, 481, 492, 494, 498, 503, 507, 508, 516, 524, 527, 529, 535, 540, 556 Franche-Comté 294, 321, 358 Francia occidentalis 265, 266, 281, 284

612

Urban World History

Francia orientalis 265, 284, 285, 291 Francis I of France 315 Francis Xavier (saint) 218, 222 Franconian-Salian emperors 288 Frankfurt 278, 279, 286, 287, 448, 539 Franks 44, 45, 108, 148, 152, 186, 253, 261-264, 271, 272, 277, 281, 287, 291, 382 Fraser River 486 Frederic III the Wise of Saxony 310 Frederick I Barbarossa (emperor) 271, 288 Frederick II of Sicily 284 Frederick II the Great of Prussia 362, 446 Frederick of Habsburg 327 Freiberg 278 Frémont, John Charles 476, 477, 484 French (language) 3, 6, 10, 11, 13, 95, 98, 125, 127, 175, 212, 218, 248-250, 253, 256, 261, 266, 269, 270, 272, 275, 278, 283-285, 291, 293, 294, 302-304, 306, 308, 319-321, 324-326, 333, 337-344, 347-349, 358366, 369, 370, 376-378, 383, 385-387, 389, 390, 392, 404, 406, 410-412, 449, 452, 454, 457, 462, 464, 465, 470-472, 474-478, 481, 483, 489, 493, 497-499, 501, 502, 506, 507, 524-526, 528, 533, 534, 539, 556, 560 French Guiana 339 French Revolution 319, 338, 359, 361-364, 376, 452 French Western Africa 392 Frescobaldi, Girolamo 311 Fronde 324 Fugger, Jacob 278 Fujiwara (family) 226 Fulani 202, 203, 249 Fulton, Robert 357 Fünfkirchen-Pécs 280 Fuzhou 412

G Gaiseric (Vandal king) 152 Galicia (Ukraine) 256 Galician (language) 284 Galileo 311 Gallipoli 252 Gama, Vasco de 55, 80, 189, 197, 217, 222, 296, 305, 307, 396, 398, 399 Ganges 146, 207, 212 Gao 202 Garonne 312, 380 Gates, Bill 485

Gaulle, Charles de 360 Gauls 135, 139, 144, 274 Gautama see Buddha Gaza 42, 72, 252 Gdansk 286, 450, 451 Gediminas, grand duke of Lithuania 257 Gelgerland 294 Gelsenkirchen 448, 449 Geneva 127, 278, 279, 310, 314, 362, 391 Genghis Khan 16, 159, 208-210, 214, 256 Genoa 14, 56, 79, 171, 179, 214, 241, 250, 251, 253, 262, 266-270, 272-274, 276-279, 286, 292, 293, 299, 304-307, 309-311, 315, 363, 408, 525, 532, 554, 555, 585, 586, 597 Genoese 251, 293, 295, 303, 304, 310, 318, 322, 341 George III of England 342 Gepidae 148, 382 German East Africa 397 Germanic Holy Roman Empire 271, 282-284, 287290, 293, 294, 308, 326-328 Germans 18, 44, 105, 144, 151, 189, 246, 262, 263, 286, 336, 386, 392, 395, 397, 452, 498, 560 Germany 7, 12, 13, 28, 80, 108, 120, 127, 144, 147, 263, 264, 266, 271, 273, 278, 280, 284, 285, 287, 288, 292, 310, 315, 328, 343, 358, 363, 369, 371, 377, 378, 380, 383, 387, 400, 415, 444, 446-452, 470, 498, 499, 503, 506, 518, 524, 530, 556 Gerrha 59, 72 Ghana 201, 203, 205 Ghaznavids 210 Ghaznavids (dynasty) 210, 212 Ghent 284, 293, 294, 296, 308, 319, 372, 582, 596 Ghibellines 271, 288 Ghurids (dynasty) 210 Gibraltar, Strait of 80, 199, 276, 293, 295, 306, 310, 312, 380 Glasgow 234, 370, 371, 375, 382, 539, 587, 598 Goa 213, 218, 223, 406, 584, 596 Gober 202 Godfrey of Bouillon 249 Gold 201, 296, 408, 477, 480 Gold Road 201, 296 Good Hope (Cape of) 296, 398, 517, 518 Gorée (island) 392 Goths 44, 83, 148, 262, 381 Grain Route 80, 81

613

Index

Granada 98, 214, 259-262, 295, 300, 335, 488, 581, 596 Grand Canal, Imperial 156, 160-162, 505, 506, 508, 552 Grand Trek 398 Grand Trunk Railway 486 Grasse, Admiral of 347 Great Corridor 16, 19, 28-30, 42, 44, 45, 54, 59, 66, 67, 71, 73-80, 85, 86, 91, 92, 134, 135, 140, 141, 145-151, 155, 159, 161, 166, 172, 183, 184, 188, 189, 192, 193, 195, 197, 202, 207-210, 212, 214, 215, 220, 221, 223, 224, 228, 245, 246, 248, 254-256, 258, 259, 261, 262, 264-268, 273, 275, 277, 279, 280, 282, 285, 286, 289, 290, 292, 294, 305, 306, 312, 315, 323, 325, 350, 353, 358, 375, 377, 379, 380, 382-384, 399-401, 403-405, 414, 444, 446-448, 450, 470, 496, 497, 499, 507, 509, 516-518, 544, 552, 560 Great Ebb 161, 181, 184, 185, 187, 211-216, 218-220, 223, 228, 243, 245, 259, 262, 292, 350, 378, 507, 509, 552, 553, 557, 560 Great Plain of China 154-156, 159, 160, 164 Great St. Bernard Pass 274, 275, 314 Great Wall 149, 156, 159 Greece 13, 28, 29, 49, 54, 56-60, 74-80, 82-86, 135, 136, 141, 143, 147, 150, 241, 247, 251, 252, 268, 381, 450, 452 Greeks 50, 55, 68, 74, 76, 77, 79-81, 83, 85, 103, 128, 135, 137, 139, 141, 158, 163, 165, 202, 207, 251, 255, 257, 301, 455, 532 Greenland 98, 301, 341 Grimaldi 261 Grimm, Melchior 447 Guadalajara 111, 259, 333 Guadalquivir River 199, 304 Guaranis 336 Guelfs 271, 288 Gulf Stream 16, 300-302, 329, 340 Gustav Vasa 458 Gutenberg 158, 268 Guyana Current 300 Guzman, House of 299 Gypsies 451

H Habsburg (dynasty) 270, 284, 288, 291, 313, 319, 321, 327, 369 Habsburg, Albert of 291

Hadramawt 59, 72, 190 Hadrian (emperor) 72, 141-144, 247, 375, 452 Hafsids 209 Hagar 43, 191 Hainaut 294, 377 Haiphong 411 Haiti 233, 302, 304, 331, 338 Hakodate 228 Halifax 341, 375 Halin 218 Hamburg 175, 268, 285, 286, 289, 319, 363, 371, 449, 450, 457, 458, 516, 536, 539, 583, 596 Hammurabi 43, 61 Han dynasty 87, 93, 95, 162 Han Wu Ti (emperor) 93 Hangzhou 96, 133, 156, 157, 159-161, 164, 166, 171, 180, 221, 232, 414, 506, 524, 527, 552, 584, 596 Hanoi 221, 410, 411, 588, 598 Hanover 449, 450, 483, 529 Hansa, German 286, 293 Hanseatic League 285, 286, 289, 293, 319, 372, 450 Hao Ching 93, 157 Harappa 88-93, 214, 523, 532, 533, 579, 594 Harbin 455, 503, 504, 508, 525, 592, 599 Hargreaves 367 Harvard University 7, 8, 75, 89, 123, 175, 184, 267, 279, 310, 316, 355, 357, 500, 528, 536 Hattusa 67, 68, 70, 120, 577, 594 Haussmann, Georges Eugène 528, 534 Hauteville (family) 250, 270, 283, 284 Havana 339 Hebron 44, 70, 71 Hecatompylos 65, 68, 87, 141, 143 Heidelberg 280 Hellenes 44 Henry IV (emperor) 271, 296, 319, 326 Henry IV of France 319 Henry the Navigator 296, 299 Henry VII of England 299 Heraclius I (emperor) 245 Herbs and Spice Roads 82 Herodotus 75 Heruli 83, 148, 152 Herzegovina 147, 271, 381 Highways 528, 531 Hima 204

