This chapter addresses developments in Late Antiquity, which witnessed a partial shift to more land-based conceptions of both ownership and rulership. The prior literature has pointed to two explanatory factors: the decline of classical polis culture amidst the deurbanization of Late Antiquity, and the rise of Christianity. The chapter draws together the threads of this literature, in order to develop an account of late antique cultural change. Classical Roman property law, it argues, had its context in classical cities. The relative decay of urban dominance and the rise of Christianity tended to undermine the classical foundations of the law of both ownership and rulership. The Empire was reconceived in more territorial terms, while classical conceptions of elite power faltered. The resulting shifts did not result in any decisive and thoroughgoing transformation of the understanding of ownership and rulership, but they set the stage for later developments of great significance.

The analog age of cities is over, giving way to a digitally linked network of cities that has been so thoroughly theorized by world cities scholars. This is one of the most politically precarious periods in history, as climate change washes away any sense of permanence in intercity relations. The archipelago of cities as we know it could be reconfigured beyond recognition during this century if current patterns of greenhouse gas emissions hold. In that case, alpha cities will do what they once did: Manage resource scarcity and consolidation rather than abundance. This chapter reiterates the importance of understanding intercity relations from the past in order to better understand the sweeping changes that may come – especially if the city returns to its original form as a key autonomous player in world politics, as world cities studies predict. It revisits the book’s cases, emphasizing the hopeful potential for cities in an urban age, and taking into account theoretical implications within world cities studies.

The layout of Tang Chang’an and the daily routines it fostered were stunning expressions of state power at the heart of an urban network. The city was a microcosm of the vast empire it managed, down to the tightly controlled rural growing regions, with trading routes reaching far west. It was an empire rooted in spatial order, the city’s modular layout designed to conform as closely as possible to the cosmos, the emperor at the heart of the city mandated to rule all under heaven. For all these zealous efforts at social control, Chang’an was paradoxically the world’s most cosmopolitan city. The imported religions of Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, and Zoroastrianism existed alongside Chinese Taoist and Confucian thought. In all, dynastic China engaged in unparalleled expansions of urban bureaucracy through the Qin, Han, Sui, and Tang dynasties. This chapter explores the complex cultural interactions between urban civilization and nomadic societies, exploring in particular the role of the Great Wall in urban governance.

This chapter outlines attempts by global cities scholars to explain historic networks. Research in global cities studies shows that we are living in an urban age, a high period for intercity relations that promises a reconsideration of history. Today’s world city network emerged in tandem with major shifts in the global economy, along with the gradual erosion of national borders in many spheres of politics. Global cities studies pose two major questions for cities today: First, how are cities shaping globalization? Second, how is globalization shaping lived experiences in cities? Global cities studies, led by John Friedmann, Saskia Sassen, Manuel Castells, and Peter J. Taylor presciently posed these questions in the midst of drastic contemporary changes in the architecture of the world economic system. The emphasis on late capitalism in world cities studies creates problems in the literature in need of challenge. This chapter stresses the need for a political history of city networks, identifying the absence of history of the literature as a flaw in need of change. Today’s world city network is far from a steady state or “end of history.”

Mesoamerica is one of only three world regions to have developed pristine cities, that is, without outside influence. Mesoamerica scholarship, especially the influential work of Richard E. Blanton, has vigorously applied world systems theory to the region in a way reminiscent of Mesopotamia studies. Teotihuacan, for which this analysis is apt, bears similarities to today’s migrant magnets, replete with expat neighborhoods and multilingual apartment blocks. Moreover, it reaped the benefit of trade relations outside its sphere, growing to massive size. The chapter culminates with Tenochtitlan, the apogee of Mesoamerican urbanism, at its height when Europeans arrived in 1519. It did not directly hold territory, making the Spanish-derived term “Aztec Empire” somewhat misleading. This chapter stresses the multiplicity of exchanges between cities. Environmental scarcity was central to the ebb and flow of urbanization. Tenochtitlan, like modern world cities, inspired European imaginations much the way Venice did. Its imagery fascinated renaissance figures in Europe such as Albrecht Dürer, in this sense making it the first “global” city.

