The City: A Global History (Modern Library Chronicles Series Book 21) Read Online Free PDF Page A
Author: Joel Kotkin
neighboring Asian countries adopted the Chinese model of urbanism. Japan’s first major centers—Naniwa, Fujiwara, and Nara—consciously borrowed from the Chinese city-empire of Chang’an. 18 In A.D. 794, the Japanese constructed a new, and more permanent, capital city at Heian, or Kyoto, which grew to be home to over one hundred thousand residents and served for over a millennium as essentially a ceremonial capital centered around the household of the emperor. 19
Similarly, Seoul, established as the capital of the Yi dynasty in A.D. 1394, served, in the words of two Korean historians, as a “pastoral mandarin capital” for roughly five hundred years. Following the classical Chinese model, the city was laid out as an administrative center, surrounded by walls and dominated by the royal bureaucracy.
CHAPTER THREE
THE FIRST COMMERCIAL CAPITALS
The development of imperial cities with control over large areas allowed for the rapid growth of trade in all areas of early urban growth, from China to Egypt, Mesopotamia, and eventually the Americas. Despite this, the overall role of merchants and artisans in urban society remained sharply circumscribed.
Today, the entrepreneurial class is often assumed to be the critical, if not the dominant, shaper of a vital urban area. Yet in the ancient world, even when merchants and artisans accumulated considerable wealth, power remained concentrated in the hands of priests, soldiers, and bureaucrats. Often merchants served simply as middlemen, implementing the trade initiatives of the state or the priesthood. In Egypt, one historian notes, the pharaoh stood as “the only wholesale merchant.” 1
In China, urban merchants used their wealth to scale the rigid barriers of class, seeking ways for themselves or their children to enter the government class or the aristocracy. Even the layout of the Chinese city reflected the priorities of the society: The ruler’s palace lay in the middle of the metropolis, while the markets were placed in far less auspicious and peripheral locations. 2
THE RISE OF PHOENICIA
The search for the origins of the commercial metropolis—so important to the later development of urbanism—leads us away from the great city-empires and instead to a narrow strip of land between the coastal mountains and the Mediterranean.
The climate in the area that would later become known as Phoenicia was particularly amenable to human settlement. As an Arab poet would write, it “carried winter on its head, spring on its shoulders whilst summer slumbers at its feet.” 3 Early port cities, such as Ugarit north along the Syrian coast, developed as trade centers for empires of the Hittites and Egyptians as early as the middle centuries of the second millennium B.C. 4
At a time when almost all other city dwellers feared the open sea, Phoenician traders scoured a vast extent of the known world. Their black ships explored everywhere from the far western coast of Africa to Sardinia, Cyprus, Spain, and even Great Britain. 5 Although the main Phoenician cities such as Tyre or Sidon never grew much larger than forty thousand people—a fraction of the size of Babylon 6 —they arguably spread their influence over a wider array of places than any civilization up to that time.
Unlike the great empires, the Phoenicians never expanded deeply into the interior. Clinging to the coastline, they instead developed an urban life based predominantly on trading goods, and sometimes services, to their more powerful neighbors. 7 The Phoenicians’ genius lay in making themselves indispensable, preferably at a healthy profit.
“WHOSE MERCHANTS ARE PRINCES”
By the ninth and eighth centuries B.C., Phoenician cities such as Bylbos (a key port for the Lebanese cedar trade), Tyre, and Sidon had become wealthy and powerful in their own right. Here, for the first time, we see the emergence of an influential, even dominant, merchant class. Tyre, wrote Isaiah, was “the
Similarly, Seoul, established as the capital of the Yi dynasty in A.D. 1394, served, in the words of two Korean historians, as a “pastoral mandarin capital” for roughly five hundred years. Following the classical Chinese model, the city was laid out as an administrative center, surrounded by walls and dominated by the royal bureaucracy.
CHAPTER THREE
THE FIRST COMMERCIAL CAPITALS
The development of imperial cities with control over large areas allowed for the rapid growth of trade in all areas of early urban growth, from China to Egypt, Mesopotamia, and eventually the Americas. Despite this, the overall role of merchants and artisans in urban society remained sharply circumscribed.
Today, the entrepreneurial class is often assumed to be the critical, if not the dominant, shaper of a vital urban area. Yet in the ancient world, even when merchants and artisans accumulated considerable wealth, power remained concentrated in the hands of priests, soldiers, and bureaucrats. Often merchants served simply as middlemen, implementing the trade initiatives of the state or the priesthood. In Egypt, one historian notes, the pharaoh stood as “the only wholesale merchant.” 1
In China, urban merchants used their wealth to scale the rigid barriers of class, seeking ways for themselves or their children to enter the government class or the aristocracy. Even the layout of the Chinese city reflected the priorities of the society: The ruler’s palace lay in the middle of the metropolis, while the markets were placed in far less auspicious and peripheral locations. 2
THE RISE OF PHOENICIA
The search for the origins of the commercial metropolis—so important to the later development of urbanism—leads us away from the great city-empires and instead to a narrow strip of land between the coastal mountains and the Mediterranean.
The climate in the area that would later become known as Phoenicia was particularly amenable to human settlement. As an Arab poet would write, it “carried winter on its head, spring on its shoulders whilst summer slumbers at its feet.” 3 Early port cities, such as Ugarit north along the Syrian coast, developed as trade centers for empires of the Hittites and Egyptians as early as the middle centuries of the second millennium B.C. 4
At a time when almost all other city dwellers feared the open sea, Phoenician traders scoured a vast extent of the known world. Their black ships explored everywhere from the far western coast of Africa to Sardinia, Cyprus, Spain, and even Great Britain. 5 Although the main Phoenician cities such as Tyre or Sidon never grew much larger than forty thousand people—a fraction of the size of Babylon 6 —they arguably spread their influence over a wider array of places than any civilization up to that time.
Unlike the great empires, the Phoenicians never expanded deeply into the interior. Clinging to the coastline, they instead developed an urban life based predominantly on trading goods, and sometimes services, to their more powerful neighbors. 7 The Phoenicians’ genius lay in making themselves indispensable, preferably at a healthy profit.
“WHOSE MERCHANTS ARE PRINCES”
By the ninth and eighth centuries B.C., Phoenician cities such as Bylbos (a key port for the Lebanese cedar trade), Tyre, and Sidon had become wealthy and powerful in their own right. Here, for the first time, we see the emergence of an influential, even dominant, merchant class. Tyre, wrote Isaiah, was “the
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