614 Hinduism 46, 91, 193, 206, 208, 213-215, 217, 231, 409 Hinduism-Brahmanism 46 Hirohito 498 Hispaniola 304, 331 Hitler, Adolf 127, 400, 444, 449, 451, 452, 499, 556 Hittites 44, 52, 61, 67, 68 Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) 410, 411 Hoesch 448 Hohenberg, Paul M. 7, 123, 124, 126, 184, 267, 277, 278, 310, 320, 321, 356, 357, 373, 376, 434, 435, 528 Hohenstaufen 270, 271, 284, 288 Hohenzollern 448, 449 Hôjô (family) 226 Holland 294, 295, 316, 317, 321, 348 Hollywood 479 Hong Kong 58, 221, 222, 234, 389, 408, 412-414, 497, 499, 502, 505, 506, 509, 537, 542, 588, 598 Honorius (emperor) 151, 280, 285 Honorius III (pope) 280, 285 Horde, Golden 214, 256-258 Horde, White 258 Horn of Africa 72, 81, 190, 203, 391 Horse 26 Hotelling, Harold 170, 171 Hottentots-Khoisans 202 Houston 234, 464, 469, 474, 479-482, 591, 599 Houston, Sam 480 Huascar 331 Huayna Capac 331 Huddersfield 375 Hudson 16, 17, 343, 347, 348, 445, 462, 483 Hugh Capet, king of France 282, 318 Hugh the Great, count of Paris 282 Huguenots 326, 333, 341, 349, 383, 398, 449 Hundred Years’ War 275, 283, 284, 312, 360, 364, 369, 516 Hungarians 44, 45, 203, 289-291, 382, 392 Hungary 252, 256, 280, 289-291, 327, 328, 452, 506 Huns 18, 44, 45, 66, 93, 149, 152, 208, 209, 247, 290, 381 Hutus 395 Hyderabad 401 Hyksos 44, 50, 60, 289 Hypatia 82

Urban World History

I Ibadan 388, 393, 394, 589, 598 Iberians 199 Ibn Battutah 201 Ictinus 83 Ife 205, 393 Ignatius of Loyola (saint) 218 Igor 44, 86, 255 Il-Khans (family) 209 Illyria 141, 151, 188, 246, 271, 382 Inca 96, 97, 100, 107 Inca Empire 106, 111, 308, 331, 334, 495, 530 Incense Road 72 Index India 18, 26, 28, 44-47, 59, 60, 69, 72, 73, 80, 81, 85-87, 89-91, 95, 99, 128, 143, 146, 148, 149, 163-165, 190, 192, 193, 195, 197, 202, 207, 208, 210-215, 217, 218, 220, 222-224, 227, 232, 249, 252, 259, 268, 296, 299, 302, 304-306, 312, 315, 318, 320, 321, 329, 341, 342, 350, 353, 371, 373, 378, 387, 388, 392, 397-407, 409, 412, 413, 496, 502, 525, 543, 560 Indian Silk Road 94, 95, 212, 215 Indianapolis 342, 460, 474 Indochina 218, 220, 227, 409, 496, 499, 508 Indo-Europeans 44, 60, 62, 68, 73, 75, 137, 139-141, 149, 189, 199, 203, 247, 560 Indonesia 95, 184, 190, 193, 202, 215, 217, 218, 224, 227, 259, 318, 321, 329, 407, 408, 443, 497, 499, 552, 553, 560 Indus 16, 28, 29, 45, 47, 59, 60, 74, 85-92, 95, 96, 107, 110, 115, 141, 146, 184, 193, 195, 208, 210-212, 400, 401, 523, 531, 533, 552 Industrial Revolution 33, 40, 117, 136, 191, 267, 277, 286, 322, 333, 350, 353-355, 358-360, 366-368, 370, 374, 376-378, 380, 382, 383, 391, 397, 405, 407-410, 415, 443, 524, 527, 533, 537, 552, 560 Industrialization 370, 488 Institutional Revolutionary Party 490 Interdependence 433 Invincible Armada 322 Ionians 44, 76, 79, 84 Iran 16, 26, 27, 31, 46, 64, 73, 74, 81, 90, 143, 206, 207, 209, 210, 248, 378, 398, 400, 401, 554 Iraq 13, 26, 27, 31, 74, 143, 209, 248, 252, 400, 401 Ireland 12, 263, 369, 387

615

Index

Irrigation 40 Isaac 43, 44, 57, 70, 71 Isabel of Castile, queen of Spain 260 Isabel of France, queen of England 283 Isfahan 73, 206, 207, 401 Ishmael 43, 191 Islam 9, 53, 70, 71, 73, 136, 184, 185, 189-195, 197, 198, 200-202, 205-211, 213-215, 217, 218, 222, 231, 245, 248, 253, 254, 256, 259, 261, 264, 267, 269, 378, 391, 396, 398, 409, 529, 553, 554, 560 Isle-en-Champagne 294 Isocrates 83 Israel 44, 46, 56, 57, 69-71, 74, 396, 400 Istakhr 73, 401 Istanbul 14, 147, 241, 252, 253, 350, 371, 401, 455, 529, 539, 554 Italics 44, 137, 139 Italy 12, 13, 28, 49, 79, 80, 84, 86, 108, 125, 126, 135139, 141, 145, 147, 150-152, 163, 171, 173, 188, 196, 232, 241, 246, 247, 250, 253, 256, 262, 264-280, 282285, 288, 290, 292, 293, 295, 306-315, 320-323, 358, 360, 363, 368, 369, 377, 378, 381, 383, 385, 387, 391, 444, 452, 454, 470, 493, 499, 506, 558 Ivan I of Moscow and Vladimir 257, 258, 456 Ivan III of Moscow and Vladimir 258, 456 Ivan IV the Terrible, tsar of Russia 258

J Jacob 30, 44, 45, 70, 71, 149, 278, 540 Jacobinism 127, 364 Jacobins 362 Jacquard, Joseph Marie 367 Jagiellons (dynasty) 291 Jainism 46 Jakarta 398, 407, 584, 596 James II of England 316, 483 Jamestown 341, 349 Japan 16, 19, 46, 213, 220-228, 232, 234, 241, 318, 353, 371, 398, 406, 408-411, 415, 443, 444, 454, 470, 485, 496-501, 503-509, 516-518, 553, 558 Japan, Bank of 497 Japanese Empire 224 Jarmo 37, 40, 50, 64, 65, 110, 523, 532, 576, 594 Jaruzelski, Wojciech 453 Java 95, 165, 217, 321, 407 Jenner, Edward 367 Jericho 37, 39, 70, 120, 523, 532, 576, 594

Jerusalem 69-72, 150, 246, 248-250, 270, 291, 452, 577, 594 Jesuits 218, 223, 227, 336, 337, 362, 455, 491 Jesus 57, 69, 70, 145, 189, 191, 507, 560 Jevons, William Stanley 365 Jews 4, 43, 45, 46, 69, 71, 191, 261, 323, 363, 400, 451, 452, 531 Jiménez de Quesada 335 Jimmu-Tenno (emperor) 224 Joan of Arc 283 Johannesburg 120, 205, 388, 394, 397-399, 517, 525, 544 Johannesburg, 588, 598 John I of Portugal 248, 296, 299, 303 John II the Perfect of Portugal 248, 299, 303 John III Asen II of Bulgaria 248 John Lackland of England 283 John of Ghent, duke of Lancaster 284, 293, 294, 296, 308, 319, 372 John XII (pope) 288 Jonah 65 Jouffroy d’Abbans, Claude François 358 Judah, Kingdom of 69-71 Judaism 46, 53, 70, 71, 190, 191, 254 Julian calendar 269 Julian the Apostate 281 Justin II (emperor) 152, 188 Justinian I (emperor) 152 Jutes 44, 45, 152, 253, 263, 369

K Kabul 90, 193, 195, 207, 211 Kabyles 202 Kaffa (Crimea) 251, 252, 268, 276 Kaifeng 95, 156-161, 164, 171, 180, 499, 523, 579, 595 Kairouan 198, 582, 596 Kalibangan 90, 523, 579, 594 Kalmar Union 458 Kamakura 225 Kaminaljuyu 100, 101, 104 Kano 202, 393 Kansas City 16, 342, 460, 473, 474, 477-479, 481, 482, 484, 525, 538, 552 Kanuri 203 Karachi 401, 403, 406, 588, 598 Karakorum 157, 159, 208, 256

