The Transformation of the World (58 page)

In the West such a system suddenly appeared after the middle of the century. Its largest city, Chicago, exploded from a population of 30,000 in 1850 to 1.1 million forty years later.
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Chicago and other Midwestern cities, like the cities of Australia around the same time, literally arose out of nothing. As the frontier moved westward, cities did not spring up from the land in keeping with the European model but anticipated an expansion of trade before their surrounding country had been opened up for farming.
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On the Pacific coast, the loose network of Spanish mission stations had already laid the geographical foundation for the development of cities. California was never a stomping ground
of cowboys and Indians: in the absence of village structures, its cities already accounted for 50 percent of the population in 1885, at a time when the average for the United States was around 32 percent.
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But the real population boom, in absolute figures, began afterward. In the 1870s Los Angeles still had some features of a Mexican pueblo; only later did it become “Anglo” (or anyway mainly English-speaking), Protestant, and white.
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Alongside the growth of cities in the industrializing English Midlands, the urbanization of the American Midwest and of the Australian southeastern coast were the most spectacular cases of the sudden formation of an urban archipelago. In special circumstances, a city could blossom forth even in relative isolation. Driven by the rapid development of an export economy on an agricultural frontier, a city like Buenos Aires—which in Spanish colonial times had been of no great importance—could rocket from a population of 64,000 in 1836 to one of 1,576,000 in 1914.
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Such rapid multiplication was rare in Europe. Throughout the period from 1800 to 1890, Berlin, Leipzig, Glasgow, Budapest, and Munich were among the fastest-growing large cities, averaging 8 to 11 percent per annum. The others, including London, Paris, and Moscow, expanded more slowly. But no city in Europe matched the growth rates in the New World, even of older cities with a colonial past: New York (47 percent), Philadelphia and Boston (19 percent).
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The picture changes somewhat if the two halves of the century are taken separately. In the second half, the growth pattern in the largest East Coast cities was not fundamentally different from what was happening in Europe. Indeed, it was then that the influx into big cities was at its height worldwide, and new land and groups of people were being incorporated into them from surrounding areas. Only in England and Scotland, and to a lesser extent in Belgium, Saxony, and France, was the change smaller than in the first half of the century. The period between 1850 and 1910 witnessed the highest annual rate of growth of the urban population in the whole history of Europe.
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In 1850 there were two cities in Europe with a population over one million—London and Paris—and then a large gap before a group with 300,000 to 500,000. By 1913 the distribution was more even, with thirteen cities above the one-million mark: London, Paris, Berlin, Saint Petersburg, Vienna, Moscow, Manchester, Birmingham, Glasgow, Istanbul, Hamburg, Budapest, and Liverpool.
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Which forces were driving the growth of cities? Unlike in earlier history, political will was not the primary factor. There was little in the nineteenth century to compare with such titanic founding acts as the establishment of Edo (Tokyo) in 1590 by the warlord Tokugawa Ieyasu, the elevation of Madrid to capital status in 1561 (though it was built up into a metropolis only after 1850), the resolution of Tsar Peter I in 1703 to build the fortress of Saint Petersburg on an island in the Neva, or the decision of the young United States in 1790 to create a brand new capital on the Potomac. At best, the transfer of the viceregal government of British India from Calcutta to Delhi in 1911 and the construction of a high-prestige
capital in the new location belong in the same category of events. Cities did not grow
because
they were seats of government or official residences. Only a few colonial capitals in Africa (Lagos, which in 1900 was only a one-third of the size of the old Nigerian metropolis Ibadan, or Lourenço Marques, the capital of Portuguese East Africa) and some advance posts of Russia's eastward expansion such as Blagoveshchensk (1858), Vladivostok (1860), and Khabarovsk (1880), constituted—demographically not very successful—exceptions. On the other hand, after the formation of nation-states in Germany, Italy, and Japan, many small residential seats lost their importance and often many of their inhabitants.

In the nineteenth century, the growth of cities was driven more than ever before by market forces and private initiative. The rise of some of the largest and most dynamic cities in the world was the result of private “civic” action; they were not so much seats of power and prestigious high culture as business centers that competed keenly with places of higher political status. Chicago, Moscow, and Osaka are good illustrations of this.
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The advantages that really counted now were better organization of the social division of labor, better availability of sophisticated services (especially in the finance sector), more complex market mechanisms, and faster communications. Thanks to new technologies (steamship travel, canal construction, railroads, telegraphs, and so on), big cities could continually increase their radius of operations. The opportunities for rapid growth were especially great in cities such as Buenos Aires, Shanghai, Chicago, Sydney, and Melbourne, which developed the resources of a vast hinterland for the world market without initially being industrial centers in their own right. In both colonial and noncolonial contexts, it was generally port cities that were able to record the highest growth. In Japan, for example, not industrialization but the opening up of foreign trade has been seen as the main source of the growth of big cities.
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City Systems

