World Cities In History—Overview

Which were the world cities of the ancient, classical, and modern era, and what was their role in organizing social life on earth? World history is sometimes viewed as the history of cities because urbanization has been coextensive with the portion of human experience commonly portrayed in world histories—that is, the past five or six millennia. This is why the study of world cities and their interrelationships can offer useful insights not just into the growth of a central form of human organization, but also into world history itself. This overview focuses on three questions: (1) How do we define and identify world cities? (2) Over the entire time span of world history, which cities were world cities, and can they meaningfully be regarded as the centers of the world system of their time? and (3) What are the major outlines and trends in the system of world cities?

What Is a “World City ”?

World cities can be defined as cities of world importance, actually and potentially. The source of that importance might be either a city’s size or its position in the functioning of the world system. Size will be reckoned principally in terms of population numbers (compared with other cities of that same era), and we will distinguish among world cities of the ancient, classical, and modern periods because over historical time cities have grown larger by orders of magnitude. World system position might, in the most obvious case, refer to a place in the global economy, either in a commercial role or a productive capacity. For instance, the capitals of powerful or strategically important states and the military garrisons they might harbor will be politically important, and religious centers will attract interest and visitors from afar. There have also been cities noted for their cultural assets and the excellence of the learning they afford. Large cities have often been multifunctional; large populations, in turn, provide fertile soil for innovative enterprises. It is hard to find a single, dominant world city over the past several millennia, but we can identify sets of urban centers and examine their form and composition and the connections among them (for example, were they imperial or nonimperial?).

In the present survey, world cities will be identified primarily by size, because in a survey of this scale, both spatial and temporal, it’s not practicable to make an empirical, detailed, and documented assessment of world system position. For the ancient era (about 3000 to 1000 BCE) we will examine cities with settlements whose population may be estimated (for instance, on the basis of archaeologists’ site reports) to be in excess of ten thousand; the population of most such cities are in the range of ten thousand to 100,000. For the classical era (1000 BCE to 1000 CE), we will look at urban centers with populations of 100,000 or more, most typically in the range of 100,000 to 1 million. For the modern era (since 1000 CE) we focus principally on cities with populations in the 1 to 10 million range.

This overview draws its empirical data from two quantitative censuses of urban growth and contextualizes that data for several eras and regions. Until quite recently the prevailing view held that a statistical description of urbanization prior to about 1800 was an impossibility. However, new sources have opened up—for instance, in archaeology and social and economic history—that make that task less difficult. The pioneering effort in this regard has been Tertius Chandler’s Four Thousand Years of Urban Growth (1987), a product of decades of research that brought together a mass of material on cities between 2250 BCE and 1975 CE. Complementing and extending that work has been George Modelski’s World Cities:-3000 to 2000 (2003), which provides fuller coverage for the first four millennia but deals more lightly with the data from 1000 CE onward; it also reports on world trends in urbanization.

This portion of a large Japanese print shows people using a variety of transportation modes.

The Ancient World

The first city system emerged in Southern Mesopotamia in the fourth millennium BCE in what archeologist Vere Gordon Childe dubbed the “Urban Revolution.” This group of urban settlements centered on Uruk, clearly a major cult center; Uruk was probably also a focus of political activities and was almost certainly the center of regional exchanges whose reach extended from Iran in the east, to the upper Euphrates in the north, and to Egypt in the west. By 3000 BCE we find here (and nowhere else) some half-dozen units that satisfy our criteria for an incipient world city system. Uruk is at that time the largest among them and the largest city in the world at that time, with a population possibly reaching forty thousand. And this is just one reason for calling it the first world city, because we also know, from archaeological and literary evidence, that Uruk was also the likely locus of the invention of writing and of calendars, innovations that proved to be of epochal significance.