616 Karlsruhe 533 Katowice 451 Kay, John 367 Kazan 214, 258 Kazargamu 202 Kent 263 Khaljis (dynasty) 210 Khartoum 203, 387, 390, 393, 589, 598 Khazars 44, 45, 254, 255, 290 Khoisans (Hottentots) 204 Khorasan 210 Khotan-Hotan 87, 95, 221 Khyber Pass 90, 193, 207 Kiakhta 222, 411 Kiev 214, 255-257, 453-455, 582, 595 Kigali 395, 396, 589, 598 Kigoma 394, 395, 397 Kinshasa 127, 394, 397, 588, 598 Kipchak Turks 256 Kitchener, Horatio Herbert 387 Kivu 395, 396 Kleve 294 Knud the Great of England, Norway and Denmark 457 Kobe 227, 497, 500 Koran 191 Korea 46, 221, 224, 227, 228, 232, 234, 413, 443, 450, 470, 496-499, 501-504, 509, 543, 544 Korean War 502 Kosovo 147, 382 Kosovo (battle of) 252 Koulikoro (Mali) 388 Krakatoa (volcano) 184 Krakow (Poland) 280, 450, 451, 453 Krishna River 213 Krupp 448 Kuala Lumpur 408, 410 Kublai Khan 159, 209, 221, 222 Kufa 192, 195 Kulikovo Pole (battle of) 258 Kumans 44, 45, 256, 290 Kumbi 203, 205 Kuril Islands 254 Kush (kingdom) 53, 202, 204, 208, 390, 391 Kushans 44, 144 Kyoto 225-227, 500 Kyoto, 585, 597

Urban World History

L La Cerda, House of 300 La Fayette 347 La Garde-Freinet 261 La Navidad 304 La Vérendrye, Pierre de 473 Labrador 342 Lagos 127, 238, 388, 392-394, 397, 543, 588, 598 Lahore 211, 401, 584, 596 Lancashire 372, 375 Landes, David. S. 3, 5 Laon 264, 282 Laos 215, 220, 409-411 Lapps 290 Las Casas, Bartolomé de 337 Las Navas de Tolosa (battle of) 260 Lascaris (family) 250 Latin America 17, 277, 302, 329, 331, 335, 338, 340, 373, 445, 487-490, 492-496, 529, 533, 540, 543, 544 Latin Empire of Constantinople 247, 250, 251 Latin States of the Orient 283 Latin-Falisci 137 Latvia 286, 452 Launhardt, Wilhelm 421, 430 Laureot Owls 83 Laurium region 83 Lausanne 314 Lavoisier, Antoine de 367 Lavrion see Laurium region Lawrence of Arabia 399 Le Bras, Hervé 5, 8 Le Nôtre, André 327, 533 Le Peletier, Claude 325 Le Tellier, Michel 127, 280, 324-326, 360, 361, 363 League of Mayapan 103 Leeds 358, 368, 370, 375, 587, 598 Lees, Lynn Hollen 7, 123, 124, 126, 184, 267, 277, 278, 310, 320, 321, 356, 357, 373, 376, 434, 435, 528 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 311 Leicester 369, 372 Leiden (Netherlands) 285 Leipzig 137, 278 Lenin 127, 454, 455 Leningrad 454 Leo III (pope) 264 Leo X (John of Medici, pope) 309 León (kingdom) 259, 260, 532

Index

Leopold II of Belgium 387 Lepanto (battle of) 252 Lesseps, Ferdinand de 389, 478 Leuctra (battle of) 84 Lewis, Meriwether 473, 551 Liao (dynasty) 44, 157, 159, 503, 504 Liberal Party, English 365 Liberalism, basic thesis of 10, 358 Liberia 383, 391 Libya 74, 147, 203, 252, 385, 386, 389 Licinius (co-emperor) 150 Liège 294, 377, 378 Lille 376, 587, 598 Lima 109-111, 331, 332, 586, 597 Limburg 294 Limousin 283 Lincoln, Abraham 145, 338, 369, 372, 477 Lintong 93 Lisbon 12, 55, 98, 125, 172, 199, 260, 268, 280, 295, 299, 302, 307, 312, 336, 359, 583, 596 Lithuania 257, 286, 452, 455 Lithuanians 257, 291 Little St. Bernard Pass 314 Liudolfing (dynasty) 271, 282, 288 Liverpool 234, 302, 346, 357, 358, 368, 370-375, 463, 464, 587, 598 Livorno 277 Llobregat River 312, 380 Locke, John 365 Loess Plateau 29, 86-88, 92-96, 123, 154, 155, 158-162, 164, 171, 174, 241, 496, 508, 523, 552 Loire 267, 281, 282, 358, 376 Lombards 44, 45, 152, 262, 263, 274 Lombardy 265, 274 London 3, 7, 8, 13, 14, 16, 25, 26, 35, 44, 45, 48, 56, 60, 61, 75, 76, 79, 86, 91, 120, 123-127, 136, 144-146, 148, 153, 171, 179, 184, 194, 200, 204, 225, 232, 234, 236, 266-268, 272, 273, 275, 277, 286, 293, 295, 304, 305, 308, 310, 311, 315, 316, 319-322, 327, 329, 342, 344-346, 348, 350, 355, 357-360, 364, 368-371, 374, 375, 377-380, 388, 389, 392, 398, 403, 406, 443, 444, 446, 448, 457-460, 463, 464, 470, 474, 482, 483, 488, 496, 499, 500, 507, 518, 525, 527-529, 536, 539, 542544, 552-556, 587, 598 Lorraine 265, 266, 282, 294, 318

617 Los Angeles 6, 16, 17, 120, 234, 239, 444, 445, 460, 466, 470, 474, 475, 477-479, 481, 482, 485, 487, 489, 496, 517, 518, 529, 534, 542-544, 552, 553, 555, 557, 590, 599 Lösch, August 7, 120-123, 172, 325, 542 Lothair I (emperor) 288 Lothair of Supplinburg (emperor) 285 Lotharingia 265, 266, 294 Louis I the Pious (emperor) 282, 288, 291, 324 Louis II of Hungary and Bohemia 282, 288, 291, 324 Louis II of Italy (emperor) 282, 288, 291, 324 Louis III the Blind of Provence 282, 288 Louis III the Young of Saxe and Lotharingia 282, 288 Louis the German 265, 282 Louis V of France 282 Louis X the Stubborn of France 53, 212, 283, 317, 319, 324-327, 337, 343, 359, 361, 362, 369, 385, 470 Louis XIII of France 324 Louis XIV of France 53, 212, 317, 319, 324-327, 337, 343, 361, 369, 470 Louis XVI of France 359, 361, 362, 385 Louis XVIII of France 359, 361 Louisiana 342, 467, 475, 480 Louis-Philippe 385 Louvain-Leuwen 293 Louvois, François Michel Le Tellier de 127, 324, 325, 361 Lower Canada 343, 471 Lübeck 285, 286, 289, 319, 363, 457, 458, 530 Lucca 278, 311 Lucy (hominid) 390 Ludwig Canal 382 Luoyang 87, 94-96, 155-157, 159, 160, 164, 171, 180, 523, 533, 579 Lusaka 387, 397 Lutetia 145, 171, 281, 285 Luther, Martin 284, 309 Lutheranism 310, 327 Luxembourg 288, 290-292, 294 Lyautey, Louis Hubert Gonzalve 389 Lydia (kingdom) 74, 79 Lyon 136, 145, 146, 171, 273, 275, 278, 279, 281, 287, 312, 314, 315, 376, 378, 450, 516, 533, 580, 595

618

Urban World History

M Maastricht 12, 378 Macau 220, 221, 222, 234, 404, 411, 413, 509, 584, 597 Macedonia 74, 84, 135, 141, 147, 150, 247, 252, 381 Machiavelli, Niccolò 311 Machu Picchu 110, 523 Mackenzie River 486 Mackinder, Halford John 45 Mâconnais 294 Madagascar 95, 202 Maddison, Angus 137, 153, 158, 165, 185, 186, 213, 222, 223, 225, 227, 273, 295, 317, 332, 353, 359, 384, 396, 411, 413, 543, 545, 560 Madeira, Archipelago of 296, 299, 303 Madison, James 338, 447, 462 Madras 389, 403, 405, 406, 589, 598 Madrid 172, 321-323, 335, 359, 539, 585, 597 Maghrib 136, 140, 147, 192, 198, 199, 201, 203, 259, 385, 389 Magna Graecia 80 Mahdi, Muhammad Ahmad ibn Abdallah called the 387 Maine (France) 283, 291, 301, 341, 343, 557 Mainz 145, 287 Maisonneuve, Paul de Chomedey de 462 Majapahit 216 Malabar Coast 16, 213, 403, 552 Malacca (region) 216-218, 584, 596 Malacca, Strait of 16, 165, 217, 221, 407, 410 Malawi 386 Malaysia 9, 217, 218, 318, 407-410, 413, 443, 499, 502, 544 Mali 201, 203, 388, 392 Malindi (port) 397 Malta 55, 140, 261, 270 Malta, Knights of 55, 140, 261, 270 Manchester 13, 145, 234, 357, 368, 371-375, 542, 587, 598 Manchester School 365 Manchukuo Empire 498, 503 Manchuria 159, 160, 228, 233, 234, 443, 455, 497, 498, 501, 503-506, 508, 552 Manco Cápac II (emperor) 110 Manhattan 348 Manichaean religion 391 Manichaeism 93, 193