Although viable cities were only seldom founded by administrative fiat, central state coordination usually had a favorable effect on the formation and construction of city systems, by creating a large degree of uniformity in legal and monetary matters, imposing exchange and communication standards, and planning and funding the city infrastructure for the common good. The last of these points was especially important. Even before the age of the railroad, the construction of river-canal systems in England and the United States made a major contribution to interurban communication. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, goods could be sent by waterway to London from all parts of Britain, and people in the United States had good reason to celebrate with pride the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825.
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Elsewhere in the world, such things were a geographical possibility only in the Ganges Valley, the hinterlands of Canton, or the “macroregion” of Jiangnan. In China, however, the various city systems were never (not even in China proper) integrated into a
single national system, and new technological possibilities were scarcely exploited. The horizontal integration and vertical differentiation of city systems was therefore bound up not only with fundamental social-economic processes such as industrialization but also with the building of nation-states. Economic success in the nineteenth century went to countries with an internally integrated and differentiated city system that was also open to the outside. Whereas nation-states required city systems, cities were themselves often not dependent on a functioning nation-state framework. The absence, or relative weakness, of integration into a national territory did not hinder the development of a large colonial port like Hong Kong or that of a noncolonial maritime city such as Beirut on the periphery of the Ottoman Empire.
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Most of the national city systems were permeable to the outside. Whereas the nation-state (if one existed) increasingly became the framework for the organization of economies in which urban industrialization played a growing role,
very large
cities were directly linked into international networks of trade, migration, and communications. In other words, even in the “age of the nation-state,” individual countries were not necessarily “stronger” than big cities, which served to gather and distribute capital (not only national in origin) and provided a base for “transnational” connections. The development of cities is no more a direct consequence of state formation than it is an epiphenomenon of industrialization.
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For the early modern period, networking across great distances is already a dimension without which the history of cities cannot be written. There were regular trade links within Europe (e.g., in the shape of fairs), as well as maritime activity, first in the Mediterranean, then on a much larger scale between Atlantic ports such as Lisbon, Seville, Amsterdam, London, Nantes, and Bristol and their counterparts across the seas. These might be either colonial ports (Cape Town, Bombay, Macau, Batavia, Rio de Janeiro, Havana) or ports under indigenous control (Istanbul, Zanzibar, Surat, Canton, Nagasaki). Colonial cities such as Batavia or the ports of Spanish America were often slightly modified copies of European town patterns. At least one colonial city, however, saw itself not as a satellite or bridgehead of Europe but as a center with political and cultural functions in its own right: this was Philadelphia, which in 1760—barely eighty years old and, with 20,000 inhabitants, a little larger than New York—was one of the most dynamic cities in the English-speaking world. Its core, where trade, politics, and culture were concentrated, was the nexus between the colony of Pennsylvania and the rest of the Atlantic space.
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In the nineteenth century—and this was new—the geography of colonial urban growth, when seen on an international level, came to obey laws of the market more than it did political guidelines. Until the 1840s the Navigation Laws governed many overseas commercial relationships in the British Empire, stipulating, inter alia, that an export producer such as Jamaica, in return for a monopoly over its products in the British market, had to obtain its imports from the United Kingdom. These laws were a sharp weapon in the rivalry among
European trading empires and were one of the reasons why the influence of Amsterdam in the world economy fell behind that of London in the eighteenth century. At exactly the same time that the Navigation Laws ceased to operate, British pressure in China ended the monopoly privileges of Canton as a transshipment port for the whole of the overseas trade with Europe. Such mercantilist regulations, quite independently of one another in Asia and Europe and its colonies, had led directly or indirectly to a preference for certain cities and the impeding of the rise of others. Path dependencies created in the early modern period had continued to function in later centuries as established structural facts. But from the 1840s onward, the global imposition of free trade and the free movement of persons strengthened the market (nonstate) features of the changing city systems.

Networks and Hubs

City systems may be conceived in two different ways, vertically and horizontally. On the
vertical
plane, a size-graded hierarchy of settlements stretches up pyramid-like, in shorter or longer steps, from a multiplicity of villages at the bottom to a central location at the top. On the
horizontal
plane, it is a question of relations among cities, and thus of the networks in which they are inserted and to whose development and functioning they contribute. If the first model may be visualized as a structure of subordination and superordination, the second may be seen in terms of interaction between an urban center and its periphery, or with another urban center of a similar kind. The farther one moves up the hierarchy, the more easily the two models may be linked to each other, for many cities, especially large ones, have intensive vertical and horizontal affiliations. The horizontal networking model is more productive for a global historical approach: it lays greater emphasis on cities as hubs than on their dominant position within a regionally defined hierarchy, directing our attention to the fact that control over an immediate hinterland may be much less important for a city than the control it exercises over distant markets or sources of supply. Thus, for example, the textile cities of Lancashire had at least as close relations with the Russian Black Sea ports that supplied them with grain, or with the cotton latifundia of Egypt, as they did with the hinterland of the county of Suffolk. This kind of economic topography, which is invisible on conventional maps, also had political implications. For cities such as Manchester or Bradford, the consequences of the American Civil War were far more direct than those of the revolutions of 1848/49 in nearby continental Europe. But cities were also inserted into wider contexts within the same country. The boom cities of the Industrial Revolution may have been able to organize on their own the tasks of production, raw materials procurement, and marketing, but they were still dependent on political and financial decisions made in London.

The networking approach has the further advantage that it can elucidate city formation in the periphery. Many new cities of the nineteenth century did not
so much grow out of their rural surroundings as they expanded because of their attractions to
external
interested parties.
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This was true of numerous cities in the colonies and the American West, but also of Dar es Salaam—which in the late 1860s, before its colonial period, was created ex nihilo by Sultan Seyyid Majid of Zanzibar as the terminus of the caravan trade
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—and of fast-emerging metropolises such as Beirut. At the beginning of the century Beirut had a population of just 6,000; by the end it was over 100,000. Its rise would have been impossible without the old urban tradition of Syria, but the real driving force was the general revival of Mediterranean trade originating in Europe.
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