This was the Uruk nucleus of an emerging system of world cities. The first basic trend we can identify is the emergence, by the mid-third millennium BCE, of a viable and productive center in Sumer, the heartland of cities, then organized in the form of some two dozen autonomous city-states. An increasingly costly competition for regional leadership animated those states (for example, by about 2300 BCE, the competition between Umma and Lagash), which made it possible for Sargon of Akkad, from outside the Land of Sumer, to step in and subdue them. The reign of Akkad and Sumer came and went, and was followed by a native dynasty based on Ur. As late as about 2000 BCE something of a numerical parity existed between Sumer and non-Sumer cities, but a short time later the former land of cities completely dropped out of sight. By contrast, important cities rose in Egypt (Memphis,Thebes, and Heliopolis), in north Mesopotamia (Mari), and in the Indus Valley (Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa).

The second basic trend was the experience of dispersal, or more precisely, the spread of urban practices throughout Eurasia that coincided with what in several areas were described as “Dark Ages”—for instance, in Sumer, in the Harappan region, and in post-Mycenean Greece. By the end of the ancient era (and the Bronze age), three of the four major regions of the “Old World” had been fertilized by the Urban Revolution: West Asia (for instance, Babylon), the Mediterranean (Mycenae), and East Asia (Yin, near Anyang, a major Shang capital). The less-than-successful experiments in the Indus Valley, in the Ukraine, and even in Peru would ultimately bear fruit, too. This dispersal was in fact a form of redistribution, because while Sumer lost cities and was virtually deurbanized, urbanism rose elsewhere and the number of world cities remained about the same as it had been a millennium earlier (twenty-two in 2000 BCE became twenty-three in 1200 BCE). In other words, the story of the ancient era has rapid urban expansion at the center in its first half, followed by deceleration and dispersal in the second.

Cities have often been protected by walls of all types of shapes and sizes and materials. This drawing shows the wall outside a Chinese city in the late nineteenth century.

The Classical World

The principal tendency of the classical era was the rapid formation and subsequent consolidation of strongly regional but also interconnected urban systems in the four main regions of Eurasia: East Asia, South Asia, the Mediterranean, and West Asia. A separate development also occurred in the Americas. In the first three of these regions we observe a thriving system of independent citystates, which then succumbs to imperial rule; but in West Asia, the sequence is reversed, and in Mesoamerica, the Mayan system of citystates collapses by itself into incoherence.

In East Asia, virtually all the principal urban growth occurred in China. Haoqing (near Xi’an) was the Western Zhou capital and ceremonial center that bridged the ancient and classical periods. After its destruction in 771 BCE, the political center shifted to Luoyang, and in this Eastern Zhou era that followed, urbanization took off with considerable flourish. One report credits ninetyone cities as likely founded before 771 BCE, the number rising to 466 in the spring and autumn of Eastern Zhou. City-building was apparently part of state-building, with the term for “state” (guo) denoting a walled city. While many of these cities were quite small, in no time a system of independent and flourishing states arose, each anchored in a major city with merely nominal and ceremonial links to Luoyang.

That, in turn, left the field open to immensely destructive wars, in what came to be known as the period of Warring States. The most ruthless and warlike of these states, Qin, conquered all the others and founded the First Empire. But that proved shortlived, and the Han Empire that replaced it quickly built a great new capital, Changan (Xi’an), while continuing Luoyang in a secondary role. Changan and Luoyang each had their good and bad times (the former was largely destroyed in 189, sacked in 315, plundered in 756 and 763, and subjected to a bloodbath in 881; the latter was utterly destroyed in 189 and 190, sacked in 311, and declined after 907), but they continued to alternate as China’s leading cities right until the end of the classical era, when Kaifeng assumed a central place in the Northern Song. By that time Kyoto (Japan) and Sorabol (in Silla, Korea) also joined the ranks of world cities in East Asia that accounted, in the classical era, for about onethird of the world’s major urban potential.

The South Asian experience paralleled that of East Asia, albeit on a smaller scale, in that the first millennium BCE saw a flourishing of cities in a context of autonomy, in North India in particular, a process that was then set back by the founding of imperial structures and by external incursions. Out of a cluster of tribal units an urban landscape emerged in the Ganges Valley that in turn coalesced into a system of independent polities that became the seedbed of Buddhism. However, a recent study of the sites of the capitals of sixteen of these Early Historic states showed them to be in the range of 50 to 200 hectares, suggesting populations smaller than their counterparts in China of that time and falling below our threshold.