Mao Tse-tung 508 Maratha Confederation 213, 406 Marathon (battle of) 74 Marco Polo 161, 221, 284 Marcus Aurelius (emperor) 142, 144, 528 Marggraf, Andreas Sigismund 302 Marguerite of Austria 322 Maricourt, Pierre Pèlerin de 269 Marillac, Michel de 325, 360, 361 Marinids (dynasty) 209, 260 Marlborough, John Churchill, duke of 319, 370 Marmara Sea 188 Marrakech 198, 200, 201, 304, 389, 554, 581, 596 Marranos 323 Marseille 80, 81, 85, 268, 277, 282, 310, 312, 315, 380, 382, 394, 516, 578, 594 Marshall, Alfred 365 Martin V (pope) 272, 291 Mary of Burgundy 313, 327 Maryland 326, 345, 469, 472 Masai 203 Massada (fortress) 72 Matadi (port) 394, 395 Matthias I Corvinus of Hungary 291, 328 Matto Grosso 332 Maupeou, René Nicolas Charles Augustin de 361 Mauretania Tingitana 198, 201 Mauritius 397, 399, 517, 544 Maximilian I (emperor) 327 Maximilian of Habsburg (emperor of Mexico) 313, 489 Maya 49, 96-98, 100-104, 109, 163, 301 Mayapan 102, 104 Mayer (family) 8, 175, 355, 436, 448 Mayflower 341, 343 Mazarin, Jules 324 Mazdeanism 190-192, 206, 208, 213 Mazovia, Conrad of, duke of Poland 286 Mecca 72, 81, 184, 190, 191, 582, 595 Medersa 199, 201 Medes 63, 66, 73, 75 Medici (family) 279, 309, 322 Medina 72, 81, 184, 190, 191, 299 Medina-Celi 299 Medina-Sedonia 299 Medjerda River 139, 140 Megara 80

Index

Meiji era 226 Meknes 198, 389 Mekong River 162, 411 Melungeon Amerindians of Tennessee 301 Memphis 50-54, 56, 72, 75, 120, 127, 177, 197, 383, 460, 474, 516s, 576, 594 Menander 83 Mendoza (Argentina) 106, 109, 489, 492 Mercosur 491, 495 Mesoamerica 27, 29, 41, 49, 97-101, 104-107, 123, 127, 482 Metz 264 Mexico 27, 61, 96-98, 100, 101, 103-107, 111, 120, 127, 205, 233, 237, 300, 301, 304, 308, 309, 329, 331-336, 338-340, 413, 465, 467, 469, 471, 474-476, 478-481, 488-490, 492-494, 517, 525, 529, 543, 544 Mexico City 27, 97, 100, 101, 105, 111, 120, 127, 331, 333, 334, 340, 476, 489, 490, 492, 494, 517, 525, 543, 580, 586, 590, 595, 597 Michael III of Tver 258 Michelangelo 310, 527 Michigan Canal 465 Midwest 463, 466, 467, 475 Mikado 224-226 Milan 8, 125, 137, 147, 151, 152, 171, 173, 262, 266, 267, 272-278, 287, 292, 293, 310, 311, 314, 315, 322, 369, 379, 382, 516, 581, 596 Milanese 321 Miletus 78, 79, 533 Mill, John Stuart 365 Milwaukee 342, 475 Minamoto (family) 226 Minas Gerais 332 Ming (dynasty) 157, 161, 165, 222, 505 Minneapolis 342, 460, 464, 473-475, 479, 481, 591, 599 Minorca 321 Minsk (Belarus) 455 Minuit, Peter 346, 348 Mississippi River 17, 445, 467, 469, 473, 475, 482 Mitrovica (Sremska) 314 Mittellandkanal 16, 445, 449, 455, 552 Mixtec 101, 104 Moche Valley 107 Mochica (people) 107 Moctezuma II (emperor) 333 Modena 279

619 Mohawk Valley 348 Mohenjo-daro 89, 90, 533 Moldavia 381 Moluccas Islands 218 Mombasa 396 Mon (kingdom) 219, 493, 494, 592, 599 Mongol Empire 16, 18, 207-210, 215, 254 Mongol Empire, First 16, 18, 207-210, 215, 254 Mongol Empire, Second 18, 207, 210, 215 Mongol postal service 156 Mongolia 44, 149, 159, 160, 208, 209, 221, 254, 256, 391, 411, 499, 508 Mongols 44, 45, 104, 159, 196, 208-210, 214, 247, 256258, 289, 392, 455, 456 Monomotapa 205, 206 Monotheism 53 Montenegro 147, 381 Montevideo 493, 494, 592, 599 Montferrat, Boniface de 250 Montgenevre (pass) 275, 314 Montpellier 280 Montreal 9, 14, 19, 119, 340-342, 347, 348, 358, 460, 462-464, 471, 473, 474, 482, 483, 485-489, 516, 542, 592, 599 Moors 202, 260, 261, 277 Moravia 265, 284, 289, 291, 328 Morea (principality) 77, 250, 251 Moriscos 261, 323 Morocco 54, 140, 145, 193, 198-202, 208, 209, 218, 260, 293, 296, 306, 385, 386, 389 Moscow 172, 214, 257, 258, 371, 403, 444, 446, 450, 451, 453-457, 518, 525, 529, 539, 544, 552, 553, 590, 599 Moskva River 257 Motorized transportation 530 Mozambique 383, 386, 396, 399 Mughal (dynasty) 210, 212, 403, 406 Mughal Empire 212 Muhammad 184, 189-191, 198, 206, 210, 248, 261, 387, 401, 560 Mukden-Shenyang 414, 503, 504, 506, 508, 591 Multiplier effects 173, 555 Mumford, Lewis 551 Mussolini, Benito 391 Muycas 301 Myanmar 26, 94, 95, 162, 215, 218, 410, 443, 508 Mycenae 77, 78, 578, 594

620

Urban World History

N Nabataean 72 Nabopolassar 62 NAFTA see North American Free Trade Agreement Nagaoka 225 Nagasaki 222, 318, 499, 553 Nairobi 396, 397, 525, 588, 598 Namibia 205, 386, 443 Namur 294 Nanking-Nanjing 95, 133, 160, 161, 164, 166, 171, 177, 179, 180, 234, 414, 497, 506, 537 Nantes 127, 326, 398 Nantes, Revocation of the Edict of 127, 326, 398 Naples 13, 250, 266, 267, 270-272, 299, 307, 310, 311, 321, 364, 543, 585, 597 Napoleon 165, 287, 288, 302, 319, 327, 328, 338, 342, 348, 359, 361, 363, 364, 389, 398, 410, 452, 457, 462, 487, 489 Nara 224, 225, 227, 500, 585, 597 Narbonne 154, 261 Nasrids 260 Natal 398 Naucratis 81 Navarre 259, 264 Nazca 108 Nazis 449, 451, 452 Ndebele 398 Nebuchadrezzar II 62, 196 Necker, Jacques 361, 362, 363 Nefertiti 53 Nero (emperor) 138, 142, 148 Netherlands 12, 13, 26, 147, 263-266, 278, 284, 285, 292, 294, 304, 309, 310, 317, 320, 322, 338, 339, 358, 359, 363, 378, 414, 450, 452, 499 Networks 438 Nevers 294 New Amsterdam 318, 344, 347, 398 New France 325, 326, 341-344, 347, 460, 463, 465, 474, 475, 483 New Göteborg 346 New Netherland 318, 343, 344, 346, 347 New Orleans 342, 460, 463, 469, 474, 480 New Sweden 343, 346 New York 3, 6, 25, 30, 33, 45, 48, 56, 58, 60, 64, 76, 91, 108, 120, 126, 144, 161, 165, 194, 204, 205, 232, 234, 238, 239, 248, 267, 286, 306, 311, 318, 329, 340, 345-349, 353, 357, 370, 371, 388, 392, 398, 412, 414,

