Читать книгу Global Political Cities - Kent E. Calder - Страница 28

As Greg Clark notes, the origins of the global city can be found in the trading city, engaged in the exchange of goods, services, ideas, and capital over long distances but among merchants engaged in direct, often face-to-face transactions.² Cities by their very nature, and from their very earliest origins, enjoyed two powerful comparative advantages that enhanced their role on the global stage. Most importantly, cities promoted connectivity—they were a meeting place where people of diverse backgrounds could gather and forge relationships. In addition, cities provided support services vital to trade: boat-building, cartography, banking, navigation, insurance, and currency exchange, among others. These dual functions, performed in efficient physical proximity, transformed cities into formidable political-economic actors long before the rise of geographically much more expansive empires and nation-states.

Trading cities with long-distance interpersonal networks—forerunners of the global cities of today—began appearing in the Mediterranean basin around 1000 BC. Alexandria, Athens, Antioch, Carthage, and Rome were among the first.³ They rose as both a consequence and the creator of nascent trade flows. These early trading cities played notable civilizational roles, creating alphabets, developing philosophical concepts, and furthering the spread of literacy, while also spurring the development of physical infrastructure through shipbuilding and the construction of road networks.

Roughly five centuries after the rise of trading cities within the Mediterranean basin, or around 400 BC, trading cities began emerging along overland routes for Eurasian economic exchange, routes that later became known as the Silk Roads.⁴ At the western terminus were preexisting centers from the early Mediterranean trading era, including Alexandria, Damascus, and Constantinople. To the east, stretching across the continent, were way stations such as Baghdad, Herat, and Bagram, leading to an eastern terminus in ancient Asian cities such as Xi’an, Hangzhou, and Nara. Through these cities passed trade caravans laden with silk, amber, and all manner of precious commodities to trade. These included textiles, spices, grain, vegetables and fruit, animal hides, tools, woodwork, metal work, religious objects, artwork, and precious stones. Yet the trade routes also conveyed—consciously or unconsciously—fatefully important technical innovations, including paper, gunpowder, algebra, the compass, printing, banking, and coinage.⁵

Initially the trade routes functioned with only minimal and intermittent political organization. Human networks, often among ethnic kinsmen, provided predictability and supplied necessary business information. There was little need for political units larger than the city-state.

Empires, beginning with the Han in China and the Roman in the West, did provide intermittent, overarching stability. Inefficiencies in transportation and communication, however, made it difficult for these empires to establish consistent and enduring control. The city remained the core administrative unit for regulating economic transactions.

The Silk Road network of cities reached its peak of vitality at the height of the Mongol conquests, from roughly 1250 to 1350; the Mongols, for all their brutality, created a stability and predictability conducive to trade that left important functions, such as the administration of trade, to cities.⁶ The vitality of the Silk Road declined sharply following the arrival of Vasco da Gama at Calicut in 1498, however, eclipsed by the cost-efficient sea routes that he and fellow long-distance mariners created. Calicut, Malacca, Canton, Macao, and Nagasaki emerged as new entrepôt trading ports, to replace the Kashgars, Khivas, and Samarkands of earlier years.

Many historians and political economists, including Fernand Braudel, Janet Abu-Lughod, and at times Karl Marx, consider the commercial revolution of the thirteenth century among cities across Eurasia, augmented by the subsequent voyages of exploration, to have marked the birth of an integrated world system, although its cohesion periodically waxed and waned thereafter.⁷ Others, such as Immanuel Wallerstein and Eric Wolf, similarly draw attention to medieval developments such as the Mongol Empire and the trade routes that it facilitated as being a step toward broader global integration, without creating a modern world system per se.⁸

One sobering indication that an integrated global system indeed prevailed during the Middle Ages is the remarkable coincidence with which one of recorded history’s most terrifying pandemics, the Black Death outbreak of plague, reached disparate areas of the world. This deadly scourge broke out of its epidemiological homeland in the Himalayan mountain region following the Mongol conquest of that remote area in 1252, conveyed first to China and then to Mongolia in the bodies of infected fleas astride Mongol horses that were somehow immune. The Black Death appeared in inland China during 1331 and then spread across the Silk Road over the following fifteen years into eastern Europe and Crimea, before jumping, astride rats on ships, from Crimea across the entire Mediterranean between 1346 and 1349.⁹

Before it had completed its ravages, the Black Death was thought to have killed forty to sixty million Europeans, or close to half of the continent’s population. The average European city suffered a population decline of nearly 39 percent.¹⁰ By the early sixteenth century, however, the average European city had recovered its pre–Black Death population, and was beginning to grow again, thanks particularly to migration from the countryside.