Читать книгу Global Political Cities - Kent E. Calder - Страница 32

Trading cities are among the most venerable forms of human social organization, emerging around 1000 BC in the Mediterranean basin and even earlier in China. Cities were also among the earliest and most persistent forms of political life. They alternated with empires as the dominant forms of human governance worldwide until less than four hundred years ago.

The enduring strength of cities across history is rooted in a simple geo-economic proposition: the power of proximity. Urban propinquity reduces the costs of shipping goods and speeds the flow of ideas. These transactional realities made cities from ancient times natural centers for both manufacturing and commerce, as well as purveyors of civilization. Their ability to perform such functions, however, rested on an ability to remain unmolested by outside authority, free from random obstruction.

For many centuries, cities were able to survive and prosper as largely autonomous units of political-economic affairs. On occasion they combined to form larger collaborative units, such as the Hanseatic League of the Middle Ages. In other settings, they operated autonomously yet cooperatively, as along the Silk Road. At times city-states became more assertive political-military units, often in efforts to control trading routes, as Venice and Genoa did.

During the late Middle Ages, cities were beset with new challenges, such as the Black Death, as well as a revolution in the means of warfare, including the advent of cannons, muskets, and gunpowder. These challenges imposed huge new costs that few small city-states could meet. Amid decades—indeed, centuries—of interminable warfare, beginning around the fifteenth century, nation-states gradually rose and asserted dominance over cities. Their supremacy came to involve high levels of taxation and regulation that undermined both urban autonomy and, in many cases, the cities’ own urban power of proximity. By the end of the Cold War, nation-state political dominance over cities was virtually complete, even as the socioeconomic potential for a new, more decentralized global order was rising.