436, 443-445, 447, 457, 459, 460, 462-465, 468, 469, 472, 474, 479, 480, 488, 489, 495, 496, 498, 499, 513, 518, 525, 529, 534, 536-539, 542-544, 551-557, 587, 590, 597, 599 Newcastle-upon-Tyne 375 Newcomen, Thomas 367 Newport 340 Newton, Isaac 311 Niamey 388 Nicaea 250, 251 Nicholas II of Russia 271, 454 Nicomedia 147 Nigeria 204, 205, 388, 393 Nigero-Congolese 202, 204 Nile 42, 49, 51-54, 60, 62, 66, 72, 78, 80, 81, 92, 134, 139, 145, 197, 198, 202, 388, 390, 394, 395, 515, 516 Nilo-Saharians 202 Nimrud 63, 64, 65, 577 Nineveh 63, 65, 66, 68, 119, 120, 177, 577, 594 Ningbo 220, 222, 411, 412, 415, 499, 552, 585, 597 Nisa 141, 143, 580, 595 Noah 41, 43 Nordrhein-Westfalen 263, 266 Normandy 249, 283, 358 Normans 44, 249, 251, 253, 256, 269, 270, 285, 360, 368, 372, 457 North American Free Trade Agreement 237, 490 North Sea 146, 275, 286, 289, 292-294, 301, 306, 309, 312, 314, 317, 320, 370, 374, 375, 378, 379, 450, 457, 458, 483 North West Company 483, 485 Norwich 294, 295, 320, 368, 586 Nothingham 369 Novgorod 255, 453, 455 Novosibirsk 455 Nubia 60, 202, 204, 390, 391 Numidia 198, 203 Nuremberg 278, 287, 356

O Oberhausen 448 Obock (Djibouti) 387, 390 October Revolution 453 Odaenathus (king) 149, 189 Oder River 328, 449, 450, 458 Odoacer 152, 186 Ogadai (great khan) 214, 256

621

Index

Ogbomosho (Nigeria) 393 Ohio 27, 98, 342, 445, 465, 467, 472, 489 Oil (petroleum) 400 Oka River 257, 455 Olmec 100, 104, 106 Opium 412 Opium War 412, 506 Oran 389 Orange Free State 398, 399 Oregon 474, 476, 482-484 Orissa 213 Orléans 264, 280, 282 Orontes River 29, 42, 57, 65, 67, 68, 188 Oruro 332, 334, 340 Osaka 227, 371, 500, 502, 537, 539, 590, 599 Ostia (harbor) 138, 139, 151 Ostrogoths 44, 45, 149, 152, 188, 246, 262, 263 Otto I the Great (emperor) 271, 282, 288 Otto II (emperor) 282 Ottoman Empire 4, 154, 223, 246, 252, 253, 261, 323, 328, 336, 380-382, 385, 399, 444, 450, 453, 554 Ottoman Turks 44, 210, 214, 246, 251-253, 273, 306, 323, 380, 382 Oxford 28, 48, 76, 143, 153, 161, 225, 280, 308, 355, 357, 370, 438, 459, 500, 513, 551

P Pacific 16, 100, 107-109, 227, 254, 258, 302, 303, 333, 408, 439, 443, 444, 450, 460, 473-477, 479, 482, 484488, 490, 493, 495, 498, 500, 553 Pacific Fur Company 484 Padua 273, 278, 280 Palencia 280 Palenque 102-104, 523, 580, 595 Palermo 55, 256, 262, 581, 595 Palestine 26, 62, 70, 71, 127, 136, 137, 147, 192, 248, 252, 400 Palestrina 311 Palmyra 43, 137, 149, 189 Palos de la Frontera 300 Panama Canal 478, 479, 484, 489, 517, 518 Pandya (dynasty) 213 Panipat (battle of) 211 Paper 8, 163 Paper money 163 Papin, Denis 367 Papua New Guinea 407

Paraguay 336, 491, 492 Parameswara (prince) 216 Paris 3, 8, 13, 42, 45, 59, 61, 82, 120, 125, 135-137, 145, 146, 149, 151, 153, 165, 171, 175, 186, 190, 200, 201, 203, 213, 214, 223, 225, 234, 251, 253, 264, 266, 268, 269, 273, 275, 278, 280-283, 285, 296, 305, 312, 315, 317, 319, 327, 329, 342, 344, 353, 355, 359, 362, 364, 368, 369, 371, 377, 378, 391, 392, 396, 411, 436, 444, 447, 450, 457, 492, 493, 500, 507, 518, 525, 527-530, 533, 538-543, 545, 546, 553, 555-557, 581, 587, 596, 597 Parma 279, 322 Parsiism 46, 93 Parthians 44, 62, 141, 143, 144, 147, 196 Pasargadae 73, 401 Pasteur, Louis 367 Patrick (saint) 263 Paul (saint) 150, 193 Pavia 272, 275, 278, 280 Pea 196, 326, 328, 347, 348 Peace of Paris (1783) 347, 348, 462 Pearl River see Xi Jiang Pechenegs 44, 45, 290 Pegu 219, 585, 597 Peikthano 218 Peking-Beijing 96, 156, 157, 159-161, 164, 177, 213, 227, 234, 370, 371, 403, 414, 444, 497, 499, 502, 504507, 584, 591 Pelago 200, 201, 259 Penn, William 345, 346 Pennsylvania 326, 345, 346, 447 Pennsylvania (University of) 331 Pennsylvania Canal 465, 469 Pepi II (pharaoh) 53 Pepin (son of Louis the Pious) 265 Pepin the Short (king) 271 Pergamum 137, 141, 379 Pericles 79, 81, 139 Perigord 283 Perry, Matthew (commodore) 227, 496 Persepolis 73, 75, 177, 197, 401, 577, 594 Persia 16, 44, 54, 62, 73, 84, 86, 139, 143, 165, 190, 192, 193, 202, 206, 212, 213, 223, 259, 391, 400, 401 Persian Empire 47, 54, 62, 63, 73-75, 79, 135, 143, 190, 196, 206, 207, 524, 552 Persian Royal Road 74, 75, 79

622 Persians 44, 49, 68, 69, 73, 75, 79, 83, 85, 141, 190, 193, 206, 207, 220, 396 Peru 27, 98, 100, 107-110, 205, 302, 304, 308, 309, 329, 331, 332, 334-336, 343, 488, 493-495 Perugia 138 Peshawar 90 Petén 102 Peter (saint) 189 Peter the Great (tsar) 247, 444, 446, 453 Petra 72, 81, 120, 197, 207, 577, 594 Phaistos 77, 158 Phidias 83 Philadelphia 6, 17, 64, 71, 234, 238, 326, 331, 340, 345-347, 349, 371, 463-466, 468, 472, 488, 489, 528, 529, 534, 539, 587, 597 Philip II August of France 322, 323 Philip II of Macedonia 84 Philip II of Spain 304, 305, 327 Philip III of Spain 305 Philip IV of Spain 305 Philip IV the Fair of France 270 Philip of Bourbon, duke of Anjou 319 Philip the Handsome of Habsburg 327 Philip V the Tall of France 283, 369 Philippi 150 Philippines 95, 193, 218, 222, 227, 304, 321, 329, 334, 411, 443, 497, 499, 503, 552 Phnum Penh 410 Phocaea 80 Phoenicians 52, 54-56, 58, 59, 77-79, 128, 135, 139141, 200, 202, 260, 295, 301 Phrygians 44, 68 Physiocrats 10, 325, 361, 362, 365 Piacenza 278, 314 Picardy 294 Pien Canal see Bian Canal Pindar 83 Pinkiang (Harbin) 503, 592 Pinochet, Agusto 495 Pireus 82, 83, 533 Pisa 138, 250, 251, 262, 276-278 Pitt, William the Younger 365 Pittsburgh 234, 342, 445, 460, 464, 465, 474, 489, 528 Pizarro, Francisco 108, 110, 302, 331, 334 Plague 184 Plains of Abraham (battle of) 342

Urban World History

Plantagenet (dynasty) 283, 291, 360 Plassey (battle of) 406 Plato 83 Pleading, Statute of 284 Pliska 247 Plymouth 295, 320, 331, 343, 368 Po River 273, 274, 378 Poitiers 193, 250, 259, 471, 514, 524 Poitou 283 Poland 256, 257, 280, 285, 291, 387, 447, 450-453, 524, 544 Polarization 6, 23, 436, 515, 553 Polignac, Jules de 385 Polovtsy 44, 256, 290 Pomerania 265 Pompey 141 Pondicherry 404, 406 Ponthieu 294 Port Said 389 Portland 49, 460, 482, 484, 485, 487 Porto 259, 295 Port-Royal 341 Portugal 11, 12, 108, 215, 218, 222, 260, 280, 299-301, 303, 304, 306, 320-323, 333, 336, 338, 340, 360, 369, 387, 403, 452, 487, 488 Portuguese 205, 206, 215, 217, 218, 222, 227, 295, 296, 299, 301, 303, 304, 320, 321, 323, 333, 336, 338, 339, 369, 383, 386, 391-393, 397, 403, 404, 406, 411, 487, 493, 525, 556 Postumus (general) 149 Potosí 334, 335, 340, 586, 597 Pottery 39 Prague 280, 289, 290, 382, 582, 596 Praxiteles 83 Premyslid (dynasty) 290 Preslav 247, 582, 595 Pretoria 399 Pre-urban cities 39, 50, 524 Priest John 296 Protagoras 80 Protestantism 12, 279, 309, 311, 315, 316 Proto-industrialization 355 Provence 261, 265, 266, 283-285, 288, 291, 299 Prussia 242, 265, 285, 288, 326, 337, 342, 364, 444, 446-449, 451, 458 Ptolemaeus, Claudius 145, 299 Ptolemies (dynasty) 54, 141, 143