The first city networks were as old as the first cities. The mud brick metropolises of the fourth millennium were built to accelerate a burgeoning regional trading system. Settlements were linked, for example, through the alpha city of Uruk. This chapter also explores the later Babylonian and Ur “world systems.” These were effectively knowledge-based global cities at the heart of robust trading networks. With the advent of the city came the first bureaucratic administrators finding advantages in large concentrated forms of living in a hitherto decentralized world. The strange new idea was hardly normal. Cities were labor intensive, dangerous places that exacted high demands on their populations. With their invention came new social hierarchies. The movement of unprecedented global resources through cities required seminal bureaucratic breakthroughs—not least of which cuneiform writing. This increased the power of a privileged few, extracting exorbitant tribute and labor. Cities were in reality systems of concentrated power and global resource management whose walls functioned to keep their populations in, rather than simply to repel invaders.

The Venetian Republic reached its zenith in the dramatic takeover of “a quarter and a half a quarter” of the Byzantine Empire in the Fourth Crusade. It acquired a network of port cities – the Stato da Mar – that enabled its control over trade routes between Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Called the “hinge” of Europe by one historian, Venice spearheaded an economic leap forward on the continent through a mastery of long-distance navigation. This was Italy’s second great urban age, as cities saw resurgences from the dramatic declines into feudalism in late antiquity. Venice was the prototypical world city of the time, competing with Genoa for control of seaborne trade routes. Indeed, the activities in Italian city-states are critical to the scholarly understanding of the European economic revivals in the ninth and eleventh centuries. The city figures centrally in major works by Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Michael McCormick, Henri Pirenne, and Fernand Braudel for fostering seminal forms of intercity relations at crucial times. Its relations with Constantinople, for example, were of equal importance with those of its Italian neighbors.

Rome’s was a politics of all five senses. It was a city of noise, of refuse and bodies in the street, of massive crowds, of massive construction, and a size and opulence not equaled in Europe again for more than a millennium. In maps and inscriptions, Rome was the center of the world. How did Rome become this way? This chapter looks to intercity relations to resolve this puzzle. The Roman Empire was in effect a network of cities in the core–periphery mode – the ultimate “consumer city” supplied by vast hinterlands. Lacking the perfect local environment, Rome imported the commodities – and people – needed to construct an alpha city. The city grew as haphazardly and violently as the Empire itself. The greater the resources of the Empire, the larger the foundation for Rome’s growth. This hit crisis point in the Late Republic, as an increasingly dispossessed agrarian peasantry migrated en-masse to cities alongside inhabitants from across the world. In short, the context for Rome’s growth was a hitherto unparalleled age of globalization in the first and second centuries CE.

Classical Greece was a high period for city networks, with trading centers dotting the map of the Aegean Sea like “frogs around a marsh” in the words of Aristotle. These were strange times, where Spartans annually declared war on their slaves. Where the Athenian reformer Solon banned the export of vital foodstuffs – on penalty of death – while at the same time laying the groundwork for unprecedented political pluralism. Yet we see an uncommon iteration of city networking that was well ahead of its time. Embedded in the lives of these cities was an early echo of the modern. Athens was the alpha city in a polis system of autonomous city-states that, at its height, spanned from Spain to Africa to the Black Sea with a total population of thirty million people. This was an incredible period of seafaring. Language, culture, aesthetics, and revolutionary political ideas flowed in the currents alongside goods and services in an elaborate trading network. Far from localized cultures of self-sufficiency, most Greek cities depended on trade for basics such as foodstuffs, but also for military, intellectual, and cultural production.