Over time, one of these became the dominant power and formed the core of an empire centered on Pataliputra, on the Ganges, a large city that greatly impressed a Greek ambassador about 300 BCE. In the second half of the classical era the focus of North India shifted to Kanauji, which became the capital of the Guptas and continued as the centerpiece of regional politics until it was sacked by Muslim armies in 1018 and then destroyed. In the south, Buddhism gained an early foothold in Sri Lanka at Anuradhapura and came to radiate its influence throughout Southeast Asia, including Sri Ksetra in Burma, Palembang in Srivijaja, and Angkor in Cambodia.

The Mediterranean was the focus of the other major urban network of the classical world, equal in weight to the East Asian. The Mediterranean network began to form later in the ancient era but quickly expanded via three great waves of urbanization: the Phoenician, the Greek, and the Roman. In about 1000 BCE Tyre sent a first colony to Cyprus, and soon its settlers founded Carthage, which in short order became the powerhouse of the Western Mediterranean. Pliny the Elder, the encyclopedist, put its population, prior to the start of the wars with Rome, at 700,000, probably too high but indicating its reputation.The second wave came from the Greek world, under the sponsorship of individual cities. For example, Corinth initiated the foundation of Syracuse, on Sicily, whose defeat of the Athenian expedition tipped the scales in the Peloponnesian war, and which may have been, about 400 BCE, the largest city in the Greek world.

But the greatest impetus to Hellenization came from the conquests of Alexander of Macedon, the founder of numerous cities. The most important of these was Alexandria, which became the capital of the postAlexandrine rulers of Egypt, the Ptolemies, who fashioned it not only into a center of political power, and of trade and shipping, but also equipped it with a great lighthouse on Pharos Island, a beacon to shipfarers and a symbol of enlightenment for a city boasting of a museion and a huge library. A city that was home to many nationalities, Alexandria became the first exemplar, in Stoic thought, of a cosmopolis, a city of the world, a higher formation than a mere polis.

The last wave was that of the Romans, builders of an empire, but also builders of cities. Rome annihilated Carthage (but within a century put a new city in its place) and conquered Alexandria, to become the imperial capital of this new Greco-Roman world. It grew to huge proportions, to become the world’s most populous city, its citizens, untaxed, living off free bread, slave labor, and other spoils of empire. The sack of Rome in 410 CE marked the start of the collapse of Western Rome and the definitive onset, in this part of the world, of the second Dark Age.

Which was the city whose population was the first to attain 1 million? The estimates for Alexandria, at about 100 BCE, tend to put it in the 500,000 range, but some scholars claim that it might have reached 1 million between 200 and 100 BCE, which would make it first. But the more conservative guess would probably point to Rome, which at the turn of the new millennium likely reached that figure, and held on to it, and exceeded it for some two or three centuries. The next city to reach “millionaire” status was Tang era Changan, at between 700 and 800 CE.

Early in the classical era, powerful West Asian empires, in particular the Assyrian and the Persian, pressed upon the Mediterranean world, probably pushing the Phoenicians out to sea and impressing the Greek world. But the collapse of the Persian realm diminished the vitality of that region and reduced its urban potential, and it was not until the Muslim conquests of the seventh century that new political and urban space opened up to become what we now call the “Muslim world.” Arab cavalry armies overthrew the Sassanian Empire and overran large portions of the Eastern Roman Empire based in Constantinople.

Urbanization became one of the hallmarks of the Muslim world. Many cities would be conquered, such as Alexandria and Antioch, others would be destroyed, such as the Sassanian capital, Ctesiphon, and yet others would be founded, among them Fustat, and later Cairo, al Kufah, and Basrah, as well as Baghdad and Rayy (later to become the seed of Tehran), together with Kairouan and Cordova (as a capital) in the West. By 900 CE, the Muslim world had the densest urban network; it was a principal precinct of the world system on the eve of the modern era.