623

Index

Public transportation 530, 547 Puerto Hormiga 100 Punic Wars 140 Puritans 326, 346 Puuc style 102 Pygmies 202 Pyrenees Treaty 324

Q Qandahar 197, 207 Qarakhanids (dynasty) 210 Qazvin 73, 401 Qin (dynasty) 93-95, 157, 162 Qing (dynasty) 157, 160, 497, 498, 507 Qom 401 Quakers 326, 338, 346 Quanzhou 220-222, 228, 524, 597 Quebec City 14, 238, 331, 340-343, 348, 349, 460, 463, 468, 474, 476, 483, 516, 534, 587, 597 Quebec City Seminary 331 Quebec, Act of 345 Quebec, Province of 343, 459, 471, 475 Quechua 108 Quesnay, François 361, 365 Quito 109, 111 Quraysh 190, 191

R Rabat 198, 201 Radisson, Pierre Esprit 483 Ragusa (Dubrovnik) 253, 273, 286 Rajput Confederation 213 Raleigh, Walter 341 Ramses II (pharaoh) 52, 53, 67 Randstad Holland 379 Rangoon 410 Raphael 311 Ravenna 137, 147, 151, 152, 272, 278, 279, 379 Ravenstein, Ernest 271, 557 Reconquista 213, 249, 259-261, 300, 322 Red Basin 94-96, 154, 162-164, 523 Red River 460, 484 Redfield, Robert 126, 309, 556 Regensburg 145, 287 Reich, Second 450, 451 Reich, Third 451 Reims 145, 263, 264, 499 Rembrandt 311

Remi (saint) 262 Remscheid 358 René I the Good of Provence 299 Repulsive force 175-179 Rethel 249, 294 Reunion 397 Rhine River 267, 274, 317, 358, 378, 448 Rhodes, Cecil 77, 81, 270, 286, 386, 399 Rhône River 81, 314 Rhurids (dynasty) 210 Ricardo, David 10, 11, 365 Richelieu (cardinal-duke) 324, 328, 347, 361, 458, 462 Richmond 370, 469, 472, 539 Ricimer 152 Rift Valley 204, 396 Rimini 279 Rio de Janeiro 64, 127, 238, 332, 341, 491, 534, 586, 597 Riza Pahlavi (shah) 400 Road 65, 74, 75, 79, 81, 87, 93-95, 119, 126, 138, 141, 143, 144, 146, 155, 162, 190, 197, 207, 214, 215, 221, 252, 401, 474, 552 Rochambeau (count) 347 Rockies Mountains 460 Rocroi (battle) 321, 324 Roman Empire 4, 6, 18, 27, 45, 50, 59, 64, 73, 85, 96, 105, 133-137, 139, 141-156, 161, 164, 166, 171, 178, 183-186, 188, 189, 193, 195, 198, 199, 208, 209, 223, 228, 245, 246, 249, 259-265, 267, 269-272, 275-277, 279, 281, 282, 284-290, 293, 294, 312, 314, 326, 353, 357, 360, 370, 375, 381, 431, 516-518, 524, 531-533, 553, 554, 560 Roman road 108, 134, 137, 145, 156, 314, 367 Romania 74, 381 Romanus IV Diogenes (emperor) 248 Rome 13, 14, 57, 64, 69, 81, 84-86, 88, 120, 133, 135, 137-144, 146-155, 165, 166, 171, 172, 174, 175, 177180, 183-186, 188, 189, 195, 223, 225, 228, 231, 232, 241, 245, 246, 258, 260, 262-265, 270-272, 277, 280, 281, 288, 291, 292, 310-312, 324, 359, 363, 368, 371, 382, 391, 507, 509, 527, 532, 533, 535, 536, 543, 552, 554, 556, 560, 580, 585, 595, 597 Romulus Augustulus (emperor) 137, 142, 152 Rosario 493 Rostock 286, 319, 458 Rotterdam 292, 317, 378, 379, 465, 529, 589, 598

624

Urban World History

Roubaix 376 Rouen 145, 282, 312, 376, 493 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 362 Rubens, Peter Paul 311 Russia 44, 53, 67, 146, 185, 195, 200, 209, 210, 214, 221, 242, 253-256, 258, 259, 293, 324, 337, 339, 342, 358, 371, 380, 400, 415, 444, 446-448, 450-458, 468, 487, 498, 501, 503-506, 508, 518 Russo-Japanese War 455, 498, 502, 503, 505, 508 Rwanda 23, 203-205, 390, 395, 396, 398

S Sabini 137 Sacramento River 477 Sagres 296 Sahara 27, 51, 134, 146, 193, 199, 201, 202, 204, 206, 233, 386, 392, 393 Sailendra (dynasty) 216, 217 Saint-Dié 303 Sainte-Croix see Dochet Island Saint-Étienne 358, 376 Saintonge 283 Saladin 250 Salamanca 145, 280 Salamis (battle) 74, 83 Salaria Road 138 Salerno 271, 280 Salic law 265 Salona (Split) 137, 138, 147, 379 Salt Road 138, 201, 271 Salvador de Bahia 333 Salween River 162 Samanids (dynasty) 206, 209, 210 Samarkand 87, 94, 193, 195, 207, 210, 211, 214, 401, 584, 596 Samnites 137, 139 Samuel (tsar) 247, 341, 470 Samurais 226 San Bernardino Pass 314 San Diego 475, 478, 481, 482, 487, 529 San Francisco 33, 234, 460, 473, 475-479, 482, 483, 485, 487, 529, 534, 591, 599 San Martín, general José de 488, 493, 495 San Sebastian 380 Santiago 109, 111, 259, 333, 339, 494, 591, 599 Santo Domingo 302, 330, 337 Santo Domingo, University of 331

Santos 491 São Paulo 490-494, 517, 525, 543, 544, 599 Saracen Route 455 Sarai-Batu 214, 258 Sarai-Berke 214, 258 Sardinia 79, 140, 141, 251, 261, 276, 310, 321 Sardis 74, 79 Sargon I of Akkad 47 Sasanian Persians 62, 149, 188, 189, 192, 246 Saul (king) 69, 70 Savery, Thomas 367 Saxons 44, 45, 148, 152, 253, 263, 369, 370, 372 Saxony 263, 271, 310, 342 Scale economies 128 Scheldt River 308 Schism 272, 291, 382 Schleswig-Holstein 289 Schumpeter, Joseph. A 513 Scipio the African 140 Scotland 12, 125, 134, 146, 263, 310, 369, 373, 375, 446, 470 Scythians 44, 63, 66, 80, 141 Seattle 234, 460, 473, 477, 479, 482, 484, 485, 487, 592, 599 Secession War 232, 349, 468-470, 477, 481 Second Babylonian Empire 62, 66, 69, 73, 75, 196 Second Mongol Empire 207, 210 Seine River 145, 378 Seleucia 62, 68, 143, 188, 195, 196 Seleucids 141, 143, 196 Seleucus I Nicator 188 Seljuq Turks 44, 210 Semites 43, 45, 58, 61, 72, 73, 104, 140, 189, 203 Senegal 201, 383, 387, 392 Sens 264 Seoul 403, 444, 502, 504, 518, 544, 553l, 599 Septimania 154 Septimus Severus (emperor) 143, 147 Serbia 147, 188, 247, 252, 271, 314, 380-382, 544 Serbians 188 Seres 94 Seven Years’ War 320, 342, 370 Seville 199, 200, 256, 260-262, 280, 295, 304, 305, 307310, 312, 321, 334, 380, 516, 581, 596 Sforza (dynasty) 276 Shaanxi province 29, 86, 94, 162 Shang (dynasty) 86, 92, 157