Alexander the Great envisioned a city network designed to control “spear won” territory in the wake of his conquests. Alexander imagined a world bridging Greek and Asian cultures – a new era of globalization. He was willing to force whole populations across continents to this end, via city mergers, mass deportations, and resettlements. From its Macedonian foundations, the Hellenistic Age had urban roots. Greek economic influence spanned from Afghanistan to the Atlantic. Trade increased markedly, as did cultural exchange. There was unprecedented hybridization, closely reflected in city building. The urban form dwarfed what existed in the old poleis. Their geopolitical importance increased under territorial empires, the dominant form of statecraft. Cities managed flows of resources. They defended trading routes against nomads, projecting royal military power. Out of Alexander’s splintered empire, his namesake Alexandria was the closest realization of his global vision. There were darker sides to this: Alexandria was part of a system entailing political domination over peripheral zones.

The caliph Al Mansur literally forged the city plan in fire in 762 CE. His Round City was an architectural symbol of order in a vast combustible empire. Ninth-century Baghdad had relations extending from the Atlantic to China, with tranches of coins found as far afield as Scandinavia. The city was by design the heart of a vast city network at a time of pronounced urbanization, an urban golden age by standard reckonings. At the height of Abbasid power its population was an estimated 840,000. It thereby stretched the geographic boundaries of time and space across Eurasia, a Silk Roads terminus in its own right. Baghdad was one of the world’s preeminent “open cities,” incubating trade, knowledge in art, astronomy, mathematics, amidst a myriad of other cross-cultural exchanges. It attracted generations of scientists, philosophers, planners, and literati, especially from Central Asia. Migratory flows included a durable revolving network linking Baghdad to Merv and other key centers of learning and trade along the Silk Roads. Rapidly expanding Islamic civilization had to develop new forms of city building to spread Dar al Islam (the realm of Islam) across vast disparate realms.

Identified by Immanuel Wallerstein as the first true hegemon, the Dutch Empire dominated maritime commerce in the seventeenth century. Amsterdam emerged as the world’s alpha city, the site of the first true global multinational corporations. In tandem with corporate activities including the founding of New York City, Cape Town, and Jakarta, Amsterdam established the first modern stock market. It also solidified the North–South power imbalance. European powers extracted the labor and raw materials of far-flung colonies, refining them at higher value. The under-populated Dutch Empire relied on forced migration and slave labor to produce valuable goods such as sugar, tobacco, and spices. This chapter traces the emergence of a city network in the Low Countries that prefigured its independence from Spain, and the construction of its own imperial network. The Dutch city network expanded globally, establishing critical nodes in West Africa, the Americas, the Caribbean, and Asia to manage the flow of resources and labor. Amsterdam’s place at the top of the world city hierarchy led to rising inequality, prefiguring modern urban “command centers.”

At the turn of the seventeenth century, Felipa de la Cruz penned two letters to her freed husband who had moved from Sevilla to Veracruz in New Spain. These letters reveal extended discussions of Cruz’s commitment to securing liberty for herself and their children, as she reminded her husband not to forget her desire for freedom. Felipa de la Cruz’s letters hold immense historical value as they are among the earliest known letters penned by an enslaved Black woman in the Atlantic world that have survived in a historical archive. Reading the private correspondence between Felipa de la Cruz and her absent husband also reveals the day-to-day lives of enslaved people in an urban environment. The Coda presents these two letters transcribed in Spanish as well as in English translation. The Coda also includes a map of the social ties of a generation of free and liberated Black Sevillians who were Cruz’s contemporaries in the late sixteenth century (approximately 1569–1626). The map and extended key allow readers to trace some of Felipa de la Cruz’s Black neighbors who also had ties with the Spanish Americas, and their respective socioeconomic ties across the city.

Until recently, Gaza attracted little attention in historical scholarship. This volume innovates by examining late Ottoman Gaza’s diverse society, its built environment, and its political dynamics. The introduction sets the stage to better understand the vital contexts impacting the role and status of Gaza as compared to other cities in the Eastern Mediterranean, provides analyses and new resources for the study of late Ottoman Gaza, and presents state-of-the-art methodology in urban history as applied to Gaza.