Each of the four regional processes in Eurasia in the classical era had its own developmental trajectory, but these processes were not isolated phenomena but were entangled in several ways, though seldom in a complete fashion.They can be seen as a world city system with two chief lines of communication: the overland Silk Roads, via Central Asia, and the maritime Spice Roads, via the Indian Ocean. Both in effect bound East Asia to the Mediterranean.The world cities basically formed one system, with routes that served as links among the cities. These were not just trade routes but also the paths taken by new ideas and social innovations such as Buddhism.

The harbor of Hong Kong, a major trading and commercial city.

The one area of significant urban development that stands apart was in the Americas, between 400 and 800 CE in particular, when we find cities seemingly meeting our criteria in Mexico (Teotihuacan), in the Mayan lands (Tical, Caracol), and possibly even in Peru, a conceivable nucleus of a regional city system. But the system was short-lived and largely collapsed after 800. Anthropologist David Webster questions the urban character of the Mayan cities in particular, and suggests that they were actually “king-places” or “regalritual” cities whose singlefunctionality was one reason for the fragility of the system when it was exposed to environmental stress and persistent warfare.

The Modern World

For the modern era, we return to a unitary vision because our threshold criterion rises to 1 million, in other words, to “millionaire cities” that, at least initially, were few in number. (See Table 1.)

The table depicts a process that over the course of one millennium raised the number of modern world cities from one, to 300, a rate of urban expansion never previously experienced. What is more, most of that expansion occurred in the last one or two centuries.

To start with, the urban landscape at the turn to the second millennium continued as it was in 900, with a central role for the Muslim world and strong Chinese participation. But then, soon after 1200, disaster struck. In a space of two or three generations, the Mongols captured all the “millionaire cities” and seized control of the Silk Roads, even while laying waste to North China and Central Asia, destroying and massacring the inhabitants of Beijing, Merv, Samarkand, Herat, and Baghdad.When they faded away, one century later, this was still the “Asian age,” but the spirit had gone out of it, and the Silk Roads withered.

Viewing the table of modern world cities, we might still see an “Asian age” right up to 1800 because all the world’s major cities were then Asian, if not actually Chinese. But on closer inspection that is less of an indicator of wealth and power than a symptom of stagnation because the table shows, before 1800, no evidence of growth, only some form of musical chairs. The growth that mattered was happening at the other end of Eurasia, in Western Europe, but it was, for a while, still under the radar. The growth factor initially rose from the citystates, Genoa and Venice, and in the Low Countries, whose experience was by 1500 translated into that of nationstates. Portugal, Spain, and the Dutch Republic assumed increasingly important global roles spearheaded by their enterprising cities—Lisbon, Antwerp, and Amsterdam. These were experiments in new forms of global organization that reached maturity with the experience of Britain. By 1800 London broke through to the “millionaire city” league, which suggests that innovation is not just a product of city size.

Table 1.Modern Cities of 1 Million Inhabitants or More

It is the list for 1900 that offers a clear picture of the urban structure that shaped what we tend to think of as the world of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: the strong British stake earned in the Industrial Revolution, with London, Manchester, Birmingham, and Glasgow; the thennew, and rising, United States’ challenge, with NewYork, Chicago, Boston, and Philadelphia; the traditional great powers of Europe, with Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Moscow, and St. Petersburg, and somewhat marginally, Tokyo, Beijing, and Calcutta.

But that was then, and by 2000 the urban landscape was much changed.The figure reported in table 1, some three hundred cities for that year, means that the population of world cities became too numerous to be shown in that small table. In that year, all the world’s regions were now fully represented. The largest single share was that of East Asia which, at over one-third, was not really surprising, for this is about what its share was in the classical era. Overall, the world city system had moved into a new configuration and scholars are now at work to clarify the nature and composition of this new system.

A view of central São Paulo the largest metropolis in South America. The city sprawls over 3,000 square miles and contains countless medium-sized high rise buildings. The city overtook Rio in population during the 1950s largely as a result of investments in the automobile industry that attracted thousands of workers and related industries. It is now the corporate headquarters of Brazil’s most important firms. At one point in the mid-1990s, the city claimed to have the largest number of manufacturing workers in the world.