Index

Shanghai 19, 120, 221, 234, 394, 412-414, 443, 497499, 505-509, 516, 517, 537, 542, 544, 588, 598 Sheffield 368, 375 Shenzhen 234, 413, 509 Sherman, William Tecumseh 469 Shi Huangdi (emperor) 93 Shiism 206 Shimoda 228 Shintoism 224, 226 Shiraz 206, 396 Siam 409 Sichuan (province) 94, 162 Sicily 55, 79, 84, 140, 141, 249, 251, 256, 259, 261, 262, 265, 266, 268-271, 283, 284, 285, 321, 457 Sidon 55, 56, 58, 59, 68, 150, 273 Sienna 278 Sigismund II of Luxembourg (king of Hungary) 291 Silesia 291, 328, 448, 450-452, 455 Silk Road 16, 17, 65, 68, 72, 87, 88, 93-95, 119, 141, 143, 144, 146, 149, 150, 155, 162, 188-190, 196, 197, 206, 207, 209, 215, 217, 220, 221, 251, 252, 268, 306, 401, 496, 552, 560 Silver Fleet 305 Simplon (pass) 274, 314, 379 Sind (region) 193, 197, 207, 208 Singapore 9, 58, 300, 405, 407, 408, 410, 413, 443, 499, 502, 544, 552, 598 Singer, M.B. 126, 309, 556 Singhasari 216 Sino-Japanese War 506 Sirmium 147, 314 Slave 338 Slave trade 338 Slavery 153, 338, 468 Slavs 18, 44, 45, 188, 246-248, 254, 255, 265, 289, 290, 336 Slovaks 289 Slovenia 147, 328 Smith, Adam 325, 365 Socrates 83 Sogdiana 193, 195, 197, 207 Soissons 264, 282 Solidarnosc 453 Solingen 358 Solomon (king) 69, 71, 408, 443 Somalia 190, 203, 252, 396 Somalis, French Coast of the 390

625 Song (dynasty) 156 Songhai (civilization) 203 Sophocles 83 Sorbonne 281, 283 South Africa 205, 234, 326, 385, 393, 397-399, 406, 544 South Equatorial Current 300 Southeast Asia 26, 41, 46, 95, 99, 216, 218, 219, 228, 398, 407, 408, 496, 509, 543 Soweto 399 Spain 12, 18, 28, 55, 78-80, 106, 108, 125, 127, 140, 147, 152, 188, 192, 193, 195, 197-201, 208, 209, 214, 218, 246, 249, 252, 253, 259-261, 268, 280, 284, 294, 295, 300, 301, 303-306, 308-310, 313, 316-324, 327329, 333-335, 337-340, 342, 343, 358, 360, 364, 369, 377, 380, 387, 452, 454, 471, 475, 482, 487, 488, 493, 533, 554, 556 Spanish Trail 474, 478, 479 Sparta 82-84, 177, 578, 594 Spatial competition 169, 435 Spice Road 54, 72, 73, 81, 190, 195, 197, 252 Spinola (family) 322 Spinola, Ambrogio, marquis of 322 Spire 287 Sri Lanka 146, 215, 217, 502 Srivijaya Empire 216, 217 St. Gothard Pass 275 St. Louis (city) 221, 267, 342, 387, 445, 460, 473, 474, 478, 524 St. Paul (city) 189, 474, 475 St. Petersburg (Russia) 255, 599 St. Sophia (church) 188, 246 Stalin 400, 444, 457 Stalingrad 214 Stamford 369, 372 Steel 1, 3, 25, 45, 91, 158, 164, 204, 311, 388 Stephen (saint) 291 Stephenson, George 357, 367 Stilicon 151 Stockholm 172, 268, 382, 457, 458, 527, 590, 599 Stockton 357, 477 Straight Road 88, 94, 162, 212 Straits of Dover 292, 293 Strasbourg 268 Styria 328 Subway 528 Sudan 52-54, 202, 203, 386, 387, 390

626

Urban World History

Suevi 44, 45 Suez Canal 389-391, 397, 400, 401, 404, 485, 517, 518 Sulaiman Range 197 Sumatra 202, 216, 217, 407 Sumer (region) 29, 31, 39-43, 47, 48, 51, 58, 59, 61, 62, 64, 73, 75, 85, 86, 88, 89, 115, 180, 183, 192, 292, 401, 516, 526, 531, 552 Surat 212, 404, 406, 583, 596 Suriname 318, 339, 344, 348 Susa 73-75, 401, 577 Suzhou 161, 164, 166, 171 Sweden 12, 253, 255, 304, 323, 324, 328, 338, 339, 342344, 358, 364, 453, 457-459 Swiss Cantons 313 Switzerland 125, 145, 147, 264, 266, 274, 292, 314, 321, 328, 378-380 Syagrius (king) 264 Sydney 405, 408, 589, 598 Sylvester II (pope) 291 Syracuse 79, 84, 135, 578, 594 Syria 13, 43, 56, 67-69, 74, 78, 136, 141, 143, 147, 149, 188, 202, 248, 252, 399

T Tabriz 73, 214, 401 Tagus River 295, 322 Taira (family) 226 Taiwan 16, 95, 234, 413, 498, 499, 502, 509, 544, 552 Taj Mahal 212 Talleyrand, Charles Maurice de 361 Tana 214, 251, 252, 273, 276 Tanganyika 394-397, 443 Tangier 145, 198, 201 Tanis 78 Tanzania 394, 397, 398 Taoism 217 Taranto 80, 578, 594 Tarnovo 247 Tarquinia 138 Tarvisio Pass 273, 314 Tashkent 207 Tatars 44, 196, 210, 256, 258 Tbilisi 214 Tehran 65, 68, 141, 206, 207 Tellier, Charles 6, 7, 17, 19, 120, 127, 129, 174, 231, 236-238, 324, 325, 361, 421, 430, 493, 517, 551

Templars 270 Tenochtitlan 97, 101, 104-107, 109-111, 309, 331, 333, 334, 530 Teotihuacan 97, 100, 101, 104-107, 110, 523, 530, 533, 580 Tertullian 151 Tetrarchs 147, 173 Teutonic Knights 257, 285 Teutonic Order 270 Texas 467, 476, 477, 480-482, 489 Thailand 94, 162, 220, 224, 227, 409-411, 499, 502 Thames River 308, 370 Thayekhettaya 218 The Hague 329, 379 Thebes (Egypt) 52, 53, 63, 202, 516, 576, 594 Thebes (Greece) 52, 82, 84, 177, 578 Themistocles 82 Theodoric 152 Theodosius I (emperor) 142, 150 Thessaloniki 137, 147, 150, 188, 246, 250, 379, 582 Thirty Years’ War 324, 327, 328 Thomas Aquinas (saint) 281 Thrace 74, 80, 147, 247 Thucydides 83 Thyssen (family) 448 Tianjin 156, 234, 414, 504-506, 508, 527, 591, 599 Tiber River 138 Tibet 95, 162, 210 Tibetans 159 Tigris River 42, 48, 58, 61, 64, 73, 141, 143, 196 Tikal 102, 103, 104, 580, 595 Tillabery 388 Timbuktu 201, 202, 596 Timur, also called Tamerlane 196, 207, 210, 257, 258 Titus 72, 142, 452 Tocqueville, Alexis de 366, 448 Togwa (kingdom) 205 Tokugawa family 226, 228, 497, 500 Tokugawa, Ieyasu 226, 500 Tokyo 16, 56, 120, 225-228, 231, 371, 378, 403, 443, 444, 465, 496, 497, 499-502, 507, 517, 518, 525, 537, 539, 542-544, 552-554, 585, 590, 597, 599 Toledo 110, 200, 259, 322, 323, 465 Toltec 101-105 Topodynamic inertia 233-236, 239-241, 292, 553

627

Index

Toronto 8, 14, 342, 460, 463, 471, 472, 487, 516, 518, 537, 591, 599 Torquemada 261 Torricelli, Evangelista 311 Toscanelli, Paolo 299 Touaregs 202 Toulouse 124, 145, 234, 250, 280, 312 Touraine 283 Tourcoing 376 Tournai 263, 264 Toynbee, Arnold 41, 551 Toyotomi (family) 226, 500 Trajan (emperor) 73, 134, 141-143 Transgariep 398 Transoxiana 192, 193, 195, 197, 207, 208, 210, 248 Trans-Siberian 16, 209, 445, 446, 455, 552 Transvaal Province 399 Treaty of Breda 344 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo 477 Treaty of Kangawa 496 Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca 381 Treaty of Nanking 412 Treaty of Paris 320, 342, 344, 359, 370, 398, 406 Treaty of Ribemont 282 Treaty of The Hague 344 Treaty of Tordesillas 303, 336 Treaty of Westphalia 324 Trebizond 250, 252 Trento 287 Treviso 280 Trier 145, 171, 285 Tripoli 249, 250 Trogir 286 Troy 78, 578, 594 Troyes 278, 312, 315 Tsaritsyne 214 Tughluq 210 Tula 104 Tunis 127, 139, 389, 589, 598 Tunisia 193, 198, 209, 252, 385, 386, 389 Turgot, Anne Robert Jacques 127, 325, 361-363, 365 Turin 275, 279, 310, 314, 363, 382 Turkey 13, 26, 35, 52, 67, 74, 143, 145, 252, 371 Turkmen 44, 196 Turks 44, 45, 83, 206, 210, 214, 246-248, 251, 252, 254, 256, 258, 273, 290, 306, 323, 328, 380-382, 385, 392

Tuscany 138, 277 Tutankhamen 52, 53 Tutsi 203, 392, 396 Tver (city) 258 Tver (dynasty) 258 Tyre 55, 56, 58, 59, 68, 139, 150, 252, 273, 576, 594 Tyrol 328 Tyrtaeus 84

U USSR 254 Uaxactun 102 Ubaid culture 29, 77, 91 Uganda 204, 390, 396, 398 Ugarit 55-58, 60, 65, 67, 78, 79, 120, 127, 188, 576, 594 Uighurs 215 Ukraine 26, 45, 67, 253, 254, 451 Ulfilas 262 Umayyads (dynasty) 192, 195, 198, 200, 207, 208 United Provinces (Netherlands) 304, 309, 310, 316, 317, 319, 320, 322, 323, 326, 328, 338, 339, 343, 348, 369, 370, 378 United States 6, 27, 64, 98, 163, 232, 234, 237, 301, 323, 332, 338, 340, 342, 343, 347-349, 353, 358, 365, 371-373, 383, 402, 406, 410, 411, 415, 443-447, 450, 452, 457, 460, 462-468, 470, 472-485, 487-490, 493, 496, 498, 499, 501, 502, 509, 518, 529, 537, 543, 554, 555, 557, 558 University 7, 19, 28, 40, 44, 47, 86, 93, 107, 120, 123, 134, 137, 161, 165, 174, 183, 194, 199, 235, 246, 248, 264, 267, 273, 280, 281, 290, 318, 331, 338, 355, 368, 370, 414, 421, 438, 439, 454, 464, 486, 513, 524, 525, 532, 536, 551, 560 Ur 16, 29, 41-43, 45-48, 56, 73, 86, 523, 526, 552, 576, 594 Ural 44, 45, 203, 208, 254, 290 Uralic-speakers 44 Urban II (pope) 248 Urban sprawl 240, 529, 545 Urbanization 8, 29, 75, 86, 91, 100, 106, 161, 225, 267, 308, 316, 329, 355, 357, 438, 459, 500, 543 Uruguay 487, 491-494 Uruk 41, 42, 48, 49, 56, 523, 552, 576, 594 Utrecht 379 Uxmal 102-104, 523, 580, 595 Uzbekistan 74, 143, 206, 207, 210, 214 Uzbeks 44, 210

628

Urban World History

V Valachia 381 Valencia 199, 260 Valenciennes 376 Valladolid 280, 302, 322 Valois (dynasty) 283, 291, 320 Valois, Charles of 283 Valparaiso 111 Van Horne, William Cornelius 486 Vance, James E. Jr 7, 123, 325, 515, 524, 527, 538 Vancouver 460, 473, 479, 482, 484-487, 592, 599 Vandals 44, 45, 149, 152, 188, 198-200, 246, 262, 263 Vandavashy (battle) 342 Varegs 253, 255-257 Vasily III (tsar) 258 Vauban, Sébastien Le Prestre de 127, 325, 326, 360, 361, 363 Vedas 46, 95, 215 Venetian Empire 253, 274 Venetians 250, 251, 293 Venice 13, 14, 56, 58, 79, 171, 179, 195, 200, 214, 232, 241, 250, 251, 253, 256, 262, 266-270, 272-274, 276279, 284, 286, 292, 304, 306, 307, 310, 311, 314, 315, 339, 350, 408, 444, 516, 525, 527, 532, 535, 554, 555, 581, 596 Veracruz 111, 334 Vercelli 280 Vercingetorix 145 Vermandois 294 Verona 272, 274, 287, 314 Verrazano, Giovanni da 341, 347 Versailles 127, 282, 321, 327, 360, 362, 533, 539, 586, 597 Verviers 377 Vespucci, Amerigo 303, 339 Via Aemilia Scauri 277 Via Annia 277, 279 Via Claudia Augusta 314 Via Flaminia 277 Via Postumia 274 Vicenza 280 Victoria (city) 53, 387, 397, 486 Vienna 125, 145, 252, 273, 280, 287, 290, 314, 321, 328, 359, 371, 380, 381, 448, 539, 585, 597 Vienna, Congress of 386, 451 Vietnam 94, 95, 158, 162, 215, 218, 220, 409-411, 499

Vijayanagar 213, 406, 583, 596 Vikings 44, 249, 253, 265, 301, 359, 392, 458 Vilnius 455 Visby 286 Visigoths 44, 45, 148, 149, 151, 188, 200, 246, 260, 262, 263 Vistula River 451 Vitruvius 532 Vladimir (city) 256-258, 455 Vladimir I the Great (grand-prince) 256 Vladislav II of Bohemia 291 Vladivostok 254, 455, 503 Vojvodina 314, 381 Volga River 214, 257, 455 Volgograd 214 Voltaire 325, 337, 362

W Wakefield 375 Waldseemüller 303 Walesa, Lech 453 Wallerstein, Immanuel 6 War of the Spanish Succession 319, 320, 369 War 1812 War 348, 402 Anglo-Dutch Wars 344 Boxer War 506, 508 Hundred Years’ War 275, 283, 284, 312, 360, 364, 369, 516 Korean War 502 Opium War 412, 506 Punic Wars 140 RussoJapanese War 455, 498, 502, 503, 505, 508 Secession War 232, 349, 468-470, 477, 481 Seven Years’ War 320, 342, 370 Sino-Japanese War 506 Thirty Years’ War 324, 327, 328 Warsaw 364, 450-453, 455, 590, 599 Washington, 591 Washington, D.C. 64, 119, 346, 469, 472, 473, 476, 481, 484, 529, 534, 537 Washington, George 347, 472 Waterloo 359 Watt, James 367, 374 Weber triangle 429 Weber, Alfred 420, 429, 430, 432, 439 Weber, Max 3, 12, 279 Welf (House of) 271 Weser River 449 Wessex 266 Western Zhou (dynasty) 157 Wheat 26, 467 Wheat Belt 467

629

Index

Whebell, C.F.J. 515 Whig 342, 365 Wilderness Road 472 Wilhelm II, Kaiser 444 William and Mary College 331 William of Orange, king of England 316, 317, 319, 483 William the Conqueror 253, 369 Willow Palisade 504 Winnipeg 460, 473, 486, 487 Wismar 286, 458 Witte, Sergueï Ioulievitch, count 454 Wittelsbach 288, 483 Wojtyla, Karol 453 Worms 287, 315 Worms, Edict of 310 Writing 3 Wuppertal 449

X Xenophon 83 Xi Jiang 16, 164, 221, 222, 496 Xi Jiang (Pearl River) 164, 221, 496 Xi Jin (dynasty) 157 Xiamen 222, 234, 411-413, 499, 509 Xianyang 93, 157, 162 Xinjiang (province) 193, 208, 215 Xochicalco 102 Xuzhou 414

Y Yale College 331 Yamato Empire 224 Yangtze River 16, 19, 27, 92, 94, 95, 158, 160-163, 171, 174, 241, 394, 404, 414, 496, 516, 552, 558 Yarmouth 294 Yarmuk River (battle) 248 Yasodharman 208 Yekaterinburg 455

Yellow River (Huang He) 27, 87, 92, 93, 119, 149, 506 Yemen 59, 72, 81, 184, 190, 252 Yonne River 378 York 60, 120, 126, 145, 238, 239, 266, 267, 295, 320, 340, 345, 347-349, 368, 392, 443, 445, 462-465, 471, 472, 479, 489, 499, 513, 537, 539, 544, 551, 554, 555 Yorkshire 375 Yoruba States 205, 206 Yoshimune (shogun) 227 Yoshino 225 Ypres 293 Yüan (dynasty) 157, 159-161 Yucatan 97 Yugoslavia 141, 381 Yunnan (province) 16, 95, 162, 193, 215, 409, 411

Z Zambezi River 205, 396 Zambia 386, 387, 397, 399 Zanzibar 396, 397 Zapotec 101, 104 Zaragoza 199, 303, 312, 380 Zarathushtra 206 Zaria 202 Zayton (Quanzhou) 220-222, 228, 524, 584, 597 Zeno 83 Zenobia of Palmyra 149 Zheng He (navigator) 215 Zhengzhou 95, 155, 156, 158, 160, 164, 579, 595 Zimbabwe 205, 386, 387, 399, 583, 596 Zirids (dynasty) 209 Zoe-Sophia Paleologus 258 Zoroastrianism 46, 93, 190-192, 206, 208, 213 Zulu 398 Zurich 127, 315, 379, 589, 598 Zwin River 308