Major Trends

The powerful process presented in this overview has been the steady and unrelenting urbanization on a world scale. That is, over the past several millennia, cities have emerged and have grown bigger and better, and their weight in the social makeup of the human species has kept on rising. By the start of the twenty-first century, one-half of the world’s population was living in cities, and 10 percent in world cities alone (compared to about 1 percent in the ancient and 2 percent in the classical worlds). What is more, because of the concurrent rise in the same time frame of the overall population of this planet, from maybe 6 million to over 6 billion, the absolute number of people living in cities is of course the highest ever.

The world cities have composed, over the millennia, the center of the emerging world system, but their story can never constitute the entire picture, for it neglects all those living outside the great urban centers, those in the peripheries and in the hinterlands of world history. In fact, the process of interaction between the centers and the peripheries has been a major and recurrent feature of the world system. Thousand-year-long sequences of concentration, which brought city building, may have alternated with periods of redistribution that show stable if not stagnant urban conditions, and these, in the past two instances, gave rise to Dark Ages. This raises the question of whether the urban expansion and concentration recently and prominently underway might not be heralding the onset of a new age of redistribution.

The world cities might be thought of as making up a complex, interlinked system in a condition that might be termed “urban entanglement.” In approaching this system, the useful starting point is the presumption of connectivity; in other words, what needs to be demonstrated is isolation and lack of contact rather than the reverse, which is currently the standard. If world cities have formed a system, then that system might be thought of as having emergent properties over and above the characteristics of its members, such as the alternation of phases of concentration and redistribution just mentioned.

More generally, the world city system might be viewed as a component of world system evolution. The eras of world history (ancient, classical, and modern) that helped us to organize the presentation of our material might be viewed as phases of that process, and we have shown that such eras display quantitative features (such as changes in magnitude) as well as qualitative changes (such as the scope of the network). Our study therefore suggests that world urbanization, which is a key component of globalization, might also be usefully studied as an evolutionary process.

George Modelski

【Further Reading】：

Abu-Lughod, J. (1989). Before European hegemony:The world system A.D. 1250-1350. New York: Oxford University Press.

Adams, R. M. (1981). Heartland of cities. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Bairoch, P. (1988). Cities and economic development. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Braudel, F. (1984). Parts 2 and 3: The citycentered economies of the European past. In Civilization and Capitalism 15th to 18th century (Vol. 3): The perspective of the world. London: Collins.

Chandler, T. (1987). Four thousand years of urban growth: An historical census. Lewiston: St. Gavid’s.

Childe,V. G. (1950).The urban revolution. Town Planning Review, 21(1), 3-17.

Hourani, A. (1991). Part II: Arab-Muslim societies. In A history of the Arab peoples. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Hourani, A., & Stern, S. M. (Eds.). (1970). The Islamic city. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Kenoyer, J. (1998). Ancient cities of the Indus Valley civilization. Karachi: Oxford University Press.

King, P. L., & Taylor, P. (Eds.). (1995). World cities in a worldsystem. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Modelski, G. (2000). World system evolution. In R. Denamark, J. Friedman, B. Gills, & G. Modelski (Eds.), World system history: The social science of long-term change (pp. 24-53). New York: Routledge.

Modelski, G. (2003). World cities-3000 to 2000. Washington, DC: Faros 2000.

Modelski, G., & Thompson,W. R. (2002). Evolutionary pulsations in the world system. In S. C. Chew & J. D. Knotterus (Eds.), Structure, culture, and history: Recent issues in social theory. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

Mumford, L. (1938, 1970). The culture of cities. New York: Harcourt Brace.

Nichols, D., & Charlton, Y. H. (Eds.). (1997). The archaeology of citystates. Washington, DC: Smithsonian.

Tilly, C., & Blockmans, W. P. (Eds.). (1994). Cities and the rise of states in Europe A.D. 1000 to 1800. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Toynbee, A. (Ed.). (1967). Cities of destiny. New York: McGraw Hill.

Webster, D. (2002). The fall of the ancient Maya. New York: Thames and Hudson.

Wheatley, P. (1971). The pivot of the four quarters: A preliminary inquiry into the origins and the character of the ancient Chinese city. Chicago: Aldine.